Subterranean Press Sale Today and Tomorrow
Posted on September 29, 2014 Posted by John Scalzi 34 Comments
Most of you know that Subterranean Press is the place I go to publish much of my limited and “off-beat” work — they do a great job and have always done very well by me and other authors I know. SubPress is now partnering with Gumroad to sell their ebook titles more directly to readers — an alternative to Amazon and other retailers, with more of the sale price going to publishers (and authors!) than before.
To celebrate, SubPress is running a special two-day sale, in which many ebook titles are significantly reduced in price when they’re bought through Gumroad. It’s a fine way for you to stock up on some excellent SubPress titles and to get an introduction to Gumroad at the same time.
Here’s the SubPress announcement of the sale, with all the additional information you need. Happy browsing!
Fantastic idea but damn, US only.
Gumroad does not sell outside US, alas (or, at least, not in Italy) … maybe the process can be “fooled” by clever use of proxies but … a bit too much work for a Monday afternoon :)
Your “mallet of loving correction” and the Michael Swanwick’s “best of” are interesting, though :)
Indeed, if an offer you mention is open to fewer than 5% of the people in the world, it might be worth mentioning that fact prominently.
I just bought “The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox,” the title featured in the “cover” to this piece. I loved the series when I first read the stories in EQMM, and, at ten bucks for the ebook version, it’s a steal that I felt was too good to pass up. Thank you so much for mentioning the sale! :-)
Drplotka:
This post is for you. Also, of course, the “US only” bit is mentioned at the link.
Thanks for posting this, John; I had no idea, and there are a few of their books I want. Including at least one of yours I somehow missed (“Muse of Fire”; amusingly, Dan Simmons has a book from SubPress by that name, too). Hmm, K.J. Parker’s collection is quite tempting. . . .
Their physical books are so high quality, but I will accept the price-versus-beautiful-artifact trade-off. ;-)
Drplotka: What an odd comment, when his U.S. readers are very likely a lot more than a mere 5% of his total readers. Then, too, even if only 5% of his readers benefited from something, why on earth NOT mention it. (shrug) Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
P.S. For those (U.S.) readers who were wondering, I found a 2012 blog post of theirs (from a previous sale) mentioning their ebooks are DRM-free. :-) Bonus points!
Everybody must be shopping, because I can’t get their page to refresh. Wow.
To those unhappy with the US only restriction, please note that in over 97% of our ebooks, we are only able to sell them in the US.
Authors and agents have a number of reasons (some quite good) to hold back the non-US rights from us. For example, not being able to include Ebook rights would make it damnably hard to sell the print edition of a book in many territories, not the least being the UK, Canada, and Australia, places from which I seem to get the most complaints.
Bill
SubPress
Wow, that storefront is not good. Just give me a list of all the books. Not only is it hard to follow but it seems to be taking forever to load each block of 9 books.
Yeah, the storefront isn’t great. I purchased 11 books but was only able to download about 5 of them because I couldn’t scroll down to the rest of the receipt — the page wouldn’t let me. Weird and frustrating. Hope I’ll be able to figure out a way to get my books!
And now I should mention that I did get all my books — Gumroad sends an email that allows you to access your purchases.
I disliked the storefront, too. And I wasn’t thrilled with Gumroad’s sales management — I couldn’t figure out how to bundle multiple purchases together and so had to manually key in my purchasing credentials for each individual book.
I tried, I really did, but after 20 minutes of fighting Gumroad’s interface (and having it finally just hang completely), I gave up. Sub Press, I’d really *like* to give you my money. Please fix your ebook vendor.
Reblogged this on db mcneill – Momsomniac and commented:
Great news!
How do I get Gumroad to show me more than those 9 books on the gallery page?
Since I’m unable to figure this out, I’m going back to the SubPress site, looking at the books there, and then clicking “buy on Gumroad” on whatever strikes my fancy. But, um?
Doug M.
Doug, you have to scroll down until it starts loading the next block, which may take some time and lock up that tab or your whole browser until it does so.
@Kendall – the Parker collection is fabulous. Here’s an author who has history, and knows how to use it.
Wow. Great deal. Terrible website (Gumroad that is). Definitely look through the e-books on Subterranean’s web site and then follow links through to buy on Gumroad. Trying to look through the list of Subterranean books on Gumroad’s web site will just make you less sane.
On the plus side, Gumroad has really a really nice purchase interface (especially once you’ve put a credit card on your account). Also, you can set a send-to-kindle e-mail with them, which is pretty awesome for Kindle owners.
I tried and failed to buy Silverberg’s THE MILLENNIUM EXPRESS on the Gumroad site. The “I Want This” button wouldn’t work on my iPad. It would on my desktop, but I didn’t know if I’d be able to transfer it over. And I couldn’t find a place on the Gumroad site to ask for help.
So I took a chance and went to Amazon. It’s there for the same price, and 1 click got me the book.
@ drplokta
The US may only be 5% of the world’s population but it’s roughly 3/4 of Whatever’s readership. (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/10/13/some-whatever-stats-geekery-for-you/)
But hey, proxy server! It’s also the only way to get Netflix over here :)
Would suggest that comments on the usability of Gumroad are probably more helpful directed to Gumroad….
About it being better to direct comments on Gumroad to Gumroad — that’s what this part was about:
“And I couldn’t find a place on the Gumroad site to ask for help.”
https://help.gumroad.com/
Most designed for sellers but there’s a contact button down the bottom.
But agree, it’s a very annoying website/interface. It looks like one of those new-fangled which have been designed by someone who has only ever used a smartphone.
(Insert “get off my lawn” here in the voice of your choosing…)
@Dave Creek: Hmm. I just pulled up gumroad.com and found the Help link; at the bottom of that page is a Contact Us link. They also have some help/FAQ pages, though I don’t know if those are useful or not.
But as far as transferring, well, I commented upthread that SubPress doesn’t use DRM (according to SubPress’s site) and FYI, I got epub and mobi files. (I only bothered downloading the epubs.) I opened up one in iBooks on my iPad with no problem.
I hope this helps!
@M.A.: Thanks! :-) I decided to buy Parker’s collection. Too bad Purple & Black doesn’t use a purple font in the ebook. ;-) But I’m buying it in 3, 2, 1….
Kendall, thanks for the tip on Gumroad. As I mentioned earlier, I’d already gone over to Amazon to get what I want. I went back to gumroad.com and still didn’t see a Contact Us link or help pages. And I wouldn’t have known, as moggybreath suggested, to try putting “help” in front on the web address.
As far as transferring files, I’ve never done that and didn’t want to buy the ebook first and then see if I could figure out how to do it.
But now I know! I might just go back armed with this new info and try to see if there’s more “stuff” I want. So thanks, everyone for the new info.
Thanks a lot John – I’ve added even more to my (ever growing pile of) “to read when I have the time” books. At least all the additional 1’s and 0’s won’t add any weight to my ebook reader, plus I don’t have to dust ’em off when I eventually do get to them!
@akismet-44586386df4260ce5c591d007e2ee97b (why’s your name changing to this weird thing?): Whoops, I didn’t notice, but the Help link I referred to (top right of home page) only shows up there when I’m NOT logged in. Color me baffled!
In other news, I bought Parker’s collection. :-) /happy-camper
Ringing in on the oh my gawds, what was that website. Sorry to continue to pile it on you, John, but one hopes that Gumroad is reading the comments and possibly going to get a better interface with the proceeds of this sale… (I persevered & got a ha’dozen ebooks)
Another mystery to add to the Gumroad ones — why DOES my name keep changing to a series of numbers?
That’s the default I get when I post. Sometimes my attempt to change it to my name works, sometimes it doesn’t.
Let’s see who I am this time!
Not to pile on Gumroad, but:
1) No shopping cart. You want to buy a bunch of things, you buy them one at a time.
2) Cannot find a search box. I assume there must be one. I just can’t find it.
3) Gallery takes a long time to load — so long that, until I came back here and asked, I wasted a couple of minutes trying to figure out how to get more titles.
Now, once I paid the files were promptly e-mailed to me and everything was excellent. So that was fine. (And in honor of our host, one of them was The God Engines. So this sale has put at least a few cents in his pocket.)
But Gumroad did not make it easy. If Subpress had significantly more eBooks — a few hundred, let’s say, instead of the few dozen that they have currently — Gumroad would be pretty much unworkable; you’d have to click through dozens of pages, looking for the book you wanted.
SubPress, what exactly is the thinking here? Your own eBook site is, frankly, not great — but Gumroad seems actually worse. Not snarking or anything, sincerely curious.
Doug M.
I’ll stick to the positive here – Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox for $2.99 is a great deal (since I only ever had the first book and it appears to have gone walkabout). I highly recommend doing the search through Subterranean’s website because reasons.