Deirdre Saoirse Moen

Ellora’s Cave: Don’t Bet on Black

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Ellora's Cave: Don't Bet on Black

Every single time I’m convinced the Ellora’s Cave situation can’t take another weird turn (I mean, c’mon, Ebola strippers? What are the freakin’ odds?)—well, let’s just say that I’m rarely disappointed because there’s always something new and strange.

I found out about this side project of Jaid Black’s two days ago, and I can’t help but shake my head repeatedly over it. On the bright side, at least I’m getting my neck exercises in.

Here’s a screenshot of the latest project, Bet on Black Books, which has a header link proudly titled “Self Publish With Us.”

bet on black homepage

So. Tone. Deaf.

Does Jaid Black have any idea how tone deaf this comes across?

Why would anyone need to “bet on” anything?

If this were a portal for, say, books about gambling strategy—it would be a great site name. As something that’s ostensibly otherwise, though, it’s like you’re supposed to bet on her reputation. Which, when it comes to women’s reputations and betting, it’s just skeevy to me.

Furthermore, expecting customers to bet on Jaid Black’s reputation just seems incredibly strange.

Also, the timing of this is interesting. If you look at the domain screencap further down, the domain was registered a couple of days before the mass layoffs at Ellora’s Cave last August. And this is supposed to inspire confidence to “bet on” Jaid Black?

And yet, at the same time, it’s less appropriative a name than Ellora’s Cave, which also appropriates a second culture of color with its logo. So, um, better? Differently wrong?

I don’t even.

Wait, What, Self Publish?

Basically, it’s an electronic store for books. You know, like Amazon. Except this one’s newly-built with outdated technology on a free website builder with a cart service several of us (who have spent more than our fair share of time with shopping cart services) have never heard of.

Yeah, you also have to sign a contract when you submit.

There are a lot of interesting nuances in the FAQ that are not in the contract.

Things like:

When you buy a book from Bet On Black Books, you own it permanently.

Unlike, say, every single other ebook agreement, possibly making new case law in doctrine of first sale as it applies to ebooks.

Courtney Milan had a few comments as well:

This one is particularly important as it involves a significant downside risk:

There Are Illegitimate Sites Selling Books Out There

Modest though my own sales are, I’ve found my own books on sites selling them for $—sites that never had any intention of paying me any royalties. These sites are often based on the same kind of free site builders and payment gateways.

Note that I don’t believe Black’s intentions are untoward here, it’s just that, were I a potential customer who didn’t know who she was but happened across the site, I wouldn’t assume it’s legitimate. I admit that the gambling metaphor would be my first red flag.

But there are times when I was buying things in market sectors I knew less well than publishing, desperately wanted something, but didn’t buy it because it just didn’t feel entirely above board.

If You’re an Author, Should You Sell Here?

I’m going to say it: I believe it’s a bad idea to sell your books through this site.

If you want to sell your books off of a web site other than Amazon, you can sell them off your own site, get the money more quickly, not have to contract with another company, and make more money. Oh, and note that the Bet on Black contract does not specify when or how frequently you will be paid.

Let’s say you have a book you’d like to sell for $1.99, and you sell it today (April 12th, as I write this)

Sales Outlet You’d Receive When
Bet on Black Books $1.49 Undefined
Amazon $0.70 end of June
B&N Nook $0.80 end of June
iBooks $1.39 mid-June
Kobo $1.39 (monthly or semi-annually)
Smashwords $1.69 mid-July
Your Own Site $1.63 Today

And let’s look at the $2.99 level, too:

Sales Outlet You’d Receive When
Bet on Black Books $2.09 Undefined
Amazon $2.09 end of June
B&N Nook $1.94 end of June
iBooks $2.09 mid-June
Kobo $2.09 (monthly or semi-annually)
Smashwords $2.54 mid-July
Your Own Site $2.60 Today

(Note: Google’s also a book vendor, but their terms of royalty amount are unclear, so I’ve omitted them. I believe they’re in the 52-55% range.)

The whole thing: freebie website builder, cheesy cart system, unexceptional royalties, no defined payment schedule, peculiar legal terms—add up to nope.

So How Hard Is it to Set Up an E-Commerce Store?

This answer assumes that you want to sell directly to readers, in addition to other outlets such as Amazon and iBooks.

If you want to accept PayPal (typical transaction fees of 2.9% + 0.30 for premier and business accounts), then here’s one way to get what you need:

  1. A self-hosted WordPress account (varies widely, but I’d be looking in the $12-20/month range)
  2. A domain name for said account ($15/yr)
  3. Easy Digital Downloads or WooCommerce
  4. A theme that is compatible with your storefront of choice.

Because PayPal handles the payment information, you do not need an SSL certificate. The beauty of it: once you set up the site, when someone buys a book from you, you get your money right away.

For very little cash (~$27 initial outlay, same as a WordPress self-hosted site with no e-commerce), you can sell your digital goods, and you can have your own shop. Plus, you can add other things to your little store, too. Like maybe you want to recommend books, and get affiliate commissions on those. Maybe you’re part of a writing group and you want to exchange ad space on each others’ sites.

Without having done it before in WordPress, I found that it took me about 30 minutes to set up either Easy Digital Downloads or Woocommerce for the first time. (Granted, I’m very technical.)

Examples: deirdre.net currently has Easy Digital Downloads on its front page (that will change in a couple of weeks). desamo.graphics uses WooCommerce. (deirdre.net is changing simply because WooCommerce is something I’m also using on other sites, and I’d rather have one ecosystem to maintain.)

Okay, Maybe I Don’t Want to Go That Far

Let’s say you don’t want to fuss with WordPress. You want your own domain, you want a lovely pre-rolled solution.

I’d recommend Squarespace. Fees start at $8/month; with that plan you could sell one product. The next plan is $16/month, which allows up to 20 products.

For two examples of Squarespace author sites, Tiffany Reisz and her husband Andrew Shaffer’s site.(Note that they don’t sell directly off their sites, but they do have different-looking sites from each other.)

Is This Independent? Ellora’s Cave? WTF BBQ?

The domain registration says the registrant organization is Ellora’s Cave, and uses the exact same street address that EC does, even though the bottom of the web page says “Jaid Black Productions.”

bet on black domain registry

Jaid Black Productions is indeed an LLC in Ohio, but I didn’t find a DBA for Bet on Black books. (I have had issues figuring out where the UI is for that, so this may be my fault. It’s been a few months.)

So: I don’t know? Maybe Ellora’s Cave just owns the domain?

One Hilarious Thing

One thing I do find hilarious, though: she’s using the classic 70s typeface Avant Garde for the header.

This is the same typeface that Marc Randazza—you know, opposing counsel in the Ellora’s Cave v. Dear Author case—famously uses for his pleadings.

Was there no better choice of typeface? Personally, it’s not one I warm to very much, which is why I don’t have the same thinner weights that either Black or Randazza use.

Got Comments? Questions?

I’d love to hear your thoughts. I do have a planned topic about the specific problems of author websites, so questions on that topic will help me formulate that post.

Comments

  1. I find it particularly dismaying that, as contractors went unpaid for their hard work, this was even being discussed, a domain purchased, any of it. It is, quite frankly, offensive to think that this group of people (EC, JB, whatever, the bleedover seems immense) was planning new ventures while not taking care of the arrears in their current mess.

    They certainly didn’t hesitate to release the books, even though the cover artists and editors remained unpaid.

  2. The only “bet” I’d make on Tina’s reputation is that it will continue to erode and almost entirely due to her own actions. (Leaving the .001% chance someone else will manage to negatively impact it more than she does. Just in case.)

    I keep trying to figure the angles on this one. I can’t believe even Tina, et al, as poor business people as they’ve proven themselves to be, are so stupid as to think this is a viable proposition. They’re not going to make any money at this, at least not long term. There are always going to be people with “more dollars than sense” (some puns simply must be spoken :-), even writers. But I don’t know there are enough stupid people trying to self-pub who’ve ever even heard of Jaid Black let alone been to any of her sites to make such a misbegotten venture profitable. If this is intended to be her leverage when negotiating with Amazon, I think the only way Amazon could be hurt by it is when they collectively fall out of their chairs laughing.

    “I’m taking my toys and going home” is only ever a “threat” if people want you, or your toys, to stay in the first place.

    • What if the angle’s very simple? It’s not intended to publish other people really (though that’s an option). It’s mostly to move from writing for Ellora’s Cave to being an indie writer herself.

      In other words, she’s bailing on her own company.

      • Thing is, SHE’s the reason EC is failing. That she doesn’t see that is…well it’s very Tina. EC will be the chain around her ankles for many, many years to come, and I don’t just mean the lawsuit she instigated. That might have been the final cannonball below the waterline, but it didn’t start it. EC’s been listing to starboard for years now.

        It could be a way for her to port her books over, or at least anything new would go there. Which begs the question of why she has all those empty categories on the page. Is she really intending to write cookbooks? Children’s books? The entire site is an exercise in how NOT to do it.

        Near as I can tell, she’s had one really good business idea and that was starting EC (though it needed a better name). She hit the sweet spot of an emerging market and rode that wave for a long time. I don’t think she’ll ever have another one.

        • She’s apparently spent more time picking the charities than on the focus of the site.

          EC was a really good idea, and at the right time. However, one of the really hard things to know is when to stop doing something. When you’re a majority owner and you burn out, well, that can cost the company because you don’t make the necessary choices in the needed time. Or your priorities get inverted. Etc.

          The error rate builds up, and then it becomes a crisis. Only this time, it’s bigger than the earlier crises.

          Sometimes I wonder if the reason she sued over the Curious article wasn’t so much that it pointed at her failure, but suddenly she couldn’t escape it because of all the attention.

          • As the saying goes, once the avalanche starts, it’s too late for the pebbles to vote.

            I think EC was opened with very little forethought.

            It was the right idea at the right time and damn, people made a lot of money on it. That is cool.

            But I suspect the problems began before the doors opened. And, as you say, they multiplied. What seemed like a minor annoyance back then, and would have probably been easily fixable, snowballed. Mistake after mistake gets made until the whole thing resembles a house of cards more than a well-run, profitable company. Everyone points and says, “OMG! No one could have seen this coming!” Except everyone saw it–at least bits and pieces of it. The crime (possibly only in the colloquial sense) is that management wasn’t paying attention, didn’t recognize the problems or chose to ignore them.

            And now it’s too late. I really don’t see any way they can come back from this. It has nothing to do with Jane’s post that simply aggregated what people already knew and were talking about. It has everything to do with entrenched, and apparently incompetent management who refused for years to see the problems building up.

            That Tina seems to think she can shrug it off and keep tap dancing is…special.

            • The other thing is that she’s always had all these side projects, showing to me that she really wanted to go in other directions and do other things, but was constrained by EC.

              She starts more stuff than I do, and that’s saying something.

              • Lack of focus is death to an entrepreneurial endeavor. I’ve known some folks who followed their passions and did well. I’ve studied, lightly, admittedly, historical entrepreneurs. The thing the successful ones have/had in common is focus. They had a passion and they followed it until they were done. Then they moved on to the next one, or retired from the field.

                One of the reasons Bill Gates was so successful wasn’t his passion for computers. It was his passion for business and the aptitude to go with it. Without it, Microsoft would have been a blip in the history of computing. There were other products that were just as good, if not better, but Microsoft had what the others didn’t–it had Gates.

                Passion comes up with the idea, focus keeps it to the forefront and aptitude makes it work. Takes all three.

                • That’s also the Tesla model. In my own current case, I’m trying to start several similar things all at once, but they’re not scriptable, so I’m at that point where there’s a billion items on the ToDo list. It’s getting better.

  3. Something just occurred to me. Could Tina really think she has the potential to compete with Amazon?

    That’s oddly sad, even though it’s Tina.

    • By her actions, I don’t think so. If she really thought she could take on Amazon, I think she’d have sued them instead of picking on a woman of color.

      • Excellent point.

        Jane’s WOC? I didn’t know. Tina suing her makes more sense now, at least it falls into line with the picture Tina’s been painting of herself online.

          • Okay, that is NOT a woman I’d want to cross. 🙂 She looks like she’s got a spine of steel. I’m glad she didn’t back down. (Very pretty, too.)

            I don’t know anything about her that I haven’t learned as a result of my interest in this case. It would be nice if there were no controversy about her personally, but none of that has any bearing on the first amendment aspects of the suit. I wish we could get a federal anti-SLAAP law passed.

            • She is. I’ve seen several photos of her in the past (though I didn’t go looking for them until just now). I bet she really rocks the pencil skirts she loves so much.

              I wish we could get the federal anti-SLAPP law passed, too. Or at least a Uniform Anti-SLAPP.

  4. In my world the phrase “bet on black” means a not-well-thought-out effort to make a success of something, or at least keep it from being a total bust. It’s the strategy of the uninitiated (who don’t know better) or the desperate (who’ve run out of options).

    Yet another aspect of this endeavor that isn’t too well thought out.

        • LOL! When I was a kid we had a “casino” board game thingy. Actually came with its own roulette wheel. (I learned to play poker when I was five–daddy was Navy. There were three things to do onboard ship in those days: read, play chess and gamble. He taught us all three. 🙂 It’s something I’ve been fascinated by all my life even though I’ve never set foot in a casino. I know enough about them to know to steer clear. I’d rather lose money at the track. LOL

          “Betting on black” can also be a way to hedge your bet (on the worst game in the house). You bet on a row on the wheel (it’s been years since I read about this stuff, so I may get some terms wrong), and also bet on black. You’ve got a theoretical 50% chance of winning just on black and then you’ve got a shot at the red numbers on the wheel row, plus a double win if the ball lands on a black number.

          She may just be hedging her bet. But I have a feeling that when EC goes under, and in my opinion it’s a case of when and not if, it’s going to take this new venture with it.

  5. I’d love to hear your thoughts. I do have a planned topic about the specific problems of author websites, so questions on that topic will help me formulate that post.

    What do you have to say on the topic of sideloading? It seems to me that the inescapable problem for anyone selling ebooks on their own website is that the vast majority of ebook readers don’t even know that getting ebooks from a site other than Amazon, Nook, or Kobo onto their reader or tablet is even possible, never mind how to do it. Is there any technical or social solution to this problem?

    • Oh, that’s a good one. Thanks.

      (There are no great solutions, unfortunately, unless you have an actual Kindle device and happen to keep track of its email address.)

      • I read on my iPad and while it’s not TOO hard, it can still be a pain. I end up putting stuff on dropbox and using that to move it into ibooks.

        If someone came up with an affordable portable one click sideload…now THAT could put a serious crimp in Amazon’s nickers.

        • When I download books, I drag it into iBooks, then I drop a copy into my Books folder on Dropbox. (because iBooks renames and disassembles EPUBs, which is annoying)

  6. The idea of starting a retailer for erotic romance and erotica is an interesting one*, given Amazon’s unclear policies and somewhat arbitrary dungeoning of books. Of course, that’s not what this is–it’s a general retailer with no benefits, that I can see, for using it.

    What are her plans for bringing in readers? Why would a reader buy books through this site, rather than, say, All Romance eBooks?

    For writers, the policies are not good. You’re required to leave your book there for 90 days, and you have to give them 30 days notice before removing your work. You have no direct control over your book’s listing. If you want to price pulse or just run regular sales, it’s going to cost you 25$+ to have someone else adjust the price for you–and I’m guessing it will take several business days for them to do that, making it almost impossible to guarantee that your sale will begin and end when you want it to.

    • I keep going back to thinking about how Redbubble works, even though that’s not a book retailer: they have everything figured out. I can change anything at any time for free. I even get Google analytics out of it.

  7. My God, that’s a cheesy looking website. I remember back in late summer or early fall when JB/TE put out a statement that she was starting this up and Patty Marks put out a contradictory statement that this venture was in no way a separate publishing house. There was a talk about a company that would provide “services for self-publishers”. Then we had @pubnt going on a tear about “disloyal authors” and her lack of respect for self-publishing. Remember the claim of the long term partnership between author and publishing house? Sure seems like someone is seriously off message here.

    This is merely a theoretical question…

    What effect would it gave if someone (such as JB/TE or any other author) moved their EC titles to BOBB’s from EC then EC were to close or go into bankruptcy. Would that shield them from having their work tied up in receivership or a force sell off to an outside party? Would it shield them from having these works encumbered due to any potential award in civil proceedings? How entangled are they with the parent company under the circumstances. Obviously, I’m not a lawyer and I have seen that even things that seem inconsequential to me as a layperson have unexpected ramifications.

    All I could think about when I saw the news is that EC and its owners must be completely unacquainted with the concept of irony, or hypocrisy, and most certainly hubris.

    • Let’s say that the domain registration was a genuine oops and it’s supposed to be completely separate company.

      Shifting a contract of a successful author from one company to another is moving an asset, basically. It can be clawed back, typically for a year. (Not a lawyer, not legal advice, but I’ve done a lot of reading.)

      I’ve always been considering the “Blade Runner” scenario, where all the most privileged had bailed to live offworld, leaving Earth to the destitute.

      If that happens with EC, leaving less plum contracts in EC’s hands, then the left-behinds can, if owed enough money, file invol bankruptcy and claw those contracts back.

    • One interesting thing–the last book Jaid published with her cowriter, Sporked in Time, was removed from sale at Amazon and the EC website (possibly other retailers; I haven’t checked) recently. I wonder if she plans to move it to BOB.

  8. I’m guessing that she took that Sporked book down so she wasn’t ridiculed for how badly it was selling. If I am remembering correctly, it was something like #700,000 in paid books on Amazon.

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