The prices for my books are: 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 / $4.99
• More Lost Memories: $8.99 / $4.99
• Cheating, Death: $4.99 / $2.99
• The First Untrue Trilogy: $9.99 / $4.99
• 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

There’s so much work yet to be done on these books. Beyond the 60+ good hours of writing it will take to finish the first drafts, there’s initial editing so I can send to my Beta Readers, then days or weeks waiting for them to get back to me with their feedback, then re-writes and edits based on that feedback and possibly (if I can convince anyone to re-read the books so quickly) a second round of the same. Once I’ve got the basic text in good shape I’ve got to do another close read (copyediting) before I begin recording the audio version – a step which always finds new errors and awkward sentences/dialogue in the text, and which I prefer to do before publishing, when possible. I’ve got to do the interior layout, which shouldn’t be too difficult at this point and with all the experience I have, but I’ve also got to design the cover in three ways, for each individual eBook as well as for the paper/limited-edition/flipbook, hopefully all as a single image. I’ve got to do fundraising (possibly via Kickstarter) to pay for the paper edition, which almost certainly takes weeks or more. Actually podcasting the audio version may take up to a year, though it’s the hundreds of hours of recording, editing, and assembling them which I’ll want to have done before publication. After all that, getting the eBooks ready will be a snap.

Why am I thinking about all this? I just noticed January has slipped away, almost without my notice, and February is at hand. Tomorrow I’ll process the data on January eBook sales and (possibly) update the prices on some of my books/eBooks, according to the formula I rolled out at the start of the year. This has reminded me that Phoenix Comicon is coming up at the end of May; hopefully the significantly lower prices this model affords my paperbacks will result in increased sales at Comicon. This has led me inexorably to the idea that, if possible, I’d like to have my vampire duology flipbook on hand and for sale at the Phoenix Comicon. Which led to thinking about everything in that last paragraph, and more.

Part of the ‘more’ is all the other projects I’ve been working on lately, in my lack of focus, especially the interactive book on writing and publishing. I mentioned on Google+ last night that, in addition to beginning to write that book, I spent some time mapping out its (quite complex) hypertext structure; it’s intended to be read in a non-linear way, like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book as well as a cross between a memoir and a how-to guide for independent writing and publishing, and it’s been percolating up through my mind for years. At the current stage of mapping and note-making, I’ve already got forty-plus chapters/chunks started; if no more occur to me, and they’re each the 1500+word chunks they’ve been becoming so far, it’s already shaping up to be book-length, complex, and interesting. I’ve got at least another 60 hours of work just writing the thing, and possibly over 100 hours, the way it’s been going.

(I won’t even mention each of the other projects I’ve had queueing up and being worked on by my scattered thoughts and efforts, except to say that if I continue on as I am, none of them -certainly not the vampire books- will be finished by Comicon.)

According to my calculations, if I seriously applied myself, I could finish the first draft of the vampire duology in six or eight solid days of work, since I’ve already got it all well-planned and developed. The same is roughly true of the book on publishing; six to ten long, hard days of dedicated work and I could have a first draft complete, from where I’ve already got it. The work would be intense, draining work, and would require me to (somehow) overcome the worst elements of my own insanity; what I have been trying to figure out is whether, if I actually applied myself and accomplished those things, would I have the time needed to get either (or preferably both) projects ready for sale in time for Phoenix Comicon. All that extra work I listed off in the second paragraph – can it be completed and the finished books delivered to my hands before the end of May? And if so, is it worth it to me to try to do so?

If I set myself to these tasks/goals, to this deadline, the aspect most at risk for being potentially short-changed is the editing/rewrites. Getting people, even family and close friends, to read a single book and give feedback (even just basic spelling & grammar, to say nothing of content) in as little as a week or two tends to be a huge fight and to carry a significant attrition rate. I dread sending out two (or worse, three) books with the intention of getting meaningful feedback on any limited timeline, for free. I don’t know how long professional editors would take to do the work, but I know I can’t afford such a thing right now. There are some other parts of the work I can accomplish while waiting for feedback, such as cover design, or working on the other title, but if I expect to incorporate any meaningful changes to the text, the bigger time-sink of recording the audiobook has to wait. I can probably start fundraising before completing the final edits of the text, which helps even out the timeline, some.

Let’s see what the hard deadline would be… Phoenix Comicon runs May 24-27 (Memorial Day Weekend, except without the Memorial Day), which means I’d want to have any items for sale there on hand no later than Tuesday the 22nd, for booth setup Wednesday. LSI typically takes about a week from when I send them the files before they approve a title for printing, then another 3-5 days to print, then I have them shipped via UPS Ground (because shipping heavy things like cases of books any faster is prohibitively expensive), so to be conservative I need to submit the files three weeks before I need the books on hand, at the latest. That means I have to have the book ready for print on or before May 1st.

Yow. 90 days.

If I go mad (in a good, hard-working way) for the next couple/few weeks, I can finish at least the vampire books by the end of next week, and possibly all three books the week after that, and get them to my Beta Readers before mid-February. I’ll need not less than a week after I think I’m done editing the book to work through the audio version, probably at least two weeks, plus time to make final changes to the layouts & text after that, so I should say I need to be done polishing the text by mid-April. That doesn’t sound so bad.

Of course, if I continue to have trouble focusing, trouble writing for long periods, or writing at reasonable rates, even with significant daily work it could take me until mid-March to finish the first drafts. Ugh.

What if I need significant re-writes? These books are important to me. Important that they express what I want them to express, even to casual readers. Not so important that they read like mainstream fiction… they’re not even in the same realm as that. But important to me that they’re good, that they do what they set out to do. Tell the stories they were meant to tell. I don’t know. I don’t really even know how to do re-writes. (Ooh; I’ve just added another chapter/chunk’s beginning to the book on writing/publishing, about my editing/rewriting process, or lack thereof.) If my Beta Readers all come back to me saying something like “we don’t really believe Emily is in love with Nicholas; you have to show it, make us feel it, it isn’t there”, or “we couldn’t buy in to anything Nicholas and his group were doing; it was obvious you disagreed with everything he had to say or tried to do”, I may just have a total breakdown, as that would mean most everything I’ve worked so hard to accomplish (in one of the books) I had failed at, compromising the work straight to the core. I might have to take another year on the re-writes, or I might just publish as-is, with the admission that I’m a shitty writer… I don’t know where my emotional collapse would leave me, after excellent feedback like that. (Although, really, I’m just kidding myself with ideas like that; I have never in my life received feedback of that caliber. I don’t know whether it’s because the people reading my books understand my intent and I’m actually doing what I meant to do, or whether my goals were so far beyond the beyond that no one even know what was wrong, and that I’ve secretly, quietly, been a dismal failure all these years. (On the other hand, based on the comments in the worst of my reviews, the one and two star reviews, the single-sentence reviews, the reviews from people who admit they quit reading in under 50 pages… the things those people hate about them are generally all the things that were so important to me to accomplish, or were at least intentional. Not failures of writing, but failure of readers to appreciate what the author was setting out to do. The polarizing effect of my work has become quite encouraging, lately.)) I feel like time is my enemy, at times.

Still, even with worst-case responses, if I can get any meaningful feedback out of people within a month of sending them my books, even that should give me enough time to accomplish significant rewrites, if necessary. Whole chapters, or plot-lines, could be replaced in the time remaining… So I suppose that’s what I’ll have to do. Start applying myself. Intensely. Finish three books’ first drafts in the next three weeks, and have them ready for publication within the next three months.

I’d be tempted to find some money in the budget to order a bunch of modafinil, but I suspect that, if all goes to plan, I’ll be done (or very nearly done) with the most intense part of the work before the drugs arrived from my international pharmacy. If I didn’t have an unnatural aversion to 1) seeing doctors and 2) dishonesty, I’d be much better off convincing a local doctor to write me a prescription for the stuff, and picking it up at my local pharmacy the same day. Somehow, violating federal and international laws bothers me less than either of the things involved in obtaining modafinil the way I’m supposed to. Oh, well. If I had modafinil on hand, I wouldn’t have even had to question any of this, as getting this level of work done would become nearly trivial. *sigh*

I’d better go get to work.

Apple eBook sales 2011

As you can see, the numbers are as small as I’ve been telling you. This isn’t the whole picture; there’s also a few dozen kindle sales, a few direct BN sales, my half-dozen direct Smashwords sales, et cetera, but I really liked that iTunes chart showing I usually only sell  two or three eBooks a month through Apple. Then the Smashwords summary of the year was also a bit dismal, so I captured it, too.

Then I totally forgot to include them in my big numbers post. So here they are.

On the other hand, it’s ridiculously difficult to try to track how many people are reading such a thing. I’ve tried fixing it several times, but Google Analytics doesn’t report it properly. I’ve been downloading my server access logs and manually parsing them (to get eBook download numbers) since February of 2011, when 1 and 1 (my web host) changed their Web Statistics to “Site Analytics” and removed all the usefulness from the tool for me. I tried parsing out the data about access to the 7 domains/subdomains which hold the web-based versions of these novels, to try to get any useful data about how many people have been reading them, and to start I just parsed out February and December’s numbers (rather than going through the full year before figuring out whether I can get anything useful out of them). (Yes, I know, I could maybe write a script/program to parse the logs for me. That might even work for the eBooks, despite at least half of the logs being garbage (it looks to me like zombies accessing hundreds/thousands of nonexistent URLs, possibly as some wasted DDOS effort), but for these sites … I’ll explain.) The logs are a mess.

I’d have to figure out which IPs are robots, first, I think, so I can get rid of all the requests from them – a lot, lot, lot of the requests are clearly spiders following every single link on every single page. Since every single paragraph has a unique URI for its location and a corresponding link to the separate comments associated with it, there are hundreds/thousands of links per book which I know no human would ever have clicked; they’re links to comments which clearly say there are zero comments. From what I can tell, there’s at least one Russian spider/bot following every link of every page of all these domains at least once a month, using a wide range of IP addresses to do so. Plus google, which isn’t as thorough or as frequent – which seems reasonable, since none of these sites have been updated in the slightest in a year.

ASIDE: Oh, yeah, that’s another thing. There hasn’t been a single comment anywhere on any of the books in a year. (Well, come to think of it, those Russian IPs are probably the SPAM bots posting SPAM comments Akismet has no trouble automatically moderating. There are huge numbers of those.) Whether or not anyone is reading these versions of the books, they certainly aren’t commenting on them. Or linking to them (no trackbacks), or emailing me / calling me / texting me about them. (Aside to the aside: While I was in the middle of writing this post, I received a phone call from someone asking whether I buy poetry. The person says they have, maybe, six or seven poems. Apparently, ever. It’s like people can’t read.)

So I can pretty easily see how much traffic a particular domain/subdomain received, based on the logs. A lot of that is bots, not humans. Worse, the bots make it so, if I try to total up access to individual pages of each book, I’ll have to manually filter out all the requests the bots made for things humans didn’t. There’s no easy script for that, because I have to make a human determination about which pages humans might have clicked on and which ones they clearly didn’t (or aren’t worth counting), and there are hundreds to thousands of those little decisions per domain per month of data. Some of it isn’t just bots, but bot-garbage (requests for non-existent pages). I thought I’d take a look at the 1 and 1 Site Analytics to see what it said, and at the way, way lower Google Analytics numbers to compare, but … they’re all so wildly different from one another. For reference, the 1 and 1 official Site Analytics tool reports fewer than 1/4 of the requests for my most popular eBook file (not the web ones, the PDF) versus the raw logs those analytics are theoretically built from, and for other files I’ve already parsed, even the variations are all over the board. Likewise, if the 1 and 1 Site Analytics tool were to be believed, in December 2011 around a thousand different people each read one chapter of the web version of Cheating, Death (pretty evenly distributed across all 13 chapters), and a small handful read every chapter. My access logs show almost 2k page requests (almost double what 1 and 1 shows) for the same period. Google shows … twenty page requests from 11 visitors… though admittedly, they’ve mixed together numbers from four other books in that (all the books in the Lost and Not Found universe are on the lostandnotfound.com domain, and I can’t get Google Analytics to properly separate out the subdomains) so that’s 20 page requests across the several hundred pages of five books… and only really from 9 different pages, only 1 from Cheating, Death… except it isn’t that, either. Google has no idea what to do with these web pages.

So how many people are actually reading these versions? While I don’t want to actually invest the dozens of hours it would take to parse the data, at a glance it looks like very few. Possibly none, depending on the bots. Maybe a dozen people a month. Why am I asking? Because I have to pay the domain renewal fees on those domains every year, really. Is it worth $9/year (and/or the hassle of moving them to modernevil.com, or moving the registrations to another registrar, or whatever) for zero to perhaps a dozen people a month to read these versions of these books, instead of the other sixteen ways they can read them (seven free)? This year I’m cutting out recurring costs for things which my readers don’t take enough advantage of for them to be financially worthwhile (see my posts on canceling distribution, if you haven’t yet), and I’ve got a few months but I’ve got to decide whether or not to keep paying to maintain the dragonstruth.com and lostandnotfound.com domains… and whether, if/when I release the domains, I should bother getting the web-based versions of the books back up and running on one of the domains I’m keeping.

Speaking of which, what do you think about my moving this blog to, say, teelmcclanahan.com/blog/ ? That site probably needs a revamp, anyway, but if I’m paring down domains, maybe lessthanthis.com is one to subtract, too. Considering I never/extremely-rarely get comments, I’ll probably turn off blog comments while I’m at it. I ask these sorts of open-ended questions, questions only readers of the blog can answer, and don’t get answers… maybe I’d do better about not bothering to ask (or feeling compelled to ask) if comments were just … gone.

For all my titles, every single one that was available in both formats, in 2011 the free eBooks were downloaded more frequently than the free Podiobooks. For every book other than Cheating, Death, the ratio of eBook to audio is not less than about 2 to 1, though the Dragons’ Truth eBook was downloaded almost 6 times more than the audiobook. If I just look at Q4 of 2011, the numbers are even more significantly disparate; even the Cheating, Death eBook was downloaded 4 times more than the Podiobook, and Dragons’ Truth was around 14 to 1. (Most titles were at 5 to 1 for Q4, though my least popular Podiobooks (short stories & director’s cuts) were at 6 or 9 to 1.) Looking at Q1, Q2, and Q3, I find that Cheating Death had twice as many audio downloads as eBook downloads, and that the Untrue Tales books were pretty closely matched, but that the rest of my titles were 2, 3, or 4 to 1 being downloaded as eBooks instead of as audiobooks.

In 2008, all the books I had available for free in both formats (and most of them in 2009) had more downloads as Podiobooks than eBooks. Consequently, I spent a lot more time and effort working on the audiobooks side of my production efforts. By 2010, even with eBooks downloads relatively flat, all my titles except Cheating, Death and the Untrue Tales series were doing better as eBooks. Those few titles’ popularity as audiobooks meant that my total audiobook downloads for 2010 were nearly double those of my eBook downloads, despite every other title going the other way!

One conclusion to draw from this is that the exceptions more closely represent the genres the audience at Podiobooks.com is interested in, and that my other titles didn’t do as well because they weren’t the right books for the audience. On the other hand, by mid-2011 my Untrue Tales books were being downloaded twice as often as eBooks, and in Q4 five times as often, plus in Q4 of 2011 even Cheating, Death had four times as many eBook downloads as audiobook downloads. Some of that has to do with my eBooks being linked to by big “free eBook” sites, but a lot of it has to do with more and more readers being turned on to eBooks, generally.

I can’t say whether the audience for serialized audiobooks is growing or shrinking, but based on my numbers, I can say that my appeal to that audience is shrinking or already tapped out. It’s possible that there’s a core audience of several thousand Podiobooks subscribers and it took me a couple of years to reach them, but that now all the core members have been exposed to my stuff it’s only the new members subscribing… and that the gradual decline relates to some expression of that. Yet even when, after a period without updates, I returned to updating regularly, adding new books every few months and at least one new episode every week, the peak my numbers hit was only about half what it had been about a year earlier, with 50% fewer titles to contribute to the total downloads. The average number of downloads my Podiobooks have been receiving, per title, has been pretty consistently dropping off for two full years, and are now less than 1/6th what they were in January 2010.

I don’t think this is just because they aren’t fresh, new titles – they’re the same titles I have available as eBooks, and eBook downloads have been moving pretty steadily upwards for the last year and a half. …and except for 4 inbound links in Q4 of 2011, I haven’t done or seen anything to advertise/promote any of my titles or formats over the others in the last two years. I hate marketing, promotion, et cetera, and I’ve been pretty lazy about it. I almost haven’t even Tweeted in the last two years. I blog a little, update Facebook/Twitter/G+ when I have a new thing, once or twice, then mostly don’t mention it again. So it must be something else. I think it’s just that the audience listening to audiobooks is small and the audience reading eBooks is growing.

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.

This conversation goes around and around and around, and as various players in the publishing industry take one tenuous step after another, the details may change, but one of the core responses coming from readers about the price of eBooks is this: “eBooks cost nothing to produce, so why should I pay more than $x?” (Where $x varies by reader, usually being one of $9.99, $5, $3, or $0.99 – and there are various reasons why they picked those numbers, some of which I’ll cover.) The biggest problem with that response is its inaccuracy. Really, the marginal cost of producing one more copy of an eBook is only pennies. The book itself cost quite a bit to produce, especially if you expect the author to be paid, but also because traditionally published books also have the cost of (often) three editors, a graphic designer, an illustrator, at least one marketing professional, and someone (whether internal or external) to create the various eBook formats, and all that even when they’re only going to produce an eBook; there are more people and expensive processes involved if the book also has a paper edition. Even among the new wave of indie publishers (some people prefer to think of them as self publishers, but whatever) there is a growing consensus that they need to hire a professional editor, pay for copy editing, and hire a cover artist, at the least – all of which, for quality results, costs thousands of dollars. So if you want to pretend eBooks cost nothing to produce, you have to remember that the first copy cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to produce, and it’s all the copies after that where the marginal cost of pennies may begin to have some meaning.

When this is brought up, sometimes an intelligent person will respond with something like “once the book has earned out, there’s no reason for the price to be so high!” – Usually they want to buy a back-list title and are shocked to discover it costs almost as much for the eBook as the paperback! There’s no getting through to such people that books have value (apart from how much it costs to produce the copy you’ll read, how much is that story/information worth?), and rarely are they interested in a conversation containing the words “what the market will bear” because their dollar vote says “no, I won’t pay more than $x for an eBook!” …often, in protest, they’ll go buy the more-expensive paper book. (Or a used book. I would estimate that 90% or more of all my book, music, and movie purchases, in my entire life, have been of used items. Publishers hate the idea of me. I hate the idea that the world would let people be so poor they can’t afford books. I also love that the world has libraries; support your local library!) Of course, for big publishers with hundreds of new books per year, and thousands or tens of thousands of back-list titles, trying to track which books have “earned out” and adjusting their prices accordingly is a massive task. (Or it would be, if they didn’t have to track all the expenses and revenues of all their titles, anyway. I mean, they pay royalties, don’t they? They keep track of exactly how much each title cost, how much it has earned, how many copies are out on shelves, who has them, et cetera… Hmm…)

Anyway, I’m a small publisher. I only publish a few books a year, and only have a few dozen titles to manage, so far. With agency pricing (You think you hate it because you think it means higher prices, but really what it means is “publishers set the retail price, and all retailers keep the same cut of that.” Watch what I’m about to do with it. This is a possible future for agency publishing, once publishers get up to speed. Give them a decade or so.) I can alter the prices of my eBooks any time I want, and all the eBook retailers have to sell it at the price I set, and I can know for certain how much I’ll be earning on each copy sold. So what I’m going to do is this: I’m going to adjust the prices of my books based on whether they’ve “earned out” yet, and I’m going to do it for both the eBook versions and the paper copies I sell directly.

For books I’ve already published, the starting price of the paperbacks will be the list price on the cover. For eBooks the starting price will be half of that, rounded up to the nearest $.99. The floor for eBook prices will be $2.99 for book-length works, $0.99 for short stories. (If a short story is in a collection, I’ll be combining expenses & revenue from all sources, and applying pricing based on that aggregate. More on that, below.)

An aside: Why $2.99, and not $0.99? Blame Amazon; they pay me 70% on eBooks priced from $2.99 to $9.99 and only 35% on all other-priced eBooks. (On the high end, this means that even when my formula says an eBook should be more than $9.99, it won’t be, so you win on that end.) Well, plus this: In my calculations, which I’ll detail in a moment, I don’t assign a value to my time. As the author (& everything else) I only get paid after the book “earns out” anyway. Oh, and this: If you want the book for free, it’s still available for free on modernevil.com. So, that $2.99 price is for people who want to support the creator, but can’t afford the premium options.

Oh, and the floor for the paper versions will be based on (cost to print 1 copy + $2), rounded up to the nearest $.99. The $2 is what I earn from Amazon on those $2.99 eBooks when they actually pay the 70% (they don’t, always), so the amount I pocket from “earned out” books is roughly the same, regardless of format.

I have the prices I’ll be using for the updates I’ll be putting through over the next few days, and I plan to update prices once a month during 2012. (We’ll see where we are, after a year of this.) Probably in the first week of each month, based on the prior month’s sales. Or, if/when a premium item sells, immediately for the relevant title. Premium items will include: signed paperbacks, original artwork, and my original poetry journals, for now. I plan to leave most of my signed paperbacks at $25, and the prices of the cover art & journals have always been based roughly on covering the full expense of producing the published books. I still believe in the pay what you can model, also known as “Freemium” since it lets some people get the content for free, while others pay, and at the high end there are premium goods. I’m just modifying the way the cheaper of the for-pay versions of my content will be priced.

Here is how I’m calculating prices: Calculate what percentage of the total cost of publishing the book still needs to be earned, multiply it by the difference between the starting price and the floor price, and add that to the floor price. So, for example, my first novel, Lost and Not Found, has a paperback list price of $13.99 and a price floor of $6.99 (the eBook price starting point would be $6.99 and the eBook price floor $2.99). So far, it has earned 65% of what it cost to publish (not including my time) and has 35% left to earn. The difference between the list and floor is $7 and 35% of that is $2.45 (the difference is $4 for the eBook, 35% of which is $1.40), which gives us the (rounded up, remember) new direct paperback price I’ll be offering of $9.99 (the eBook will be $4.99).

If you didn’t follow that, don’t worry, you don’t have to figure anything out or update the spreadsheet. You just get to buy the books at a discount. Here are all the new prices (title: paperback / ebook / % left to “earn out”):

• Lost and Not Found: $9.99 / $4.99 / 35%
• Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: $6.99 / $3.99 / 33%
• Forget What You Can’t Remember: $8.99 / $4.99 / 26%
• More Lost Memories: $8.99 / $4.99 / 41%
• Cheating, Death: $4.99 / $2.99 / N/A
• The First Untrue Trilogy: $9.99 / $4.99 / 12%
• The Second Untrue Trilogy: $19.99 / $8.99 / 65%
• Dragons’ Truth: $7.99 / $3.99 / 28%
• Time, emiT, and Time Again: $5.99 / $2.99 / N/A
• Unspecified: $4.99 / $2.99 / N/A
• Worth 1k — Volume 1: $9.99 / $4.99 / 87%
• Worth 1k — Volume 2: $9.99 / $4.99 / 83%

Where it says “N/A” it means the title has already “earned out”. I should note that for the purposes of this calculation, I am considering all expenses and revenue from the individual sales of Untrue Tales… Books 1-3 as part of those for The First Untrue Trilogy, and the same for 4-6 for the second. Since I originally published Book One back in 2004 but didn’t put out Book Four until last Fall, the first trilogy has had some time to get closer to “earning out”. Also, for reference, the percent of total expenses for the entire series combined remaining to earn out is only 35%, and if that ever crosses the line I may just drop the price of all editions of all books in the series to their floor prices. Also of note: Time, emiT, and Time Again has “earned out”, so all its individual short stories will drop from $1.99 to $0.99, whereas More Lost Memories is far from earning out, so most of its individually-available short stories will be increasing from $0.99 to $1.99.

For most of my books, selling just another 10 or 15 paperback copies (or twice that many eBooks) will allow them to “earn out” and both: reach their price floor, and start earning me money. A small handful of collectors could create the same impact.

There are some who will say I’m doing this backwards. That I should start prices as low as possible, to encourage “early adopters” and “build a critical mass” and gradually raise prices so that, when my book “hits it big” I’ll be “maximizing my revenue”. Actually, I read that exact plan on someone else’s blog a few weeks ago. It was by a guy who thought the book reaches full price point was after it had sold 15,000 copies. My highest-volume title has sold 62 copies (and well over 7k free downloads), so … not in the same ball park. On the other hand, with the system I’ve designed, my prices bottom out within about 25 paperback sales (or 50 eBook sales), so if ever I had such a popular book, most of the copies would sell at a low, low price – and earn me $2 apiece. Plus, as I keep saying, the for-pay versions of my books are all intended for people who want to support the creator, which is to say that “early adopters” are people who love my work and want to support it however they can; they’re willing to spend a little extra (and sometimes a lot extra). The free versions are for “building a critical mass” and if I ever had 15k sales of a title I’d know every one earned me at least $2/copy, or roughly a year’s pay if I got a “normal” day job (though likely I’d earn less at a day job, at my current theoretical earning potential).

I’ll begin updating eBook retailers soon, along with modernevil.com, so hopefully by the end of next week the new prices will be rolled out almost everywhere. Oh, and right now I’m thinking that, for future books, I’d start the eBook price at $9.99 and the paperback price at $25, to be sure they go down quickly… though that’s all in the air; with a successful fundraiser, they’d start at the price floor, and without one, the expenses are super-low. I don’t know. Cross that bridge, and all that…

Your feedback on this change is welcome. Comment, email, call, txt, whatever…

*Updated* I just updated the numbers (just after midnight, 1/1/2012) after doing a little more bookkeeping for the end of the year, and made a change for how I’ll be calculating expenses on Dragons’ Truth, so prices for both Untrue Trilogies and Dragons’ Truth have been updated in the chart above to reflect the most current numbers. For reference: selling one extra copy of each Untrue Trilogy (Thanks, John!) dropped the price of each book by another dollar. Sorry I hadn’t already taken that sale into account; I knew about it… Also: My latest calculations show that, for my first two poetry collections, I can’t afford to drop the price from $9.99/copy. I didn’t order enough copies to make the new model work, and I’ve already cancelled them at LSI so I can’t order more without paying setup fees again. So … for those two books, the paper editions are super-limited, and will be stuck at $9.99.

So, since I pay for each book’s digital catalog fee a year in advance and LSI doesn’t refund a prorated amount based on what wasn’t used, I’ve decided that -for now- I’m going to cancel each title in the month before the pre-paid distribution-availability runs out. I’ve gone through my records to find when I was billed last for each title, and created calendar reminders 11 months after each came up, so I have 4-8 weeks to actually get around to sending the email (rather than actually waiting for the last minute). As I said before, it may take several months (or forever?) after I tell LSI to cancel the title before other sites recognize them as out of print (even though I’ve been (and will continue to be) updating Bowker with their out of print status at the same time), and LSI may even allow book stores (Amazon included) to order them for quite some time after I tell them to stop. Not that I expect anyone to order. Here’s a quick breakdown of the schedule:

• January, 2012: Cancel Forget What You Can’t Remember
• January, 2012: Cancel More Lost Memories
• March, 2012: Cancel both Untrue Trilogies
• April, 2012: Cancel Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut
• June, 2012: Cancel Time, emiT, and Time Again
• July, 2012: Cancel Lost and Not Found
• September, 2012: Cancel Dragons’ Truth
• September, 2012: Cancel Unspecified
• October, 2012: Cancel Cheating, Death

Please keep in mind: These books won’t actually be going away. They’ll still be available as eBooks, for free at modernevil.com and for purchase through eBookstores and on eReaders (and tablets and phones) everywhere. They’ll still be available as audiobooks, for free through Podiobooks.com and for purchase through Audible/iTunes. They’ll even continue to be available in paperback for a long while, exclusively through modernevil.com – I have up to 45 copies of some titles, and not fewer than a dozen, and if I feel the need, I may order a few copies of anything I’m running low on before canceling them. Likely you’ll be able to order all my books from me for years to come – knowing that when you do, they’re now part of extremely limited print editions. (Perhaps I’ll calculate the edition sizes for all my books and note it on my site.)

Also keep in mind that my future books aren’t going away, either. I’ll still be writing them, and I’ll still be publishing them. They’ll simply become available as eBooks and audiobooks first, and paper if/when doing so makes financial sense. I’m really hoping I can find a way to do a limited print edition of the books I’m currently writing, as I’m quite enamored with the idea of putting the two books out in a single binding, as a flipbook (the two books upside down & reverse of one another) – and being limited-edition rather than full-distribution makes that easier, as both covers can look like covers if I don’t have to put a barcode “on the back” or any marketing copy there, either. Whether it makes sense to do it as a hardback (and then put the marketing info & barcode on the dust jacket flap) or not will depend on what the financial situation surrounding the book turns out to be. Will the cover art sell? Will people want to pre-order? Will I do a Kickstarter? (And will anyone pledge, if I do?) We’ll have to wait and see… I’ve still got a long road to go before we get there. Half the text left to write. Then the editing, the beta-reading, the audio version… all before I’m ready for fundraising, let alone publishing.

Here’s some backstory before I get into the numbers: Back in the before-times, I began writing stories. By the turn of the millennia, I’d begun thinking about writing novels. By the end of 2002 I’d written (and published, albeit in extremely low quantity and quality, and quietly) my first novel. By 2004 I’d done a nearly-professional job publishing it, and my second novel, though I still lacked distribution. At the end of 2004, my life went off a cliff, right after I published my 3rd novel, and publishing my 4th novel in 2005 was part of the long descent into Hell, which didn’t begin to let up until the Fall of 2006, when I also finished my 5th novel. Coming out of those dark days, I decided to take publishing seriously, started Modern Evil Press officially in 2007, and re-published my first 5 novels via Lightning Source (LSI), along with two poetry books. With LSI, I had professional (though not offset) printing, and I also had professional distribution (though not the sort of distribution where sales reps were trying to get my books onto store shelves; ‘distribution’ has two definitions in the publishing world, and mine just meant that if a bookstore ordered a book, it would be printed & delivered), and my books began appearing on Amazon &c. in their new forms. In 2008 I left my day job and began working as a full time creative, putting out professional-level eBooks and near-professional audiobooks along with the paper editions. Since then I’ve continued writing, editing, recording and publishing books, and as of right now I’ve written 11 novels, 2 short story collections, 2 poetry collections, and edited & published my first book by someone else. I’ve also published one short story exclusively in digital (eBook & audio).

If you read here much, you probably knew all that. (If not, please check out modernevil.com.) You may even have some idea of my financials. But… Did you know that, of my books released on paper, none one of them has ever made enough sales (even including sales across all formats, to try to make up for the cost of the paper editions through digital sales) to cover the cost of putting out that paper edition? My only “profitable” titles are the ones where I either 1) never published a paper edition, or 2) sold the original work of art I created for the cover of the book. Then there’s that short story I linked to in the last paragraph, Last Christmas (have you read it? It’s only $1.99!), which has both earned more than it cost me to publish the eBook (I still have to buy an ISBN) and for which I sold the cover art. Including some of the other books’ cover art means it’s not my most profitable book, but it feels that way, since it’s earned close to $70 but cost me less than $10 to publish.

Here are some fun numbers about my relationship with LSI: Since I began working with them in 2007, I have paid LSI $2163.46. By my calculation, $408 of that was in “Digital Catalog Fees”, which is an Invoice-y way of saying I pay $12/year/title to have my books available for distribution to booksellers (i.e.: Amazon &c.), and the other $1728.46 was for things like setup fees, shipping and handling, proof copies, oh, and actually printing copies of my books for me to have for direct sales. Let’s take that second number first, and compare it to the total revenue I’ve had come in from direct sales of paper books, which is approximately $1531.33, or a couple hundred dollars less than I spent getting those books. That’s from nearly 5 years of sales. Of course, I have a fair amount of inventory on hand. If all the books I have on the shelves next to me sold for their full cover prices, my bookkeeping software tells me I’d have another $4716.93 from the sale of those 307 books. By retail value, roughly 40% of that is in the two Untrue Trilogies I published this year, fewer than ten of which have sold (between the two titles), so far. Theoretically, if I could ever sell all these books, I’d still make quite a good margin on selling paper copies directly. With the nearly-2/3 margin I calculate for that, I can even afford to do some discounting (which I regularly do, a dollar or two at a time, whenever it’ll help make a sale).

Now let’s look at that other number. The Digital Catalog Fees. I spent $408 to make and keep my titles available for distribution over the last 5 years. I earned $131.26 from wholesale sales of my books (after LSI took their cut for printing them). That’s right. Over the last five years I spent $408 to earn $131.26. On one hand, I’m also paying for visibility; that fee covers getting my books listed on Amazon, bn.com, and theoretically hundreds of other online booksellers, plus it gets them listed as available in the computers of all the bookstores, large and small, across the country. On the other hand, they (bookstores, and customers of online stores) rarely, if ever, order my paper books. Of the 13 titles I’ve printed & distributed with LSI, only 5 titles have ever sold wholesale via LSI, and only one title earned enough from wholesale sales to cover its own Digital Catalog Fees (until/unless I get one more annual fee, then it’s just as red as the others). That includes zero books sold in 2011. (Actually, technically, I sold negative two books via LSI in 2011 – I recently received two returns. Because of strange LSI policies I didn’t fully understand, the cost of the return of one of them exceeded the value of all 5 sales that book had made in prior years. Five sales, one return, zero profit (for that title).) So what is that visibility getting me? Not more sales from my own website. Maybe more eBook sales, though that’s impossible to track. Oh, and speaking of eBook sales: For the 5 titles which had wholesale sales, all earned more from eBook sales than from wholesale paperback sales. All. To readers who paid at least 50% less than those who bought paper copies.

So, what do we learn from this? Well, for one: Paying for distribution of paper books doesn’t make sense, at all. Also: I need to better gauge the number of paper books I’ll be able to sell directly; when I sell them, they’re profitable, but when they sit on my shelf, they aren’t. (To clarify: It was a terrible idea to publish a new edition of the First Untrue Trilogy, and was probably a bad idea to put out a paper edition of the Second Untrue Trilogy. Of the ~$1700 I spent on getting paper books made in the last 5 years, ~$700 was for those two books. Which is to say: Without those books, I’d have had ~$1300 in direct sales and ~$1000 in printing costs, and at least that aspect of it would have been profitable.) Another detail which comes up: Publishing digital-only is much more likely to be profitable for me, even when only a few copies sell.

Really, because only a few copies sell.

I can pretend that “someday I’ll reach a bigger paying audience”, and maybe I will, but I can’t count on it. I need to make decisions based on reality. Right now the reality is that I have a few, very dedicated readers and supporters (the so-called “true fans”) and a whole lot of readers who are very unlikely to spend anything at all on my work. (And when they do, it isn’t on a paperback.) So: I’ve already begun taking my books “out of print”.

I told LSI to “cancel” my two poetry books (right after publishing Unspecified), which have earned about $70 between them and cost me somewhat over $480, so far. They weren’t making even enough sales to cover the annual Digital Catalog Fees, so I cancelled them. (I’ll have full eBook editions for sale… soon.) I’ll probably cancel all the rest when my LSI reps get back from holiday. I have literally no idea when they’ll stop being listed as available on Amazon and other sites. Right now my poetry books are listed as “temporarily out of stock” on Amazon, even though I cancelled them months ago. Note: I still have plenty of copies available. That actually goes for all my books. I have over 300 books sitting here, waiting for readers. Even after they’re removed from all the bookstores’ databases, I’ll still have them for sale. I’ll work on updating modernevil.com in the new year, too. I’ll probably offer them unsigned for the cover price and signed for a little more, close to what I have now, but my own buy button instead of external links. (Since those links literally never worked for getting sales, anyway.)

What about my future books, you may be wondering? Well, how about digital-first? (Maybe digital-only.) How about digital first, and maybe a Kickstarter or just-straight-painting-sale or maybe a pre-order signup process to see whether there’s any interest in a limited-edition, direct-only, paper version of the book (probably hardback). If I’m not doing distribution, if each paper book is limited edition from copy one, the whole thing gets turned on its head, from price to quality to design. Offset printing still won’t make sense until/unless I get that theoretical larger-audience, but I can design a very nice hardback edition for LSI to print just for me and my readers. If I don’t have to give a retailer 50% (or more) off the top of every sale, even POD hardbacks can be reasonable prices. If I’m producing collector’s items, even relatively affordable ones, even just selling a few can make me a lot more money than I’ve been getting from book sales. It’ll be a sort of cautious Freemium model. Less-popular books will make most of their money from digital, more-popular books will make vastly more money from paper books, and I’ll still probably make more money from art than from books for years to come. (These aren’t final numbers, but it looks like for 2011 I’ll have had a little over $700 in book sales, a little over $1400 in art sales, and a little over $1600 in expenses. Profitable again, which is good, but not by a whole lot. If I just get an order of magnitude more successful, I might actually have to think about things like paying quarterly estimated taxes! In the meantime, I’m generally happy where I’m at.)

I’m going to play around with numbers a lot more in the next few weeks. Keep your eyes out for a new set of quarterly (and end-of-year) download numbers, with some interesting spikes, some time next month. I’ve actually got about 3 months of bookkeeping I’ve got to go through; I’ve been slacking. (The numbers above are all estimates; I have numbers, I just haven’t got them all in the right places for business purposes, yet.) I’ll also want to run all the numbers I can think of on … everything I’ve been talking about. And some projections into the new year.

Oh, and I’ve got to finish writing those books. I’ve not been working on them in the last week or two, partially because sitting down every day to grind out more chapters was beginning to feel more like work and less like something I wanted to be doing – and I want to write these books. So I’m taking most of the money/expenses out of my business, and I’m taking most of the pressure off my process, and I think I’ll be better off for it. In fact, I think my business will be more successful, financially, and I’ll personally be more successful, creatively and emotionally. Win, win, win, and win for anyone who likes reading my books, too.

When I started outlining the first book, a few days before November, I determined that at least the first book wanted to be over 65k words. Because of what I’m planning on doing with them, I want the books to be roughly the same length. Consequently, my word count goal for the month was set at, roughly, one hundred and thirty thousand words. Which is about 4,334 words/day, every day. I kept up a pretty good pace for the first week, almost ten days, then began to taper off. This was largely due to difficult things taking place in the story, but once I’d lost my momentum, around 50k words, actually, I wasn’t able to regain it. Different things kept happening, coming up, interrupting, et cetera. I didn’t finish the first book, yet. I wrote to the point that one of the main characters from the other book is introduced – I need to know what he’s like, what he’s been going through, where he’s at, and how the events about to take place in Sophia’s story are going to affect Emily in hers before I can write them. So I stopped that one and started working on the other.

The outline for that one seemed to imply that it wants to be shorter, which is especially frustrating since Sophia’s story seems to have gone even longer, currently on track for somewhat over 70k words. We’ll have to wait and see how that one actually ends up, but so far the chapters want to be short, too, which is frustrating – but maybe later chapters will want to be longer. Meh. I’m sure it’ll all work out alright. When I get around to writing it. Probably slowly over the next month or so. I predict a lot of workdays writing. Maybe not 5k-10k words/day, but some.

It’s more important to me to get the books written well than to stress out over any artificial deadlines. I recently determined that, by the time I’m done working on these two books, I’ll have spent around a thousand hours on them, between research, planning, writing, editing, recording/editing, and publishing them. Trying to rush any part of the process for books I’m investing so much time in seems inappropriate. So, I’m trying to get back into the right frame of mind for writing these books. This one is a tough one, for a whole stack of reasons I’ve mentioned on Google+ as I run into them, but I’m dedicated to doing it, and doing it well.

Anyway, I’m over 60k words so far on the novels this month, so I’m a “winner” of NaNoWriMo. I may write more this week, depending on what else is going on, perhaps another 10k-20k words… but I don’t expect to finish the first drafts of the two novels for at least several more weeks. If you’re interested in helping me with them, in becoming a ‘Beta Reader’ of my unfinished books, to give me feedback on them before I move into the final editing/layout/recording stages, comment or email me, and I’ll add you to the list, then send you copies of the books when I’m finished writing them.

Anyhow, here are all the eBook and Podiobook download numbers for/through Q3 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: 296 / 1,751 / 73
• Dragons’ Truth: 710 / 1,781 / 175
• Forget What You Can’t Remember: 322 / 6,686 / 126
• The First Untrue Trilogy: 409 (eBook only)
• The Second Untrue Trilogy: 299 (eBook only)
• Untrue Tales… Book One: 2 / 3,797 / 237
• Untrue Tales… Book Two: 1 / 4,534 / 310
• Untrue Tales… Book Three: 1 / 2,124 / 166
• Untrue Tales… Book Four: N/A / 1,728 / 154
• Untrue Tales… Book Five: N/A / 1,636 / 168
• Untrue Tales… Book Six: N/A / 2,607 / 312
• Cheating, Death: 261 / 7,663 / 467
• Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 180 / 511 / 63
• More Lost Memories (full): 182 / 1,409 / 80
• More Lost Memories (ind. stories, eBook only): 15
• Time, emiT, and Time Again (full): 177 / 1,286 / 75
• Time, emiT, and Time Again (ind. stories, eBook only): 8
• Last Christmas: 1
• Total Q3: 2,864 / 37,513 / 2,406
• Total all-time: 25,805 / 515,002 / 33,439

As you can probably see, most of the drop in Podiobooks downloads was among the Untrue Tales… books. The total downloads for the series actually dropped 31%, quarter-over-quarter, though clearly there’s a huge drop over the course of the series. Now, Books 1-3 were all in print (and available as eBooks) before I even began podcasting my books, and I began podcasting Book One in April 2009, so they’ve a bit of a head start. Books 4-6 were all in print (as The Second Untrue Trilogy) by March of this year, and I finished podcasting Book Six in June, so the end of the series has been available 4-6 months already, depending on preferred format. Still, people just aren’t finishing the series. I’ll break out a few numbers to really clarify, starting with (all time, PB only) Total # of downloads / final-episode downloads:

• Untrue Tales… Book One: 82,040 / 6,578
• Untrue Tales… Book Two: 77,489 / 5,460
• Untrue Tales… Book Three: 39,516 / 3,345
• Untrue Tales… Book Four: 9,075 / 762
• Untrue Tales… Book Five: 7,539 / 595
• Untrue Tales… Book Six: 5,764 / 399

Keep in mind that all 6 books have 10 episodes each, so the first number should be about 10x the second number, and where it isn’t, that indicates that people aren’t finishing that book. So we can see about 20% of people who start Book One don’t finish it, a whopping 30% of those who try Book Two don’t get through it, but 85% of those who start Book Three or Book Four finish those books. More drastic than the number of people who start Book Two and never finish is the 50% drop in downloads between Book Two and Book Three. That only 23% of people who downloaded through Book Three bothered to pick up Book Four when it became available (starting last December) is also telling. Now, you may say that the years of downloads of the first 3 books are skewing the numbers; okay, let’s look at just the numbers for 2011. (By the time 2011 / Book Four had started, I’d made it quite clear the series would have a conclusion by the summer.)

• Untrue Tales… Book One: 14,772 / 1,031
• Untrue Tales… Book Two: 15,320 / 1,031
• Untrue Tales… Book Three: 7,941 / 699
• Untrue Tales… Book Four: 8,641 / 762
• Untrue Tales… Book Five: 7,539 / 595
• Untrue Tales… Book Six: 5,764 / 399

Here we see 31% of people didn’t finish Book One, 33% didn’t finish Book Two, but by the time they get to Book Three and Book Four 88% are finishing. We also see a strange phenomenon I also observed with the eBooks: more people start Book Two than Book One; people are skipping the first book and going straight to the second, then quitting. There’s that 49% drop between Book Two and Book Three again, but instead of a drop, there’s a jump in the number of Book Four downloads; presumably, people who had listened in previous years did actually seek out the remainder of the series. Interestingly, if we consider the 2,646 people who finished Book Three prior to 2011, either 78% of everyone who finishes Book Three never starts Book Four or (if the retention rates seen from the start of Book Three to the end of Book Four hold across the gap for people who started the series this year) only about 5% of the people who has listened to Books 1-3 previously have returned to listen to the conclusion to the series. This projection actually matches the roughly 6% ratio between people who finished Book One and people who have finished Book Six, over all time. (If we look at just this year, the drop from Book One to Book Six is only about 60%, not 94%. It’ll be interesting to see how those numbers shape the picture over coming years.)

Anyway, between these downloads and the eBook downloads of The Second Untrue Trilogy, there are well over 1000 people who (even if they haven’t taken the time to read/listen to the whole thing) wanted to read the books. A thousand people. Well worth the effort, I say.

(A mere three-quarters of a percent of them seem to be willing to pay money for any version of my work, but I still say it’s well worth the effort. Having a thousand fans is a far road from the “thousand true fans” of myth (the ones whose steady financial support would be enough to sustain any independent creator); I estimate I’ll need in the neighborhood of 125,000 fans before I get near the “thousand true fans”. Or in the neighborhood of a million downloads (cumulative across all my titles) per year. I’m projecting reaching about 24k downloads this year. So it’ll be a while. I’ll keep making the effort, it you’ll keep reading.)

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