Goodreads Book Giveaway

Unspecified

by Yoshira Marbel

Giveaway ends October 07, 2011.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Released Pain

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Friend

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

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

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

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

Doll

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This world destroys me.
  I drink it in,
       refreshed,
           the acidic coldness
swallows me entirely.

One has never been enough.
I’m incomplete without you.

and then what?

suddenly simple?
   everything works out?

that … seems unlikely.
           seems untrue.

but maybe “friends”
  or maybe nothing
               ever
               again

only one has ever
               disappeared
completely
               gone;
can she too              ?

I wish someone would
   tell me
   what it is
   I’m supposed to have done
                              wrong.

or how to do
            right
            right now.

and then what?