There’s so much work yet to be done on these books. Beyond the 60+ good hours of writing it will take to finish the first drafts, there’s initial editing so I can send to my Beta Readers, then days or weeks waiting for them to get back to me with their feedback, then re-writes and edits based on that feedback and possibly (if I can convince anyone to re-read the books so quickly) a second round of the same. Once I’ve got the basic text in good shape I’ve got to do another close read (copyediting) before I begin recording the audio version – a step which always finds new errors and awkward sentences/dialogue in the text, and which I prefer to do before publishing, when possible. I’ve got to do the interior layout, which shouldn’t be too difficult at this point and with all the experience I have, but I’ve also got to design the cover in three ways, for each individual eBook as well as for the paper/limited-edition/flipbook, hopefully all as a single image. I’ve got to do fundraising (possibly via Kickstarter) to pay for the paper edition, which almost certainly takes weeks or more. Actually podcasting the audio version may take up to a year, though it’s the hundreds of hours of recording, editing, and assembling them which I’ll want to have done before publication. After all that, getting the eBooks ready will be a snap.

Why am I thinking about all this? I just noticed January has slipped away, almost without my notice, and February is at hand. Tomorrow I’ll process the data on January eBook sales and (possibly) update the prices on some of my books/eBooks, according to the formula I rolled out at the start of the year. This has reminded me that Phoenix Comicon is coming up at the end of May; hopefully the significantly lower prices this model affords my paperbacks will result in increased sales at Comicon. This has led me inexorably to the idea that, if possible, I’d like to have my vampire duology flipbook on hand and for sale at the Phoenix Comicon. Which led to thinking about everything in that last paragraph, and more.

Part of the ‘more’ is all the other projects I’ve been working on lately, in my lack of focus, especially the interactive book on writing and publishing. I mentioned on Google+ last night that, in addition to beginning to write that book, I spent some time mapping out its (quite complex) hypertext structure; it’s intended to be read in a non-linear way, like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book as well as a cross between a memoir and a how-to guide for independent writing and publishing, and it’s been percolating up through my mind for years. At the current stage of mapping and note-making, I’ve already got forty-plus chapters/chunks started; if no more occur to me, and they’re each the 1500+word chunks they’ve been becoming so far, it’s already shaping up to be book-length, complex, and interesting. I’ve got at least another 60 hours of work just writing the thing, and possibly over 100 hours, the way it’s been going.

(I won’t even mention each of the other projects I’ve had queueing up and being worked on by my scattered thoughts and efforts, except to say that if I continue on as I am, none of them -certainly not the vampire books- will be finished by Comicon.)

According to my calculations, if I seriously applied myself, I could finish the first draft of the vampire duology in six or eight solid days of work, since I’ve already got it all well-planned and developed. The same is roughly true of the book on publishing; six to ten long, hard days of dedicated work and I could have a first draft complete, from where I’ve already got it. The work would be intense, draining work, and would require me to (somehow) overcome the worst elements of my own insanity; what I have been trying to figure out is whether, if I actually applied myself and accomplished those things, would I have the time needed to get either (or preferably both) projects ready for sale in time for Phoenix Comicon. All that extra work I listed off in the second paragraph – can it be completed and the finished books delivered to my hands before the end of May? And if so, is it worth it to me to try to do so?

If I set myself to these tasks/goals, to this deadline, the aspect most at risk for being potentially short-changed is the editing/rewrites. Getting people, even family and close friends, to read a single book and give feedback (even just basic spelling & grammar, to say nothing of content) in as little as a week or two tends to be a huge fight and to carry a significant attrition rate. I dread sending out two (or worse, three) books with the intention of getting meaningful feedback on any limited timeline, for free. I don’t know how long professional editors would take to do the work, but I know I can’t afford such a thing right now. There are some other parts of the work I can accomplish while waiting for feedback, such as cover design, or working on the other title, but if I expect to incorporate any meaningful changes to the text, the bigger time-sink of recording the audiobook has to wait. I can probably start fundraising before completing the final edits of the text, which helps even out the timeline, some.

Let’s see what the hard deadline would be… Phoenix Comicon runs May 24-27 (Memorial Day Weekend, except without the Memorial Day), which means I’d want to have any items for sale there on hand no later than Tuesday the 22nd, for booth setup Wednesday. LSI typically takes about a week from when I send them the files before they approve a title for printing, then another 3-5 days to print, then I have them shipped via UPS Ground (because shipping heavy things like cases of books any faster is prohibitively expensive), so to be conservative I need to submit the files three weeks before I need the books on hand, at the latest. That means I have to have the book ready for print on or before May 1st.

Yow. 90 days.

If I go mad (in a good, hard-working way) for the next couple/few weeks, I can finish at least the vampire books by the end of next week, and possibly all three books the week after that, and get them to my Beta Readers before mid-February. I’ll need not less than a week after I think I’m done editing the book to work through the audio version, probably at least two weeks, plus time to make final changes to the layouts & text after that, so I should say I need to be done polishing the text by mid-April. That doesn’t sound so bad.

Of course, if I continue to have trouble focusing, trouble writing for long periods, or writing at reasonable rates, even with significant daily work it could take me until mid-March to finish the first drafts. Ugh.

What if I need significant re-writes? These books are important to me. Important that they express what I want them to express, even to casual readers. Not so important that they read like mainstream fiction… they’re not even in the same realm as that. But important to me that they’re good, that they do what they set out to do. Tell the stories they were meant to tell. I don’t know. I don’t really even know how to do re-writes. (Ooh; I’ve just added another chapter/chunk’s beginning to the book on writing/publishing, about my editing/rewriting process, or lack thereof.) If my Beta Readers all come back to me saying something like “we don’t really believe Emily is in love with Nicholas; you have to show it, make us feel it, it isn’t there”, or “we couldn’t buy in to anything Nicholas and his group were doing; it was obvious you disagreed with everything he had to say or tried to do”, I may just have a total breakdown, as that would mean most everything I’ve worked so hard to accomplish (in one of the books) I had failed at, compromising the work straight to the core. I might have to take another year on the re-writes, or I might just publish as-is, with the admission that I’m a shitty writer… I don’t know where my emotional collapse would leave me, after excellent feedback like that. (Although, really, I’m just kidding myself with ideas like that; I have never in my life received feedback of that caliber. I don’t know whether it’s because the people reading my books understand my intent and I’m actually doing what I meant to do, or whether my goals were so far beyond the beyond that no one even know what was wrong, and that I’ve secretly, quietly, been a dismal failure all these years. (On the other hand, based on the comments in the worst of my reviews, the one and two star reviews, the single-sentence reviews, the reviews from people who admit they quit reading in under 50 pages… the things those people hate about them are generally all the things that were so important to me to accomplish, or were at least intentional. Not failures of writing, but failure of readers to appreciate what the author was setting out to do. The polarizing effect of my work has become quite encouraging, lately.)) I feel like time is my enemy, at times.

Still, even with worst-case responses, if I can get any meaningful feedback out of people within a month of sending them my books, even that should give me enough time to accomplish significant rewrites, if necessary. Whole chapters, or plot-lines, could be replaced in the time remaining… So I suppose that’s what I’ll have to do. Start applying myself. Intensely. Finish three books’ first drafts in the next three weeks, and have them ready for publication within the next three months.

I’d be tempted to find some money in the budget to order a bunch of modafinil, but I suspect that, if all goes to plan, I’ll be done (or very nearly done) with the most intense part of the work before the drugs arrived from my international pharmacy. If I didn’t have an unnatural aversion to 1) seeing doctors and 2) dishonesty, I’d be much better off convincing a local doctor to write me a prescription for the stuff, and picking it up at my local pharmacy the same day. Somehow, violating federal and international laws bothers me less than either of the things involved in obtaining modafinil the way I’m supposed to. Oh, well. If I had modafinil on hand, I wouldn’t have even had to question any of this, as getting this level of work done would become nearly trivial. *sigh*

I’d better go get to work.

For all my titles, every single one that was available in both formats, in 2011 the free eBooks were downloaded more frequently than the free Podiobooks. For every book other than Cheating, Death, the ratio of eBook to audio is not less than about 2 to 1, though the Dragons’ Truth eBook was downloaded almost 6 times more than the audiobook. If I just look at Q4 of 2011, the numbers are even more significantly disparate; even the Cheating, Death eBook was downloaded 4 times more than the Podiobook, and Dragons’ Truth was around 14 to 1. (Most titles were at 5 to 1 for Q4, though my least popular Podiobooks (short stories & director’s cuts) were at 6 or 9 to 1.) Looking at Q1, Q2, and Q3, I find that Cheating Death had twice as many audio downloads as eBook downloads, and that the Untrue Tales books were pretty closely matched, but that the rest of my titles were 2, 3, or 4 to 1 being downloaded as eBooks instead of as audiobooks.

In 2008, all the books I had available for free in both formats (and most of them in 2009) had more downloads as Podiobooks than eBooks. Consequently, I spent a lot more time and effort working on the audiobooks side of my production efforts. By 2010, even with eBooks downloads relatively flat, all my titles except Cheating, Death and the Untrue Tales series were doing better as eBooks. Those few titles’ popularity as audiobooks meant that my total audiobook downloads for 2010 were nearly double those of my eBook downloads, despite every other title going the other way!

One conclusion to draw from this is that the exceptions more closely represent the genres the audience at Podiobooks.com is interested in, and that my other titles didn’t do as well because they weren’t the right books for the audience. On the other hand, by mid-2011 my Untrue Tales books were being downloaded twice as often as eBooks, and in Q4 five times as often, plus in Q4 of 2011 even Cheating, Death had four times as many eBook downloads as audiobook downloads. Some of that has to do with my eBooks being linked to by big “free eBook” sites, but a lot of it has to do with more and more readers being turned on to eBooks, generally.

I can’t say whether the audience for serialized audiobooks is growing or shrinking, but based on my numbers, I can say that my appeal to that audience is shrinking or already tapped out. It’s possible that there’s a core audience of several thousand Podiobooks subscribers and it took me a couple of years to reach them, but that now all the core members have been exposed to my stuff it’s only the new members subscribing… and that the gradual decline relates to some expression of that. Yet even when, after a period without updates, I returned to updating regularly, adding new books every few months and at least one new episode every week, the peak my numbers hit was only about half what it had been about a year earlier, with 50% fewer titles to contribute to the total downloads. The average number of downloads my Podiobooks have been receiving, per title, has been pretty consistently dropping off for two full years, and are now less than 1/6th what they were in January 2010.

I don’t think this is just because they aren’t fresh, new titles – they’re the same titles I have available as eBooks, and eBook downloads have been moving pretty steadily upwards for the last year and a half. …and except for 4 inbound links in Q4 of 2011, I haven’t done or seen anything to advertise/promote any of my titles or formats over the others in the last two years. I hate marketing, promotion, et cetera, and I’ve been pretty lazy about it. I almost haven’t even Tweeted in the last two years. I blog a little, update Facebook/Twitter/G+ when I have a new thing, once or twice, then mostly don’t mention it again. So it must be something else. I think it’s just that the audience listening to audiobooks is small and the audience reading eBooks is growing.

Briefly, first, before we get into the hard numbers: eBook downloads were way, way up for Q4 of 2011. This is largely due to traffic from getfreeebooks.com, which linked to Cheating, Death on October 16th, to Unspecified on November 9th, to Dragons’ Truth on November 29th, and to The First Untrue Trilogy on December 23rd. Total eBook downloads (across all titles) were up more than 100%, quarter-over-quarter. Podiobooks downloads continued their decline; my numbers there only seem to hold steady or increase while I’m actively releasing new content, but mostly they’ve just been declining for the last two years. For Q4 I had roughly $29 in eBook sales, and Podiobooks lumped Q3 and Q4 donations together – my cut was $9.74 for the 6-month period (which equates to $12.99 in donations). I also sold a full set of the Untrue Tales series in paper for $50.

Now, so they’re in the same format as the other quarters of 2011, here are all the eBook and Podiobook download numbers for/through Q4 of 2011, as usual giving the total of eBook downloads, the total of Podiobook downloads, and the more-accurate (re: # of people who dl’d a full book) total downloads of the final episodes of each Podiobook, as: eBook/total-PB/final-PB

• Lost and Not Found: 494 / 1,376 / 97
• Dragons’ Truth: 2,123 / 1,527 / 155
• Forget What You Can’t Remember: 729 / 5,828 / 140
• The First Untrue Trilogy: 1,034 (eBook only)
• The Second Untrue Trilogy: 557 (eBook only)
• Untrue Tales… Book One: 1 / 3,032 / 198
• Untrue Tales… Book Two: N/A / 4,015 / 264
• Untrue Tales… Book Three: N/A / 1,656 / 144
• Untrue Tales… Book Four: N/A / 1,301 / 113
• Untrue Tales… Book Five: N/A / 1,140 / 113
• Untrue Tales… Book Six: N/A / 1,076 / 102
• Cheating, Death: 1,567 / 5,834 / 356
• Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 260 / 345 / 29
• More Lost Memories (full): 335 / 702 / 39
• More Lost Memories (ind. stories, eBook only): 3
• Time, emiT, and Time Again (full): 277 / 761 / 48
• Time, emiT, and Time Again (ind. stories, eBook only): 6
• Last Christmas: 3
• Unspecified: 1,537
• Total Q4: 7,390 / 28,593 / 1,798
• Total 2011: 17,502 / 151,233 / 9,784
• Total all-time: 33,195 / 543,595 / 35,237

re: Podiobooks downloads: It looks like about 200 people started the Untrue Tales series, I lost a good chunk in Book Two, more in Book Three, but the 100 people who made it to Book Four stuck with it to the end – which matches what I’ve previously observed. Downloads of my short story collections and the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut were off by about 50% quarter-over-quarter, to fewer than 50 people finishing each title during the entire quarter. Everything else is just less than flat, part of a gradual overall decline.

re: eBooks: Only about half of the people who downloaded The First Untrue Trilogy downloaded the second, which has remained roughly true since I released the eBooks (60% over the life of the eBooks). (This is unfortunate, as I believe books 5 & 6 are some of my best writing to date, and that the second trilogy is much better than the first.) Unspecified was released at the beginning of Q4, and has been downloaded more in Q4 than all but 2 of my titles, which is saying a lot, since it’s a poetry book. The only titles which did better where my YA novel and my zombie novel, and Unspecified was only 30 downloads (>2%) behind Cheating, Death. All free eBook downloads were up for the quarter, probably owing to the free-ebook-seeking traffic linked in as mentioned above, but eBook purchases for the period were down again. It looks like I only sold 21 eBooks across all titles and all platforms during Q4, 2011.

Now, some year-end numbers, with prior-year numbers for comparison. I’ve been doing this full time for four years, now, and looking back is interesting (to me). The following numbers are as follows (dollars rounded to nearest $1): 2008 / 2009 / 2010 / 2011 / all time

• Total # of paper books sold: 21 / 61 / 68 / 26 / 176
• Revenue from paper books: $293 / $440 / $587 / $484 / $1805
• Total # of eBooks sold: 5 / 38 / 106 / 133 / 282
• Income from eBooks: $15 / $71 / $124 / $267 / $477
• Total # of PB donations: 0 / 3 / 13 / 7 / 23
• Income from PB: $0 / $22 / $60 / $25 / $107
• Total # of books sold*: 28 / 150 / 214 / 201 / 593
• Total income from books: $308 / $534 / $771 / $776 / $2,389
• Total # of works of art sold: 18 / 29 / 10 / 5 / 62
• Total income from art sales: $1,384 / $1,074 / $775 / $1,450 / $4,683
• Total income from art+books: $1,692 / $1,608 / $1,546 / $2,226 / $7,071.63

 *Total number of books sold includes paper copies given away as review copies and PB donations as sales.

This is downloads (estimated – for audio I’m using the “finished” number of downloads of the final episode of a Podiobook), with one number added, showing the number of downloads which were paid for, so the last two numbers are all time/paid:

• Lost and Not Found eBook: 1,079 / 506 / 1,015 / 1,432 / 4,032/7
• Lost and Not Found audio: 80 / 926 / 693 / 417 / 2,116/1
• Dragons’ Truth eBook: 961 / 609 / 1,574 / 4,360 / 7,504/16
• Dragons’ Truth audio: 1,271 / 1,616 / 1,277 / 788 / 4,952/4
• ForgetWYCR eBook: na / 735 / 1,316 / 1,845 / 3,896/19
• ForgetWYCR audio: na / 1,150 / 1,152 / 607 / 2,909/0
• Cheating, Death eBook: na / 8 / 67 / 2,356 / 2,431/23
• Cheating, Death audio: na / 366 / 3,276 / 1,683 / 5,325/3
• LaNF-DC eBook: na / 0 / 20 / 895 / 915/3
• LaNF-DC audio: na / na / 439 / 254 / 693/0
• More Lost Memories eBook: na / 6 / 22 / 1,000 / 1,028/5
• More Lost Memories audio: na /na / 385 / 335 / 720/1
• Time, emiT, and Time Again eBook: na / na / 15 / 935 / 950/7
• Time, emiT, and Time Again audio: na / na / 200 / 249 / 449/1
• Untrue Tales Book One eBook: 948 / 587 / 1,103 / 287 / 2,925/17
• Untrue Tales Book One audio: na / 2,865 / 2,682 / 1,229 / 6,776/3
• Untrue Tales Book Two eBook: 964 / 562 / 989 / 285 / 2,800/6
• Untrue Tales Book Two audio: na / 1,843 / 2,586 / 1,295 / 5,724/2
• Untrue Tales Book Three eBook: 897 / 553 / 1,043 / 225 / 2,718/7
• Untrue Tales Book Three audio: na / 1,002 / 1,644 / 843 / 3,489/3
• Untrue Tales Book Four eBook: na / na / 26 / 314 / 340/0
• Untrue Tales Book Four audio: na / na / na / 875 / 875/2
• Untrue Tales Book Five eBook: na / na /na / 265 / 265/0
• Untrue Tales Book Five audio: na / na / na / 708 / 708/3
• Untrue Tales Book Six eBook: na / na / na / 0 / 0/0
• Untrue Tales Book Six audio: na / na / na / 501 / 501/0
• The First Untrue Trilogy eBook: na / na / na / 2,006 / 2,006/3
• The Second Untrue Trilogy eBook: na / na / na / 1,211 / 1,211/4
• Unspecified: na / na / na / 1,539 / 1,539/4
• Total eBook downloads: 4,849 / 3,573 / 7,271 / 19,041 / 34,734/282
• Total audio downloads: 1,351 / 9,768 / 14,334 / 9,784 / 35,237/23

I’ve highlighted a number at the bottom: In 2011 I had 19,041 free eBook downloads. That’s a lot of downloads, compared to every other annual number I’ve just listed. That averages out to over 50 downloads a day. It also represents more than a total reversal from the ratio of eBook to Podiobook downloads I had last year.

The green numbers running down the right side are paid downloads, which for Podiobooks.com represents individual donations and for eBooks is actually in addition to the numbers in the first four columns. (Because I’m working from several spreadsheets to synthesize this data for you, and because the sales numbers are so small they barely make a difference on a year-by-year basis. If you want all the numbers, again, ask for it and I’ll send you the spreadsheets.) This means that the final numbers are a (backwards) ratio of paid downloads to free downloads across the last four years. All but three of them work out to less than half of one percent (Untrue Tales Book One eBook at 0.58%, Time, emiT, and Time Again eBook at 0.74%, and Cheating, Death eBook at 0.95%) and all of them are less than one percent paid. Some titles do better than others, but when I aggregate all the numbers together I get the following two data points:

• 1 in 290 people who download one of my book-length eBooks pays
• 1 in 953 people who download one of my Podiobooks pays

This is … bad. If I look at all sales of all formats (including paper) compared to all downloads across all book-length titles available for free, I get another data point: About 1 in every 206 times someone acquires a copy of one of my book-length works, they pay for it. So, about 1 in 200 overall (half a percent) pay at least something. Except that where about 1 in 300 people who want one of my eBooks pays for it, only about 1 in 1,000 people who listen to one of my audiobooks pays for it.

Some of that may represent a false comparison. If you’re looking for free eBooks, you can pretty easily find modernevil.com and, faced with the big “pay what you can” banner across every page, make a decision about whether to pay or not. If you’re looking for free audiobooks, you can pretty easily find my audiobooks on Podiobooks.com and in the iTunes podcast directory, and at least one of those makes it clear the only source of income for the creators is donations – but both are distinctly (currently – Evo has been promising for years to make PB more revenue-centric) focused on providing you my content for free. On the other hand, if you’ve got a kindle/nook/iPad/whatever and are shopping in the on-device store for eBooks, it’s pretty easy to find my eBooks, but the option to get them for free isn’t even hinted at. How many of the people who paid for my eBooks would have paid if they’d known they could also have got them for free? Perhaps that ratio would also drop to 1 in 1000 if, from the very start, it was made clear to those readers that free was an option…

Anyway… 2011 was a good year. I sold fewer paper books, but a few more eBooks, and my book revenue was the highest it’s ever been, even if only by about $5. I sold fewer works of art (and only created 3 new works of art all year), but my art revenue was the highest it’s ever been. The number of eBooks I’ve sold and had downloaded for free have been pretty steadily increasing, and both numbers were the highest they’ve ever been. For the second year in a row, Modern Evil Press has come out profitable (for tax purposes), even if only by a small amount – but that’s the highest it’s ever been, too. By some arcane calculations, I currently estimate I’ve gained at least 1,800 new readers in each of the last two years, and that I have been read/heard (or at least downloaded) by at least 7,500 people and possibly as many as 68,000 (though it’s probably closer to the neighborhood of 12k-30k). If you want a really big number, I think the biggest one I’ve got is the total number of episode downloads across all my Podiobooks for all time (through 12/31/2011), which was 543,595. (Interestingly, that doesn’t count any of the downloads of those same books on the Modern Evil Podcast – because I’ve never had a very good way to track that. I simply don’t have those numbers. Sorry.)

Oh, and I don’t know whether I’ll be doing posts exactly like this, this year. I’m not confident there’s much interest in all these details. I’ll probably post sales numbers monthly, as I’ll need to calculate them monthly to update my prices, but that won’t take long unless things really start to take off. Perhaps I’ll do some vague posts – I’ll surely still be gathering all these numbers and wrangling them into my spreadsheets… Part of the problem, as I see it, is that I’m not some one-title author blogging about their sales of their one book, and their one-weekend pricing experiment. I’m an independent publisher, reporting on the sales and downloads of dozens of distinct and interrelated titles which have been made available at a dizzying array of prices over time, and usually each at several prices at once. I’ll almost certainly do another post at this time next year, to compare year over year how things go.

Either way, I’m glad it’s nearly over. I’ve been wanting this series to be behind me for quite some time. Also, this is the last remnant of any ongoing work for any of my existing projects. After the final episode of Book Six is uploaded to Podiobooks.com, everything is potential future projects. Stories I haven’t written yet, books I haven’t read yet, art I haven’t thought of yet… no schedules, nothing set in stone, nothing ongoing or weekly or really even seasonally or annually, since my plan for this vampire duology doesn’t neatly fit NaNoWriMo, just… nothingness. Err.. I’m supposed to say “possibiltity” instead of nothingness, right? Make it seem less suicidal to be happy to be clearing my plate?

Anyway, the final episode of Untrue Tales… Book Six, the final episode of the entire six-book series, goes live at Podiobooks.com this Wednesday. Perhaps I should write a paragraph or two to hand Evo to post on the Podiobooks blog when it goes up, commemorating the end. I’ll think on that.

What about paid eBook sales? I’ve been doing a price experiment, as you may recall; at the start of the year I dropped all my full-book eBook prices into the $2.99 to $4.99 range. After three months, how did sales change? Sales went down, actually. Fewer copies sold at the lower prices. The only title whose sales increased was Untrue Tales… Book One, which I had reduced down to $0.99 (with the rest of the series at $3.99/book), which sold a total of 5 copies in 3 months. (And no one went on to buy the rest of the series – only a single copy of Book Three sold, of all the books after One.) Seeing that sales had not improved (and in some cases had become much worse) with the lowered prices, rather than leaving them a full six months, or even a full three months, I put through price increases on all my full-book eBooks with about a week left in March – at the same time I pulled the individual Untrue Tales eBooks and uploaded them as two trilogies (for parity with the print version, and so they’d have more attractive pricing). My eBooks are now all in the $6.99 to $9.99 price range. I made half as much money in 1 week at the higher prices as I had in 12 weeks at the lower prices. Which is what I expected, and expect to continue to see over Q2.

Here are the eBook and Podiobook download numbers for the Q1 of 2011, as usual giving the total of eBook downloads, the total of Podiobook downloads, and the more-accurate (re: # of people who dl’d a full book) total downloads of the final episodes of each Podiobook, as: eBook/total-PB/final-PB

• Lost and Not Found: 302 / 2,684 / 126
• Dragons’ Truth: 695 / 1,874 / 237
• Forget What You Can’t Remember: 422 / 6,742 / 189
• The First Untrue Trilogy: 59 (eBook, only available 7 days)
• The Second Untrue Trilogy: 66 (eBook, only available 7 days)
• Untrue Tales… Book One: 283 / 5,165 / 370
• Untrue Tales… Book Two: 283 / 5,359 / 349
• Untrue Tales… Book Three: 223 / 2,899 / 269
• Untrue Tales… Book Four: 314 / 4,366 / 377
• Untrue Tales… Book Five: 265 / 1,787 / N/A
• Cheating, Death: 284 / 6,750 / 439
• Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 245 / 610 / 114
• More Lost Memories (full): 252 / 1,271 / 134
• More Lost Memories (ind. stories, eBook only): 10
• Time, emiT, and Time Again (full): 248 / 1,201 / 68
• Time, emiT, and Time Again (ind. stories, eBook only): 6
• Last Christmas: 4
• Total Q1: 3,961 / 40,708 / 2,672
• Total all-time: 19,654 / 433,070 / 28,125

So, there’s that. I’m approaching half a million episodes downloaded via Podiobooks.com, across my current 12 titles, with something in the range of 5.5k-28k listeners downloading at least one full book. (I’m guessing around 6k, but I have a lot of numbers to look at, here.) About seven one-hundredths of 1% (0.07%) of Podiobooks.com full-book-downloads resulted in a donation to one of my books. I’m also approaching 20k eBook downloads across 28 titles (half of the titles are short stories; I’ve only written 15 full books/trilogies available as eBooks), and about 1% of those are paid, rather than free, eBook downloads. In Q1 I sold ~40 eBooks for a net income (after Amazon / Apple / Smashwords take their cut) of ~$58, and I had 3 Podiobooks donations totaling $6.53 (again, net to me). I also gave away 14 paperback books (the Untrue Trilogies) in Q1 (which cost me over $100). Also during Q1 I opted my books out of Smashwords “Premium” distribution to Apple and Barnes & Noble, and I set up direct relationships with both, via iTunesConnect and Pubit, respectively. Apple is slow, and a bit opaque about their setup process, and the result is that most of my eBooks have been unavailable via the iBookstore for about 3 weeks (so far)… and a downside I didn’t take into account with B&N was that all the salesrank data for my eBooks would no longer be associated with my eBooks – when I set them up directly (even though it’s the same title/ISBN/eBook), B&N considers it a totally separate entity from the version they’d received from Smashwords. In fact, for a couple of days, both versions of each eBook were available in the B&N/nookbook store, side by side. So … I suspect that’s why my B&N sales also stopped completely after the changeover. We’ll see how that goes.

I currently project that I’ll sell about twice as many eBooks in 2011 as I did in 2010, and that I’ll earn up to 10x as much from eBook sales. Which would be nice, if it proved true, since that would cover the expense of having all those paper copies of the Untrue Trilogies printed. Actually, I was running the numbers, and for all versions of all the Untrue Tales books (2007-present; I don’t have solid numbers for prior to 2007), with all the expenses and all the income, I’m roughly $700 in the red for the Untrue Tales series. All I need to do is sell 50 more sets of the eBooks (at $9.99/trilogy & 70% net) or 14 sets of the paper books (at $25/trilogy, selling by hand… it’s over 50 sets if they sell through Amazon/other-bookseller) (or some combination therein) and the Untrue Tales series will have broken even. Have you bought your set?

With all these projects and ideas and such burning to the fore of my mind, keeping me continuously busy for the first quarter of 2011 (and beyond), my initial plan for the year nearly faded from my thoughts. If you’ve also managed to forget it, it went something like this: My general goal is to write/publish 2 to 4 books per year and I’ve already done that much (with the Untrue Tales series), so there’s no real pressure (from my own goals) to try to finish any new books this year. This gives me the freedom to spend more time reading, to make progress on my “reading list,” as it were, not just books for pleasure but books for research (for several upcoming books I’ve got in mind, but don’t want to write without a lot of appropriate reading first). I’d also like to get some time invested in working again on my art, in taking it in a new direction, and in trying to produce beautiful artwork free from commercial concerns.

This last thought is perhaps the central one; to move to a place where the work I’m doing is no longer driven by commercial concerns. I think I’ve got our finances structured now in a way which will allow me to fully realize that mindset before the end of 2011. …though not if I continue to allow myself to obsess over things like getting funding, like promoting & marketing my creations, and/or like trying to learn how to write commercial/normal/formulaic books (or screenplays).

Anyway, I’ve been having some trouble keeping my mind focused, lately. I’m pretty sure the proliferation of projects preceded the present peripatetic propensity of my thoughts. Either way, it’s too many things, within and without. All things I want to accomplish, but I’m not confident a hurry in any way enhances or improves those accomplishments, so I’m going to try to slow down and take things one at a time. Try to focus on each thing in turn, if I can, instead of focusing on none of them at all. I’m significantly less stressed than I ever was working for someone else, or working for money, but those things are like infectious splinters, wedging their way into everything and poisoning even the good in life – and I am more stressed than I’d prefer to be because of them.

If my Kickstarter project gets funded, I’ll try to focus on that. If not, maybe I’ll try to focus on screenwriting for a month. Otherwise, I’m just going to focus on reading and on gradually developing the ideas, structure, and meaning of my upcoming vampire duology… while I try to adjust my frame of mind.

Ignore the following paragraph if you are allergic to details about money:

With shipping, all 100 books cost me $719.52, or $7.20/book. The printing cost when they’re ordered wholesale is $5.56, and the discount on both books (for now) is 50% which, with a $24.99 cover price for each trilogy, means I’d earn $6.94 if you bought one through, say, Amazon. That’s about $2.31 for each of the three books included in each trilogy. To earn at that rate per title, if released as individual paperbacks, they’d have to be priced at $11.99 each (because of rounding up to the nearest $.99, it actually goes up to a net return of ~$2.62 each, so a little more), or $35.97 for 3 (That’s $71.94 for the full series, vs. $49.98 for the two trilogies at list price, and while you’d pay $21.96 more for the 6 individual books, I’d only net $1.84 more.), which seems a bit steep. On the other hand, if you ordered straight from me, say, in person at Phoenix Comicon 2011, (presuming you don’t take one of the deals I’ll certainly have, some of which I’ll discuss below) paying a full $25 (I don’t usually screw with pennies or charging sales tax; I pay your sales tax for in-person book sales), then after I cover sales tax ($2.32), printing and shipping ($7.20), I net $15.47, which is a much better return on writing three books than $6.94 is. That’s almost $5.16 per title. (Which is, admittedly, a couple of dollars less than I’d earn hand-selling the individual books, if priced as above.) Anyway, although it seems like $15.47 is the lionshare of $24.99 at a glance, I have to sell 47 of the 100 books I just ordered, at full price, to just cover the cost of ordering the paper books; that doesn’t cover any other expenses involved in writing the books (paper, ink, computers, typewriters, time, et cetera) or marketing the books (web hosting, space rental at Comicon, business cards, et cetera), just the printing & shipping & the convenience of not asking people for $27.31 (or $54.63 for both trilogies) when I can ask for $25 (or $50). I’m reconsidering the tax thing, with sales tax nearly at ten cents on the dollar, but I know it’s my preference as a consumer to pay round-numbered amounts. Your feelings are welcomed.

So, less detailed here, though still about money, I want to write out some thoughts on various pricing options. Right now at modernevil.com, you can order any of my books at a flat rate of $25 each, and I’ll personally sign it and ship it to you. Except for the First Edition First Untrue Trilogy, which is $50 (since the cover price is already $25). The idea in those prices was that, if you wanted to get the books for less, they’re available at Amazon (Audible, et cetera) for their cover price or less ($10-$14, or $25), as eBooks for half that or less (currently $3-$5 each, no combined editions available), and for free as downloads (eBooks, audiobooks). If you wanted to support me, my writing, my publishing company, and the idea of independent creators succeeding as much as possible, then you order directly from me at the higher prices. $25 isn’t that much more for a reader to pay, but it means $15-$20 in my pocket, vs. $2-$3 when you order any other way. And I do really believe in “pay what you can” – that people who can afford to pay more should pay more and people who can’t afford to pay more still deserve access to great content. So I want to offer as many viable options as possible for the Untrue Tales… series, but I don’t want to over-complicate things, either. So I’ll probably over-simplify them, instead.

I think the numbers support, for the 14 people who purchased the existing paperback version of The First Untrue Trilogy (when it was all that was available of that series), offering the option of buying both of the new books (so they’d have a matching set; the new ones aren’t even the same size as the old one) for just $25. In fact, that’s still (slightly) profitable. Almost as profitable as selling just one of the trilogies at wholesale. I know for certain who 4 of the 14 buyers are, and would gladly accept visual proof of ownership (bring it with you to the con, post a photo of you holding it to Twitter/facebook/blog) for the other 10. But how to communicate that? Well, I’ve just said it, here. Maybe, if I can get my nerve up (I’ve been building toward it for a year, I hope I can), I’ll send out a sort-of-a newsletter to my mailing list between now and Memorial Day, and hope most of them are on it.

For everyone else, I’ll probably offer two options for ordering from me: $50 each for signed copies, or $40 (maybe $50 and no add’l shipping charge) for both books together, unsigned. Plus, if you pay the $100 for the signed pair, I’ll throw in something extra. Does that sound fair?

Then there’s the question of eBooks and audiobooks. First, eBooks: I’ve been contemplating whether I ought to continue to offer the series only as individual eBooks, or add the combined trilogies to the mix, or offer only the trilogies and pull the individual eBooks, or somehow put together all six books in one eBook with an unreadable cover…? I think I’ve decided to offer only the trilogies and pull the individual eBooks. (and that the covers with 14 titles each are complex enough, trying to fit 26 titles on one cover would be overkill) Covers is taken care of for that, since I would have parity between the new paper books and the new eBooks. Pricing is a concern, though eBooks pricing deserves its own long post, soon. (My eBooks pricing experiment is going exactly as expected; sales dropped off with the lower prices.) Probably I’ll try to keep some sort of parity with the relative prices of my other paperbacks and eBooks, so if (for some crazy reason) I keep individual eBook prices in the $3-$5 range, the trilogies will be $9.99 each or if I raise individual eBook prices up to the $8-$10 range, the trilogies will be roughly $16.99 each. And, yes, still also available for free.

But what about the audiobooks? Do I remix/remaster the entire series as two long podcasts/audiobooks? One? If I don’t combine them, covers becomes a question again. Should I go to the trouble of creating a cover for Book Six that matches the 5 old covers’ style, or recreate all six covers in a style which matches the new paper books’ covers? Probably I’ll do the latter, and remix the entire series anyway (to adjust the outros of every episode to correctly refer to the availability of the completed series), all 60 episodes of it. Well, maybe just 50. Book Six doesn’t start podcasting until after everything else will be settled with the new releases; I can just do them the new way the first time. That should be fine.

No, where was I? And where was I headed? Let’s see… finished editing/creating the new print versions of the books… talked about pricing, profits, and plans… talked about eBook and audiobook versions… Did I mention I put the new books up on Goodreads? (The First Untrue Trilogy, The Second Untrue Trilogy) No? Well, I did. In fact, I’ve just (now, in a pause from writing this post) submitted giveaways there for both books. One should start any moment now, with details listed here when the Goodreads staff turns it on. It’s for two copies of the first trilogy and it runs from … whenever they turn it on through March 16th. The other one, which I’ll probably post about on or after the 17th, is for two copies of the second trilogy and it runs from March 17th through March 30th. Except that I’ll actually be sending both trilogies to all four winners, so they can read the entire semi-epic series. Except that what this series of six books really needed was six free sets given away. So in addition to the four copies I’m giving away via Goodreads, I’m also giving away two copies here on my blog. I’ll give away one in this post, and another later.

To whom? To people who read all the way through my 2000+ word posts, of course! Heck, you wouldn’t even be hearing about these free books if you weren’t among that tiny, elite group of people! So, how will we do this? Comments? Some sort of quiz, testing your reading comprehension? (Or is it your comprehension of rambling?) What do the other blogs do for book giveaways? One entry for commenting, another for tweeting about the new books, another couple for blogging about the new books, another for adding the books to your library on Goodreads, another for telling me who your favorite character from any of my books is and why, and one final entry for posting a photo of yourself holding one of my books to twitter/facebook/etc? Then I put all the entries in a hat and pick one, right? Sure, that sounds fun. Do that.

ie: At least comment, if you’d like a shot at $50 in free books. Help spread the word, and you increase your chances… as long as you comment again to let me know you’ve done so. This contest ends … let’s say on March 16th. Then I’ll do another post and another contest for the second half of the month. Then, on April 1st, the books come out.

Oh, that’s another thing I forgot to mention. (Though if you ‘Like’ me or ‘Like’ Modern Evil Press on facebook, you may already have some idea.) In order to get the free setup from LSI, I had to submit by the end of February, so I did. So as of March 2nd, the books were officially approved, ready, and “available for printing” … and ordering … from LSI. Now, it typically takes 1-2 weeks after approval before new titles begin appearing at booksellers’ sites (ie: Amazon, bn.com, et cetera), though bn.com seems to add books based on ISBN data and already has both books listed (for $16.86 apiece, for members!) with incomplete data, but that’s still a couple of weeks before the official publication date. I’ve added both the “publication date” and ‘on sale date’ of 4/1/2011 to both books’ ISBN metadata, and I’m hoping (but not expecting) that some book stores will honor that. Heck, it’d be the first time any of my books was available for an actual Amazon pre-order, if Amazon did. (Signs I’m a nothing-of-a-publisher: I don’t even have sufficient relationship with Amazon to get them to list my upcoming books for pre-sale. They’re either not in the system, or for sale.) When will I personally start selling/shipping the books? Meh. I don’t know. Some time after I receive them. My order will take a few days to print and a business week to ship, so I’ll probably have them by the 15th… Probably I’ll put up the Google Checkout ‘Add To Cart’ buttons as soon as I have the books on hand, and then no one will order them between then and 4/1/2011 so this question will be irrelevant.. Oh, well.

Oh, and on the subject of hand-selling books at Phoenix Comicon – I’ll probably also have mega-combo-deals again, then, like I did last year. Things like all 5 books in the Lost and Not Found universe for $50, or maybe the Starter Kit for $55. And the “all books from Modern Evil Press” option, of course. That’s 11 books (15 titles) whose cover prices total $158, and I’ll probably sell it for $125 or $135. Maybe less. And I’m thinking of running whatever sales/deals I offer at Comicon at modernevil.com for the duration of the con, so people who can’t make it to Phoenix can still get the deal (plus S&H).

I think that’s everything. Did I miss anything?

Update: For the purposes of the contest, if you wanted to blog about the new books coming out, you can link to either the Goodreads pages I linked to mid-post, or to the pages I just created for the books on modernevil.com. The First Untrue Trilogy, The Second Untrue Trilogy. Or both.

Cover image Copyright © 2011 by Teel McClanahan III, based on the image ‘Disk Around a Massive Baby Star (Artist's Concept)’ by ESO/L. Calçada.

At right you can see the cover image I’ve just put together for Untrue Tales… Book Five, which will be available (if all goes well) this Friday, January 14th, 2011 as an eBook and as a serialized audiobook. Which is to say the first of ten episodes of the serialized audiobook will be available Friday, on the Modern Evil Podcast, and in February on Podiobooks.com. Why is the cover of the book an image of a black hole? (Yes, I know, the artist was thinking “baby star,” not “black hole,” but if I say “black hole” then when you look at the cover you see a black hole, complete with accretion disc and reletivistic jets, which is what I wanted my cover to show.) Because the prison Trevor and his tiny army are trying to break into in Book Five, the Oubliexxe, is built into a black hole. The corporation has to keep adding cell blocks to the end of the prison which sticks out, because the whole thing is being gradually drawn into the black hole’s event horizon. Pretty terrible prison, right?

Well, as you know if you’ve read/listened to the end of  Untrue Tales… Book Four, that’s Trevor and the AIs’ best guess for where Nirgal and Neyal’h have been taken by the corporation. So that’s where they’re going, to try to break them free. Of course, they first have to recruit all the exiles on Earth to build their army and defeat the corporate security forces between them and the Oubliexxe… it’s all very exciting. ((If that was a spoiler for you, why haven’t you bought the eBook ($3.99) yet, or at least subscribed to the Modern Evil Podcast?))

I’ve been through a couple rounds of edits to the text and have been recording the audiobook version of Book Five this week. If you’ve been following me on Twitter or Facebook, you know I’ve been making acceptable, if not amazing, progress – as of right now I’ve finished recording about five and a half of the ten episodes, plus all the intros and outros for the 3 different versions of the audiobook I make. I haven’t begun to edit the audio yet, but I only need to get one episode done by Friday (at the least), so I can actually do that editing Friday morning (at the latest) and still update the podcast on time. Of course, I also needed to design the cover (2 versions, since Audible wants a square cover), so when my neighbors started playing their bass-thumping music in the middle of my recording today, that’s what I worked on. I think it came out pretty good.

Now I just need to write/record a promo, record the rest of the book, update the eBook with any additional changes to the text, edit at least 1 episode, and I’ll be ready to submit it to Evo, for Podiobooks.com. If all goes according to plan (ie: I have the episode ready for Friday’s MEPod, and thus will also have it ready for Podiobooks.com.) I should still be able to snag the Feb. 16th launch date I have penciled in for PB, so it’ll launch one week after Book Four finishes there.

Are you ready for it? Untrue Tales… Book Five is coming, 1/14/2011!

I started work on Untrue Tales… Book Five on Thursday, and when Starbucks closed & kicked me out last night (Friday), I’d already passed 10k words. My current goal is to finish Book Five before the end of October so I can go into NaNoWriMo with a blank slate & have a more relaxed schedule (a whole month?) for Untrue Tales… Book Six. Which will be the end of the series. Two trilogies. I’m making good progress toward my goals of getting them done, one right after the other, so I can get the entire second trilogy out in paperback in the Spring of 2011.

Depending on time availability I’m planning to start podcasting Book Four on the Modern Evil Podcast starting Friday November 5th, which puts Book Five’s start in mid-January, so I’ll probably hold off on the Book Five eBook release until January as well. Then I can aim to release the Book Six eBook and the 2nd-trilogy paperback around the end of March / beginning of April (April Fool’s day?), 2011… That sounds good.  Gives me time to edit & get feedback, lets me do the audiobook versions before the print version (recording the audio version always catches a few more flaws, trust me), but doesn’t make my audience wait too much longer to get the rest of the story. People who can’t afford to buy the eBooks (they’re just $5.99 each!) or the paperbacks ($24.99/trilogy retail, $50/trilogy signed & author-direct) will be able to hear the whole thing for free on the podcast before summer. (Or read the free eBooks not long after that.)

After I finish writing the end of the Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction – Recollections of an Alternate Past series (fingers crossed; by November 30th!), I can maybe get back to doing research for that alternate/zombie history series I was talking about this time last year. I have at least 10k more pages to read before I’ll be comfortable tackling that one. Lots of histories, biographies, and philosophy books, plus probably another stack of zombie books, and almost certainly a stack of steampunk (since I intend to invent the ‘solarpunk’ genre with the series). But that’s later. Right now, I’m writing about Trevor. Last night I wrote Trevor’s first confrontation with God. It was neat. Trevor and Toni got to go to Heaven, then God took them for a walk in the midst of the Garden. I think you’ll like it.

Here are the eBook and Podiobook download numbers, as usual giving the total of eBook downloads, the total of Podiobook downloads, and the more-accurate (re: # of people who dl’d a full book) total downloads of the final episodes of each Podiobook, as: eBook/total-PB/final-PB

• Lost and Not Found: 49 / 457 / 18
• Dragons’ Truth: 98 / 572 / 55
• Forget What You Can’t Remember: 104 / 1,765 / 51
• Untrue Tales… Book One: 69 / 1,594 / 134
• Untrue Tales… Book Two: 76 / 1,852 / 122
• Untrue Tales… Book Three: 55 / 877 / 94
• Cheating, Death: 6 / 2,988 / 197
• Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 2 / 260 / 37
• More Lost Memories (full): 2 / 362 / 39
• More Lost Memories (ind. stories, eBook only): 0
• Time, emiT, and Time Again (full): 1 / 943 / N/A
• Time, emiT, and Time Again (ind. stories, eBook only): 1
• Total for all titles: 463 / 11,670 / 747
• Total YTD: 4552 / 174,653 / 12,031
• Total all-time: 12,974 / 354,754 / 23,150

Free eBook downloads have remained relatively flat all year, much more stable than during either 2008 or 2009. eBook sales, actual paid sales, are still small enough that a shift from selling four or five to selling three in a month is not statistically relevant. I sold 3 eBooks in September, one copy of Untrue Tales… Book Three on kindle, one copy of Cheating, Death at Smashwords, and one copy of the TeaTA short story Oracular Offspring at Smashwords. (I also had 10 free/coupon eBook downloads at Smashwords, half of them Cheating, Death.) That makes for $8.78 from my cut of eBooks sales in September. Wheee, the kindle 70% royalty makes a big difference – & is now also coming to me from UK sales (none of which I’ve ever/yet made).

I forgot to mention it last month, but since it’s happened 2 months in a row: I also sold 2 paperback copies of Cheating, Death via wholesale/LSI in each of August and September. I net $2.44/copy, so that’s $4.88/month or $9.76 for all four. While looking that up, I noticed that in June I sold 2 copies of Forget What You Can’t Remember via wholesale/LSI, earning $4.50. Not sure where these sold, exactly, but probably not Amazon, where their sales ranks are in the multi-millions (and could drop into the hundreds of thousands with just a couple copies moving per month, from what I hear); maybe book stores I’ve never heard of (or a certain horror book store I have) are shelving/selling them.

I should ask. *scoots off, sends a DM* If an actual bookstore is shelving/selling my zombie book, I’ll keep the discount at 50% indefinitely, rather than follow my new plan of dropping the discount to 20% after the book has been out a year. *twiddles thumbs* *waits for DM reply* Because really, yes, it’s still cool that a bookstore ever voluntarily shelved my book. The ~$3 more/copy I’d get from online stores doesn’t seem worth the cost of removing it from a physical bookstore, especially if it’s actually selling there. Plus, as an author, a reader, and a publisher, I’d rather do something nice for an indie bookstore who was willing to do business with me than to do something that was only intended to bring in more money from online bookstore sales. As you may have noticed, I almost always prefer doing something nice over making money.

In other news, I just finished writing Untrue Tales… Book Four. Now I just need to read, edit, re-read & copyedit, share with my Beta Readers & incorporate their feedback, design a cover, write copy, and do eBook layout & conversion for it. While writing Book Five. Before the end of the month. So I can write Book Six for NaNoWriMo. (because I’m crazy)

I’m working on Untrue Tales… Book Four. I know I mentioned it on Twitter/Facebook, but in case you haven’t been following me; I began writing Book Four while I was in Las Vegas recently. (During the day while we were there, my wife Mandy was at a teaching conference, so I had plenty of time to work. Evenings were for having fun.) I got about 5700 words written in Vegas, and haven’t added a word in the three weeks since. Actually, I’ve been pretty darn depressed lately -including the last three weeks, comicon, Vegas, and for quite some time before that. I’m a bit surprised I was able to write anything at all. Luckily, I’ve been working on feeling a bit better and in the last week or two, and while I haven’t managed to get any actual writing done (and have actually experienced stress to the level of physical pain the last two times I tried to sit down to work on Book Four), I have been working through the story quite a bit.

I’ve seen/remembered quite a bit of the rest of the story, and it looks like instead of 7 books (or more) as I recall originally envisioning, the story will be well told in 6 books. The first three are done, you can read them now. I should have Book Four done within a couple of months. (ie: before NaNoWriMo’10) Then maybe I’ll write Book Five for release in early 2011 and Book Six for release in mid- or late-2011. I am planning on keeping them all very close to the same length as each other and as the first three books. The writing may (or may not) go quickly through all 3 books, one after the other, but I’m beginning to get used to the idea of investing months per book for editing/preparation/recording in advance of an official release.

I’ve just looked at a calendar, and if Book Four is ready by October 8th & I start podcasting it on the Modern Evil Podcast that week (immediately after TeaTA finishes its run), then it’ll run out in mid-December… Two more books of the same length would be another 5 months of episodes, if posted back-to-back, which would put the release of Book Five in December 2010 or January 2011 and Book Six in March 2011. Which I suppose would be alright. The first three were released in 2004, 2005, and 2006. I somewhat wish I could release the next three in 2010, 2011, and 2012… but I also don’t like the idea of sitting on a finished book for a year or more… and I kinda want to get all three books written as quickly as possible.

Of course, pre-2008 I was only writing/publishing about one book per year.

Now, for the release, I’m thinking of doing a modified version of what I’ve been implementing with my more recent releases (though certainly in line with the current availability of the first three Untrue Tales… books). I’m thinking of releasing the individual books 4-6 as eBooks and audiobooks and not as individual paperback books, then putting out the second trilogy as a combined paperback after all three books are done. I brainstormed a variety of models for putting out various other combinations of paper/eBook/audio at various intervals, doing various fundraisers, even thought about limited hardback releases, but due to the expense of paper (and the miniscule interest I’ve seen over the years in the individual books in the series in paperback) I think this will be the most reasonable plan. Then, maybe, I’ll look into doing a limited hardback release encompassing the full series.

On the writing itself: (Possible spoilers ahead) I haven’t written -or been in the mindset that created- books in the Untrue Tales… series for over four years. Since then I’ve been through a variety of life changes, not the least of which was my marriage in 2007. Despite Trevor’s having been reunited with his wife at the end of Book Three, their being together for the remainder of the series, and Book Four being about their life together before his being exiled to Earth, my relationship with my wife actually distances me from the relationship Trevor has with his wife. Writing Book Four has been an emotional stumbling block since (perhaps) 2005, and is the primary reason I’ve not previously continued the series. It was supposed to be about Trev & Toni’s love story, which led directly to his exile on Earth… and writing the core of that story is one I may never be able to do.

Luckily, upon examining the way the story needs to be told and how events unfolded prior to Trevor’s exile, I discovered that the emotional core of and the how-they-met-and-fell-in-love part of Trev & Toni’s story doesn’t get told in Book Four or (probably) anywhere in the series. Book Four is still nearly-all-flashback to what led Trev into exile, as told by Toni, but she’s keeping a vital element secret. Something that won’t be revealed until the cliffhanger ending of Book Five. Something which, since she’s keeping it secret (for good reason), means she won’t be telling the story of how they met, fell in love, et cetera, either. This takes a huge weight off my back re: writing Book Four.

I’ve also discovered that the tall man, the closest thing to an antagonist in the first 3 books, figures into Trev & Toni’s backstory and into future books – would you believe he’s actually a complex, sympathetic, and manipulated character? His love story, I get to tell.

Most of the rest of what I have planned, I can’t tell you about here. It would give too much away. But it’s going to be awesome. The main battle sequence in Book Five is mind-blowing, and the twist at the end of Book Five… well, the main storyline has been planned from the beginning, it’s just a few details that have needed ironing out. Most of which happens in a process very similar to remembering something that happened to me long ago… or far into my future. It’s hard to tell the difference, sometimes.

It’s coming. If you want to get early access, you can volunteer to be a ‘Beta Reader’ – you’ll get to read the books before the general public does, in exchange for giving me feedback on them. You don’t have to be a professional editor, you just have to be an interested reader (and familiar with the first three books in the series).  Email me, or comment below, if you’re interested.

• Buy the paperback at modernevil.com
• Buy the paperback at Amazon.com
• Buy the paperback at barnesandnoble.com
• Buy the eBook from Smashwords
• Buy the eBook for your kindle

I’m already working on the audiobook version; if you subscribe to the Modern Evil Podcast, you’ve already heard some of it. It should begin running on Podiobooks.com in August, after More Lost Memories is complete there. Actually, I’ve already recorded the entire book, but still need to do most of the audio-editing… and I need to work on the music a while longer. I’m not happy with my first few attempts to compose the intro/outro music for the audiobook. Definitely not doing book-length bed music for it, but I’m a bit blocked on coming up with a melody/sound which encapsulates the entire collection.

I’m pretty happy with the finished book. After reading and re-reading the book over and over again in the last few weeks, it feels pretty solid. In case you’re wondering: I read each story aloud as soon as it’s written, for any immediate/obvious edits. About half the stories in this book were written a couple of years ago, so -while they’d already received quite a bit of editing- I re-read them recently, as well. Then when I’d written the first nine stories & essays, I re-read the entire book (aloud, again) before sending it to my Beta Readers. (Then I wrote the final story, Buying Time.) Then after I’d got the final feedback from my Beta Readers, after preparing the book for print, I printed out a proof and read that aloud (Finding even more errors!) before sending it to Lightning Source (my printer). Then I read it aloud again to record the entire audiobook.

The order of the stories and essays feels good. The balance between them is strong. There’s a wide variety of characters, time manipulations, and relationships. I’d have liked to have had more/longer essays, but that’s more a personal preference than that the book doesn’t work as-is; the essays currently in the book work well as brief interstitials between the stories, like a mental palate-cleansing. I’m happy with it, overall, and I think readers will be, too.

I do not recall the precise details of the conversation, but it began with a confusion. When the caller insisted that something must be wrong, that Untrue Tales… wasn’t all there, I immediately went into tech-support mode and tried to determine where their problem downloading might be. Soon, as they explained further and my mind wakened more, I realised that what they meant was that the story didn’t have an ending.

Which is correct. Only the first three books of the series are written, so far, and I have plans for at least another four (possibly six) books to complete Trevor’s story. I have been putting off continuing the story for the last several years. Book Four is supposed to be nearly entirely flashback, filling in the story that led to Trevor’s exile on Earth and separation from his true love, and I’ve worried that I won’t do the story justice.

I wrote & published (via Cafepress, originally) Book One in 2004, Book Two in 2005, and Book Three in 2006. In 2007 I began seriously working on starting Modern Evil Press, buying ISBNs, contracting with Lightning Source, and getting several books both in print and available for purchase everywhere. And got married. In 2008 I stopped working a day job and started being a creative full-time, devoting quite a bit of that time to creating audio versions of my existing books and writing Forget What You Can’t Remember and More Lost Memories, which were published on 1/1/2009. In 2009, in response to certain feedback from readers of FWYCR, I spent the better part of the year doing research on zombie novels, then wrote Cheating, Death. Then edited together the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut for sale as an eBook. So far this year I’ve put out the print edition of LaNF-DC and am nearing completion of this new collection of short stories and essays, Time, emiT, and Time Again. I’ve been busy.

Then, while I was working on Cheating, Death I had a few ideas for an alternate history universe where I could tell at least a few good stories. I’ve been doing a fair amount of research on the period and characters from which I intend to develop these stories from, but the task is far and away the most research-intensive project I’ve ever attempted. (Normally I prefer simply to write the stories and worlds that originate in my own imagination, rather than to attempt to start anywhere near actual history and real people.) So I’ve postponed it a bit, too. In fact, putting together (and expanding) Time, emiT, and Time Again was partially because I suspect that I might not feel ready for the first book to see print by the end of 2010, and I wanted to be sure to put out at least 2 new books this year.

On the other hand, I’ve received my first enthusiastic contact from a fan since Dragons’ Truth also led a few people to ask me if/when there would be a sequel. (My response to that is a question of where, exactly, one might go from the end of Dragons’ Truth. As soon as someone has a reasonable idea, I don’t see any problem with pursuing it.) I know thousands of people have downloaded the eBook and Podiobook versions of each of the three Untrue Tales… books, but the dropoff in readers/listeners from Book Two to Book Three is fairly significant, feedback & reviews are sparse & mixed, and I’ve long suspected that people aren’t getting to the end or don’t like the series very much. The only people who, prior to today, had asked me about continuing the series were people who hadn’t read it yet and were avoiding it because it was unfinished.

Actually, I’ve still been asked more frequently about the description of the fireplace in Book Three than when or whether Book Four will be written. As in: “I really liked the whole series, except for the description of the fireplace in Book Three. What was that about?” That, dear readers, was in the same vein as the entirety of Forget What You Can’t Remember; I was trying to simulate in the reader, via writing style and structure, the experience the character is having – forced on you by the act of reading itself. You like to feel tension and excitement while reading the tense, exciting parts of a thriller. You like to feel as though you are being romanced while reading a romance. I just tried to do the same thing with irritating distraction (in the fireplace), depersonalization disorder, and amnesiac confusion and ethical doubts (in FWYCR).

Yet I’ve now had a great conversation with someone who not only liked the Untrue Tales… books, but is eager and excited to read the rest of the series. Eager enough to look up and call the author’s phone number, to ask about the rest of the story. Which is, in itself, perhaps enough motivation to attempt to squeeze Book Four into my schedule before starting on the alternate history series. At first glance, I think perhaps if I start thinking about it now, I might be able to finish it & publish it by the end of August. Or perhaps September.

Even though I’m not much motivated to write it. I’m a bit distanced from the explicit erotica, violence, and (the core of the thing, which most readers will never notice) the central motivation for the whole project being the satire by exaggeration of the way series like Harry Potter and A Series of Unfortunate Events were unfolding at the time. Rather than despising such frustratingly written yet inexplicably popular books and wanting to mock them by emulating and exploding them, I just don’t care about them any more. Technically I had already got to that point by the time I published Book Three, but it has been a real stumbling block to the continued writing of the series. I will have to determine whether I can either simulate or replace that motivation, in order to continue the series without drastically altering the storytelling style.

Perhaps this comes down to that question of ‘why’ – Why I write, why I publish, why I do all this work. If I write “for the readers” I’ve got to finish the series. If I publish to be able to write what and how I want to write, I’m fine to go on ignoring it. I think it’s complicated and contains some of both of those (and other factors), which is why I’ve neither written the next book nor taken the first three out of print. I shall continue to think about  it, and I’ll see if I can start working on it this summer.

Here are the eBook and Podiobook download numbers (including above eBooks estimates), as usual giving the total of eBook downloads, the total of Podiobook downloads, and the more-accurate (re: # of people who dl’d a full book) total downloads of the final episodes of each Podiobook, as: eBook/total-PB/final-PB

• Lost and Not Found: 65 / 1342 / 61
• Dragons’ Truth: 133 / 934 / 102
• Forget What You Can’t Remember: 102 / 3032 / 90
• Untrue Tales… Book One: 91 / 3771 / 332
• Untrue Tales… Book Two: 89 / 3493 / 247
• Untrue Tales… Book Three: 93 / 1841 / 159
• Cheating, Death: 2 / 3176 / 229
• Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 0 / 909 / 89
• Total for all titles: 575 / 17,589 / 1,220
• Total YTD: 2,595 / 109,990 / 7,800
• Total all-time: 11,017 / 290,091 / 18,919

What this looks like, in case you didn’t just look at April’s numbers, is a slight drop in dl rates of most of the Podiobooks and a slight increase in most of the dl rates of the eBooks. The Untrue Tales… Book One & Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut Podiobooks held steady, and the Lost and Not Found eBook dropped off. I can guess the latter is because the Director’s Cut is quite visible on modernevil.com, and is new on Podiobooks.com. It also looks like I’ve probably (in the last couple days) passed the 30,000 downloads point (across eBooks & “finished” Podiobooks, for 8+ distinct books), which is a nice-looking round number. I’ll probably also pass 300,000 Podiobooks episodes downloaded some time this month. Not anywhere near Scott Sigler’s numbers, or Nathan Lowell’s, but numbers I’m pretty happy with.

I have a new Podiobook launching in a couple of days; the short story collection More Lost Memories, which has been out a year and a half in paperback and all but one story of which has already run on the Modern Evil Podcast. It’ll run for the next couple of months and then I’ll start running the audio version of Time, emiT, and Time Again there. (TeaTA begins on MEPod in 3 weeks.) Each new Podiobook means the “Total all-time” numbers just go up faster and faster, both simply because there are more episodes to be downloaded, but also because (generally) people who try one are likely to try all the others, and the more they like them the more likely they are to share them.

Moving on to actual sales: First, you already know about the great success I had with my first attempt at a Kickstarter fundraiser. The fundraiser ended (and the pledges were transfered to me) on May 15th. The big pledge is $500 and I’m counting it as art sales (since the $500 reward level included ‘everything below’ and a single piece of original art, and the ‘everything below’ reward level was much lower at only $150). I’ve never made $500+ in art sales in a single month. (Even if you want to only count $350 toward art, since the other rewards are all related to the book, I haven’t made $350+ in art sales in a single month since moving back to Phoenix in ’04. (My records for sales in Pine are … effectively non-existent.)) Best art sales month, ever.

My other two backers pledged $15 each for copies of the TeaTA paperback & a chapbook & eBook. That’s $30 for 2 (or six, if you want to count them that way) books.

Also in May (last weekend) was the Phoenix Comicon 2010, at which I was a ‘Small Press’ exhibitor. I had all my books with me, prominently breaking them up into genres (heh) of ‘Science Fiction’, ‘Fantasy’, ‘Horror’, and ‘Poetry’ (in the back corner). I also had the little zombie I’d crocheted, priced at $55, as a sort of mascot to sit next to the stacks of Cheating, Death. The zombie sold Saturday, along with a copy of the book, which was awesome. (The zombie sale counts as art, bring the total art sales for May to $555, by the way.) Here are my total sales (all paperback, except where noted):

• Lost and Not Found: 0 / $0
• Dragons’ Truth: 4 / $49
• Dragons’ Truth MP3 CD: 1 / $13
• Forget What You Can’t Remember: 5 / $70
• More Lost Memories: 0 / $0
• MLM/Pay Attention chapbook: 1 / $2
• Untrue Tales… Book One: 1 / $12
• Untrue Tales… Book Two: 0 / $0
• Untrue Tales… Book Three: 0 / $0
• Untrue Tales… Books 1-3 (combined): 8 / $200
• Cheating, Death: 6 (plus 2 given away, 1 to Wil Wheaton) / $55
• Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 1 / $10
• Total Comicon book sales: 27 / $411

I have never had $411 in book sales in a single month before. Actually, with the sale of another copy of LaNF-DC prior to Comicon, the TeaTA sales, wholesale sales of 3 books (2 Untrue Tales… Books 1-3 (combined) & 1 Cheating, Death; $14.82 total net) and eBook sales, my total book sales for the month were $468.10. Best book sales month, ever, and it compares pretty favorably with the total book sales I reported on this blog for the whole of 2009 ($503.39). I suppose I’d better sign up for a table at the 2011 Phoenix Comicon.

Two very successful projects came to fruition in May, and they pretty fairly secure profitability for Modern Evil Press for the remainder of the year, barring unforeseen expenses (or, if/when I return to the Art Walk this Fall, even worse sales than before). More importantly, they give me hope for the ongoing financial viability of Modern Evil Press. Thirty-four books doesn’t come close to the sales volume most other authors and publishers would consider “successful” for a month’s work. It does exceed the goal I set last time I bothered trying to set a sales goal; that if I could sell at least one thing per day, on average, Modern Evil Press would be financially viable, and more than successful. Since I’m not planning on doing any in-person sales for the next 3-4 months, I expect much lower sales numbers for a while. Still, I believe I’m on the right track, and things are looking good.

Here are the eBook and Podiobook download numbers (including above eBooks estimates), as usual giving the total of eBook downloads, the total of Podiobook downloads, and the more-accurate (re: # of people who dl’d a full book) total downloads of the final episodes of each Podiobook, as: eBook/total-PB/final-PB

• Lost and Not Found: 81 / 1488 / 71
• Dragons’ Truth: 90 / 1149 / 111
• Forget What You Can’t Remember: 96 / 3029 / 90
• Untrue Tales… Book One: 69 / 3961 / 354
• Untrue Tales… Book Two: 60 / 4241 / 327
• Untrue Tales… Book Three: 70 / 2320 / 214
• Cheating, Death: 2 / 4042 / 304
• Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 0 / 806 / 97
• Total for all titles: 468 / 20,230 / 1471
• Total YTD: 2020 / 92,401 / 6580
• Total all-time: 10,442 / 272,502 / 17,699

Starting late in the month, I put a code to download Cheating, Death for free from Smashwords on its eBook page at modernevil.com – for my other books, I’ve downloaded or created the various free versions of the eBook and put them right on the page, which is where the above download numbers come from; this is an experiment to see if people will go through the extra couple of steps to get the book from Smashwords for free. So far: no. None. Maybe next month. LaNF:DC eBook is still pay-only.