Wednesday, March 8, 2017

National Cereal Day!

This holiday was actually yesterday. There are so many different types of cereal out there. Interesting to have a day for it. For cold cereal, I normally like Honey Nut Cheerios. For hot, usually oatmeal with some light syrup, raisins, a little Splenda, and cinnamon. Sometimes I'll have cream of rice. I might do a similar thing as the oatmeal with it.

Well, only Dad and I showed up for the first local ace group meeting. I'm a bit disappointed, but at least it symbolically started. People might need to get used to the time. 2 people said they were planning to go, but they ended up doing other things at the same time.

Since I was already at the cafe, I got an iced chai. It was so overfilled that when I tried to poke the straw through, the liquid spurted out. It was good, though. Actually better than the Starbuck's version. Also, got a Texas pecan pie bar. It was huge and really tasty. Pecan pie is one of my fave pies, and to have it in bar form was interesting. Probably shouldn't have had it because of the whole nuts. They were very soft, and there wasn't very many.

Next time the meeting will be at a different cafe. Hopefully other people will be there. I thought in the past that it might be best to meet at somebody's house. Just to have it safer and more 'private'. I'm wondering if some people don't want to talk or be out about it in public. I can see why that would be scary. However, maybe some want to make sure they get to know people before doing something like that. So, I can see both sides of this. If we had it at someone's home I could use my huge flag for the meeting. It'd be easier for the dessert potluck part, too. I decided to skip that until we talk things out in person. For the time being, since we're meeting at cafes, we can grab desserts there.

I unpublished my 2 ebooks from Smashwords, and enrolled them both in Amazon's KDP Select's program. While they're enrolled, they can't be sold anywhere else. They weren't doing much with Smashwords and its distributors, so I thought this would be a good thing to do. With Select, there are 2 promos you can choose from, they're put into something similar to a library, it's open to more countries, etc. The terms are 3 months long, and you can reenroll after each one.

For Alliance, I chose the Kindle Countdown Deal. They won't let you start it until after it's been enrolled for a month. So, I scheduled it for the beginning of next month. You can only do it for a week at most during the entire term. It'll have 4 price increments. It'll start with 80% of, then 60%, and so on. People will see the regular price (which will now be $4.99) next to the discounted one. I'll still get the same percentage in royalties. Even though it'll dip below the normal $2.99 mark. Usually, anything less than that, and you'll only get 35%. At that mark and more, you get 70% back. That's a lot better, and I'm glad they keep it with this promo.

With Sweet Endless Terror, I chose the Free Book Promotion. That you can you do right away. I scheduled that to start today, and it'll go until the 12th at midnight. Apparently, you can't schedule it to start before 8am. So, it ends up being slightly less than 5 days worth...It can only be for 5 days each term. I chose this one for the free promo, since it's shorter and set to be cheaper than Alliance. (It'll be $3.99 normally.) After the 5 days are up, they'll briefly put it on the paid 100 Amazon Best Seller List. This will help with exposure, too.

Last time I checked, I've 'sold' 8 today through the free book promo. That's not bad for the first 9 hours. With each one sold (even if it's free), the ranking for that book goes up. More people will see it this way. It gets suggested more often, and can make it onto certain lists. So, that in itself can be awesome. With selling it for free, I still get something out of it.

I like that the promos will be one after the other. There will be some time between them, and a month without until the term ends. I think this will help a lot. Then, I could start all over again when I reenroll. It'll expose it to even more people this way.

Also, with their library, I get paid for every page that's read. It's quite a bit different with how much you get back. It varies, and I think it depends on how much is in a given 'pool' of money that they get. They take that into account and how many pages have been read, and that's what you get back. There's also a set maximum amount of pages that I don't even come close to. Something like 30,000. The longest one of mine, Alliance, is about 400 pages...No matter how long somebody takes to read it, I'll still get paid. Even if it's after the Select term is over and I don't reenroll. Pretty awesome! I've read that people can be paid quite a lot this way. I'll still think of it as 'extra' compared to selling them like usual.

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