I don’t even know why I’m uploading books to Google Play right now instead of writing. I’m off the backs of two hard revisions, Breaking Down came out yesterday, and I’ve just sold eleven books at Amazon today (not Amazon US, Amazon everywhere), so I’m restless.

Selling books makes me restless. I’ll go days without selling more than one, maybe two. But selling eleven at one vendor in one day? Record-breaking. Makes me all jumpy and shit.

So instead of writing the wedding fic or revising Roller Coasters, I’m fucking about on Google Play. This? So not on any of my to-do lists.

Google Play does not have a great reputation among self publishers. The interface is wonky and the pricing requires math and/or internet searches to keep every other vendor from price-matching your books at way too low. But still, man, more availability is good, and I love Google. They may or may not be evil, but they make good products and the only price I pay is that they know everything about me. Who’s getting the better deal there will be something only Future Me can decide.

But whoa. Man. Google Play back-end? My eyes are blurring. If Yahoo designed a self-pub portal, this is how I’d picture it. You got sidebar tabs and upper tabs and then you got a sidebar tab that loads a view, and that view has a sidebar and also a row of buttons at the top without explanation. (Labels? What labels? Labels like tags, as in Gmail? No? Jesus!) And the help files are abysmal.

So, some helpful links for anyone interested:
IndiesUnlimited’s Google Play post
Quite possibly the most helpful kboards post ever, on Google Play

I will update all the book links when Google Play’s up, and if folks want to test out the freebies on their devices, I’d be fascinated to hear how it all works.

I’m also playing with the idea of putting out HTML files at ARE. It’s an option, but I’m kind of a code nerd, so I hate the idea of poorly-interpreted HTML. But I have a volunteer HTML file guinea pig, so we’ll see how that goes!