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Posted by Ilona

https://ilona-andrews.com/blog/the-great-re-muggening/

https://ilona-andrews.com/?p=40602

Essential information: today is the Preview Day where you look at the mugs and plan your purchase. We uploaded mostly what people asked to be replaced and some new stuff.

If the mug you want is not available or is in the wrong size, please comment below and we will add it. So if you want a latte mug with Here Kitty, Kitty or a 20 oz mug with the BDH designs, let us know.

All orders will automatically go into production in 1 hour. Be sure you have the correct address and the correct email.

If you made a mistake, we can sometimes get in there and edit things before the item ships, but it’s not a guarantee.

Some mugs will arrive broken. We are using a vendor who ships them in cardboard because we don’t want to make more plastic garbage than we have to. If the mug arrives broken, snap a picture and email us through the store. The vendor will replace it at no charge to us.

The store opens on Saturday.

For those of you who would like to understand more about merch, the pricing, etc, please prep with a caffeinated beverage of your choice for this merchandise saga post. This will be long.

Background

The last time we opened the store, one of the vendors quit midway through. Unfortunately, the orders were already in, so we had to spend three days going through each order manually, and refunding the cost of that item and the portion of taxes and shipping that applied to that item only. The amount of stress and work this generated broke me for a bit.

The plan was to abandon the merch ship. I deleted all the merch items, and we reopened as an ebook only. Best laid plans, ha!

A while ago, people in the Facebook fan group lamented that their mugs broke, and there was no way to replace them. Coincidentally, at that point B.A. Bookish approached us and asked if we could license them to produce merchandise.

License in this case means that we gave them permission to use some of our images and quotes to get them started. The idea was that they would produce merch, pay us the industry standard 15% of the profit, and everything would be fine.

This has proven to be a bit of a disaster through no fault of B.A. Bookish. For some reason, some people thought that their store was our store. The fact that they are not us is just not landing. This makes me extremely reluctant to enter a partnership with anyone else, because some portion of the BDH refuses to acknowledge that we do not have full control over what that vendor may design.

This is probably due to the fact that most of the people don’t know how much merch costs and how licensing works, which is why I will break it down below.

Also, B.A. mugs are metal and cannot be microwaved, so we haven’t solved the broken mug issue.

With that in mind, we are reopening the store with mugs. Today is the Preview day, meaning, you can look at the store, comment here to make requests for the mugs of a certain design and size, and plan your purchase so you don’t have the morning-after regrets.

Tomorrow the store will officially open. It will remain open semi-permanently. It may be periodically paused for a couple of days, if we need to make adjustments or wait for the money to catch up, because we don’t get the payments immediately. PayPal often sits on it for like 45 days or something. But the plan is to keep it mostly open, so please don’t panic buy. Please.

How it works

My philosophy for the merchandise is that it is fan service. We are not mug sellers or T-shirt sellers. We don’t even want to sell books, to be honest. We would rather just write and let someone else handle the selling part.

Nobody is owed merchandise. Fan service, by definition, is an extra. However, merch is nice to have, and it makes us happy. This is my happy merch:

The girl on the left is Umaru-chan. She comes from an anime about a girl who is perfect and poised in school and turns into that funny version at home, where she wants to play video games all day, eat steak and chips, and drink Coke. I love this because Kid 1 gave her to me. We watched the anime together, and looking at Umaru-chan makes me happy. Also, Kid 1 is totally Umaru-chan.

To me, merch should meet several requirements:

• Be of decent quality. These are not heirlooms, but they should look nice.
• Be somewhat affordable. Nobody wants to pay $30 for an 11 oz mug on top of shipping.
• Must not take up a ton of our time
• Must not land us into a financial hole.

We cannot maintain inventory. We cannot spend time shipping a lot of small orders. All of this costs too much money and time. This is why we are going with drop shipping, which is basically Print On Demand. We provide artwork and the vendor makes the item and ships it. Because of that, they charge more for shipping and production.

We have 3 sizes of mugs available: 11 oz, 15 oz, and 20 oz. In addition, some mugs are white, some are black, and some have a color interior. We also have latte mugs, which are at 12 oz. All mugs shipped to the US will have free shipping.

Funny story about this: one of the readers measured the volume of the latte mugs and informed me that it was not quite 12 oz. I asked if she wanted a refund. I don’t remember how we resolved the slightly less than 12 oz issue, but no merch can stand up to that level of scrutiny. If you are expecting a high end item, this is not it. These are mass-market produced standard mugs. They are microwavable and dishwasher safe.

The price of the mugs is calculated as follows: cost of the mug (what the vendor charged us to make it) + shipping + $5. We need to make at least $5 off a mug to make up our costs. We pay annually for the store website and the bookkeeper to file taxes stateside, and we pay EU people to file our VAT and taxes. And we must recoup design costs.

Most of the mugs follow this pricing table:

• 11 oz – $15.99
• 12 oz latte – $19.99
• 15 oz – $19.99
• 20 oz – $25.99

Some of the mugs are more expensive. The black mugs cost more to make, for example. But I want to highlight the artist mugs.

This is one of those mugs. It is a 15 oz that retails for $21.99.

We’ve worked with a lot of artists over the years and we have access to beautiful art. However, licensing art for merchandising means extra fees. Some artists do not want to do it, because they prefer to retain control or they simply don’t want their artwork on a tote bag.

Some artists ask for a very high fee. I’ve been quoted $2,000 per image before. A quick calculation: how many mugs do we have to sell to make up $2,000?

When you buy a mug, we don’t get money immediately. We pay the vendor immediately, however. So for every $5 earned, we must first put $15.

To make up $2,000, we must sell 400 mugs and invest additional $6,000 into production on top of the $2,000 we paid. And we haven’t broken even at this point. We still have all the costs I mentioned above and we haven’t paid ourselves for labor. This is for just one design.

In an effort to not land ourselves into a financial hole but still provide you with pretty mugs, we are doing a split. The artist mugs are priced higher – we are making $7 instead of $5 – and we are splitting that $7 50/50 with the artist. So when you buy a mug with Helena‘s art or Candice‘s art, they get $3.50 or however the split happens to land.

In the past, we would approve orders manually. We cannot do that now. It takes too long. To reiterate:

All orders will automatically go into production in 1 hour. Be sure you have the correct address and the correct email.

If you made a mistake, we can sometimes get in there and edit things before the item ships, but it’s not a guarantee.

Some mugs will arrive broken. We are using a vendor who ships them in cardboard because we don’t want to make more plastic garbage than we have to. If the mug arrives broken, snap a picture and email us through the store. The vendor will replace it at no charge to us.

UK, AUS, EU

We are planning to make all mugs available to the territories above. We are waiting for the service that collects VAT to sort us out, because physical products are different from ebooks. (We paid VAT before, but I deleted everything when I removed the merch.) So the international store will open a little later. But we have mug vendors lined up.

Canada

Working on it.

Phew. Okay, I’m going to go kill Maggie now, and you have fun looking at the store and making evil plans.

The post The Great Re-Muggening first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

https://ilona-andrews.com/blog/the-great-re-muggening/

https://ilona-andrews.com/?p=40602

Posted by Ilona Gordon

https://ilona-andrews.com/blog/beast-business-answers-and-ramblings/

https://ilona-andrews.com/?p=40587

Happy belated release!

First, huge thanks to S.C. for stepping in as the last minute copyeditor, since our scheduled CE had an emergency.

Second, thank you to Mod R, who had read and edited the manuscript several times and handled things when a technical glitch on Amazon ate the cover. Much appreciation to Natanya W. of Nancy Yost Literary, who liaised with Amazon and got it eventually fixed. If the cover is not showing up on your Kindle, please delete the file and redownload.

Beast Business Questions

There are some mild spoilers below. Read at your own risk.

Matilda’s First Bond?

“You must be Matilda.” I smiled at the little girl.

She nodded.

“Is that your dog?”

She nodded again.

“What’s his name?”

“Bunny,” she said in a small voice.

Bunny looked at me with the kind of suspicion usually reserved for rattlesnakes. Cornelius was an animal mage, a rare brand of magic, which meant Bunny wasn’t a dog. He was the equivalent of a loaded assault rifle pointed in my direction.

“He can smile,” Matilda offered. “Smile, Bunny.”

Bunny showed me a forest of gleaming white fangs. I fought an urge to step back.

Andrews, Ilona. White Hot: A Hidden Legacy Novel (p. 10). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Animal mages do take on the traits of their first bond, but they also tend to bond to the animals who are most compatible with them. Like Bunny, Matilda is disciplined, serious, efficient, and believes that things must be just so.

Konstantin reappeared. Rooster fell silent and panted at him.

“Rooster barks at 112 decibels,” Matilda informed him. “She can continue to bark for hours without straining herself. If you change shape, she will bark. If you attempt to escape, she will bark. If you try to separate from her in any way . . .”

“She will bark?” Konstantin asked.

“Yes. If she barks for longer than one minute, the electronic sensor in her collar will send an alert. Cutting the collar or removing it will also trigger an alert.” Matilda stared at him. “If anything happens to Rooster or her collar, I will know. I will come. I will bring friends. I hope we understand each other.”

“Crystal clear,” he told her.

Andrews, Ilona. Ruby Fever: A Hidden Legacy Novel: Romance and Supernatural Suspense in Texas (p. 206). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

(A Hidden Legacy Novel: Romance and Supernatural Suspense in Texas? That’s new. I didn’t know Avon added that.)

Where was Kitty during Ruby Fever?

With her mother. Kitty is still a baby.

If Diana was almost overcome with the animals in the menagerie, how did Matilda survive?

Matilda is special.

How deadly is Augustine really?

Extremely. Augustine is an assassin by training. If he wants you dead, it doesn’t matter how protected you are, he will kill you.

How bad was adolescence for Augustine? There are hints that he and his family were traumatized and not just by the family murders. How did he get that scar on his cheek?

Augustine’s father was a difficult person. While he wasn’t physically or emotionally abusive, he wasn’t what you would call a warm parent. Of all the Houses we have shown so far, Montgomery is the most likely to be targeted because you don’t hire them unless there is a crisis. They know a lot of potentially damaging information and a lot of shady people view them as enemies.

Augustine’s father was very focused on security and survival, and when Augustine was growing up, he was idealistic, in a somewhat similar way that Connor was. His father wanted him to assume the responsibility for the House and the firm and tried to train and mold him in his own image.

Both Connor and Augustine were well educated and encouraged to think for themselves at an early age, and both of them rejected what they saw as the rigid thinking of their fathers and the inherent imbalance of power within the society. Unfortunately, for the two of them, that “rigid” thinking was the result of bitter experience, and both Connor and Augustine ended up with emotional and physical scars.

The society portrayed in Hidden Legacy is not aspirational. None of us would want to live in a system like that. It’s a cautionary tale about what happens when some have a great deal of power and others have none. Everyone is damaged by this, even the most powerful.

Does Cornelius know about panthercakes?

Yes.

Will Arabella and Tia become friends?

Yes.

Why does Arabella say she needs a friend because she doesn’t have one, isn’t she friends with Augustine’s sister and her own sisters?

I have more than one friend, and I talk to them about different things. I’m sure you do as well. Verena is a school friend, and Runa is basically family. But neither of them fully understands how Arabella feels about her magic. Tia can relate to it on an completely different level.

Do Augustine and Diana end up together?

I looked to the left where Cornelius sat at the table with his daughter, sister, brother, and surprisingly Augustine Montgomery. I was hoping Cornelius would bring a date as well, but he hadn’t. I wanted him to meet someone, but there was nobody like Nari. An animal menagerie, including Sgt. Teddy, Zeus, a small pack of attack dogs, a few birds, and three cats napped behind them.

Andrews, Ilona. Ruby Fever: A Hidden Legacy Novel: Romance and Supernatural Suspense in Texas (p. 369). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Will there be a sequel? Arabella trilogy? More…

We are so glad that you like it enough to want a sequel.

The novella was written, because we left hints about Augustine and Diana and never followed through. And we received persistent questions about how Arabella came to be mentored by Augustine. It felt like the world had a missing piece and it was bothersome. That piece is now in place.

While it would be fun to do Augustine and Diana sequel, we are done for now. It is demonstrated that they get together in the main series, but how exactly that happens for now will have to remain a mystery. If we return to it, it will likely be a duology only.

As far as Arabella trilogy: Hidden Legacy is complete for now. That trilogy would have to take place several years in the HL future, when Arabella is not only an adult but is established. It would be a major project. We would probably want to seek partnership with a traditional publishing house because the first 2 trilogies were traditionally published. We are not in the position to start a new project of this scope.

HL, KD, and Edge have complete main arcs. People bring up Hugh and Blood Heir, but those are side stories.

The Innkeeper and This Kingdom have unfinished main arcs. Those are our priority. We are going to be concentrating on that, because we need to complete those storylines. We have got to see if Maggie survives. And if Dina and Maud find their parents – the Innkeeper part of the BDH should get to see it happen.

Why is there a difference between the content in snippets and published books? The preview of Augustine had different stuff in it…

You know what, good point. We should stop snippeting things until the final file is ready. It’s a bad habit. Until we go to publication, the story elements are fluid, and some people really have a hard time with it.

Why are posts and free snippets archived?

People have asked if this is a resource issue. It’s not.

We get a lot of traffic spikes. The culprit is the free serials. When a serial is running, people are reading each chapter multiple times, and they comment and then come back to check responses to their comments, which causes an increase. New releases and giveaways also result in sharp increases in traffic. The graph of the site’s sessions looks like a hysterical hedgehog.

Over the years, we moved from generic hosting to a virtual server, to dedicated hosting, then to a better dedicated host, and we hung on there as long as we could until we were basically kind of fired as a client, because we outgrew it, so now we are here. Each move had to be made. We are with WP-Engine right now.

(Yes, I know about the Mullenweg/WP-Engine drama, we were not affected. We’re using the WP-Engine because it can handle the traffic, the up time is great, and the customer support allows me to immediately jump on the issues.)

The matter is complicated because we cannot cache the blog. If you are unfamiliar with caching, the short simple explanation is that your browser takes a screenshot of the page and then serves that stored page to you when you access the site. So instead of loading fresh images, etc., it loads a slightly older version, which significantly speeds up the loading.

We’re caching everything else, but when the blog is cached, people don’t see their comments pop up right away. They attempt to repost the comments numerous times and then email us in a panic and sometimes in outrage. So, we’ve elected to keep the blog un-cached.

(The reluctance to cache has recently bit us in butt, because we had crawlers causing 504 timeouts. Sogou web spider was the bane of my existence for a bit, but the latest block finally took. There was a suggestion to go to P6, but it’s a patch, and eventually, probably sooner rather than later, we may end up either caching the blog or disabling the comments. That will go over like a lead balloon with BDH. I don’t know what the hell to do about that. Maybe we will go to a dedicated site for serials only, but again, the problem would just reoccur. I guess, no serials? I don’t know. Eh. Sorry about tech issue vomit.)

We could move away from WordPress as the hosting platform, which would buy us a bit more speed and breathing room, but majority of people are comfortable with it. If we move to a new model, people will have to learn how to use it and I will have to learn a new UI, and I don’t have the time for that.

Back to archiving: it happens because posts get outdated. Publishing landscape changes and what was true a couple of years ago isn’t true now. Plans change as well. And personal life moves on. Nobody wants to read my two-year-old surgery trauma posts, heh.

When short stories or deleted scenes get archived, it is usually for one of two reasons.

One, they were multicategorized. Each post has a category and sometimes there is more than one. We archive by age of post and category, so if a post is tagged Pets and Free Fiction, and we archived Pets for that year, it hides the post. We’ve been trying to move all of the free fiction to its own pages, but time is in short supply, and I get to it when I get to it.

Two, some free stuff gets taken down for editing. We are trying to put together an anthology of freebies that can be downloaded from the store and hopefully would provide a good introduction to each series. Unfortunately, that is on top of everything else. And right now, we are 105K into Maggie 2, it is not done, and there are thousands of pages to sign still. ::shudder::

Mod R informed me that Questing Beast was caught up in the archiving. I fished it out. Here it is. I will add it to free fiction section at some point. But, I mean, just because something was posted as a freebie doesn’t mean it will always stay that way. There is some weird entitlement happening here. Last I checked, it is our IP and we can do whatever we want with it.

Upcoming blog stuff: you will see a lot less of me in the next couple of months. I need to write and this post took 2 hours. Books must be a priority, because you are not here to read my ramblings. You are here for the books.

I wish you a calm and happy week.

The post Beast Business Answers and Ramblings first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.

https://ilona-andrews.com/blog/beast-business-answers-and-ramblings/

https://ilona-andrews.com/?p=40587