The most obvious in Never Let the Right One Go, part of the mirrored-activities-to-draw-comparisons between Sophia and Emily, was shopping for clothes and getting dressed. Emily is a shop-a-holic, and buying and wearing fashionable clothing is a major part of her social life (and her identity, before meeting Nicholas). Sophia, upon moving out, decides to buy a whole new wardrobe. Sophia later goes on several dates and pays particular attention to her wardrobe; one of her dates even takes her shopping for clothes, and buys her a complete outfit. Sophia ends up meeting a world-class fashion designer and having clothes custom made for her childlike body.

Going back to my older works, in Lost and Not Found, the main character’s first attempt at writing a novel contains a long description of a superhero designing his own costume – and at the end of the book there’s a chapter-long section where he and Tinkerbell are going through a magical closet full of clothes trying to decide what to wear. In the Untrue Tales… series there are several getting-dressed scenes, including Hannah’s unfortunate rushed morning before her accident, and Trevor in the locker room before his first dodgeball match. Melvin helps dress his children before they leave the safety of their homes to go face the zombies in Cheating, Death.

Of course, the most obvious are in Lost and Not Found, and specifically in the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut, where perhaps fully half of the narrative is concerned with these four touchstones. (Warning: SPOILERS ahead) After the main character whisks Tink away from Never-never land, and after they finally arrive at Haven, their first morning is first full of cooking, then of eating, then of bathing (in a magical bubble bath), and then of getting dressed, before heading out to visit a museum. (Trevor and Toni visit a museum in Untrue Tales… Book Four, as well, and there’s a museum visit in Worth 1k — Volume 2.) (Update: I’ve just remembered (10 hrs after posting this) that Sophia visits a museum, too! After going to the opera, Sophia’s date takes her on a private tour of a sort of history museum. She really gets all of them, doesn’t she?)

I like that order, as it’s a very natural one, but I don’t stick religiously to it, adding these relatively-mundane scenes in wherever they belong along the way. The main character of Lost and Not Found also spends some time cooking at the beginning of the book, while waiting for the day he can begin writing a novel. Lance, one of the major characters of Forget What You Can’t Remember, becomes a chef and opens his own restaurant – giving Paul and Job one of the only opportunities for anyone to eat in the entire book, and not until the penultimate chapter – then he gets an entire short story, ‘Self-Serve’ to himself and his restaurant in More Lost Memories, where the unique/unusual nature of his cooking, and of the eating of it, is given more room to breathe.

In Never Let the Right One Go, Emily doesn’t do any cooking. Alternatively, gourmet cooking is one of Sophia’s hobbies/passions. Early in the book, she cooks meals for her family (though she does not partake), and after she moves out she has more opportunities to prepare food for other people. Putting together a tray and fruit and cheese for her suitor is a big highlight of one of Sophia’s many frustrating dates, for example. Sophia’s relationship with food isn’t a perfect one, though, which I’ll cover below, as I address scenes of eating:

In another story from More Lost Memories (a story later re-integrated into the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut), ‘Happy Anniversary’, the main character from Lost and Not Found and Tink, on their wedding anniversary, go out for an exquisite meal at one of Skythia’s top restaurants. There are quite a few poems in Worth 1k — Volume 2 about eating (and its harmful/wonderful effects), just as there were poems in Worth 1k — Volume 1 about finding and eating food on the road. I won’t attempt to get into all the different meals (some described in nauseating detail) Trevor and his companions experience during the course of the Untrue Tales… series; they are numerous and sometimes unusual. Then there are the zombies in Forget What You Can’t Remember and in Cheating, Death, which are always going around eating people and/or brains.

In Never Let the Right One Go, Emily hardly eats at all (which is in keeping with her character) – I think the only times she’s described as eating are a few pieces of cut-up fruit the morning she arrives in Washington, D.C. for the big protest rally, a Frappuccino on the closest thing to a real date she ever has with Nicholas, and a single bite of popcorn on her terrible date with Austin. Sophia, on the other hand, spends half the book concerned with eating and not eating. As a vampire, she’s capable of eating human food but not capable of absorbing nutrition from it; anything she swallows merely passes through her body and exits undigested. Unfortunately, her super-senses turn that into a disgusting proposition, and by the time the book starts, Sophia knows better than to actually swallow any of the food she cooks. She loves cooking, loves food, loves the aromas and flavors, but can’t swallow anything but blood. The amount and frequency of Sophia’s blood consumption are thoroughly detailed throughout her story, along with the long periods of fasting she goes through, burning with hunger, so she’ll be able to donate her organs safely.

Bathing I cover a little less (though the magic bubble bath in Forlorn was, as I said, chapter-length in its detail), but I still see it as a touchstone. Real people bathe. We can identify with it, with how showering or taking a bath makes us feel. How nice it is to be fresh and refreshed and clean – or how desperately we feel the need to bathe after going through something particularly (even just emotionally) grueling. I don’t think Emily bathes at all in the text, but Sophia takes at least one shower, and right after a scene which may make you want to take a shower, too. I won’t give any more away.

I knew, going in, that Sophia was my favorite of the two novels, but I didn’t realize that I’d subconsciously include all these touchstones in one book and leave them almost entirely out of the other. Looking forward, I don’t expect to include any of these touchstones in my next four books… and I also don’t expect them to rank among my favorites.

Have you read my books? What scenes have I failed to mention? Did you remember Mary showering in ‘Pay Attention -A Zombie Story-’, and how it marked a major turning point for her, as a character? What about the particular food eaten in ‘They Stole God’ and the trouble its eating caused?

The Indie eBook site, OnlyIndie, uses a variable pricing model which starts at free. After 15 “sales” the price goes to $0.01, and increments up by $0.01 per reader (up to a maximum of $7.98). Unless the book goes 24 hours without a sale, and then the price starts dropping again. (They don’t say how much or how quickly. For the following calculations, I’ve decided it’s probably “quick enough” since it’s rare for any of my eBooks to sell two days in a row (or, really, two months in a row).) Most of my eBooks sell between 0 and 6 times per year, across all available platforms - though Untrue Tales… Book One sold 9 copies last year, and Cheating, Death sold 14 last year.

Based on a quick look at my spreadsheets, and pretending that 1) getting 15 people to take a book for free is easy, 2) once a title hits a price of $0.01 it doesn’t actually drop to free again, and 3) demand for my eBooks would have been the same at $0.01 as it was at all the different prices they’ve been at in the last 3.5 years (Okay, this one is actually based on some data, where I’ve lowered and raised and adjusted prices between $0.99 and $9.99 for months at a time, and seen that interest in my books drops when they’re below $2.99 but doesn’t really change much between $4.99 and $9.99.), I would have made roughly $3.25 $1.62 if 100% of my eBook sales in the last 3.5 years had been made through OnlyIndie. (They take 50% of all sales under $2/each. Not even my most popular $0.99 short story has sold 200 copies, ever.)

Since Amazon price-matches, Apple won’t allow books below $0.99 and won’t allow you to undercut them on other sites, et cetera, et cetera, saying 100% of sales had to be through OnlyIndie isn’t even relevant: The earnings would be the same. Maybe this tool/site/scheme would work as a way to “build a platform”, but it seems like it would need a lot of attention, just to keep prices from falling to useless levels.

The prices for my books are: paper / ebook:

• Lost and Not Found: $9.99 / $4.99
• Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: $6.99 / $3.99
• Forget What You Can’t Remember: $8.99 / $3.99
• More Lost Memories: $8.99 / $4.99
• Cheating, Death: $4.99 / $2.99
• The First Untrue Trilogy: $9.99 / $3.99
• The Second Untrue Trilogy: $18.99 / $8.99
• Both Untrue Trilogies together: $25.99
• Dragons’ Truth: $7.99 / $3.99
• Time, emiT, and Time Again: $5.99 / $2.99
• Unspecified: $4.99 / $2.99
• Worth 1k — Volume 1: $9.99 / $4.99
• Worth 1k — Volume 2: $9.99 / $4.99
• Never Let the Right One Go: $35 / $9.99(each)

Looks like the only things I’ll have priced over $10 are books which contain more than one novel. Hopefully, that’ll help spur sales. The Lost and Not Found Universe 5-pack of books is only $39.95 at these prices. The full Untrue Tales… series can be had for just $0.99 more than I was asking for each trilogy this time last year. The complete Modern Evil package, containing a copy of every single book, would only be $139.89 (a little over $150 with tax, so I’ll say $150 for cash customers) – that’s for all 18 books, containing over 825k words.

(Ooh, just realized that, with the books I’m planning on writing next, I’ll jump past 1 million published words within my first decade of publishing. It won’t even be hard; if each book of the new Dragons’ Truth trilogy is around 60k words, that’ll cover the distance alone – and I’ve already got another book well under way that I expect to be again as long as that. What a fun milestone this will be.)

Some things getting started even earlier: I’ve finished the editing of both audio books, though they still need to be mixed thrice, and I’ve begun podcasting them on the Modern Evil Podcast. The first episode of Sophia went up last Friday, the first episode of Emily goes up tomorrow, and then starting next week there’ll be a new episode on the feed every Monday (Sophia), Wednesday (Unspecified), and Friday (Emily) through Halloween. According to the current version of my plans, both books will then appear on Podiobooks.com (complete) on Halloween, 2012. I keep trying to figure out how to sell the full audio books directly from modernevil.com (no intros or outros on each chapter, just a straight audio book like you’d get from Audible, or on CD), and I’m really close. Maybe not “ready to launch on Saturday” close, but … nearly.

One (big) thing getting launched a little later: The limited edition hardcover has been ordered, and printed, and shipped, and is apparently currently on a truck slowly making its way across the country to me – the books should get to me on Monday, May 14th, 2012, just two days after their official publication date. Then I have to sign and number them all (and cut one page out of each one) and then I can put them up for sale on modernevil.com. Actually, as soon as I have the boxes of books in hand I’ll probably add the ‘Buy buttons’ to the site, since I’ll certainly be able to get them out by the end of the next postal day, at the latest. I expect to film myself signing and numbering the books, then edit together a (mostly time-lapse) video of the process – look for that, some time next week.

Lots to do, lots going on, and that release date just keeps getting closer and closer. (With Phoenix Comicon approaching at an eerily similar rate of one day closer per day… Hmm… Do you suppose they’re working together?) I think I’ve got all my ducks in a row, though. It ought to be a smooth launch, even though some of the parts are coming a couple of days late. (I don’t expect to sell out of the hardcovers within a couple of years, so a couple of days at this end just seems like a big deal. It isn’t, in the long run.)

Someone commented, asking, “Have you looked at http://backmybook.com/? It’s what Scott Sigler’s using — and Scott Sigler pushes preorder of his books pretty heavily in his podcasts.” This was my reply, and I thought it worth re-posting, here:

I never get past the front page, where it says they charge more per month than I earn from my books most months, just to set up a store, and double that to try to build a community around the books. You have to keep in mind I’ve not got lots of eager, paying customers: A clue is my recent Kickstarter – which I used as a way to sell pre-orders of this book, actually – which failed because I could only come up with 14 backers.

The pre-order system I’m looking for needs to be cost-effective at selling as few as half a dozen books. Really, any store I set up needs to be that way, right now. Last year I sold 26 paper books and 133 eBooks, or an average of just over 13 copies a month. That’s across all platforms and venues – I can’t afford any platform which costs more than the <$25/month I make in sales across all platforms (most months); even $10/month is really too much.

I sell more copies each year than the last, and for most titles each new book is more popular than the last – I’m building an audience, slowly but surely. (Last year an average of over 1,500 people/month downloaded my free eBooks, and a little over half as many downloaded my free audiobooks.) I’m in this for the long haul. In another five or ten years I expect to have passed the inflection point where my books sell enough copies that I can throw money at services like Back My Book and MyWrite, and where a signed numbered limited edition hardback release doesn’t take several years to sell 50 copies. (Which, frankly, is an optimistic outlook for Never Let the Right One Go, right now. Could take a decade.)
—

This also precludes services for hosting/selling digital goods (there are several out there, most charge a minimum monthly fee) such as ZIPs of my audiobooks (without all the extra intros/outros/chatter that you get on podcasts), or eBooks. In fact, it also means I don’t have a business checking account, because the minimum monthly fees would cancel out half my monthly business (and the situation was much worse four years ago when I started doing this full time) – I still do everything through my personal accounts.  As a general rule, if a service provider between me and my customers operates on a subscription model or on upfront costs, rather than piecemeal (per transaction costs), I can’t afford it. My business is not regular enough, yet.

As I keep posting, even the upfront costs of printing paper books (and the subscription-type costs of keeping them available for “market distribution”) no longer make sense to me; the 50-copy print run of Never Let the Right One Go could, potentially, wipe out this entire year’s revenues, if few copies sell. I don’t expect to create paper versions of my next 4 (planned) books, three of which are YA novels. By the end of this year, I’ll have cut off the “Market Distribution” for every single one of my (paper) books; the eBooks and audiobooks will still be everywhere, but the paper versions will only be available directly from modernevil.com. With any luck, this will help maintain my gradual, but steadily increasing, distance from losing money on every book, every year.

So, today (Saturday, April 28th, 2012), Untrue Tales… Book One is available for free in the Amazon Kindle store. I would love it if you would click over to Amazon and click the Buy button -even if you’ve already read it, or listened to it, or if you have no intention of reading it, or reviewing it- because everyone who “Buys” it helps increase its Amazon Sales Rank. It would be even better if you then read and reviewed it, but that’s not really the point of this FREE day; the point is to increase visibility for the title, and if you have an Amazon account, you can help. (If you’re reading this after 4/28/2012 and before 5/5/12 – it’ll be free again 5/4 and 5/5, so you’ll have another chance to help!) Here’s the book description, in case you actually want to know what it’s about before you click through:

High school Sophomore Trevor believes he’s got a rich and detailed imagination. When his wandering mind shows him visions of car-size insects, arcane rituals, and odd-looking people talking to other creatures who don’t seem human at all, Trevor doesn’t think it’s any different from his sexual fantasies, or his daydreams about what it would be like to know what the girls from school were really thinking. When an afternoon of such intense mental wandering proves to be a real out-of-body psychic experience, Trevor soon finds himself literally teleported into an unseen world of magic and Mentalism – the science of reading other people’s thoughts and memories he didn’t know he had a natural talent for.

Transferred to a school where they teach subjects ranging from the mathematics of magical ethics to the secret histories of the magical world, Trevor tries to fit in to a student body who believes his existence has been foretold by prophecy – and that he might cause the end of the universe as they know it. Some of the students, and even a few of the teachers, are willing to risk lives and their own ethical balance to stop Trevor from fulfilling his potential, while he just wants to get through his first day at a new school.

Add the menacing conspiracy of three dark figures -two of whom work at the school- and the fact that Trevor accidentally got a girl pregnant when he thought he’d only been fantasizing about her, plus a P.E. teacher who thrusts him into a game of dodgeball where Trevor has to quickly adapt to avoiding balls of fire, lightning, and worse, and the first book of Untrue Tales gets the series off to a potentially apocalyptic start.

Please, go to Amazon and “buy” Untrue Tales… Book One for FREE, today!

Update: The book peaked at about #40 in Contemporary Fantasy (2,250 overall)… as a free eBook… and has now, apparently, lost all visibility as its sales rank has reverted to only include paid copies? Perhaps this is a failed experiment. Alternatively, perhaps some of the people who “bought” it for free weren’t just my friends/family/contacts, and they’ll actually read it. And perhaps some of them will want to read more, and will buy the full Untrue Tales series… Incidentally, it only took 85 “free” buyers (78 Amazon, 7 Amazon.co.uk) to reach #40 in Contemporary Fantasy and #2,250 overall at Amazon. I wonder how many “sales” it would take to get into the top 10.

Remaining to complete: I have to edit the rest of the two audiobooks; I’ve only done about 10% of the audio editing so far. I need to update the Book Trailer I created for the Kickstarter, to post when the book is actually available, and to point people to where they can buy the eBooks. I have to go over the proof copy very carefully and then either approve it or prepare corrections – and once approved and the 50-copy limited edition is ordered, I’ll have to sign and number every copy (and cut one page out of each copy, incidentally). I’m considering putting together a couple/few copies of the two audiobooks as a single audiobook-package of audio CDs; it would be 14 discs, and I’d have to charge at least $35 for it; it would also be a fair amount of work, and need to be done before Phoenix Comicon. I should probably also record several versions of audio promos for the books, to run on all my existing Podiobooks – I have no evidence that any ad I’ve ever run there has resulted in a single person spending a single dollar, but … I guess I just have to keep trying, eh?

There’s a stack of things I’ll need to do when the May 12th, 2012 release date rolls around, including uploading the eBooks everywhere, uploading the new Book Trailer, and updating a bunch of pages at modernevil.com to reflect that they’re out/available, and then there’s the “marketing” I’m “supposed” to do after that, to actually get people to be aware of the books’ existence… but the actual creation of the books is nearly complete, and that’s what I consider my real work. Then, over the following six months or so, I’ll also be podcasting the books on the Modern Evil Podcast, but since the whole thing will already be written, recorded, edited, and (probably) assembled, it’s just a matter of uploading the files and creating the posts. Which is good, because I really want to be working on my next 3-4 titles, and some art, too!

There are only a limited number of hours in the day during which I can record, for a start. Between 9 or 10 in the morning and a little after 11AM, my sister is awake and getting ready for her workday – unpredictably doing noisy things like showering, making breakfast/lunch, and sometimes adding a workout video to the mix. After 1PM most days, the level of traffic (where I mean vehicles with intentionally-loud engines, revving aggressively as they cruise slowly through the neighborhood, alternated with vehicles which have ridiculously-amplified sound systems thumping away as they go by) goes up significantly, adding a lot of pauses waiting for silence to any attempts to record, though not unbearably so. After 3PM on weekdays, between kids getting out of school and more people getting off work, the traffic noise does become nearly-impossible to record through. After about 5PM, and until about 7AM, my wife is home and we’re either doing other things together, usually noisy things, or she’s sleeping (in the room where my recording setup is), and even though the neighborhood goes quiet after a certain point (on nights without any parties), I can’t realistically get any recording done at night. This leaves 3-4 hours a day when I could potentially record.

Interestingly, this corresponds pretty closely to the other major limiting factor on my recording: my voice/quality only holds out (at most) 3-4 hours a day, anyway. Whether I go hoarse, or my mouth becomes exceedingly tacky, or my nose clogs up, I can’t seem to get more than a few short hours of high-quality voice work done on any given day. I haven’t taken the time to experiment with it, but I have the impression that when I do more recording/talking on one day, it reduces the number of good hours I have the next by a corresponding amount. Recording every-other-day seems the best at reducing incidence of sore throat by the end of a week, though it isn’t always possible.

Between these two factors, there are hard limits on the amount of recording I can get through in a given period. In addition are factors such as my irregular sleep schedule (for example, I slept until 1PM yesterday), my wife and/or sister’s days off work (weekends, spring break, sick days), and everything else in life I need to accomplish, not to mention the time lost switching to/from different activities. (The last factor meaning that generally, even if awake, having only 7AM-9AM and 11AM-1PM to record only gives me two and a half or three hours of good work, generally.) In the end, I can’t actually record the theoretical-maximum 20 hours a week; at best I can probably do 12 hours, and 6 to 9 hours a week is more realistic. (Keep in mind an hour of recording translates to at most half an hour of finished audio, after another couple of hours of editing.)

Alternatively, as you may recall, I recently wrote almost 48k words in nine working days, and I once wrote about as much in under 60 hours of continuous, uninterrupted work. Coming to terms with these sorts of limits on my creative work is proving to be difficult. Scheduling the part of publishing a book which requires it to be recorded continues to throw me off, usually by weeks. With the work on Never Let the Right One Go, I’m currently more than a week behind my initial projection for having finished the audiobook and I’ve recorded fewer than half the chapters. For my next book, I’ll try to remember what rate I can actually make progress at, and schedule appropriately.

I’m still on track to get the hardcover flipbook published in time for Phoenix Comicon, and with the numbers I had in Q1, financially, I’m not worried about my business being at a loss for the year – even if zero copies sell, which would probably be both shocking and super-depressing, Modern Evil Press should stay in the black in 2012. If a bunch of them sell, I’ll do a lot better, of course. I still can’t afford that font I want (unless some more art sells in the next week or so), but otherwise everything has come together quite nicely.

Oh, and I’m working out a plan/schedule for podcasting Never Let the Right One Go which may have the first episode going out on the Modern Evil Podcast as early as yesterday. Which doesn’t make any sense. I better bump that up to … today at the earliest. I may put the first episode of Sophia on the Modern Evil Podcast as early as today. (Savvy readers who have been following the project closely may already have listened to chapter 1 of each book, and/or read the first two chapters of each book.) Depends on how the next 14 hours or so go, I suppose.

Big, vague observations: The spike in eBook downloads (remember, directly attributable to being linked by freeebooks.com) we saw in Q4 of 2011 really was just a spike. Most of the extra traffic had dissipated by January, then February was extra low and March was near the average for the first three quarters of last year. Podiobooks downloads were a little more interesting. Averaged across all 13 of my available titles, PB downloads were almost flat – but a couple of titles (FWYCR, Cheating, Death) saw a significant increase in downloads in March, and others (Untrue Tales… Book Four, Book Five, and Book Six) decreased by almost half in March. Since the only thing I’m doing differently is talking about Never Let the Right One Go, I’m not sure what would cause the increase in interest in my “zombie” books – the updated descriptions for Lost and Not Found and Forget What You Can’t Remember haven’t been applied to the Podiobooks (yet), so … I’m not sure.

As usual, most of the downloads of my eBooks and audiobooks were unpaid/free. Last year when I gave you updates I finagled the paid numbers to match the counting method I use for free downloads, but from now on I’ll just be giving you the numbers the way I track them for actual bookkeeping/accounting purposes – that is, because sites like Amazon and iTunes and Smashwords’ Premium channels don’t give me final numbers until at least the following month after the books were bought (in case of returns, but also because businesses follow all sorts of crazy rules about billing one another), I don’t count them as sales until my balances are updated (not paid, just updated). Anyway, so far this year (this includes a paper-book sale I made yesterday) I show I sold 4 paper books directly for a total of $57.99, I sold 39 eBooks for a total of $75.24, and 2 people donated to my Podiobooks (technically in Q4, so I may already have mentioned this) and my cut of their donations was $9.74. That’s a total of 45 “book sales” for $142.97 in revenue. So far in my name-your-own-price art sale I’ve found homes for 21 pieces of art for $970. (Note: There are still 27 pieces available at wretchedcreature.com – please take a look and see if there’s anything you’d like!)

Now, here are all the eBook and Podiobook download numbers for Q1 of 2012, 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: 318 / 945 / 93
• Dragons’ Truth: 1,076 / 1,926 / 218
• Forget What You Can’t Remember: 336 / 5,230 / 158
• The First Untrue Trilogy: 798 (eBook only)
• The Second Untrue Trilogy: 252 (eBook only)
• Untrue Tales… Book One: 1 / 3,552 / 242
• Untrue Tales… Book Two: N/A / 2,031 / 152
• Untrue Tales… Book Three: N/A / 1,686 / 143
• Untrue Tales… Book Four: N/A / 1,448 / 125
• Untrue Tales… Book Five: N/A / 1,588 / 152
• Untrue Tales… Book Six: N/A / 1,256 / 112
• Cheating, Death: 448 / 5,843 / 364
• Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 177 / 318 / 47
• More Lost Memories (full): 194 / 545 / 58
• More Lost Memories (ind. stories, eBook only): 5
• Time, emiT, and Time Again (full): 172 / 668 / 36
• Time, emiT, and Time Again (ind. stories, eBook only): 8
• Last Christmas: 2
• Unspecified: 1,204
• Total Q1: 4,991 / 27,036 / 1,900
• Total all-time: 39,723 / 570,631 / 37,137

So… people still don’t like short stories much, especially on the audio side. Yoshira’s poetry book is still doing really well – it had more downloads than any other eBook last quarter, including the ever-popular Dragons’ Truth. Dragons’ Truth has now been downloaded at least 13,750 times, which is almost 4k past my next-most-popular title (though still less than 10x my least-popular). I suppose I need to finally get around to posting eBook versions of my Worth 1k poetry books, at some point; people seem to like downloading (if not paying for) poetry.

The pay-what-you-can model isn’t making me a lot of money, yet, but that was never the point. The idea that 6,891 copies of my books were downloaded in Q1 and only 45 of them were paid for implies that 0.65% (one in 153 people) could both afford to pay and were honest about paying for my books. What portion of the 99.35% of people who didn’t pay (but had access to the technology to download an eBook or listen to a podcast) do you suppose were actually unable to afford the few dollars I’m asking per title, and what portion do you suppose are just dishonest people?

In related news, there were enough sales in March (including last night’s sale) to adjust the prices on several of the books. (It may take a few days to see the prices updated across all the sites/stores they’re available on.) Here are the new prices: paperback / ebook:

• Lost and Not Found: $9.99 / $4.99
• Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: $6.99 / $3.99
• Forget What You Can’t Remember: $8.99 / $3.99
• More Lost Memories: $8.99 / $4.99
• Cheating, Death: $4.99 / $2.99
• The First Untrue Trilogy: $9.99 / $3.99
• The Second Untrue Trilogy: $19.99 / $8.99
• Dragons’ Truth: $7.99 / $3.99
• Time, emiT, and Time Again: $5.99 / $2.99
• Unspecified: $4.99 / $2.99
• Worth 1k — Volume 1: $9.99 / $4.99
• Worth 1k — Volume 2: $9.99 / $4.99

Today, unable to get any recording done due to noise issues, I worked in Photoshop, instead. I’ve finally received permission from both of my preferred photographers to use their images on the covers of my new books, so I spent the afternoon re-altering the image for Sophia with the full-resolution original and I spent the evening laying out the full-spread dust jacket for the flipbook. Here is a preview of what the book’s cover will (probably) look like:

I reserve the right to continue tweaking it, as needed. In fact, if you have constructive feedback, I’ve got time to work improvements in, as needed. The image I’ve uploaded is around 1/5 the actual resolution I’m working with, and it’s still probably too big to fit on your screen; sorry.

The worst-case scenario has the text of Never Let the Right One Go at only the same level of quality as my other recent books, and not better. I keep trying to extend and expand my workflow, to add as much quality as possible between my first draft and my published product. The flow I’d mapped out for this book added a set of “First Readers” to the “Beta Readers” I’ve worked with in the past, in the hope that, were the book in need of significant re-writes, I might be able to correct the content before moving on to correcting the text. Then I wanted to record and edit the full audio version of both books, as doing so requires me to go over every single word at least 2-3 times (and sometimes several times as many), which is a great way to find almost every little error in the text (along with any remaining awkward sentences or clunky dialog) – this is a step I’ve been intending to do with all of my books since early 2010 (some I’ve managed, some I haven’t), but it’s also a step which takes several weeks of work. My intention for Never Let the Right One Go was to finish that step before sending the books to my Beta Readers for final feedback and proofreading; many eyes looking at text they’ve never read before find errors my eyes (having read the books quite a few times by this point) easily miss. I’ve since decided that, to get as many early reviews as possible, and since I won’t be sending any of the limited-edition hardcovers for free to reviewers, I’ll send the Beta (read: ARC) eBooks to reviewers at the same time, and ask all my First Readers and Beta Readers to post a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads as well.

On my initial calendar (filled in after finishing the first draft) I’d laid everything out so, all things going well, I could send the Beta version out by the end of March, in the hope of getting at least some feedback before the end of April – which is my hard deadline for sending the books to LSI for printing, if I want to be sure I can have them in time for Comicon. Then I kept wanting to give my First Readers more time (I had most of the feedback I would end up getting within the first week, but have still only heard from about a third of them six weeks later) and didn’t plan to start on recording the audiobook until last Monday… which I forgot (in my multi-month planning) was my wife’s spring break (she’s a teacher), and I only got a few hours of work done (I prefer to spend time with my wife, when possible; imagine that!) all week. This pushes everything back a week. If I record very aggressively, and spend a heckuva lot of time editing, I could theoretically finish “on time” to get the Beta version out by the end of the month. I’ve actually been telling most people “first week of April” for the Beta version lately, but even that would be a challenge for my voice (and ears, and mind) holding out for the next couple of weeks. I’ll try, for sure, but something’s got to give.

Either the Beta version is going out later than I’d hoped, reducing the amount of helpful feedback I can get before publication, or the Beta version is going out before I can finish recording and editing the audio version, potentially increasing the number of errors in the text I send to reviewers (and the number the Beta Readers would need to locate). I should still be able to finish my own passes over the text before publication, certainly, and the audiobooks with them, before reaching my hard deadline, so that makes the books about as good as I can make them. Where quality suffers by this compression of the schedule is in potentially getting less feedback from Beta Readers. In potentially getting worse reviews for having errors in the text, errors which may or may not be found before publication.

Oh, and then there’s the other goal I’d set, which might find itself incomplete before Comicon: Writing & publishing my book about my experiences writing and publishing. I’ve already put a fair amount of work into it, not just over the years but over the last few months, and now it’s largely a matter of writing from my “outline” the remaining 40k-50k words I haven’t written, yet. (No content editing needed for a book like this, it’s my honest life experience – likely no real Beta Reading, either, though since it’s digital-only the deadline is much closer to the end of May, to promote it at Comicon, so there may be time.) I might be able to do it as quickly as I finished Never Let the Right One Go, after I finish the audio recording of the next couple of weeks, and if I’m able to stay focused. There’s time while I wait for Beta feedback to get it written. In theory. To get it written, and coded for basic eReaders, and “enhanced” for iBooks, and maybe even time to figure out how to market an eBook in person at a con.

All in all, still enough time to get everything done, and done well enough – just not, perhaps, enough time to reach perfection. Hopefully enough time to straighten out the covers situation. Still only halfway there. I’d better email the other photographer again today. If I don’t hear back from him by the end of March, I’ll be assuming I need to use a different image for Sophia. Trying not to stress out about it. I’ll maybe put together a first alternate to show you, soon. To show me, to convince me all isn’t lost, that other photos would work. I guess I’ve got a month to convince me.

The main thing this Kickstarter campaign was meant to do, which it did quite successfully, was to gauge reader interest in my new books. As I said before, if a hundred or more people would have been willing to pay $30 for the hardcover, I wouldn’t want to have limited the edition to 50 copies. If 1,000 people wanted to buy the book, I’d certainly want to do an additional unlimited-edition (paperback) and also pay the LSI distribution fee, at least for the first year, getting the paperback on Amazon &c. for that huge audience’s friends. Likewise, if fewer than 50 people expressed interest (as has happened), then my planned limited edition of 50 copies is sufficient.

Interestingly, the Kickstarter campaign’s gauge of interest showed me something else: I had nearly double the number of backers, versus my last two Kickstarters. Half of the hardback-level backers were people who found the campaign on their own, browsing Kickstarter.com, and liked my project enough (not knowing me or my existing body of work, not following my links, my friends’ links, or any other thing extended from my online presence & social network) to pledge. This speaks well to the general-public appeal of the books, I believe. Perhaps the eBooks will, indeed, find an audience.

re: Printing the hardcover edition, when I take into account all the costs of producing a hardcover print run (setup, proof, printing, shipping, ISBNs, free copies for the photographers, et cetera), if I want to keep the pricing in line with my new scheme, and start at $25 or $30 a copy, and not lose money (presuming all copies eventually sell), I can’t realistically do an edition much smaller than 50 copies. In fact, I’ve been running and re-running the math, and if I follow my current/new pricing scheme, and if I start them at $25, and if I sell all 46 salable copies, my net profit will only be about $70 for the whole publication. If I start at $30, I can double that, and if I sell all 46 copies at $30 I can net roughly $457 of profit. My current estimate puts me at having spent between 1,000 and 1,250 working hours on these books by the time I’m done, not including the hours it’ll take over the years to actually sell them. Yet here I am, trying to decide between valuing my time at 6¢/hr or 11¢/hr, and feeling bad about having the audacity to suggest I might like to earn 38¢/hr for my efforts by standing fast to a single price for all copies of the signed, limited-edition hardcover.

Actually, technically, with the latest numbers, I can’t really afford to print the limited edition without putting my company in the red for the year… I’ll need to actually sell a bunch of copies to earn the difference between my early estimates and the actual numbers I’m getting now. And/or sell a few more pieces of art soon. Ack. Not to mention, the profits mentioned in the previous paragraph are on a per-title basis, not an overall-business basis, and do not take into account my overhead costs. Like, I keep thinking/wondering/hoping about how many copies I’ll sell at Phoenix Comicon, and how much money I’ll earn that way – but showing at Comicon costs me hundreds of dollars, dollars which have to come out of “profit”, one way or another. If I price to only earn $70 or even $140 on the full print run, even the best-case scenario of somehow selling out at Comicon wouldn’t actually be profitable, after overhead. I’m terrible at business, I guess.

Of course, there’s no good way to know how many people will buy the book (or the eBook; if the eBooks sell well, it takes a lot of pressure off the hardcover edition), regardless of venue. At the last two Comicons, I sold only a couple dozen books across all my titles, including very cheap books, each. My best-selling title (in paper) has sold fewer than 20 copies in two and a half years. If I were to guess, I’d say that probably 3 or 4 of the backers will follow through and actually buy the finished book, now that the Kickstarter has failed. I have no clue how it’ll do at Comicon: Probably either really well, or like a lead balloon. It would be foolish to expect to sell more than half the print run before the year is out, based on the data I have now. That many sales would cover my accounting underestimation, but then what?

I don’t know. I’m very frustrated, right now. I probably need to get some sleep. I was hoping I could work through more of this, and come to a better emotional point through logorrhea, but I still feel quite mixed up, and my eyes are begging to be shut. Expect another couple thousand words on this, and related topics I don’t want to even begin to write about tonight, soon.

I’ve heard back from one of the two photographers whose images I wanted to use on the covers, and barring an unexpected problem with getting a model release signed, have permission to use their image. I’ve begun working on the full-resolution image for the dust jacket, with it. I haven’t mentioned it here before, but I also recently found some music I wanted to use for the intro/outro of the audiobook versions (I normally compose something myself, but have been having difficulty coming up with anything I liked for this project), and this morning I heard back from the composer with permission to use it. All I’m waiting on now is permission from the other photographer (or to locate another acceptable photo for Sophia, which I can get license for) and the rest is good to go. I’ve been spending a fair proportion of my worry over the last month on the matter of getting permission from other creators, and it’s nice to have this (mostly) resolved.

The Kickstarter campaign for Never Let the Right One Go is only at about 20% with less than five days left, and unless there’s a surge of interest in the next few days (I don’t really know how to create one) it looks like it won’t be funded. This is okay, as I’ve said before: I can afford to do a limited-edition print run (probably 50 hardcovers, though I’m now considering an even smaller run) without funding, and without my business going into the red for the year. Being funded would be better, and knowing I had more than half a dozen potential buyers up front would be nice, but I’ll find the readers for these books eventually. Sadly, without funding (or more art sales) I won’t be able to afford to buy the font I want for the text. Oh, well.

I expect to begin recording the audiobook versions either this week or the next, and to send the “Beta” or “ARC” (Advance Reader Copy) version of the texts out to Beta Readers and reviewers as soon as I’m done working on the audiobook. Depending on how my voice and ears hold out, possibly by the end of the month. I still seem to be on track for getting everything together for a mid-May eBook release and hardcover availability, and I’m thinking of making the official release date 5/12/2012. (Though I probably won’t have the hardcovers in hand (and almost certainly not signed, numbered, and ready to ship) at that point.) I haven’t set down a release schedule for the audiobooks, yet, but probably I’ll be releasing one chapter of each book once a week, with (say) a chapter of Sophia on Monday and a chapter of Emily on Friday (with a couple poems from Unspecified, which I haven’t podcast yet) on Wednesdays. That would stretch it out to just over 26 weeks, not being complete until late November. I’ll have to check their policies in May, but Podiobooks.com has said they want to move to only accepting “complete” audiobooks, which would mean neither book would be available there until the end of November. Meh. If people want the whole thing sooner, they can come to modernevil.com and/or pay for it.

I think that’s it for status updates. Things aren’t as good as they could be, but they’re going pretty well. Getting more feedback, hearing from the other photographer, finding another 30 backers, these things would be nice – but I’ve gotten some good feedback, I’ve heard from some of the creatives I want to integrate the work of into mine, and I’ll be able to afford to publish something very close to the premium edition of the books I’ve been imagining. Plus: I’m aiming for finishing (if not publishing) another 3-4 books (or more) this year, and I don’t feel I’m over-reaching. There’s a good chance they’ll all be digital-only.

I’m working on several things at once. That’s a good thing. Both so that, when I finish one thing I’ve always got another thing queued up to be working on, and also so that, if I get bored/frustrated/blocked on one thing, I can simply switch projects and work on something else. Here are just a few of the things I’m working on right now, or will begin working on soon:

• running a Kickstarter campaign for Never Let the Right One Go
• developing a book trailer for Never Let the Right One Go
• editing Never Let the Right One Go based on First-Reader feedback
• making a decision about the cover(s) for Never Let the Right One Go
• recording the audio books for Never Let the Right One Go
• composing the theme music for the NLtROG audio books & trailer
• writing a book about my experiences writing & publishing
• studying the hero’s journey & other formulas for YA adventure books
• planning the re-write for Dragons’ Truth, as a formulaic YA adventure
• planning two additional books, to make Dragons’ Truth part of a trilogy

I already compromised some to get Never Let the Right One Go as potentially-commercial as possible, but for the Dragons’ Truth re-write, I want to go just-about all the way. I’ve purchased Joseph Campbell’s book, I’ve been looking up other resources, and I have plans to formalize the structure, down to a fine grain, of the Dragons’ Truth re-write based on the patterns of commercial fiction, and of YA adventure books in particular. In reality, this will not merely be an edited version of Dragons’ Truth, or a simple re-write, but a completely new work, barely derivative of the original. With any luck, I’ll be able to power through the whole process and have at least the first book (if not two or three) written by the end of this year.

Then, almost undoubtedly, I’ll want to write something completely lacking in plot, conflict, character growth, and antagonists. Something extremely cerebral, deeply layered, and which is not nearly what it appears to be. No idea what that will be, yet, but that seems like the sort of rebound my mind will take. Either that or I’ll go straight into the crime/thriller/action TV miniseries I’ve been planning on writing, since it’ll require me to think formulaically, but will also be a bizarrely-philosophical construction. Have to see how I feel & what I’m thinking by the time I get through the Dragons’ Truth business.

(Yes, to a certain extent, the interactive digital comic I was planning on has disappeared from my schedule. Depending on events out of my control which may occur in the next few weeks, it’ll either reappear in my plans or remain indefinitely postponed.)

Anyway, part of the plan is to absorb and digest the formulaic writing, focus it intensely onto the Dragons’ Truth re-write, and then move beyond it, pushing it out of my conscious mind. I expect the process to be painful. I never want to be the sort of author who consciously constructs their prose based on things like “what will sell” and “what normal readers expect”, and for this upcoming project, that is (in a way) precisely what I plan on doing. My intent is not in alignment with the apparent goals of such a process, which helps, and challenging even my own norms and ideals seems worthwhile if I can learn something from it, just as I tend to hope to do when challenging any other set of norms and ideals.

Ah, well, now it’s time to go record another video for Never Let the Right One Go, or something. Wish me luck!

The Kickstarter fundraiser for Never Let the Right One Go is now live and accepting pledges/backing/pre-orders. As I think I’ve covered (if not here, then on Google+), the initial art sales from my “Blank Canvas” Art Sale have been sufficient to cover the cost of printing a 50-copy hardcover print run of the flipbook containing both full books without putting my small business in the red this year. (I’m still looking to move the rest of my art; I’ve added an art+book reward tier to the fundraiser, and I’ll still gladly take any other reasonable offer. Email me!) This means that the pressure is off; if I don’t hit my $1k goal in the next 16 days, that’s okay – the book will still be published, and even the premium paper version of it will be created, regardless of the outcome of the fundraiser. No fear of emotional breakdowns, terrible stress, or feeling like my failure to make money represents a fundamental failure in the nature of my work and the quality of my creations. Well… maybe a little of that last one, considering all the compromises I’ve made to make these books more commercial…

Anyway, the point of the fundraiser is primarily an expression of optimism. I think these books have a chance of being very popular; my most popular and commercially successful books yet. I think there’s a chance that many more than 50 people will want to buy the premium paper version of the books. By putting this out there now, in this way, I can see before I finalize the size of the limited edition what size it ought to be. If there are a hundred, or several hundred, or several thousand people who want to buy the paper books but I only print 50, that’s a problem. If there are only a handful of people who want the books right away and I print 50, that’s no problem; I can find the extra copies’ readers later. (This is so much easier with eBooks – there are always exactly as many copies available as there are readers who want them.)

I’ve set the goal higher than my past Kickstarters for a few reasons, the biggest of which is that meeting this goal would mean Never Let the Right One Go is my first release to have paid for itself from book sales alone. (Well, barring art sales being high and book sales being low, which is an odd possibility.) The thousand dollars covers the printing cost of 50 copies, plus shipping, and maybe part of the cost of Mrs. Eaves (though I don’t feel bad about paying for that from the art-sale profits if I need to), but any less fails to. It’s a bigger expense because it’s a bigger/thicker book (two titles in one) than most of my past releases, and because it’s hardcover instead of softcover/paperback. I also have a general impression that Kickstarter fundraisers with goals larger than I’ve set before have a better overall response; like, if the goal is too small, potential backers maybe think you don’t actually need their support. Like, “What? $400? I spent that on shoes this weekend! If they don’t reach the goal, I’m sure they’ll be fine. $400 is nothing!” sigh. Except, it isn’t. Not to me.

I’m rambling a bit, I guess. Not sure what I meant to be posting about here, beyond the first sentence. Please take a look at the Kickstarter page, watch the video, tell your friends about it … back it, if you’ve any interest in the stories and can afford to. I’m sure I’ll post about this again, possibly more coherently.