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I was very proud of having made a schedule over the last couple months. The schedule gave me hope.
Any orc will tell you that “Hope exists to be crushed” but nooo, I listened to the Hope Demon and here I am.
Family matters have largely overwhelmed me in the last few weeks. Book sales are always low in the summer, but ever since Fearless Leader declared that one way or another there would be tariffs, they’ve hit an all-time low. My Patronizer income exceeds everything else combined. So once again: thank you for supporting me!
Real life complications hit everyone. If I worked for a company, my boss would classify me as “temporarily zombied” and increase the amount of time he spent beating me until I produced something. It’s nothing personal, of course. Being self-employed, I have to beat myself to produce things. In particular, I’ve promised the world an orc story for the Twisted Presents collection. That story does not exist. I’m going to delay the start of the Kickstarter until the tale does exist. I have half of something, and I know the shape of the tale, but every word I grunt out lies dead on the page.
Advertising “there’s a brand new orc tale in this collection so back it” only works if the story is good. Oops.
The mysterious, omnipresent, all-knowning They say that “a change is as good as a rest,” so I’ve turned what attention I have to a simple matter of programming.
Print sponsors might buy a book as much as a year before the book is released. I’d like to be more timely, but that’s the sad truth. The new Networking for System Administrators has about 170 print sponsors. Even a small rate of address changes means several returned packages. Each book attracts more sponsors. Don’t get me wrong, that’s great, but this problem will only get worse. I really must verify everyone’s shipping address.
The standard method of business data exchange is the (ugh) spreadsheet. WooCommerce exports data via spreadsheets.
So I wrote a simple Perl script to extract sponsor names and addresses from an export spreadsheet and send a confirmation mail to the sponsor. No, I’m not going to put this on github because 1) github takes money from ICE, and 2) some poor bastard might try to use it. When I order the sponsor gifts I’ll use the script to correct everybody’s shipping address.
Yes, some folks won’t catch the mail. If it halves the number of bounced packages, I’ll count it as a success.
That led to my other project. My web site is a mess. Listing books by category and genre helps hold the site down to a vaguely sane number of pages, but stuffing all the buy links next to each book makes the page ugly and unwieldy. Plus, it’s unauditable. All of my books are on Kobo, Amazon, TWP, Apple, and so on, but not every store is listed for each book.
I’ve decided to treat my web site as a catalog, without buy links. Clicking on an individual title in the catalog will take you to an individual page for the book. Maintaining pages by hand is unsustainable. I want to be able to hand maintenance to someone else, so that means (ugh) a spreadsheet. Or I could write a web app but no, the first thing I’d have to do with that web app is build a report system to generate a spreadsheet so let’s just stay with the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet records the buy links for each non-Amazon retailer, the Amazon catalog number (ASIN) for the book, and Amazon affiliate codes. It also has the book’s jacket copy and tag line.
I also have a long-running annoyance where people on the socials link to one of my books but an unrelated image shows up. Giving each book its own page lets me work around that by setting a featured image in the HTML.
The script basically works. I need to change the text for free ebooks, but that’s fairly minor. Now I’m going through every page on mwl.io creating spreadsheet entries and ad images for each title. Comparing, say, the finished SF page to an old tech book page, it does look better.
Click on a title and you’ll get the individual page, like this one for the brand-new Laserblasted.
Oh, right. Laserblasted left my bookstore this month and went into the broad world of retailers. A couple folks bought it at Amazon. Reception among those who read it has been positive, which is nice. If you’ve read it, I would appreciate a review at Goodreads or Amazon or… anywhere, really. (The usual reminder: Amazon and Goodreads considers a three star review negative and their algorithms will treat the book as such.)
The good thing with spreadsheet work is I can snatch a few minutes here and there to do it, amidst the larger mayhem that is my life right now. Right now I’m hanging on, hoping matters will settle down enough in the next week for me to actually clear my brain and write for a few hours. I’m hoping US politics settle enough that I can sell some books and stay in business. I’m hoping I can return to my home after September’s trip to EuroBSDCon in Croatia.
In happier news, I have received the N4SA2e challenge coins and they’re quite spiffy. Sponsors and print-level Patronizers will be pleased. But that’s about it for happy news.
Months like this, your support means the difference between keeping this career and returning to normal employment. I am grateful to every single one of you.
Until next month!