This, as you may imagine, is frustrating to me. Worse still is that, apparently, the professional web developers moved past that sort of thing, too, and have moved on to the next thing. And the next, and the next, in so many areas. I follow a few design-related blogs (via Google Reader / RSS, which many people have “moved on from”, as well) and when I’ve recently tried to read articles about things which interested me, I’ve found designers are assuming everyone understands and uses techniques I didn’t know existed or worked, such as gzipping most of the files which make up their website, or using (apparently linux-only?) tools to further (somehow losslessly) compress their JPEGs, to get everything just that little bit smaller. Part of what I was looking into was how to make my sites look better on my new iPad (love that retina display, don’t love half of everything on the web looking pixelated and weird) – how to serve even larger image files… and the articles all assumed a bunch of things I had never heard of.

Tonight I was reading further into some of the things I’ve missed out on, in some cases following concepts backward through three or four years of their history/evolution to be able to reach a point of grasping what I’ve missed. Responsive web design being the new/old/standard that the hip web designers swear by, but it being based on flexible grid design, which seems pretty straightforward to me except I apparently stopped paying attention to web design before fixed grid design took hold in everyone’s minds, so it’s like an iteration of an improvement of a design foundation I’d never learned or used. Or even just things like being aware Typekit exists, or that the whole “serving fonts to webpages” and “doing web typography” issues apparently got pretty-much solved. I’ve never used jQuery, wouldn’t know how (I guess it’s a JS library?), but am aware that “good” web developers are all trying to minimize their use of JS altogether and now joke amicably about the “old days” when they used jQuery, usually while explaining their new solution/standard in terms which only make sense to people who used jQuery daily for years – and often while offering “a workaround for older browsers, which is built on jQuery”.

I think I’m going to need more study. I don’t know CSS3, HTML5, et cetera, et cetera. I don’t know modern web best practices. More and more, I want to redesign modernevil.com, overhaul the back-end (which is currently based on WordPress, and will probably eventually be based on WordPress plus a custom plugin that … I guess I’ve got to figure out how to write), add some functionality to it… I don’t really want to be a web designer/developer. That might be the other part of why I dropped out of the field (though good money is on depression, oppression, and a general creative malaise), that I’d realized I oughtn’t waste my time doing work I didn’t want to be doing – except it’s like a lot of the rest of the work I do, these days, where I want the work to be done, and to be done to exacting specifications, and certainly can’t afford to pay an appropriately skilled web artist to do it for me, so I’d better put my nose to the grindstone and figure out how to make it work. If I want something done right (or really, done at all), I’ve generally got to do it myself.

So, added to the list of things to do, now, is re-immerse myself in modern web development and design. Learn what I need to know to catch up, and re-design all my sites to make use of my new knowledge – and then keep them up to date, rather than allowing them to fall further and further behind. For example: With a little dedication and application of effort (and of focus, which I’ve been having some difficulty maintaining, in my depression) I should soon also learn how to use Amazon’s cloud servers, and then use them to compete directly with Amazon, to sell my own eBooks and audiobooks directly. Possibly even before I learn enough to do a thorough front-end redesign.

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.

As for the idea that Amazon moving to a web-based solution will be a cunning strategy to hurt Apple – that’s what Apple asked everyone to do in the first place! Don’t you recall, the iPhone launched without an app store? Apple told developers “Safari is a modern, standards-compliant browser. Web apps can be just as good as native apps. Go build web apps.” Developers didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want to develop for the web, and Apple developed an SDK and the App Store – putting a price on the ability to use it. That was always the bargain: Develop a web app and maintain complete control, or, if you want to develop a native app we’ll take 30% of everything and we’ll be the ones in control.

Since that day, I’ve been hearing people complaining that Apple and the iPhone (and now iPad) are “closed” systems, “walled gardens,” et cetera, but that bargain has never gone away and I don’t expect it ever will. If you want control, and if you don’t want to give Apple 30% of everything, you’re free to build a web app. If you want to be in Apple’s App Store, you have to follow Apple’s rules and give them their cut. It’s not “closed Apple” vs. “open Android” – it’s (at least) a three way race between “closed Apple,” “a-little-less-closed Android,” and the “open web.” Did you notice that Android phones have pretty good web browsers, too? So weird. Too bad you’ve created artificial adversity where none needs exist.

Oh, and I think this little kerfuffle between Apple and Sony (& perhaps Amazon, B&N, et cetera) will be little more than a speed bump. The apps won’t go away, the retailers won’t move (entirely) to web apps, and Apple will get a cut of every single sale, just like they always told developers they were due. Don’t be surprised if Amazon adds a clause to their kindle-sales TOS to the effect of “that 70% cut we’ve been giving you? It also doesn’t apply when eBooks are purchased through 3rd Party sales channels. You get the old 35%, just like on global sales.” Prices stay the same, Amazon and Apple laugh all the way to the bank. Business will go on, and you’ll all forget this before the next time you can blow something Apple does out of proportion with reality.

Prior to this week, one of the versions/formats my eBooks were available in on modernevil.com (for the books which were available there) was HTML. It was basically just the .rtf dumped into a single huge web page. I didn’t do anything to it to make it more web-readable or web-friendly or whatever you want to call it. I’m not doing weblit. I author the book/story/whatever first, edit it / et cetera, and then I share it with the public. Fully formed. Eight of my eleven novels (including all 6 Untrue Tales… books) don’t even have chapters, and in those few with chapters, they aren’t as short as people expect web pages to be. The only chapter in Dragons’ Truth (a YA book) short enough to be a single web page has always felt like an anomaly. Even the chapters of Forget What You Can’t Remember are almost all ~2500 words (though some of them even further sub-divided), which is about 5 times too long for a single web page (for most people – obviously not me on this blog!). How to make my books easily readable online is a bit of a conundrum, as far as I’m concerned. So I never really tried to do it right, myself.

This addendum to my main post about my eBooks in 2011 is to say that this year I’m thinking about (practically planning, now) going to the effort of putting together proper HTML versions of all my books. I’m only in the planning stages right now (though could be moving forward with this as soon as this week, depending on how sleep and other projects go; I’m also planning on beginning recording of the Untrue Tales… Book Five audiobook this week, but that work requires very specific circumstances) but at this point I’m thinking I need to do a separate WordPress installation for each book, and divide the book up into bite-size/page-size chunks (250 words? 500? same as the paperbacks?) which will each be their own WP post, and possibly use Commentpress or digress.it to enable per-paragraph commenting throughout all my books.

I’m also thinking about deep linking the books one to another, and possibly to outside resources. If I go with the Commentpress/digress.it installs, I can add a link in the comments on a paragraph, rather than in the text itself, which feels better to me – especially in the Lost and Not Found universe of books, I feel that the books are really more of a conversation with one another than directly linked, and parallel rather than serial. With the books so granular, connecting subtle repetitions of a phrase or idea, or even connecting obvious things like the short stories in More Lost Memories with the specific scenes and characters they’re spawned from, would be relatively straightforward.

In fact, building a comprehensive, nearly-chronological version of all the stories in the Lost and Not Found universe (something I’ve been toying with putting together for a limited-edition hardback release, or an expensive eBook, for fans) would be relatively easy as well, once I’ve got everything chunked like that.

I look forward to playing with my options, getting a feel for what works, and seeing where the possibilities take me. Not to another whole-book-dump-single-HTML-file for each book, though. That was silly/terrible. I’m not sure whether the 13% of downloads of the .html versions of the eBooks were ever actually read, or just seen as awful and abandoned for something readable. Hopefully this year I’ll develop a working alternative. Ooh: and once I have that settled, I’d like to use something like the setup I’ve described here to pseudo-live-write my books. Would you be interested in reading them (and commenting on them, pointing out errors, questioning the story/characters/pronouns, as I write them, et cetera) in a setup like that? Heck, would you be interested in reading my existing books in a setup like that?

Here are the eBook and Podiobook download numbers for the full Year-To-Date, 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: 498 / 11,843 / 550
• Dragons’ Truth: 755 / 8,785 / 965
• Forget What You Can’t Remember: 648 / 28,446 / 828
• More Lost Memories: 2 / 1,909 / n/a
• *MLM/individual stories: 32 (24: Pay Attention)
• Untrue Tales… Book One: 569 / 23,594 / 2,040
• Untrue Tales… Book Two: 480 / 25,962 / 2,009
• Untrue Tales… Book Three: 539 / 14,053 / 1,278
• Cheating, Death: 13 / 31,773 / 2,340
• Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 1 / 2,526 / 297
• Time, emiT, and Time Again: 1 / n/a
• *TeaTA/individual stories: 1
• Total for all titles: 3,537 / 148,891 / 10,307
• Total, all time: 11,959 / 328,992 / 21,426

The two items marked with a * are for the short stories, from my two short story collections, which I have released as individual eBooks for $0.99-$1.99. Though they are also available on the podcasts, I have chosen to only count their audio downloads as part of the whole collections. Also, More Lost Memories wasn’t entirely available on Podiobooks.com until today, so there are no ‘finished’ numbers available yet. Time, emiT, and Time Again was available as an eBook in July, but does not start on Podiobooks.com until August 9th.

Overall, these numbers look good. Podiobooks downloads have been dropping all year, but are already passing last year’s numbers (with 5 months & a couple books to go in 2010). eBooks numbers are holding reasonably steady and have also just passed 2009′s totals – they’re not up to where eBook downloads were in 2008, but it’s still about 75-100 copies of each book available for free on modernevil.com, every month. The only books without huge download numbers are the ones I haven’t posted directly to modernevil.com – and even Cheating, Death (which only requires you to download from Smashwords to get the free eBook) has only had about 8 free downloads all year.

On the money side, I’m doing reasonably well. My goal for this year, financially, is to have Modern Evil Press operating at a profit. Any profit. I’ve reported a loss on my taxes the last two years, and would prefer not to have to deal with reporting a loss for a third year in a row. Due to a slight miscalculation or two, I’m currently about $20 in the red, year-to-date. Which is pretty close to a profit. If I sell a few copies of my new book, I’ll be there. If I decide to participate in the Art Walk again this fall, I just need to ensure I make more money than it costs to show. ((I haven’t been working on art at all, in months, so maybe I’ll just bring books. Or maybe I’ll start working on art again this month. Who knows?))

On a related note, I’ve just gone through modernevil.com and updated all the ‘Add to cart’ buttons with a new model for sales, based on the idea of ‘pay what you can’. I’ve always believed that this was the model I was trying to use, but I have the feeling people didn’t see it very clearly on the site, so I’ve tried to make it more clear. If you like my work and want to support its further creation, you can do things like buy the original art I’ve created for some of the covers (or in the case of my poetry journals, the original hand-written journals themselves), becoming a patron of the arts by spending hundreds of dollars. For $25 each (or $50 for the Untrue Tales… Books 1-3 combined edition), you can buy a signed paperback copy of any of my books; this flat rate is still based on the idea that you would like to offer your patronage, but that perhaps your budget cannot afford to invest $100-$500 right now. If that’s out of your price range, rather than personally selling my unsigned paperbacks and eBooks at list price, I’ve simply linked to several online stores where you can order them for list or less, typically from $5-$14. Then, of course, I also make my eBooks and audiobooks available for free, creating a spectrum from full patronage at one end to the ability to try my work for free at the other end, encouraging people to ‘pay what they can’ on nearly every page of the site.  Your feedback/comments/suggestions on this change are welcome/encouraged.

My experience so far: it looks mostly the same, except for all the things that are broken. It pretty-much broke all my plugins, one way or another, including Disqus comments. (Which I can have enabled, and then the WP admin pages break, or I can disable it… which I was thinking of doing anyway… possibly turning comments off altogether, since they certainly don’t happen around here the way they do on “real blogs”) Then, since I’d made quite a few custom changes to my theme to work with the various plugins, the site broke. I glanced at currently-popular free WP themes for a couple minutes, then decided to use the exciting, “new” default theme. Several features of which also appear to be broken.

I’ll probably tweak it a bit, and if you have suggestions please feel free to comment… comments ought to be working correctly… but yeah, that’s why it looks different. WP 3.0.

• Lost and Not Found: 74 eBooks, 85/1,695 Podiobooks
• Dragons’ Truth: 96 eBooks, 150/1,393 Podiobooks
• Forget What You Can’t Remember: 84 eBooks, 95/3,110 Podiobooks
• Untrue Tales… Book One: 81 eBooks, 292/3,318 Podiobooks
• Untrue Tales… Book Two: 70 eBooks, 268/3,529 Podiobooks
• Untrue Tales… Book Three: 70 eBooks, 152/1,581 Podiobooks
• Cheating, Death: 0 eBooks, 293/4,253 Podiobooks
• Total FREE downloads: 475 eBooks, 1,335/18,879 Podiobooks

Note that Cheating, Death is not currently available as a free eBook. I’ll change that, soon, I think. Now paid digital downloads. I had zero smashwords sales in March.

• Dragons’ Truth: 1 kindle
• Cheating, Death: 1 kindle
• More Lost Memories, individual stories: 3 kindle
• Total paid eBooks: 5 downloads, $5.08 net

I also sold a few paper books (& some art) in March, at the First Friday Art Walk & wholesale via LSI:

• Worth 1k — Volume 2: 2 copies by hand
• Second Thoughts chapbook: 1 copy by hand
• Cheating, Death: 1 copy wholesale
• Art: 1 painting, 1 mini-painting, 1 crocheted item
• Total (paper) book sales: 4 books, $24.44 net
• Total art sales: 3 works of art, $125 net

The order I made today for paperback copies of Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut cost about $145. (ie: everything I just earned) This is intentional; even if they don’t sell right away, they’re already covered by income I’ve already earned. But hopefully they’ll sell, too.

So, for Quarter One of 2010, we have:

• 1,535 free eBook dl’s, 17 paid eBook dl’s, for $22.51 net
• 5,109 dl’s of final Podiobook episodes, 72,171 total episodes dl’d
• Podiobooks donations for Q1 were $29.97, my cut was $22.48.
• 4 paperbacks & 8 chapbooks by hand, 3 paperbacks wholesale, for $57.07
• 1 painting, 5 mini-paintings, & 1 crocheted item sold, for $170
• Gross income for Q1: $272.06

That’s about 4 cents per free download of one of my books, by the way, assuming you include the art income. (w/o art income, it’s about 1.5 cents per copy)

I’ve taken on a job
I am both
     loathe to do &
     wish were already done,
a job I am more than capable of
lowering myself
     and my standards
     and my
            productivity on
         my own work
to accomplish.
To do what I’ve been avoiding
   Working for someone else
   Building a generic
              corporate
              clone of a site
   Learning all that e-commerce
                     bullshit
   Sitting through meeting
             after meeting
             after meeting about it
   Waiting for groupthink
All in the midst of my own crippling
depression.
All instead of anything I’m interested in.
 (If I were to give the opposite of
  an Ignite Presentation
   (Talk about your passion!)
  I might talk for five minutes about
  modern web development.)
Troubleshooting the irrational behaviour of someone else’s CSS
/* Professionally-developed CSS */
frustrates.
I take long breaks.
I’m confident that with 8 good hours
I could show more results than their
last year’s work.
But there are so few
                     good hours
right now I’ll be lucky
to get 8 good hours all week.

I’ve taken on a job.
I wish someone else would.

 
—Teel McClanahan III

To begin, a snapshot of right now. As of 1/1/2010, I have 13 titles in some form of publication or other. 5 standalone novels, 2 poetry journals, 2 short story collections, 3 books in the Untrue Tales… series and a single edition containing those 3 books. One of the novels (the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut) is currently only available as an eBook. One of the short story collections (Time, emiT, and Time Again) isn’t yet finished, but I’ve released one of the short stories that will be contained in it as a standalone chapbook.  The 3 individual Untrue Tales… books aren’t technically “in print”, though I have a few copies, printed by Cafepress & sans ISBN. I am not counting The Vintage Collection, though it is another book I’ve put together, had printed, and sold at one time. (I plan to edit and re-release it at a later date.) Seven of my books are available as podcast audiobooks, and all but the poetry is available as eBooks.

Now. What would you like first, sales numbers, or free download numbers?  Sales numbers you say? Alright, free downloads it is! Early in 2008 I began putting my books online as free PDFs & txt files, and in April of 2008 (shortly after I returned to life as a full-time creative) I put all my novels (Lost and Not Found, Dragons’ Truth, and Untrue Tales… Book One, Book Two, and Book Three) as free eBooks in 7 different formats (PDF, galley-style PDF, txt, rtf, html, mobi, & epub) on modernevil.com, and made them available for sale on Amazon’s kindle. Here are 2008‘s download numbers:

• Lost and Not Found – 1079 downloads, including 1 paid copy
• Dragons’ Truth – 961 downloads, including 3 paid copies
• Untrue Tales… Book 1 – 948 downloads, including 2 paid copies
• Untrue Tales… Book 2 – 964 downloads, including 1 paid copy
• Untrue Tales… Book 3 – 897 downloads, including 1 paid copy
• Total eBook downloads in 2008: 4849
• Total paid eBook downloads in 2008: 8
• Total direct revenue from eBooks in 2008: $22.71

Also in 2008, I began podcasting audio versions of my books. In June 2008 I released Dragons’ Truth all at once, and starting in September 2008 I began podcasting Lost and Not Found (finishing in December 2008). Tracking the # of people who have downloaded the podcast audiobooks is more tricky than eBooks, since each book is broken into many files. I’ve gathered data about how many people have downloaded the first episode of each book, as well as the number who have downloaded the last episode of each book. I figure counting downloads of the final episode is a fairly conservative estimate of downloads. Here are the numbers for all of 2008:

• Dragons’ Truth – 2334 downloads of first, 1271 downloads of last, $9.99 donated
• Lost and Not Found – 434 downloads of first, 80 downloads of last
• Total “finished” downloads of audiobooks in 2008: 1351
• Total direct income from podcast audiobooks (after Podiobooks’ cut) for 2008: $7.49

On 1/1/2009, I published two new books, Forget What You Can’t Remember and More Lost Memories. I began podcasting Forget What You Can’t Remember on the same day. It was complete by April, and I started Untrue Tales… Book One the next week. Book One was complete in June, Book Two ran from July to September, and Book Three ran from September to November. In September/October I wrote a new novel, Cheating, Death, publishing it as an eBook for sale while I was still writing it. Cheating, Death was in print by 10/31 and began podcasting on Friday, 11/13/09 (finishing 12/25/09). For the eBooks, I decided to treat Forget What You Can’t Remember like my other novels, and made it available as a free eBook in 9 formats (I added .lrf & .pdb) and for sale on Amazon’s kindle. Starting in January I also began putting my eBooks up for sale on Smashwords.com, beginning with Forget What You Can’t Remember. Then I decided to make More Lost Memories free only by direct request, and for sale (as a whole & with 7 of its 9 stories available individually for $0.99 each) on kindle and at Smashwords. When Cheating, Death came out, I put it up for sale and again said I’d give a free copy of the eBook to anyone who asked. (So far, only book bloggers have asked, and I sent quite a few of them free paper copies as well.) At the end of November I threw together the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut and put it up for sale as an eBook on the kindle and at Smashwords. Here are the numbers for all of 2009‘s eBook downloads, with for-pay-only titles in italics:

• Lost and Not Found – 506 downloads, 5 of them paid
• Dragons’ Truth – 609 downloads, 7 of them paid
• Forget What You Can’t Remember – 735 downloads, 13 of them paid
• Untrue Tales… Book One – 587 downloads, 4 of them paid
• Untrue Tales… Book Two – 562 downloads, 3 of them paid
• Untrue Tales… Book Three – 553 downloads, 1 of them paid
• Cheating, Death – 8 downloads
• More Lost Memories – 13 downloads, 7 of them the individual stories
• Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut – 0 downloads
• Total eBook downloads in 2009: 3573
• Total paid eBook downloads in 2009: 54
• Total direct revenue from eBooks in 2009: $65.17

And here are 2009‘s podcast/audiobook download numbers:

• Dragons’ Truth – 3231 downloads of first, 1616 downloads of last
• Lost and Not Found – 1523 downloads of first, 926 downloads of last
• Forget What You Can’t Remember – 2711 downloads of first, 1150 downloads of last
• Untrue Tales… Book One – 5006 downloads of first, 2865 downloads of last, $10 donated
• Untrue Tales… Book Two – 5173 downloads of first, 1843 downloads of last, $10 donated
• Untrue Tales… Book Three – 1890 downloads of first, 1002 downloads of last
• Cheating, Death – 1786 downloads of first, 366 downloads of last
• Total “finished” downloads of audiobooks in 2009: 9768
• Total direct income from podcast audiobooks (after Podiobooks’ cut) for 2009: $15

Of note, the 366 downloads of the final episode of Cheating, Death actually occurred in a period of 4 days (I put it on my feed on Christmas, but it wasn’t on Podiobooks.com until the 28th). Speaking of my feed… I don’t have nearly as good of statistics for the Modern Evil Podcast as I do for the Podiobooks.com versions of my books. PodPress gives me total downloads of each file I put in the feed, and tracks how many are dl’d via the feed, direct from the site, and played through the flash-based player embedded in each post, but unless I’d been copying them out at the end of each month/year… I don’t know any way to get good breakdowns. Not to mention the number of downloads of each episode of MEPod vary wildly from one to the next. I’ve been putting all my novels into the feed, as well as quite a bit of poetry and some short fiction. Yet even when I put an entire novel up, one chapter after another uninterrupted, the numbers don’t make sense; most of my novels show more people downloaded the final chapter/episode than any other in the book. There are patterns like … the first few and last couple chapters of each book get downloaded several times more times than the others, even in the “feed” – which would mean someone (a lot of someones, actually – hundreds in some cases) had subscribed to the podcast & then selectively downloaded only a few parts of each book.

As far as numbers go, the Modern Evil Podcast seems to run at around …. 30 regular subscribers (ie: consistent & immediate feed downloads) but individual episodes tend to get downloaded… around one to two hundred times each… over time. With wild variations, as stated. Overall I might estimate that the Modern Evil Podcast has contributed an additional … perhaps 1000 finished podcast audiobook downloads to my total… including both 2008 & 2009 numbers together, since PodPress doesn’t break them out. But enough of the free download counts, let us move on to the money:

Beginning, again, with 2008, when I had 2 standalone novels, 2 poetry collections, and the 3 Untrue Tales… books plus the collected edition, for all of 2008 I sold:

• Lost and Not Found – 10 paperbacks by hand, 1 eBook: 11 copies for $143.11
• Dragons’ Truth – 3 paperbacks by hand, 3 eBooks, 1 giveaway: 7 copies for $47.74
• Untrue Tales Books 1-3 combined – 2 paperbacks by hand: 2 copies for $49.99
• Untrue Tales… Book One – 2 paperbacks by hand, 2 eBooks, 1 giveaway: 5 copies for $27.40
• Untrue Tales… Book Two – 1 paperback by hand, 1 eBook: 2 copies for $14.70
• Untrue Tales… Book Three – 1 eBook: 1 copy for $2.70
• Worth 1k — Volume 1 – 1 paperback by hand: 1 copy for $9.99
• Worth 1k — Volume 2 – 2 paperbacks by hand: 2 copies for $19.99
• Total copies sold of all titles: 31
• Total income from book sales in 2008: $315.62
• Paintings sold in 2008: 13 paintings & 5 mini-paintings: 18 original works of art for $1384
• Total from sales of books + art combined in 2008: $1699.62

In 2009 I added 2 novels, a short story collection, and some chapbooks; for all of 2009 I sold:

• Lost and Not Found – 4 paperbacks by hand, 3 paperbacks wholesale, 2 eBooks, 3 giveaways: 12 copies for $72.43
• Dragons’ Truth – 1 paperback by hand, 1 audiobook on CD by hand, 4 eBooks, 4 giveaways: 10 copies for $42.60
• Forget What You Can’t Remember – 9 paperbacks by hand, 8 paperbacks wholesale, 9 eBooks, 18 giveaways: 44 copies for $153.98
• Untrue Tales Books 1-3 combines – 0 copies for $0
• Untrue Tales… Book One – 4 eBooks: 4 copies for $5.86
• Untrue Tales… Book Two – 3 eBooks: 3 copies for 3.23
• Untrue Tales… Book Three – 1 eBook: 1 copy for $0.53
• Cheating, Death – 6 paperbacks by hand, 6 paperbacks wholesale, 4 eBooks, 15 giveaways: 31 copies for $83.40
• More Lost Memories (full) – 8 paperbacks by hand, 5 paperbacks wholesale, 3 eBooks, 8 giveaways: 24 copies for $110.82
• More Lost Memories (individual stories) – 5 chapbooks by hand, 6 eBooks: 11 copies for $12.54
• Time, emiT, and Time Again (individual stories) – 4 chapbooks by hand: 4 copies for $8.00
• Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut – 0 copies for $0
• Worth 1k — Volume 1 – 1 paperback by hand: 1 copy for $10.00
• Worth 1k — Volume 2 – 0 copies for $0
• Total copies sold of all titles in 2009: 145
• Total income from book sales in 2009: $503.39
• Paintings sold in 2009: 10 paintings & 19 mini-paintings: 29 original works of art for $1074
• Total from sales of books + art combined in 2009: $1577.39

Not very much, is it?  I also sold a few hand-screen-printed T-Shirts in 2009… but… yeah. So, a few notes: This summer for almost 3 months I reduced the prices of all my eBooks below $2 retail, to see whether volume would increase. Volume of sales did NOT increase. But that’s why, for example, I only earned $0.53 from Untrue Tales… Book Three in 2009; I earned 35% of $1.50. Also, I’ve included giveaway copies here because they’re copies that should have earned money.  I actually have another set of figures that examines the profitability of each individual title (mostly not, so far), but I’ve already put too many numbers into this post. Suffice it to say that for my in-print titles it costs me $200-$375 to get a book set up & to make an initial order of paperback copies (not counting the value of my time at all) and my highest-grossing book to date (Lost and Not Found) has only earned $218.36.  That examination is for another post, at another time.

In fact, I think I’ll save any thoughts/conclusions/analyses of these numbers for a possible future post, as well.  For right now, this is it.

Let me try to put the problem in terms of its scale:

• A dedicated reader (of which there are few) will probably read around 3000 books in their entire life.  (1 book a week for 60 years is 3120 books… some people may read faster or live longer, but not by much.)
• A more average reader will probably read around 1000 books in their lifetime.  (1 book a month for 60 years is only 720 books…)
• Many adults (perhaps as much as 40% of literate adults) will read less than 1 book a year, and fewer than 50 books in their life.
• In the US in 2008 over 75,000 publishers published over half a million new books, averaging over 1500 new titles per day, every day.

To restate:  There are more new books being published every day than the average reader will read in their entire life.

The tough question that isn’t being addressed, the unsolved problem, doesn’t have to do with how much eBooks should cost, what sort of devices we’ll read eBooks on, or what format readers prefer.  It’s a problem of scale.  Kirkus is shutting down, which is sad, but they only reviewed about 5000 new titles per year – less than 1% of 2008′s titles and less than 2% of new titles in 2006 & earlier.  No one knows how to review all the books, or even most of the books.

The number of new books being created is only growing.  (38% year-over-year growth in number of titles since 2006 – I’m waiting to see if 2009 actually puts new titles in the 750k range!)  It’s easier and easier for more and more people to publish books, between eBooks and POD technology, and it’s only going to become easier and cheaper as time goes on.  There was some backlash recently when someone over at scribd suggested that we’d be better off with three million books instead of 300,000 -and I assume he meant three million new books per year- and a lot of book bloggers suggested that he was off-base, and that current output was already too big.  But we’re already on track for that.  I don’t know global numbers (is it possible the global publishing output is already 5x-10x the size of the US publishing output?), but I fully expect new-books-publishing in all forms to surpass 3 million titles per year within 5 years (10 on the outside).

When more new books are being published every three to four hours than the average reader will read in their entire lifetime, how do you choose what to read?  How does an author find an audience?  How does a publisher make a profit?  How does a bookstore compete with the internet / sell eBooks / et cetera?

It isn’t just old-publishing (hardbacks at $30, only as many books as fit on physical shelves) versus new-media (eBooks <$10, infinite shelving on the internet’s virtual shelves), it’s a problem of the amount of reading material dwarfing what anyone could ever read.  In the past, in the old model, this was “solved” by books going out-of-print – only the current season’s books were readily available, and anything more than a year or two old was generally unavailable.  Some books were kept in print on publishers’ back lists, but only a few from any given year.  This is why the fact that the number of books that have ever been published (Google estimates it around 100 million titles by the year 2000), though already impossible for any one person to consume or really consider, hasn’t previously appeared to be a problem.  Now there are groups trying to make all those books available to everyone all at once.  And forces at work that will increase the total by a larger and larger fraction every year.

Which of those hundred million books ought I to read?  Which of the three million new books published (in the US alone) in this decade ought I to read?  Solve that problem, and all the rest of publishing’s “problems” will seem easily resolved.

So I took some time on Monday and put together a quick “Director’s Cut” that had all the love story and fantasy adventure that had ended up being the last third of Lost and Not Found, cut out the few scenes that had connected it further to the confusing-and-irrelevant characters-who-get-found-and-forgotten, and re-attached the part of the story that goes to Skythia (released earlier this year as a short story in More Lost Memories). I wrote a few words about why I was creating the Director’s Cut, put them up on modernevil.com. I wrote a quick marketing summary so I could put the book up for sale as an eBook on Smashwords. Whoosh, from frustration at people misunderstanding my book to publishing a version of the book that those frustrated people would hate outright, in the space of an afternoon.

Yesterday I sketched for a while & then painted an image for the cover.  I’ve been thinking about doing this with other books (have you seen the covers of More Lost Memories and Cheating, Death?) and I’ve finally decided to do it with the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: I’ve put the painting I did for the cover art up for sale at a price that will allow me to fund a paperback release of the book. If you buy the art, I’ll make the book available on paper. ((Alternatively, if I can get, say, 25 people to pre-order a paper copy, I’ll make the book available on paper.)) Otherwise, it’s going to remain available only in formats that cost me nothing to make available: eBook (and probably audiobook, later this year, especially since I’ve already recorded most of it).

I’m thinking of trying this with some of my future books:  Release them as an eBook and if 1) enough eBook copies sell or 2) the original painting for the cover sells or 3) enough people are willing to pre-order then I’ll put out a print edition.  Because realistically, right now, I’m not even breaking even on the publishing costs.  I sell too-few copies.  I’m not saying this is permanent/final, especially since I sell a lot more paper copies by hand (and make more money per copy) than I sell eBooks, but I figure it’s worth a try.  It’s my publishing company, I can do what I want, right?  The only rules to follow are my own.

So, here’s the brief marketing summary I wrote for Smashwords:

A non-traditional story; no real conflict, no struggle, no antagonist, and -some would say- no plot. A love story of fantastic proportions, of two people who realize that the less-than-comfortable normalcy they’d felt responsible to is the only thing keeping them from achieving true bliss. With a faerie, titans, a two-headed monster, a flying city, amazing museums, unusual time mechanics, & more.

And here’s the page-or-so I wrote “About the Director’s Cut”:

Lost and Not Found was the first look at the storybook universe expanded upon in Forget What You Can’t Remember, More Lost Memories, and Cheating, Death. This “Director’s Cut” of Lost and Not Found comes closer to my original intent, and to the original first draft of my 2002 NaNoWriMo novel, originally released in limited edition under the title Forlorn. Forlorn was written in the final 8 days of November, after a similar ordeal to the fictional one presented in Lost and Not Found.

In response to the criticism and feedback from a very vocal and adamant subset of the people who read Forlorn, and based on advise about what “all” fiction “needs” I spent the following year trying to find ways to give the story I’d written in Forlorn things like conflict, character arcs, and a three-act structure. I ended up cutting Skythia out completely, and writing a significant amount about the writer’s life and the journey toward the heart of the story, which I’ve always believed starts with the word ‘Forlorn.’

I released the First Edition of that expanded, “fixed” book as Lost and Not Found in 2004, and I’ve been receiving two kinds of feedback from readers in the five years since then: One group of people liked the book right up until the word ‘Forlorn.’ This group thinks the rest of the book is a “wrong turn”, and they were disappointed by it. The other group of people typically don’t even remember what happened in the book before the word ‘Forlorn.’ They understood the heart of the story to be the same thing I did, and they loved it.

This “Director’s Cut” of Lost and Not Found is bound to divide readers in the same way, though I expect to a more significant extreme. The people who would have been disappointed by the end of Lost and Not Found will be disappointed by this entire book. The people who would have loved the end of Lost and Not Found will probably love this entire book. And I, increasingly emboldened to do what I want to do with my books and with my publishing company, love the idea of releasing a Director’s Cut of the book, one that I prefer and that I think my true audience will prefer.

In addition, I’ve done a Q&A about Cheating, Death at Blog with Bite.  I think you might enjoy reading it – and if you like horror et cetera, you might like to take a stroll around the site & see some of the other books they’re reviewing and authors they’re interviewing.  They’ve got an interesting dynamic for a book review site, where all the reviewers give their individual takes of the same book – so you get more than one point of view.  (I’m looking forward to seeing what they have to say about mine!)

Remember, if you’re a book blogger who’d like to review Cheating, Death, just let me know and link me to your blog – I’ll be glad to send you a PDF right away.  I might be able to swing another paperback or two (though I’ve already reached the number I’d set aside initially for reviewers) if you ask nicely.  Or, if you prefer to listen to the book, the podcast version starts going out this Friday the 13th, as well.  Look for it on Podiobooks.com and on the Modern Evil Podcast.

Whew.  Done!  Now I just have a whole stack of things to do!  But at least the 1st draft is written!  One of the first things I have to do next is print it out and read it for the first time.  I’ll do this out loud and make notes as I go.  It’s a pretty good way to see if it all works, and whether any sentences need work.  I actually read quite a bit of it out loud as I was working on it; since beginning podcasting all my fiction, I pay a lot more attention to making a good read-aloud book.

Speaking of the podcast:  No voices, for this one, just narration and enough vocal variation to be able to tell any two lines of dialogue apart.  Also, based on a schedule I’d just laid out, I should be able to start this one on the Friday after Untrue Tales… Book Three is complete and then post two chapters a week (one chapter per episode, like FWYCR) from 11/13/09 to 12/25/09.  Because, yeah, I’m going to post the stunning conclusion to the novel on Christmas day. :p

Oh, in addition to writing chapter 13, I’ve also written Appendix Z, included here:

Appendix Z: About the Zombies

Some helpful information about the zombies in this book:

Zombies are slow.

Zombies are stupid.

Zombies do not use tools.

Zombies do not use language.

Zombies do not experience romance.

Zombies are not just old, hungry vampires.

Zombies do not want to exact revenge on the living.

Zombies do not have any magical abilities or super-powers.

Zombies can only be killed by damaging or destroying their brain.

Zombies eat the living, and are attracted to the motion and commotion they make.

Zombies like eating brains, but are not possessed of superhuman strength, so how are they supposed to bite through your skull?

Zombies who did manage to eat the brains of their victims wouldn’t be much of a threat, since they’d prevent the spread of zombie-ism by doing so.

Zombies are created when a human has had fluid contact with a zombie; primarily via saliva transmitted into a bite wound.

Note: Hell is not full, zombies are not a sudden and global phenomenon bringing all unburied dead to life, the dead are not clawing their way out of graves, and this book’s cover is intentionally misleading.

Zombies spread quickly because the living are stupid, too.

I’m posting it here because it’s at the end of the book, which means it isn’t in the free preview.  Which still contains (roughly) the first four chapters of the book.  Have you checked it out, yet?  You should.  The full book’s price is, as promised, at the full eBook price of $4.99 (subject to change) over at Smashwords.  It is currently in its first-draft, unedited state.  Please let me know if you find any problems or errors in it, so I correct them before I send it to press (probably next week).  When it’s corrected, I’ll update the Smashwords copy again, and release it to “Premium Distribution” as well.

Time to go throw it into InDesign, so I have a page count to submit for the PCN request.  I hope you enjoy it.

Go read Cheating, Death now.

Almost done, now.  Chapter 12 went well, I think.  Got it done before lunch, even!  Twitter being almost totally useless may have been a contributing factor; it wasn’t there to distract me or allow me to procrastinate.  I think The Mountain Goats’ The Life of the World To Come has also helped, as I’ve been streaming it continuously from colbertnation.com since some time yesterday, as I write.  May have to buy that one.

One more chapter to go, then I ought to write Appendix Z.  I’d meant to write Appendix Z before starting work on the novel, but … didn’t.  Lucky for me, I already know what I mean by ‘zombie’ for this universe.  Chapter 13 might be a little harder to write, it’s basically just Melvin Spall by himself again, thinking, but I should be able to bang it out before the end of the day.  Then if I get the rest of my sh!t together, I can register an ISBN or 3 for it, apply for a PCN, and work on proofreading it & getting it ready for print.

It took me a little over two weeks two write this one.  There are three weeks left in October. Have to decide whether to try writing another book before NaNoWriMo or not. And whether to do something like this again, posting it as I write it, or to write it “in secret” until it’s done.  A lot of people have said they don’t like reading a book before it’s finished & are waiting to read Cheating, Death.  Well, it’s an experiment.  Maybe that’s the result.  Anyway, time for lunch, then on to the final chapter.

Go read Cheating, Death now.