Laurasauras

Queer Books for Disability Pride Month

I primarily self-publish, although A Coup of Owls has published one of my novellas, and I've been in a few anthologies!

After you decide the shops you distribute to, you then have a choice of library apps to distribute to - Hoopla, BorrowBox, Vivlio, CloudLibrary, etc.

Unfortunately, all of them except Hoopla, I think, autoreject erotica, but everything else I publish I make sure to make available in library apps if I can!

If you have the tolerance to manage multiple outlets, I would recommend publishing in this order:

buy your own ISBN independently. You can buy through other services but that locks you into them. Buy it yourself! first through Amazon, both physically and ebook but with expanded distribution turned OFF. This is important because they can fuck up the ISBN stuff otherwise

then through IngramSpark for physical copies, which allows any bookstore in the world to sell them. They make you choose a discount rate between 40-60% for bookstores and recommend the higher rate but unless you're marketing to bookstores outside your local area, just go with the 40%. It already costs us so much more to print than trad publishers, it's the only way we can compete

I also get my author copies through IS because in my experience they're higher quality than Amazon author copies (nicer paper, the spines are always properly aligned). It is however cheaper to get them from Amazon, so make whatever choice works for you

I also sell through my website, which is a combo of Wordpress.org and Woocommerce. .ORG allows plugins which allows you to sell, Wordpress.COM is not the one you want. There's other stuff involved in this, so if you have less tech skills then you might want to use Squarespace/whatever or just not bother, HOWEVER having an author website is a great idea so that people can find information about you in your own words and contact you

Then with ebooks, publish through Kobo (they also distribute to Overdrive), Google and Apple. I'm still looking into Hoopla so I can't advise there, but even though D2D distributes to like 20 different places, they don't seem to be places people use

The reason you would make separate accounts in all these places is because each of them take a percentage of your royalty, and if you use an aggregator like D2D they will also take a percentage of your royalty.

Amazon especially in terms of their physical books is worth doing separately because they cost less to print and ship faster. The quality is slightly worse than IS but it really is a slight difference.

If you don't have the tolerance to manage all those sites individually (and really it's just the set up part that's time consuming and it's entering in the same info every time, so I think it's worth it), I would advise just doing everything through IngramSpark because that'll also get you into bookstores.

You can of course go exclusive with Amazon ebooks and this will get you access to Kindle Unlimited. Honestly, that might be the most profitable way to go, but it does mean that you're cutting off anyone who might want to access your ebook who doesn't have a Kindle, which I don't like. I personally think people should be able to opt out of using Amazon. I also would like to opt out of Amazon, but by far the majority of my sales come through them, so..........

Also, a lot of authors report that unless you're quite popular, the pages read in Kindle Unlimited doesn't really add up to the same kind of royalties you can get through the other platforms, so it's kind of a wash on that front.

Amazon physical books also won't distribute to other bookstores if you want to just do everything through them.

If I had my time over again, I would put a much greater emphasis on getting reviews both from advance reader copies (ARCs) and publications. A lot of the more reputable publications that allow review submissions require the book to not yet be released. It often costs money for those, but having professional reviews makes a big difference. ARCs you should never have to pay for, and ebooks are fine for most readers, but some people go the extra mile and send physical books. I don't know that it's worth it tbh.

You will get people messaging you on social media to offer you advertising in exchange for money. These are scams. They have bought a lot of followers, none of whom are going to buy your book because the account invariably advertises all books regardless of genre and most of the followers are probably bots.

Sewing machines are operated by *people*. Knitting machines are operated by *people*. Yes lots of the process is automated but you cannot tell a machine "make me a t-shirt" or "make me a knit cardigan".

Guess what

IF we were to be perfectly rigorous and sincere about vampires, the only interpretation that rings true to me - in the sense of, what would drive people from #myRegion to be putting wooden stakes into corpses and such - is that of the spiteful and ancient paterfamilias, so petty and so dedicates to maintaining his situational power within the family that he evades death itself, and so stubborn in his pitiless rein that he literally turns his victims inhuman too; some are meals, some are subordinate heads of the family, subservient patriarchs and matriarchs who also do their fair share of biting

“No age gap??!?!?”

“And no non-con elements”

“NO NON CON?”

“And no coercion or otherwise manipulative behaviors”

“Joe they want a vampire with NOTHING”

They don't have a heartbeat, they often don't even breathe, they're genuinely inhuman

They can't go out in the daylight

They can't share meals with people

They are physically repelled by representations of religion (more significant before Nietzsche, but still important)

They don't show up in mirrors or photographs, they have no way of knowing who they are, they're cut off from seeing who they've become since they've been changed

And they kill people to maintain this facsimile of living, which isn't even living. They steal the blood, the life essence of people, so they can continue being not human

When you make them drink animal blood, as is done in Twilight and sometimes Buffy, they are still participating in hunting in a way that is distinctly inhuman. They're still biting into an alive creature and draining it of life. Often the writer will have them feed on rats just to highlight how desperate this need is and how distinct it is from our human way of eating

When you make them drink from blood banks, also done in Buffy and often in media that's attempting to soften the vampire mythos, they steal other people's opportunities to be saved

They've been an analogy for sexual assault since the first portrayals of them, not only because of the intimacy of biting someone's neck, but also because they often are able to hypnotise or compel their victims. They lure them in. They're predators

You can have "good" vampires, but the thing that's compelling about them is the fact that they're fighting so hard against their instincts and there's tension in the fact that they might lose that fight

If you take away all these things idk I just think you probably don't like vampires