Kerry Allen's Love Emporium

I am such a dude when it comes to matters of the heart. Mushy, sentimental stuff makes me squirm in agony. (In hindsight, romance is perhaps not the smartest genre choice.) I scribbled out the “I love you” scene for Drown and handed it to a writer nearly as cynical and unsentimental as I am, expecting her to burst into laughter. After a while, she sniffled and said, “This is pretty good.” I said, “You don’t think it’s unbearably cheesy?” She turned to me with tears in her eyes and said, “If it is, you should always reach for the cheese. REACH FOR THE CHEESE!”

I’m thinking of getting that tattooed across my heaving bosoms.

Or maybe printed on a T-shirt.

I decided not to clog up the comments on the giveaway thread by responding there when it became clear I was going to be epically long-winded about it.

Hunny wanted to know:

I’ve been wanting to buy the books you sell and wanted to know if you’d benefit more if I bought it from you or through Barnes and Noble.

Please, buy wherever it’s most convenient for you. The difference to me is a couple of pennies, not worth the hassle involved in downloading to your computer and then side-loading onto your device when you can get it insta-delivered to your reader elsewhere.

I did the multiformat bundles mainly because I hate the formatting of the non-Amazon versions, not to make more money from them. The versions in the MFB have little niceties like chapter breaks, and when I find the best way to do a table of contents for each format, I’ll add that feature to them all. I aspire to eventually have available any format you need, perfectly formatted, DRM-free, and otherwise the answer to every ebook complaint I’ve ever heard, and hopefully with a more efficient delivery method because the whole “pay now and then get an email and click the link and go to that site and download the files and unzip them and transfer them to your reader” thing isn’t exactly ideal. (I’m working on it.)

When I start putting books out in paper, there will be a much bigger difference in my cut depending on where you buy, but I’ll tell you the same thing: shop where it’s most convenient for you, where you have a discount membership or a coupon or get free shipping or whatever works best for you. In keeping with the rant I’m about to have (see below), I think it’s awfully presumptuous for an author to dictate to readers where and when and how to buy books, so I’m not going to do it.

I didn’t know you had a newsletter, how do I sign up?

I don’t have a newsletter, and I’ll tell you why.

I once left a comment on a writer’s blog. I hadn’t read her books. I wasn’t interested in her books. I just had something to say about a blog post someone brought to my attention. Nowhere on her blog did it say, “Commenting here signs you up for my mailing list.” She nonetheless harvested my email address from that comment and added me to her mailing list. There was no “unsubscribe” option in her emails, so I had to write to her to ask to be removed. She was terribly offended that I failed to appreciate the privilege she had bestowed upon me. She was rude as only a narcissist pretending to be the wronged party can be. She did not remove me from her mailing list. It took several of these emails before my spam filter took my “this is spam” clicks seriously enough to kill them before I had to look at them. To this day, the sight of her name fills me with hostility. I will never read anything she writes. I will never participate in any group or forum in which she is involved. She is an annoyance to be avoided.

My entire “marketing strategy” is based upon things I won’t do because I’ve been irritated by other people doing them. Since I’m the sort of person who will turn around and walk out of a store if I see a salesperson swooping down upon me, there are an awful lot of things I won’t do. I mainly rely on this site and minimal “book available” mentions on Twitter, which you see only if you seek them out, and two or three forums where such mentions are explicitly invited. I don’t get a huge amount of exposure, and that’s acceptable to me because I’d rather be unknown to Person A than known to Person B as an obnoxious promo whore. I don’t have a publisher threatening to drop me if I don’t sell 10,000 books on release date. I’m never going to go out of print. I have all the time in the world for Person A to find me, so it doesn’t make any sense to aggressively shove myself in readers’ faces at the cost of permanently alienating Person B.

There are ways to do a newsletter properly—manual sign-up with manual confirmation and a link at the top of every email that will immediately automatically remove anyone who wants off—but I don’t think it’s something I’d use unless I had news that would make you do this:

And I can’t recall a single instance in my entire life when that has been the case.

If I ever decided to do a newsletter, plenty of people would be like , but they’d do that before they got the newsletter, so I still don’t know what I’d put in the newsletter.

I sold my 3000th Kindle copy of Beyond the Darkening yesterday. To commemorate this momentous occasion, I’m giving away a 3000¢ (AKA $30) giftcard from Amazon.com.

How to enter: Leave ONE comment on this post—a word, a paragraph, a smiley, doesn’t matter. USE A VALID EMAIL ADDRESS in the email field. (Cross my heart, I am not mining them to spam you later. I’m not adding you to a newsletter mailing list. I’m not selling email addresses to spammy marketing sleazebags. It’s not visible to anybody viewing the comments. I just need to be able to contact the winner.)

How to get disqualified: When I say ONE comment, I mean ONE comment. IP addresses are logged and will be compared. If yours shows up more than once in the comments on this post, all of your entries will be discarded.

How to win: At the end of the contest period, I will use random.org to select the winning comment. I will announce the winner on this here blog and send a confirmation email to the winner using the email address provided. (I’m not sending $30 to a dud email address, hence the checking.) If that email address bounces or the winner does not respond within 5 days to confirm that it is a valid email address, I will use the same method to select an alternate winner.

Contest period: Entries will be accepted until 11:59 p.m. EST on June 13, 2010.

The prize: A $30 giftcard from Amazon.com. It’s good only at Amazon.com (not Amazon.uk or Amazon.fr or Amazon.de or any other Amazon-dot-something), so if you can’t shop at Amazon.com, it’s not going to be of much use to you. Here’s the official terms, limitations, and restrictions page so you can check your eligibility. But if you can’t use it and for some reason want to win a really expensive but useless email, who am I to judge?

May the most fortuitously placed, randomly selected commenter win.

I’m drained.

* * *

But preciouses make everything better.

Never mind that I already have sixty-something books on my TBR shelf. They no longer excite and/or intrigue me as the new shineys do. What can I say? I’m fickle.

Even Angelic Daughter, who has been slammed with tons of required reading as the school year draws to a close (fun stuff like Lois Lowry and Ayn Rand and Elie Wiesel) and as a result has decreed she is “never reading anything ever again,” squeed a little over Paper Towns. (She thought An Abundance of Katherines, also by John Green, was excellent. A huge change of pace from our usual reading material, but I have to agree.)

* * *

I will publicly display the most garish 80s heaving-bosom-and-Fabio book covers I can find with no shame, but being seen with a Victoria’s Secret catalogue makes me feel like I’ve been caught by my grandma watching goat/manatee porn. (I know such a thing exists without having to investigate—RULE 34.) Yes, I do in fact require the acquistion of a new brassiere. Yes, I was sitting in the privacy of my car. However, a completely unprecedented number of people walked by the car that day and conspicuously looked inside—which might have had something to do with the creepy lady hunched in a guilty fashion over a bunch of pictures of almost-naked women while parked outside a school.

Could have been worse. I could have been in a van, the official transportation of perverts.

* * *

Demon Dog peed on a toad last night. I’m pretty sure that’s the critical phase of some diabolical curse, which I’m pretty sure Demon Dog has enacted against me because I laughed at her fear of puddles. Not big puddles. Those are awesomely muddy. Not Lake Front Yard Because Florida Believes Stormwater Drainage Is For Sissies. That’s tremendous fun to dive into and bring as much as possible back into the house. No, she will stand a foot away from a puddle the size of a drink coaster, cowering and shaking as if an alligator is going to lunge out of it and bite her face off.

Our fearless protector.  

So if I disappear the next time it rains, assume I was eaten by a 3-inch-puddle alligator because my cocker spaniel put the Curse of the Pee Toad upon me.

* * *

I’m sure I’ll have the toad putting a curse on me, too, but how stupid do you have to be to sit there and get peed on? If a creature a hundred times my size stood over me, apparently oblivious to my presence, I like to think I would take the opportunity to sneak away while said creature was spinning around in a circle 20 times trying to find the optimum wind direction, squatting form, and bladder velocity.

The fact that the toad didn’t haul bumpy little ass proves it’s a conspiracy against me.

If you have clicked “ignore this person” on a forum because their comments are too obnoxious or offensive to continue to be subjected to, there is never, ever, neverever any reason to click “show post anyway.” That person has not, in the interim, evolved into someone with witty, insightful commentary to share.

* * *

On a related note, it is almost always inappropriate to discuss your HAWT SEX life in public, and it doesn’t get more public than the internet. Most porn stars are more discreet about their personal lives than certain authors on Amazon forums. It doesn’t convince me you’re bold and fearless enough to write steamy sex scenes. It convinces me you don’t know squat about intimacy, which is kind of important to readers who don’t skip all the pages that don’t have intercourse on them.

* * *

My bath pouf came undone. It was like the Bed Bath & Beyond version of a joke can of mixed nuts—a 40-foot mesh snake exploding all over the shower.

Kinda hard to wash with, incidentally.

* * *

I bought a new bath pouf, which was sitting right on top of the grocery bag. I went out to the car to get another load of groceries. When I came back in the house, the pouf was no longer on top of that bag. I found it in the living room.

Bath poufs evidently are the mortal enemies of cocker spaniels.

* * *

It just occurred to me that Demon Dog is an English cocker spaniel, while “pouf” is clearly French. Hence, the enmity.

* * *

At the grocery store, I saw a brand of mildew remover. Right next to it, same brand, was mildew root remover.

Who uses that first product? “Oh, I don’t want to kill the poor mildew, I just want it to be less unsightly.”

* * *

Speaking of mildew, I can very rarely find a head of cauliflower that isn’t covered with the stuff (or whatever that funky black crud soaking into cauliflower is).  This week, the cauliflower was beautiful, pristine as freshly fallen snow. I bought all of it. I will be eating cauliflower for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks all week.

I tell you that so you will understand the excitement with which I prepared to make dip in which to plunge crispy cauliflower bits—and my squeal of horror when I popped the top off the sour cream and opened a hellish tub of lumpy wrongness.

Apparently, when my grocery store moved everything in the store in an obvious campaign to send me into an OCD coma, they moved the sour cream from the bin at the bottom of the dairy case up one shelf to where the cottage cheese traditionally resided and moved the cottage cheese, which  is in an identical container, down to what has been, for the past decade, the home of sour cream.

You win this round, Publix, but this battle is far from over.

* * *

How are your wars progressing this week?