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Third Party Vendors (An Informational Post)
I was told there’d be no math! :3 (Stealing that line shamelessly from LT3′s CFO. ;3) Before I get started on this topic, I’m meaning this to be informational. A lot of peeps know third-party vendors take a cut, and I’m putting solid numbers out there for those who are curious about the exactitudes of that cut. ^__^
Okay, so LT3 supplies our books to eight or so third-party vendors. Third-party vendors get us more exposure and make people more inclined to buy our books while they’re doing their other shopping (typically for books from other publishers). Sort of like the way WalMart and other stores picked up the super center model with groceries, general merch, and pharmacy and the like.
A rundown of LT3′s third party vendors:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
iTunes
Kobo
AllRomance Ebooks
Rainbow Ebooks
Bookstrand
(We also do Smashwords, but their system is extra special complicated so for simplicity I’m skipping that one.)
Let’s start with Amazon. If the book is priced between $2.99 and $9.99, they’ll give you 70% of the list price. If it’s less or more, you get 35%. But wait! Amazon distributes to a bunch of different countries (think Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.com.br, etc.) If you don’t exclusively distribute with Amazon (the KDP Select program), you can only get 35% of the price in India, Japan, and Brazil. There’s no 70% option there.
Barnes & Noble has a similar tier setting. If your book is between $2.99 and $9.99, they’ll give you 65% of the list price. Anything else, you get 40%. No ifs, ands, buts here, just two simple tiers.
iTunes is simple and complicated. They give us 70% for all books, regardless of price. However! You have to match their price tiers. This is pretty easy for USD prices, as their price tiers pretty evenly match ours (everything must end in .99), but gets trickier when you start to do conversions to Euros, GBP, etc. >_<
Kobo also does tiered percentages. If you're between $1.99 and $12.99, you get 70%. Everything else gets 45%.
AllRomance and Rainbow Ebooks both take a solid 40%, giving us 60%, and Bookstrand splits it 50-50.
So what does this mean? Well, LT3 gives our authors 40% of the price from books sold through LT3, and 35% of the gross we get from third party sales. Here's what that looks like (math!):
(Apologies for the size of that image, but no way was I coding that table by hand. x__X;;)
There you have it. ^__^ If you’ve got any questions, drop ‘em, though I may have to ping Sam to answer any tough ones.
Update update update
I’m sure it’s no surprise that I suck at updates by this point. :3
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CONS
Yaoi-con was fantastic, and I have a lovely, lovely tattoo to show for that trip to CA.
It hurt, of course, both more and less than I thought it would. IDK why I assumed every stab of the needle would hurt the same, duh of course not. Things I did not know: it itches like a mother fucker and it loses a layer of inked skin. Seriously, why does no one talk about the itching? Because holy mother of god, did it itch. (Did I mention it was a tiny bit itchy? :3) Also, you’re supposed to not wear constricting/rough stuff over it (a.k.a., jeans) and I totally planned ahead and packed mostly … jeans. >_>
GRL was next, which was cool in some ways and utterly frustrating in others. The peeps we met were the highlight, ffs. Putting faces to names and just hanging out with peeps was totally awesome. ^__^ Hopefully the frustrating parts will smooth out in future years as the con is around longer.
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BOOKS
Private Dicks: Undercovers is out! ^__^ I love this anthology, no lie. There are some super awesome stories in here, and you should definitely check them out when you get a chance. Everything from contemp to paranormal to knights (::coughMegancough::) to sci-fi (me? WTF?).
With a Touch is my contribution to the Halloween Rentboys collection that comes out tomorrow. It’s fantasy, as per usual, and is a cute little short about a man who’s trying to find a missing person of magical means, and finds much more than that.
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I think that’s it? IDK, I thought I had more. We’ll go with it.
Saving Liam!
Saving Liam comes out tomorrow! (late tomorrow, technically “Wednesday,” but I don’t think anyone doesn’t know that we do updates the night before at this point. :3)
God, this story was a monster to write. It took me over a year (with other projects in between), and it’s one of the longest I’ve written, if not THE longest. It’s definitely one of the best, IMHO, and I am really, really fucking happy with the way it turned out. I haven’t heard much from peeps about it, but what I have heard is positive (which makes me really happy). ^__^
Oh, if you’re interested, there are two giveaways going on: one at Goodreads, which closes at 10:00 p.m. EDT Tuesday, and one at Babes in Boyland, which closes at 9 p.m. CDT on Wednesday. (Oh, god, those are different time zones. /resists urge to convert them)
Saving Liam
Leyton lived a quiet, simple life as a prosperous, thriving merchant alongside his twin brother Liam. But that life is shattered when Liam goes missing, and Leyton is told that the only way to save his brother’s life is to seduce a king. The task proves to be even more difficult than Leyton feared, and soon he is swept up in a tide of political machinations, betrayal, and a looming threat of execution once the men who blackmailed him are caught.
But the threat of his pending death is nothing alongside the constant fear for his missing brother’s safety—and the tangle of intrigue in which he is caught is nothing like the tangle he put himself in after breaking the heart of a king…
Also, if for any reason you do not follow M or didn’t catch this on the LT3 site, we’re kicking off our moving-three-states-east shenanigans within a few days. That means less communication (b/c, y’know, I’m so chatty now. :3), and much slower response times. Do not burn down the internet while I’m not there to help, plzkthks.
Also, oh my god the books and sneak peeks are so out of date. /o\ ::adds updating the website to the to-do list::
Vixen, Riding the Waves, and Love is Always Write
Three bits of writing news tonight! ^__^ First up, Vixen, LT3′s first F/F anthology, is out! It’s an awesome collection of stories, and I super enjoyed writing Slaying Dragons. I really want to do more F/F now. :3 I actually have an inkling of an idea for one of the women who shows up in Saving Liam, so uh, that’s also on my rather lengthy ‘to write’ list.
But back to Vixen — if you are at all interested in F/F, you should definitely check it out. I really love all of the stories in this anthology, though my favorite is The Thicket by Liz Lambdin. It’s a Rapunzel remake, and a super awesome one at that. ^__^ I love it. Cavatina, Cabaletta by Rachel White is also really cool (it has an operatic setting, which is awesome). The other stories are no slouches either. You can check it out here. ^__^
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Next point of business. ^__^ There’s an LJ comm called pic for 1000 (linked ’cause LJ tags don’t work on my website), that challenges you to write exactly 1000 words, no more, no less, based off a picture prompt. This was my picture, this is my story. Enjoy! ^__^
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Last up, I signed up for another challenge (b/c I don’t have enough to write, apparently. :3) in the M/M Romance community on Goodreads. It’s called Love is Always Write, and members of the comm put forth “Dear Author” letters with a photo and prompt. Authors then go and pick one, and write a short story for it. ^__^ This is my prompt, and it should be a lot of fun!
He was told that everything happened for a reason, that there were things out there that watched your every move. He just never thought that the people telling him this were telling the truth. Until he happened to glimpse something out of the corner of his eye, something that he couldn’t explain.
And now there are things in the shadows, things that want him. And he’s not sure if he can hold out any longer. If only he hadn’t picked up that apple on that fateful day, then the ones in the shadows would have noticed his presence.
Smoking is Bad for You
Okay, so I suck at updating. This should come as no grand surprise to anyone. The LT3 Kiss Me Quick stories have been eating a lot of my time this past month, but since tonight’s the last of them up, I shouldn’t be as tied up as I have been lately. Not that that means I’ll post more, but I’ll probably be writing more, which is the important thing, right? ^__~
Tangentially related, I’ve got a second KMQ short being released with the fourth week of stories. ^__^ It’s called Smoking is Bad for You and I’m really excited for it. It’s contemp, which is weird for me, and police detectives, which is even weirder for me. I really like the characters, though, and I’m hoping to play with them in a full-length story down the road. Check it out, if you are so inclined:
With nothing better to do until his contact shows up, Detective Keith Halfen notices a man who looks familiar, but whom he cannot place. Curious, determined to place the man, he strikes up a conversation and finds himself drawn in when he learns why the man is lingering outside a restaurant smoking a cigarette…
Help, help, I’m drawing a blank / Slaying Dragons snippet
Drawing a huge blank on a premise for a Christmas story. I cannot for the life of me come up with an idea, so I’m asking for suggestions. ^__^ Any ideas, lovely flist? The only stipulation is that it has to be holiday themed, even if loosely so.
I finished typing up my Vixen story the other day. ^__^;; Took me long enough, and I put up a snippet here, if anyone is interested in a silly slaying-dragons-and-being-badass short story. :3
That’s all I got. Uh, also lots of editing. Oh, and Yaoi-con next week. I’m flying for the second time in my life, with the first plane switchover. That should be interesting. ^__^;;
New holiday look on LT3
If you haven’t been on the LT3 site since Friday, you should definitely go check out the shiny new Halloween theme we’re rocking! Megan made the new banner, and it’s an awesome yellow / orange / spooky theme. I really like the way it turned out.
(That said, uh, if you notice anything weird–wrong color, poor placement of something, etc.–don’t hesitate to let me know!)
We’ll also be doing a Christmas theme and have plans for other holiday themes down the road, which should be a lot of fun.
Oh, and discounts! LT3 will be doing weekly discounts for Halloween: Midsummer, Vampires, Werewolves, and DwtD themed (uh, not in the order? Maybe in that order, I don’t remember. :3).
Off to write now. Hopefully I will get this short story done this week, and will have something to show ya’ll soon. ^__^
The Trouble with Magic is out!
The Trouble with Magic is now out! Congrats to lucky #42 Kathleen (the first Kathleen ^__~ and I swear that number was completely random), winner of the free copy. If you would like to buy a copy, you can do so in the LT3 Book Market! I hope ya’ll enjoy. <333
LT3 is doing some awesome stuff in October, including sales and giveaways and some awesome web stuff that I hope to do this weekend. ^__^ Keep an eye out, especially on the GoodReads group, if you happen to be a member. Megan is also doing a bunch of stuff on her website for the paltry occasion of her birthday (she’s turning old ^__~), so keep an eye out there. Also, Yaoi-con is next month! /excited
The Fairy’s Assistant, running in the LT3 Fairy Tale serial slot, completed this week! I really loved writing that story, and I hope ya’ll enjoyed it too! It’ll be available w/a serial subscription for a while yet, since we need a few more fairy tales before we can compile Volume 4 of the fairy tales (OMG, volume 4).
I think that’s all I’ve got. ^__^
Renames and restarts
I’ve been contemplating changing the domain name for my website for a while. I’ve had the name Nikerym in various forms since my fandom days, but people finding me through Less Than Three Press would be hard-pressed to connect the dots between Sasha L. Miller and Nikerym. I also debated a while on changing my LJ name, and decided that was probably a good idea as well. Everything is still connected; if you try to go to nikerym.com or nikerymis.livejournal.com, you’ll be redirected to the new names. This won’t last forever, so if you have bookmarks and or links, please to be updating. ^^
As part of the rename, I completely revamped my website. I like the colors and scheme a lot, and I’ve trimmed down the number of free reads on the site to the stories and ficbits that are complete and uh, not completely terrible to think about people reading. Everything else is still available on LJ or on Fictionpress and I have no plans for deleting any of it unless I rewrite. If you can’t find anything, let me know and I will search it out for you.
LT3 updates:
The Were Curse, my contribution to LT3′s Bad Moon Rising serial anthology, will begin on September 13! It runs for five updates (through November 8). I’ve put up an excerpt here on the site, and I think there’s more to it than I posted previously (but I can’t remember because my brain fails at retention).
The Trouble with Magic, a compilation of three stories, will be released in the LT3 Book Market on September 28. LT3 will be giving away a free copy from the Less Than Three Press GoodReads Group. The giveaway post isn’t up yet, but will be in a few weeks. I’ll also be raffling off a copy here, so keep an eye out!