It’s difficult.  Partially because I do need the money, so the commercial aspect, the idea that I’m making art I’m going to try to sell in order to buy groceries, is constantly in mind.  When I get in the neighborhood of thoughts like ‘what can I paint that will sell?’ and ‘what sort of art do people want?’ I tend to get stuck.  Like writer’s block, but for artists.  Well, like writer’s block for writers whose block stems from not wanting to “sell out,” anyway.

I have no interest in freelancing, or in getting a job as an illustrator, designer, journalist, pro-blogger, or any other such thing.  I don’t want to write the same book over and over again (ie: formulaic fiction, or process-wise, most non-fiction).  I don’t want to paint/create the same image over and over again.  I know, yes, verily I know, that these are core ways writers and artists are able to “establish” themselves and their “style” and to build a career.  To build a base of buyers who want to read another one like the last one you wrote, who are comfortable with your art because although each swirly tree is different, they can at least count on you to still be painting swirly trees the next time they need something for their walls.  And buyers would be nice.  Repeat buyers would be even better (and I have a few), but I nearly never want to be painting the same thing I’ve painted before.

((Technically, my not-very-publicly stated policy on the subject of re-creating an original work is that the base price multiplier for each successive recreation doubles.  I have a formula (an occasionally altered one, but fairly consistent for the last few years) which accounts for a work’s size and quality to determine price.  It is intentionally tweaked to give quirky prices.  I like them.  But imagine for recreations that formula is multiplied by 2ⁿ (where n is the number of times I’ve been asked to reproduce the image).  If created in quick succession, at the same size and quality, prices would quickly rise, say from $60 for the original to $120 for the second, $240 for the 3rd, $480 for the 4th, $960 for the 5th, $1920 for the 6th, $3840 for the 7th, and very quickly someone asking for the 8th copy is paying 128 times the cost of just buying something different instead.  Luckily, people don’t often ask me to paint something I’ve done before – and when they do, I simply tell them how much it would cost & see if they want it that much.))

But it is hard even to paint something new, if all I can think about is wanting to avoid painting something that won’t sell, because the bills just keep coming, even when I have a couple of dry sales months.  I’ve even been stalling a little, lately, in working on my next novel, which is intentionally an experiment in writing a formulaic (or at least recognizable) zombie novel – because although I’ve come up with a story I want to tell (and in my research of what makes a formulaic zombie novel fit, I’ve discovered that my novel won’t be as formulaic as I’d hoped… which is part of the problem), both writing a novel in reaction to people’s negative reaction to my last one (which is what motivated this experiment in the first place) and knowing before I start that my experiment will be a failure (ie: my novel will fail to be a cookie-cutter zombie novel, or to follow the ‘rules’ of commercial fiction) give me pause in pursuing it.  Even though it’s a story I want to tell, a book I want to write.

I am having trouble both because I don’t want to write commercial fiction and because I fear my attempt to do so will be ridiculously far from that blasted mark.  How can I be properly creative with this dark and complicated cloud of commerce always hovering over everything I do?

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.

Some writers include everything – from my thousand-word blog posts down to my 140-character (or less) Tweets, and grocery lists besides, but that always seemed disingenuous to me.  Until I take the time to put together a book or two from my blog posts (that pot is still boiling away at the back of my mind, believe me), writing blog posts isn’t the sort of writing that I consider Writing.  Using Twitter more mostly improves my ability to use Twitter more.  Most of the time the write-every-day writers seem to be doing so in the hopes that it is like playing an instrument & they just need daily practice to get better and better.  Which is an interesting idea.  Have fun with that.

I just choose to think every day, instead.  A lot of the day, every day.  Thinking.

One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is my audiobooks.  The audio version of Forget What You Can’t Remember was completed this week, both on my feed and on Podiobooks.com.  I began podcasting the audio version of UTFBF-RoaAP, Book One on my own feed yesterday (it goes live at Podiobooks.com April 27th).  Book One will be 10 episodes, after that I’ll start Book Two, then probably Book Three – each of them about 10 episodes, since the books are all about the same length…  And then, in about 30 weeks, I’ll be out of novels to podcast.  According to the Google Calendar, where I just mapped out those 30 episodes to Fridays, I’ll run out in mid-November.

So one of the things I’ve been thinking about is that, between now and then, I’d better write something new.  Maybe the Self-Publishing book I’ve been thinking about writing will be podcast-able, but in addition to that I’d better write some new fiction.  There’s a good chance that, reading UTFBF over and over again for the next six months will get me to a place where I can write Book Four (and maybe continue from there with the series).  And I realize that since I can certainly write a book in a month (and have produced various first drafts in: 3 weeks, 2 weeks, and even 3 days, once  upon a time) that six months is plenty of time, but … I also know that for me, a big part of writing is thinking and I’d better get to thinking.  Thinking I’m going to write more books.

One of the other things I’ve been thinking, along these lines, is maybe I’ll not do that cards/book thing I was thinking about.  I dunno.  Thinking about the packaging/marketing/sales side of it has been making me queasy.  Writing the book is one thing, painting/creating the cards is another, each difficult in its own way, but then … I can’t just set it up with Lightning Source and know that anyone can walk into a book store and order it, or get it on Amazon/etc..  I can’t have it set up for Wholesale/POD at all, really, since I need the cards to be packaged with the book – I’ll have to order a huge amount of books, order the same number of decks of cards, package them together all by hand, and then … frankly, sell them by hand.  Which … I, ugh… I mean, in person sales at Art Walks and Art Fairs and even via social media is all fine, but … going to stores and trying to get them to carry my product, dealing with consignment and/or other even-more-bizarre methods everyone apparently uses for accounting for business transactions… the thought of it makes me sick.  I really like the idea of the product, but dealing with getting it to market makes me feel like shit.

Which has a lot to do with why I haven’t moved forward with the research and/or the art for that project.  At all.  bleh.  (Overwhelming depression is also a factor, but one that I’m at least able to grind some productivity from.)

I’ve got to go get ready for an Art Fair today.  Maybe I’ll get a chance to think more, in between customers.

• 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.

Yesterday I only did three or four hours of audio work, and even though I know I worked on other things, it feels like I didn’t get anything done, since it’s harder to tally the hours and to quantify what’s work and what isn’t. Does Twitter count? Reading publishing & other blogs? Blogging? It’s all part of connecting with people, with building an audience and building myself as a “brand” and educating myself about what’s going on, what’s working, and driving ideas forward. So in a way, yes. Then there’s the oft-repeated idea that everything an author does and experiences is a sort of reasearch for future books; this is somewhat true, but feels like a sort of excuse.

In addition to feeling that perhaps I’m not being productive enough, I also think a lot about my not being profitable enough. Even with the reduced up-front costs of doing business the way I am, not a single one of my books has even reached break-even, yet. The art, comparably, has been doing great – not bringing in enough to live on, but if not for the cost of going to Tools of Change in New York (ie: if not for a big, extra publishing expense), I’d already be profitable this year on art sales alone, with only bluer skies on the horizon. The margins on the art, even with prices basically cut in half & then frozen since 2004, are great – not just in money, but in time. It takes me hundreds of hours to produce a book, and somehow it’s harder to sell a copy of the book for $14 (or less) than it is to sell a painting (that took me less than 10 hours to create) for $150.  Lately I’ve been creating a lot of “Mini Paintings”: 8×10″ for $20, 5×7″ for $15, and 4×4″ for $10, right now.  Most of them are done in under 1 hour of work (though admittedly, some have taken up to 3), and they earn me as much as or more than a book does, usually without having to try to sell them at all.

Obviously, the art sales can only scale to the limits of my creativity & time to produce original works – I’m not sure what the upper limit is, but perhaps dozens a month. Certainly not hundreds.  Whereas the book sales can scale without proportional extra work on my part – Lightning Source prints however many copies people order, whether it’s dozens a month or thousands.  If/when I “hit it big” the books will quickly win in this regard.  Not to mention I can sell a book more than once, and without doing prints (something I am currently opposed to), I can only sell an original work of art once.  So it takes orders of magnitude more work to produce a book, but I can keep selling it over and over again forever, instead of just once.

If only my sales numbers were orders of magnitude better.  Did I mention not a single one of my books has yet earned back the costs associated with its production, yet?  That’s with $0 value associated with my time, no less.  Which is to say: if I were more productive (of books), I’d perhaps only be digging myself deeper and deeper into a hole.  Being more productive of art is good, but when I really need to figure out is how to be more productive of profitability.  I need to produce more book sales.  That’s a hard one.  The podcasting thing is meant to be helping with that – it certainly puts my writing in front of a lot more minds than everything else I’ve been doing, even if it is for free, right now.  Something approaching five hundred times as many people have downloaded Dragons’ Truth from Podiobooks.com than have purchased a copy of the paperback (not counting sales to family) – that’s a huge multiplier.  Unfortunately, for whatever reason, it hasn’t translated directly into interest in my other podiobooks or in sales of my paperbacks or eBooks.  Gotta keep it up, though.  Gotta keep working on it.  Gotta get back to work, right now – I’m supposed to be editing together next week’s episodes of Forget What You Can’t Remember, right now.  Gotta go.

I’ve been vaguely considering designing a custom deck of cards, akin to tarot cards, for many years.  I’ve never really wanted to simply design a tarot deck, as so many others have done before me, simply putting my own artwork on the traditional 72 cards.  This has something to do with my understanding about about divination works, and what part cards tend to play in it (not to mention the other roles such cards tend to end up playing on the side).  I’ve wanted to not just create artwork for an existing system of divination, but to create a new system from scratch.  A wholly original deck.

Of course, I’m aware that Leviticus 19:26 makes it clear that God would prefer if I didn’t practice divination at all.  The context that Isaiah 2:6 gives divination is as a “superstition from the East.”  I’d effectively given up the practice a few years ago, after a brief, intense period of giving in to the temptation, but it’s been on my mind again, lately.  Not in the context of wanting to do readings or divine knowledge/wisdom/future, but in wanting to design the cards, and to publish a book explaining them.  So I started designing.  I want through a couple of interesting ideas, did dozens of sketches, and decided to go a different direction.

I’ve been working on steering my creativity in a direction toward more Christian writing.  Not entirely effectively, yet, but I’ve been trying to at the very least avoid going further in the direction of the sex, violence, and apparent lack of morality that the Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction was pointing me in (though that changes character in the final books).  I have a partially completed book that literally explores the concept of the unforgivable sin mentioned by Jesus – with violence, sex, action, and all sorts of other apparent sins (and exploration of the meaning of ‘sin’) along the way.  I would like to write several explorations of the complex, interesting, and challenging things I have found in scripture and in my own Christian walk.  But first, I think I’ll start with something unconventional:

I’m designing a deck of Christian cards, and writing a book to explain them.  As I conceive it now, I expect the book to have three pain parts: One part, the expected breakdown, card by card, of how to read the cards for divination – what this one means, what it means ‘reversed’, how to lay the cards out and to interpret them.  One part, a theological and biblical exploration of divination, ‘Eastern superstition’, and related new age beliefs as a temptation for modern Christians, especially as for new Christians who prior to being born again practiced such things.  One part, an alternative breakdown, card by card, that uses the deck of cards as a sort of flash cards for learning about Jesus, Christianity, and the early church.

Part of the idea (which will certainly be included in the book) is that most things of this world are neither inherently good or evil, but it is our individual choices, day by day and moment by moment, that we do right or wrong.  That we imbue the things of this world with the good or the evil that we do with them.  A deck of cards -the ones I am designing, or any deck of tarot cards- is not evil.  It is not a tool of the devil, in and of itself.  It can be used to do evil, but the cards themselves are not evil.  If I do a good job designing them, if I write a clear and well-organized book, both of which I believe can only happen through him who gives me strength, then my cards will be able to do good by those who choose to use them for good, and to likewise allow those who choose to do so to use them for divination.  A tool.  A choice.

The production, distribution, and sale of the book is easy for me, right now.  I’ve got 10 books in print already, and adding one only takes a couple of weeks, once it’s written.  The production, distribution, and sale of the cards -especially as part of a bundled item with the book- looks challenging.  There are several options for getting the cards printed.  I could pay for a huge offset run, warehouse them somehow…  There are a couple of companies that will do short-run decks of cards (hundreds instead of thousands or tens of thousands of decks).  I found one place that will do “print on demand” of custom cards, but not like POD book printers do -they aren’t doing wholesaling, retailing, distribution, and won’t do one-offs-  but they’ll print as few as 10 decks at a time, and they’ll print (but not assemble) deck boxes, too.  And I found a place that sells microperforated playing card paper, so I can print a test deck or two on my own printer.  So I’ll probably go with that last one at first, get the cards how I want them.  Then go to the POD printer and get a small order (they have a price break at 50 decks) & have a matching print run at Lightning Source (who also has a price break at 50 copies of a book).  Then try to get them carried by Christian and new age stores, I guess.  

I’m considering some options like:  Putting the book out with a high cover price & one page being a coupon you mail in for a free deck of cards.  Doing all the distribution myself, so I can bundle them manually, and don’t have to worry about people who buy the book through other channels & don’t get the cards.  Writing the book in such a way that it stands alone, without the cards, but tells you how you can order the cards, and using the same distribution setup I have for my other books.  And… uhh… do you have any other ideas?  I’ll be thinking about it for a while.

The current plan is to do the research (ie: read the bible, concordances, and other bible resources) so I can write 2-4 pages (minimum) for each of the cards (at least 1 page for each of the two parts that break down each card), and to paint an individual painting for each card’s art.  I’m hoping to do each painting 8×10″ or less, so I can do a high resolution scan with equipment I already own, do additional work in Photoshop as necessary, but then to have an original painting for sale that corresponds to every card.  To make packaging & distribution easier (and because it fell together in the designing of the deck), I’m doing a 52-card deck, currently as follows:

• 5 ‘Major’ cards: God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, Death, & Devil
• 14 Apostles cards: 1 per apostle, including both Judas & Matthias and Paul
• 11 Miracles cards, each featuring one of Jesus’ miracles
• 11 Ministry cards, each featuring one group of people to whom Jesus ministered
• 11 Message cards, each featuring one basic, foundational, repeated part of Jesus’ message

I think the hard cards will be the Apostle cards.  I need to do the research, but I’m pretty sure there are a few of the apostles there isn’t two pages’ worth of information about in the bible.  Hopefully I’m mistaken.  Either way, I’ll have to figure out how to represent each of them visually – I plan to research how they’ve each been traditionally and historically depicted in the last two millennia.  Still, they effectively represent 14 paintings of “a man,” which, if you’ve seen my art, you know hasn’t exactly been something I’ve been perfecting.  So probably 14 abstracted expressions of what each man represented or something they did or … inspired by whatever was used to depict them historically.  Your suggestions are, again, welcome.

I have a list, a flexible, mutable list, of what I expect the 52 cards to be.  I’m thinking of creating 52 blog posts -perhaps in a separate instance of WP, or perhaps merely in their own category- one for each card, where I can write out my explorations of the concepts.  I’ll have to think about that, too.  What do you think would work best?  Are you interested?  What would hold your interest?  What would annoy you about blogging it?  

Up late again.  Didn’t do any audio work today (now I’m not actually “ahead” of the podcast, anymore – a lot of recording done, but no finished episodes ready to go from here on out), but absolutely have to do some tomorrow.  Who wants to try to get me up in the morning?  Say, around 8?  sigh.

Tim O’Reilly makes the argument for Open Publishing @ TOC 2009 from Open Publishing Lab @ RIT on Vimeo.

One of the pitfalls of doing what you love full time is, apparently, not being able to get yourself to stop doing it. This entire week, while difficult and frustrating at times and almost always leaving me feeling unsure as to whether the product I’m producing will be marketable, has been enjoyable. I’ve been having a good time. A few hours ago, after I’d added the two new books (Forget What You Can’t Remember and More Lost Memories) to modernevil.com, after tweaking things around so everything displayed okay across 6 different browsers, when I spent over an hour simply rearranging the book cover thumbnails on the main page, I was having a good time. It was fun to play around with laying them out, spacing them out, and otherwise shifting the tiny images around in dozens of different configurations.

So, that’s good.

But then again, there are factors like: It’s already December 21st, I haven’t submitted either book to my printer yet -actually, I’m still waiting to hear back from a couple of people who said they’d copyedit for me, though probably not for much longer- and I haven’t finished composing the music for the podcast version of the novel and with Christmas and New Year’s Day I can’t expect particularly rapid turn-arounds on the book production and the podcast launches January 1st on the Modern Evil Podcast (and January 2nd on Podiobooks.com) and it sure would be nice to have the physical book available when the podcast goes live, but I don’t see things coming together that quickly, at this point. Wait, did that sentence make any sense?

I wanted to have the books to LSI (who prints & distributes them) ASAP, preferably in time to have them on hand before the podcast goes live (and before the Art Walk, Jan. 2nd). I wanted to have them done and ready to go a week ago. Monday of this week at the latest. But I have to do everything by myself. I’m a one-man operation. I write the books. I edit the books. I copy-edit the books. I do the layout. I design the covers. I take the photographs (or, in the case of More Lost Memories, paint the paintings) for the covers. I write the copy. I design and build the web sites. I do the accounting. I handle the “e-commerce”. I do the marketing. Everything. I do everything myself. So, it takes a little longer than I’d like. So, I probably won’t have the books on hand Jan. 2nd. Perhaps not even the proof copies back to be sure everything was set up okay.

Which, if I were trying to do things traditionally, wouldn’t be as much of a problem. A traditional publisher takes 9 months to two years to get a book on store shelves. I finished FWYCR at the end of October and I wrote More Lost Memories in November and I’m trying to have them in print and ready to sell by the end of December. Well, by “January, 2009″ right now. If I’d given myself until January 2010 it would have been no problem to get all this done. Heck, I could already have the audiobook in the can. Waiting for people to find the time to actually read the book and give me feedback wouldn’t be an issue. All that. But I’m not trying to copy what’s out there. I’m trying to run the publishing company I want to be. I want to go from first draft to book for sale in as short a time as I am capable of producing a professional product. I want to have several new books every year. This year, 2008, Modern Evil Press didn’t put a single new book in print. Next year, I’m starting with two in January and I have another short story collection about 2/3 finished, and unless the course of my life changes significantly, I should be able to get another novel (or two) written before the end of the year. I want to be the one-man operation that doesn’t hold itself back because of its limitations.

My only limitation is time. There’s only one of me. And I have to do everything. But it’s coming along. And it feels good. Hopefully I’ll be able to send these two books to the printer before Christmas. Then, with any luck, I can get some painting done in the midst of trying to launch yet another podcast novel. Alright, gotta go slice my fresh-baked cranberry bread now, then get ready for church. Thanks for reading.

Zombies! Doomsday! And someone who actually finished writing a novel in a month!

Mary, Lance, Brady, Lorraine, and the Sergeant are a handful of the survivors from a zombie outbreak that decimates a city. Each of them responds a little differently in the aftermath of the tragedy and to the inexplicable and possibly unrelated memory loss some of them seem to be suffering. Paul is obsessed with a worldwide cataclysmic event he’s been predicting for years, and while everyone else seems able to go on with their lives in its wake, he just can’t let it go. Add a utopian city in the sky and a mathematician who can fly, then watch all these elements intersect and converge in a place where some see a moral void and others can’t escape deep questions of right and wrong.

Forget What You Can’t Remember explores everything from economics and ethics to politics, post-traumatic recovery and the lonliness of heroism. If it doesn’t leave you guessing, it’ll at least get you thinking.

And then, in another part of the cover, alongside a small version of More Lost Memories‘ cover (which I haven’t even started on yet… Ugh.), the following:

More Lost Memories is a companion book to Forget What You Can’t Remember, a collection of short stories each of which delves deeper into a character, event, or situation from this book. Find out how the zombie trainers died, about Lance’s restaurant, what was really going on in chapter 21, and more. Available now from Modern Evil Press.

That’s assuming, of course, I can fit all those words on the cover in a readably-sized typeface.

Please, please, please give me your feedback, either here in the comments or via email or via Twitter reply, or via Plurk ASAP. As soon as I can get these cover designs done, I can send the books to the printer. The sooner that happens, the sooner I’ll have them for sale. I’d really, really, like to have them for sale close to the time the podcast of the book starts (1/2/09, on Podiobooks.com). Thank you!

Monday night I finished typing up the first draft of my new novel. (I’m still working on a name – what do you think of “Forget What You Can’t Remember”?) I wrote the entire thing on a manual typewriter, an Olivetti TROPICAL, which is to say ‘on paper, with ink.’ In between other projects and errands in the last two days, I’ve read the entire thing from start to finish. Out loud. Mostly to myself and to the cat. But it sounds pretty good, and I think it’s self-consistent, well-resolved, and perhaps yet another novel without an easy answer to the question “What’s it about?”

Briefly: It’s a followon to Lost and Not Found, though not a direct sequel. There are roughly two characters in common between the two books, and the main character from Lost and Not Found does not appear at all in this new one; it has an entirely new cast of characters and settings. It begins with the event that changed the world at the end of Lost and Not Found, and with zombies, but soon the story follows the characters to the flying city of Skythia while delving into the ways these various characters respond to both what has happened to them and the strange environment they now find themselves in. Going back to their old ways, moving on with their lives, lashing out against a system and a world they don’t understand, falling in love, or simply going a bit mad in a mad, mad world – the several interconnected characters’ journeys are really the heart of the story.

I’m about to start re-typing the whole thing into my computer. I haven’t decided how and when to first make it available, but I know for sure that it’ll be available in all the formats I have to offer: Paperback, eBook, and audiobook. I’m also planning on writing a companion book in November (for NaNoWriMo, actually), a collection of short stories which will tell stories somewhat perpendicular to the main thread of this novel. That is, where the novel follows closely the lives of its ensemble cast, especially re: the main progression of events, the short stories will help to build out the world the story takes place in, adding richness in the periphery of that story by telling stories that intersect with it. So, for example, in one chapter of the novel a superhero interrupts a mysterious, murderous heist at a Kwytzwyk Temple, and it changes his outlook on justice and ethics – and I want to write the story of the thieves, their previous exploits, and to give a lot more detail on the specifics of the Kwytzwyk religious practices and beliefs; all things that weren’t relevant to the main story of the novel, but which is a narrative with details worth exploring. (Playing around with a title for that gives me things like “More To Forget” and “More Memories For Forgetting”…)

It’s a pretty basic idea: Old media’s old ideas about reviews don’t work in the new digital world.

Not just because fewer and fewer book reviews are being published, and not just because the old media isn’t interested in new media, independent and self-publishers, and anyone who happens to use the ‘new’ tech of print-on-demand (unless they “hit it big”, sell out, and stop being those things). The old ideas don’t work for reasons I discussed here semi-recently: More books are being written and published than ever before, and more than could ever be reviewed in the old media without overwhelming everything else. Over a thousand new books a day in North America alone, last year. Heck, five of those were mine. So what’s the solution for getting all these new books reviewed? Heckifiknow. But I have an idea for getting some of them reviewed.

How about creators themselves -rather than just pro and amateur reviewers- review each other’s work? There could be some sort of central site where authors could log in and connect with each other and readers could come and see all the reviews in a central, searchable, well-organized location. The reviews could be done quid-pro-quo, ie: I’ll review yours if you review mine, and every book review then brings visibility to both works (because there’s always that “[name of reviewer] is the author of books such as [blah] and [bleh] and writes a blog at [blerg]” at the bottom of a review). Authors could exchange PDFs (MP3s, HTML files, URLs, et cetera), or probably, if they wanted a paper copy of the book, send them a pBook at cost (instead of full retail, since you’re getting a review, but also because none of us wants to go broke trying to get internet reviews). Reviews could then be cross-posted to the authors’ blogs, linked form their books’ sites, et cetera… Increasing the visibility of the review site. And the site would be able to scale better than most of the solo-blogger-reviewers out there, since every new author that wanted to be reviewed would have to become a reviewer. It should be media-agnostic, since we’re all internet people, here: eBook, audiobook, POD book, dynamic hyperbook, whatever, it’s all good. Lots of duplicate reviews are (I think) good, since different people have different opinions on different books – book reviews aren’t objective. A system similar to the one they use at MiniBookExpo For Bloggers could be used (except not just for Canadians), so one could be restricted to three (or so) pending reviews at a time.

Obviously, such a site would take a certain amount of work to be put up and maintained, but since it’s powered by the strengths of the network (each independent author / publisher handles their own distribution of the books, and is in charge of posting their own reviews, and for generating traffic to the site, and the more authors are involved the better the whole thing works), it’s mostly a matter of getting it off the ground.

Ooh, or does this exist already, and I don’t know about it? Point me in the right direction. I’ll sign right up. I should be doing more reading, myself, and adding the selfish motivation of getting my own books reviewed sure would help get me to review other people’s works. I bet it’d do the same thing for yours. Know anyone who could help put this thing together?

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.

The only response I got to my query on Twitter gave a few possibilities. Responding to a competitor, because it could hurt sales of a past product… but the number one response, and the one I see most often relating to this subject, generally is: To get good press.

And based on my research, the press wants your finished product and your press release months in advance of the product’s launch.  A three month lead time – for everything except daily newspapers – is the barest minimum.  Monthly magazines are effectively finalized three months before they hit newsstands, so they need even more lead time.  From what I’ve read, if you give them several months’ advance notice that you’re going to do so, daily newspapers only need weeks prior to a product’s launch to cover it.  And since that’s what the press asks for, that’s what the press gets, AND that’s what companies have become used to giving them.  So… the standard is that -if you want ‘good’ press- you have to have your product finished and ready for market a quarter or half a year before you want to release it.  The lead time in publishing, between an author turning in a complete manuscript and the book hitting store shelves seems to be one to two years, leaning toward two years, and the book is effectively done for most of a year of that. WTF?  Seriously?

I can upload a file to my printer today and -if I wanted to pay for expedited shipping- have finished, salable books in hand this time next week.  (Possibly within a week, depending.)  Amazon goes a little slower, so another week or two to have a complete page on Amazon (though if I wanted to be a Marketplace Seller, I could probably get the product up by the time the printer got it to me), but usually a couple fewer days than Amazon to hit other online booksellers like B&N, ABEBooks, Powell’s, et cetera.  I had set myself an arbitrary goal of having the book of short stories I’m working on finished in “May 2008″ and had been thinking of trying to churn away at it all week to have the finished book to the printer by the end of the month – if I did that, it would be 100% as available as every other book I’ve ever written by mid-June at the latest, and right now it’s just a virtual stack of rough drafts.  Except, apparently, if I did that, no reputable publication would ever, EVER, review the book, because I didn’t send them a “galley” to read 3-6 months in advance of publication.  WTF?  The book will be available, “in print”, indefinitely.  Forever.  It’s not a limited-time release.  It doesn’t stop being a book worth reading because it’s already out, or because it’s been out a year or two years or ten years.  It doesn’t actually stop being something worth reviewing the moment it becomes available to the public.

Yes, I know new books are coming out all the time – but that’s a separate issue.  The fact that something in the neighborhood of 100,000 new books were published last year in the English language is … wow.  Amazing, ridiculous, fantastic, encouraging, inspiring, et cetera.  Impossible for any one person, really even any team of people, to keep up with.  A publication dedicated entirely to reviewing books, a daily publication, an internet publication, a blog, even, with new reviews going up all the time … well, maybe a blog or wiki with thousands of reviewers working together to thoroughly cover every release could, but … it would be difficult, if not impossible, to review every book.  A normal publication, in the face of this, must decide how it will choose which books to review – that is a simple fact.  The idea that they’ve all decided that rule #1 is to ignore all books already in print is … arbitrary at best, but also ignorant and highly irrational.  What about the thousand-plus books that were released each week that they never even heard about?  If only a tiny portion of those were worth review, but came to the reviewers’ attention too late, too bad, eh?  What a terrible criteria.

I’ve gone on a tangent, have I?  Fine.  To sum up: The “good reason” to put off product releases is to get “good press” — because the press generally refuses to cover anything they don’t get access to before everyone else.  My response:  This is a practice based in the limitations of the past, on false scarcity and a lack of persistence -not just of products, but of vision-, which in the face of previously unheard-of levels of production (ie: 100k new books a year) and availability (ie: print on demand means nothing ever needs to go out of print), needs a massive overhaul.

The wrapping up of which brings me around to the second concept I wanted to address in this post, which I will try to do somewhat more succinctly:  I think that what people want is more content, more products; I don’t think that what people want is more marketing.

My basic, foundational, concept for what I plan to do with Modern Evil Press and wretched creature as I go forward, is based on this idea.  I’m going to paint as many paintings as I have ideas for, and make them available online for sale as soon as I can get a photograph of them taken – usually as soon as the paint is dry.  I’m going to write as much fiction as I have time for (I’ll likely never run out of ideas – I have hundreds of them, filling notebooks and file folders, usually a book’s worth of ideas per page), and put it out as quickly as possible – probably within a few weeks of getting first drafts I’m happy with.  I’m going to let people know what new things are available through whatever channels I have available (twitter, mailing list, shouting from street corners (did I mention I snagged a corner spot for the Phoenix First Friday Art Walk in June & July?), et cetera), and it is my belief that if enough people are interested enough in what I’m doing to want to pay attention, then I’ll be able to make a living on volume.  This is a version of the “1000 true fans” model – if I can find a critical mass of people who will gladly buy every book I put out, and enough people who will buy a piece or two of my art every year, and I just keep putting out new stuff all the time – two, three, or more books a year and dozens of paintings, I  can do what I love and still eat.

Because I believe people want what I create, not to see ads for what I’ve created and will be releasing later.  Marketing is to let people know the product is available – don’t confuse the issue and begin to believe that marketing is what the people want.

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.