April books: 2/4 (The Bookshop of Second Chances)
I finished my interconnected short stories class! It’s live on SkillShare here: https://skl.sh/48HfbY3
Hooray! It’s done! That said, I see SkillShare has, yet again, messed with teacher payments. It used to be that you got a share based on the number of minutes watched per month, but now apparently you have to have at least 75 minutes watched a month before you get anything. So, like, in February I only had 73 minutes watched, and so I got nothing. This seems…scammy. Like, they’re getting my content for free without paying me for it if I don’t meet some arbitrary limit?
This is on top of some shenanigans from a couple of years ago where if you’re not getting enough engagement with a class (people posting comments, projects) they hide the class from new people searching. As I always say, you can’t control other people, so now you’ve got the double whammy of not getting paid because you’re not getting the minutes, and not being able to get found to be watched because they’ve hidden your class.
(At least they stopped deleting classes, as far as I can tell.)
I don’t spend a ton of time on the SkillShare stuff. It’s supposed to be a background thing, a bit of extra income on the side, and I don’t have a huge desire to use up my writing time on marketing it. That’s on me, for sure, choices and all that, but it does feel like it’s purposefully hard to make the platform work if you’re not dedicated to being a top performer. And I wonder if top performers are still making the money they were a few years ago, or if their income has also gone down due to corporate shenanigans.
(Every so often I consider taking my classes to another platform, but none of them work quite the same, and it is easy on the backend on SkillShare. But I spend time on my classes and not getting paid when they’re making money off of them is all kinds of BS, so I shall have to look again and make some decisions. Not right now, though. Summer, probably.)
In other corporate shenanigans, Draft2Digital has announced that they’re going to start charging $12 a year maintenance fees for any author not earning at least $100/annually on the platform. D2D bought out Smashwords and is an indie book distribution system that almost everyone uses. In theory they’re doing it to try and limit the amount of AI slop being put out through them, but once again it’s really only going to hurt indie authors who are already not doing well. I’m not sure I make $100 a year through them. The majority of my sales come through Amazon, and most of D2D’s markets are tiny without much of a user base. Most of the sales I do make through there are to various library systems.
I’ve done some math because why not. If an ebook costs $2.99, you’d have to sell ~56 of them through D2D to hit the minimum threshold to not have to pay the fee. A quick search tells me 90% of indie books sell less than 100 copies. (That may include the AI slop books. I’m not sure.) And I suspect most other indie authors also sell 99% of their books through Amazon, so essentially everyone except those people doing extremely well or those purposefully marketing outside Amazon (and doing extremely well) is going to have to pay this maintenance fee.
Smashwords was completely free aside from their cut of the sales for, like, fifteen years, just saying.
And I know the AI slop is a problem, and I don’t know what the solution to it is, but it does seem like penalizing those not doing well isn’t going to help it.
Whew. That was a lot of Thoughts.
In other good news, I had a story accepted by an anthology! I turned in the contract and edits yesterday and I’m looking forward to seeing the final product.
Next steps moving forward is to actually write the short stories I outlined for my class. I also had some writing friends read the scifi short I wrote at the beginning of the year and provide feedback, so I’m going to do a few edits on that and then send it out as well.
Not a lot of the querying front (I also haven’t sent out queries in a few months due to the Scouting drama) but I have been talking to my SFWA mentor, who has been lovely and very helpful to talk to. If nothing else, it’s good to bounce my feelings off of someone who knows what they’re doing.
Anyway, hope you’re doing well, squider, and I’ll see you later in the week!
