Closing Arachne’s Doors(ish!)

Cross-posted from AI Marketing for Storytellers.

I’m on Ireland time right now, whatever timezone that may be, and here’s what I saw on my KDP dashboard last night, a few seconds after midnight local….

Which, plus all the numbers I’m about to share here, is why I’m closing Arachne’s open door policy, and pulling it back just to substack subscribers, old and new, again.

Y’see…

It’s working.

My long-range-as-hell, incredibly grandiose, multilanguage marketing plan is fucking working.

And frankly I only want to help people who’re willing to help themselves, and as it turns out, while I love coding with a heated passion, and I actually (surprisingly!) love customer service (mostly because everything’s so easily fixed, which is satisfying AF to do) — I’m never going to be the type of person who has the free time to shill software.

Literally ever.

Plus?

I am a competitive biatch.

I know, I know, a rising tide lifts all boats, and I 100% agree — I am sane. (Mostly.)

But, like, in large degree I’m on this substack to cast out life preservers to other ppl who’re already like me and who are ready to take charge, OK with occasionally making (major) mistakes, and who don’t have time for nonsense or fear.

I am A-OK with helping them.

But I don’t really want to help people who aren’t…because I don’t want to twist ppl’s arms about AI or convince them that Arachne’s solid and…

I don’t really want to share any of my upcoming money with people who aren’t solidly in the AI game.

Here’s a link to where I’m at below, so you’ll have context if you want, for the rest of this chat —

Cassie's International Sales Deets so Far Window

So that sheet only has langs that aren’t DE/FR/IT and obvs English — it’s just langs that are outside the normal translation-o-sphere.

(It also, for completeness’s sake, has all of the books I’ve uploaded that haven’t made a dime yet.)

And it’s not 100% net. I spend money on FB ads — and in fact I pissed away quite a bit of money at the end of June bc I didn’t know what I was doing or which vendor to point things at. I was clumsy at first, and just spent b/t 2-5/day on every language and property I had out, which didn’t begin to solve Korean.

But I’m dialing things in now.

I’ve stopped running ads to langs that aren’t moving — and I did turn off everything for the whole month of July, I only turned things back on about ten days ago, super precisely, a mere 2/day for book 1s in certain languages that’ve proven returns and…

I think this is where my new game is.

Momma’s gonna be the Queen of US Authors Translated into Czech (if I have my way!)

And, oddly — I’m already queen of Kobo Turkey? lol —

And I’m slowly getting enough data — with the help of my trusty Sol! — to make good decisions about future translations.

For instance — being popular on Kobo in Turkey is sweet, but doesn’t mean much, because I’m pricing those books for local sales there, about 0.99 USD, so I’m not raking in money hand over fist.

But — I did a run of fresh translations a few days ago (‘cause things run on my virtual server, and not on sad-sad cruise wifi) — and discovered that all my translations are roughly 0.0006 a word.

Most of my books are around 65,000 words — so I only have to clear around $40-50 to break even — which you can see from the shared file many of my titles are slowly but surely on their way to accomplishing.

And even some of the languages that’ve seen no traction anywhere else for ‘traditional’ sales have seen library sales!

How to Think with AI just cost like $25 to run because it’s a shorter book, and for Overdrive library purchases I priced it at $5, because it was important to me that people all over the world be able to read it.

And even wildly underpricing it…I only need four more library purchases over the fullness of time in Hindi and Tamil to make it’s translation run earn out.

I’ll admit the library sale in Tamil about gave me a heart attack — and caused me to sicc a Fable instance on triple checking literally all 49 langs (I did more for it!) of How to Think with AI overnight yesterday.

That was one of my first translations in March, and in many of those languages my only one, so it did catch a few things — mostly me, being misgendered, alas alack — but we’re fixing all of those now, and surprisingly the original Tamil translation was solid, PHEW.

(I also had an instance of Sol doublecheck all of that Fable’s work, too, as well, lol.)

And now that same Sol’s redoing my epubs, and when he’s finished, I’ll have my uploading Sol chat upload all of them to all of the vendors tonight!

(And technically these fixes & touch ups didn’t cost me anything but my pre-existing tokens on my accounts, which OpenAI has been so kind as to do a reset for today on, woot!)

But like…this is working.

Not everywhere, all at once, and not evenly across the board, but…it’s working.

This is my Kobo Plus stuff below —

Now, if I were having to math this fucker solo, I would cry — and in fact this sheet is missing several Chinese lang sales I’ve made over on Taiwan’s main self-pub system (it’s missing them bc my login’s on a different computer and I can’t lose access w/this one on cruise wifi, it’s running jobs, lolsob) — this sheet only represents Google Play, Kobo, and KDP sales.

BUT —

Because I do have AI, I can have one of my AIs fish out my ranks on Kobo and see how my books are moving (or not!) on a daily basis, so I can get out ahead of my Kobo Plus trends, since their math lags by a month, which’ll let me see what I need to translate up next, to strike while the iron’s hot.

AND —

I can sit there and have my other AI hash out the math on which properties we’re adding in (I’ve created 26 more epubs on this trip!) and have it also do covers, and tell me what we need creatives for so that we can start doing FB ads effectively from the jump on them, since we already know those languages like me.

WHICH —

Means that I can be pretty freakin’ bad ass (occasionally, slowly) and…

I want to spend the next 1-2 years while everyone in authordom is doing a performative anti-AI circle-jerk to create the biggest and best moat I can.

I want that for you, too.

But pretty much everyone else can suck it, lol.

I took Coral Hart’s Launchpad class last year, and she was amazing (she’s great!) and I was wondering about her willingness to share her entire system’s guttyworks, like, straight up, fearlessly.

And I realized about halfway through that the reason she could do that was because by and large, people aren’t built like her — not even me! (To be 1:1 with her, I’d have to be on amphetamines, lol, she’s intense!)

But that’s one of the reasons why I hesitate sharing things here sometimes, because in my little Gollum-brain, I’m all, “But I don’t want other people to be as awesome as I am,” and then the sane part of me realizes that the number of people who are willing to do what the eff it is I do is vanishingly small — unless I help them.

And, Lord help me, I do want some friends.

Look — I’m not entirely sure how to finish this post, and I’ve gotta go off to dinner here.

But I tossed it into ChatGPT (as I so often do) and asked for help, and Jack summarized it way better than I could —

And he’s right, as usual ;P.

I’m off to dinner.

If you wanna come play w/me, sign up — and if you’re already a subscriber and you want into Arachne, holler at your girl and I’ll get you into my beta which is now apparently just a coven of my nerdy AI besties ;)

xoxoxoxoxoxo,

Cassie