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.

Only one chapter, again, today.  Still on track to finish the book this week, but it’s slower than I’d expected.  I think most of the resistance I’m running into at this point comes from something I’ve had trouble with for as long as I can recall:  I know the story.  I know the story, so it’s harder to write the story.

When I just sit down and write, when I don’t know what’s coming next or where things are headed or even, in some cases, anything about what I’m going to write at all, it often flows quite freely.  Even with the Untrue Tales… where I know the basic character/story/universe arcs as well as I know my own past, I don’t know how it’s all going to come together on the page, and it comes pretty easily.  With Forget What You Can’t Remember, the most difficult parts to write came after I’d realized how it was all going to come together at the end, because then I had to push these characters through those situations and lead them to be at the right places at the right times … and that’s less like watching the story unfold as it is hammering cold iron into shackles.  And it’s always felt less like creative expression to me and more like work.

I’ve been doing somewhat better with this book than I expected, considering I’d had the bulk of the story outlined months ahead of time.  In fact, the parts of the story I knew the best, toward the beginning, were some of the easiest to write.  This may have had to do with the extent to which they were unconstrained; I knew what had to happen, and I knew what the last scenes of the book would be, but everything in between was unknown.  And until I’d reached the middle of the book, I didn’t even know how long it was going to be or how much more time/space/words/chapters I’d have available to get Melvin and Stacy and Frances to where they needed to be, when they needed to be there.

It was after that I slowed down, I guess.  After I’d more thoroughly outlined the remainder of the book.  After I’d created a bit more of a financial plan for the book.  Something vital happened in chapter 11, and getting everyone and everything in place for it has been a challenge.  Then, writing it was a challenge.  Now I’ve only got two chapters left: Chapter 12, in which I have to get everyone in place for chapter 13, in which Melvin has one more important place in the story to be, and Stacy’s final fate (in this book) is revealed.  I expect the core of chapter 13 to be technically exacting, but easy to write; this is my favorite moment, the brilliant thing that makes me love the book (and that I think will lead many to despise it/me).  I expect the vignette that closes out the novel to be reasonably easy to write and, in case I haven’t mentioned it, I plan to write a new short story to include in a 2nd Edition of More Lost Memories that expands on something that happens in that vignette. ((Actually, I plan to write two more stories for MLM; one based on that something in ch.13, one written from a zombie’s POV in the Denver outbreak.))

Ooh.  I’ve just had an idea about the length of Cheating, Death.  I could add a 2nd appendix which includes all these blog posts.  (I’m already planning on writing an “Appendix Z – About the Zombies” where I detail what the zombies are and are not in my book.  ie: they are dumb and slow, they don’t use tools or language, and they are spread by infection/bites, so the uninfected dead are just dead, and no one is coming up out of graves (Contrary to the cover image. Hah!))  They seem like they might be an interesting/relevant addition to the book.  I’ll look them over and consider it when I get to doing the layout.  Tell me what you think of the idea, in the comments.

Go read Cheating, Death now.

The fact that people didn’t have (or lied about not having) $2 to buy a short story isn’t what struck me the most about the experience that night. Instead it was this: People assumed they were free.

Now, I could have used a color and/or cardstock cover to clarify that they weren’t simply photocopied brochures or flyers, though I suspect there may still have been some people who assumed they were free. A lot of people picked the mini-books up, looked them over, and managed to ignore the price marked on it in 70pt type. Over and over again. They grabbed, they looked, we discussed what it was, and they moved to walk off without even considering that a product at a vendor booth might have a price.

I thought this was bad enough, then when the crowd had thickened a bit later in the evening, it got worse. People started grabbing the mini-books and moving to walk off with them without so much as slowing down or asking what it was they were grabbing. Upon final inventory Saturday morning I confirmed that I’d caught everyone who’d tried to walk off with an unpaid copy, but the experience further illuminated some problems with perception I’ve been having pretty consistently with my business.

Another aspect of the problem that also manifested itself last Friday at the Art Walk comes across in the oft-voiced assumption that the art I’m showing is prints (as opposed to the handmade originals they all actually are). I’d thought this might be related to my relatively-affordable prices, so this month I didn’t post any prices. More people than ever asked whether my art was prints before (or without) asking about pricing.  I know that some of the other artists at the art walk offer both prints and originals, and that some even offer prints exclusively.  I just wonder what is driving this assumption about my work.

In thinking about this problem, it occurred to me that it might have something to do with the precise nature of my recent work, and of how carefully I’ve worked to produce clean, crisp, bold intersections and interactions of color fields.  That some of my recent work is so well-crafted that it appears to have been created in (or cleaned up in) a computer and then printed out.  That the sharp edges I create with my hand-carved tape-stencils are clearly not created with manual brush strokes.  I really don’t know what it is, I can only guess, and these are what I’ve come up with in the last few days.

The other possibility is that people are projecting on to the work what they want from it.  That they don’t believe they can afford original artwork, so project the idea that the art they want is available as an affordable print.  That they can’t afford a couple of bucks for a chapbook, so they project the idea that they’re free.

Other perception problems I’ve had potential customers express: People who have been to my websites (modernevil.com, wretchedcreature.com) and who honestly are not aware that they can buy my books and/or art online (or in some cases, that they’re available for sale at all).  People who have my business card (and/or are looking at one of my websites) and don’t know my address, phone number, or email address to contact me.  (Literally: My name, address, phone number, and email address are on every single page of both of my business sites.)  People who have purchased an handmade original piece of art from me, given it away to someone else, and come back to buy another copy of the same thing for themselves – sincerely believing that what they bought was a mass-produced (or at least multiply produced) item.

I don’t know what to do about these perception problems. Putting “all artwork original” on a sign at my Art Walk booth and on wretchedcreature.com doesn’t seem to have helped to communicate that I’m not merely selling prints.  Offering prints isn’t the answer, either.  Not only do I not like the idea of it, preferring each piece to be handmade and unique, but I’ve also looked into it and found the costs to be prohibitive.  I’d have to at least double the prices on all my art, probably up to double the normal prices (ie: quadruple or more the current prices), or some of the prints would actually be more expensive -just to print- than the prices I’m asking for the originals.  I’ve been thinking of changing my prices, but downward, not upward.  I want my art to be selling briskly more than I want individual pieces to be gaining value.

Feel free to chime in with your own thoughts on these quirks of perception; I mostly just don’t understand them.  Book pricing, perception of value of the printed word, perception of value of chapbooks, these  are a separate discussion I’d meant to get to earlier today, but haven’t yet made time to.  Perhaps tomorrow.  I thought I needed a nap 5 hours ago; by now I need a full night’s sleep.  Good night.

Chapter 8 took me a long time.  Writing it involved a lot of procrastination.  I first sat down to write it at least an hour before midnight, Sept. 29/30 – and immediately spent an hour and a half re-writing the end of chapter 7.  (If you read the version that’s been on Smashwords since 9/29, which ends with Chapter 7, be sure you re-read the end of 7; I turned 2 paragraphs into a 900-word vignette.)  Then I stopped for food, watched a movie, and otherwise procrastinated & stalled, writing only ~600 words in the next 6 hours.  By 10PM on the 30th, having had only 3 hours of sleep, I’d read dozens of articles about Google Wave, started a blog post on Self Publishing, posted an episode of the Modern Evil Podcast, and only managed to get about 1500 words of chapter 8 written.  Then stayed up until almost 3AM on the 1st, adding only a couple of paragraphs in the next 5 hours.

Why was I procrastinating so much?  In a tweet I put it this way: “It feels like I’ve been avoiding an actual argument with someone I care about, rather than an argument between 2 of my characters in a book.” – If that’s not clear, I’m saying that I had become emotionally involved with the characters in my book, and I was avoiding writing the argument in a way similar to how one might attempt to avoid an argument they knew was coming with someone they care about in their real life.  But the argument was important.  I’m not sure I’ve got it right, either; I’ve been avoiding re-reading it in the same way I was avoiding writing it.

October 2nd I didn’t get any writing done.  I tried a couple of times, wrote a sentence or two at most, but it was a struggle.  And then it was the Art Walk, downtown.  And then it was the weekend (spending time with my wife seems to supplant getting work done - I realized recently that this probably represents an unconscious but real prioritization where my wife & my marriage are more important to me than my work/art/writing, which seems like a reasonable prioritization), and then… well, then last night I woke up at 11PM and … after checking my emails and eating breakfast and a watching an episode of Dexter, at around 3AM I was ready to get to work.  Monday morning, as it were.  In about an hour and a half, I wrote the final ~750 words of chapter 8, and updated it on Smashwords.

Ouch, that was a long one.  One hour shy of six days between updates, after having taken only five and a half days to write the first 7 chapters (over half of the book!).  Then, I spent the rest of today writing chapter 9.  Twelve hours is a lot better than six days, though it’s nowhere near as fast as I wrote the first half of the book.  There was plenty of stopping to think instead of writing right through.  It was a struggle.  It even required a change of venue (I wrote the 2nd half of chapter 9 at the library).

But Stacy is back in the picture for a while, now.  It’s a lot easier to write when there’s more than one living person present in the scene.  Heck, even one living person and some specific zombies is easier to write than one person and a nonspecific zombie infestation they’re effectively avoiding significant contact with.  I’m trying to keep this book from getting to be too introspective.  I mean, it’s still introspeculative fiction, but leaning toward action and somewhat away from contemplation.  With Stacy in all the remaining chapters (in one way or another), I’m thinking they’ll flow somewhat smoother.

If sleep goes okay tonight and I’m able to concentrate tomorrow, I should be able to finish at least chapters 10 & 11.  Maybe more, if I’m really on a roll.  Still on track for 13 chapters. Maybe I’ll hit the end of the first draft by Wednesday afternoon.  That would be nice.  If you haven’t started reading, yet, the first four chapters are still free, or you can buy access to the full text (including all future updates and the final eBook edition), currently priced at $2.99.  Remember, the price you pay is all you need to pay, so the sooner you buy in, the better for you.  Feel free to wait & buy the paperback from me, currently estimated to be ~$10.

Go read Cheating, Death now.

Chapter 5 took me a little longer to write than the others.  This has something to do with the weekend; I actually took some time off to play Beatles Rock Band (my birthday gift) and to spend time with my wife.  It also has something to do with money.  F_cking money.

There’s a bit of a story about this story, you see.  I’ve been thinking about writing this book for quite some time.  At some point, many moons ago, I realized what the story was, and who it was about.  I wrote a quick pseudo-outline of the basic story… well, actually I just made some notes about it in the mind-mapping software I’ve been using on my iPhone (Headspace – worth a look; I went from the free version to the paid version, its icon moved to my first page and, this week, to my ‘dock’ – I use it that much), but the character arcs were all there.  Then I spent several months reading popular modern zombie fiction, as ‘research’.  Now I’m actually writing the thing.

After a few relatively easy-to-write chapters, I started looking forward.  Wondering what the next chapter was supposed to encompass.  Thinking about length.  How long a book did I want, how many chapters (at their current, relatively stable, length) would I need for that, and so on.  And it occurred to me this weekend that … the story I have to tell isn’t of traditional “book length.”  Not without a lot of padding and filler and … and I don’t know what.  Actually, going by my outline, my mind map, my initial notes, if I’d just written the rest of it without thinking about structure at all, it’d probably be over in twenty thousand words.  And I’d probably have missed some of the story.  And it would be almost unpublishable as anything but the eBook it already is.

I stressed out, for a while, thinking about money, about what length book people expect, and how writing a shorter book would impact sales.  About how if the book were short enough, maybe I could price it at $10 and I could make a lot more impulse sales than I do at $13 and $14.  About my current trade discount of 50%, which effectively sets my cover price for me, and is based on the idea of being palatable to book stores.  About giving up on the ridiculous idea that book stores will ever stock my books, about reducing the trade discount to 20%-30%, which will keep it listed online at Amazon/bn.com & give me more pricing flexibility (& potentially more profit per copy sold).  About rethinking the premises on which I make decisions for my publishing company, looking at what my current realities are, and looking to the future & potential of storytelling in all its forms.

Then, finally, I ended up where I’d started.  Which is that I run my own publishing company so that I can write the books I want to write, the way I want to write them.  So that I can tell the stories I have in me to tell, in whatever way is best for each story, and then put it out there as though the industry has no business telling me how and how-not to be.  Because they don’t.  All they know is what’s made money for them recently.  Which isn’t the point, for me.  Realizing which, I spent some time working on writing a closer-to-proper outline (on paper, but moreso in Headspace) of the story the way it wants to be told and the way I want to present it.

I’m open to following Cheating, Death wherever it takes me, so if things here or there go longer along the way, so be it.  But with the basic structure of the story laid out, it looks like 13 chapters total.  With the average chapter length I’ve been finding so far, it looks like about 33k words total.  The paper book for a story that long will probably be around 124pp, which I can sell for $10.  (I have 2 poetry collections available that are this size, already.)  Which makes the final (estimated) eBook price $4.99, the current eBook price $0.99, with an expected $0.50 increase with each additional chapter.  So go get Cheating, Death now for $0.99 and read it as I write it.  Or wait until it’s done, pay $4.99 for the eBook or $10 for the paperback.

Hmm… I think it’s early enough yet that I’ll try to write Chapter 6 before I go to bed.  I’m right in the heart of the emotional center of the book, right now.  This is Act II, chapters 5-8, where Melvin is confronted by his wife about his cheating, before things really start to go downhill.

Go read Cheating, Death now.