Sometimes I look at the things I’m avoiding, like using any of the increasingly-large offers for free AdWords advertising I keep receiving, and wonder whether I’m afraid of success. Literally, I do not advertise my books or art through any traditional means. I don’t think it’s because I’m afraid of success. I think it may be because I’m afraid of business.

I don’t like the parts of running a small business that are the business side of things. Accounting/bookkeeping, paperwork, taxes, marketing, even some aspects of customer service. All of which are things which increase in time investment & complexity, the more business I do. With the books side of the business, the side most likely to be able to create working advertising for, the amount of extra work that needs to be done for each book sold seems disproportionate with the amount of income earned, especially in relation to the same ratio re: art sales. But how do you sell my original artwork via a 2-line text ad? What search keywords are going to be coming from people who will like my art and will click on an ad? Books are somewhat easier, though I doubt the word “zombie” comes cheaply…

If I were selling enough paper books directly (I earn 2x to 6x more per book when I sell directly, rather than wholesale, so hitting any $ target is less copies/marketing/et cetera that way) to say with any seriousness that I was making as much or more than I could earn via a traditional publishing company & contract, the time and effort it would take to physically process & ship the orders would nearly be a full time job in itself, leaving little energy left for creation of new works. That is a scary thought. That is what I’m somewhat afraid of: that I’ll be doing so much business that I won’t have time to create.

So, yes, perhaps I’m doing this writing thing “all wrong” and I ought to have gone the “normal” route where I let a publisher take most of the revenue in exchange for doing all the business-side stuff I don’t like, giving up the ability to do the editorial, design, layout, cover design, and web site design aspects of the job that I do like along with them. Except that doesn’t really end up paying much better than what I’m doing now, for most authors, since they’re putting their own money into the publicity efforts I’ve mostly been avoiding… Out of the advances they’ll be lucky to ever earn out. Maybe.

Success, though… For me, it’s more about being able to create. To create what I want to create, when I want to create it. I semi-recently had a conversation with my wife about it, where she (effectively the sole income-earner in our household) questioned the very idea that I ought to be trying to earn any sort of living from my creations. Like, “where did you get that idea?” And I think she was right, and well in tune to what I actually believe & want than my own behaviors and projected beliefs represented.

We’re closer now to a financial situation where we don’t have to worry every month about how we’re going to afford groceries than we were last year, and I’m decreasingly thinking about how to turn my creations into a regular income. I have faith in my work. I believe in the act of creation.

I don’t believe in the value of money, business, the market, or marketing.

And yes, this post is a messy ramble. I wrote it on my iPhone while my iMac was occupied with actual work.

I had intended to make a post in the first week or so of February with the numbers for January, but somehow kept putting it off until February was nearly over. Last night I managed to notice it was a new month within only a couple of days of its start, and put together most of the numbers, even tweeting some of them. But Twitter isn’t the place for a lot of information to be displayed, so here’s a post. Podiobooks are difficult to gauge, so I’m including the inflated total episodes downloaded (“total”) and the more-likely-accurate number of times the final chapter/episode was downloaded (“done”). (*=only available free by request, no requests made in this period=all paid)

• Lost and Not Found – eBook: 85 dl’s in Jan. (2 paid), 82 dl’s in Feb.
• Lost and Not Found – Podiobook: 2885 total/138 done in Jan., 1991 total/88 done in Feb.
• Dragons’ Truth – eBook: 103 dl’s in Jan., 92 dl’s in Feb.
• Dragons’ Truth – Podiobook: 1929 total/228 done in Jan., 1243 total/124 done in Feb.
• Forget What You Can’t Remember – eBook: 98 dl’s in Jan. (1 paid), 79 dl’s in Feb.
• Forget What You Can’t Remember – Podiobook: 5890 total/186 done in Jan., 4649 total/144 done in Feb.
• Untrue Tales… Book One – eBook: 94 dl’s in Jan., 93 dl’s in Feb. (1 paid)
• Untrue Tales… Book One – Podiobook: 4078 total/337 done in Jan., 3907 total/354 done in Feb.
• Untrue Tales… Book Two – eBook: 66 dl’s in Jan., 84 dl’s in Feb.
• Untrue Tales… Book Two – Podiobook: 4220 total/344 done in Jan., 4232 total/357 done in Feb.
• Untrue Tales… Book Three – eBook: 121 dl’s in Jan, 67 dl’s in Feb.
• Untrue Tales… Book Three – Podiobook: 3050 total/274 done in Jan., 1607 total/155 done in Feb.
• Cheating, Death – eBook*: 0 dl’s in Jan., 1 dl in Feb.
• Cheating, Death – Podiobook: 8853 total/687 done in Jan., 4758 total/358 done in Feb.
• More Lost Memories – full eBook*: 0 dl’s in Jan., 1 dl in Feb.
• More Lost Memories – individual story eBooks*: 1 dl in Jan., 4 dl’s in Feb.
• Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut – eBook*: 0 dl’s in Jan., 1 dl in Feb.

• Total eBook downloads: 568 in Jan., 504 in Feb.
• Total paid eBook downloads: 4 in Jan., 8 in Feb.
• Total Podiobooks downloads: 30,905 in Jan., 22,387 in Feb.
• Total Podiobooks “finished”: 2194 in Jan., 1991 in Feb.

Getting month-to-month stats for the Modern Evil Podcast is basically impossible at this point, but I from looking at the stats I do have, I can estimate that between 40 and 60 people are actively subscribed to the feed. Older episodes of the Modern Evil Podcast keep getting downloaded though, currently at a rate of roughly four times a week, each… which is a totally inaccurate way to state that, since it seems that what happens is that every once in a while someone finds the feed & downloads 50+ back-episodes, all at once. Anyway, there’s the download numbers for electronic versions. Now, here’s the numbers for paper versions, plus revenue figures for paper books, for art, and for eBooks: (Podiobooks donations are paid out quarterly, so YTD PB income is $0 AFAIK.)

• I had ZERO direct sales of books and art in January, and ZERO wholesale sales of paper books.
• eBooks sold in January: 4
• My cut from eBooks sales in Jan.: $7.70
• Total gross income for January: $7.70

• Mini-paintings sold in Feb.: 4
• Income from art in Feb.: $45
• Chapbooks sold in Feb.: 7
• Paperbacks sold in Feb.: 1 direct (W1kV2), 2 wholesale (C,D & UTFBF1-3), 1 sent to reviewer (FWYCR)
• Income from paper book sales in Feb: $32.63
• eBooks sold in Feb.: 8
• My cut from eBooks sales in Feb.: $9.73
• Total from book sales in Feb.: $42.36
• Total gross income for February: $87.36

Not great, but by not going to Tools of Change this year, I’m way, way ahead in terms of net income versus last year, even without sales in January. I’ll be at the Phoestival (read: Phoenix First Fridays Art Walk Block Party, on Roosevelt between Central and 7th Street from 6PM to 11PM) this week, and I’ll be showing/selling my art during Art Detour on Saturday outside Eye Lounge (5th St. & Roosevelt from 9AM to ~5PM), so hopefully I’ll be able to make some sales there.

eBook downloads are up again, after an off year in 2009. February wasn’t as good as January, but it was also 3 days shorter… though that doesn’t account for the actual level of dropoff in total downloads, or the opposite experience in sales. These numbers bring the total number of my podcast episodes downloaded (PB+MEPod, all time) to 264,615 (YTD: 53,292) with the total number of “final” episodes downloaded from Podiobooks.com (a more accurate number, I think) to 14,893 (YTD: 3,774), and the total number of eBook downloads from modernevil.com to 9,494 (YTD: 1,072). Total number of books sold (eBooks+paperbacks+chapbooks+giveaways) YTD is 23. One way to read that is to say that for each person who has downloaded a free copy of one of my books this year, less than one in two hundred of them decided to pay. And I think that’s more than enough numbers for now.

So, I’ve recently passed my 150th episode of the Modern Evil Podcast, having posted 2 episodes a week almost entirely without fail (there was a week or two where the episodes were a few days late, but no actual gaps in content) since I started it. I’ve just put up the penultimate chapter of Dragons’ Truth, and the final chapter will go up on Friday. ((Yes, Dragons’ Truth was the first of my books I made available, through Podiobooks, almost two years ago – but since I didn’t start the Modern Evil Podcast until  several months later, it hadn’t yet been in the Modern Evil Podcast feed.)) Then, starting a week from today, I’ll be podcasting the short story ‘Second Thoughts’.  It comes from a short story collection I haven’t yet released (I feel I need at least one more story before I can put it out, possibly several more.  They’re long-ish stories, but right now I only have 4 of them, and it comes together as about 150 pages so far.) but this story is one I’ve made available as a limited edition chapbook.  I should put those online for sale…

Anyway, ‘Second Thoughts’ will run for 3 episodes. I’ve got it recorded but not yet edited. Then I had planned on alternating between episodes of the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut (on Fridays) and new poetry (on Tuesdays)… and when I drew up that schedule a couple of months ago, I’d expected to have been able to write the 5 new poems such a schedule calls for… but I haven’t written any new poetry.  I could grab 5+ more poems from my 3 existing collections. I could cut the podcast back to once a week. I could *quick* write some poetry in the next 2 weeks. I haven’t yet decided.

Regardless of what I do, after I finish podcasting ‘Second Thoughts’ and the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut, I’m out. If I only do 1 episode of LaNF-DC per week, I’ll run out of content April 9th. Including the presumed mid-week poetry episodes, that’ll be episode 167. I don’t have anything ready for episode 168. Yet.

Theoretically I could podcast the remaining stories from More Lost Memories… though I have been reluctant to do so. I could podcast all the remaining poetry from both volumes of Worth 1k… I could edit and polish the other stories from my unfinished collection and podcast them. I could … write a new book. I could let my podcast go on ‘hiatus’ pending new content. I don’t know.

I should be able to write a new book between now and then, but I have a lot of other things going on. A major factor of which is that the book I’m currently researching for … I expect not to be one of the quick ones. I expect to spend at least the next month researching for it, actually (though I suppose if I cut back on crochet work, I could get through my reading faster), before I write word one. I expect it to come out to be one of my longest novels yet, if I want to do a good and thorough job with it. I suppose I could do what some other authors have done before, which is to podcast the unfinished, unedited work as-I-write-it. Or I could write some other book in between researching for it, and podcast that.  I don’t know.

What I don’t want to do is podfade. To stop podcasting. I really would prefer not to go on hiatus. I don’t want to lose my momentum. I also don’t want the quality to drop, or the nature of the feed to change – it’s a podcast of my writing. It isn’t some guy jabbering, it isn’t an interview show, it isn’t topical or political or humorous or informative – it’s a podcast of all the literature I write. Twice a week, every week. I’d like that to continue.

So, I put together that long post about numbers the other day, but I left out some of the numbers. Because I consider them to be less valid. But gosh, do they look more impressive! So, here are the TOTAL downloads for my various podcast novels. So for a book like Lost and Not Found, broken into 18 parts, the number is probably over 18x the number of actual listeners. And for books like Forget What You Can’t Remember and Cheating, Death where I intentionally made the episodes half as long (15min average, instead of 30), the numbers look even more impressive than that! And yet, still so much less impressive than the numbers for the actually popular podiobook authors, whose downloads are hundreds of thousands per book.

• Dragons’ Truth – 11,458 downloads in 2008, 15,985 downloads in 2009: 27,443 total downloads
• Lost and Not Found – 2,906 downloads in 2008, 18,251 downloads in 2009: 21,157 total downloads
• Forget What You Can’t Remember – 43,218 downloads in 2009
• Untrue Tales… Book One – 35,704 downloads in 2009 (~9 months)
• Untrue Tales… Book Two – 27,178 downloads in 2009 (~6 months)
• Untrue Tales… Book Three – 13,502 downloads in 2009 (~4 months)
• Cheating, Death – 11,899 downloads in 2009 (~2 months)
• Total downloads in 2008: 14,364
• Total downloads in 2009: 165,737
• Total of all my Podiobooks’ downloads as of 12/31/09: 180,101
• Total downloads of MEPod as of 1/8/2010: 24,229
• Grand total of Podiobooks + MEPod: 204,330

So there’s some bigger numbers. Still long-tail sized numbers. Even within podcast audiobooks, I’m a small fish. But 204,330 looks a lot better than the 11,119 downloads of just the final episodes of my podiobooks. Puts the donations in perspective; for every ~6005 downloads of my Podiobooks, $1 is donated. Podiobooks.com’s $0.25 cut wouldn’t cover the bandwidth cost of those 150Gb+ of downloads, so I suppose it’s a good thing they aren’t being charged for bandwidth.

I’ve spent the last few days gathering numbers and putting them into a spreadsheet. Now I’m going to take a few of them and try to communicate them to you here. The numbers come from several places, representing podcast downloads, eBook downloads, and sales of books and of art. Since I didn’t make a post about it for 2008’s numbers, I’ll probably include some of them as well, for comparison. I’ll try not to turn this post into a spreadsheet, just numbers, but will try to make it more like my usual rambles.

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

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