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

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

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

The prices for my books are: paper / ebook:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alternatively, I’ve been having a reasonably good amount of success with it, and have felt like I could go to actually fasting or near-to-fasting on the low days. In fact, this morning when I got up, I weighed only 189 pounds; this is the closest I’ve been to my goal (188 is the maximum weight not considered overweight, by BMI, for my height) in the ~2.5 years since we started. I also seem to be at the lowest body fat percentage I’ve been since we started, holding steady for several days at about 16% (according to my Tanita scale), or about 30lbs of fat. Plus, two days in a row I managed a set of at least 10 pushups in a row – this is a major improvement, and the first time I’ve ever been able to do 10 pushups. This morning I very nearly managed to do two sets of 10 pushups in a row. Maybe next time. At this rate, I figure … by this time next year, perhaps I’ll reach that 100 pushups goal!

Oh, and with Mandy changing her plan, I’m changing mine, as well. I’m going to try actually fasting (or very near to it) on my alternate-day fasting plan. Based on my experiences so far with fasting, I’ll probably fast roughly 24 hours at each stretch, and have a light supper in the evening of the “fasting” days. I’ll probably come in at around 15% of my “maintain” calorie count those days (as opposed to the 50% I’ve been aiming for) and I’ll still be aiming (roughly) for 100% on the other days. I’m really close to one of my actual goals, of being 185lbs and 15% fat, which gives me a little margin between myself and “overweight”, though I’ll certainly be doing some more research in the next few weeks about how to redefine my goals for more general fitness, now that I’m within spitting distance of my original goals for more generally losing weight.

I’ll update again, when I see how so much fasting actually goes – both in terms of health benefits, and of the difficulty of living with it.

Well, it isn’t as though we didn’t know this was coming, I suppose. Six or nine months ago, we were having intermittent problems with the oven taking a long time to pre-heat. As in, we would check the oven when we thought it ought to be done warming up, and would hear a small explosion upon opening the door, as the gas which ought to have been heating it finally lit for (presumably) the first time. I talked to my father about it at the time (he has more experience, of course, not to mention he bought the oven and probably moved the gas line at some point in the 15+ years since he bought this house, and I’d guess he’s probably done quite a few repairs on gas appliances (ranges, ovens, heaters, et cetera) in his lifetime) and he looked at it, looked up the parts, and was sure 1) it was probably the thermostat, and 2) changing the thermostat on this model oven is more expense and hassle than it would be worth, especially for such an old oven. Then it started behaving normally. For six (or was it nine? I didn’t mark my calendar) months or more. We started looking, noncommittally, at replacements, and finding them to be quite expensive. I decided to continue putting it off, as long as the oven was working, until I had more information.

So over the last few months we’ve had ovens on the mind. We’ve popped into the occasional Sears Outlet store to take a look at what sort of features and prices things were going for, but until this week there was no urgency about our shopping. The oven has been working fine; I’ve actually done a fair amount of very successful baking, lately. Cakes and cookies and pies, of course, the occasional odd thing, plus roast chicken and we’re just finishing the leftovers from our huge Easter ham. I believe we had the first problems before Thanksgiving (perhaps right before Thanksgiving? I recall discussing not wanting to attempt a repair on the oven the week of the holiday), and I know I roasted a turkey in it. Plus: New ovens aren’t cheap.

This weekend, the oven finally went over the line. I’m not sure what caused the problem – maybe using the broiler, last week, to toast a bagel sandwich for a few minutes? Maybe God just gave us an extra six months to get used to the idea of buying a new oven, or to do it on our own, and because we didn’t take the leap, He pushed? I don’t know. I know on Friday it took over an hour (with plenty of small explosions upon peeking inside, along the way) to preheat the oven just to bake some stuffed, bacon-wrapped hot dogs (I have some ideas for improving from my first attempt; maybe I’ll take a bunch of photos & blog it if/when I attempt that again.) for dinner, and the house ended up smelling like a gas leak in the process. It was frustrating, but just seemed like maybe the oven was having a relapse. Saturday my sister couldn’t get the oven to warm up at all, the house had hardly cleared from the previous day’s gas smell and after an hour or more without it even getting to 200, she gave up in frustration, threw out her food, and went out for food. I felt I was to blame, for not replacing or repairing the oven sooner. This stressed me out a little more than a merely-failing oven would have or should have; I’m a bit prone to anxiety.

We didn’t have anything going on Friday night, and it was early enough, and at Angela’s suggestion and Mandy’s seconding, Mandy and I drove over to Stardust to see whether they had anything wonderful. Stardust is a nonprofit which basically carries … used (major) household items – things recovered from houses; a lot of cabinets, doors, and windows, plus usually a reasonable selection of decade-plus-old toilets, sinks, ovens, microwaves, refrigerators, and much much more. Being used items, the only way to know what they have from day to day is to go in and see; we probably ought to have been going in every couple of weeks for the last six months, looking out for something nice to come in. Most of the stuff they have is mid-level but, for example, Mandy and I bought an old (but still working well) Sub-Zero refrigerator there for $300, and have been pretty happy with it for the last several years – as long as I remember to vacuum the dust out of the intake over the coils a couple times a year, it’s a very reliable fridge.

Alas, Stardust didn’t have any ovens that looked any better than what we needed to replace. As long as we were out, we stopped by a K-Mart (yes, there are still a few of them around), the Sears at Metrocenter (where we met a very friendly and knowledgeable appliance salesman, and had a good look at a wide selection of gas ranges (apparently, despite the bigger part being an oven, and the stovetop/range part also being a thing people buy independently, they call freestanding ovens “ranges” – not ovens), refreshing and re-confirming what we’d observed in our casual browsing during prior months), then at the Sears employee’s suggestion (since he would gladly price-match – and they were having a “friends and family” sale Sunday night, where he’d probably have the lowest price, anyway) we also stopped by Lowes and Home Depot (plus Fry’s Electronics, since we were there – which may be the only place we saw an LG range), then did our grocery shopping, too, since we were already out. Then at home I did more research and shopping online.

Sunday, I tried researching to repair the oven at home, since our research had determined that 1) we couldn’t get a new range for less than $400-$500, without buying something which looked like it would fail within another six months, and 2) if we were going to spend a big chunk of money (extending our debt payoff horizon), we wanted to get a high quality machine with all the features I’ve been wanting, which seemed to be in the $900-$1200 range and higher. Not to mention 3) the next tier, of $1700-$2100 ranges, seemed only incrementally better than the $900-$1200 ranges, with no features we thought justified the expense – unless you’re a professional chef, going $2k+ seems laughable, to us. If I could figure out how to repair it within my level of skill, it would certainly not cost us $1k (see also: about a month more time in debt). Based on my research, including taking the oven half apart, probably one or both of the ignitor and/or gas safety valve was faulty, and probably just from being old and worn out. I spoke to my father about it (since, again, he knows a lot more about this particular oven than I do), did a little more research, and determined that trying to repair an old oven, from a brand which no longer exists, which was manufactured exclusively for Montgomery Ward (which also no longer exists), rather than buying a new range, was probably a waste of time and money, and potentially dangerous. Plus, while I figure I could have tested and/or replaced the ignitor with little trouble, I was pretty sure testing and replacing the NG valve is currently beyond my ken – and that hiring a pro to do it would cost more than the oven was worth.

Sunday afternoon, upon deciding for certain that we needed to simply replace the thing, and that our target price range was near $1k, I did a little more Internet shopping, review-reading, et cetera, and determined that there were 50-100 makes and models of gas range, by reliable brands, with all the core features I was looking for – with little to differentiate one from another, on a spec sheet. I had some idea of what I wanted, I’d certainly narrowed down the minimum features in my mind, but I wanted to see the ranges in person. We set out on a bit of an adventure, to try to find just the right range, at just the right price, with just a few hours before Sears’ limited-time sale.

This time we were shopping on our own side of town, so we went by the big, local Sears Outlet first. They had a particular LG range I’d seen quite highly-rated online (and with a strikingly-blue interior Mandy was fond of), which had all the features we wanted and for about $100 less than it was going for anywhere else (including Sears) – but then we learned it had been converted to LP, and we’d need to convert it back to NG. I couldn’t quickly/easily determine how much that would cost or how difficult it would be while browsing from my iPhone, so we looked over the other models they had in stock, and moved on.

We went to PV Mall next, to stop by the Sears there, where we discovered they had a much smaller selection of gas ranges and a much less friendly major-appliance sales staff. Disappointed, I pointed the car North, remembering an independent appliance store used to be at Desert Ridge (apparently no longer in business), and thinking the Lowes on Bell and Scottsdale was our next best bet (esp. considering their free delivery & 10% off sale). Then I spotted a small appliance store across Tatum on Thunderbird, did a bit of a loop-de-loo to get turned around the right way from the wrong side of the store & we ended up going in to “Home TV & Appliance” about half an hour before they closed for the day. According to Gary, our friendly (if not intimately familiar with the features of all the gas ranges he sells) salesperson, they’re a small, locally-owned chain. They had nearly as many gas ranges on the showroom floor as we’d seen anywhere, and they were having a sale which brought the prices on the models we preferred down below … everyone I could find. Including Amazon. Including Lowes, who had free shipping, even including their moderate delivery charge (half of the Sears delivery charge).  (According to their web site, they’ll price match any local, advertised deal their prices don’t already beat.) I did about 15 minutes of online research (while Gary helped, pulling out his books with all the details when Frigidaire’s website refused to serve meaningful pages to a mobile browser) and review-checking, then we paid the man and set up for delivery today. We walked out happy, and a significant part of that was in having stumbled upon a local business to support with our purchase, without having to pay a premium to do so. (Oh, and the delivery today was quick, efficient, friendly, and on-time.)

Here is the range we bought. It is a Frigidaire FGGF3054MF, which is a model-level up from the best Frigidaire I thought I could get at the price I paid (and I’d probably have either settled for the lower model at Lowes, or paid closer to the MSRP for the one we got, some place else) and is one of the better value-and-features-for-the-money ranges on the market, right now, even at full price. The key features I didn’t want to buy a new range without included sealed burners on the range, self-cleaning oven, at least one 15k BTU burner, and convection cooking. The nice-to-have features I liked the look of were the a “simmer burner” (5k-6k BTUs, for cooking things low and slow), a continuous cooktop (preferably with optional griddle), and a feature I only saw mentioned on the Frigidaires, an integrated probe thermometer.

This oven has all of those features. One of the five burners is 17k BTUs, another is 15k, and a third is 5k. As you can see in the image at right, it’s even got the optional griddle for the center burner (though it seems to interrupt the continuous cooktop by being just a little too tall, so either someone measured wrong, or it wasn’t designed to be left in place – I’ll call their CS people to find out) which I look forward to trying some pancakes out on, soon. It even has features I may have to try some new recipes and techniques to take advantage of. Did I mention it can “quick pre-heat” in 5-6 minutes? Much nicer than the “an hour-plus, and a house full of explosive poison gas” we had before. I’m eager to see how the convection cooking changes things, too, though I don’t have anything urgently needing to be baked or roasted… But give me a couple weeks, and I’m sure I’ll have put it through its paces. Surely we need some ginger/molasses cookies around here, right? And maybe a couple loaves of French bread?

Next up, though, I need to re-start my wok research – the big draw of the high-power burner, for me, was being able to properly cook food in a wok. It’s time to retire the old Teflon-coated wok (since Teflon becomes a toxic gas at proper wok temperatures) and get a (probably) carbon steel wok. Any brand/store recommendations are welcome.

Update: I ended up ordering this wok, from Amazon.

By summer of last year we’d both plateaued, and by December 2011, largely due to depression, I was rapidly re-gaining weight. When I hit 210, I started a crash diet (which overlapped Christmas, unfortunately), and got back under 200 within a couple of weeks, and I’ve been struggling again with the last of my stubborn belly fat since then. Normal “eat less, move more” wasn’t quite cutting it (or I wasn’t really moving enough), and when I saw some science backing up an unusual sort of diet I’d thought about before, I figured what they hey, let’s try it … Actually, I just showed it to Mandy on a lark, not intending to try it, but she suggested trying it … And the week of March 26th we started doing a version of an alternate-day-fasting diet.

There are a few ideas about this sort of diet, ranging from full-on fasting every other day to eating 20%-50% of your “maintain” level of calories on the alternate days, and from normal to 150% (or just “whatever you want”) on the non-fasting days. Different people swear it has different effects, ranging from “helping get rid of that last 15 pounds” to curing asthma & allergies, and possibly to postponing the onset of diabetes or MS. Who knows? The science isn’t in, yet. Give it a few more years/decades. Since we were still trying to get rid of the last of our excess fat (I was still at/above 18% body fat) we decided to aim for a reasonable 50% on “fast” days, and 100% on “high” days – this keeps us losing weight, but confuses our bodies. (We also re-started our attempts to complete the 100 pushups and 200 situps challenges (we didn’t succeed on our first six-week attempt) three weeks ago.) In five weeks I’m down 10 pounds to 190, and down 2-3% body fat, as well. (Plus another inch at the waist; it’s a bit frustrating to be between pant sizes, but I just ordered a new pair of suspenders to hold them up, at least until I lose another inch and buy some new pants.) Mandy, unfortunately, has not been having as dramatic a success… but she’s sticking with it.

It’s been interesting. With alternating days being so low-calorie, the days we eat at our “maintain” calories are like cheating days, or feast days. If I’m having trouble sticking to the low-calorie limits, I usually only have to remind myself that the next day I’ll be able to splurge, eat what I want, and then I can more easily control myself. I can definitely say that having the relatively-high-calorie days (versus most of the last two years, where I’ve been eating little every day, first to lose the first fifty pounds, and then unsuccessfully to try to lose this last 15 pounds) have been very liberating. Also helpful since I’m still frequently overcome in difficult situations with an urge to emotionally overeat – the trick now is to control the urge, if possible, on low days, and keep it near my maintain calorie level on high days (which feels like plenty of leeway after years of running 1,000 calories lower than that every day).

I’m still a bit away from even my initial goal (technically, my BMI is still a bit into the overweight, and my body fat percentage is a few points higher than I’d like) though I hope after another few months of this unusual diet I’ll be there. I also hope I’ll be able to do 100 pushups at some point; progress on that isn’t going well, though it is going, a bit. Getting back to a point where I can do a lot of situps would be good, too – I’d love to actually have some abs worth looking at, once this obscuring fat is worked away. Not that my abs would be visible in it, but I’ve been putting off getting a new author portrait (née headshot) taken (or having my wedding ring resized) until I reach my weight goal; I’m most of the way there, and look very different from the photo I’ve been using most places, but there’s something psychological about actually reaching the goal… if you’ve been wondering why I don’t look like my photo, this is why.

So, that’s a sort of a general update on what’s been going on with my dieting. Mostly success, mostly by eating less and moving more. I didn’t mention that it also involves eating generally whole foods, plenty of fruits and vegetables, with most meals cooked from scratch – because that is for another post (or series of posts), and predates any attempts as weight loss, since eating real food is awesome, anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

My life isn’t only my work, though my work certainly defines and consumes most of my life. So where are the posts about my happy marriage and the fun and interesting things Mandy and I do together, about the ups and downs, the adventures and the goose chases? Where are the posts about food; I’ve been baking and cooking more and more, adapting, following, and inventing recipes, where are the posts about how I find the culinary arts to be an important part of my overall creative life? Where are the posts about diet and exercise, the descriptions of the successes and frustrations Mandy and I have had, about losing fifty pounds (each) in the last couple of years (mostly 2 years ago; mostly plateauing last year), and about how we’re in the best shape of our lives? I used to write book reviews, movie reviews, product reviews, and more – I still read, et cetera, I even write reviews sometimes, but why aren’t they here on my blog? I finally started attending church regularly again, a few years ago, and I’ve been working little by little on giving my faith more prominence in everything I do; I’ve even been more overtly (it was always there, but it was less than obvious to some readers) writing Christian themes, characters, and lessons into my books, but where is any mention of that on my blog?

Heck, what about politics and economics? I construct book after book with my political and economic ideas as foundations on which the stories and characters’ lives are built – my two new books, Never Let the Right One Go, are so chock full of political commentary I keep worrying readers will choke on them. (Luckily, the rest of the content seems to have been well enough crafted to carry people through.) I have strong reactions to quite a bit of the ignorance and idiocy and injustice I see taking place in the world, but where are the posts about it? I live in a state which, because 55% of the (voting) residents can be convinced to vote for crazy people, has a horrible reputation for passing bizarre, draconian, often unenforceable and sometimes unconstitutional (even re: our own state constitution) laws. I’ve been biting my tongue (restraining my fingers from typing) about these things for years, now, not just here but also keeping myself from commenting on news articles, blogs, and social networks when these topics come up – now I’m considering, at the least, posting my thoughts here, if not smearing them all over the web.

I suppose the answer is that I’m going to try to actually get myself to start posting here, more, and more about the parts of my life beyond just writing and publishing books, creating and selling art, and the business of it all (though that stuff will continue to be a part of this blog, too – it’s still the biggest part of my life). Hopefully I’ll be successful, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, here are all the eBook and Podiobook download numbers for Q1 of 2012, as usual giving the total of eBook downloads, the total of Podiobook downloads, and the more-accurate (re: # of people who dl’d a full book) total downloads of the final episodes of each Podiobook, as: eBook/total-PB/final-PB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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