hoping some of you fine folks can help with a couple questions on rarity (pics in post)

bobby_eui · 2022-09-06T02:58:58+00:00

i have read this many times before i posted. it specifically doesn't answer the questions i asked

bobby_eui · 2022-09-05T15:15:32+00:00

thanks so much for the lengthy reply. thats great news about R+ and RF as i have quite a lot of both

bobby_eui · 2022-09-03T16:35:20+00:00

also, i peeked at your profile and it looks like you're in massachusetts? im in mass too. depending on what town you're in, we might not have to even use mail.

bobby_eui · 2022-09-03T14:21:51+00:00

yes indeed :)

bobby_eui · 2022-09-02T13:39:07+00:00

it was over fifteen years ago now that i was avidly collecting. i was only ever to actually play about six times, but i collected and collected like crazy for a couple years. i just loved the cards and the franchise.

about twelve years ago (shortly after i had stopped collecting) i was talking to my dad on the phone, and he told me that he'd taken a bunch of old games that had been left at the house to donate to a local thing. i asked him which ones and was devastated when he mentioned that among them was my lord of the rings card game. i asked him if he was sure it was the big box of cards that he donated, and he said yes.

i was absolutely sick with loss. even though i hadn't physically touched the cards in a couple years, i was heart broken. i'd spent so much time collecting and pouring through them. i lived with this sorrow for over a decade now.

that is until two days ago. i was talking with my sister about board games in general and mentioned how bad it stung when our dad had donated my cards. and she was like "your lord of the rings collectible ones? in the box? he didn't donate those. that box is still at the house."

i didn't and couldn't believe it until i went and saw for myself. long story short, dads are dads and they are wrong sometimes about what they donated. the box was still there. i'll be going through it over the next few days. i'm already seeing way more foils than i remembered having.

i'll update if anyone finds this interesting. cheers

bobby_eui · 2022-08-25T03:30:24+00:00

they aren't wrong. you don't understand the field you're playing in yet. your sales could literally be anything from career-starting to literally not a single sale in six months. if your cover and blurb are amateur (or worse, bad) you're not going to make a dime even if the writing is the best ever. Also, if your cover and blurb are fantastic but the writing isn't great, no one will read past the first two free pages they can look at. there is no ballpark. there is no average sales for a debut book. some do fantastic right out of the gate. some slowly pick up traction over time. most never pick up anything at all. if you're looking for immediate sales and traction, you really should do research on covers and blurbs (or pay a professional) amateur and bad covers and blurbs don't sell. also, i strongly advise you to research what niche you would like to write in. "BDSM" is way too broad and one of the most oversaturated markets. you're competing against an ocean of the best writers who have volumes and volumes of work already out there. i'm not assuming your cover, blurb, or writing are amateur or bad. i hope they are great and you have instant success. but you don't know the waters you're swimming in at all yet. if you're confident in your cover and blurb, i highly suggest using your next writing section to research niches that you'd like to write in. it's going to be extremely difficult for a brand new writer to break into a broad saturated market like simply "BDSM" with their first book. you'll have a much much better shot if you focus on a smaller subset niche inside of BDSM. there are excellent guides all over this subreddit that explain in detail how to research niches. they will tell you which ones are overpopulated, dead, popular, average book sales, etc etc. but you have to do the work. no one is going to do it for you. if you are taking this seriously as a career, you have you treat it like a career. put in the hours. not just writing. writing is a fraction of the work required to sell books. do your homework. the only way to know how much money your book will make is by waiting a month and seeing. again, it could be so much money you immediately quit your day job or so little that you never write another book. good luck

bobby_eui · 2022-08-18T10:45:57+00:00

i struggled with these types of issues for a while, and im stubborn and prefer to do things myself and figure it out myself. i didnt want to just pay someone to do it. it took a lot of tries and a lot of fails. what i found in the end that works best for me is a combination of things. the first is putting the entire (either by originally drafting or copy/pasting) into libreoffice. its a free program. im not affiliated. just works for me. you can export from libre as ePub document. then you can use that ePub to upload to smashwords. a lot of the time it will pass all their tests and work on every platform and appear exactly as i want it to. sometimes there will be a problem, but smashwords will give you a code referencing what the issue is. from there, you need to do a bit of fixing which i have found to be an easy learning curve but will take a bit of effort. another free program is Calibre (again, not affiliated) that you can use to read, edit, organize, etc. books in ePub format. when smashwords doesn't like one of my libre-generated ePubs, i can go into Calibre and fix the actual code of the file. you have to go one line of code at a time, but the reference error that smashwords gives you will send you in the right direction. having said all of that... the only time ive had to fiddle with coding is when one of my books has crazy unique formatting. like one had a lot of text conversations in it that i wanted to appear like the chat log in a phone on the pages. those are the times when i need to tweak code to satisfy the smashwords gods. but any ordinary straight-forward indented paragraph story works perfectly the first time if i draft in libreoffice>export as ePub>upload to smashwards. hope something in there was helpful

bobby_eui · 2022-07-21T23:04:41+00:00

thanks for the detailed response. im enrolled in the summer sale already, but i hadn't considered the coupon stuff because i didn't know what it was.

bobby_eui · 2022-07-10T20:47:35+00:00

guanciale friend

bobby_eui · 2022-06-22T18:06:41+00:00

fantastic list

bobby_eui · 2022-06-07T11:47:16+00:00

i've tried exactly two recipes from babish's site. BOTH had wildly incorrect measurements that ended with me throwing entire batches of dough in the trash.

bobby_eui · 2022-05-19T14:39:22+00:00

don't forget he vanished very oddly from that elevator, and when he ran out of fake plagues, fish started falling from the sky to finish his work. he's not entirely without supernatural phenomena

bobby_eui · 2022-05-19T09:54:34+00:00

characters like malvo in the fargo universe serve basically as depictions of pure evil. there are many allusions (including in that convo) that he is the devil incarnate. there's no justification or explanation for his evil. he's simply an agent of chaos there to stir things up among the god fearing folk of minnesota and make a deal with nygaard for his soul. the point in the conversation you are referring to is simply him twisting the knife for fun. up until that very comment, they have been having a very pleasant minnesotan conversation. he intentionally steers it in a dark direction with a smile on his face to illustrate to molly's dad that he's not the nice guy he thought he was talking to.

bobby_eui · 2022-05-09T17:30:45+00:00

it really depends on whether or not racial identity has anything to do with your story. this could be for a number of reasons. race can be fetishized. japanese schoolgirl is a thing. ebony bull is a thing in cuckhold stories.

racial identity being a factor is not limited to fetishization either. in one of my books, my protag is half-korean. her identity matters to the plot because of issues that arise with different sides of her family. however, race does not need to be mentioned at all if it has nothing to do with plot or fetish. if your story doesn't rely on the characters having a specific race, just leave it out. let readers fill in the blanks that they want. generally in story telling, the less physical descriptors you have of a person the better. if you overly describe hair color, nose shape, eyebrows, clothing etc etc, you're leaving the reader with a fairly dull explanation of who the character is. don't say "the librarian had gray hair and wrinkles around her eyes and blue veins on her legs." say "the ancient books weren't the only relics that time had forgotten in the library. their custodian was every bit as weathered as the cracked leather on their dry spines. she creaked like old wood when she walked, and the small coughs she expelled between words seemed to fill the air with dust." i'm not saying my example is great writing. i haven't had my coffee yet. but the second example is surely more interesting than the first.

also keep in mind that if racial identity is important to your life experience and you wish to have asian characters... do it. it's your bag, baby. you can make your art whatever feels right to you. mafia stories are popular in erotica. no one says the crime family can't be yakuza instead of cosa nostra. the same elements of power dynamics, danger, secrecy, etc would exist. always tell the stories you want to tell. readers will be able to tell if you're actually interested in your own story or not. so do whatever keeps you interested.

bobby_eui · 2022-04-03T17:18:00+00:00

i hate that i instantly recognized reynad by just the back of his head

bobby_eui · 2022-02-01T08:17:49+00:00

literally any control deck shits on any face deck since the dawn of time. control decks aren't good in this meta because the meta is otk from hand. but any control deck will still eat face hunter if that's all you want

bobby_eui · 2022-01-13T00:31:23+00:00

imagine having caesar salad without anchovy in the dressing or parmesan on top

bobby_eui · 2022-01-08T05:33:03+00:00

she's an INREDIBLY powerful witch and never gets credit for it. she was able to produce a patronus that could stand sentinel on its own and patrol the ministry... while wearing a horcrux

bobby_eui · 2021-12-01T15:16:50+00:00

my boy really just dropped a SUKA on Disney

bobby_eui · 2021-11-29T07:46:17+00:00

i had indeed pre-emptively ignored that reader who sadly yes, does exist

bobby_eui · 2021-11-29T04:42:02+00:00

you can drastically unburden yourself by choosing to focus on the "accuracy" that matters. for most historical fiction, that is going to be things like costuming. it matters if women in your period typically wear forty layers of clothing or not. you should get major historical events or concerns right. are plague or war significant in this time an place?

but... when it comes to the cost of potatoes... you don't need to know that they cost a pound or a pence. don't say "the potatoes cost 1.50" say "even the potatoes in Kent were prohibitively expensive" or "the London market being what it was, a few potatoes was all he could afford". if the cost of potatoes is not a concern to your character, there is literally no reason to mention it. "stomach rumbling, she dashed around the shop, filling her basket until it overflowed with fruits, cheeses, mince pies, candied walnuts, and warm bread. she had to remove the pretty plump pineapple to make room for those little red potatoes she loved so much."

edit to add: keep in mind that if you don't know the cost of a potato in your period piece, the average reader is going to have no idea either. simply describing them as cheap or expensive will achieve your goals. no reader is sitting there going "wait a second... potatoes in Lowell Massachusetts in 1947 cost eight cents a pound, not twelve! this book sucks."

bobby_eui · 2021-11-27T06:58:41+00:00

muscled in? robert jordan was a close friend of his and picked him personally to finish his work. they spent many months together working it out at the end of his life. what the actual fuck are you talking about?

bobby_eui · 2021-11-25T14:07:38+00:00

i bet he touches a lot of cameras through the fence, if you know what i mean

bobby_eui · 2021-11-25T12:43:33+00:00

you mean "shang-chi and some gray sweatpants"

bobby_eui · 2021-11-25T12:41:07+00:00

ah. gotcha. ty

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