Author: Teel

Author, artist, romantic, insomniac, exorcist, creative visionary, lover, and all-around-crazy-person.

Post-PXHCC’12 post (numbers, new prices, et cetera)

Phoenix Comicon 2012 was this weekend, and it seems to have been wildly successful, all around. They haven’t released a final number yet, but current estimates of attendance seem to be falling around 30,000 people. Every exhibitor I spoke to said they had a great year, and I did, too. Suddenly the pressure is on to have new books available to sell at next year’s Comicon (I’ve already paid to get a Small Press Table there, and unless they wildly re-arrange the space, pre-paying so early should have secured the same location I had this year) because the hot seller I had this year (Never Let the Right One Go) will certainly be sold out by then.

Here are my total sales (all paperback, except where noted, and all including sales tax), with the last two years’ comparable sales (in italics, in parentheses):

  • Lost and Not Found: 1 / $11  (2011: 1 / $14, 2010: 0 / $0)
  • Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 2 / $16 (2011: 0 / $0, 2010: 1 / $10)
  • Dragons’ Truth: 3 / $47 (2011: 2 / $26, 2010: 4 / $49)
  • Cheating, Death: 9 / $45 (2011: 7 / $70, 2010: 6 (plus 2 given away) / $55)
  • Time, emiT, and Time Again: 2 / $14 (2011: 3 / $42)
  • The First Untrue Trilogy: 3 / $33 (2011: 6 / $144)
  • The Second Untrue Trilogy: 3 / $55 (2011: 3 / $70)
  • Worth 1k — Volume 2: 2 / $20
  • Unspecified: 1 / $5
  • Never Let the Right One Go (hardcover): 33 / $1250
  • Never Let the Right One Go (MP3 CDs): 1 / $20
  • Never Let the Right One Go (eBooks): 2 / $40
  • Total Comicon book sales: 62 / $1556 (2011: 27 / $411, 2010: 27 / $411)
  • Total minus NLtROG hc: 29 / $306

I haven’t included every title I have, or everything I had available, or everything that ever sold at any Comicon, just the things which sold at this year’s Comicon. (Books I had with me but sold zero copies include: Forget What You Can’t Remember, More Lost Memories, Worth 1k — Volume 2, and the MP3 CDs for Dragons’ Truth and Time, emiT, and Time Again.) Book sales were up by almost every measure: I even sold more paperbacks than previous years (even without counting the limited edition hardcover I was featuring this year), though the revenue on that was lower because of my new pricing system. Including Never Let the Right One Go, sales were more than double the last two years at Comicon, by volume, and more than triple by revenue.

Each day’s sales were better than the last, and they started with a bang: Thursday (Preview night, which in previous years has been just that – people coming around to see what’s there, and spending little) I had about $238 in sales (2011: $60, 2010: $0), which almost covered the cost of the Small Press Table ($229+tax) before things really got started. Friday I made $299, Saturday $442, and Sunday $578, including a sale after con was over: I was packed up and on my way to my car – someone spotted me rolling my boxes of books out & flagged me down to buy one.

Most of this was because of my new book, Never Let the Right One Go, and how I was marketing it. Designing great covers (thanks to getting permission to use those great photographs) was a big part, and just having the book on display brought a lot of people to my table – people would stare, mesmerized, by Emily and Sophia’s direct gazes, then find themselves drawn in. Also, creating a unique product, the flipbook, and standing there for most of the four days of Comicon, manually flipping the book over and over as though I were one of those people who stand on street corners trying to catch drivers eyes by flipping and spinning their signs/ads around, but really just to show off that it was two books in one binding, created a fair amount of interest; a surprising number of people had never seen a flipbook of any kind, before. Far and away the most important parts of my marketing efforts were in how I described the books (which I really believe worked only because of how I wrote the books), and the promotional chapbooks I gave away the first three days: I put together the first two chapters of each book, along with the synopses and the information on the limited edition and my table number, and handed them out to anyone who was interested after hearing about the books, but not ready to buy – like an eBook preview for the physical books; getting the readers hooked on the story, the characters, the world-building, and wanting more. Quite a lot of sales were to people who walked up to me with determination after having read the preview, with no doubts about needing to buy the books, and no hesitation about the price.

That was something else I was pretty sure of before Comicon, but am really glad to have seen proved out: People are willing to pay more for a good book. I didn’t put the price of the book on the book itself, or on the signs I made up, or in the promotional chapbook; I only put it on the price list I keep on my table during Comicon, which shows all the books’ prices, each relatively small, and usually unnoticed. I talked about the books and their stories and structure and characters first, and about the price last, and only when asked. For most of the people I gave the chapbooks to, especially those who came back eagerly ready to buy after having read it, they didn’t even ask the price until they walked up with cash in hand, and then didn’t blink when I asked $38 ($35+tax, rounded down to whole dollars) for a book. For most of the people who heard the price and didn’t buy, it wasn’t because they thought it was too expensive, but because they didn’t have enough cash left after their other Comicon purchases; their disappointed looks were quite crushing. (I pointed those customers to my website, where the eBooks are a lot cheaper than a limited edition hardcover – free, even.) The lesson is: If the story is good enough, the price doesn’t have to be low.

That said, while I’m tempted to keep the price of the Sophia and Emily eBooks where it is ($8.99/each), knowing that the stories are good enough to deserve that valuation (or, obviously, more – people were happily paying almost double that for the hardcover), I still want to stand by the pricing model I introduced this year, which adjusts the prices down as books “earn out”. So, with sales from Phoenix Comicon 2012 now accounted for, here are the updated prices for my books: paper / ebook:

It’ll take a few days for me to get the prices updated everywhere, which is probably a good thing considering I sold some copies of the Never Let the Right One Go eBooks at their $8.99 prices at Comicon – I don’t particularly want people who paid that price to see it so much lower when they get online to go redeem their codes; that sort of thing tends to create a feeling of buyer’s remorse. I’ve also got to go update all the pages on modernevil.com with accurate inventory levels, including things like: There are only 8 copies of the Never Let the Right One Go limited edition hardcover left, and I only have 5 more copies of Cheating, Death – and I haven’t decided whether I want to re-order any more copies of Cheating, Death. Probably I will; it’s sold more copies than any of my other books (77 copies, including paperbacks, eBooks, and Podiobooks.com donations) and is currently at a very attractive price point for hand sales… though I’m not expecting to do another event where direct sales will happen until Phoenix Comicon 2013, so maybe I’ll wait to order more until it’s time for that.

All in all, Phoenix Comicon has been a real blessing and a great opportunity for me. Meeting readers and being able to engage with them directly, often repeatedly (both day-by-day over the course of the con and year-after-year), about my works and my ideas, and often about their lives, their work, and their ideas, is awesome and rewarding on its own. As I kept telling people (usually right after handing a teenager my card and telling them they can get the eBooks for free), I’d rather have more readers than more money. Making a lot of sales, more sales each year than the year before, is certainly nice, too, and parallels what I’ve been seeing with my business overall – the beginnings of the fruition of my long-term plans; keep writing great books, keep making great art, keep connecting with readers and fans, and appropriate rewards will follow.

Now I’ve just got the next six to nine months to figure out exactly what new thing(s) I’ll be showing off at Phoenix Comicon 2013. If hundreds, or thousands, of copies of the Sophia and Emily eBooks sell, maybe that’ll include individual paperback editions of those books. If I can get the research, planning, writing, editing, and design done quickly enough, hopefully that’ll include the re-written Dragons’ Truth – and better yet, the entire new Dragons’ Truth trilogy I’ve been planning. If the book about writing and publishing does well as an eBook, and if I can figure out how to put it together as a paper book, maybe that, too – there are always aspiring authors asking me questions at Phoenix Comicon, so I know at least a few copies would sell there. Maybe a couple other, entirely different, things. Lots of time to figure it out, but even more ambition than time, so … time to get back to work, I suppose.

My quick response to the Taleist survey

Surface-level takeaways from reading the Taleist survey (1007 self-publishers asked about self-publishing):

While I earn way, way below the $10,000 average (skewed by the top 10% of authors earning 75% of the revenue), I am somewhat above the $500 median, in terms of annual revenue. I also have triple the number of titles available, compared to the top 10%, and over seven times as many as the average.

The other number which jumped out at me was 1,500: That’s the average number of copies sold last year, according to respondents. I wish they’d included a median value for that, too. That’s over nine times more copies than I sold last year, across all my titles, and if I recall correctly, their number was *per title*. My sellingest title sold 27 copies in 2011, and it was a $0.99 short story (my two best-selling book-length titles sold 18 & 17 copies apiece in 2011) – I have no idea how to get from dozens of sales a year to thousands, and as opposed to the 53% of respondents who self-published for the first time in 2011, I’ve been doing this for nearly a decade.

Glancing at the Amazon page for the $4.99 version of the report (my copy was free, for taking the survey), I see that it appears to have sold more copies in less than a day than any of my books did all last year, and possibly more copies than all of my books put together last year. I suppose I really ought to get back to work on my book about my experiences writing and self-publishing 19 books over the last ~10 years. Maybe next week, after Phoenix Comicon crushes my soul for the next four days.

Here’s hoping Never Let the Right One Go sells out at Comicon, at least doubling my book-revenue and nearly doubling my max-units-sold-per-title vs last year.

Anticipation, optimism, disappointment

Phoenix Comicon is coming up quickly. I basically have to be done/ready by tomorrow afternoon; my best opportunity for exhibitor setup is Wednesday evening, after Mandy gets off work. Thursday afternoon I’ll have a little time to finalize setup, but considering our schedule (we probably won’t be able to get there until 2:30 or 3PM), I don’t really want to be loading in any product or display elements that close to the event; Preview night / Thursday night, the exhibitor hall opens at 4PM. Then from 4-9PM Thursday, 10AM-7PM Friday & Saturday, and 10AM-5PM Sunday I’ll be stuck at my booth (small press table #227), trying to sell my books.

I decided not to try to get on any panels again, this year – intellectually, I know I’m an expert in several relevant areas, but emotionally I feel inadequate, and financially (which is a lot of people’s key yardstick for measuring someone’s worth) I’m downright anemic. Also, like last year, I’d rather be at my booth than attending a panel, since I’d just be worrying about not being at my booth the whole time; I definitely lose sales by being away, sometimes even within a few minutes for a bathroom or food break. I come back and hear stories of the someone who wanted to meet me, wanted to buy a book & get it signed, and who says they’ll be back – but they almost never come back. So really, I’ll be at my booth nearly the entire weekend. If possible, I won’t even leave for meals.

I’ve been working pretty hard to get things ready in time (especially if you count the last several months’ work getting Never Let the Right One Go written, edited, and printed in time for Comicon), and the anticipation has been steadily building. Right now it’s fairly intense, which seems a bit weird to me, considering how basic my participation is. I’ve really boiled it down to a very straightforward, low-key experience for myself. No real pressure to make a certain sales target (last year’s sales covered this year’s fee, and if the sales aren’t there to justify exhibiting, I have no problem simply not buying a table for next year), no major or elaborate displays (more on that in a moment), just me and my books and ten or fifteen thousand potential customers. I know I can’t really afford to hand things out for free to ten thousand people (I only made 200 copies of the promotional chapbook for Never Let the Right One Go, I only have a thousand or two business cards on hand), so one of my biggest concerns is trying to get what I do have into the hands of the right few hundred people, and hope it translates into new readers and/or sales.

(The promotional chapbook, by the way, is a little flipbook containing the first two chapters each of Sophia and Emily. Like an eBook preview, but on paper, and specifically for Comicon – to try to sell the hardcover.)

Along with the anticipation seems to be coming a (potentially inappropriate) sense of optimism. Ideas like “maybe I’ll sell the entire Never Let the Right One Go limited edition” and “having to tell people I’d sold out would be an awesome problem to have” keep crossing my mind. Right now I only have 41 copies left for sale, so it isn’t entirely unfeasible to think they might all sell over the con. Unlikely, given my sales history, but not impossible or unreasonable. Key elements, like the cover design, the subject matter, and the target audience for the books should help. As should the book display I’ve envisioned and outsourced – I haven’t seen it yet, and we’re getting pretty close to the deadline, so I’ve been preparing myself, mentally, for not having it, but theoretically it’ll be functional and delivered on time: It’s a rotating book display, being bolted on (and designed to fit perfectly with) my book shelf/display (purchased from a closing Borders last year), which rotates the book end over end to show off the flipbook/two-books-in-one nature of Never Let the Right One Go. The constant motion and unusual nature of the display and the book should draw the eyes of passers-by, and, between that and the preview chapters and my own ability to talk about the books to people, I seem to be getting my hopes up a little.

It feels the same as it did before I launched the Never Let the Right One Go Kickstarter campaign – like, maybe this is the book, the event, where I’ll finally reach a wider audience. Before the Kickstarter, the most optimistic part of me was able to unabashedly envision exceeding a 500-copy limited edition and needing to build the unlimited-edition paperbacks to handle the demand. Obviously, with the actual 50-copy print run, there’s now an upper limit on my optimism – but I still feel hopeful about selling those 41 remaining copies, plus a bunch of my other (radically cheaper than last year) books.

Which brings me around to the disappointment. I was disappointed by the Kickstarter campaign. It didn’t prevent the book’s publication, but it didn’t push my new work to the next tier of popularity and financial success, either. (In terms of meaningful success, I believe Never Let the Right One Go was successful before it was even published, as evidenced by the reactions of readers who both understood and appreciated the two books for the things I worked so hard to create in/with them. See Scott Roche’s review for an example.) Even as I approach Phoenix Comicon with an immense sense of optimism, the feeling that I might actually sell most (or all) of the hardbacks I have left … I am also anticipating disappointment. If I invested $250 in the booth, bought $65 worth of copies for the free chapbooks, and spent up to $50 (I don’t know how much it’ll be, but I told them before they started I couldn’t afford more than about $50) on what may be a single-use mechanized book display, plus time, plus gas and parking and food… If I don’t make at least $350-$400 in sales (10-12 copies of the hardcover book, btw), I won’t just be disappointed, I’ll be in the red. (Sorta; as I said, the booth rental was paid with last year’s sales.) With all this optimism, though, will only selling 15 copies, or 20, be disappointing because it wasn’t 40? Or what if, with ten or fifteen thousand people walking by, I can’t manage to find 200 people interested enough to take even a free chapbook? Last year I barely gave away a couple hundred business cards (if I remember correctly), despite having thousands available. How disappointing, if I can’t even give my work away?

Trying to accurately balance my anticipation on this end with nearly-inevitable disappointment on the other side of the con is tricky. How much (of either) is appropriate? Do I care more about sales volume, or revenue? More about selling, or about making connections with new/potential readers? Am I more happy to have Never Let the Right One Go available for sale at Comicon, or more disappointed I didn’t finish my book on writing&publishing in time? It’s all quite complicated, inside me. Luckily, within a week, the event itself will be over and I’ll be able to move on to worrying about something new.

Cooking, eating, bathing, and dressing; touchstones in my writing

I noticed recently (while working on the audio versions of the books) that Sophia contains all the main touchstones I’ve found I add to many (not quite all) my novels, going back all the way to Forlorn. Namely, my main characters will have a scene where they cook something, a scene where they eat something (usually what they cooked), a scene where they bathe, and a scene where they get dressed.

The most obvious in Never Let the Right One Go, part of the mirrored-activities-to-draw-comparisons between Sophia and Emily, was shopping for clothes and getting dressed. Emily is a shop-a-holic, and buying and wearing fashionable clothing is a major part of her social life (and her identity, before meeting Nicholas). Sophia, upon moving out, decides to buy a whole new wardrobe. Sophia later goes on several dates and pays particular attention to her wardrobe; one of her dates even takes her shopping for clothes, and buys her a complete outfit. Sophia ends up meeting a world-class fashion designer and having clothes custom made for her childlike body.

Going back to my older works, in Lost and Not Found, the main character’s first attempt at writing a novel contains a long description of a superhero designing his own costume – and at the end of the book there’s a chapter-long section where he and Tinkerbell are going through a magical closet full of clothes trying to decide what to wear. In the Untrue Tales… series there are several getting-dressed scenes, including Hannah’s unfortunate rushed morning before her accident, and Trevor in the locker room before his first dodgeball match. Melvin helps dress his children before they leave the safety of their homes to go face the zombies in Cheating, Death.

Of course, the most obvious are in Lost and Not Found, and specifically in the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut, where perhaps fully half of the narrative is concerned with these four touchstones. (Warning: SPOILERS ahead) After the main character whisks Tink away from Never-never land, and after they finally arrive at Haven, their first morning is first full of cooking, then of eating, then of bathing (in a magical bubble bath), and then of getting dressed, before heading out to visit a museum. (Trevor and Toni visit a museum in Untrue Tales… Book Four, as well, and there’s a museum visit in Worth 1k — Volume 2.) (Update: I’ve just remembered (10 hrs after posting this) that Sophia visits a museum, too! After going to the opera, Sophia’s date takes her on a private tour of a sort of history museum. She really gets all of them, doesn’t she?)

I like that order, as it’s a very natural one, but I don’t stick religiously to it, adding these relatively-mundane scenes in wherever they belong along the way. The main character of Lost and Not Found also spends some time cooking at the beginning of the book, while waiting for the day he can begin writing a novel. Lance, one of the major characters of Forget What You Can’t Remember, becomes a chef and opens his own restaurant – giving Paul and Job one of the only opportunities for anyone to eat in the entire book, and not until the penultimate chapter – then he gets an entire short story, ‘Self-Serve’ to himself and his restaurant in More Lost Memories, where the unique/unusual nature of his cooking, and of the eating of it, is given more room to breathe.

In Never Let the Right One Go, Emily doesn’t do any cooking. Alternatively, gourmet cooking is one of Sophia’s hobbies/passions. Early in the book, she cooks meals for her family (though she does not partake), and after she moves out she has more opportunities to prepare food for other people. Putting together a tray and fruit and cheese for her suitor is a big highlight of one of Sophia’s many frustrating dates, for example. Sophia’s relationship with food isn’t a perfect one, though, which I’ll cover below, as I address scenes of eating:

In another story from More Lost Memories (a story later re-integrated into the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut), ‘Happy Anniversary’, the main character from Lost and Not Found and Tink, on their wedding anniversary, go out for an exquisite meal at one of Skythia’s top restaurants. There are quite a few poems in Worth 1k — Volume 2 about eating (and its harmful/wonderful effects), just as there were poems in Worth 1k — Volume 1 about finding and eating food on the road. I won’t attempt to get into all the different meals (some described in nauseating detail) Trevor and his companions experience during the course of the Untrue Tales… series; they are numerous and sometimes unusual. Then there are the zombies in Forget What You Can’t Remember and in Cheating, Death, which are always going around eating people and/or brains.

In Never Let the Right One Go, Emily hardly eats at all (which is in keeping with her character) – I think the only times she’s described as eating are a few pieces of cut-up fruit the morning she arrives in Washington, D.C. for the big protest rally, a Frappuccino on the closest thing to a real date she ever has with Nicholas, and a single bite of popcorn on her terrible date with Austin. Sophia, on the other hand, spends half the book concerned with eating and not eating. As a vampire, she’s capable of eating human food but not capable of absorbing nutrition from it; anything she swallows merely passes through her body and exits undigested. Unfortunately, her super-senses turn that into a disgusting proposition, and by the time the book starts, Sophia knows better than to actually swallow any of the food she cooks. She loves cooking, loves food, loves the aromas and flavors, but can’t swallow anything but blood. The amount and frequency of Sophia’s blood consumption are thoroughly detailed throughout her story, along with the long periods of fasting she goes through, burning with hunger, so she’ll be able to donate her organs safely.

Bathing I cover a little less (though the magic bubble bath in Forlorn was, as I said, chapter-length in its detail), but I still see it as a touchstone. Real people bathe. We can identify with it, with how showering or taking a bath makes us feel. How nice it is to be fresh and refreshed and clean – or how desperately we feel the need to bathe after going through something particularly (even just emotionally) grueling. I don’t think Emily bathes at all in the text, but Sophia takes at least one shower, and right after a scene which may make you want to take a shower, too. I won’t give any more away.

I knew, going in, that Sophia was my favorite of the two novels, but I didn’t realize that I’d subconsciously include all these touchstones in one book and leave them almost entirely out of the other. Looking forward, I don’t expect to include any of these touchstones in my next four books… and I also don’t expect them to rank among my favorites.

Have you read my books? What scenes have I failed to mention? Did you remember Mary showering in ‘Pay Attention -A Zombie Story-‘, and how it marked a major turning point for her, as a character? What about the particular food eaten in ‘They Stole God’ and the trouble its eating caused?

Having fallen behind: Web design/development

As I mentioned recently, and have been making some strides to correct, in early 2005 I effectively stopped blogging. In the last few months it has come more and more to my attention that, probably right around the same time, I stopped paying attention to what was going on in the world of web design / web development. It might have been a little earlier, perhaps by mid-2004 when I had to give up being a near-full-time creative, move to the city, and get a desk job, but certainly not much later. I remember when, in mid-2009, I redesigned modernevil.com (it still uses this design), I had only heard of -never used- CSS sprite-style mouseover/effects, and the bulk of the time/effort I put into implementing the site was spent learning the technique well enough to put together the buttons at the top. This is a technique which had begun to replace JS/DOM mouseover effects in mid-2004 and was standard practice (apparently) by 2006/2007, but it was new to me in 2009 – and it’s still foreign to me, since I only ever used it once; I don’t really understand my own code/design right now, when I look at it.

This, as you may imagine, is frustrating to me. Worse still is that, apparently, the professional web developers moved past that sort of thing, too, and have moved on to the next thing. And the next, and the next, in so many areas. I follow a few design-related blogs (via Google Reader / RSS, which many people have “moved on from”, as well) and when I’ve recently tried to read articles about things which interested me, I’ve found designers are assuming everyone understands and uses techniques I didn’t know existed or worked, such as gzipping most of the files which make up their website, or using (apparently linux-only?) tools to further (somehow losslessly) compress their JPEGs, to get everything just that little bit smaller. Part of what I was looking into was how to make my sites look better on my new iPad (love that retina display, don’t love half of everything on the web looking pixelated and weird) – how to serve even larger image files… and the articles all assumed a bunch of things I had never heard of.

Tonight I was reading further into some of the things I’ve missed out on, in some cases following concepts backward through three or four years of their history/evolution to be able to reach a point of grasping what I’ve missed. Responsive web design being the new/old/standard that the hip web designers swear by, but it being based on flexible grid design, which seems pretty straightforward to me except I apparently stopped paying attention to web design before fixed grid design took hold in everyone’s minds, so it’s like an iteration of an improvement of a design foundation I’d never learned or used. Or even just things like being aware Typekit exists, or that the whole “serving fonts to webpages” and “doing web typography” issues apparently got pretty-much solved. I’ve never used jQuery, wouldn’t know how (I guess it’s a JS library?), but am aware that “good” web developers are all trying to minimize their use of JS altogether and now joke amicably about the “old days” when they used jQuery, usually while explaining their new solution/standard in terms which only make sense to people who used jQuery daily for years – and often while offering “a workaround for older browsers, which is built on jQuery”.

I think I’m going to need more study. I don’t know CSS3, HTML5, et cetera, et cetera. I don’t know modern web best practices. More and more, I want to redesign modernevil.com, overhaul the back-end (which is currently based on WordPress, and will probably eventually be based on WordPress plus a custom plugin that … I guess I’ve got to figure out how to write), add some functionality to it… I don’t really want to be a web designer/developer. That might be the other part of why I dropped out of the field (though good money is on depression, oppression, and a general creative malaise), that I’d realized I oughtn’t waste my time doing work I didn’t want to be doing – except it’s like a lot of the rest of the work I do, these days, where I want the work to be done, and to be done to exacting specifications, and certainly can’t afford to pay an appropriately skilled web artist to do it for me, so I’d better put my nose to the grindstone and figure out how to make it work. If I want something done right (or really, done at all), I’ve generally got to do it myself.

So, added to the list of things to do, now, is re-immerse myself in modern web development and design. Learn what I need to know to catch up, and re-design all my sites to make use of my new knowledge – and then keep them up to date, rather than allowing them to fall further and further behind. For example: With a little dedication and application of effort (and of focus, which I’ve been having some difficulty maintaining, in my depression) I should soon also learn how to use Amazon’s cloud servers, and then use them to compete directly with Amazon, to sell my own eBooks and audiobooks directly. Possibly even before I learn enough to do a thorough front-end redesign.