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I love SquareUp even more now.

Yesterday, as many people who follow me on Twitter know, Square and I had a bit of a misunderstanding, a SNAFU, if you will. This, from the Square TOS, was our snag:

16b. Payout Schedule – Card-Not-Present Sales.

If you accrue more than $2,002 in card-not-present sales during any trailing seven day period, Square will defer depositing the amount in excess of $2,002 for 30 days. Card-not-present sales are transactions where the payment card is not swiped using the Square Reader. If you think your account is likely to exceed $2,002 in card-not-present sales per week, contact Square support to inquire about accelerating your payout schedule. Upon receiving this request, or once you exceed $2,002 in weekly card-not-present sales, Square will conduct a review of your Square Account to determine if you qualify for acceleration. Square will consider a variety of factors in making its decision, including but not limited to a proprietary set of rules, chargeback rates, transaction behavior, and other supplemental data about your business.

Now, before anybody accuses me of not having read the ToS before going batshit crazy, I did read the ToS, but it was 18 months ago and I’ve slept since then. Remember, I have only recently been able to nudge my clients over to using a credit card over the phone, so my revenue in that channel has been slowly increasing. I’ve never reached this threshold. In short, I forgot about it.

Thursday I signed onto a particularly wonderful project which put me far over the threshold. Imagine my shock and dismay when I found only 37% of the money had been deposited in my account. You know, somewhere in the back of my mind, it did occur to me they might put a hold on that money.

BUT NOT 30 DAYS OF HOLD!!!

Three days would not have cramped my style. Ten days would not have cramped my style overmuch. Hell, banks only put a 10-day hold on a large check.

THIRTY DAYS cramped my style in ways that would have been really rather devastating.

I went to the website to see a notice that informed me I could have my account looked at if I filled out the online request form. If I also uploaded some documents, they would expedite the review and possibly maybe upgrade my deposit limit. I did that, fuming the entire while.

Somewhere in here I emailed and filled out the contact form.

What I really needed was to talk to a human being. Seriously. I would have actually called someone and talked to them on the phone to beg and plead and scrape for fast-tracking. But there is no phone number on the support page.

That’s when my head sploded and I took to Twitter.

This is the part where I tell you how wonderful Square was. Because they were. It took less than ten minutes from my first tweet as @MoriahJovan to put me together with B10 Mediaworx and get on to the expediting. (AND they addressed me as “Elizabeth” in the email, so in the middle of my rampage, they still managed to impress me.) By four pm central time, it was resolved. My deposit limit was increased and my funds were to be released to me. I got the confirmation email this morning and the money will be in my account on Monday, which was what I had originally expected.

Now, they put up with a lot of shit from me, which is not easy to do. Ask my husband. And my mother. And my partner. And my bishop. And just about anybody in romancelandia, publishing, and Mormon lit.

And they did it with the utmost of graciousness and style.

So this is my way of giving credit where credit’s due, thanking them profusely for the quick service, and commending them for being able to put up with me. (Also, to ask them very nicely to put a phone number on their website, pretty please with a cherry on top?)

But mostly this is a followup post to yesterday’s to both warn future users to read and remember this tidbit, because I recommend them most heartily. Those of you Twitter friends who have found themselves in need of such services and had been eyeballing SquareUp (but then expressed doubt), do it. You know who you are, Shiloh Walker, Carolyn Jewel, and Voirey Linger.

Do me a favor, willya, folks? Tweet this post like crazy.

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Stripped-down ecommerce

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Two years ago, I wrote “Content delivery on a shoestring,” (which cemented my love for Baldur Bjarnason). A little before that, I wrote “Tools of my trade,” which is marginally relevant to this post.

But over the years I’ve been doing this (years…oh my bob, I can’t believe I can say that, “years”), I’ve experimented and watched things change and seen things go obsolete.

For instance, when there was no iBooks, I made The Proviso an app. Sadly, Apple rejected the app on the grounds of profanity, so I spent months (I don’t remember how many, exactly) of the app’s life fighting with them about it until it was accepted. It wasn’t too long after that that iBooks came along, which didn’t impress me a whole lot anyway. I decided having a book with Apple probably wasn’t worth the time or energy. (I still think that to some extent, if one doesn’t use a third-party distributor like Smashwords.)

Another change was that many of the formats in use when I started out are pretty much gone: LIT (Microsoft Reader), IMP (eBookWise), PDB (Palm).

And then there was the fact that self-publishing exploded. (I like to think I directly influenced two traditionally published authors to try their hand at it, but that is probably me stroking my own ego.)

What has NOT happened, though, is self-publishing authors selling their wares on their own websites in the manner of indie musicians. I’ll tell you now that it’s not a tragedy and there’s very little money to be made when Kindle et al are available. Customers want a one-stop-shopping experience and the Kindle’s value, as everyone knows, is its ubiquity and easy-button delivery system. No author in the world can replicate that from their website.

But you can get pretty damn close and in my opinion, it’s worth the effort just in case.

This is my stripped-down-nekkid method of conducting ecommerce:

SHOPPING CART

With each iteration of my shopping cart, I’ve tried these:

and I’ve experimented with

and what I won’t touch with a 10-foot pole

Woo Commerce

and what lit up my world

Gumroad

Of the first four, Linklok is my hands-down favorite. I started out with it because I needed instant downloads for my needlework patterns, but I only had one format. When I got into selling ebooks and print books, though, I knew I wanted a drop-down menu, so I fiddled with Zen Cart and Os Commerce. They were far too tedious for someone with the patience of a hungry infant. Then I found and began using the WP e-commerce plugin, which broke every time I had to update WordPress and obliged me to re-enter all my products and suffer two malware attacks on my site because I didn’t want to update WordPress for obvious reasons. But dammit, I had my drop-down menu and I wanted to keep it!

But after the second attack and many wasted hours and money later, I threw in the towel, reinstalled Linklok, and made separate buttons. By this time, I only had four formats: print, EPUB, Kindle, and PDF. I soon dropped the print because I got tired of shipping books and having a disproportionate number of them go missing.

Then one day, Jane Litte of Dear Author put out a Twitter call for someone to run an experiment with her involving a thing called Gumroad and its ease of use for a mobile consumer. I happened to see her tweet and volunteered for the project. I think it shocked both of us how incredibly easy it was from start to finish, on the merchant and consumer side. I talked to the founder of Gumroad a couple of nights later and was very heartened by what I heard. Whenever I had a free minute, I gradually switched all my downloadable products to Gumroad. (As mentioned, I had stopped selling print copies from my site, but you can also sell physical products.)

I have, since, put two of my clients (one nonprofit and one corporation) on Gumroad, both of whom love it. It’s the easy-button of shopping carts. Set it and forget it.

PAYMENT PROCESSORS

GUMROAD. Gumroad is both the delivery system and the payment processor for your stuff, nobody else involved (unless you want it to be). For those authors and companies who have no need to sell services like I do, Gumroad will be sufficient. But! Since I do sell custom services, I have to have something extra, and for the longest time the only thing I had was…

PAYPAL. We all know some or most or all of the issues involved with using Paypal. I use it because it was there when nothing else was, it’s the largest, with the most users. People either trust it or use it because they have to. I have long wanted to get away from Paypal but had no attractive alternatives, and thus, Paypal could screw me over with impunity. And they did here and there. And ranting about it on the internet is ineffective.

SQUARE. Then in 2011, I was invited to be a panelist at the Sunstone Symposium because of Magdalene, and they told me to bring books. I had to have a way to sell them via credit card. My partner Eric suggested SquareUp, which was, at that time, still a bit unknown. It was perfect. It worked beautifully…for print books. Ebooks not so much, but I considered it unreasonable to expect it from them considering their reason for existence, and found a workaround solution that actually worked (even if it was a bit clunky).

Since, I’ve used Square as my payment processor for my services. It’s worked marvelously for the past 18 months. So marvelously, in fact, I have been nudging my clients in the direction of paying by credit card or check (yes, a paper check) in an attempt to get away from Paypal completely. I found it funny that Paypal just introduced their own little credit card swiper thingie, a full year after I was already using Square. Really. What took ‘em so long? Didn’t matter, though, because I wasn’t going to use that. The point was to get away from Paypal. So my revenue via Square has been growing and my revenue via Paypal has been decreasing. So increasing, as a matter of fact, that yesterday’s transaction hit a snafu.

Thus it was that today Square and I had to have a come-to-Jesus meeting. I’ll write about that tomorrow, but the spoiler is that it’s all turned out dandy and these posts are meant, in part, to sing their praises some more.

To summarize:

Authors who don’t sell anything in person or hire out services: Use Gumroad.
Authors who sell physical goods out in the wild: Use Square.
Consultants like me: Use Square.

Tomorrow, the snafu and what you need to know when using Square.

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Guest post: The state of academic publishing by @Dhympna

Guest Post: A Dose of Realism for Aspiring Authors by Warren Adler

MOBI wins

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I’ve said this before. Actually, I said it when sales of Kindle took off. And there’s a reason it wins: Whispersync. MOBI is an ancient and limited/limiting format. EPUB is an evolving and flexible (if not quite limitless yet) format. MOBI was all but dead when Amazon used it for the Kindle, but readers don’t care. They want their ebooks and they want them to be more convenient than paper.

Here’s the problem: Technology gets in the way of reading ebooks. MOBI wins simply because it happens to be the format Amazon used to make it painless for people to get books. (And if you think Barnes & Noble’s nook is going to become the EPUB equivalent of Kindle, you’re kidding yourself.)

Continuing.

I released my third book yesterday: Magdalene. In it are beautiful illustrations my fabulous artist Adam Figueira did for me.

Unfortunately, for EPUB readers built on the Adobe Digital Editions developer kit, those illustrations won’t scale. But they do in Overdrive, Kobo, and iBooks. Imagine that. So I had to manipulate the images down to the smallest size that was still barely readable, because most people read EPUB on ADE-based readers. (I use Bluefire in iPad.)

MOBI, on the other hand, that ancient and limited/limiting format, scales the images and while they’re still small on the Kindle, you can read them and they do zoom a tad. You can argue that it’s a reading software problem, and not a format problem (why blame EPUB? you wail), but it’s really irrelevant.

In this equation, the person who bought the book is the only person who matters.

No format does what it really needs to do to replicate the convenience of the print reading experience. All you have to do to read a print book is know how to read.

This format bullshit isn’t like having mismatching books on a book shelf. This is like having print books you can only read if you have a GE 75-watt bulb in your 60-watt lamp that has to plug into a European outlet. In the United States.

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Ads in ebooks

Guest Post: My Book Problem by Warren Adler

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Posted with permission from Warren Adler, author of War of the Roses, who also happens to be an ebook pioneer and rabid digital evangelist:

In another few weeks, I will be moving to another apartment in the same building in Manhattan where I have spent the past few years. While moving in itself is a traumatic event as everyone knows, my principal problem is books.

I have a huge collection of books. In the three or four major moves in my lifetime I have culled, boxed, given away and donated thousands of books. During each nesting experience, however, I have acquired yet more books and have repeated the culling process each time. I could never pass a bookstore without buying one or more books.

The fact is that I am probably a bibliophile in my soul. I love books. Reading books takes up much of my time, when I am not writing books. For years I have collected sets of leather bound books by favorite authors. It is a valuable collection. I have leather bound books by Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dickens, Hardy, O’Henry, Balzac, Henry James, Turgenev, Twain, de Maupassant, and on and on. To list them all would make this essay endless.

I also have duplicate copies of my own books in every language in which they have been translated and published. They amount to hundreds of copies. I will never part with them. They are as much a part of me as my DNA.

I love reading novels, older novels and contemporary novels. My tastes are eclectic. I have many non-fiction books as well, on politics, history and religion with particular emphasis on American history, which is yet another passion.

Now here is the kicker.

I am a pioneer in electronic publishing. All of my books have been reversed from major publishers and digitized since the late nineties. I have for years been touting the inevitable switch from print to digital. It was a no-brainer bound to happen. And it has reached the tipping point.

I made the first pitch for digital books on handheld reading devices at the Las Vegas International Consumer Electronics Show for the SONY reader when it was introduced in 2007. I bought one of the first Kindles and for kicks have been collecting other reading devices like the iPad and the Nook.

For years I have been addressing groups on the joys of reading content on screens. At first my reception had been hostile. I have listened to the same complaints ad infinitum. They all have the same ring. I love the tactile feel of a book. I love the smell of ink and paper. I love to hold them. Books are my friends. I like to see them on my shelves. A curse on screen-read books.

My response is always the same. I feel your pain. I cite other examples of lost items, both corporeal and emotional: The clip-clop sound of a horse’s hooves on city streets, the beauty of horse-drawn vehicles, the smell and sounds of sizzling logs in fireplaces, the fading art of writing letters, the lost joys of childhood, the reassuring scratches made by pen points dipped in inkwells, my mother’s cooking, the reassuring house calls of the family doctor, the old New York Herald Tribune, penny candy, knickers, saddle shoes, the Brooklyn Dodgers. It didn’t bring tears to the eyes of my audience and did not soften the blows to my advocacy of digital books.

I would explain to those early listeners and those I speak to today that there is a lot to say for the psychic joys of a physical book, but, in the end, there is one hard truth that is inescapable. The heart of a book is its content. Content trumps all. When all is said and done reading is a one on one communication system, an author’s presentation of his or her insights, stories, opinions, a distillation of his or her thoughts, instructive, inspirational, original, and, in its own way, a miracle of transference through words. I suppose one can find numerous other definitions, both literary and instructive. Content and its dissemination is the beating heart of civilization. Enough said. I’m sure the point is made.

In one tiny device, Kindle, Nook, iPad et al, I can fit the content of every book on my shelves and can, if I chose, soon be able to download at my whim the content of my choice among most books ever published since the discovery that content can be portable.

That said, it does not diminish my love of physical books as objects of admiration and devotion.

But here I am culling once again. I find I am being more ruthless than ever with less second thoughts or pangs of conscience on what to keep and what to discard. I no longer really want to shelve paperbacks and am making my culling judgments on the basis of my emotional attachments, my love of the content presented by those authors who have truly moved me, whose content has given me hours of pleasure and made a difference in my understanding of the human condition.

I will keep those books in my new apartment as a monument to my love of books and my favorite authors as well as a symbol of enduring friendship.

Oh yes, one more thought. While I can enjoy the sight of seeing many of my “friends” tucked comfortably on my bookshelves, I can now carry these “friends” everywhere I go and in both a physical and symbolic sense hold them close to my heart.

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Stop sucking

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Never mind the fact that I don’t consider PDFs ebooks. Yes, they can be read on a computer and a couple of devices. However, my definition has always rested on the fact that they’re not reflowable, and the few devices that can read them can’t do it well or efficiently (see reflowability). PDFs are print books for a screen big enough to read them comfortably.

But last night I discovered one more reason they shouldn’t be considered ebooks: metadata. EVERYBODY sucks at putting the metadata into a PDF. Period. Big publishers, small publishers (even me), self-publishers. EVERYBODY does reasonably well at putting the metadata into files they know will be read on a device. PDFs…not so much.

You suck. I suck. We suck.

How do I know this? I know this because I was loading all my PDFs into my iPad last night and using iBooks to read them. My library looks like this:

Stop sucking

We need to stop sucking if we’re going to put PDFs on sale like they’re bona fide ebooks.

(Note: The entries with the parentheses are ones that defaulted to my file naming system.)

Somewhere along last week, I realized that I sucked. I assumed no one else sucked as badly as I do. So I determined to make sure that Magdalene‘s metadata didn’t suck. It doesn’t. Behold:

Suck no more.

Now, getting this isn’t difficult, but here you go, step by step:

Stop sucking.

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Content delivery on a shoestring

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If you, Renegade Writer, have an ebook to sell, once you have the files in your hands, the trick is to getting it to the readers. There are the usual outlets (Kindle, Smashwords), but even with their broad reach, you’re leaving money on the table by not selling from your website.

Let me tell you right now: Selling a PDF with a Paypal button, after which you have to email the file is not a good solution. You probably know that. If you’ve done it, you know what a hassle it is. For your customer, it defeats the purpose of an ebook, which is instant gratification. You’re tired of monitoring your email; your customers are irritated with you if you don’t pony up the file in about 2 minutes. I bought an ebook that way once. That was all it took.

Mike Cane pointed me to this: Massive Sqwertz for Indie Comics, which outlines a delivery system that is essentially manual (the part where you constantly manipulate your email filters). There are some good ideas there that I’ve had on my to-do list for some time, such as the SMS and QR code enabling, but at the moment, because I am on a shoestring budget, those tools compete with more high-priority customer needs (in my opinion).

Your goal, Renegade Writer, is to automate your delivery system without spending more than about $0.

I’ve said before that I’m not a visionary: I’m an implementer and streamliner of good ideas. The best one I’ve seen yet was Samhain’s My Bookstore and More (which is apparently on hiatus). It had everything:

1. Drop-down menu

2. Automated delivery

3. Perpetual bookshelf with unlimited downloads

4. Ability to redownload different formats (i.e., if you bought a title, you bought all formats)

5. Live files you can open immediately from your wifi device

That’s what I wanted. I contacted the people who built their site and about swallowed my tongue at the price. I’m a nanopress. I can’t afford that. Neither can an individual author. ZenCart and its ilk (free) are, I think, capable of doing this, but I really haven’t had time to delve into it for the exactly four titles B10 and Peculiar Pages have, which will expand to at least six by the end of the year.

My need to have a comprehensive perpetual bookshelf (defined as re-downloadability of different live-file formats) warred with my need to allow the customer to own all the formats. I couldn’t find a free shopping cart that would do that. (For one good discussion of shopping carts, go to Crystal Williams’s blog, Big Bright Bulb.)

So I had to choose between giving a customer ALL the formats and giving the customer a single live-file format (which would then necessitate me emailing the others).

It’s not a perfect solution, but I can’t afford a perpetual bookshelf. However, it sure beats any type of manual delivery system that depends on you, Renegade Writer, sitting guard over your email.

[blackbirdpie url="http://twitter.com/#!/mikecane/status/26031535081656320"]

Perhaps the addition of SMS-enabled and/or QR code-enabled purchasing (if I can integrate it with my current shopping cart) will change my mind to favor the live file.

1. Domain name (~$15/year)

2. Webhosting (~$60/year)

3. WordPress installation ($0)

4. WP eCommerce shopping cart ($0)

5. Not having to tend my email 24/7 and having pissed-off customers (priceless)

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A word on using PDFs to create a Kindle book

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Don’t.

Amazon’s at fault here, in my opinion, in allowing one to do it at all because it really doesn’t work well. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should, but most people don’t know they shouldn’t or don’t know why they shouldn’t.

Well, why shouldn’t you, if they let you? Listen up.

This is your Kindle book from a nicely formatted PRC: