I’m giving away 5 copies of my new novel, Forget What You Can’t Remember, through Goodreads‘ First Reads program. “How can I be the lucky recipient of one of these free books,” you ask? It’s easy:
 
1) Sign up for a Goodreads account.
 
1b) Actually use your account; put in books you’ve read, are currently reading, want to read, write reviews, and otherwise participate!
 
2) Go here and click ‘Enter to win’.
 
No, really, it’s that easy to enter. Then, at the end of the month (ie: January 31st, 2009) Goodreads will work its mojo and semi-randomly select 5 people to receive free books. ((They have an algorithm and everything: “Goodreads will collect interest in the book, and select winners at our discretion. Our algorithm uses member data to match interested members with each book.”)) Then I’ll ship out the books personally to the winners, and they’ll bask in the wordy-goodness that is the new book.
 
For those of you who either a) don’t win, or b) don’t like paper books, but still don’t feel like paying: Please feel free to enjoy the free serialized audio version of the novel, either by signing up for the Modern Evil Podcast or by going to Podiobooks.com and signing up for either the default feed (which gives you episodes as I post them) or a custom feed (and get episodes on your own schedule). The free eBook version should be available in February, 2009, as well. Enjoy!

You’ve been reading a lot about it here because it’s been dominating my time and my thoughts a lot lately. In case you somehow aren’t aware, I’ve been podcasting my fiction and poetry via the Modern Evil Podcast, and simultaneously releasing my podcast novels over at Podiobooks.com in sync with my personal feed. My feed (the Modern Evil Podcast) has also included (in addition to the weekly, half-hour episodes roughly identical to the Podiobooks release) poetry and short fiction in mid-week episodes.

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What this means, for my time, is that I have effectively been running three weekly podcasts: The podiobooks feed, with just the novel, the Modern Evil Podcast Friday episodes, with the novel and alternate introduction and closing, and the Modern Evil Podcast mid-week episodes, with my poetry and short fiction. ~2.2x the recording and editing, 3x the mixing, converting, and uploading vs. doing one weekly podcast. It’s been a lot of work, and time and thought consuming.
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So, along with the upcoming release of my new book, Forget What You Can’t Remember (now targeting a January release), I’m going to be starting podcasting it. In fact, I’m planning to overlap the two novels’ releases, so that people who listen to the final episode of Lost and Not Found on Podiobooks can immediately go subscribe to Forget What You Can’t Remember and so that people who subscribe to the Modern Evil Podcast will -instead of going for a while without episodes- get an extra episode or two during the overlap. Now, here’s the lazy part:

I’m going to continue releasing on the MEPodcast at the same time as Podiobooks, but Forget What You Can’t Remember is already broken into chapters of roughly even length, each of which should be around 15 minutes long. I’m going to release one chapter at a time, twice a week, into each feed. No poetry or short stories in the MEPodcast during the run, just chapter after chapter of the novel. Also: because of the structure of Forget What You Can’t Remember, the majority of chapters have no “breaks” in them, and thus will have a somewhat reduced editing time and effort - a savings then multiplied by the double feeds.

The Forget What You Can’t Remember podcast should wrap up around mid-April, 2009, according to this release schedule. Hopefully by then I’ll have another book or two written.

The local Art Walk at Intatto Coffee was yesterday.  Length-wise it was somewhere in between a weekend festival (two or three full days) and the First Fridays Art Walk (four hours), with setup starting at 9:30AM (7AM at home, for me) and breakdown around 6PM.  Daytime show in a shopping center meant plenty of casual walk-up traffic over the course of the day.  Nothing like the downtown art walk, which typically has tens of thousands of disinterested people walking by in a rush every hour, but since people weren’t trying to ’see everything’ and fight the crowds at the same time, it was easier to take a few minutes and talk to people about my books and my art.  Usually people at First Fridays want me to be able to explain 8 books and 10 years’ worth of art in 30 seconds, and -oh, yeah- they didn’t bring any cash with them.  This environment was somewhat more casual; people were willing to take more time and discuss the works.

Over the course of the day I sold (and signed) several books (good thing I brought them along, instead of just the art, eh?), and talked to a lot of people about the paintings I brought, and ran into a couple of old friends.  Then, when I thought for sure I’d make more money from books than art at an Art Walk (which is about the opposite of my typical average sales numbers), in the last hour of the day, I sold one of my latest paintings, ‘fibonacci series #1′.  Yay!

Between these actual sales and the fact that I didn’t have to pay for the privilege of setting up (well, aside from all the $$ we spent eating and drinking at Intatto over the course of the day…), it was infinitely better than First Fridays.  No, seriously, I’ve never sold more than a single paperback (and usually less) at the First Fridays Art Walk.  Maybe in the fall, but until and unless and in a few weeks I’ll be at Intatto again.  I’ll let you know when I know more.

Haven’t decided whether I’ll be verbose or brief on this subject, here, today.  Have to look back and see, I guess.

Conversation threads this morning on Twitter (which I can’t retrieve, on account of Twitter is “stressing out” - and I don’t feel like trying to track everything down with tweetscan/summize), included one creator saying they were thinking of planning on releasing a project they’re working on … in September or October.  To which my mind replied: “I don’t understand.  If you have a releasable product, why not put it out there as soon as it’s ready? For a finished product, why wait?”

Now, I can see how with certain products - say, a dancing Santa Claus doll or a new line of Valentine’s Day candies - releasing at a particular time of year might be appropriate.  And I can see how products which will only be relevant for a limited time should be released in a specific time period - though that’s now, not later - to avoid irrelevance.

I can even see where something like a blockbuster movie, trying to maximize attention and profits would want to schedule its release to not be the same weekend as a directly competing release, which would not only compete for viewers dollars but for the actual, finite number of screens, but — and this is a big but — I can’t see why a studio would hold off on releasing a movie for months or, as actually happens more often than you’d think, years after it was ready to be shown.  The finite number of screens is (I believe) now well over 30,000 in the US alone, and even the widest of releases hasn’t topped 1/3 of those - there’s a LOT of screens, if you have a movie ready to go, put it out there!   If you don’t think it’ll make “enough” money in theatres, throw it to DVD - as long as you keep it in print, it’ll be available to whoever wants it.  As long as it’s sitting “in the can”, unreleased, it’s not making anyone any money, it’s not entertaining anyone, it’s not communicating anything, it’s wasted.

Which, I think, is part of my problem with the whole thing:  Someone, possibly a lot of someones, put their hard work and creative energy and ideas into creating something, and that work, that creation, is being held back, hidden, kept from its audience.

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I have been “self employed” for a couple of months now, and have been “networking” with and connecting to more and more independent people who are doing the same sorts of things; authors, authors doing their own audiobooks, bloggers, artists, illustrators, graphic designers, photographers… et cetera.  As I have spoken to them, I have noticed that there seems to be a difference between their ways of thinking and mine, about success and about what they are trying to accomplish.  Even the independent creators who -at first- seem to be the most successful and accomplished and appear to have a lot of fans and plenty of “true fans”… and presumedly sales to go along with them …seem actually to want more traditional forms of success.  Authors are trying for, hoping for, dreaming of getting a deal with a “real” publisher.  Podcasters seem to want to have radio or TV shows.  Bloggers want to get hired by a company and get a salary for blogging.  I haven’t managed to network with enough artists to figure out what they want, but it’s not hard to guess that it’s in the same neighborhood.  These creatives, these independent creatives, the ones using “social media” and “web 2.0″ and advanced technologies connected via the internet, print on demand, RSS distribution, CC licenses, crowdsourcing, et cetera…  Creatives who own their IP and connect directly with their fan base in a meaningful way - which I know for a fact cuts out a long line of middle men and increases the creator’s share of every sale substantially - seem to want to “sell out” as it were, or “hit the big time” as has been defined for the last 50+ years.

But that’s not what I want.  I’m not doing what I’m doing in an attempt to get a job doing something else.  I’m not doing what I’m doing because I want to get noticed by a big publisher, an internet startup, or some faceless corporate entity.  I’m doing what I’m doing because this is what I want to be doing.

I want to create art.  I want to write stories.  I want to record my stories, in my own voice.  I want to explore new distribution techniques (podcasting audiobooks, publishing books with some features of a wiki, creating an internet video channel of a poet reading their own poetry, et cetera), new ways of sharing, using and re-using ideas (all my novels and audiobooks are available under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license),  and new ways of connecting with an audience of interested people and of fans (twitter, blogging, facebook/mySpace, and platforms yet to come).  I want people to be able to enjoy what I create.

I hate money, conceptually.  It would be my preference to not have to deal with the foul stuff at all.  I have no desire to accumulate wealth.  Yet I must eat, and the grocery store doesn’t seem to accept stories and art in trade for food.  So:  I want to publish my books myself, not just because it gives me complete control and complete freedom with the finished product, but because as the publisher and the major retailer (via modernevil.com), I get those portions of the revenue (70%+ vs. 8%-12%).  I want to show my art on my own terms, sell directly through my website to the people who want it, talk to the people who are interested in it directly, and -yes- take the full retail price for myself, not just out of greed, but so that -as I’m starting out and building a name- I can set my retail prices lower (and hopefully make more sales), and still make a reasonable amount of money.  –  If I get a deal with a publisher, I still have to do most of the marketing (a fact that most authors learn too late; that except for the top few books, most publishers do little to market the books they print) for the book I wrote myself, but I only get a small percentage of the retail price of each copy sold (the retailer takes half or more, the distributor takes some, the publisher takes a chunk, and the author gets the leftovers).  If I get my art shown in a gallery in Phoenix, and hand-deliver it, the gallery takes half and I get the other half, but if I get shown in galleries out of state or -ohmygosh- in a big gallery in New York or internationally, then the gallery takes their half AND I get to pay (at least part of) shipping costs for getting everything there and -for everything that doesn’t sell- back again.

Advanced technologies, internet connections, and other modern wonders make these things possible.  One person, from anywhere, can run a business doing most anything.  They can have books professionally printed and distributed, and can do so with less overall environmental impact and for lower upfront costs than “big” publishers by using the bizarrely looked down upon technology of print on demand instead of giant offset print runs coupled with later pulping of unsold copies.  They can connect with more people, in more meaningful ways, anywhere in the world - far more than a traditional author signing tour or art festival circuit allows - and they can do it every day, all year, even while doing those more traditional marketing things.  This is the future, people.  Creators whose hard work pays them directly, and gets the IP into the hands of the fans directly, using technology.  It’s either this or a total collapse of civilization and a return to pre-oil lifestyles, and then the sell-outs lose, too.

Why does it seem like I’m the only one who not only sees that this is the future, but actually wants to make it a reality now?  I’m not doing what I’m doing because I want to be doing something else - this is what I want to do, and it’s possible now, and I’m doing it!  I may not be the best at marketing, but at least I’m getting every dollar of pitiful sales that I earn instead of a few cents of each dollar my weak marketing can pull in.  At least I’m trying to be both feet in the future instead of one foot in the future and both eyes on the model of success that is rapidly becoming past.  I’m going to get to work on another painting (write-up soon; it’s nearly complete).  That’s enough blogging for now, I think.