Sillybean

A letter to the personal care industry

Could you try to sell us products that don’t infantilize us and give us cancer?

nolove,
Women

Take control of your excerpts

Here are three short functions you can add to your theme’s functions.php file to change the way excerpts work on your site.

When you use the_excerpt() in a theme file, WordPress will first use the contents of the Excerpt field from your Post→Edit screen. If it’s empty, WordPress will auto-generate an excerpt. These first two functions change the way excerpts are generated. They will not affect any excerpts you write by hand. (more…)

Changing roles’ capabilities

If you need to change one or two capabilities, it’s relatively easy to do so with a few lines of code in a plugin or your theme functions file. For example, if we wanted to allow any logged-in user to view our private posts and pages, we would need to grant them two additional capabilities. (more…)

Amazon is not negotiating lower ebook prices for your benefit

On Friday, Amazon stopped selling Macmillan books, including Tor SF, Minotaur mysteries, and several other things I buy a lot. It’s a bullying move in a heated negotiation over how ebooks are sold.

Before you say, “Go Amazon! Fight those publishers and their $15 ebooks!” you need to understand a little bit more about how publishing works. Go read what Tobias Buckell, Charles Stross, and Jay Lake and Cory Doctorow have to say about it. Are they biased? Well, yeah, they’re all Tor authors, so they’re pretty pissed. At the same time, they’re ebook consumers, and they have a pretty well-balanced understanding of the situation.

Do not assume that because they’re negotiating for a lower fixed price, Amazon is on your side. Macmillan is trying to introduce variable pricing, where books are more expensive when they first come out and then get cheaper than Amazon’s fixed price — just like hardcover/paperback works now. In fighting this, Amazon is positioning itself more like a publishing subcontractor and less like a bookstore. The problem for Macmillan (and every other major publisher) is that the money it makes on those initially-more-expensive books is what allows it to a) stay in business, and b) take risks on new or unknown authors. Publishing operates on a razor-thin margin, and publishers know damn well that paper printed books are going away. They have to work out an ebook model that doesn’t slice off the profitable part of their business. Amazon’s model does.

Update: Amazon has folded. Their letter is strangely worded. I like Laura Anne Gilman’s response.

Update 2: Mary Robinette Kowal hilariously skewers the Amazon letter, and Scott Westerfeld has a remarkably sane overview of the situation.

Creating a user directory, part 2: Building the page template

In the first installment, we added some contact fields for our users. Now we’re going to build the page template that displays the user directory. (more…)