Progress Report–Rite of Passage

Rite of Passage has been available as an ebook for a little over a month now. You can find it on:
the Amazon Kindle
deviantArt as a zip file, containing Mobi and Epub formats (which should cover most devices)
and Smashwords with practically every format out there.

Not to mention, thanks to Smashwords’s Premium Catalog:
Barnes and Noble,
Kobo,
Sony,
and possibly a fair few others (their catalog also includes Apple, Diesel, Page Foundry, Baker & Taylor Blio, Library Direct, and Baker-Taylor Axis360).

It has sold, so far:
1 copy via Amazon,
7 downloads via Smashwords (3 of which were free samples)
and… nada via deviantArt. I might want to re-upload it as an HTML or something…. Maybe with some text for a proper preview of the story.

It has made, so far:
70 cents via Amazon,
and nada via the other two. For that reason, I suspect most of those 7 downloads on Smashwords were me, loading it onto my Kindle.
And technically, I haven’t even made the 70 cents. If I recall, there’s a certain threshold I’m supposed to meet before I actually get any money.

I need to do more research on marketing.
Not to mention keep working on my other stories; it’s not like I could make a living off of one short story, now is it?

Related articles

• Beware!…. the .mobi file… (jadereyner.com)
• Should Amazon change how Kindle pages are numbered? (reviews.cnet.com)
• Smashwords (discipleshippress.wordpress.com)
• Starting Off with a Bang . . . Not the Good Kind (legendsofwindemere.com)
• Over the Finish Line (wideawakebutdreaming.wordpress.com)
• Name your own price for fantasy e-book bundle (reviews.cnet.com)
• A Little Competition for Smashwords? (goodereader.com)

WordPress Wish List Part 2

“Blogs I Follow” and “Posts I Like” widgets, and similar headings in the Reader.

More to the point, some tweaks in the features we’ve already got.

First…

Blogs I Follow (Reader)

Not all of the blogs I follow with my WordPress account are from WordPress.

If I Won the Lottery, I Would….

(in no particular order):

Pay off my student loans.

Set up an IRA (Roth, I think, since I’ll have already been taxed on the winnings).

Talk to an allergist about getting shots. Achoo!

Buy every single Doctor Who/Torchwood book

Odd Fanfiction Crossover Labels

On some fanfiction sites, crossovers–stories that are fanfiction of two or more other unrelated storylines–are actually fairly easy to categorize. That is, they are labeled as “crossovers,” and they can probably be found among other crossovers for each story they represent.

But what about sites that don’t have a crossover category?
Should you label your Doctor Who/Star Trek fanfiction as Doctor Who, or as Star Trek? What criteria would you use?

And what about stories that aren’t typically labelled as crossovers?
What if I wanted to write Doctor Who fiction about one of the actors meeting the Doctor? Is it fanfiction… or real person fiction? And, since many of the sites I’m on don’t actually allow RPF, would such a story, such a crossover, be permitted on those sites?

Related articles

• The Fabulous Fandom of Fanfictions (venikaforever.wordpress.com)
• Acer teases new laptop in Strek Trek promo (reviews.cnet.com)
• FFillustrated: a FanFiction/DeviantArt crossover (inimbi.wordpress.com)
• Fanfiction (shm2983.wordpress.com)
• Fanfiction (booksdreamslife.wordpress.com)
• About Fanfiction (persephonemagazine.com)
• Fanfiction Contest – the winners (hilobrow.com)
• Fanfiction Update (jdroxburgh.com)

Final Fantasy 1, 2, 20th anniversary edition for sale

And then some.

Another quick post, more so to provide pictures of things I’m selling than for any other reason.
It will be deleted at such time as the items are bought, confirmed received, and likely reviewed, or until they are bought and the listing has expired.

These are all for the Playstation Portable. The games are in the UMD format.

WordPress wishlist

First item on the list: combining similar tags.

No, I don’t mean to simply merge tags in your blog, and use less tags overall.
I mean to combine global tags, in the event that I and John Doe from down the road write about the same topics, but don’t spell our tags in quite the same way.

Bugging the heck out of me

for no good reason.

I have, a few months back, come across the TVTropes page for “Gainax Ending.” I don’t remember why, exactly, I clicked that page, but I do remember one comment that bugs me to no end. And I remembered it just the other day when my father and I were looking for something to watch and found The Red Planet showing on one channel.

The comment in question bugs me because it doesn’t, near as I can tell, say what movie it’s talking about.

I’m officially a published author!

As opposed to the unofficially “published” fanfiction author, who has had two original shorts accepted by my college’s literary magazine.

Now, I actually have something for sale.

Rite of Passage full cover art, deviantArt

Rite of Passage started out as a flashback while I worked on NaNoWriMo 2011.

I broke Skyrim

Oops. If anybody else has run into the problem I’m about to describe, and knows of a solution, feel free to comment.

I have thirty mods (give or take) installed on Skyrim, and recently I decided to go and uninstall some of them.
Mostly things I’d just tried out for a while and decided I wasn’t interested. Like one of the various crafting for mages mods. Nothing major, nothing earth-shattering, nothing game breaking.

Or so I thought.

Custom Fiction Template

Some odd years back, I created a custom template for use in my fiction. I named it “Mns,” short for Manuscript.
I had created several toolbars and arranged them as I wanted them. (In fact, “arranging them as I wanted them” is one of the reasons I dislike Office 2007 on up; that ribbon interface doesn’t want to let me create and arrange my distinct toolbars.)
Over time, I fine-tuned these toolbars to add new functions I might need, or to eliminate those that I did not use frequently. I am now down to three custom toolbars.

I have since read multiple articles detailing the preferred fonts and layouts for submitting manuscripts to publishers.
So I took these details