Authorship in the Information Age

[Richard Herley]

Some MR members will know that I launched an experiment a couple of years ago, offering free download of six of my novels, requesting payment only from satisfied readers. The experiment ended on Sunday, and I have just posted a summary on my blog.

I go on to speculate about authorship in the Information Age. The whole thing is much too long to quote here, but the gloomy conclusion is that

Linear fiction will never die out, but will become a backwater served by authors who have independent means and write purely to be read.

All dissenting views will be much appreciated!

[Ben Thornton]

I hope that you're wrong. Given that there is money to be made from fiction, I think that a model will emerge to tap that market in a way that is widely viewed as fair. The problem with the ebook market at the moment is that the major publishers are not supporting a model that provides convenience, quality and a fair price.

The smashwords approach looks like a good one. I've downloaded your free book, and if I like it, I'll buy more. Like a lot of people, I tend to buy books from authors that I've read before, or who I have a trusted recommendation for - or that are free. In a world with so much on offer, much of low quality, I think a free taster is a good idea.

It seems to me that it's too early to say how all this will pan out. I don't think that your original "honesty box" approach will make many authors a living, but I'm hopeful that the smashwords model (free tasters, low price but direct from the author) can work.

There's an interesting blog from JA Konrath on this.

[ficbot]

Richard, in some ways I agree with you and in some ways I don't I do think authorship is going to *change* in the digital age. But I think most media will. Let me give you an example, people in television paid a lot of money for rights to air the Olympics and how did I watch the opening ceremonies? Not on TV! I got home an hour late from a party, turned on my computer and found a streaming feed on-line---and someone had helpfully put in markers at all the key spots. I flipped from marker to marker and watched all the good parts, in about half an hour.

Regarding your point about free content, I think one has to consider that there are simply a lot of entertainment options these days. I don't even have cable, yet I can watch three of the four shows I enjoy just with the two channels I get over the air. The other, I can watch for free off the website of the network who airs it. I also have free access to a community centre right across the street complete with skating rink and running track, I am thinking of getting the wii so I will have another 'active' option in the evenings, the internet can fill a lot of time---and then, book-wise, there are freebies galore at Project Gutenberg and here, there are hundreds of author promo books or free samples I have downloaded and not gotten to yet, there are books I have *bought* and not gotten to yet...

I went through a phase of micropay hoarding at Fictionwise and spent it on tons of little cheap books I now regret having to slog through to clear out my TBR pile, and I have made a resolution this year to only read quality books. If I start it and it doesn't grab me, I am shelving it and moving on. It's not that people don't like reading or don't like books. It's just that there is so much competing for their time and attention! If you think this is unique to the digital age, just check out the TBR pile at my parents paperbook house---she buys something, reads it, puts it on his bedside table in case he wants to read it next. He buys something, reads it, puts it on her table etc. Meanwhile, he's already bought his next one. And the cycle repeats. They each have a stack an arms-length high!

I think authors are just going to have to accept that pure *writing* is not going to be the only part of the job if they want to make money at it. Plenty of authors have said 'it's not fair to expect authors to take time away from writing to do PR work' or 'not every author is a self-promoter and it doesn't mean they are a bad writer.' But that is not going to be good enough anymore. If people want 'being an author' to be their *career* and support them for bread and butter, they are going to have to be shameless self-promoters to get themselves noticed and make their book stand out from the crowd. Otherwise, it'll be a hobby, I'm afraid.

In an ideal world, maybe authors would be able to 'just' write. But in an ideal world, daycare workers would make more than minimum wage, and ticket-takers at the subway station would not be along the highest-paid civil servants in my city...

[mores]

Donationware rises and falls with the level of commitment people have to the product.

If I were to get your book from someone I know, or stumbled upon it, or something, I would have no emotional attachment to it whatsoever, initially. After reading it, I might like it, or not.

Now, if you were to give it away for free to all MobileRead members, me being one of them, I would feel like you are my friend. And I try to support my friends, when I can.
And suppose my credit card was not maxed out again, like it frequently is, I would gladly send some cash (so to speak) your way.

Also, it requires a certain maturity for the concept of "you get what you pay for" to evolve. When I was young, I think I bent some car antennas and broke a few windows. I never had to *work* to acquire something. Everything was free, or you saved up for it (with "free" money you got from people, like allowances and christmas, birthdays etc.) so you never really learned the value of something. Sure, you were in love with the new bike you got "yourself" or the stuff you earned by showing up at your grandparents'.

It's been a long, long time (retrospecively) until I realized that just because you can get something for free does not mean you should. I'm not rich (yet ), and I still pirate songs and music. But at the same time, when I like something I buy the stuff I previously pirated. To relieve my conscience, to support the author/artist AND make my liking show up in the books, so that the author/artist can see, how many fans he has got.

[Richard Herley]

Ben, I read J A Konrath's post and he makes it clear that he owes his success to having started in print. He also says he can write four books a year, which does make me wonder about the quality (I've never read him).

Smashwords is a brilliant idea and all kudos to them for making it work. Now if they could just find a way to speed the site up ...

ficbot, I agree completely. Just as mp3s have made bands concentrate on live performances, etc., to make ends meet, so will other artists whose work can be digitized and duplicated. Watching an author type at a computer is unlikely to attract much interest, but I have a nascent idea in this respect which I was going to develop further before going public. However, given the nature of the project, I may as well say something now.

Here is an extract from an email to a friend, asking advice:

I have two novels on the go, one a thriller and the other a black comedy. Both appeal to me at different moments. The thriller will probably be easier to write and more exciting, but entails a lot of research into all these conspiracy theories about the New World Order (the kind of stuff your bro-in-law eats for breakfast). The comedy will be more fun. It's about a young guy who has dumped his Albanian girlfriend (did I tell you this?) and to escape her vengeful brothers he takes a summer job at a nudist colony. I have not worked out the plot yet, which is a concern. The thriller is more conventional fare -- the hero (a political blogger and geek) goes on the run when the baddies trace him -- meets sympathetic lady -- they team up -- narrow scrapes -- the conspiracy is revealed in all its horror -- the information-bomb prepared by our leading couple sees daylight and the world is saved.

I need encouragement to go on with either project, because publishing is in such a dire strait. I also need some sort of shameless self-promotion that will sell my ebooks. The idea is this. I invite people to sign up for a writing project ("get inside an author's mind"). Subscribers pay a sum of money to get access to a private blog where I post the work in progress, together with sundry musings, complaints, technical explanations, etc. The ideal mix of subscribers would include wannabe writers and more successful ones, all outnumbered by keen readers who are tired of ever taking a passive role in the reading experience.

Subscribers get to discuss the work with me and among themselves. They can suggest changes or point out absurdities. I can ask them to go off and do research on my behalf (entirely voluntary on their part), freeing up some of the time that I spend updating the blog. If bullied sufficiently, I will set up polls so they can vote on plot details ("Should Edward try to seduce Mandy at their first meeting? Yes/No/Maybe"), but not on overall direction. I can be persuaded, but my judgement there is final, even though I risk the ire of the community, since a novel by its nature cannot be a true collaboration.

As a way of working it flies in the face of received wisdom about the author's craft (lonely penitent sits at desk, battling with his muse and keeping all this thoughts about the work sacrosanct lest they're sullied by exposure to unsympathetic minds). That is the main thing that gives me pause. On the other hand, it might be refreshing to be unconventional for once. It's a very Web 2.0 idea.

In order to write either of these books I would want a guaranteed sum which would collectively be provided upfront by the subscribers. If I don't finish the book all the subscribers get their money back. If I do finish it and we (i.e. the subscribers and I) cannot sell it after one year, I keep the subscription money and release the work as a free ebook at Smashwords. If we sell it to a mainstream publisher, the payments received and the subscription money go into a pot to be divvied up according to some shareholding scheme yet to be devised, where I keep a fair percentage and the subscribers get the rest.

The first thing to do would be to gauge the amount of interest in this. How keen would readers and writers be to get involved? The readers could watch and guide the raw process of creating a novel, rewrites, blocks, inspirations and all. The writers could learn quite a bit (I have been doing this for 40 years now.) Perhaps the best thing would be the interaction, the persuasion and voting: and the first question to be settled is the choice of book. The nudist colony will be more amusing, but the conspiracy theory might sell to Hollywood and make us all rich.

If and when people start to indicate an interest, we would have to decide what the subscription would be, together with other financial stuff. That settled, we'd get the exact terms and the legal side sorted; with any luck one of us would be a lawyer. I would need some help in the geek department, too. Squarespace.com offers some cool blogging services and might be just the thing.

I have more thoughts about this, but that's quite enough for now.

So, the thing is, am I nuts or does anyone out there think this could provide a new way for writers to work?

[ficbot]

That sounds like a very complex scheme, Richard. Best of luck to you if you can make it work though. I think the next big internet success story is going to be whomever gets a taker on something like 'the books are free but the movie rights cost a million dollars' but I could be wrong.

It's important to think not just about what might be changing for the worse but what might be changing for the better, too. I'll give you an example, I am in my 30s now and finding it harder and harder to keep my weight down compared to when I first started working out, in college. So when I look to add something to my schedule, I am increasingly trying top get away from things like movies and internet which involve just sitting around. I sometimes go to the community centre to skate or use the track, I am pondering Tae Kwon Do classes and thinking of getting a wii for a bit of fun extra activity. Books would be seemingly incompatible with this new get off the couch approach. Even audio books are problematic because you can *only* listen and can't read the traditional way. The Kindle has been a valuable upgrade for me because the TTS lets me use it like an audio book, the resume 'normal' reading later. Yes, this might sometimes involve removing the DRM to enable this feature, should one be amenable so such a thing But if the choice for the publisher is 'enable this feature and people like me will buy the book' or 'restrict it using DRM and lose some sales' then why should they not enable the feature?

[Ben Thornton]

Originally Posted by Richard Herley

Ben, I read J A Konrath's post and he makes it clear that he owes his success to having started in print. He also says he can write four books a year, which does make me wonder about the quality (I've never read him).

Nor have I (yet - I've downloaded a freebie). The point was that he seems to have found a model that works for him.

So, the thing is, am I nuts or does anyone out there think this could provide a new way for writers to work?

FWIW, my view is, this won't work. I don't think that it has mass appeal, and what you want it to find some way of getting a lot of people to pay a bit of money. I don't mean that you couldn't make this process interesting, just that you won't pay the mortgage with it. You should only do it if you want to do it as an experiment in ways of working - i.e. not for the money.

One model that might work, I think, is one which gets people coming back for more, paying a little at a time, with the first fix for free. It's reminiscent of the 19th century authors churning out what is now literature in instalments. If it was good enough for them?

Whatever you end up doing - good luck with it, and more power to you for persevering after the b*stards left the honesty box empty!

[K-Thom]

Richard, congrats on your net income, honestly! I tried this some time ago with a series of mine, 25 episodes totalling in more than 300.000 downloads by now.

Donations response? Zero. Zip. Zilch. None.

Maybe this is a cultural attitude. I'm from Germany, and usually Germans tend to treat free stuff either

a) if it's free, the author already seems to have enough money. So why pay him?
b) if it's free, it can't be good. Good things aren't for free.
c) if you want to give it away for free, suit yourself. When will the next episode be online?

This was two or three years back, before the rising of eInk readers. So maybe the situation has changed. But I doubt it.

Again, thanks for your insights.

[zerospinboson]

Well, I'm afraid I'd never heard of you before today, but I would offer a few thoughts, based on my observations of people's behaviour on download sites (of pirated materials), especially as it pertains to music and ebook downloads:

0. I myself hugely dislike and distrust Paypal. Also, Paypal is fairly expensive to use, which might matter for Asians (because you need to have a CC in order to credit the account)
1. A huge number of people download but never look at ebooks; this is a pure magpie instinct, coupled with a vague idea of "it's good, and doesn't cost anything to download it now, and I might feel like it later". The exact same thing applies to classical music downloads.
2. People don't like having to share things back; protocols like the torrent protocol force people to do so at least to some degree, but whenever they can get away with something, the majority will choose to do so.
3. You might have attracted downloads because of the "novelty" of downloading something for free legally.
4. during most of this 2-year period, ebook-reader sales were still in their infancy. The lack of a comfortable reading platform likely discouraged people from "having a look" at your book.

Now, I can't tell you what kind of weights to apply to any of the points made above, but may I, as an antidote to the slightly depressed undercurrent, suggest you read the article "Culture is Ordinary" by Raymond Williams?
The point I was reminded of by reading your post was this: (Excuse length)

Originally Posted by Raymond Williams

My second reason is historical: I deny, and can prove my denial, that popular education and commercial culture are cause and effect. I have shown elsewhere that the myth of 1870 — the education act which is said to have produced, as its children grew up, a new cheap and nasty press — is indeed myth. There was more than enough literacy, long before 1870, to support a cheap press, and in fact there were cheap and really bad newspapers selling in great quantities before the 1870 act was heard of. The bad new commercial culture came out of the social chaos of industrialism, and out of the success, in this chaos, of the 'masses' formula, not out of popular education. Northcliffe did few worse things than start this myth, for while the connection between bad culture and the social chaos of industrialism is significant, the connection between it and popular education is vicious. The Northcliffe revolution, by the way, was a radical change in the financial structure of the press, basing it on a new kind of revenue — the new mass advertising of the 1890s — rather than the making of a cheap popular press, in which he had been widely and successfully preceded. But I tire of making these points. Everyone prefers to believe Northcliffe. Yet does nobody, even a Royal Commission, read the most ordinarily accessible newspaper history? When people do read the history, the false equation between popular education and commercial culture will disappear forever. Popular education came out of the other camp, and has had quite opposite effects.
The second false equation is this: that the observable badness of so much widely distributed popular culture is a true guide to the state of mind and feeling, the essential quality of living of its consumers. Too many good men have said this for me to treat it lightly, but I still, on evidence, can't accept it. It is easy to assemble, from print and cinema and television, a terrifying and fantastic congress of cheap feelings and moronic arguments. It is easy to go on from this and assume this deeply degrading version of the actual lives of our contemporaries. Yet do we find this confirmed, when we meet people? This is where 'masses' comes in again, of course: the people we meet aren't vulgar, but god, think of Bootle and Surbiton and Aston! I haven't lived in any of those places; have you?
[...]
Now the false analogy, that we must also reject, this is known, in discussions of culture, as a 'kind of Gresham’s law'. Just as bad money will drive out good, so bad culture will drive out good, and this, it is said, has in fact been happening. If you can't see, straight away, the defect of the analogy, your answer, equally effective, will have to be historical. For in fact, of course, it has not been happening. There is more, much more bad culture about; it is easier, now, to distribute it, and there is more leisure to receive it. But test this in any field you like, and see if this has been accompanied by a shrinking consumption a things we can all agree to be good. The editions of good literature are very much larger than they were; the listeners to good music are much more numerous than they were; the number of people who look at good visual art is larger than it has ever been. If bad newspapers drive our good newspapers, by a kind of Gresham’s law, why is it that, allowing for the rise in population, The Times sells nearly three times as many copies as in the days of its virtual monopoly of the press, in 1850? It is the law I am questioning, not the seriousness of the facts as a whole. Instead of a kind of Gresham’s law, keeping people awake at nights with the now orthodox putropian nightmare, let us put it another way, to fit the actual facts: we live in an expanding culture, and all the elements in this culture are themselves expanding.

Now, admittedly Williams wrote this quite some time before the advent of the internet, and it may very well be that relational reading/"hypertext" will change expectations somewhat, but for me, I would argue that this change is for the better. That is, I am immensely, hugely annoyed when I read a newspaper that doesn't cite its sources. In part because the writing tends to be rather shoddy, specifically when it comes to science reporting, but the larger point I would draw is the following: "footnoting" through these hyperlinks can also be used for "good". Basically, I am just not willing to assume that the internet will turn all of us into slugs.
The point that is not often noticed or drawn attention to is that we are getting an ever larger amount of input from the "classes" that in earlier days would have been pretty much entirely mute (because of a lack of social access to the media). This will surely lead to more dross, and a lower signal-to-noise ratio, but it is accompanied by a less noticeable (because less controversial) growth of the somewhat-higher-educated. So remain hopeful for our collective culture, even if you aren't being remunerated for your freely distributed books yet.

[lene1949]

Originally Posted by Richard Herley

Some MR members will know that I launched an experiment a couple of years ago, offering free download of six of my novels, requesting payment only from satisfied readers. The experiment ended on Sunday, and I have just posted a summary on my blog.

I go on to speculate about authorship in the Information Age. The whole thing is much too long to quote here, but the gloomy conclusion is that

All dissenting views will be much appreciated!

OMG... I'm so embarrassed... I downloaded 3 of your book a while ago, and they're still on my TBR list... I've sent you money for them via your paypal address..

[NightGeometry]

Originally Posted by ficbot

I think authors are just going to have to accept that pure *writing* is not going to be the only part of the job if they want to make money at it. Plenty of authors have said 'it's not fair to expect authors to take time away from writing to do PR work' or 'not every author is a self-promoter and it doesn't mean they are a bad writer.' But that is not going to be good enough anymore. If people want 'being an author' to be their *career* and support them for bread and butter, they are going to have to be shameless self-promoters to get themselves noticed and make their book stand out from the crowd. Otherwise, it'll be a hobby, I'm afraid.

A similar thing has happened in the photography world, as far as I can make out. The successful 'professional' photographers I know are shameless self publicists, they are not necessarily the best photographers I know. Some of the best photographers I have met are hobbyists, who have other jobs, and who don't promote themselves. They may sell an occasional image, but that is not what it is about, for them. The professional's (who are in no way bad photographers), publicise, and through that get commissions. This has pretty much been the case in wedding photography for a long time - the most successful aren't necessarily the best.

Not completely on topic, but possibly relevant.

[Richard Herley]

Thanks for your comments and encouragement, everyone.

ficbot -- yes, probably it's crazy and would be a nightmare to administer!

Ben -- I'll keep bouncing back for as long as I can. Your model is used with great success by Alexandra Erin, and is something I might well look into.

K-Thom -- the thing to do is not take it personally. Easier said than done, I know.

zerospinboson -- that's fascinating. We should never assume anything; only make observations based on firm scientific evidence, which my experiment does not really provide. And indeed Penguin and other publishers are working on supercharged editions with hyperlinks appropriately placed in the text: an ideal use for an iPad.

lene -- you are very sweet, but only satisfied readers were asked to pay. If the books are on your TBR list, there's no need for you to do so. Please PM me. It's late here, so I probably won't get back to the computer till tomorrow.

NightGeometry -- some of the most amazing wildlife photography is the work of amateurs, so I know just what you mean. You have to do these things for the love of it. No one sensible goes into any sort of artistic endeavour with the aim of making a fortune. Still, we can always try!

Ralph Sir Edward of this parish posted the following thoughtful comment on my blog, and I hope he won't mind if I paste it here:

It seems appropriate to comment here. Quae Rara, Cara. The Romans weren't dummies, although we like to think so in modern times. Perhaps, Hemmingway might be more appropriate "You're either writing something new, or you're trying to beat dead men at their own games."

There are several ways to look at the current situation. I mention two.

First, technology changes form. By that I mean that how an entertainment is enjoyed is dependent upon what the technology of the times permits. For example, music. 150 years ago, you choice for enjoying music consisted of going out to hear a concert being given, or making your own, limited to what skills you had. To utilize those skills, you needed to purchase a template of the music you wanted to reproduce, called sheet music, printed with a unique nomenclature to describe how to reproduce the music. Today, the technology has totally bypassed the idea of making your own music, you merely reproduce your favorite music on demand. The idea of self-reproduction of music is so arcane that Project Gutenberg had dormanted the sheet music section, due to lack of interest. Even free, there is little interest. Time has passed it by.

I suspect that technology is doing the same for linear reading. Things like Massive Multi-Player Online Games, Internet interaction, and the sheer availability of past story-telling, is making the demand for new product drop steadily. Scarcity is being killed in the digital world, and anything based in scarcity is going to fail. I say this not to be offensive, but merely to state the new reality.

Second, it's not just limited to the digital items themselves, but consider the secondary aspect you didn't mention, the vast expansion of marketplace availability of obsolete items. I hear about a fifty year old book, which has been out-of print for forty years. Thirty years ago, the odds of my being able to find it in a used book store was fairly low, I might spend years hunting for that book. So only the most dedicated even tried, the others bought the new equivalent product. Today, you just go out to American Booksellers Exchange, and odds are that you'll find it right off, in various conditions, at various prices. You may consider them too high, but they are . And that makes them competition, as out-of-print is no longer a reduction of competition. And that is not even making digital copies, merely digital indexing and marketplace access.

Over the last two hundred years, we, as a society, have created an enormous mountain of entertainment, more than can be enjoyed in ten lifetimes. The system depended on the "forgetting" of previously created works to make room for the creation of new works. This has been shattered by the new digital technology. Like the surviving American jet fighter pilots over North Vietnam, that consumers are starting to "flip off the switches" to reduce the entertainment load. It should be no surprise that they are flipping off the most expensive sources first....

17 February 2010 14:43
Blogger Richard Herley said...

Excellent stuff, if I may say so, Ralph. You're right, I didn't even get into the question of the internet and second-hand books.

Apparently World of Warcraft is so addictive that there's now a club for "Warcraft widows" where they share ideas about getting their husbands back.

Was there ever such a club for the spouses of Dickens's most avid readers?

17 February 2010 16:32
Anonymous Ralph Sir Edward said...

Perhaps not, but think of how many kids were told by their parents - "Get your nose out of a book and go do something..." Similar concept, I imagine...

Richard, if you are interested, (and no reason why you should be), I wrote a Precis of these ideas on MobileRead under the title "And The World Changed". Look under Edward, Ralph in the e-book section. I placed it in the Public Domain, don't worry about downloading it...

I did, and it's on my TBR pile.

[fugazied]

I think the payment model could be tweaked. If micropayments were embedded in the document, it could be possible to have the first 5 chapters free then ask for a micropayment per remaining chapter. A minimum of 10 cents per chapter and at the end of the book prompt for more if they liked it.

For people to pay for an item they need to believe the item has some distinct value. A PDF which has no physical body and barely any cost to create doesn't have the same perceived worth compared to a paper book where the reader knows cost has gone into the actual production of additional copies. With e-books the cost that has gone into 'printing' additional copies is perhaps 0.0001 cents per copy. If the reader believes there is little cost to the author they may be less inclined to pay for it.

So the donation scheme may not work without additional incentive. I would suggest:
- First half of the book then a minimum donation of $1 for the rest of the book. If they get that far they are enjoying it and most people will pay (who leaves a book half read over $1).
- The method of payment MUST BE fast, simple and easy. You lose consumers if they have to create a paypal account or trudge to a specific website (putting down their reader to do so). Ideally the micropayment method needs to be integrated into the reading device with existing payment methods.
- Offer half of the money to charity. Make the minimum payment $2 but $1 of that goes to cancer research of some kind of charity. People gain the added benefit of feeling good about themselves when they make a purchase, you feel good about donating hundreds/thousands to charity and you get more sales.
- Also there need to be limited edition real world collectors edition versions of the items. Nine Inch Nails who gave away their last album for donation made millions of dollars off the limited edition versions, which as I recall were vinyl and some nice artwork (and may have been signed by the singer). See http://theslip.nin.com/

They sold out of that initial pressing I believe, netting the band some 1 million dollars or so. Consumers who become fans of your work will pay additional amounts for physical versions of media. If they LOVE your work, their $1 ebook purchase can turn into a $40 signed hardcover purchase, you need to upsell these people.

Independent E-book authors have the advantage of being able to see the music model where people have tried and failed at certain things.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by Richard Herley

Thanks for your comments and encouragement, everyone.

ficbot -- yes, probably it's crazy and would be a nightmare to administer!

Ben -- I'll keep bouncing back for as long as I can. Your model is used with great success by Alexandra Erin, and is something I might well look into.

K-Thom -- the thing to do is not take it personally. Easier said than done, I know.

zerospinboson -- that's fascinating. We should never assume anything; only make observations based on firm scientific evidence, which my experiment does not really provide. And indeed Penguin and other publishers are working on supercharged editions with hyperlinks appropriately placed in the text: an ideal use for an iPad.

lene -- you are very sweet, but only satisfied readers were asked to pay. If the books are on your TBR list, there's no need for you to do so. Please PM me. It's late here, so I probably won't get back to the computer till tomorrow.

NightGeometry -- some of the most amazing wildlife photography is the work of amateurs, so I know just what you mean. You have to do these things for the love of it. No one sensible goes into any sort of artistic endeavour with the aim of making a fortune. Still, we can always try!

Ralph Sir Edward of this parish posted the following thoughtful comment on my blog, and I hope he won't mind if I paste it here:



I did, and it's on my TBR pile.

Not in the least, sir. (bows)

[lilac_jive]

I was one of those who paid for it when you waived the fee for MR book club members. It was totally worth it too. I'm glad that you posted this actually, because now I know you're on Smashwords. I've been wanting to read another one of your books. Loved Refuge!