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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In addition, I’m looking for people willing to review the books. Beta Readers are included. The Beta version of the book will be 99% of the way to the published edition, and suitable for reviewing. I’ll be able to deliver the eBook to reviewers in/after the same time period (mid-March to mid-April), with expected publication in May, 2012. Realistically, I’m aiming for a May Day (5/1/2012) publication date. (That’s when I figured I’d need to have the book ready to send to my printer to have the hard copies at hand in time for Phoenix Comicon.) I’ll encourage all my Beta Readers to write reviews, too, but the more reviews the better. If you would be willing to review the books, please contact me.

What are the books about? Here are the blurbs and covers I’ve got, so far:

Before she met Nicholas, Emily believed the vampires had her best interests in mind. Now she stands by his side in the fight for what’s right, while waging her own campaign in the fight for his heart. Emily follows Nicholas from the woods of Vermont to the White House and home again, putting her life and her blood on the line for a cause almost as important to her as the love she feels for him. (Cover image adapted from a photograph by Danila Panfilov.)

Sophia’s conservative Christian parents have kept her isolated from the outside world for the last ten years. Is it any wonder she wants to move out the very night she turns 18, then falls in love with Joshua, the first young man she sees? Complicating Sophia’s quest for love are her body, frozen at age 7 when she was turned into a vampire, and her faith in God, making her passions feel like sins. (Cover image adapted from a photograph by Jesse Millan.)

Sound interesting? If you want to be a Beta Reader or reviewer, please contact me. Comment, email, call, text, tweet, facebook, G+, USMail, whatever you prefer. Only digital copies will be available for this pass, but I can make the books available in most eBook formats (ePub, mobi/kindle, PDF, etc). I look forward to hearing from you.

Already thinking about fundraising for Never Let the Right One Go. Have to figure out how to do a Kickstarter more than a handful of people will respond to, or an alternative means of raising funds. Also ought to contact those photographers & see if/what they want for high-res, commercial-use, et cetera, since it could have a huge impact on my fundraising goal. sigh.

(Note: I just sent messages to each photographer, via flickr. We’ll see what they say.)

If the photographers are awesome & generous, or at least not evil, the minimum I’d need to raise for a 50-copy limited edition paperback is around $400. Or around $800 to do it as a hardback.

Pretending I could ever sell all 50 copies, and adding the cost of shipping &c, I could price a signed, numbered, limited edition paperback flipbook (containing both texts) at $20-$25, on Kickstarter. For the signed, numbered, limited edition hardback I’d have to ask $40+, but … Hmm… How about a limited edition of either 50 or however many people pledge at that level (“to allow for more,” he said optimistically), whichever is greater, and at a quality level to be determined by the number of backers, based a little on:

The floor price for direct paperback sales (under my current pricing scheme) would probably be $10.99, and around $15.99 for the hardback, based on some top-of-the-head calculations. (And of course $2.99/eBook, though I’ll be offering them individually only.)

So, if the pledge point to get the paper book was $20 or $25, then if we only hit the minimum goal (say, $400, if the photographers are awesome), the print edition will be paperback, and if we pass a sufficient threshold (really just 35-40 backers, by my estimates), then everyone gets hardbacks instead. And if I’m wildly successful (thousands of backers, or tens of thousands) then I could afford to do offset printing of an even higher-quality book. And then die, trying to sign them all. Maybe I should limit it to, say, 500 copies?

Ah, wild, unbridled optimism. Who put that in my pessimism? I’m supposed to be all, like, “In my past Kickstarters, I’ve been successful only by the sale of one or two super-premium items, not by the accumulation of many paper book pre-sales. This time, I have no ‘original cover art’ to sell, and may in fact have to pay a significant sum for the covers I have in mind. This will never work!” Oh, well. Maybe I can find 16-40 people actually interested in paying $25 for my new books? Seriously, though. $25 for 2 books! What a great deal! I mean, if you buy new books, at all. It includes shipping? sigh.

I did manage to do a lot of things with my latest books to make them more commercially viable than a lot of my other books, though pre-blurbing them was not one. For example, when structuring the story, I made sure that the “kindle preview” (or first couple podcast episodes) was more of a “hook” than I normally do. In one of the books, I took an exciting sequence from the end of the story and moved it to the beginning, so the book starts (almost misleadingly) with tension, drama, and action, instead of just exposition. In both books, I crafted the first sentence, the first paragraph, and the first 2 chapters specifically as “hooks”. I’ve also been working on creating industry-standard book covers for the books, which tell you very little about what the book is, while looking like a lot of the other book covers out there, and maybe make you want to click through and get to those first paragraphs/chapters. (I’ll show you the covers in a moment.)

The blurb/descriptions, though, are my next big challenge, along with coming up with commercially viable main titles for each book. (I have a series title / subtitle for both books: Never Let the Right One Go, which I had before I even knew it would be two books. That title is almost the inspiration for the whole project, actually.) The titles need to be short and declarative or active, preferably one or two words, and memorable. The blurbs can be up to about 100 words, but as I keep saying, I’m not much good at that part. And the title is 50-100 times harder. I’m not sure what I’ll do.

Anyway, the following are the quick-and-dirty first-draft covers I put on the first-draft eBooks I sent out to my First Readers this weekend. Keep in mind, I’m just using the name of each book’s protagonist as the titles for this version, “Sophia” and “Emily”, so the books can be told apart in my First Readers’ descriptions/responses. Also, I’m not 100% satisfied with the font. But this is the sort of generic/commercial covers I’ve come up with, so far:

The image of “Emily” is adapted from a photograph by Danila Panfilov, and the image of “Sophia” is adapted from a photograph by Jesse Millan. I think they’re great photos, and represent the characters well enough, and while the versions I used here were available under a CC BY license, so I can (theoretically) use them commercially as long as I credit the photographers, I’m thinking I need to contact the photographers, and may have to pay considerable sums of money (which I don’t have, and the books probably won’t earn) to get high-resolution copies of the originals for a print edition, to get broader license to actually distribute the modified images (the covers) as covers (I can credit them inside the book, but what about every online bookseller the cover appears on? Do I need to add their photo credit to the blurb to satisfy the CC license?), or to get model releases for using these two young ladies’ likenesses on my books. My business model of selling the original artwork I create for a book’s cover in order to cover the costs of creating the print edition doesn’t work when, instead of painting the cover, I have to buy photographs; it reverses it, turning the cover from a source of income to an expense. Not sure how to reconcile that, yet.

So that’s where I’m at. The books are written, and now I’m into getting them ready for marketing/distribution. As I get feedback from my First Readers (let me know if you’d like to be a Beta Reader!), I’ll modify the text, but in the meantime I’m trying to figure out these frustrating, commercial, details.

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.