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.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Unspecified

by Yoshira Marbel

Giveaway ends October 07, 2011.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

If you’re interested in reading Unspecified, but can’t afford a few dollars to get a copy & don’t want to wait for the free eBook, this is a good opportunity for you. Also, I’m looking for a few book bloggers who might be interested in reading and reviewing this poetry collection, so if you are one or if you know one, please let me know and I’ll send you a copy of the book in your preferred format (print, or any of half a dozen eBook formats), ASAP.

The new poetry collection, Unspecified by Yoshira Marbel, which I’ve been posting about for the last couple of weeks, is currently trying to raise funds to cover the costs of creating a print edition of the book. I posted a little bit about the costs involved in that (setup, proofs, initial printing, shipping to me, shipping to South Africa, ISBNs, et cetera) and in running the Kickstarter project itself (shipping rewards to backers, Kickstarter takes 5%, Amazon takes a few % to process payments), but I guessed I’d need $330. I decided to run a shorter Kickstarter fundraiser than average, since statistically most pledges come in the first few days and on the last day, only about two weeks long, ending at 9PM MST, Friday September 16th, 2011.

As of last night, we reached our funding goal. (This is presuming no one removes their pledge in the next two days.) There are still two days for you and your friends and family and pets to pledge to the project, knowing confidently that the book will have a print edition which should be delivered to me by the first week of October and then forwarded on to you post-haste. Knowing that Yoshira’s dream is coming true and her poetry and message will be reaching people who never would have had a chance to have contact with it otherwise, and that as a backer, you are contributing to that dream fulfillment (and you’ll have your name in the book’s Special Thanks section in acknowledgement of that).

Here’s how we reached our funding goal:
On the first day we had one person pledge $30 (Thanks, John!). I was posting about the fundraiser on Facebook, on Google+, on Twitter, I’ve been running a 30-second ad on every episode of all 13 of my Podiobooks which gets downloaded during the course of the fundraiser, and I posted an episode of the Modern Evil Podcast with info on the book, the fundraiser, and containing a few of the poems. Over that first week we got one more pledge of $2. Which is part of why by the end of that first week I was having an emotional breakdown. (More on that, below.) My semi-public emotional breakdown led to another $51 in pledges on Friday/Saturday.

Around the same time I added a couple of new reward levels offering any piece of original artwork (see wretchedcreature.com); $50 for the book, eBook, and any piece of art 8″x10″ or smaller, and $300 for the book, eBook, and any piece of art (including an original commissioned piece). Those offers are still available, by the way. If you’ve been looking at some of my art (some of which is priced significantly higher than $300, which includes shipping) or want to commission something, this is a great opportunity, which will help support the publishing side of my business, too. You have two days to take advantage of this offer via the Kickstarter fundraiser.

One person has already taken advantage of it. Bill Jonas Jr., someone who has bought a couple of pieces of my artwork in the past, was moved by Yoshira’s notes (see the Kickstarter page) and was thinking about pledging most of last week. He was thinking of pledging at the $250 level, to support the project (that would have put us over our goal) and because he really likes the piece of art I used to create the book cover… and then he saw the offer re: getting commissioning a new piece and he contacted me about that. (For reasons I won’t go into, rather than pledging directly, he preferred to give me cash – I had my sister use her Kickstarter account to put the pledge up on the site on his behalf.) We met last night so he could give me the cash and his thoughts and ideas for the painting he wants (and to hang out and chat, which was nice (and about the limit of the social I think I can take right now; it was just my wife and Bill and myself chatting at a coffee shop); we were friends before Bill became a fan of my art). That $300 put us at the $383 pledged we’re at as I write this post. Enough to publish the book in print, and depending on how Yoshira and I feel about it in a year, the rest either to keep it in print for a while after that, or which can be used toward the publication of my future books. (ie: Probably the next time you see me post a Kickstarter fundraiser for a book, the goal will be ~$50 lower than it otherwise would have been. (Or not happen at all, if someone else pledges at the $250 or $300 reward levels in the next two days.))

Which brings us around to a long, long ramble about what’s been going on with me, emotionally:
I’ve been quite depressed for some long time, actually. About a month ago my stress, anxiety and depression reached a point where I could no longer handle even relatively low-key social gatherings exceeding about 8 people. (For about half the summer, Mandy and I had been attending a weekly (well, mostly weekly) game night at a friend’s house, where we played board games (mostly of the strategy variety, though they’d been admirably enduring my unusual collection of Scrabble variations, one a week) with a handful of friends.) I’ve managed to avoid acting on my suicidal thoughts, to avoid attempting to numb/poison myself with alcohol, and mostly to avoid emotional overeating. I have stopped strength training in the last two or three weeks, and I’m not sure whether that’s mostly because of the depression, mostly because I’ve run out of Podiobooks I want to listen to (and keep starting Podiobooks I don’t enjoy, which puts me off my exercise a bit), somewhat because the worst of my depression induces a sort of constant, all-over bodily pain/soreness which makes strength training even more painful, some combination of factors, or just because I don’t enjoy exercise for its own sake. Of course, at its worst my insanity drives me out of doors on long, long walks (usually in the middle of the night), so I haven’t been entirely without exercise, or been entirely cooped up in the house; I suppose that can be counted as good. Anyway, to sum up: I’ve been feeling quite poorly of late.

Getting a submission, a good and appropriate one, was a bright point. Working with the author to create a publishable book from that submission was something which could take advantage of my occasional manias or give me something to focus on and distract me from the darkest of my depression. Getting an eye exam and being prescribed eye glasses for the first time (right around the time I launched the Kickstarter, a week and a half ago) feels pretty dark, and I’m sure I’ll begin feeling even worse when the glasses arrive and I actually have them as a constant reminder of my own slowly decaying body; I don’t cope well with disorder, disease, aging or the reality of what our physical bodies go through as they approach death and I expect I’ll take my life in a decade or two (at the latest) rather than suffer the indignities of that end of the experience of life; getting glasses is like a precursor, and I have repeatedly thought, in the last 10 days (and in recent years as my eyesight has degraded) that I ought to kill myself now, rather than even begin down that slippery slope of decay toward death.

Then there’s the Kickstarter itself. What it feels like it represents. As I said on Facebook, most of the time it’s easy to believe/pretend I’m successful, because I’m doing what I love. I’m writing the books I want to write, I’m creating the art I want to create, I’m telling stories, reading books, living my life, loving my wife, worshiping my God, and most of the time I can believe I’m successful. Once in a while I have to do bookkeeping (at least quarterly, when taxes are due), and once in a while I become involved in something like this fundraiser, and once in a while I look at the number of people reading/buying/responding-to my books in the context of other creators’ work, and when I do it becomes easy to try to measure my success with numbers and contexts and comparisons. It becomes almost impossible to avoid feeling that I’m unsuccessful. Other indie authors, who consider their books to be less successful than they’d like, usually posting from a context of “this isn’t close to where I want it to be, but I can see how, if I were just doing ten or twenty times better, I could consider myself successful”, make off-handed remarks about how many eBooks they’re selling (this week it was “only averaging 18 copies a day” when they raised their price from $0.99 to $2.99) and the perspective it throws my own eBook sales into feels like they’ve physically thrown me down the stairs. Down an infinite spiral staircase, and I’m tumbling all the way down in increasing pain. (I don’t think I’ve ever, in over three and a half years of selling eBooks, sold 18 eBooks in a month. Right now I have 27 or 28 eBooks available; novels and short stories, collections of short stories and even collected novels, ranging in price from $0.99 to $9.99. Eleven novels priced $5.99 or less. I don’t have my spreadsheets in front of me right now (and don’t care to look at them, which I’m sure would make me feel even worse, a countering of “Yay! The Kickstarter is funded!” I don’t really need), but I don’t believe I’ve ever gotten within an order of magnitude of the sales other authors bemoan as “not making it”.) At some point after I launched my Kickstarter fundraiser trying to raise $330 -this was while I still only had $32 in pledges after most of a week- another Podiobooks/indie author launched a Kickstarter to raise funds for a print edition of one of his books, looking to raise $4000, and he surpassed his goal within about 25 hours. This was around the time I began to have a major emotional breakdown. I spent a few hours curled up in bed crying, I tried to find things to do to occupy myself, and I ended up posting something about how I felt on Facebook… which is when a handful of people pledged a bit more, but I continued to be less than 25% of the way to the goal.

I hate marketing. I loathe promotion. I’m not fond of sales. Working on any of those things, especially to try to market/promote/sell my own creations, tends to induce physical symptoms such as nausea, headaches, and worse… and emotional responses including grief, intense self-loathing, and anger. I believe in this book, in Yoshira’s poetry, and I believe that it deserves to be published, or I wouldn’t be putting my name and the name of my company behind it. Yet writing copy for it was just about as uncomfortable as writing copy for my own work. Promoting the fundraiser has been … very bad. Worse, in light of how the last Kickstarter I attempted turned out. Bad, in knowing that most pledges for most Kickstarter fundraisers come in the first 24-48 hours, and I hadn’t even reached 10% of our admittedly modest goal. Imagine I’d set a $4000 goal, or -like another indie author I know who was raising funds for a strictly eBook release- an $8000 goal; my “success” would have been obviously “none” (while both of those other projects were fully funded within a matter of hours or days). Those successful authors certainly did more to promote their fundraisers than I did, but even just the little promotion I was doing felt like too much to me, like SPAMming my social network and my readers, like I was going to make myself sick with all that goddamned promotion. I just couldn’t take it, couldn’t face it. Thousands of people download my books, possibly tens of thousands (it’s hard to know how to count), and hundreds of people follow me and my work or call me a friend, and dozens of people have called/written/txt’d or otherwise reached out specifically to tell me they’re fans of me and my work, and yet …

…and yet, only a small handful of people buy my books, only 1 of my friends (friends and fans combined, really) had pledged anything to show their support, and it felt like their not pledging (or sharing the link, even, or commenting), not even $1, was a refutation of my success. It felt like every one of the hundreds of people who would self-identify as my “friend” on Facebook but hadn’t bought a book, eBook, or painting, hadn’t donated to a Podiobook, hadn’t pledged toward any of my 3 Kickstarters, that every one of them was outing themselves as someone who doesn’t believe in me, doesn’t like or support my work, doesn’t care about what I’m doing or who I am or what I believe in. I know I have real friends, and I know I have genuine fans, and I know there are people who care about me, even if they aren’t saying so with their money; those people actually say so, and then usually spend money even after I tell them it isn’t necessary. I also know that when hundreds or thousands of people purport to be your friend or fan and neither say they support your work nor spend to support your work, the one or few who do are easily overshadowed. Especially when I’m already really, really depressed. And once it begins, measuring self-worth with dollar-signs is a difficult paradigm to break free of. When I’m trying to raise funds, or when I’m trying to sell books (say, at comicon), or when I’m launching a new/finished project, it’s too easy to fall into that trap and too difficult to find my way back out again. In between, while I’m working on creating things and not thinking about whether my past projects have made money and whether the things I’m creating are going to be able to make money, when all I’m thinking about is the work of creation itself, I feel fine. As I said, I feel successful to be able to be doing that work, and to be able to not be thinking about money. I suppose I ought to add to my earlier list: I really, really hate money. I wish I never had to deal with it or think about it at all. In a way, I think that’s a large part of how I measure my success; the less I have to think about money, the more successful I am. I can imagine that, if I were to suddenly start making millions of eBook sales and I had to start dealing with all the financial bullshit that comes along with financial “success” I might see myself as less successful than I am now… though… there must be a balance point somewhere, where the increased income means less time spent thinking about my family’s money (food budgets, clothes budgets, how we’re going to afford glasses, medical procedures, new tires, et cetera), in excess of the increased time spent thinking about bookkeeping/accounting/taxes/etc. I can almost guarantee you that point is still lower than would put me in the top two quintiles of American income. (Stupid rich people.)

To wrap things up a bit, I’m glad we’ve reached our funding goal and that I don’t really need to do any more promotion (in a traditional sense) or fundraising for Unspecified. The process of getting there has been painful and difficult, and has made me question the value of my life and the measure of my success. I’m depressed enough right now that I don’t know whether my misgivings and self-doubt are real or are symptoms. I suppose I haven’t quite reached a point where I’ve been able to sufficiently decouple my business from its reliance on money… Ugh. I suppose that’s something else I need to work on, another money thing I need to think about before trying to launch my next project. Sigh.

I’ll post again when I’ve got books in hand; possibly even when I get a good-looking proof copy. Ooh, or if/when my mood changes; better or significantly worse.

Click to see it a little bigger. That, of course, is the full wraparound cover. This is the front cover by itself:

If I don’t hear from anyone who is interested in buying one of my paintings (heck, any of my paintings, even a new commission) to help fund the print publication of this book in the next day or so (you don’t have to pay in the next few days, just let me know you’re interested & can pay, say, by 10/1), I’ll go ahead and launch the Kickstarter project. I’ve been mapping it out and it looks like I’ll probably have the following reward levels:

• $1+ – Your name in the book’s ‘Special Thanks’
• $10+ – The above, plus a copy of the eBook
• $25+ – The above, plus a copy of the print edition
• $50+ – The above, plus a 2nd copy of Unspecified, plus both of my poetry collections in print
• $250+ – One backer gets everything at the $50 level plus ‘without you’
• $250+ – One backer gets everything at the $50 level plus ‘embers of you in a sea of me’

The goal will probably be $300 or $330/$350 (I just remembered to add the Kickstarter/Amazon fees, each around 5%, to the $300 I actually need), and I don’t think I’ll bother running it more than 2 weeks – I like the end of the day on 9/16 as the end date; it’s a Friday and right after a payday, whether you get paid weekly, bi-weekly, or bi-monthly. Then, whether you email me right now to say you want to buy a piece of art or whether the Kickstarter fundraising is successful, the book should be in print by 10/1… and if neither works out, I can publish the eBook 9/16 and the print edition as soon as one/both of those paintings sell (or profit from eBook sales covers the print cost).

Oh, and the final prices on the eBook and print editions won’t be anywhere near $10/$25 – these pledge points are based on the idea of “you’re pledging because you want to support this project,” not based on trying to reach the thriftiest of book shoppers… I fully expect to price the eBook at $2.99 and the print edition somewhere in the $9.99 to $14.99 range – I’m worried that a print edition price lower than $12.99, even for a 66-page book, will devalue the collection… based on prevailing prices for similar books. In my research I even found that several of the most popular single-author poetry collections under 90 pages had list prices at $24.99. (Also that, while some publishers are sticking eBook prices to ~80% of the print edition’s list price, an equal number seemed to just stick the eBook at $2.99-$3.50, regardless of the print prices.) So… if you’re concerned with the price & don’t think you can afford to pledge, please at least pledge $1, then try to remember to order the book when it’s published.

I’m getting sleepy and may be rambling a bit, now. Sorry about that. Anyway, if this art doesn’t jump up and find a buyer soon, I’ll be rambling at you again, soon! More promotion! More fundraising! Plus, there’ll be a deadline! A countdown! A community! Kickstarter, ho!

To give you some idea of what sort of poetry you’ll find in the collection (what you’ll be helping share with the world through your purchase of the art or, later, the book itself), I’m going to share a poem or three from it, along with the (current version of the) description I’ve written for the book.

Released Pain

Tiny slit
Sweet release
Blood droplets
Hypnotize me
A fountain of blood
Dancing on the crystal water
Floating away
Darkness has destroyed the pain
End is near
Now free
Blood has released me

I picked that poem to start because it speaks to one of the recurring motifs of the collection, something also addressed by one of the paintings we’re hoping you’ll buy, ‘without you’.

We’re asking just $239 (plus tax & shipping) for this original work of art, and the buyer will also receive a copy of the finished paperback book. It’s mostly acrylic on canvas, though technically, because of the real razor blades which are cutting into (and affixed securely to) the canvas, it’s really “mixed media” artwork. The purchase price of this piece would nearly cover all the costs of publishing a print edition of Unspecified; close enough that I’d be able to send it to my printer immediately.

Here is the current version of the official Description we’ve put together for the book, a version of which will appear in the book’s listing on sites such as Amazon, or in eBook stores:

Young South African poet Yoshira Marbel experiences such a complex and profound state of emotional turmoil in her everyday life that it leaves even the most experienced doctors at a loss for words; their official diagnosis for her was ‘Unspecified’. Yoshira has invested years of her life in the painful struggle to do what her doctors could not; both in finding a path through the troubles of her life and in expressing her depression, heartbreak, emptiness, anger, and suffering through poetry. ‘Unspecified’ is her first published collection, exploring themes which are familiar to most of us, to one degree or another, but amplified through the lens of Yoshira’s honesty, intensity, and natural lyricism.

Here’s another example of Yoshira’s poetry, the first poem from the collection:

My Friend

At least I have my faithful friend
He never leaves my side
Lays next to me at night
Wraps his arms around me
Holding me tight
Can’t break away
He is here to stay
My dear friend
Pain

The other painting we’re offering as part of the fundraising for Unspecified is a smaller piece which, in insufficient lighting, appears solid black. It’s titled ‘embers of you in a sea of me’, and it’s also acrylic on canvas. This is the piece I’ve adapted for the cover of Unspecified, which you’ll see soon, and if you can’t make it out in the small image below, it’s a swirling black field full of tiny bursts of color (red, blue, and some green).

The asking price for this piece is an affordable $199 (plus tax & shipping), and the buyer will of course receive a copy of the finished paperback book. Again, while that alone will not fully cover the printing/setup costs, it’s still enough to get things started, and if you buy this piece, I can send Unspecified to my printer immediately. (And avoid having to do a Kickstarter fundraiser!)

Finally, I’d like to share one more poem from the collection with you. I hope you appreciate these poems and will consider contributing to this project.

Doll

Emptiness consumes me
An infectious disease
No escape
Silent tears
Depression in control
Drowning
Pretending
You say you love me
But you’re never really here
My dear depression
Never disappears
Like a rag doll
Thrown in the trash
Come back
See through my façade
I may not say this a lot
But I love you

As you probably know if you’ve been following my work (or this blog) at all, my publishing model (to be sure books are, if not profitable, at least don’t lose money) has two parts: 1) Electronic publishing, which doesn’t cost me much money, and I’ll do for any book I publish (eBooks and audiobooks, for free and for sale), and 2) Print publishing, which costs a couple/few hundred dollars for setup & initial printing), and I’ll only initiate printing after I’ve raised sufficient capital to pay those up-front costs, usually through the sale of the original artwork I design for each book’s cover. The time and effort it takes to get the book ready for publication is roughly the same whether I’m only doing one or I do both, and since I only publish books I either love or wrote (preferably both), I don’t count the time & effort spent to publish a book against its profitability. (Yet. Perhaps someday I’ll sell enough books to be able to pay myself a salary. Heh.)

As it is with my own books, so it goes with the new one. Yoshira and I would really like to do a print version of the collection, so while we’re still selecting poems and crafting their order, polishing the front matter and end matter, designing the cover and writing the copy, I’m getting started on the fundraising. Immediately upon reading her poetry, which hews toward themes of heartbreak and sadness, I knew I could use my painting ‘without you’ to raise at least part of the funds.

If you haven’t seen it before, yes, those are real razor blades. They really cut into the canvas. I actually forced red paint (no, not blood) through the cut canvas to get the drips just right. I painted it specifically to capture an emotion I was sure razor blades were the only answer to. Alas, it was not really appropriate for the cover of this collection… Still, it matches well enough with the book that proceeds from its sale are definitely earmarked for covering the costs of printing this collection.

I spent a few days thinking about creating a new painting for the cover, reading and re-reading the poetry, immersing myself in it, trying to appropriately capture visually what the words expressed. Several of the ideas I had seemed to be gravitating back toward something I’d already painted, ‘embers of you in a sea of me’. I spent a few hours throwing together a basic design so I could get Yoshira’s impression of what I was thinking for her book cover, and she thought it was great, too, so we’re going forward with part of this painting as the basis for the cover design. I’ll post again when we’ve got something close-to-final, but here’s the full painting:

It’s nearly all black, but the black isn’t a perfect darkness, and there are tiny bursts of color swirling throughout. I think it’s dark but hopeful, in a way.

If you’ve seen these paintings before and have considered purchasing them but hadn’t made up your mind about them, now would be an excellent time to do so. Even if you’ve never seen them before but one (or both) of them speaks to you, please consider adding it to your growing art collection. Perhaps you’d like to do your part to support independent creators such as Yoshira and myself, or to support small-press poetry publishing, or you meant to chip in to one of my earlier books and didn’t get the chance or didn’t have the cash; here’s your opportunity to become a patron of the arts. If you do decide to buy one, in addition to the painting itself, an original one-of-a-kind work of art, you’ll receive a print copy of the finished poetry collection as soon as I have it in hand, and a copy of the eBook as soon as it’s published.

If neither painting sells in the next couple of weeks, we’ll start a Kickstarter fundraiser with the paintings as rewards alongside copies of the paperback and eBook editions. If the Kickstarter fundraiser doesn’t get funded, we’ll probably just publish the eBook version at first, at least until one or both of these paintings sells (or until revenue from eBook sales covers the cost of the print edition, whichever comes first). I’ll be able to share a couple/few of the poems with you here, soon, too, to give you an idea of the sort of work you’ll be supporting when you purchase this art. For now, hopefully the art itself and what I’ve told you about the poetry (and my enthusiasm for it) will be enough.

Here are my total sales (all paperback, except where noted), with last year’s comparable sales (in italics, in parentheses):

• Lost and Not Found: 1 / $14 / (0 / $0)
• Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 0 / $0 / (1 / $10)
• Dragons’ Truth: 2 / $26 / (4 / $49)
• Dragons’ Truth MP3 CD: 0 / $0 / (1 / $13)
• Forget What You Can’t Remember: 1 / $14 / (5 / $70)
• More Lost Memories: 0 / $0 / (0 / $0)
• MLM/Pay Attention chapbook: 0 / $0 / (1 / $2)
• Cheating, Death: 7 / $70 / (6 (plus 2 given away) / $55)
• Cheating, Death eBook (collectable card): 1 / $7 / (N/A)
• Time, emiT, and Time Again: 3 / $42 / (N/A)
• Untrue Tales… Book One (OoP): 1 / $6 / (1 / $12)
• Untrue Tales… Book Two (OoP): 0 / $0 / (0 / $0)
• Untrue Tales… Book Three (OoP): 0 / $0 / (0 / $0)
• Untrue Tales… Books 1-2 (combined, OoP): 1 / $6 / (0 / $0)
• Untrue Tales… Books 1-3 (combined, OoP): 1 / $12 / (8 / $200)
• The First Untrue Trilogy: 6 / $144 / (N/A)
• The Second Untrue Trilogy: 3 / $70 / (N/A)
• Total Comicon book sales: 27 / $411 / (27 / $411)

…that… didn’t total out the way I expected it to. I apparently sold the exact same number of books for the same amount of money, compared to last year. Weird. Anyway, based on my rough estimate of the same thing, I did pre-pay for a small press table at the 2012 Phoenix Comicon, so I’ll be there again next year.

((For reference, ‘OoP’ is ‘Out of Print’ and is the out-of-print first editions of the Untrue Tales books, which I’d had printed along the way as I’d finished each book – and which, with the new editions of the complete series out, I want to get rid of. Thursday and Friday I tried “Name your own price” but found people don’t like to do that, so Saturday and Sunday I said “50% off” and sold a couple of them.))

In addition, I brought a couple of paintings with me to show at the con: The original artwork I created for the cover of Cheating, Death, and my latest, ‘RainbowAwesomeUnicornWow’. I bought an easel specifically to show these paintings at this con, and I suppose it worked out alright, because the unicorn painting (which I had at/above eye level throughout the con) certainly brought more visibility to my booth than I would otherwise have had, and before the convention was through, both paintings had sold, for $400 apiece. I’ve still got to deliver them (this week), and both buyers will be working out payment plans with me over the next few months, but they’re also repeat customers who are also friends I trust. I’m sure that part of what made up their minds about buying the art this weekend was that I was showing pieces they were interested in, and that other people were expressing interest in buying them. So… not technically sales I made / money I took in at con, but certainly sales which mightn’t have happened any time soon otherwise. I feel a bit bad about it; it hadn’t been trying to pressure those particular people into buying those pieces, I simply wanted to sell the art. I haven’t done any Art Walks or other shows in over a year, so wanted to take advantage of the opportunity. :/

On the other hand, if I add the art sales to the book sales total (using accrual method accounting, of course), my sales at this year’s con are nearly triple last years… even though they were actually, eerily flat. (Come to think of it, the only non-book I sold at last year’s con was a crocheted artwork, sold for $55, and this year I brought a single piece of crocheted artwork to decorate my table which I traded, at the last moment, for roughly the same value.) Eerily flat.

Of course, there are also expenses. The cost of the table, of gas to and from downtown every day (or, as others do, of renting a room downtown for the duration), the cost of parking (last year I was trying to use free street parking ~1mile away & ended up getting a ticket – this year I paid to park in a garage adjacent to the convention center & ended up paying much less), the cost of food while captive downtown for ten and twelve hour days, the cost of the new easel, a few display materials, hundreds of business cards, and (I never account properly for this) the value of my time. I’ve been coming out a bit ahead each year, though realistically -if I want to do any better- I’ve got to spend significantly more money. Buy bookmarks or postcards or the like to try to sell or simply give away. Buy big, full-color signage; at least with my company name, possibly with my book covers, et cetera. Pay for a full-size booth instead of a small press table. Worse, perhaps worst of all to me, and most-recommended to me by other creators and by fans/attendees alike, is to show/sell at more conventions. Leprecon, San Diego Comicon and Emerald City, Tuscon Festival of Books and TusCon, Saboten-Con (really?), CopperCon, and on and on… Each one a big up-front cost for a space, tied to the hope/dream that I’ll sell enough to earn it back, and most with travel expenses far, far beyond both booth costs and my best sales experiences, ever. Hotels, gasoline and/or flights & shipping, and the cost of eating out multiplied severalfold (I could eat breakfasts at home, this weekend, and make/pack lunches, which is difficult or impossible from a hotel room in a strange city) and I doubt I could make enough sales to break even with such expenses. Yes, it’s a problem of confidence. It’s also a problem backed up with data, as in: $400 in book sales doesn’t cover $1000+ in expenses for a non-local show. Heck, a standard 10′x10′ space at SDCC is listed at $2200 for 2011. (The Leprecon & TFoB web sites are so terrible I can’t quote prices for you here; I can’t find them.) If I were motivated by money, I’d likely either have some terrible plan to make conventions profitable or have given up on the whole thing by now…

Realistically, I wouldn’t be doing Phoenix Comicon, either, if my wife weren’t in love with the whole thing. It’s a lot of effort, it results in a tiny amount of profit and a huge amount of stress and a small number of new readers. (For comparison, I sold books this weekend to only 20 new readers and gave away roughly 200 business cards (most of which have probably already been thrown away) – while each of the 13 of my titles which are available as free eBooks and podcast audiobooks finds nearly 200 new readers a month, every month.) There are roughly 3 people I met and talked with this weekend who I expect will, upon reading the books they bought from me, turn into “true fans” of my work (though 2 of those are teenagers who I’m not sure qualify in the sense of a small number of “true fans” being sufficient to financially support an independent creator, yet) – and that’s great… but I wonder about how much time and effort and money ought to be invested in acquiring one more fan… and I really need to get some sleep.

I’ve just looked up and it’s after 2AM… and I’ve been running long, hard days at the comicon since I woke up early Thursday morning. I probably won’t get much more good thoughts out of my now-almost-painfully-tired brain until I’ve slept. Feel free to insert your input in the comments, or by email, or by calling/txt’ing me… Or by buying my books… or art… *sigh* Enough trying to sell. Hopefully for a long time.

1. What is your book about? I never know how to answer this question about my books, and that failure is probably the biggest reason my book sales are consistently slow and low. If I had to answer, without going into great length, I’d say perhaps that the Untrue Tales series is about watching reality unfold around you and the uselessness of trying to control anything. Ask me again in a week/month/year and I’ll probably have a different answer.
2. How long had the idea of your book been developing before you began to write the story? Ooh, this is a good question, for this series. I actually started “working on” what became the Untrue Trilogies over twenty years ago. All through my youth (I can’t be sure when it started, but perhaps age 10 or 12?) I was a storyteller, often with myself at the heart of the stories. Rather than writing my stories down, I practiced oral storytelling, and I told my stories as though they were true stories about my life – and believe me that trying to tell the story of how I accidentally bested Satan at age 12 and was forced to take over the day-to-day operation of Hell in a realistic and convincing way was a learning experience. All the basic threads of story which ended up in the Untrue Trilogies (and quite a few which didn’t) were part of these overlapping narratives I developed primarily during my high school years (roughly age 12-16), which I then adapted into a new story, not about me, beginning in 2004.
3. What inspired you to write this particular story? I guess I partly answered this, but the development of these stories was in large part an attempt to gather people’s attention. Prior to high school I had been largely an outcast and picked on to the point that it got me kicked out of school (you can read a modified/compressed/fictionalized account of this, buried in my first novel, Lost and Not Found), and when I finally got back into school, a new school, I was determined to do things differently. Developing these stories, largely in collaboration with the friends I was making, seemed to help cement my role in several social circles. Years and years later, after I’d written a couple of novels, I decided to try to resurrect those stories, rather than allow them to be forgotten, and thus began the seed that led to these six books.
4. How much of yourself is hidden in the characters in the book? Around the time I wrote Untrue Tales… Book One I was likely to be heard saying that all the characters in all my books are me, and that’s still true, in some ways. Without giving away the ending of the last book, I’ll say that there’s quite a lot of me in Trev.
5. Tell us a little about your main characters. Who was your favorite? Why? My favorite character? Is it cheating to say it was my daughter? Err… Trev’s daughter, Neyal’h… Except, she almost isn’t in these books at all. She’s practically peripheral, the entire journey, despite being central to all the action in most of the books. Why is she my favorite? Don’t you love your daughter? … If you check with me here in “reality” I don’t even have a daughter, so I suppose this answer doesn’t make sense. But if you’d read the stories I was writing, all the way back to when I began writing stories, you’ll find her there. Maybe someday I’ll re-release an updated version of The Vintage Collection (everything I wrote as a teen, which I’d made available in paperback for a few years), and you can see for yourself.
6. Who is your most unusual/most likeable character? My most unusual/likeable character? Probably Maheu’le. I can’t even accurately describe him, and had a hard time expressing his true physicality in Books Five and Six, and I certainly didn’t get his voice right in the audio versions. (That might be a spoiler, but only if you’ve read through Book Two but not started Book Five.) He’s some sort of giant, psychic monster, but friendly, helpful, and a good teacher, too. There’s a level of relationship with Ms. Charming implied at the end of the series that I can’t even imagine the specifics of… you’d have to ask them about it yourself, I suppose.
7. How long did it take you to write your book? This is a tricky one, but I’ll try to be brief (You can go back through the blog and find more detailed explanations for most of these): Book One: 2 weeks (NaNoWriMo 2004), Book Two: ~3 weeks (~Feb. 2005), Book Three: a weekend, an afternoon, and a day (Labor Day Weekend 2005, and a day & a half about a year later), Book Four: ~11 weeks, less than half actually writing (7/2010-10/2010), Book Five: 33 days (10/2010-11/2010), Book Six: 1/2 in one long day, the rest over a couple weeks a couple of months later (11/2010-2/2011). I write in bursts of activity, often writing 5k-25k words in a single, long sitting, usually at a coffee shop (usually my local Starbucks), so when it says “months” it means a few days here and a few days there and a lot of thinking without writing a single word in between.
8. How much of a story do you have in mind before you start writing it? For this series? All of it, and almost none of it, at once. What do you mean by story? How can I put this? I know the story in much the same way you remember something that happened to you long ago, but for most of the books in the series I didn’t make any effort to plan out how they would be written; I just set down at a computer and let the words flow out in a torrent. Often I’d read the sentence I’d just written and find myself laughing, surprised, or worse, and I almost never knew what was going to come next until the words were already on the page. On the other hand, I had all the “plot points” and “twists” and “reveals” mapped out / known years before I ever tried to turn them into a series of novels.
9. Did you do any research for the book? If so, how did you do it? (searching Internet, magazines, other books, etc.) When I wrote the First Untrue Trilogy, I was decidedly against what I thought ‘research’ meant, and wrote by the seat of my pants and the ideas in my head … except that I also did a lot of research that I didn’t think of as research, just looking up information, words, facts, figures, locations, et cetera online while I raced through the writing. So when they’re discussing the physical characteristics of Hell, all that math is accurate, and correlates accurately to the description of ‘the pit’ in Book One, for example, and so is everything in the sex scene in Book Three. In the years between writing the first trilogy and the Second Untrue Trilogy, my attitude toward research had shifted a bit, and I didn’t shy away from blatantly brushing up on the math and science surrounding relativistic travel, nanotechnology, black holes, information systems, et cetera, so that while building a totally fictional and wrong world, I could do so with a basis in sound science.
10. How do you develop and differentiate your characters? For the Untrue Trilogies, that’s difficult to answer; to me, most of these are characters who have been with me for decades, they’re like real people I recall. Come to think of it, almost all the characters in all my books feel that way; not like “characters I develop and differentiate,” but like people who are already differentiated and it’s my job to try to describe what’s already there, to show who they are through what they say and do.
11. Do you have specific techniques you use to develop the plot and stay on track? For the final two books of the series, I was crunching to get the story ended and a lot of ground covered -I’d originally (back in 2004) mapped the Untrue Tales… out to at least 7 books, and potentially up to 11 books, just for the part of Trev’s story I’ve squeezed into 6- so I did a fairly heavy amount of outlining from about halfway through Book Five, on, to be sure I’d hit the pacing and plot targets I needed to. Having moved from writing purely-for-paper to a serialized-audiobook mindset in the years between Book Three and Book Four also meant I was chunking the story into half-hour-long ‘episodes’ as I wrote it, and the outlines reflected that structure. The decision to try to keep all six books within about a thousands words’ length of one another also helped keep everything moving forward and toward impending conclusion. (Unlike, you may have noticed, this interview/post.)
12. How (or when) do you decide that you are finished writing a story? For the Untrue Tales… books, it all started with NaNoWriMo, so the 50,000-word goal was how I sized-up the first couple; I’d actually intended to write Book One and Book Two back to back during November, doubling the goal to 100,000 words, and I finished Book One on the 14th, wrote 1 more sentence, and then … failed to come up with any more words until the next year. When I wrote Book Two, the length goal stuck, and after that it was a pattern.
13. What is your goal for the book, ie: what do you want people to take with them after they finish reading the story? Shit, I knew I was forgetting something. Uhh… Let’s make something up after the fact, alright? How about… Question everything? Or: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar?
14. Is there a message in your writing you want readers to grasp? Yes, but since, in over 6 years of people reading and listening to these books, not a single one has expressed any awareness of it, let’s just pretend it isn’t there. (Hint: The entire thing was supposed to be a subtle satire of everything I hate about popular fiction, but most people just take it at face value as pop fiction, and don’t notice the extremes I’ve taken some of the elements to.)
15. What challenges did you face as you wrote this book? The biggest challenges I faced were that, after beginning the series I had a change of heart and decided that these aren’t the sort of books I want to be writing at all, not even to try to show what’s wrong with these sorts of books, and then (after Dragons’ Truth, my worst book ever) they became my most popular books, and the majority of contact I’ve received from readers has been “when will you write more Untrue Tales?” I didn’t want to write more. That’s the biggest part of why I never returned to the series, and it’s been a huge challenge to write Books 4-6. If/when you notice a significant change in tone and character of writing between the First and Second Untrue Trilogies, this is why: If I’d been required to write three (or more) books like the first three Untrue Tales… books, they would never have been written.
16. What was the most difficult part about writing the book? Starting again. See above.
17. Do you think writing this book changed your life? How so? Nah. Not yet, anyway.
18. What has changed for you personally since you wrote your first book? So much. I wrote my first “real” book in 2002. I was single, still looking for work in computers, my paternal grandparents were still alive… right after I wrote that book I moved 100 miles to live with my grandparents and help them in their declining health, and it was in that year (before my grandmother’s death) that I first had the time to work on my art and writing nearly full-time. In 2004 I moved back to Phoenix, took a day job, fell in love again, and wrote Book One. 2004 through 2007 were a rollercoaster of life experience and emotions (I’ll almost certainly write about a lot of it if/when my book about writing/publishing happens) culminating in my getting married 12/1/2007. In March, 2008 I left my day job and returned to being a nearly-full-time creative (I’m also a househusband, an equally important job), and I’ve been at it ever since. How has my life changed? Tremendously, and for the better.
19. How has your background influenced your writing? Have you finished reading Book Six yet? No? Let me just say: Significantly.
20. How does your environment/upbringing color your writing? Less than I’d like, more than I’d like to admit.
21. What’s your writing schedule like? Do you strive for a certain amount of words each day? Partially answered above, largely answered in Time, emiT, and Time Again: What schedule? I can go months or years at a time without writing any new stories, then suddenly write a book in a few days or weeks. Writing “a certain amount each day” kills me. Yech. I write what I’m interested in writing, when I’m in the mood.
22. Do you have any rituals that you follow before sitting down to write? Not rituals, per se. I do like to have a clean work area, though I’m not beholden to the idea, so sometimes I’ll take a bit of time before trying to write to clean. When I do, I’ll clean not just the work area, but often several rooms. Somehow, knowing the toilets and sink are clean and the floors are vacuumed can make it easier for the words to flow. Alternatively: I leave the house altogether, and write where someone else is paid to keep things tidy.
23. Do you prefer to write at a particular time of day? If by time, you mean ‘quiet,’ then yes. I like to write at the quiet times. Not just literal, physical quiet, but mental quiet. An active mind in the next room can, at times, be too noisy for me to get any creative work done. Depending on when my family members are working, that sometimes means I have all day to write and it sometimes means I have only the night to write. I’m writing this at night, for example. During the summer (my wife is a teacher), I often only have the hours she’s asleep.
24. Do you have a favorite snack food or favorite beverage that you enjoy while you write? Several. Most of the drinks are caffeinated. Mountain Dew. Mostly Diet, since I can easily drink 2-4litres/day. At Starbucks, depending on budget (both money and calories), it ranges from a Grande Nonfat Mocha with Sugar-Free Vanilla to a Venti Breve Black&White (full pumps of both) with Vanilla & whip… or all the way down to a Venti Passion Tea sweetend with (a lot of) Splenda. Basically: sweet, sweet, sweet. And when I can, high-fat, high-sugar, highly-caffeinated, and usually hot.
25. What are you working on right now? Several things. I’ve got a Kickstarter fundraiser running to maybe do a book of my experiences writing and publishing. I’ve been working on plans for what I’m calling a vampire duology; two books, one which sees the vampire-laden SciFi world as a Utopia and the other which sees the same world as a Dystopia, and each of which is (hopefully) fully convinced and convincing that its view is correct. Plus, I’ve been researching (off and on since NaNoWriMo ’09) for a series of books in an alternate history universe where, rather than the flu, there’s a zombie outbreak in 1918, and I’ve got at least 3 books planned for it, spanning 60+ years and at least 5 genres… but I really want to do a good job on the historical & medical aspects, plus I need more time to work out my concepts for ‘SolarPunk’ that will form a foundation for at least one of the books (and the world from that point forward). And I get new ideas all the time.
26. Are you writing to reach a particular kind of reader? Yes. Readers who like to think. Like: If you spend time sitting in silence, thinking, for hours or days at a time, and you like doing it and like that you do it, you’re who I’m thinking of. If people tell you you ‘think too much’ and your initial response (at least in your mind) is that there’s no such thing as too much thinking, you’re who I’m thinking of. If you’ve been accused of ‘overthinking,’ especially books, then please, read my books. Think about them. Overthink them. I have a feeling that someday there will be a few people who, upon overthinking my books, finally begin to see what I was thinking about in the first place.
27. What was the first story you remember writing? When I was 5 or 6, I wrote a SciFi story about a time traveller who encountered giant, sentient food in the future which was really quite glad to be able to solve its overpopulation problem and the past’s global hunger problems by making use of his accidental time machine. No, really. There were illustrations, including at least one giant donut with arms, legs, and a face. It may not have been the first story I wrote, but it’s certainly stuck in my mind.
28. What is the most difficult part of the whole writing process? Writing copy. More generally: marketing, promotion. I was simply not made for Marketing. Almost all marketing feels like lying to me, which I can’t stand to do. I’d rather no one ever read my books than that I put out dishonest, manipulative marketing copy.
29. What is the easiest part of the writing process? Coming up with and writing the stories, themselves. Sitting down is hard, but once I’ve sat down, sitting there letting the words flow out can be amazing.
30. Does writing come easy for you? Often. Not always; it depends on a lot of factors. Generally, if I can get a block of time set aside for writing and actually get myself to sit down to write, the writing comes easily.
31. What’s been the most surprising part of being a writer? Learning (years ago, now, before I even officially started Modern Evil Press) the realities of the publishing industry. The terrible economics. The low numbers most books ever move. The insane number of books pulped every year. Most of all, probably the idea that most full-time writers don’t earn a living wage from their writing. In almost any other field, if people worked full time at a job and didn’t get paid enough to survive, wages would eventually go up. Somehow, in writing/publishing, the concept of paying writers/authors enough money to live on is actually laughable. Out of the question. Not even a consideration. This is ridiculous.
32. Have you ever had difficulty “killing off” a character in your story because she or he was so intriguing and full of possibility for you, his or her creator? Not yet, but there isn’t a whole lot of actual death in my books. (except for the zombie book, but it’s a zombie book: everyone dies)
33. Do you have mental list or a computer file or a spiral notebook with the ideas for or outlines of stories that you have not written but intend to one day? Mental lists, pocket notebooks, several pocket notebooks I carried until they were either full or falling apart & have stored and/or lost… I get ideas all the time. In the last couple of years, I’ve only written a tiny fraction of them down, and I’ve only developed a fraction of those into books/stories, so far. But I’ll always have paper/pen and/or iPhone at hand to take down ideas.
34. How many stories do you currently have swirling around in your head? More than I can count.
35. What do you like to read? That is a good question. I’ve been taking up reading more and more in the last few years, after quite a long time with almost no reading at all, and I’ve found that I don’t like to read a lot of different kinds of books. In fact, I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that I dislike reading most kinds of books. I’ll tell you what, though: I suspect I like reading books that were intended for people who like to think. Books that require thinking.
36. What writer influenced you the most? Douglas Adams and/or Roald Dahl.
37. What one book, written by someone else, do you wish you’d written yourself? This is a silly question. I’m not even sure I understand it the way you mean it. The only way the answer can make sense is for me to wish I were that other person/author, for only they could have written that book the way they did. If I wrote that book (and were me) it would be a totally different book. Sometimes I think that if I tried to write one of my own books at a different time in my life, it would be a totally different book. We’ll find out soon, I suppose; I’m beginning to think seriously about completely rewriting Dragons’ Truth. Anyway, I don’t wish I were someone else, or some other author. I’d rather be myself. And I’d rather write my own books.
38. What, in your opinion, are the essential qualities of a good story? No idea. I’ll try to think about this as I read the next several hundred books I read and dozen books I write, and maybe in several years I’ll have an answer. Right now I’m of the opinion that there really aren’t any essential qualities; that good stories may be wholly different from one another and still be good stories.
39. Who gave you the best writing advice you ever received and what was it? Huh. Can’t think of any in particular. Sorry.
40. What advice you would give to an aspiring author? Write.
41. How have you marketed and promoted your work? Not enough, some would say. I run a handful of websites with details. I talk to people. I introduce myself as an author and hand out business cards that point to modernevil.com. I Twitter and facebook and blog about the writing I’m doing and the books I’m putting out. I give away free copies of my books digitally, as eBook and serialized audiobooks. Probably the most successful promotion tool I’ve ever used has been podcasting audio versions of my books for free, in terms of getting my work in front of readers/listeners. Other people work hard to promote their podcasts, where I see the podcasts as promotion for my books… But promotion and marketing are an anathema to me.
42. What are your current writing goals and how do you juggle the promotional aspects with the actual writing? The only kind of promotion I can really do much of without getting sick is just talking to people about what I’m doing. Twittering status updates as I work through projects. Writing blog posts about what I’m going through, what I’m thinking about, what I’m planning, hoping, dreaming, et cetera. This means that it’s easy to make it a normal, ongoing part of my process. As far as current writing goals, my vague goal is “write 2-4 new books a year.” I already mentioned the books I’m working on; if it gets funded, I’m going to try to get the book on writing/publishing done & printed before the end of May. Otherwise, I’ve already hit my goal (Books 4 & 5, not to mention the paper release of the new Untrue Trilogies) for the year, so any other writing I accomplish is butter. I was thinking of writing a short story I got an idea for the other day, and submitting it to a local thing (plus putting it online for sale and as a podcast episode), and the submission deadline is just a couple weeks away, so maybe that, too. Really, my goal for the rest of 2011 is to get a lot of reading done. I have a whole shelf of books to read before I can even begin work on that alternate history, and I keep starting new writing projects instead of investing enough time reading…
43. What advice would you give other novelists about book promotion? Do as much as you’re comfortable with, and expect proportional results. I don’t do a lot of promotion, and I don’t get very numerically big results. You’ll probably be lucky to get a single percent of people you reach out to even looking your way, and perhaps a single percent of them to spend any money on an unknown author, so set your expectations reasonably. If you’re one for significant promotion, you can get significant results, but I think (except for a few lucky breaks) most everyone’s results are disappointing, at least for the first several years of continuous promotion.
44. What words would you like to leave the world when you are gone? This notion of leaving something for the world isn’t important to me. I am but a vapor on the wind. Nothing I can build will last; only God lasts, and in the end only his mercy will remain. If I can accomplish anything in this life, it will be to disappear so that when (perhaps, someday) you look my way you see only Jesus and his love.
45. Have you written any other books? Yes. Lots.
46. Where can people learn more about your books? modernevil.com

I’ve put the Kickstarter widget, which gives a brief image/blurb and tracks the progress of the funding, in the right-hand column of this blog and on the front page of modernevil.com, hoping that’ll increase its visibility. I’m going to be putting a brief audio promo for the project in all my podcast/books. I’m blogging about it. I’m Twittering and facebooking about it. I may become annoying about it in the coming weeks, depending on how funding goes.

To prevent being annoyed, please, pledge today. Tell your friends to pledge. Post the widget around. Surely, you know people who are interested in writing & publishing. Or people who like rainbows, beards, and/or suspenders. Show them my video.

Oh, and there’s still over a week to enter the contests to win copies of my the Untrue Trilogies, on this blog or via Goodreads. Because I can’t seem to do only one thing at a time.

I’ll have my copies of the books this Thursday (March 10th, 2011), and will make them available for purchase from modernevil.com as soon as possible after they arrive. As detailed in my last post, I’m planning on offering them at the following price points:

• $50 for both Untrue Trilogies, unsigned
• $50 each ($100 for both) Untrue Trilogies, signed

No additional shipping/handling charges, sent via USPS Priority Mail with delivery confirmation, packed and shipped by the author… signed & personalized by the author, if you pay for it. Is my signature worth that much? Maybe, but that isn’t the point: The point is to give people the option of becoming a patron / benefactor / philanthropist / supporter of an independent creator, rather than just a blind consumer looking for the best price. If you want the best price, currently $28.92 for the pair, go buy at B&N (or wherever), and I’ll get about $13.88 of that. If you order unsigned from me, depending on what shipping costs me (I don’t have the final weight of the books yet, and it depends on where you live, but it’ll be somewhere from $6-$11 for the pair), I’ll net $25-$29. If you order the signed copies, I’ll net $75-$80. See how that works?

Oh, and in case you didn’t read my last post (because it was over 2k words long?), you may have missed that I’m giving away FREE copies of the full Untrue Tales… series. You can enter right now on Goodreads, or you can go back and comment on that post and have a much better chance of winning. (Currently, I’m the only person eligible. Maybe I’ll win copies of my own books…)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click to view larger

I’ve decided to go with a larger format for these books for a couple of reasons, going from the 8×5″ I’ve used for all my other paperback releases to 8.5×5.5″ – partially so I can get the page counts down, since the cost to me for having any book printed is directly related to the number of pages, partially to give the impression that these books are “bigger” and “contain more” than my other books, since people feel like size means value even for books, and also because this is a very ‘popular’ size lately for trade paperbacks. As I mentioned before, part of why I’m re-releasing the first trilogy is so that I can put out a matched set that will look good together on a shelf, and you can see at right what the spines of the books (with the current version of the design) will look like next to each other. I think they look pretty good. (If you have any feedback on any of the images in this post, please comment (or email me, or tweet me, or message me on facebook).)

Showing the spines like this may bring up a question about the books’ titles. As I’ve learned in the years since initially writing the first two books of this series (ah, 2004/2005, when I thought that, just as I could (as a self-publisher) write whatever content I wanted, I could title books in any way I wanted), the publishing industry has some very specific requirements, limits, and expectations about what book titles will be. There is a reluctant acceptance of long book titles, but they must be structured in a very particular way: “Short Title: Long Title” where ‘Long Title’ is actually a subtitle, for metadata purposes. It’s important to note that, as I’ve complained about before, the publishing industry expects all ‘Short Titles’ to be under 5 words (often not counting ‘the’ and ‘of’, but you get the idea). I really didn’t want to compromise on the titles of these books, not really, so what I’ve decided to do is make the ‘Short Title’ of each book something like “The First Untrue Trilogy” and put the actual, full titles of all the included books in as a subtitle. This has the advantage of making it clear, when looking at these books in an online catalog or on an eReader (I’m thinking of putting the series out in combined eBook editions, possibly these trilogies (for parity w/ the new print versions), as well.) which books you’re getting. Unlike the current iteration of my titles, where the first title of each book is first, and which comes first, “Escape From Exile,” “The Bloodless Battles,” or “An Introduction To Dodgeball”?

A big challenge I’ve been facing is how to describe the books, especially the books of The Second Untrue Trilogy in a way which doesn’t spoil … anything. It’s nigh-impossible. Without being vague beyond the point of frustration; there is almost nothing that can be said about what happens in Books 4-6 which doesn’t give away at least a little something about what happened in Books 1-3. I’ve tried. It’s possible I’ve failed, and that the descriptions which follow still give too much away. Aside from general feedback about the basic design of the covers, which I would love to get, this is the most important thing I need help with. Writing marketing copy is my weakness. Marketing is, to me, like kryptonite is, to Superman. I work on writing a couple of paragraphs, then feel sick for a couple hours. The last couple of days have been hell. I’m sure my inability to write good/effective marketing copy is why my books/eBooks don’t sell well, and for these print editions, this text will have a *very* long shelf life; I’m ordering 50 copies of each book, which is almost three times more copies than I sold of my best selling paperback book, ever. Anyone, whether you’ve read the books or not, please, please read the following back-cover descriptions I’ve written up and let me know what you think. Will they be effective? Do they make you want to read the books? Do they give too much away? I don’t know what to do… This part freaks me out more than anything else about running a publishing company or small business.

In other news, Untrue Tales… Book Five launched on Podiobooks.com today!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book One:
An Introduction to Dodgeball
-or-
Conception and Induction
-or-
How To Begin An Apocalypse

At the time I’d not yet begun thinking about marketing. Not the way Marketing people think about marketing. Perhaps a pinch of the way Salesmen think about sales, but really I was mostly thinking about writing the stories I wanted to write and giving them titles I thought were appropriate. The idea, when I titled it originally, was that the book took place in the universe of the “Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction” of which many various stories and series may eventually be written, and that the series I’d just begun was called the “Recollections of an Alternate Past.” The first book, “Book One” had three titles, each of which was an appropriate title and none of which, I felt, properly encompassed the full scope of the book. That part, I can understand, might be confusing at first. Most books have only one title or, at most, two titles. Three is just, whew, confusing?

After that, in 2005, I wrote and published the next book in that series. I gave it a title commensurate with the first book:

Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book Two:
The Twofold Invasion
-or-
Penetration and Destruction
-or-
How To Make Love With Twins

Again, with the two series titles and the three book titles. In 2005-2006 I wrote (& in 2006 published) the third book:

Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book Three:
Escape From Exile
-or-
Confusion and Contraction
-or-
How To Get Out Of Hell

Yep. 5 titles. Again.

In 2007 I decided to take my publishing company into the major leagues by buying ISBNs, registering with the Library of Congress, properly registering as a business with the state, and signing up for printing & distribution with Lightning Source (LSI). Based on my research at the time, the choice between Lulu.com and LSI was a false dichotomy, since all of Lulu’s printing was done by LSI. Cafepress wasn’t (and still isn’t) taking publishing seriously, and Amazon’s CreateSpace/whatever cost a bit more than LSI & limited distribution to Amazon, which seems more like bush league than major league.

In 2008 I began working full-time as a creative, and began to look into marketing a bit. As I’ve recently written about re-realizing, I had accidentally let myself slip into a mindset of thinking sales & marketing were important. In two years of frustrating myself, I did get a smidgen of understanding about marketing. By 2009 I was aware that it was considered a bad idea for a book’s title to be longer than 3 or 4 words. If you look at the New York Times Bestsellers this week, in Hardcover Nonfiction four of the top five books have a one-word title. (Did you notice none of them is a word over 5 letters long?) In Hardcover Fiction, four of the top five have two-word or three-word titles, and that trend covers most all mass-market books by all major publishers. It’s good marketing, you see, to have a short, memorable title.

In 2010, I’ve begun to come to terms with the fact that the entire publishing world (both in books and in music/audiobooks) has been built around the assumption that all publishers follow that sort of thinking. The relevant metadata fields for books, eBooks, audiobooks, et cetera are small. On some eReaders, books’ titles simply get cut off if they’re more than about 25-30 characters. On some eBook stores, book descriptions can’t exceed a few hundred characters. I can still name paper books whatever I want, but in the transition to digital, I lose a certain degree of creative freedom with regard to titling books. I “can” put my full titles in the title fields of my eBooks, but I can’t guarantee potential readers will actually be able to see the full titles there. (In fact, in 2009 I discovered that I literally can’t use my full titles on my audiobooks because of how RSS/WinXP handle the titles of podcasts episodes. I compromised on an abbreviated title because not doing so prevented people from hearing my books. (ie: not about money, but about readership))

This year I’ve also been going back and forth with Mark Coker / Smashwords on the subject of titles. Smashwords didn’t like how I initially named my short stories from short story collections. I thought about it for a month or so, then decided to change the way I arranged the titles of my short stories (going from collection first to individual story title first), trying to make it more clear, in light of my discoveries about how eReaders display the titles. I also decided to use a similar tactic to rename the eBook versions of my Untrue Tales… series according to the compromise I’d made on the audiobooks, waiting until Book Four was released, 11/5/2010. The full title of Book Four is:

Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book Four:
Explorations of Ridiculous Realities
-or-
Corporation and Collusion
-or-
How To Subvert Corporatocracy

But in the “title” field I put the abbreviated version, “Untrue Tales… Book Four” when I uploaded it to Smashwords, the Kindle store, and when I gave Bowker the information for the eBook. At the same time, I updated the titles of the first three books to the abbreviated versions on all sites, putting the full titles in the books’ description fields instead. I feel that, under the circumstances of the limitations placed on book titles for eBooks, this is a good compromise, allowing me to communicate basic info (this book is in a series whose name begins with “Untrue Tales,” and is book number “Four”) in the limited space of the title field, along with the full title to people who click through, look at the book cover, or actually download the book and look at the title page.

Mark Coker disagrees. In fact, as someone with a background in Marketing, his opinion is that I ought to just rename my books. I complained a bit about this current disagreement on Twitter and someone chimed in to the same effect; if it helps sales, change the titles. To me, this is like a teacher asking a parent to rename their 6-year-old because it might confuse the other kids at school.

Yet, even after working on this blog post for 3-4 hours, after spending another while writing another response to Mark Coker via email (highlight: “As far as I’m concerned the only problem is when retailers decide not to display the correct/full titles. Since they seem to accurately display covers and descriptions, but not titles, I moved my titles to where they could be seen: the book covers and the book descriptions. I then put an abbreviated (as your reviewer noted: incorrect) title in the title field, in order to fit the limitations of the system.“), I still don’t know what I’m going to do. Usually I write posts like these to work through sticky ideas, and after a thousand words or so, I know what I mean to do. I’m still a bit conflicted. Only about the metadata, though. The other two books in the series are all going to get the 3-titles-each treatment, and the series still has two titles. Here’s what I’ve got for the recently-finished Book Five:

Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book Five:
The Bloodless Battles
-or-
Conscription and Revelation
-or-
How To Break Into Prison

I’ll start work on writing Book Six pretty soon. Hopefully I’ll have it’s ridiculously long title by the end of the month (or early December, at the latest).

I don’t believe in capitalism. I hate money. I don’t like business. Accounting rules are literally insane. Marketing makes me nauseous. Sales, inasmuch as I can do it honestly, is moderately acceptable, at best.

I’m concerned with the questions of ‘why’. The ‘why’ of my art, of my writing, of my publishing, of my life – none of it has to do with money. I’m not interested in wealth. I don’t want those concerns to alter or infect the ‘whys’ of my creative work, or my life in general. When I need to address a question of ‘why’ I created this book or that work of art, I don’t ever want the answer to be something like “to make money.”

This has been easier to maintain with my books, possibly because they’ve never been “profitable” in any financial sense. They’ve always been works of love, the ideas behind them and the effort going into them based on expressing myself and writing the books I wanted to write rather than the books I thought were going to sell. For a long time, this was true of my art, as well. Then I began doing the art walks every month. Twice a month, at times. Investing as much or more time in selling my art than I was in creating it.

The mini-paintings were literally a money grab. The reason I bought small canvases (mostly 4×4″, but up to 8×10″) to paint was so that I could have items for sale under $20 at the art walks, where people often balked at paying realistic/appropriate prices for art. One problem with this was that, after a while, I would get down to a day or two before an art walk and -in a panic- paint half a dozen mini-paintings at once, almost entirely at random, just so I would have something that might sell. Another was that they became an overwhelming percentage of sales. In 2008, where I only did art walks for four months, they made up 28% of my unit sales and about 3.6% of my revenue from art. In 2009 where I showed probably 18+ times, they were 66% of unit sales and 25% of my art revenue. If I exclude the sale of the original artwork created for my book covers (and sold explicitly to people who wanted to support the publication of my books), for 2010, which I only showed at 3 art walks before pausing, mini-paintings make up 100% of my art sales. (Actually, looking at my spreadsheet, I also sold a crocheted mobius strip for $5 and a crocheted zombie to a fan of my books at Comicon, and I consider my crocheted creations to be sculptural artwork. If I account for those works, the mini-paintings only make up 71% of unit sales and 52% of revenue for 2010.)

So, even when I first began to create the mini-paintings, I was already uneasy about the significantly commercial nature of their existence. Certainly they were each an original work of handmade art, created with my own style and ideas. Just as certainly, I was creating them for the express purpose of making sales at art walks. When they began to make up a larger and larger proportion of both my creative efforts and my actual sales, it made me very uneasy. The point of showing at the art walks wasn’t really supposed to be about finding something that would sell and making that, over and over again, just for the sake of sales. The point was supposed to be that I already create art and the only way to sell it is if people know it’s available. I believe (though I’d have to go to my other computer and dig around in Quickbooks for a while to give accurate numbers) that I made more sales online via Twitter/Plurk/facebook in 2008 and 2009 than I did at art walks (not in volume, but in revenue). My art walk sales were mostly, then, works I’d created from a drive to have something to sell, rather than from a drive to express myself or to create what I wanted to create. Which makes me a bit sick.

My wife and I have been working on our financial situation fairly diligently for the last ~3 years (we’ll have been married 3 years on 12/1), and I’ve been working on structuring my “business model” for Modern Evil Press so that I’m not running further in the red the more books I write (see: selling paintings to pay for the cost of publishing, specifically the original cover art (and possibly interior illustrations, in future) for the book in question), and this year we reached a point where we’re slightly better than breaking even both personally and in terms of the business. I’ve got us on track, barring unexpected negative changes (apocalypse, housefire, expensive car repairs, pregnancy and the like), to have all our debt (was close to $45k when we married) paid off except Mandy’s student loans (another $40k) by mid-2013. That’s without Modern Evil Press earning another dollar. That’s without selling any more art. If I could make money from my art and books, we could get there faster, but it isn’t necessary.

This is what what I’ve been working on, mentally and emotionally. This is how I’ve been trying to get my mind right; to deeply realize that making money from my creative output isn’t necessary. With a model similar to what I did with the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut, going electronic-only (eBooks & audiobooks) until/unless sales (generally: the original cover art) cover the cost of going to press, I can write as many (or as few) books as I’d like. With the amount of canvas & paint & yarn I currently have stockpiled (from excellent sales at local stores), I’ll have a debt account or two paid off before I need to go shopping for real (expensive) art supplies again – so I’ll be able to afford it, even if none of the art I create between now and then sells. I need to fully return to a point of creating from inspiration rather than from profit motive.

I’ll accept profits, if and when they appear, but that isn’t -and shouldn’t be- why I work.