JVL
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styofa doing anything
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
AnasAbdin
izzy's playlists!
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almost home
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Andulka
PR's Tumblrdome
ojovivo
dirt enthusiast
titsay
Today's Document
i don't do bad sauce passes
YOU ARE THE REASON
if i look back, i am lost
RMH
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@smolwritercrab
A HANDY CHART FOR THOSE OF YOU WONDERING WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THESE. NOTE THAT THESE ARE ALL THE INFORMAL AND YOU IS THE FORMAL SO LIKE YOU WOULD ALWAYS ADDRESS YOUR SUPERIOR/ OLDER PERSON/ SOCIAL BETTER WITH YOU BUT WITH YOUR BUDS YOU CAN USE THESE.
Almée Couture "Spirit of the Forgotten" Haute Couture Collection
These looked so fantastical, I had to find the source to make sure they were ai.
Spirit of the Forgotten – NYFW Debut Unveiled on the prestigious stage of New York Fashion Week, Spirit of the Forgotten is a poetic journey
I love soulmates but also this-
In life news, I am VERY close to actually finishing the rough draft of my original novel, and looking towards editing and publishing.
And I have a TERRIBLE feeling that since it includes queer stuff and a poly romance, it won't be palatable to mainstream publishers, though I am poking around for indie houses that might be open to that. I am absolutely unwilling to cut either the queer or poly stuff, I'm not doing a love triangle.
Which means I've been poking my nose around investigating various self publishing stuff... @thebibliosphere you've been a huge help here, inadvertently...and am biting glass at the fact that the royalties at Amazon are simply so, SO much better than anywhere else.
Amazon
Draft2Digital
the difference is fucking STARK
That's fucking insane
Like as much as I dislike Amazon, the numbers are absolutely implacable here. It sucks but like. Eight and a half dollars, PER SALE, of royalty difference is absolutely inarguable here.
have you looked at @copperbadge’s model / advice on self publishing? I know he’s had to push this rock up this particular hill, and came to a different conclusion than Amazon self-publishing.
ETA: Systlin just posted to say that @thebibliosphere has hooked her up with a beta and a potential publisher. I'm going to leave the post up so others can possibly use this knowledge but please refrain from further publisher suggestions and selfpub advice!
Unfortunately, if what you want is to maximize both sale volume and revenue -- which is a very normal goal, I'm not taking a swipe at that or anything -- Amazon is probably the way to go. I write for fun and have a large readership already so I didn't necessarily need Amazon, and when I was on Amazon it forced me to price my books higher than I was comfortable with, which is why I backed out.
As an alternative to Draft2Digital, I use Lulu.com. The mechanism -- how you upload your book and what information you include -- is functionally the same, but Lulu doesn't charge a setup fee, allows you to edit your text multiple times without fees, and is slightly less expensive per-page. So if you don't want to deal directly with Amazon, Lulu is superior to Draft2Digital in my opinion.
Lulu will allow you to sell through other platforms such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc, but it's opt-in, it won't do it automatically, and if you do that it makes you price the books so that those platforms aren't taking a "loss" by their standards. So a book I publish on Lulu might cost $10 to print (that's Lulu's cut) and I can sell it for whatever I like above that on Lulu -- say I sell it for $20, I get $10 per book. But the same book would "cost" Amazon $21 since Amazon takes a much larger cut, and Lulu's retail price dictates Amazon's. So in order for Amazon to sell my book, I have to price the book above $21. If I price it at $22 and someone buys it from Lulu, I get $12, whereas if someone buys it on Amazon, I get $1. Lulu will never be more expensive than Amazon but Lulu will always take Amazon's cost into account if you hook them up together. (I just pulled numbers out of the air for that example, but for a real-life one, when I took one of my recent 6x9, 90K-word paperbacks off Amazon, I was able to drop the price from something like $18 to $12.)
Selling directly through Lulu without involving Amazon is thus absolutely the most profitable way to go except that you don't get Amazon's reach or universality. Buying from Lulu, people have to know it exists, navigate the site, and trust that it's legitimate. Buying from Amazon, someone might just...find your book, and people will go to Amazon just to browse, which they will not do on Lulu, especially since as a self-publishing site, Lulu is full of garbage bad books. So if you're publishing outside of Amazon you will have to do a lot more publicity and you will never have the same sales volume.
I will also say that when Lulu published my work to Amazon, something got truly fucked up -- I'm not sure who did it, but either Lulu or Amazon assigned someone else's book to my author name and fixing it was really hard because I wasn't the one who set it up, Lulu was. I couldn't just go in and remove the book, I had to talk to Amazon and then Lulu and then have Amazon and Lulu talk to each other. I think my author page on Amazon might still list a book by Kathleen Starbuck as one of mine. There's also some weird shit around adult content -- I believe to sell on Amazon through Lulu, you have to jump through some hoops if there's adult content by Amazon's standards, which I know includes erotica but may also extend to queer/poly non-erotic content.
So yeah, I think depending on your goals, Lulu is worth exploring, but if you want to make life easy on yourself probably the best thing to do is just hold your nose and go with Amazon. However, if you're interested in Lulu I'm happy to answer questions.
Also, if you're interested in publishing in such a way that you can have your book sold in stores and held in libraries it will need an ISBN for the print version and a separate ISBN for the ebook. If you're in the US those cost $125 each unless you buy in bulk, which I happen to have done, so I have like 80 of them. If you want a few I'm happy to give you some for the at-cost of $5 per, but there's no way to transfer ownership of the number itself, so you'd officially be published by Sam Starbuck / Extribulum Press (you'd retain rights/profits, I'd just be your publisher on paper). I know Lulu will also give you one free and I imagine Amazon would, but often that means they retain certain rights to the text that I've never been comfortable letting a corporation have.
Slight addendum to what Sam posted above: there is no set up fee or fee to change files with Draft2Digital. I *think* they might limit how many times you can change a file within x amount of time, but once the timer resets your fine again. It makes them a good option for mass distribution and library access.
Ingram Spark, however, may they rest in filth, did used to charge $75 to set up your book and then $25 there after to make alterations to files. I think the setup fee was reduced, but they’ve found new awful ways to get money out of us (like $25 per 30 minutes to speak to a customer service rep on the phone if you need help and your issue can’t wait the glacial age it takes for them to respond to their free email) and they also made it so you need to contact a customer service rep to pull your work from their network. The quality of their books has also taken a steep nose dive since 2020. I had four books arrive without covers a while back. Just straight up naked in the box. And I had to fight them to get a refund. Madness.
At this point I’d pick Lulu over Ingram if I didn’t have draft2digital. Fortunately for my ADHD, I do have D2D and only have to remember one login account 😂
Ah, my mistake! I thought D2D had introduced a setup fee when they had some merger a while back but I may have mixed them up with Ingram Spark (which, damn, I'd forgotten that one existed). Reblogging for more accurate info.
Two additions:
1/ Ingram no longer charges to revise books either.
2/ If you want your book in bookshops, as far as I know you need to have it in Ingram's system. This is in no way economical, I probably earn $2 per book, but it does open you up to another market, AND people can order through their local bookstores, which is neat. The exception to this is sometimes bookstores in my area will ask if they can buy copies directly from me, but they have already been carrying my books and know they will sell. And occasionally some bookstores will take indie books on consignment, but that is really annoying and not everyone does it.
Also, on the negative side of the chart, I have had bookstores refuse to carry my book because the wholesale price didn't allow them to mark it up enough (I guess that specific store wanted to sell it for the same as Amazon would? Like some bookstores sell my book for $5-6 over what you'd pay on Amazon and they sell plenty of copies, I am told. So...whatever. Sorry I keep my prices low.) Also, if someone returns books, it can easily wipe out your profits for a month because you don't get charged for the cost of the books + shipping like you would if you had bought them, but the wholesale price they charged to the bookstore. I am honestly kind of surprised that is legal.
Draft2Digital has access to Ingram's market. So book buyers can buy from them as well. I don't think they have the full international reach of Ingram (yet), but you can still get your print book distributed to brick-and-mortar stores.
From their FAQ:
Print books published through D2D Print are made available to Amazon and to all distribution channels served by Ingram, including Barnes and Noble and most independent bookstores in the US. It will also be available for physical (“brick-and-mortar”) stores to order. https://draft2digital.com/faq/
And yeah... the whole retailer side of things is... honestly, it feels like a racket at this point. There's a reason I don't allow returns on paperbacks, even though it makes brick-and-mortar stores less likely to stock me, and that's why.
I've also been told by people who do the buying for certain big-box retailers that Ingram isn't showing them the retailer discount, even though Ingram requires me to put my books at a 50-60% discount to remain available for retailers to buy. I've seen screenshots; they're being shown something like 10% on their end while I'm showing a 60% discount.
So wherever the fuck that money is going, it's not going to the retailer or me. (This may have been fixed since then, but the last instance I know of this happening was in 2024)
Victor Glover (Pilot), Artemis II - April 4th 2026
we've got lunar flyby and eclipse pics!
more at the gallery here!
Martha Wells is pretty cool.
I like how she encourages people to just keep on creating. Doesn’t matter if you’re good or bad, what your goal is, what you’re writing. Just write.
Don’t let them take the joy away.
Don’t stop.
New York City ballet production of Midsummer Nights Dream
The fact this isn't a painting is a testament to one of the greatest feats of set design and production I've ever seen.
My god just look at this! The lighting, set design, photography... I've just never seen anything like it.
This is from 1966 and you can see over a hundred photos on the NYPL digital collections website. It is absolutely gorgeous. These are just a few of my favourites.
Plus Puck's face here:
Cucculelli Shaheen | Electric Cosmos
i'm going to say something insane. i think the overall pronounced fandom cultural slide away from complex plotty violent work and towards kidfic and coffee shops AUs and cozy domestic romcoms is a symptom of fascism.
okay actually this is a great phrase for it
Reblogging this for the term "neopastoralism", because I think that's fantastic.
Coffee shop AUs are, like... fine. They're not my thing, but they're hardly going to end the world. We don't need to have a moral panic about people enjoying coffee shop AUs. I'm also not about to come for anyone seeking escapism in the current hellscape.
However, I do think it's interesting to examine the tendency within these AUs to project a sort of idyll onto the coffee shop: here is a whimsical place where you can spend time with your friends and potentially meet your true love; here is a world where the greatest dilemma you may face is choosing the right coffee syrup for a new beverage or sneaking your number onto that to-go cup without being obvious.
The fantasy of the coffee shop AU is divorced almost entirely from the reality of an actual coffee shop. There are no abusive, creepy customers or bosses; there is no mention of the barista's wages; we don't see the dishwasher sweating at their station, the cashiers' aching feet; the person whose job it is to clean the (customer-only?) toilets. These topics are Political and Depressing and Must Be Avoided, because Political and Depressing things are antithetical to this kind of escapism.
The coffee shop AU exists, not in a world without capitalism (because this is a setting where commerce is actively happening) but in a world where capitalism has no teeth: a world where capitalism somehow works. In order to be convinced and soothed by this fantasy, you must suspend your disbelief and avert your eyes. You must filter the coffee shop through a neopastoralist lens.
To me, there's something very uncanny about it.
(by norrisniman)
in 2026, remember how GOOD writing feels. remember how satsfying it is to get your characters to the point you have been dying to get to, where they will experience the love, fear, relief or whatever the feeling you want to bring to life may be. let this year be the year of writing, prgress and of satisfactory endings.
You're afraid to write because you care too much about your craft. Not because you suck.
You want it to be perfect. Worthy. You're scared it won't be good enough. But the thing is, everything you write is worthy if you write it with heart.
That fear doesn't make you a fraud, or lazy. It makes you a perfectionist who doesn't write as much as they should because their fear is choking them. Your writing will never be perfect—nothing ever is.
So stop waiting for the perfect moment and go pour your heart out. Unleash your wild—and slightly disturbing—imagination onto those pages. Go create magic that only you can make.
GO WRITE THE THING YOU KEEP THINKING ABOUT DAY AND NIGHT. And make sure you write it for yourself before anyone else!
Researchers are painstakingly reconstructing the oldest-known map of the night sky – previously thought lost forever – by X-raying parchment
