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saxbrightwell: a transparent image of a saxifrage flower (saxrockfoil)
Kobo Canadian Spring Reading Sale

I recently found the toggle on Draft2Digital's account settings that lets them notify me when I can submit my books to store-specific promotions. I've gotten a fair few emails since then, and for the first time one of my submissions was selected!

From April 3-16, my omnibus of volumes 1-3 of Secrets of Sleipnir will be CDN$3.99 as part of a Kobo sale featuring Canadian authors! (Thanks to store contract requirements, it will be CDN$3.99 on every digital storefront during that time, but only for Canadians. I think. That's my understanding, anyway.)

Observant readers may notice that this is more of an identity reveal than I've ever openly made before. Very observant readers will have already figured it out from the way I've been stubbornly insisting on using Canadian spelling all along. Passive-aggression is the Canadian way, but in the face of provocation it's not the aggression that subsides; it's the passivity. For obvious reasons, I've been feeling provoked lately.

My pseudonymity is still important to me. This only narrows the field down to my being 1 of 41 million people. I consider that acceptable.

Book 5 Progress

I don't consider myself a "pantser," really - someone who writes by the seat of their pants, with no outline or even much of a plan. With my habit of editing-as-I-go I call myself a "knitter:" I can't do the next 'stitch' until the first one is right. I had to rewrite my most recent full chapter 3 times before it finally let me move on. This makes me slower on my first drafts, but leaves those first drafts in good enough shape that later editing passes are actually kind of enjoyable. I am, after all, writing to please myself first (though part of pleasing myself is telling a story I hope others will also enjoy).

Which is to say I'm still writing the first half of the first draft of book 5. But it's shaping up to be a fun one, that I'm going to be excited to share!

Speaking of being excited to share...

Twitch Readalouds Resume

Starting this Sunday morning, 06 April 2025, at 3:00 PM GMT (15:00), my friend Aunty Trashy will resume reading excerpts of Low Dusk on their Twitch channel! I will be in the chat as the author-in-residence: getting made fun of for my five-dollar-words (I consciously allow myself one per book! Learning new words builds character!), sending blushing emojis as Trashy effusively praises my sex scenes whilst skipping them to comply with Twitch's Terms of Service, sharing insider information about my writing journey and details that haven't (yet) made it into the books... and giving out Smashwords coupons for free books! Come on out and join the party! 
saxbrightwell: the name Sax in teal on a yellow background (teal)
I was starting to feel like a neurotic sheepdog trying to wrangle all of my links related to my Online PresenceTM, so I tried Linktree, and it had the audacity to inflict a wiggling popup ad for itself upon my eyes! Right through uBlock Origin!

Disgusted, I considered the preformatted layout it set me up with, and decided I could code a serviceable replacement using my tiny fistful of understanding of HTML and my ability to search for how to use CSS. I'm not great at working through whole "courses" on this stuff; I do better picking a goal of one task at a time and hunting down how to do that one thing. 

I may also have been influenced by my meditations in my previous post, about the ultimate backline if queer/explicit ebooks are made impossible to sell anywhere and AO3 falls: a plain old personal website where I give away my ebooks for free. This is not that, but I am confident that if I had to I could make that, in an ugly but functional fashion, without much trouble. 

I can't find information anywhere about where Neocities' servers are in the world, so they're probably in the USA. But it's also so enthusiastically designed to teach DIY rock-bottom-basic HTML and CSS that you end up with documents you can in fact download and then reupload elsewhere. So I feel better about messing around learning to create other pages there than most other places.

Anyway here it is, not so much a webbed site as a list of my links that doesn't make me puke. Oh and it finally let me verify myself on Mastodon!

I'll get back to book 5 soon, I swear. In a certain light this is PART of working on my books: making plans for how to continue my storytelling even if things get really bad.

saxbrightwell: the name Sax against a starry background (stars)
Complying in advance, no. Fretting in advance, yes... ) At first I only heard of people embedding Payhip into their own personal website, which is itself a subscription, but when I looked closer I found you don't have to do it that way; you can just build a storefront right on Payhip's own website.

So I did!

I actually really like how clean and simple the page turned out. And, at least in theory, I pocket more of the royalties than using the D2D --> platform pipeline. The payment processors take $0.30 per transaction, which is 10% of my cheapest books, and then a 3% fee, and then Payhip pockets 5%, for a total cut of 18%. Compared to the platforms taking 30% and D2D taking 10% for a total cut of 40% (85% for print-on-demand), that's pretty good! 

I've updated my sticky posts for Low Dusk (as the most recent release), and the master list of all my ebooks and audiobooks, to put the Payhip link first. In the process I made the blog look a little better on mobile, and made the master list look a lot better. 

I'm not expecting to make a lot of sales this way; most people are very attached to whatever store platform connects directly to their ereader or ereader app. But it feels good to have it set up, as an additional way for folks to buy my books and as a kind of - archive, almost. An archive people can buy copies from. A backup storefront separated from a supply chain that's looking uncomfortably vulnerable these days.

(Don't worry, I also have other backups that aren't stores! 3 devices of my own and a Nextcloud in Denmark. The great thing about text is it's so data-light I can fit tiny stashes anywhere and everywhere. I also have one print-on-demand omnibus and will acquire another when it exists.)

I know this isn't very important or meaningful in the broad scheme of things. Maintaining reader access to 4 (for now) self-published smutty novels is about as impactful as turning a single box of cereal upside-down in the grocery store to signal to other shoppers that it's made in the USA. But it's still something I can do. It has more impact than not turning the box. My own little act of resistance, within my own little scope of power. So, I persist.
saxbrightwell: a transparent image of a saxifrage flower (Default)
Apologies for the lack of a November update. My reaction to the disaster of the American election was to withdraw, snail-like, into a tiny circuit of comfort games, shows, and reading, and I just started to re-emerge a week or two ago.

Things That Helped Read more... )

Which brought me back to:

4. My own writing! 

Secrets of Sleipnir has always been an exercise in writing even more exactly what I want to read than I could achieve in fandom. That didn't change when taking a heavy blow to my morale. Slowly but surely, my desire to continue the story came back. It helped a great deal when a dear friend did a reaction thread to book 3, which has about the same energizing power as a few dozen excellent AO3 comments. It also helped when I considered that the particular rising powers that be hate exactly my kind of writing the most, and so making more of it is, in its own small way, an act of resistance - even if only by feeding the flame of joy in myself and a few readers.

As someone said, and which I may in fact embroider on something the next time I pick up a cross-stitch project, the horrors persist but so do I.

In practical terms, this means the first draft of book 4 just crossed 46,000 words today. It feels a little more first draft than some of the previous books; I may have to let it sit for longer and edit it harder, because as I said in October the material is heavier than my usual. But I am determined to see it through, to earn the books (4 of them at last count, 2 more in the current arc and 2 standalones) waiting on the other side of these events.

Bluesky

I recently passed the 1-year mark on Mastodon, and I can say that I enjoy microblogging! I've been hearing some good things about Bluesky, and after exploring it with Bridgy Fed I decided to graduate to full cross-posting with an app, so that most of my posts go to both platforms at once. I don't really know what I'm doing there yet, and I can't say it doesn't feel very much poised at the top of an enshittification luge chute, but I'm willing to give it a chance. The shorter character limits on Bluesky have certainly made my writing meme answers more concise! There, as everywhere, I am saxbrightwell.

Smashwords

Having seen very little response with a smaller discount during the last Smashwords sale, especially compared to the satisfying amount of Number Go Up during the sale previous, I have decided to participate again at the giveaway level this holiday season! 



All my books will be free on Smashwords from 12 December 2024 to 01 January 2025. If you take advantage of this, in lieu of payment I would greatly appreciate reviews and links on your own socials. My own hype can only go so far; the hype of others has exponentially more impact!

That about wraps it up for this month. Take care, stay warm (or cool!), and have fun!

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