The Monkey Cabal

Hello, it’s me again. You know how I hate to ask, and I have no expectation, but I have to ask anyway. I need some help with my latest medical bill. I was able to pay down half of it, but I still owe about $1750, which is a dumb number I don’t expect you to pay. The new new drug is pretty expensive and Insurance knocks off a lot, to be fair, but between it and my recent hospital stay, it’s more than I can manage at the moment.

I would be grateful for any help you can give, even just a signal boost or something.

Those of you who notice such things will know that in a little less than two weeks, it's going to be a year since @petermorwood departed this plane of existence.

As the date's been getting closer, I'm becoming increasingly clear (due to mood swings and sleep disturbances and other such stuff) that it would be a really good thing for me if I don't have to live through this first anniversary of his loss anywhere near the house where he breathed his last.

For that day, and ideally a couple/few days on either side of it, I really need to get away from here.

So that's my plan, if I can get all this to come together (with everybody's help). ...It's not like any brief escape will get the pain to stop, you know? That's years away... if ever. But at least this move will prevent a short-term crisis, and allow me (after the really painful day has passed) to start getting back to what around here now passes for "standard operating procedure"—meaning writing, and doing other work, and getting on with the rest of the current form of life—as quickly as possible.

What I have in mind is to spend the days on either side of May 9th—and the day itself—as far away from the cottage as physical issues will allow me to travel. Let's think of it as a long weekend, an hour or two's flight away. To manage that, though, I need to boost sales at the Ebooks Direct store over the days to come. If the necessary funds manifest themselves over the course of this week, I'll have time to make the necessary arrangements.

So can I get those of you who see this post to reblog it, and bring the Ebooks Direct store to people's notice as widely as possible? ...As numerous ebook bundles are available at discount prices. (There are more than show in the slide below: that's just a snapshot of how the front-page carousel looks.)

...And if none of these appeal (or if you've got them already and want to give them to somebody else): hey, there are gift cards! (I finally managed to get these things organized correctly...) 😅 They come in per-bundle versions, or in a number of cash values to suit your preference.

Finally: if you've already got too many ebooks, or otherwise just prefer to drop a little something into the kitty to help me escape for a few-ish days, here's my Ko-Fi.

...So let's see if this can be pulled off. And for all your past help, and assistance to come: thanks, friends. I appreciate you so much... as your voices, heard daily, are pretty much all that makes the local silence bearable.

project hail mary + space

As most if not all of my followers know, I am a self-published author of SFF books (Whitney & Davies, a cozy mystery-fantasy series set in 1920s England, and From the Shadows, a standalone sci-fi) and historical mysteries (the Pauline Gray novellas, set in rural upstate NY in the 1930s).

The two distributors I use for publishing my e-books are Amazon (thanks, I hate it, and will be pulling all my books from them as soon as I have my own online store set up for my website due to their new AI search inside this book tool, which cannot be turned off and offers absolutely zero guarantee to authors that their works are not being scraped to further feed the AI program), and Draft2Digital, which publishes my books to a vast number of non-Amazon retailers in exchange for a small royalties fee.

Or at least, that's what they have done. Starting May 14, Draft2Digital is charging all authors who make less than $100 in a year through their site an annual "maintenance fee." It's not huge, but it's more than I make in a year off book sales, which means I will in fact be losing money every year to have my books distributed through them. Which leaves me with two choices: close my account with D2D and sell my e-books only through my website, OR sell somewhere between 50-75 e-books before May 14.

I obviously have not sold many e-books through this vast network of retailers in the last few years, or else I wouldn't have to worry about the maintenance fee, so resorting to only selling my e-books through my website shouldn't bother me (and I can learn how to upload them directly to some of the bigger retailers, like Kobo and Barnes & Noble, so I may still have a few options open to me), but I will admit that it seems like the death knell for me as a self-publisher. And if that is the case, okay--I've been working at this for around eleven years and have never made much of a go of it, always figuring things out too late or too early to match the trends, never being able to get the social media algorithms to work for me, always struggling to find my audience. So if this is the end, ok. I'm certainly not going to quit writing stories (and if you are a fan of Whitney & Davies, please don't worry--the fourth book WILL be published, even if it ends up only available through my website. I am not going to leave this series dangling) even if I quit self-publishing.

But I'm also not interested in just fading into the night without making at least an effort to beat the system. SO, I am requesting that if you have read any of my books and enjoyed them, please spread the word in these next two weeks for people to give them a try and to please purchase them through any retailer EXCEPT Amazon. Which I know is a pain if you have a Kindle e-reader, but I believe that Smashwords, at least, can upload to a Kindle, so you do have some options even there.

It's a long shot, I know. But it's better to take a long shot than to just give up. Links to my books are below:

Magic Most Deadly (W&D 1)

Glamours & Gunshots (W&D 2)

Death by Disguise (W&D 3)

While Shepherds Watch (W&D Christmas novella)

Magic & Mayhem (short stories in the W&D world)

From the Shadows

Candles in the Dark (PG 1)

Diamonds to Dust (PG 2)