I’m done with Twitter. If you follow me over there, I’ll leave the account open to post blog links back to here and book ads, but other than that I’m not going to use it for any sort of conversation.

You’ve probably heard about how Twitter is falling apart. Their stock price has been tanking.

Recently they created a Trust and Safety Council, to protect people from being triggered with hurtful dissenting ideas. Of course the council is made up of people like Anita Sarkesian, so you know how it is going to swing.

They’ve been unverifying conservatives, and outright banning conservative journalists. Then there were rumors of “shadow banning” where people would post, but their followers wouldn’t see it in their timelines. So it’s like you’re talking to a room that you think has 9,000 people in it, but when the lights come on you’ve been wasting time talking to an empty room.

For the record, I don’t know if that’s what happened to me or not. Some of my posts have just disappeared from my timeline entirely. Other tweets seem to show up for some followers, but not others, and it wasn’t just replies. Beats me. Either something weird was going on and I’ve violated the unwritten rules of the Ministry of Public Truth, or their technical interface is just getting worse (never attribute to malice what could just be stupidity). Either way it is enough of a pain that it was getting to be not worth the hassle.

Then today they disappeared all of my friend Adam Baldwin’s tweets. Ironically, his only visible post (out of 8,000) was a link to an article about how Twitter is banning conservatives. That was the last straw.

So I’m done there. Twitter can take it’s Orwellian “Trust and Safety Council” and stick it.

 

A little while ago I posted a cryptic little comment on Facebook. “I just bought a mountain.”

Then there were several hundred guesses about mountain of what, or pics of the big dude on HBO, or guesses about my secret volcano lair. No actual mountain. Okay, here’s the deal. We just bought a bunch of acres of mountainside several miles from our current home, and we’re going to be building a compound… err… I mean house. Yes. House. Like normal people own. We will be building a “house” there.

We’ve been looking for the last year. This was a real score, but I’ll talk more about that. It will still be called Yard Moose Mountain, of course. We’re still in the same county, across the valley on the other slope. We’re only seven minutes further from the city than we are now.

We scored our current house right when the economy tanked, and a bunch of developers had lost their butts and were trying to move lots for cheap. At that point I was a successful accountant who needed to be close enough to the city to commute (I was just starting my writing career) but we were still living in the little house in the SLC area we’d picked up out of foreclosure on my entry level accountant’s salary and repaired over seven years. We sold that house for way more than we bought it for, and used the money to build this one. (seriously people, debt to equity ratio, learn it, live it, love it).

When we built our current house it was all open fields around us. There were houses near, but we had a little room to breathe. I’m a country boy at heart. I don’t like people all up in my business. We even had a moose come and live in our yard. That’s why we started calling it Yard Moose Mountain. He just kind of camped out under my son’s bedroom window, then he’d wander out and eat our neighbor’s trees, but he never messed with my trees. Good moose.

It was really nice.

Over the last five years our area slowly filled in, until one day I woke up, and realized that rather than living in the country anymore, we were living in a small neighborhood. Sure, it was a nice commuter neighborhood (I’ve got 12 doctors in my ward, no joke) and the people are about as nice as you could possibly ask for, but it was still a neighborhood.  We landscaped and put in a fence for privacy, but it has lost its charm. Add to that, I’d retired from my finance manager job a few years ago to just be a full time author, so I no longer needed to be close enough to the city to commute.

Being a failed D List nobody hack pulp writer with an irreparably damaged career who will never be a *real* author and who can’t even manage to get measly five hundred people to a book signing, my income had still somehow gone up dramatically, but we’d not really changed our standard of living (well, except for more guns and minis, but those don’t count). Plus, because I have a pathological hatred of debt I had been making lots of extra house payments, to the point that I’d knocked 27 years worth of our 30 year mortgage payments out in 5. Because screw debt.

So last year we decided we wanted to move, and this time we were going to move someplace where we’d never have to move again. The problem is, I really like the county we live in now. To me it is the best place in Utah. Problem is, lots of rich people agree with me. So property is in demand.

For those of you who haven’t been to Utah you’ve got to understand what it is like. This state is huge. We have vast swaths of desert nothingness (I used to live in Delta!). Out there, land is super cheap. But you’re a million miles from everything, and in lots of those areas the weather sucks, freezing winter winds, and then summer is hot, dry, and windy, when it isn’t on fire, and I really hope you like sagebrush. But it’s big, affordable, and it certainly isn’t crowded.

Almost all of our population lives in a narrow strip of valleys between Provo and Ogden. This is called the Wasatch Front. This is where most of the jobs are. The problem there is that it is a dense city. Despite how the media portrays Utah as a bunch of bumpkins and our women are wearing butter churning dresses and floral bonnets, we’re actually one of the most urbanized states in the country, because everybody lives in the same damn place. It has all the negatives of city and suburban living, with other humans everywhere, lousy traffic, no space, shooting off your porch results in a SWAT call out, and land isn’t cheap. It’s all small lots, I’d guess quarter of an acre average, or maybe an occasional acre sized plot for way too much. Anything bigger gets subdivided.

Now, to clarify, when I say way too much money, I mean way too much by Rocky Mountain state standards. By some parts of the US standards, all of Utah is cheap. The equivalent to our current house in my wife’s home area California would be in the four or five million dollar range, only we couldn’t actually price that out because there are no lots the size of our current lot listed in Santa Clara county.

I used to live on the Wasatch Front. The worst part is that during the winter we experience what is called “The Inversion”. Now, you might be familiar with that winter weather effect, where because of the difference between the warm and cold air, the air in the valley will get stuck there and not circulate out, but in Utah, where we decided to stick two million people into what is basically one skinny valley, for a few weeks every winter we get to have the worst air quality in the world. Suck it, Bejing. If you have asthma like I do, it’s like sucking hot death through a straw.

So, expensive, crowded, and a few weeks a year the air is made of poisonous gas. Yay.

But there are a few sweet spots in Utah near the population center that aren’t desert, but rather pretty mountains, that aren’t all crowded, which are above the inversion, or better, on the other side of the Wasatch where the air is clean and all our pollution gets blown down to Salt Lake every morning. Now these peaceful mountain valleys were originally owned by farmers, who then figured out they could get stupid rich by subdividing it out and selling the land to ski resorts and movie stars.

That’s how you get Park City. Where the super rich go to ski, and Quentin Tarantino might yell at you over a parking space at Starbucks. Oh, it’s snooty, but we shopped for land there too. Last year we even seriously contemplated buying a piece of land there but then Katherine Heigl would have been our neighbor… I’m not making that up. Only I don’t want to raise my kids in the kind of neighborhood where people who make romantic comedies live. Next thing I know they’d be hanging out with Seth Rogan or something.

I don’t want to give you a bad impression of this part of Utah. It isn’t all imported snoots. It is also normal people, who are holding onto their farms in anticipation of selling them for absurd amounts of money to snoots. There are several smaller areas on the opposite side of the Wasatch that aren’t as developed, but still have the perks. Yard Moose Mountain is one of them.

So we started shopping for land in our region, problem is, so is everybody else, because it is still on the long side of commutable to SLC or Ogden. We hired the same realtor who found our current place for us, and gave him our wish list. My wife wanted privacy, and a good view, and no HOA (because HOAs can go to hell, and if I want to put up a concrete manatee as my mailbox, I’m going to put up a friggin’ concrete manatee as my mailbox). My list was I want to shoot off the porch and I don’t want to hear the highway.

If you’re in Utah, and you need a realtor, hire Cade Erickson. You’ll thank me. Dude moves houses like crazy. If what you want is out there, he’ll find it. He sold my last house in ten days for more than we thought we could get for it, right after the housing market fell apart. And when stuff goes sideways during the negotiation, he’s on it. Every oddball county regulation or water right or whatever, Cade is on it.

We looked at a bunch of properties. One nice thing about having your house paid off is that it gives you leverage and the ability to move quickly, so we could afford to be picky. Because I hate debt, I also skipped a bunch of things that were super nice, but would have required me to sell my existing house to finance building the new one, and I’m sorry, I’m never going to do the Sell a House/Rent an Apartment While You Build a House thing ever again. When you’ve got a bunch of kids and work from home that is a pain.

Then a few weeks ago, bingo. This one was one of the biggest plots, priced right, good location, same schools, the works. Score. It was perfect. We made an offer that same day. There were some complications because after we’d put down our earnest money and signed, the farmer selling it had misjudged how much land he needed to keep for himself in order to keep enough water shares. Rather than be jerks about it we just gave back enough acreage so he’d have no problems with his rights (even if they’re further away, you still want to be a good neighbor). It was all final this afternoon.

Score!

Questions I got on the internet so far:

How much did it cost?

It cost none of your damn business.

How big is it?

Pretty big. It isn’t the whole mountain. I was being facetious. Utah mountains are very large, and I’m merely a poor D List author (to be fair, in Alabama, this would totally be a mountain). However, my new lot is now 88 times larger than my current good sized lot. So we’ll get by.

Put it this way, first time I walked around it in the snow, I got really winded. And I’m not that out of shape. Next day tried to tackle the tall part with the kids straight up the middle, only to realize that the drifts got to be about four feet deep on the slope. So you’d climb three feet up, slide two feet down.

But the flat part we’re going to put the house on? It is gorgeous.

Will it have a shooting range?

Yes. My goal was to be able to shoot long range off my back porch. I can theoretically shoot a thousand yards. However, the lovely Mrs. Correia wants to put the fortress compound house in the middle.  So the way it is shaped, off the porch I’ll only be able to shoot about 500 yards, unless I make friends with the farmer below us, because if I could put some targets across his pasture I could get out to about 2,000 yards. I’m actually thinking about using one corner and pushing up some berms to make a couple hundred yard enclosed bays too.

Can I come shoot?

Only if I personally invite you. Don’t be that guy.

Does it have an abandoned missile silo?

No. Though since I don’t have an HOA I can totally put one in if I feel like it.

Does it come with moose?

Haven’t seen one there yet, but probably. Every time I’ve been there I’ve seen between twenty or thirty deer. We’ve got some small copses of trees on our plot, but there are forested ravines all around us. The moose around here seem to love those.

Will you name it Mount Hoooon/Wendell Peak/Some other manatee based name?

Nope. If it stays Yard Moose Mountain I don’t have to change the family logo or stationary. Wendell understands. Aquatic mammals are fiscally responsible. And besides, he gets a cool mailbox shipped all the way from Florida.

Will it have a secret base inside of a volcano?

If I told you that, it wouldn’t be much of a secret base now would it?

Will the secret volcano base have lava?

Only if the Yellowstone Caldera explodes. Then we’ll have all the lava we could ever want about two minutes later.

Are you moving now?

We’re not moving anytime soon. We are planning on taking our time. We’re going to have to put in half a mile of driveway before we can do anything else (Yes, it will be called Yard Moose Mountain Road). There is no rush. Mostly I just wanted to find a good piece of land and lock it up. The plan is build the new one, then move in and sell the current one.

Anyways, that is one of my big secret cool fun projects that has been sucking up my time. I’ve got a bunch of crazy things going on right now, a few of which I can’t even hint at. This is going to be a really exciting year.

Check this out. They did a full cast audio drama of my Grimnoir short story Detroit Christmas: http://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/Detroit-Christmas-Audiobook/B01BMLELYG/ref=a_search_c4_1_1_srTtl?qid=1455897326&sr=1-1

My next novel is Into the Wild, sequel to Into the Storm.

http://privateerpress.com/into-the-wild-acosta

Because they are from a smaller press, these are my least well known books. That said, they’re really good, and I’m proud of them. You guys should check them out.

Here is some backstory of how I ended up working with them.

http://privateerpress.com/into-the-game-into-print

This review was posted for Son of the Black Sword.

1.0 out of 5 starsThis rating has NOTHING to do with the writing!

(Name removed because he probably meant well, and this isn’t personal)

Format: Kindle Edition

I read and absolutely loved, Correia’s monster hunter books. Own each and every one of them. I was so looking forward to reading this one after I saw the blurbs for it. However, I cannot bring myself to allow the publishing company that Correia has his contract with, to take advantage of me. Like many of the ‘main stream’ authors, or rather, those that aren’t taking advantage of self publishing, the cost of the book is inane. The Ebook. Which costs the publishing company NOTHING to create in comparison to hardback, and paperback books. Costs more than the Paperback. That alone, will prevent me from purchasing this book, until the price is fixed to something reasonable.

 

 

I know writers aren’t supposed to respond to reviews, but I’m not responding to this as a writer, I’m responding to it as a retired accountant.

I am the author in question. Your review doesn’t hurt anything except my overall average. You aren’t sticking it to the man. You aren’t harming the corporate fat cats. If you think the book sucks, give it one star. That’s awesome. That’s what the stars are for. But you don’t use one star to bitch about the price of eBooks. That just makes you look stupid. We shouldn’t still be having this conversation with anybody who isn’t a Bernie Sanders supporter.

Now, Accountant Hat on. This is pretty basic stuff. This is how basic costing works, not just for books, but quite literally everything. But today, we’ll talk about books, because your ridiculous review has pissed me off.  I’m going to dumb this down and keep it simple as possible.

I produce a product, which I sell to a publisher. Under that contract I am given an advance against royalties (money up front), and then I get royalties based upon a percentage of the sales price. This is good. This is how authors GET PAID.

Now, over on the publisher side they have a bunch of costs associated with the production of my product. Some of these costs apply to both ebooks and print. However, contrary to what most people think printing isn’t the big deal, as much as all the other stuff.

There are four levels of costing. Each one will represent a percentage of the cost of the product.

General and Administrative: These are the costs associated with having a company. Regardless of whether the product makes it out the door or not, you are paying the rent and keeping the lights on.

Overhead: Cost related to doing whatever it is your company actually does.

Direct: Costs related to actually making whatever it is you make.

Now, I’ve never been an accountant in the publishing industry so I’m not sure what the rules are for which costs go into which bucket. (My accounting experience was for manufacturing high end electronics, then guns, and finally keeping the wings from falling off of A-10s, and this varies from industry to industry)

Now, the thing that is different between eBooks and physical books is that Direct part. (Which having seen how books are printed, trust me, you are drastically overestimating) and you’re leaving out all that other stuff like having a company, and paying a bunch of people to make art and sell it.

And direct cost is more than “paper” and “ink”. On my publisher’s books, I am a Direct Cost.

Oh, but wait, we forgot the last percentage, and that’s profit. That’s the awesome part everybody wants to maximize. I like when my publisher makes a profit, because that means they get to stay in business, which means I get to continue making lots and lots of money.

So when a producer sets the price of an item, they look at what all those numbers above are, and then they try to cover all of them, and have some left over to make a profit so it is worth doing it again.

Some products are more profitable than others. When you go to a fast food restaurant, the margin on the burgers is slim. If they sold nothing but burgers they’d be in trouble. However, the margin on soda is amazing. That soda you spent a couple bucks on? The most expensive thing involved was probably the cup. When I was selling guns, guns were cut throat, high competition, and on most brands I’d only make 10-15% on the sale of a gun. But then I’d made 40%-50% on accessories. That was how I kept the lights on.

Ebooks are like that. Publishing is an industry with crappy margins. Don’t believe me? Ask Borders. Yes, ebooks have a lower direct cost, but that is all still going into the same company bucket. Some lines are more profitable than others. Duh. It isn’t about “fairness”. Business has nothing to do with fairness. Business is about staying in business.

That’s the basics of how costing works.

But wait, there’s more!

Now we get into Econ 101! (I love Econ).

So now that you know how much you have to make in order to keep the lights on, you want to maximize your profit. You want to sell it for as much as possible, but not for too much because that will turn some people off and you’ll sell fewer units, so you want to get that sweet spot where the supply and demand curves meet.

Some people are willing to pay more, others are willing to pay less. Go super cheap, make less per unit, and sell more, and at the other end you go super expensive, make more per unit, but sell less. Which is why the Nissan Versa and Aston Martin DB9 can both exist.

Beyond that I’m not going to explain how supply and demand work. That’s the first few hours of an Econ class. Or go read Thomas Sowell. You’ll thank me later.

Books aren’t cars, but they’re basically interchangeable entertainment products. Some authors’ brands can get away with a higher cost because they’ve established that they’re a Honda, and some new guy is going for moped prices because his quality isn’t established and the only way he can hope to attract customers is by low price. The super cheap customer isn’t going to buy the Ferrari, and Ferrari is just fine with that.  But when cheap guy posts a one star review for the Ferrari, we’re all going to laugh at him. For the record, I’m not a Ferrari. I’m more of a Ford Expedition.

Since there isn’t some super easy way to tell you what the perfect sweet spot is, publishers guess. Some guess too high, and others guess too low. Who guesses just right? Well, we don’t know, because it isn’t like you go around showing your competitors your P&L (that’s a Profit and Loss statement for you Bernie fans, for those guys, think of it as magic voodoo).

Oooooh, but there’s even more!

What? Pricing eBooks is even more complex? Unpossible!

Yes, because now lawyers get involved!

Did you know that Amazon is actually a business too? And that it exists to make money? And that it also wants to maximize its profit? Crazy. Bernie should do something about that.

Publishing houses don’t work off the same contract as lone self-published authors. In fact, for a publishing house to set up an ebook distribution deal with Amazon there is a lot of wrangling, and Amazon gets a say in how those books are priced. This involves lawyers (see that line about Overhead, they probably go in that bucket).

And that isn’t even getting into the fact that in said contract, there are all sorts of little special things, like Amazon promotions (where they can put things on sale or discount them or bundle them with audiobooks) and publishers need to set their regular price to take those things into account.

Now, if you’ve got a publishing house that sells ebooks in other places (like on their own page in monthly Webscription discount bundles that have been around since the internet was invented) then that complicates matters, and Amazon is going to have you set minimum price guidelines and maximum discount rates. It all gets very complicated, and is also why for the first few years of my career the most common FAQ on my blog was “Why can’t I get your book on my Kindle?”

Once my publisher got that contract hammered out, and Amazon was happy with the minimum prices they agreed to, I was super happy, because now on my personal P&L I was making a whole lot more money by having my eBooks in the biggest marketplace. Yay.

Now, you may have noticed that my publisher (who trust me, isn’t evil, she’s actually pretty cool) drops the prices of the ebook the longer it has been out. Part of this is that contract thing, and another part is that demand curve thing, but either way, it gets cheaper as it goes.

So yeah, in this case the ebook is around paperback costs. HOW BARBARIC! Oh, except wait… There is no paperback yet. The book is only out in hardcover. Which means back on that demand curve (remember, profit good) the potential customers aren’t choosing between an $8.99 paperback and a $7.99 ebook. They’re choosing between a $25 hard back and a $7.99 ebook.

In our case when the paperback comes out, my publisher drops the price because the market conditions have changed (which is why the Monster Hunter Nemesis ebook is $6.99 and Monster Hunter International is free). Sometimes my eBooks show up for less because Amazon is having a sale, and I don’t even know about it until one of my fans tags me on Facebook about the sale.

You really want to get offended? My Super Evil Publisher also sells eARCs (Electronic Advanced Reader Copies) on their own page three months before the book comes out, for close to hard cover prices! GASP! These are the early, probably not fully proofed, versions that would normally go out to reviewers. But going back to that demand curve thing, some brands are in such demand that there is a market of people who will spend $15(!) to get an eBook, because they are in that much of a hurry to find out what happens next, and are willing to pay a premium to get it first (I actually earned out my advance for Monster Hunter Nemesis off of eARC sales alone).

Now if you’re self-publishing and trying to decide how to price your book, it is simpler. You don’t have a bunch of lawyers involved, and you don’t have all that G&A and Overhead. Lots of self-published folks go 99 cents, others do the $2.99 to maximize the royalty percentage. Same principle. You’ve got your market and your demand curve, and you’re going to price accordingly. You need to figure out the price that maximizes your return. Whatever you set it at, somebody is going to come along and say it is wrong. ONE STAR!

This all boils down to a question of entertainment dollar value to the customer. If you want it now, and you really like this particular brand, you’ll realize that you spent more than that on your burger combo at lunch today and buy the book. If that isn’t worth your entertainment dollar value, then you won’t purchase.

In pricing, nobody is “taking advantage of you” unless you are stuck in a monopolistic situation. Ruth’s Chris costs more than Sizzler, but Ruth’s Chris isn’t taking advantage of you, they are pricing according to their brand and their product to maximize their position in the marketplace. If they price too high, then they will not make a profit, and will have to adjust or lose market share. Which is kind of funny, because in this tortured analogy, I’m actually priced more like Sizzler, and you just gave a one star review to Sizzler, because I’m not priced like McDonalds.

Accountant Hat off, Writer Hat on… Back to this kind of one star review, it is utterly pointless. You aren’t educating anybody. The only person you’re harming is the author. Because nobody in the world is going to say your review was helpful, nobody is ever going to read it. So all you did was lower the overall average stars, which primarily damages the author’s standing. A review that says “I’m too cheap to buy this ONE STAR!” is the same as “It sounds like this baby killer likes guns ONE STAR!” or “I bet he listens to Fox News ONE STAR!”

“What a rip off! It turns out Moby Dick is about whales! Whales are fat and stupid and so is Herman Melville! ONE STAR!”

Ignorant reviewers… You aren’t helping.

Frankly, it is kind of insulting. Me? I’m fine being insulted. I consider it blog fodder. A. I get called the worst things in the world daily, so I’ve got rhino hide. B. I’ve sold a ton of books so I know you’re full of crap. But put yourself in the shoes of some new author at a publishing house and think about how they feel when you post reviews like that. It’s like you’re telling them that the eight hours* of entertainment they provided was worth less than the price of a hamburger.

And I’m not even talking a very good hamburger.

The value of a book isn’t the paper. The value is the entertainment you get from the book. If you get books because you like having shelves and shelves of books (nothing wrong with that by the way, you should see my office) great, but why the hell did you buy an eReader anyway? Authors love being told that the entertainment they provide isn’t worth a buck an hour, usually from people who have no problem drinking a $6 Coke and eating $4 nachos while watching a 90 minute movie that cost $8 to get into.

Stars are to rate the product, not to announce to the world you don’t understand how capitalism works. If you’re too cheap to buy it, just don’t buy it! If you read it and it is good, give it stars! If you read it, and you thought it was bad, give it less stars. It’s that simple.

 

 

*Oh, and shut up, speed readers. That’s right. I said eight hours. Deal with it. Nobody cares that you read 6,000 WPM like some sort of freaky robot person. Most people read for fun at 200 WPM and most books are 100k words. I swear, I’ve never in my life mentioned that it takes hours to read a novel without some self-righteous speed reader chiming in the comments about how brilliant they are and how they read a novel every fifteen minutes. Goody for you. Those of us who’ve known the touch of a woman don’t care you read fast.