I’m cross-posting this from the Greater Portland Scribists blog post, here

My brother Paul and I have been indie-publishing our novels through Amazon’s CreateSpace service for over a year now. We wanted physical copies of our books to give to friends and family, and to have on our shelves. It’s one of those things that is just nice to see. For every book we published, we purchased their Pro Plan for $39. Doing so lowered the printing costs, which meant three things for us:

1. Copies we bought for ourselves were less expensive
2. Copies other people purchased gave us a higher royalty, and
3. (probably most important) We could have a lower list price.

Without the Pro Plan, I would have had to have listed my first novel, Pariah, for at least $12 a copy. With the Pro Plan, I can sell it for $8 per copy. And I get a higher royalty than the $12 copy would have given me.

All things considered, we didn’t like having to pay $39 up front for each book we published, but we felt like we were getting a good value. We got to order copies for ourselves at a lower price point, and then we’d only have to sell a few more to break even.

The staff at CreateSpace sent an email today notifying me that the Pro Plan has been discontinued. They decided to give everyone the lower costs and higher royalties.

Thank you for your recent purchase of Pro Plan. As a member with Pro Plan, we’re emailing to let you know that Pro Plan is being discontinued as of January 18, 2012. We’re now offering industry-leading royalties, low costs on copies of your books and improved distribution options to all our members, free of charge.

I have very mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it’s great that they decided to do this. I don’t have to purchase the Pro Plan for every title I publish from now on. And I still get the benefits of it, so it lowers the cost of indie-publishing paperbacks through their service. This is great news. I don’t dispute that at all.

Here’s where my problem lies:

On September 16, 2011, we purchased the Pro Plan for The Sol-Bect War, Part 1. This was four months ago. Therefore, I only received one third of the service I paid for. I should get a $26 refund. I really doubt they’ll do anything. And in a way, I’m sort of okay with it. After all, it was four months ago. I’m over it.

On January 8, 2012, we purchased the Pro Plan for The Sol-Bect War, Part 2. This was ten days ago. Obviously, the people at CreateSpace must have known they were going to discontinue the Pro Plan. There must have been meetings. And yet there was no indication at all that anything was going to change. They accepted the $39 payment and never said a thing. And then I get this email. Naturally, I expect a full refund. Their email, however, had another plan:

Since you purchased Pro Plan within the last 30 days, we’re giving you 5 free copies of your book for each title you enrolled. Be sure to use your unique offer code(s) when placing your member order(s) so you can get 5 copies free.*

Um… okay.. wait a minute, there’s an asterisk. Scroll to the bottom of the email and they add:

*Your offer code(s) are unique and are valid on member orders only for one time use on any of your books through January 18, 2013 at midnight PT. With this offer, you will have to pay the costs associated with having these complimentary copies of your book shipped to you. Void if transferred and where prohibited by law. Any other use constitutes fraud. We reserve the right, in our sole discretion, to terminate or modify this promotion at any time.

Wow. So I get five copies of the book, roughly a $25 value, but I have to pay shipping for them? They took $39 and ten days later they offer me $25 in compensation. I’ve sent a message to their support and I’m hoping that they just refund the money.

——

Update Jan 24, 2012:

This is now resolved. The short version is that they assumed I wanted the $25 Expanded Distribution plan, but I didn’t, so I got them to give me a full refund. The long version is posted in the comments on the Scribists blog version of this post.

This morning I had a problem with my server. After some diagnostics, I traced it down to the power supply. And, because I’m a little bit crazy (just a little), I went further.

Breaking the seal and opening a power supply will void the warranty. This should be obvious, and just in case it isn’t, they say so on the very seal I had to cut. Granted, this piece of electronics is almost seven years old now, so the warranty is long gone anyway. And I was curious. I was sure the power supply was where the fault lay, but I wanted to be certain.

At first glance, everything looked fine. A little dusty inside there, but nothing out of the ordinary for more than six years of service. Again, no smell of burnt electronics. No scorch marks. I was starting to think that I had opened it for no reason. And then I saw this, in the back, near the exhaust fan:

Two capacitors, both bulging, although the picture doesn’t really show that very well. I would have had to disassemble it a lot more in order to get a decent angle. But what you can see is that there is corrosion on one of the capacitors. Let’s zoom in:

Looks to me like it’s about to burst. I’m still rather glad that the power supply was smart enough to just turn off to prevent a bigger problem.

And as for luggage01, I stuck a spare power supply in (this one is only about three years old) and it’s happily processing away again. I may even get ambitious and upgrade the operating system while it’s got my attention. Fedora 9 is a little too old for my tastes…

I haven’t had a bad day in a long while now.

Every so often they creep in, screw up a bunch of things, and then just slowly fade away. Unless you count that one September, when I was in college, where the whole month was like one very long bad day…

But I digress.

This post is about today. And today is so bad, it started yesterday. At some point in the evening (maybe around 6pm or so), I heard a beep from my server rack. An odd beep, one that I vaguely remember being from my keyboard switch. I logged into my server, the trusty luggage01, and found that it had just rebooted. Strange, I thought, but I kept doing my thing. After all, this server has been on and plugging away for six and a half years now. The most downtime it’s had in all those years was about a week, when I was moving from Florida to Maine. Every other time it was down was no longer than a single day. In my new residence, luggage01 has been on since Paul and I moved in, back in June 2011.

“It’s a beast,” I’ve said many times. “That thing’s like a cockroach. It’ll be on until the end of time!”

Famous last words.

This morning, it was off. The light on the front was on, but the server was definitely off. And Mondays are my days for running backups. Fitting, eh? Fortunately for me, I back my data up religiously, so my worst case scenario is losing one week of work. But I can’t very well go ahead with new work when I don’t have my server for all the functionality it provides. Which leaves me with the only choice: to fix the server (and oh how I hate IT work). I had some errands to run, so I proceeded to drive all the way to the bank and post office (about twenty minutes), only to realize that I had forgotten to bring the keys I needed to get into my safety deposit box and post office box. Wonderful.

So I drove all the way home. Rather than turning around and driving all the way back, I decided to brew some coffee and start working on the server. Apparently there’s a leak in my coffee pot. Wasn’t there yesterday, but today it definitely is there. Half the water I poured into the reservoir ended up all over the countertop. So instead of my normal three cups of coffee (I use big cups; about seven cups of water), I ended up with about one and a half very strong cups of coffee. Yummy, actually. But not at all what I intended.

Next I took my server downstairs, into the garage, and sprayed about seven months’ worth of dust out of it. I checked the capacitors on the motherboard and they looked fine. No bulging caps, nothing burst. I’ve had that happen with more recent boards, but I guess Intel uses good components in their motherboards. Any electronics that can last seven years of active use and still be in good shape is a winner in my book. I did a quick sniff test. No stench of burnt electronics. Near as I can tell, I think the power supply failed. But it didn’t fail epicly, it didn’t burst into flames or melt down or anything. It just sort of said “eh…” and died. That’s probably thanks to another good electronics provider - Antec.

Luckily I have spare parts (actually four entire spare computers) so I can replace the power supply and see what happens. But part of me is scared, as always, that I’m just inviting more disaster.

The way this day has been going so far… I have a dentist appointment in about two hours.

And I’m looking forward to it.

I know I’ve neglected this blog for a long while, but I finally found something worth taking a break to rant about!

I am just now finding out about all the shady dealings that CNet’s Download.com has been up to. This site used to be the place to download software from… granted, that was in the 90s when there were only a few hundred websites total. But when I used Windows full time, this was the site I always went to to find new software.

Until now.

In short, they are now taking legitimate software (like mine) and bundling it into new installers that are engineered to trick users into installing malware (browser toolbars, trojans, viruses, and such). I’m not usually one to mince words. This pisses me off, plain and simple. Why? Because every person who is tricked into installing that crap will blame my software for screwing up their systems, when in reality it’s not my fault at all. And, to be quite frank, it’s expressly against my licensing terms for anybody to build a new installation package for my software. That includes big sites like Download.com.

So, I’m pulling all my software listings from their site, effective immediat… er… effective as soon as they respond to my support email. I guess they anticipated an exodus and decided it was best to not allow anyone to remove a software listing from their site. They force their users to go through support channels, where I expect they’ll attempt to sell me upgraded listing packages that don’t include this malware crap. Starting to sound like a protection racket yet? (Nice little software you have there; would be a shame if something happened to it…)

And they’ll probably tell me that I agreed to their distribution terms when I signed up for the site, which is false, because I actually read the terms all those years ago and there was no mention of them doing this. Which means they probably amended the terms and neglected to inform me.

As soon as I get this resolved, my entire account on their site will go away. But you can always get our software directly from our site, where we have original packages I created that include no malware, spyware, crapware, or anything else. Because we actually care about our users.