Also, Mandy loved it so much that she has stated that she would like to read it again.  So:

1) I could go to a book store and buy the book (the paperback is broadly available, on account of the movie), or just order the paperback from Amazon for … looks like $8.88 used or $10.85 new (or the hardback for $9.90 used / $14.69 new) … then we’d own it & I’d be able to read it and Mandy would be able to read it over and over, and we could even lend it out if we wanted to.

2) I could buy the kindle version from Amazon for $9.99 and read it on my iPhone.  And only my iPhone.  And Mandy can’t read it again without us buying or borrowing it again.

I can’t find the book as an eBook anywhere else (though admittedly I’m not experienced at trying – where do YOU look for eBooks?), so this may be the only e-option for this title.  Amazon’s DRM means that I can either pay twice for the two people in my household to be able to read the one book, or buy the paper book and then a totally unrestricted number of people can read it.  Let me rephrase: I can buy the electronic version for $9.99 and I’ll be the first and only person ever allowed to read that copy OR I can buy a paper copy for $8.88 that’s already been read by an unknown number of people and I can be one of many people who are allowed to read that copy in the future.

There is a reason publishers like DRM and dislike used books, and it has nowt to do with readers.

I believe that publishers should do everything they can to encourage reading as much as they can in every possible way that they can.  I believe that anything publishers do that discourages reading, or that fails to encourage reading, is working against their own best interests.  I believe that the amount of money society spends on reading material relates directly to how much people are reading – so that the best way to increase spending on books is to increase reading. Duh! Please, Macmillan, encourage me.

If you watch it a couple of times (once to absorb everything I’m saying, then again to absorb the production techniques) you’ll see that … at the beginning of working on this video, last Monday, I had never done any 3D animation and only a modicum of modeling (mostly in SL), and had never used Kinemac before.  (I bought the Macheist 3 bundle earlier this year, for access to that and BoinxTV, mostly.)  As I worked for about a week and a half on this video, I became more and more experienced with the software, more aware of what it was capable of, and more comfortable doing more advanced things with it.  So at the beginning, the big 3D text is pretty neat, but by the end I have an entire bookcase of individually hand-animated books leaping in and out of a box.

There’s things I’d like to change about it.  Not just improving the animation in the first half, either.

On Demand Books is now saying they’ll have two million titles available by years’ end, rather than one, for example.  Plus, I feel like I may have represented the kindle more strongly than the iPhone – while I believe the 41million iPhones/iPod Touches in circulation worldwide, each with hundreds of individual book apps and at least 4 different major eReader apps, each with robust eBook catalogs and (coming soon) in-app purchasing will do significantly better and reach wider and have more of an impact than the roughly half-million, all-US-based kindles.

I’m already working on the script for the next couple of videos.  More thoughts on what it means to have over 1400 new titles published every day.  More thoughts on print on demand.  Something about eBook pricing.

I’ve reduced the price of the Kinde versions of all my eBooks, and then all the Smashwords versions of my eBooks, to under $2 each.  Forget What You Can’t Remember & Lost and Not Found, for only $1.99 each.  Dragons’ Truth & More Lost Memories for only $1.75 each.  And on the Kindle, each of the first three books of the Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction – Recollections of an Alternate Past series for only $1.50 each.

The Kindle versions, of course, can only be read on the Kindle.  Sorry.  The versions at Smashwords can be read on most any device – your PC’s browser or word processor (.txt, .rtf, & .pdf), the Kindle and other Mobipocket-compatible eReaders, Palm devices (.pdb), Sony eReaders (.lrf, etc.), iPhone/iPodTouch (via Stanza)… pretty much anything.  And yes, for reasons I’ve stated clearly before, there are still free versions available for those of you who either 1) can’t afford to pay and/or 2) refuse to pay.

This is an experiment. Tell your friends. Twitter about it. Link to it. Set up an affiliate account at Smashwords & take a cut of every sub-$2 sale.  ($0.15 here, $0.18 there, repeat hundreds or thousands of times & it adds up!)  Copy it.  Compete with it.  Blog about how you think I’m devaluing my content. Blog about how you think I’m building my reader base. Blog about how you think Amazon’s 65% cut is terrible and I’m a fool for even publishing a kindle version.  Or ignore it.  If unit sales increase over the next couple of months, which is what I’m hoping for, great! I’ll keep the prices low.  (Sub-$2 low? Maybe…)  If, by the end of the summer, unit sales haven’t changed (or haven’t changed enough that my significantly lower per-eBook take gets close to my current -relatively low- sales numbers), I’ll put them back up.  Maybe put them up to a $9.99 price point & see if “fitting in” increases sales.  Maybe split the difference.

So give one (or all) of my books a try.  The prices are low enough that it’s worth the risk of not liking my writing – but if you like to think, I think you’ll like my books.

No idea if/when they’ll get this corrected, but I’ll keep an eye on it. Theoretically, this means that if you buy one of my books for your kindle right now, you pay ~$7 and I get ~$0.60. Wheee!

Now, I’m going to try to turn something disappointing into something a little bit better.  I’m going to change the nature of the contest, and the reward.  The idea now is to have an open-ended opportunity for anyone who reads my books and wants to try another.  Anyone, at any time, for any of my books, who can provide something to help me sell my books that’s better than what I’m currently using can win a free paperback of one of my books of their choice.

If that’s a better answer to the question “What is this book about?” – great!  If that’s better marketing copy, a better “elevator pitch,” a blurb from another author that I can put on the cover & the website, or even an entirely new cover image – wonderful!  If that’s an insightful blog post, or a detailed review (not necessarily positive), or a thoughtful analysis of character, theme, plot (or lack thereof) – I look forward to it!  Be creative!  Write a spin-off or sequel, a short story in the same universe, a song or a poem, shoot a video, or create any other derivative work (automatically allowed for non-commercial uses, since all my novels are available under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license) – and you’re a shoe-in!

As before, simply email your entries to me at teel@modernevil.com - perhaps containing your entry, or perhaps linking to your blog / a review / a video – and I’ll consider all entries using my personal judgement as to whether you’re doing a better job marketing my book than I am (which shouldn’t be hard – Marketing is not one of my strengths).  Every time I receive an entry that I believe will help sell books, I’ll send out a signed paperback copy of one of my books (their choice) to the entrant, and I’ll get my marketing efforts updated to incorporate the new materials.  So go, read or listen to one of my books, and think about how you might let someone else know about them.

Void where prohibited. No purchase necessary: You can read the eBook or listen to the podcast for free. Officially open to US Residents only – but only because I don’t want to deal with shipping books internationally. You can still enter from anywhere and, if you’re willing to help me with international shipping, get your free book. Winners will be selected by whatever method I want – probably I’ll just pick the entries I think are best, but I’m not ruling out asking people on Twitter or some such. Contest runs until I don’t feel like it anymore – which probably means it never ends, since when wouldn’t I want to sell more books?  By submitting an entry you are granting me an unlimited, nonexclusive right to use your entry and any derivations thereof for any purpose, including commercial - ie: the point of having better marketing material is to be able to get more people to read and/or buy my book, so I need the right to use the best entries to that end.  If you create a derivative work & would like to license it for commercial use (ex: you want to be able to make money by writing a sequel and selling it yourself), we can talk. I’m open to that, too.

• One (1) First Prize: I’ll name a character after you in my next novel & let you decide whether that character lives or dies, plus send you a signed paperback copy of one of my books (your choice).
• Two (2) Second Prizes: I’ll send you a signed paperback copy of one of my books (your choice).

 
How to enter:
Email your answer to the question “What is Forget What You Can’t Remember about?” to teel@modernevil.com. The deadline for entry is May 1st, 2009, two weeks after the final chapter goes live at Podiobooks.com.
 
Void where prohibited. No purchase necessary: You can read the eBook or listen to the podcast for free. Officially open to US Residents only – but only because I don’t want to deal with shipping books internationally. You can still enter from anywhere & if you win I’ll still name a character after you… and… I don’t know, maybe look up international shipping rates & customs paperwork? Winners will be selected by whatever method I want – probably I’ll just pick the answers I think are best, but I’m not ruling out asking people on Twitter or some such. By submitting an entry you are granting me an unlimited, nonexclusive right to use your entry and any derivations thereof for any purpose, including commercial - ie: the point of having a better answer to this question is to be able to get more people to read and/or buy my book, so I need the right to use the best answers to that end. I will be running a very similar contest for both Lost and Not Found and Dragons’ Truth in May, in case you want to go read and/or listen to those books & prepare your answer in advance.

What’s the video about, you ask?  Umm… it’s about how I, Modern Evil Press, have decided to handle pricing of the for-pay text versions of my books, including the paperback & eBook versions through various sales channels.  There is another video needed, to cover the alternatives being explored by other publishers, especially re: eBook pricing, and I hope to have it up in a week or two.  (A lot going on right now – did I tell you I’ve started screen-printing T-Shirts?)  Here it is, I encourage you to watch in “High Quality” if your bandwidth allows:

In addition, Dragons’ Truth is now available through Smashwords in all the formats they offer (and directly to your iPhone or iPod Touch through the Stanza app).  Going from the kindle version to a Smashwords version I was happy with took about 40 minutes.  It would have been 20 minutes, but I wasn’t happy with how the Chapter headings were coming through, and I had to switch to my PC to get the result I wanted.  Some difference between how TextEdit and WordPad handle .rtf files means that as picky as I am, I have to do half the formatting in one and the rest in the other.  Very smooth.  No upload problems, formatting came out as expected, go have a look for yourself.

Four books down, three to go.  (Not counting the poetry.)  If they all go as easily as Dragons’ Truth, I’ll have corrected kindle versions and Smashwords versions in as little as 15hrs’ work.

It’s 5AM.  I’m going to bed.  Tomorrow: no eBooks work.  Podcast work, instead.  Night.

I had some difficulties with Smashwords over the weekend – I kept trying to upload my book and it kept timing out or getting stuck or something.  I was time consuming to deal with, because it would often freeze up on an actively loading page that said it was working and not to refresh.  So I would wait what I was sure was long enough before interrupting it.  I thought it was possibly on my end, to before I even contacted Smashwords for help (they have a link at the top of every page that allows you to contact them with any questions, comments, or problems) I tried uploading through 4 different browsers on 2 operating systems, tried deleting cookies, checking over my code…

I did, eventually, contact Smashwords to ask for help.  And immediately had a response.  From the founder, Mark Coker (who I had several interesting conversations with at Tools of Change, last month).  We emailed back and forth and he went way above and beyond (especially considering this was taking place on the weekend – the bulk of the back and forth taking place on a Saturday night!) to try to figure out why my book wasn’t going through the meatgrinder.  Eventually, looking at the HTML I was feeding it, he ran it through the W3C validator and discovered that I had some errors.  Okay, that’s my fault.  (Then we each went out for the evening – neither of us is staying in all night on a Saturday night fiddling with eBook conversions!)

Turns out that when I had initially exported from Adobe’s software to HTML, it had both put in the incorrect doctype and had failed to close the head tag.  WTF, Adobe?  I fixed that & still had trouble, but Mark was there trying to help along the way.  Sunday I didn’t work on it, and since he hadn’t heard from me and we hadn’t had it resolved yet, he even followed up with me this morning.  (Right after I’d got everything working, actually.)  The meatgrinder doesn’t seem to like big HTML files (it works best with Word .doc files, I’m told), but Smashwords has amazing/fantastic/excellent/astounding customer service and a real dedication to helping authors/publishers and to creating a tool that works.  They’ve earned a lot of loyalty from me by actually caring about doing a good job and supporting the authors they’re trying to provide a service to.

Now, how did I get it working?  I just used TextEdit (on OS X, where I do most of my work) to save the HTML file as an .rtf, adjusted font sizes a bit (TextEdit seems to make everything a couple of sizes bigger), and Smashwords’ meatgrinder worked great.  So if you’re thinking of uploading your books to Smashwords, first look at their style guide, but then try to upload a .doc or .rtf file.  It should give you awesome output.

Which brings me around to the other subject I wanted to address: Why does the publishing industry use Microsoft Word as the de-facto standard for writing/editing/et cetera?  Word isn’t good at handling book-length manuscripts.  It isn’t good at multi-user editing, tracking changes, and the like.  It isn’t good at layout.  I’m not sure what it’s good at.  I’ve used the Windows versions and the Mac versions, and I even wrote a book in it once. Ugh.  It’s terribly unstable when you have a document of book length. How does the publishing industry function?  As soon as I had Apple’s Pages available, I imported from my Word .doc (cleaned up the formatting) and the stability, speed, ease of editing and layout was instantly orders of magnitude better.  Pages wasn’t really designed for book-length documents, either -its strength is the brochure and the full-color newsletter with lots of pictures and complicated layouts, not the block of text that is a novel- but at least it handles them well.  After the first version, Pages refused to output text in CMYK, which is a bizarre sort of a problem that means it isn’t of much use if you’re outputting for a professional printer, but for the couple of books I wrote in it, it was oh-so-easy.  And stable.  Never crashed, never froze, didn’t get slower the more I wrote.  Nice.

Of course, since I do have to do professional layouts and put out files my printer can use, I started using InDesign for layout… and then, for my last book, I just wrote the first draft directly into an InDesign template.  I was able to make layout decisions as I was writing the book, so that – when the first draft was done, so was 90% of the layout work.  Editing in InDesign (for the one person that I am) is simple enough -easier than Word, though not as smooth (yet) as Pages- and I can immediately see how my changes will look when printed.  I don’t know for sure what layout software is ‘industry standard’ -though anecdotally I have an impression that InDesign is fairly widespread in use- but I’m sure it isn’t MS Word.  So why do they do everything else in Word?  Why are all the tools designed assuming that I’m going to work in Word, Smashwords & kindle included?  Word is terrible at this sort of work.

For writing, I’d rather use something like Scrivener or even just WriteRoom.  For layout, obviously I’d use a professional layout software (which Pages does well enough – too bad about the CMYK).  Why Word?

I think it’s the ongoing acceptance of standards like the industry-wide use of MS Word that are indicative of why old-school, big publishers are going out of business.  They aren’t thinking clearly about what would be the best way to do what they’re doing, they just keep doing it the same way they’ve been doing it.  If you aren’t looking forward, if you aren’t concerned with whether you’re using the best tools for the job, you’re going to face stiff competition from those of us who are.

For now, I can give Smashwords the .rtf files it likes.  No problem.  But XML is the future (and, yes, the publishing industry is trying to figure out how to integrate XML into its MS Word-based workflows.  Seriously.), the open epub standard is the future, and I talked to Mark about it at ToC and hopefully, eventually, the meatgrinder will be able to take the soon-to-be-worldwide-standard epub format and grind it out into all the old, dying, proprietary formats.  And hopefully someone will create an easy to use tool for originating documents in XML – that doesn’t involve plugging something into MS Word.

The PDFs are easy.  I already have to do the work in InDesign to create the paperback, and Adobe software loves to output nice PDFs.  Adobe recently announced that they’re updating their software soon to create epub files easily, which would be nice, but Smashwords seems to do a better job, right now.  Note to people not in publishing: epub is the future of eBooks.

Making a well-formatted document for the kindle is … well, I’m getting better at it. Luckily I’m not doing anything fancy with my books.  No charts, no pictures, no tables, no complex layouts… well, not in the books I’ve been putting in, so far.  My poetry can wait.  Because it’s going to be a headache, and probably won’t ever sell in volume sufficient to cover the value of the time I’ll have to spend to get it looking right on the kindle (and will never look good in most other eBook formats).  I’m just putting novels in. Still, I have to go through each book line by line manually marking it up.  Then, because the kindle has a limited range of fonts and doesn’t support extended characters, I have to go through basically character by character and -in some cases- not only change to characters without diacritical marks where I’d used them in the original text, but also rewrite entire sections where the use of specialized fonts and unsupported characters are actually integral to the text.

bleh.

Last year, before Smashwords, I would have had a similarly frustrating process to go through six more times, once for each of the other formats’ idiosyncratic proprietary requirements.  Now, by simply doing a quick find-and-replace of Amazon’s proprietary page break tags with a few line break tags, I can upload the well-formatted HTML file I created for the kindle version to Smashwords and -pretty much- get a good output within a few minutes.  It’s still lacking the extended characters and custom fonts of the original/paperback version, but most of the eBook formats don’t support that stuff, either.

I’m still developing a “workflow” for eBooks, probably go through and do the main markup in one pass, then save it out as two files & add the kindle markup to one (& remove special characters) and the Smashwords markup to the other.  I’m not really much for “workflows” but its something I’ve been thinking a bit about, lately.  At Tools of Change 2009, there were multiple, competing products in the exhibition hall & various presentations trying to help publishers manage their “workflows.”  At the upcoming ABPA conference (which I don’t plan on attending), one of the six sessions (the rest of which are trying to address the future of publishing via subjects like: alternative and online sales channels, online and social marketing, et cetera) is about creating and managing production workflows.  Apparently this is a problem area for publishers.  Apparently, solving the “workflow” problem is a very cutting edge, future-of-publishing sort of issue.

So I’m thinking about it.  Workflow.  Huh.  I’ve got some notes.  Maybe if I “plan” a “workflow” for my next book, it’ll go more smoothly?

What am I talking about?  The main hiccups in my last two books’ production were 1) Lightning Source not meeting their contractually stated production schedules and 2) volunteer, unpaid proofreaders taking unpredictable periods of time to get back to me.  One of these things I can’t effect, and the other I can only fix by spending money I can’t afford to spend.  Maybe I should add “wait an indefinite period for proofreaders” to my workflow.  Or maybe I’ll research reasonable time periods professional, freelance proofreaders take and how much they charge and negotiate expectations and/or my budget to find a reasonable solution.  Otherwise, my production of books works pretty smoothly.

I seem to have gone off topic.  Sorry, it’s late.  Maybe I’ll go to bed.  Ooh, but first I should link to my latest eBooks.  The eBook of Forget What You Can’t Remember is available in the Kindle Store for less than $8.99, at Smashwords for $3.99, and for those of you who can’t afford that price or don’t have a credit card, as a free eBook in a whole mess of formats.  The eBook of More Lost Memories, a companion collection of short stories, is available in the Kindle Store for less than $8.35, at Smashwords for $3.99, and if you can’t afford that price or don’t have a credit card you can email me for a free copy.  Enjoy:

• Forget What You Can’t Remember eBook
• More Lost Memories eBook

I’ll be re-working all the eBooks I did last year soon, too, to get them on Smashwords.  I’m excited about Smashwords largely because of their partnership with Lexcycle – which is to say, because it makes my eBooks available for sale to iPhone users, in an iPhone-compatible format, and through an increasingly easy-to-use iPhone app-based storefront.  If you have an iPhone, download Stanza and take a look for yourself!

Which is to say that my novels are now available as screen readable PDFs, printable PDFs (galley-like layout), basic HTML, RTF, Mobi, .epub*, and plaintext files. They are also available for purchase on the Amazon Kindle. All my print books (including poetry) will (soon?) be fully searchable on Google Book Search & purchasable via same as E-Books. After I get them set up via Lightning Source, they will also be available for purchase through all major online E-Book retailers, but that could be a couple of weeks.  Oh, and I also created preview PDFs of my poetry books – I don’t want to give those away for free in their entirety, and think their format doesn’t work as well as E-Books.

Starting tomorrow, I’ll be recording audiobooks almost full time for a while, and accompanying videos soon thereafter. For now: sleep.

*I’m not sure that my .epub files are formatted correctly – I couldn’t get several of them to open with Adobe Digital Editions, but they did open in other readers. I haven’t tested them on my PC yet, only my Mac.  Anyone use the .epub format who might be willing to assist with getting these to work better / look better?  Thanks

So to get off to a good start, I started with a painting. I’ve been meaning to document my “process” better, so I also took a quick shot of the first coat of paint with my iPhone and threw it up on flickr (thumbnail at right). It’s a sort of a landscape right now. The image I’m planning for this background, which I will now describe as a “…monster with a robot head…” is not what it sounds like. Maybe I’ll post some more images tomorrow, when I’m working (digitally, of course) on adapting the sketch for the canvas. I sortof jumped the gun on the composition of the background without doing proper previsualization, but it’s no problem to work the elements together on the computer screen before I apply any more paint.

Ooh, thinking of it, I actually took a photo of another painting first, while the sun was still quite low. It’s one of four paintings I finished last year that I’ve only just put on wretched creature: ‘what… and why?’ was today’s photo, and I’ve been working on getting ‘it’s the internet…’, ‘without you’, and a (currently) untitled one with a face … Okay, admittedly, when I finished it I had a name for it, and I didn’t write it down or put it on the site right away, so … I can’t remember it right now. I’ll update it later, in the event I can recall the full name.

Then I spent a couple of hours reading my feeds, focusing on publishing feeds, and following a couple dozen links to more publishing and lit blogs, going through them to find ones I think will be beneficial and subscribing to them and passing on the rest. Ah, blogs. I’ve got to start reading them, getting in tune with whatever it is “blogging” has turned into in the last few years, and becoming an active part of “the conversation” – because, as the people who appear to be in the know will tell you, that’s a key part of successful online sales. The blogosphere. Yup.

Then I worked on outlining the specifications and basic layout I want to try and either implement (by spending hundreds of hours learning modern web programming and building it) or find someone else to implement (see the paragraph above, re: becoming part of “the conversation” – I just have to get these ideas into the heads of the genius programmers already doing stuff, and they’ll do it, right?) in the coming months for … what I’m currently referring to as “Web 2.5″ in my notes and design documents. I want to put my novels online with it, and blog in it, and I’d like to see it spread a bit through the internet. More on that later.

After a couple of pages of that, I grabbed some drawing paper and sketched out a design for a flyer to advertise my books. And then spent the rest of the day in InDesign and Photoshop working on the flyer. Actually, it came out pretty good. I’ll get some copies made soon and get them posted up places. Your suggestions for places are welcome. I’m thinking, like, colleges, libraries, and then the book stores I’ll be schlepping my books around to to try to get them on shelves in, anyway. Ooh, I know. Here, (right-click, choose Save As…) a PDF of the flyer for you to print and post if you want to help. Its primary focus is on my free e-books, and the wonders of the Creative Commons license.

Anyway, then Mandy came home, and it only took another 30 or 45 minutes to get the flyer done after that, and then … we went for a walk, had dinner, and I settled in to write this post while we watched a movie (Black Irish)… and actually, Mandy’s just headed to the bedroom, so I guess it’s bed time again.

Hopefully we’ll have another good day tomorrow. Plenty to do. Gotta stay home for now – I’ve ordered a big order of physical books, and the first box arrived today (all poetry) and three more are coming tomorrow – but that alone gives me plenty to do. Finally going to set up my own online sales. Planning on using Google Checkout, so I’ve gotta sign up for that, read all the documentation, and re-work my website with a bunch of links so people can order books directly from me and can pay for the PDFs if they want to. (ie: If they want to support the artist for a little less than the cost of the book itself.) I gotta figure out shipping costs, I guess. Anyway, that’s it for now. Good night.