Of shawls and sales and Kindle Unlimited.

First off this week, since I know you're all dying to know: Yes, I did receive the black yarn as promised, and yes, I did finish the Eden Prairie shawl. It turned out spectacularly well, if I do say so myself. Here's the picture of the finished product, in case you missed it when I posted it on Facebook.

And if you want all the details, including a link to the pattern, here's my Eden Prairie project page on Ravelry.

The shawl came out so well, in fact, that I'm toying with the idea of modifying the pattern to make a blanket or throw with the same idea. It's pretty far down on my list of priorities, though, and I will probably come to my senses before I buy the yarn.

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There's been a fair amount of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in the indie world lately over Kindle Unlimited, a feature Amazon instituted a few months back. The Zon envisioned it as their answer to Oyster or Scribd. Basically, readers pay Amazon about ten bucks a month, and in return they get unlimited borrowing privileges for every book in the program -- as many books as you want at a time, for however long you want to borrow them.

The program has some drawbacks. For one thing, it's obviously not a good deal unless you read a lot. For another, at least initially, a number of traditional publishers were unwilling to opt their books into the program.

Indies didn't have a choice. If your book was enrolled in Kindle Select, Amazon opted it into Kindle Unlimited. When some indie authors complained, the Zon allowed us a one-time opportunity to opt our previously-enrolled-in-Select books out of KU. However, at this point, if you put a book in Select, it will be in KU, period.

At first, it wasn't such a bad deal. Amazon has set aside a separate pot of money for borrows. At the end of each month, they announce how much money they'll put in the pot for borrows during the previous month, as well as how much each borrow was worth that month.

Before KU, the only way to get a piece of that fund was if a reader with an Amazon Prime membership borrowed your book. Prime members are allowed to borrow one book per month (along with all the other Prime perks, including free two-day shipping and free streaming movies). Back then, a borrow was worth about two bucks a book to the author -- which is more than twice what you could get as a royalty on a 99-cent book if the reader just out-and-out bought it.

But after KU was instituted, that per-borrow payout began to drop -- until a borrow paid just $1.33 in October.

At that point, the anti-Amazon faction started howling about how the Zon had finally turned on indies. Some indie authors who had been making a living from their books found that Kindle Unlimited borrows were gutting their sales. Some said they planned to pull their books out of Select. Then Joe Konrath mentioned, almost offhand, in a comment on one of his own blog posts that he was evaluating whether to pull out. Konrath has been an Amazon cheerleader since the inception of KDP, so an admission that he's evaluating his participation in Select was big news indeed.

The noise got loud enough that I wrote a column about Kindle Unlimited borrows for Indies Unlimited last month. My fellow IU minion Martin Crosbie followed up with his own take this past week. Martin intends to let his books stay in Select for now, even though his earnings, too, have taken a hit with the advent of KU.

I'm planning to let mine ride for now, as well, for three reasons:

1. The payout-per-borrow is trending back up. Since the low of $1.33 in October, Amazon raised the amount to $1.39 in November. Last month it went up to $1.43. To me, that's a sign that the Zon realized they'd taken the per-borrow rate too low. I expect further rate juggling over the next few months. It may never go back into $2-per-book territory, but I don't think we'll see $1.33 again any time soon.
2. A lot of authors talk about the wisdom of not having all of your eggs in one basket. To that end, I have only a few things in Select, so there are only a few books of mine that KU readers can borrow: the Pipe Woman Chronicles Omnibus, the Land Sea Sky Trilogy, my short story called Lulie and, for right now, Seasons of the Fool. Everything else, including the individual books of each series, are available all over.
3. Frankly, my sales were never so robust that I could turn down money, whether from a borrow or a sale.

I created the omnibus editions for the express purpose of putting them in Select, so I expect I'll leave them there, no matter what. Seasons has another two months in Select before I can move it out. (Enrollment periods for Select are in 90-day increments.) I'm planning to keep an eye on the borrow rate and the per-borrow payout, and I'll decide at the end of next month whether to release the book to other markets or leave it in Select for another 90 days.

And in the meantime, I'm going to keep writing.

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These moments of borrowed blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Revenge of the black yarn.

You may recall, in my last exciting post about knitting, that I ranted about black yarn. It's boring to knit with, I said. It's hard to see the stitches in low light, I said. (Especially when you have dark-colored needles like I do -- which I meant to say but forgot.) The next person who wants me to make something with black yarn is going to get dragged to a yarn shop and forced to pick another color, I said.

Clearly, the Goddess of Black Yarn heard me. And apparently, She has a sense of humor.

My current knitting project is a shawl called Eden Prairie. Here's what it looks like:

Pretty, huh? The designer, Nancy Whitman, said on her website that it's meant to mimic stained glass. I was drawn to it because of the Frank Lloyd Wright vibe it gives off: it has the clean lines of Prairie School architecture, and yeah, that stained-glass effect along the bottom edge.

So when I was looking through Ravelry for a pattern to use the two skeins of wool/bamboo blend sock yarn I'd bought on a whim, this one jumped out at me. I dug through my yarn stash and determined that the leftover yarn from my Celestarium shawl would look great with the new yarn, and I had plenty left for the diamonds. And at the Shenandoah Fiber Fest last fall, I picked up a skein of recycled black yarn for the borders.

About recycled yarn: Craft stores sometimes stock cheap yarn made of recycled acrylic, but that's not what I'm talking about. There are crafters out there who buy commercially-made sweaters at thrift stores and unravel them. They can then either reuse the yarn for their own projects, or wind it into a skein and sell it. (If you're interested in the process -- or if you think I'm making this up -- go here for directions.)

The yarn I bought was a wool/alpaca/cashmere blend. It's soft and very lovely. It's also, as I mentioned, black.

A knitting pattern gives you a list of stuff you need to make the project. If I had made the list for the Eden Prairie, I would have put colors A, B, and C first, and the border color (BC) last. But the designer listed them in the order you use them in the project: color A, color B, BC, and color C. Which makes sense if you know the pattern. For somebody who's coming to it for the first time, maybe not so much. Or maybe I just need to pay attention better. In any case, I read the last item on the list as needing 105 yards of yarn, so I bought a smallish skein (136 yards) of the recycled black. Turns out I needed 105 yards for the diamonds, and 175 yards of black. And of course, I didn't figure this out until I was well into the project. I soldiered on anyway, thinking that maybe I could stretch what I had to make it work.

So here's where I am. The shawl is done except for the top and bottom borders. I couldn't lay it out flat for the photo because the bottom edge is all grunched up on my longest circular needle. I need to knit six more rows along that bottom edge, then pick up stitches along the top edge and knit seven rows there. And that little bobble of black at the bottom left of the shawl is all I have left of my lovely recycled yarn.

The good news is that I was able to contact the seller. She has some of this yarn left and she promised to put it in the mail to me tomorrow. This is how I know the Goddess of Black Yarn doesn't really have it in for me; if She did, I'd have to use some other yarn to finish the project.

So the shawl will be done soon, and it will be gorgeous, and I take back everything I said about knitting with black yarn. I've changed my mind. It's awesome. Really.

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These moments of bloggy black yarniness have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell -- who just loves knitting with black yarn, honest.