Liu Miao

I self published my novel “Pilgrimage to the dust” finally,with the experience from the first day,I was feeling like a rock star,in a writers way.

I love the advantages of self publishing: You know who is reading your book,you grab the money right after the readers paid,you bypass the censorship in some country,and so on.

I should do this much earlier,there are online payment methods for years,I haven’t used it at all,sorry for keep you waiting,paypal.

First I used tinypay.me to collect the payments,but seems it couldn’t give customers download link in a straightforward way,so I did that manually,which was exhausting. I was doing a promotion the first day,under a price at $0.99 per item,while the normal price is $2.99.

Later I tried boxrockit.com,which didn’t work,so I switched to pulleyapp.com,which charges $6 per month. Under this plan,I can sell 25 items in the mean time,but now I only have one.

Then I tried a few other services,like Gumroad.com,which mistook my account with some Japnese’s,and Oronjo.com,which wasn’t so friendly to Chinese.

Finally,I settled down at Boxrockit.com,it works when I stopped using a Chinese title,under a free plan,I can sell up to three items and there’s no monthly fee.

However,the experience makes me thinking of the possibility of self publishing,which becomes so easy. No ISBN needed,no censorship anymore,without hustle and bustle,the digital content can be sold all over the world,as long as the quality is good.

The link to buy my novel is this: http://www.boxrockit.com/p/liumiao/Pilgrimage_to_the_dust . It contains three file format: PDF,mobi and epub. If you want to buy,keep in mind it’s all in Chinese.

之前订阅过我Tinyletter的读者，已经被我导入到Mailchimp里，三番五次地折腾您，实在不好意思。

上个月我满怀期待Mailchimp把Tinyletter改造得更好用些，没想到越改越糟，不仅原先简洁易用的优点没有了，还多了许多缺点。这种感觉就像好不容易赶走了国民党，还没来得及高兴，共产党来了。

经过几次三番写博客发推特抱怨，Mailchimp终于给改版后的Tinyletter加上了导出邮件列表的功能，我也就忙不迭地导出，并导入了Mailchimp里，以后就用这个给大家发邮件了。

按照阴谋论一点的想法，说不定Mailchimp故意要把Tinyletter毁掉，因为后者相当于一个完全免费版的Mailchimp，会与它的收费服务竞争。这只是我阴谋惯了思维的产物，不大可能是真的。

之前在这个博客上留下了大量的Tinyletter链接，为了不给大家造成困扰，我已经将我的Tinyletter删除，从此开始使用Mailchimp。假如最终Tinyletter能够改邪归正，回到正道上来，说不定我再用回去，但那起码是我的订阅数超过2000以后的事了，目前才139，还早。

It is unreasonable that killing people is crime but suicide is not. I really want to kill the Mailchimp guys for what they did to tinyletter,or kill myself after I tried a thousand times but still cannot log in tinyletter’s dashboard.

These days,I was so frustrated using the Mailchimp version of Tinyletter,which they called V2. I wanted to love it,but it really sucks.

After the update,all the Chinese characters became mess codes,that was not bad enough. The system is forever in a “timeout” status and makes it impossible changing any setting.

I emailed them and they later declared some mail requesting support lost,which was like a call center saying they cannot be reached by phone.

Luckily there is twitter. It not only helped Iranians to protest but also made tinyletter’s support team reachable. After tweeting my own issue and retweeted some other guys’ complaining,I got replied finally,which said the timeout issue is caused by my big background image,so if I can change that,this “timeout” problem will be solved.

Wait,did I make it clear that,because of this “timeout” issue,I could do nothing but blaming you guys for throttling me in you login page? If I could login this clumsy system,the first thing I do would be copying all the email addresses item by item out(since they don’t allow users to export),suppose I’m lucky enough to not be hindered by “timeout” again.

Now all I can do is trying another thousands of time logging in to the system,and keep myself from slapping their [inter]face.

Seems I’m doomed to be tortured by tinyletter.Last week I reported some problems the new version was causing,but didn’t get replied. Later,they explained:

We’re going to have to ask that you re-send any correspondence you wrote directly via email to[support at tinyletter dot com]. We simply didn’t receive what you sent, and unfortunately don’t have a way to retrieve what was lost.

Wow,a company focusing on email business and built by “someone really love email”,CAN’T receive correspondence by email. Mailchimp must hire some comedian to write this out.

However,I’m not so pathetic,while comparing with Alex Brie,who just wanted to try tinyletter,and imported his gmail contacts,then,

It imported the contacts, that’s for sure. But it also, without asking me first, without asking confirmation, without even warning me, sent out an “Thanks for subscribing to my newsletter” email to all the people I had ever contacted on Gmail: ex-boses, ex-girlfriends, business partners, teachers, friends, unknown others.

And this isn’t bad enough,

That it doesn’t even have a “select all” and delete option. Not even a “check this, this, this and this and then delete” one. Nope. For every single one of the hundreds of contacts it has imported, I have to click on an Ajax “x” button, then wait until a custom made alert popup appears, then move my mouse over to the confirm “Delete” button and click again, then move my mouse back to the “x” button of the next contact, and so on and so forth.

I’ve mentioned a lot about tinyletter recently,so I feel obligated that,I must warn my friends,don’t make the same mistake as above. Stay away from tinyletter as far as you can before they solved all the problems.

But when can they get it fixed? Nobody knows. However,they replied me finally,said:

@liumiao List exports will be added asap. Sorry, it just didn’t quite make the launch. Looking into the charset issue too.

— TinyLetter (@tinyletter) 3月 11, 2012

I will see how long will the “asap” take.

声明：最近Mailchimp把tinyletter搞得一团糟，如果您注册了它，千万不要从gmail导入联系人，因为它会自动给所有人发一封“欢迎”邮件，此外，还没有一键删除所有联系人的选项，必须要一个一个点，操作难度非常大。