Thinking of going indie?

First off this week, a couple of bits of business.

I never awarded prizes for those pathetic Valentine's Day stories I asked y'all to post. Apparently you guys have either sublimated your bad experiences or you don't want to admit to having had any, because I only got three stories. And I can't pick -- they're all great. So congrats to Laurie Boris, BigAl, and Rich Meyer. The mini-bookmarks are as good as in the mail.

Speaking of prizes, the Goodreads giveaway for Crosswind is over. I had more than 500 entries, but only three could win. Congrats to Joanne Wofford, Alison Hong, and Justine Miller for being the lucky winners! I'll get your copies in the mail to you within the week.

Thanks for playing, everyone.

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Bigstock Photos

If you've been thinking of going indie with your book (or books), but you're still on the fence, have I got a website for you. A couple of weeks ago, indie phenom Hugh Howey fired up a new site called www.authorearnings.com. Howey was approached by an indie author who knows something about number-crunching, and together they sifted through Amazon's sales data and came up with some pretty amazing results -- among them, that for the top-selling books, "[i]ndie authors are earning nearly half the total author revenue from genre fiction sales on Amazon." How can that be? Because indie authors make more per book than traditional authors do. A lot more. Indies who publish through Kindle Direct Publishing earn 70% of the purchase price from ebooks priced between $2.99 and $9.99; traditional contracts typically provide their authors a 25% royalty on each ebook sold.

So okay, not everybody has a top-selling book. That's why Howey and his unnamed Data Guy are collecting information on earnings from as many indie authors as they can. There's a button on the website's landing page that will take you to the form for inputting your own earnings info.

As you might expect, the blogosphere lit up almost as soon as the first part of this report went live. The usual suspects have all weighed in, with trad-publishing apologists claiming the data is incomplete and/or just plain wrong, and indie-publishing cheerleaders picking apart the trad-pub arguments yet again. It certainly makes for great theater. But it also makes me wonder whether traditional publishers are paying close enough attention to the indie movement. 

To be clear, Howey himself isn't out to skewer trad publishing. He's a hybrid author, after all -- his dead-tree books are traditionally published, but he's still self-publishing the ebook editions of his novels. What he says he wants to do with authorearnings.com is to force traditional publishers to wake up. In the old days, when publishers actually nurtured their authors and took an active interest in their careers -- and when a trad contract was the only respectable way to get your book in front of readers -- it made sense to pursue a traditional contract. Now, indie publishing is offering a respectable -- and more lucrative -- alternative. Howey would like to see publishers lower the prices of their ebooks, and offer better contract terms to their authors.

I snagged an interview with Howey this week for my LynneQuisition feature at Indies Unlimited. That post will run this coming Thursday. But in the meantime, I'll leave you with another mind-expanding conclusion from his report. If you write mysteries, thrillers, speculative fiction or romance: "Genre writers are financially better off self-publishing, no matter the potential of their manuscripts."

Just sayin'.

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This moment of bloggy reporting has been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

A knitting post: one in a highly irregular series.

Hmm, well.  It's Sunday, which means I need to write a blog post.  Let's see...I could talk about how well the Pipe Woman Chronicles freebie weeks are going (and if you're here for the first time after reading one of my books, welcome!).  Or I could talk about how much fun I'm having with the LynneQuisitions I've been doing for Indies Unlimited.  Or I could do a post dissecting the ruling against Apple in the price-fixing case and what that's going to mean for indies. 

Or I could talk about the ideas I'm ruminating on for the new series, and potentially get people hyped up for something that might not end up in the books, after all. That sounds like a great idea, huh?

I know!  Let's talk about knitting!

Shawls are my new big thing to knit.  I'll be honest -- and this will come as a shock to you, I know -- I've never been a frou-frou dresser.  Which was a bit of a problem when I entered the working world in the 1980s. Back then, women who wanted to be taken seriously at work dressed exactly as advised in the book Dress for Success.  It's laughable today, of course, but back then, women were told to wear a version of the men's suit: a blazer and A-line skirt (trousers were still frowned on for professional women).  Skirts should fall just above the knee, tops needed to cover cleavage, and nylons in skin tones were to be paired with sensible pumps.  Women were also advised to develop their ascot-tying skills, as a nod to men's neckties.  Oh, and we were supposed to load ourselves up with jewelry; as I recall, the magic number of pieces (to include bracelets, necklaces, lapel pin, wristwatch, rings, and ONE set of earrings) was ten.

I did okay with the suits, back in the day, and the pumps.  And even the nylons, gods help me (clear nail polish was my friend -- not to paint on my toes, but to paint on my nylons when my toes wore through 'em).  But the jewelry thing was too gaudy for me -- the best I ever did was five or six, I think (two rings, the watch, the lapel pin, and a couple of necklaces in graduated sizes).  And I never got the appeal of scarves.

Fast-forward thirty years.  Today, my work wardrobe consists of a selection of slacks in basic colors and a slightly larger selection of...oh, let's call them collarless knitted tops, to get around the implication that I wear t-shirts to work.  I have a couple of hand-knitted jackets that I pull out for days when we have clients in the office, but I tend to want to shed them as soon as I can, even though it's verboten. (Men get professional points for taking off their jackets and rolling up their sleeves; women never have.)

But then I started hearing about shawls, and I began to realize the possibilities. A lot of the shawl patterns on Ravelry are exceedingly lacy (here's the one my daughter Amy is working on right now, and more power to her); I don't bother with them because I know I'll never wear them (see "not a frou-frou dresser" above).  But garter-stitch shawls in interesting shapes? Now you're talking my lingo. They're dressy without being fussy, you get to wear fun pins with them, and they don't take nearly as long to knit as a jacket.

So! Here are a few that I've made:

The Wingspan (before I wove in the ends)

The TGV - my Danube cruise project

The Simple Shawl - my Alaska project

The Adirondack (with the Lady Morgana)

The Simple Shawl is folded in quarters in this picture; I had just finished it, but the edges were curling up and I had no way to block it while I was still on vacation.  I've got a picture of it blocked, but the background is prettier in this one....

My current project is called a Dragonwheel.  With any luck, it will end up looking something like this, although my yarn is more red-brown than the fire-engine red here:

I'll keep you posted.  Oh, and if you're on Ravelry and want to friend me there, I'm lynnecm.

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This moment of shawl-a-licious blogginess is brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.