Teel – Page 10 – Teel McClanahan

Brainstorming future projects, Fall 2012 – Spring 2013

I have Facebook Pages set up for myself and for Modern Evil Press, but I don’t really make good use of them. I also have subscriptions turned on, on my personal Facebook account, so fans can just subscribe to my updates there and … well, that’s probably the best option, if you actually want to see all my updates, and know what I’m doing, what I’m working on, et cetera. I do have a couple apps pulling the feeds from this blog, my podcast, and any updates to modernevil.com and wretchedcreature.com onto the official Facebook page for me (though not the Modern Evil Press page), so if you Like me there, you’ll know most of what I’m doing, but I rarely make direct updates/posts. Sometimes I try.

A little while ago I began trying to write an update for my page, from my iPhone, and … it got a bit out of hand. Here’s what I wrote (with a few tiny adjustments):

Trying to decide what to attempt this year for NaNoWriMo, and how to publish it (in print) in time for PHXCC’13 without going broke in the process. Possible ideas:

1) Rush to be ready to re-write Dragons’ Truth by November 1st
2) Write a ‘tentacle novel’ for NaNoWriMo (specifically to sell at PHXCC, partially via a tentacle-themed-crafts collective I’m tentatively a part of).

These two ideas each lead to spin-off ideas:

3) The Dragons’ Truth re-write is supposed to include designing it to allow for a sequel – actually I’m planning a trilogy. Due to timeline issues, I’d like to have all 3 written before the first goes to press. (At least for the paper version; eBooks are easy to change/correct/update.)
4) Should I write one long-ish tentacle novel (say, 75k+ words) or two or three short ones (under 40k words each), which can sell for pocket money (target: <$7.99)? Doesn’t “The Tentacle Trilogy” sound good? “Introducing: The Mystery of the Missing Manacles, Book 1 of The Tentacle Trilogy“

5) Printing trilogies is expensive. Triple the setup costs, trouble moving inventory for later books in the series… And while I really like the idea of doing the individual books (for either trilogy) as cheap paperbacks and adding a combined hardcover limited edition that would sell for a premium price, that makes for a very expensive spring, next year.
6) If I really put my mind to it (and didn’t spend the whole of the next 3.5 months on the tabletop game I’m also developing) I could theoretically write all six books (How did I go from one or two books in the next few months to six? Six!?) in time to have some or all of them at PHXCC.

How those books are presented/sold becomes the conundrum: Do I only release the first book (of each series), and give specific release dates for the others? Do I make the first books available as paperbacks, both series available in combined LE hardbacks, and conditionally print the other paperbacks if/when the cost of doing so would be covered? Do I break the bank & print up 6 new paperback and 2 new LE hardbacks, all at once, and hope enough of them sell?

It would be difficult to set deadlines appropriately without knowing my publishing plans, or to begin building marketing hype for those unknown future releases.

Then there’s always the thought of kickstarting: I could write the books, edit them, prepare them for publication, and release the first book as an eBook (or just link to the free interactive version I’m planning, for Dragons’ Truth), then kickstart to try to raise funds for printing paper versions, with stretch goals for the various mixes/release-schedules postulated above, and the main reward being the “best version” printed.

This is getting longer than I’d planned. Maybe I should go do a blog post.

So… here I am. Doing a blog post. Continue reading Brainstorming future projects, Fall 2012 – Spring 2013

I did get the iPhone 5

I did get the iPhone 5. None of the tricks/tips I found for trying to fix the home button on the iPhone 4 worked (WD-40, rubbing alcohol, blowing air, and various software things), nor did they kill the button/phone. Mandy and I discussed it, our upcoming expenses & plans, and decided that, for example, the iPhone’s home button was more frustrating to her than the couch’s failing springs -and replacing the couch will cost a lot more than the iPhone- so we pushed the couch replacement back another several months (unless we find an amazing deal on a couch we love, at just the right time) and I bought the iPhone with my Apple credit card (okay, it’s technically Barclay, but I got it when buying an iMac interest-free, it generates iTunes cards when I earn points, et cetera) which gives me 6 months interest-free for buying it at an Apple Store.

It’s pretty great. Love the extra screen space without the device being appreciably larger – it seems the increase in device height is about half as much as the increase in screen height. Plus the screen is brighter, with better color, a better camera, and everything is faster – not just because of the LTE (which I’ll rarely use), but because of the processor and RAM. We did stay on the old/unlimited plan, for now. Ooh, and the sales rep at the Apple store was even able to get me the extra sims & setup needed to to the phone-swapping/contract-swapping musical-phones routine, so I didn’t have to go into an AT&T store at all! A very smooth procedure. A very happy outcome.

iPhone 5 and related thoughts

To begin: I’m a big proponent of Apple devices. I believe they’re the best option for people who would rather have their computing devices “just work” than to have to work to get their computing devices to do what they need. I don’t want to “root” or “jailbreak” or “hack” or choose between kernels or otherwise have to manually manage or deeply customize my computer/tablet/phone – I just want to open the box and start using it, and I want to be able to continue using it the way I did when I opened the box until the device dies. (Said device failure preferably coming 5+ years after purchase… and though I don’t expect to still be the primary user of a particular phone after that many years, I do expect it to still be working as, say, an iPod Touch for someone without a smartphone.) Nearly every computing device in my household is from Apple, from the wireless routers to the iMac, Macbook Pro, iBook, iPad, and several iPhones and iPods. (We don’t, yet, have an AppleTV. Maybe soon.)

We don’t compulsively upgrade our devices, certainly not with unsubsidized phones. We can’t really afford to. Instead, we typically wait as long as possible before updating. So, for example, I bought the original iPhone (the day after they dropped the price) and didn’t upgrade until the 3GS was available. Then I got married and, when we wanted to move Mandy over from Verizon to AT&T onto a shared plan, we never even had to put her on a contract – she just used my original iPhone, at first. With two phones, two lines, and one not under contract, it would be easy enough to buy one of the latest iPhone every year, putting every other phone line on a fresh 2-year contract – and since I’m the tech geek and last-year’s-iPhone is still a really good smartphone, just shuffle the devices so I have the newest and Mandy has the next-newest, and my sister gets the no-plan-use-it-as-an-iPod-Touch two-versions-old device. Due to other influences (including planning for possibly heading to Japan, a plan currently moved once more to the back-burner) we never did get a second contract on our account, and had nearly let mine run out entirely – though this spring when Mandy’s 3GS started going mad (I think I determined in the end it was Gmail’s fault) using 10x-100x more data than it had any reason to, we did renew my contract for 2 years to got me a new 4s and give her my 4 (my sister is now much happier with the 3GS-as-iPod-Touch than she was with the original iPhone).

So now we’re to the release of the iPhone 5. It looks great, and I’d love to have one, but it’s not necessary. The closest thing to failure on our devices is that the home button on the 4 isn’t entirely reliable – which has been a problem for years; I dealt with it, but it frustrates Mandy quite a bit. (In case you hadn’t heard, some iPhone 4 home buttons are less-than-perfect. Sometimes you press it and nothing happens. Other times you press it and it registers as a double-press. Since the introduction of multitasking to iOS, this is somewhat inconvenient.) What we’ve decided is that tonight we’ll try the anecdotally-recommended solution to the button problem, WD-40, and if it kills the iPhone 4, we’ll buy an iPhone 5 tomorrow morning (I’m excellent at waiting in lines) and do the old iPhone-shuffle. And if it fixes (or doesn’t change) the button problem, no problem, we’ll just stick with the hardware we have until something goes wrong (or there’s an irresistible upgrade, like the retina display was). Continue reading iPhone 5 and related thoughts

Alternative roles in video games

Last night I watched the midnight showing of Resident Evil: Retribution 3D. Lots of fun/over-the-top-to-the-point-of-silliness action, though perhaps significantly too much shooting zombies in the chest for the fifth movie in a series. They keep adding nods to the games, to the new games, many of which I at least recognize despite never having played any of them. I tried, a bit, but quit within minutes. The first three were too difficult because of the (intentional) limitations of the interface, and while 4’s interface was some improvement, I’m still not quite good enough at that sort of action game to succeed. But watching Milla et al kick ass on the big screen is pretty fun, now and again.

Anyway, what I wanted to post about was this: One of the two groups of protagonists we follow through the film (until the two groups eventually manage to meet up) is a group of five guys, all well-armed, experienced, et cetera… but one of them stood out to me, especially in the first scene they’re facing an oncoming army of undead soldiers. You see, throughout most of the battle, while four of the men were shooting, shooting, shooting, his gun was slung, his computer was out, and he was hacking, mapping, and planning. How are they going to get out of this unwinnable situation? Where can they turn? What about the [evil character who directs the attacks], and interfering with them? What about how this is making them run late; where is the other group, now?

I watched this sequence and thought, “Now there’s a role I’d be glad to play in a Resident Evil game.” I’m not much good at shooting zombies, but maybe I could hack into the computers to look at the situation (accessing cameras, heat maps, systems, et cetera) and plan escapes and systems-based counterattacks, while my team of NPCs shot the zombies for me. Then we all move around together, according to the plans/routes I helped find. I don’t mind a little action being mixed into the experience, but more on the scale of QTEs and/or triggering things I set up or discover with my technical prowess. If I hack well enough, plan well enough, and out-think the [evil enemy] at every step, my team stays alive. The more mistakes I make the smaller my team gets, until eventually I lose when I’m the last man standing and can’t stand against the zombie hordes (or whatever) on my own.

Now, I’m not looking for a “traditional” support role, as seen in MMOs, where the challenge is not much different from the DPS in its button-mashing, just making your side’s health go up rather than the other side’s health go down. I’m looking for something more engaging and cerebral. Something where, as I would in a single-player shooter/RPG, my character is effectively leading the action and the guys shooting the zombies/whatever were really the “support” characters. I generally don’t want to micromanage things like where they stand during a firefight, what weapons and special abilities they use, or who they target; they should be smart enough to figure that out on their own. I should have to pay attention to things like “how much ammo do we have left”, and then if I can find the armory/gun-shop on the map when needed and get my team there safely, they should know to reload and pick up as much as they can carry. Or if one of my guys gets injured, then it’s up to me to find a way to a hospital/clinic/whatever, hack the doors to get us in, et cetera.

It’s not a fully fleshed-out idea, just a brainstorm. Saw the guy doing it in the movie and wanted the option in a game. Even if it does boil down to half a dozen mini-games to resolve different sorts of hacking, plus map-reading and planning, with QTEs thrown in for action, it would probably be more fun for me than having to be the big guy with the gun standing in front. Make me the geeky guy standing in the back. Let me use my brain.

Amazon Sales Rank

Sometimes I see other authors post about their Amazon Sales Rank, and their comments consistently frustrate me – because they do not, in any way, match my experience. I saw someone post on G+ recently about how they saw their sales rank “plateau” after a 1-star review, and go on to speculate that Amazon must have frozen their sales rank, because their sales seemed to be continuing at the same pace. I’ve seen other people talk about building spreadsheets or even screen-scraping apps to pull and correlate their sales rank as it changes over time, where by “over time” they mean hour-by-hour and day-by-day. Now, certainly there are those whose books make it into the various “Top 100” lists at Amazon, and I can see the value of paying close attention when it gets to (or near) that level – anything you can do to stay in the top 100 will have a major impact on sales; those are the books people find by browsing, everything else is found at random or by name.

In case you aren’t familiar with Amazon Sales Rank, I’ll give a brief description: It’s like those Top 100 lists, in that a Sales Rank of 1 means the title is the most popular, a Sales Rank of 2 means the title is slightly less popular, and so on. Amazon has close to (or possibly now over) ten million titles available, so a title’s Sales Rank can be anywhere from 1 to 10,000,000. The lower the Sales Rank, the better the title is selling – and once a title breaks into the Top 100, visibility (and thus sales) skyrockets.

Now, in addition to Sales Rank, there’s also a per-category ranking done by Amazon, but it only even appears on a title’s page when that title is in the top 100 for that category. The per-category rankings (once you reach the top 100) can have nearly as big an impact on sales as being in the general Top 100, especially if those categories are well-matched to the content of your book. None of my books has ever really been in the Top 100 of anything (barring my one KDP Select title, which, during its promotionally-free days was in the top 100 free books for its category – a fleeting thing, seeing as that “sales rank” was reset as soon as the promotion ended), or really even close. In fact, most of my books don’t make it to Sales Ranks of lower than the tens of thousands – and then only for a matter of hours. Here’s a chart of the Sales Rank, over time, for one of my latest releases, Sophia (Never Let the Right One Go):

What you’re seeing there is that when a copy sells, the Sales Rank jumps. In the case of its first sale, it jumped (down to) under 100,000. For less than a day. If a second sale had been made that day, or within a couple of days, it would have gone even closer to that elusive “#1” on the chart. (Peak Sales Rank for Sophia, so far: 83,547) Except it didn’t get another sale. For over a month. So its Sales Rank dropped: 300,000 places in the first week, and another ~250,000 places over subsequent weeks until… Another sale! Jump up 500,000 sales ranks! Passing, presumably, 500,000 books which didn’t make a sale that day, most not that week or that month. But again you can see the immediate drop-off. The same 300,000 places down in a week without sales.

One could speculate that books which stay in Sales Ranks between 100,000 and 400,000 are probably making about a sale a week, and those that stay above about 700,000 are probably making a sale a month. Conversely one could speculate that Amazon has over half a million (of its ~ten million) titles which sell at least one copy a month or more. That’s the long tail.

My work lives in the long tail… Just a little further out.

Here’s another chart, from my best-selling novel (across all formats) ever, Cheating, Death:

That’s a lot more time compressed into the same chart, but you can see the same thing at work. It makes a sale, the Sales Rank jumps up for a day, drops rapidly, then gradually settles. The highest peak there, the first one, is a Sales Rank of 37,490 – just 37,390 places away from reaching the Top 100, right? The other peaks under 100k are in the 75k-95k range, but you can see its unpopularity has driven even single-sale-bumps to the 150k-range, near Spring 2012. (The fact that, across all countries, Cheating, Death has sold 18 kindle copies… simply tells us they calculate Sales Rank on a per-region basis.)

This is all somewhat to say that, while the unbounded “shelf space” of the online marketplace allows the long tail of products to exist, and to make sales, it doesn’t seem to do anything to make the products in the long tail more discoverable. Discoverability still rests on the shoulders of marketing. Amazon (et al) are not interested in selling more copies of the roughly ten million titles which sell one copy a week or less – they’re only putting their efforts into selling those books which are already selling a lot. They feature “Bestsellers” and “Top Sellers” and by default sort a lot of search results by “Popularity” rather than relevance. i.e.: If you do a lot of your own marketing, enough to build a big audience of your own, Amazon’s algorithms will bolster your marketing, adding their strengths to yours, turning your success into a runaway success. If your marketing doesn’t work, Amazon doesn’t help. It’s like tax breaks for the rich.

A few of my titles are like the ones pictured here, spending most of their time drifting in Sales Rank from 400,000 to 1,000,000. Several of my titles actually linger in the mid-millions; things which sold once, but never again. Most of my titles actually have no Sales Rank; they have never sold a single copy via Amazon, and thus aren’t even branded a failure in the same way as those which have – on the product page for something which has never sold a single copy, Amazon doesn’t even include a line for Sales Rank in the product data.

I just can’t identify with authors who claim to get sales of 2-3 copies a day, right out of the gate, and who worry when it slows down to 1-2 copies a day. Or with authors whose Sales Rank plateaus. If my Sales Rank plateaued, it would mean I was having record sales. Sales like I’ve never seen before, on any title. It would mean sustained sales, rather than one sale here and one sale there. Right now selling 2-3 copies a month, across all my kindle titles, isn’t a terrible month.