Author: Teel

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

on canceling book distribution

(Read my last post, first.)

So, since I pay for each book’s digital catalog fee a year in advance and LSI doesn’t refund a prorated amount based on what wasn’t used, I’ve decided that -for now- I’m going to cancel each title in the month before the pre-paid distribution-availability runs out. I’ve gone through my records to find when I was billed last for each title, and created calendar reminders 11 months after each came up, so I have 4-8 weeks to actually get around to sending the email (rather than actually waiting for the last minute). As I said before, it may take several months (or forever?) after I tell LSI to cancel the title before other sites recognize them as out of print (even though I’ve been (and will continue to be) updating Bowker with their out of print status at the same time), and LSI may even allow book stores (Amazon included) to order them for quite some time after I tell them to stop. Not that I expect anyone to order. Here’s a quick breakdown of the schedule:

Please keep in mind: These books won’t actually be going away. They’ll still be available as eBooks, for free at modernevil.com and for purchase through eBookstores and on eReaders (and tablets and phones) everywhere. They’ll still be available as audiobooks, for free through Podiobooks.com and for purchase through Audible/iTunes. They’ll even continue to be available in paperback for a long while, exclusively through modernevil.com – I have up to 45 copies of some titles, and not fewer than a dozen, and if I feel the need, I may order a few copies of anything I’m running low on before canceling them. Likely you’ll be able to order all my books from me for years to come – knowing that when you do, they’re now part of extremely limited print editions. (Perhaps I’ll calculate the edition sizes for all my books and note it on my site.)

Also keep in mind that my future books aren’t going away, either. I’ll still be writing them, and I’ll still be publishing them. They’ll simply become available as eBooks and audiobooks first, and paper if/when doing so makes financial sense. I’m really hoping I can find a way to do a limited print edition of the books I’m currently writing, as I’m quite enamored with the idea of putting the two books out in a single binding, as a flipbook (the two books upside down & reverse of one another) – and being limited-edition rather than full-distribution makes that easier, as both covers can look like covers if I don’t have to put a barcode “on the back” or any marketing copy there, either. Whether it makes sense to do it as a hardback (and then put the marketing info & barcode on the dust jacket flap) or not will depend on what the financial situation surrounding the book turns out to be. Will the cover art sell? Will people want to pre-order? Will I do a Kickstarter? (And will anyone pledge, if I do?) We’ll have to wait and see… I’ve still got a long road to go before we get there. Half the text left to write. Then the editing, the beta-reading, the audio version… all before I’m ready for fundraising, let alone publishing.

Publishing, paper, distribution, and doing what works

This has been a long time coming. I think I’ve even announced it here, before, in one form or two others. I just can’t make sense of publishing books on paper and having them available for distribution/wholesale-sales. Warning: This post is going to be full of numbers. Numbers about money.

Here’s some backstory before I get into the numbers: Back in the before-times, I began writing stories. By the turn of the millennia, I’d begun thinking about writing novels. By the end of 2002 I’d written (and published, albeit in extremely low quantity and quality, and quietly) my first novel. By 2004 I’d done a nearly-professional job publishing it, and my second novel, though I still lacked distribution. At the end of 2004, my life went off a cliff, right after I published my 3rd novel, and publishing my 4th novel in 2005 was part of the long descent into Hell, which didn’t begin to let up until the Fall of 2006, when I also finished my 5th novel. Coming out of those dark days, I decided to take publishing seriously, started Modern Evil Press officially in 2007, and re-published my first 5 novels via Lightning Source (LSI), along with two poetry books. With LSI, I had professional (though not offset) printing, and I also had professional distribution (though not the sort of distribution where sales reps were trying to get my books onto store shelves; ‘distribution’ has two definitions in the publishing world, and mine just meant that if a bookstore ordered a book, it would be printed & delivered), and my books began appearing on Amazon &c. in their new forms. In 2008 I left my day job and began working as a full time creative, putting out professional-level eBooks and near-professional audiobooks along with the paper editions. Since then I’ve continued writing, editing, recording and publishing books, and as of right now I’ve written 11 novels, 2 short story collections, 2 poetry collections, and edited & published my first book by someone else. I’ve also published one short story exclusively in digital (eBook & audio).

If you read here much, you probably knew all that. (If not, please check out modernevil.com.) You may even have some idea of my financials. But… Did you know that, of my books released on paper, none one of them has ever made enough sales (even including sales across all formats, to try to make up for the cost of the paper editions through digital sales) to cover the cost of putting out that paper edition? My only “profitable” titles are the ones where I either 1) never published a paper edition, or 2) sold the original work of art I created for the cover of the book. Then there’s that short story I linked to in the last paragraph, Last Christmas (have you read it? It’s only $1.99!), which has both earned more than it cost me to publish the eBook (I still have to buy an ISBN) and for which I sold the cover art. Including some of the other books’ cover art means it’s not my most profitable book, but it feels that way, since it’s earned close to $70 but cost me less than $10 to publish.

Here are some fun numbers about my relationship with LSI: Since I began working with them in 2007, I have paid LSI $2163.46. By my calculation, $408 of that was in “Digital Catalog Fees”, which is an Invoice-y way of saying I pay $12/year/title to have my books available for distribution to booksellers (i.e.: Amazon &c.), and the other $1728.46 was for things like setup fees, shipping and handling, proof copies, oh, and actually printing copies of my books for me to have for direct sales. Let’s take that second number first, and compare it to the total revenue I’ve had come in from direct sales of paper books, which is approximately $1531.33, or a couple hundred dollars less than I spent getting those books. That’s from nearly 5 years of sales. Of course, I have a fair amount of inventory on hand. If all the books I have on the shelves next to me sold for their full cover prices, my bookkeeping software tells me I’d have another $4716.93 from the sale of those 307 books. By retail value, roughly 40% of that is in the two Untrue Trilogies I published this year, fewer than ten of which have sold (between the two titles), so far. Theoretically, if I could ever sell all these books, I’d still make quite a good margin on selling paper copies directly. With the nearly-2/3 margin I calculate for that, I can even afford to do some discounting (which I regularly do, a dollar or two at a time, whenever it’ll help make a sale).

Now let’s look at that other number. The Digital Catalog Fees. I spent $408 to make and keep my titles available for distribution over the last 5 years. I earned $131.26 from wholesale sales of my books (after LSI took their cut for printing them). That’s right. Over the last five years I spent $408 to earn $131.26. On one hand, I’m also paying for visibility; that fee covers getting my books listed on Amazon, bn.com, and theoretically hundreds of other online booksellers, plus it gets them listed as available in the computers of all the bookstores, large and small, across the country. On the other hand, they (bookstores, and customers of online stores) rarely, if ever, order my paper books. Of the 13 titles I’ve printed & distributed with LSI, only 5 titles have ever sold wholesale via LSI, and only one title earned enough from wholesale sales to cover its own Digital Catalog Fees (until/unless I get one more annual fee, then it’s just as red as the others). That includes zero books sold in 2011. (Actually, technically, I sold negative two books via LSI in 2011 – I recently received two returns. Because of strange LSI policies I didn’t fully understand, the cost of the return of one of them exceeded the value of all 5 sales that book had made in prior years. Five sales, one return, zero profit (for that title).) So what is that visibility getting me? Not more sales from my own website. Maybe more eBook sales, though that’s impossible to track. Oh, and speaking of eBook sales: For the 5 titles which had wholesale sales, all earned more from eBook sales than from wholesale paperback sales. All. To readers who paid at least 50% less than those who bought paper copies.

So, what do we learn from this? Well, for one: Paying for distribution of paper books doesn’t make sense, at all. Also: I need to better gauge the number of paper books I’ll be able to sell directly; when I sell them, they’re profitable, but when they sit on my shelf, they aren’t. (To clarify: It was a terrible idea to publish a new edition of the First Untrue Trilogy, and was probably a bad idea to put out a paper edition of the Second Untrue Trilogy. Of the ~$1700 I spent on getting paper books made in the last 5 years, ~$700 was for those two books. Which is to say: Without those books, I’d have had ~$1300 in direct sales and ~$1000 in printing costs, and at least that aspect of it would have been profitable.) Another detail which comes up: Publishing digital-only is much more likely to be profitable for me, even when only a few copies sell.

Really, because only a few copies sell.

I can pretend that “someday I’ll reach a bigger paying audience”, and maybe I will, but I can’t count on it. I need to make decisions based on reality. Right now the reality is that I have a few, very dedicated readers and supporters (the so-called “true fans”) and a whole lot of readers who are very unlikely to spend anything at all on my work. (And when they do, it isn’t on a paperback.) So: I’ve already begun taking my books “out of print”.

I told LSI to “cancel” my two poetry books (right after publishing Unspecified), which have earned about $70 between them and cost me somewhat over $480, so far. They weren’t making even enough sales to cover the annual Digital Catalog Fees, so I cancelled them. (I’ll have full eBook editions for sale… soon.) I’ll probably cancel all the rest when my LSI reps get back from holiday. I have literally no idea when they’ll stop being listed as available on Amazon and other sites. Right now my poetry books are listed as “temporarily out of stock” on Amazon, even though I cancelled them months ago. Note: I still have plenty of copies available. That actually goes for all my books. I have over 300 books sitting here, waiting for readers. Even after they’re removed from all the bookstores’ databases, I’ll still have them for sale. I’ll work on updating modernevil.com in the new year, too. I’ll probably offer them unsigned for the cover price and signed for a little more, close to what I have now, but my own buy button instead of external links. (Since those links literally never worked for getting sales, anyway.)

What about my future books, you may be wondering? Well, how about digital-first? (Maybe digital-only.) How about digital first, and maybe a Kickstarter or just-straight-painting-sale or maybe a pre-order signup process to see whether there’s any interest in a limited-edition, direct-only, paper version of the book (probably hardback). If I’m not doing distribution, if each paper book is limited edition from copy one, the whole thing gets turned on its head, from price to quality to design. Offset printing still won’t make sense until/unless I get that theoretical larger-audience, but I can design a very nice hardback edition for LSI to print just for me and my readers. If I don’t have to give a retailer 50% (or more) off the top of every sale, even POD hardbacks can be reasonable prices. If I’m producing collector’s items, even relatively affordable ones, even just selling a few can make me a lot more money than I’ve been getting from book sales. It’ll be a sort of cautious Freemium model. Less-popular books will make most of their money from digital, more-popular books will make vastly more money from paper books, and I’ll still probably make more money from art than from books for years to come. (These aren’t final numbers, but it looks like for 2011 I’ll have had a little over $700 in book sales, a little over $1400 in art sales, and a little over $1600 in expenses. Profitable again, which is good, but not by a whole lot. If I just get an order of magnitude more successful, I might actually have to think about things like paying quarterly estimated taxes! In the meantime, I’m generally happy where I’m at.)

I’m going to play around with numbers a lot more in the next few weeks. Keep your eyes out for a new set of quarterly (and end-of-year) download numbers, with some interesting spikes, some time next month. I’ve actually got about 3 months of bookkeeping I’ve got to go through; I’ve been slacking. (The numbers above are all estimates; I have numbers, I just haven’t got them all in the right places for business purposes, yet.) I’ll also want to run all the numbers I can think of on … everything I’ve been talking about. And some projections into the new year.

Oh, and I’ve got to finish writing those books. I’ve not been working on them in the last week or two, partially because sitting down every day to grind out more chapters was beginning to feel more like work and less like something I wanted to be doing – and I want to write these books. So I’m taking most of the money/expenses out of my business, and I’m taking most of the pressure off my process, and I think I’ll be better off for it. In fact, I think my business will be more successful, financially, and I’ll personally be more successful, creatively and emotionally. Win, win, win, and win for anyone who likes reading my books, too.

Being pro-NaNoWriMo

(Copied from something I just posted to Google+)

I think most of the people who find themselves anti-NaNoWriMo need to step back and figure out what they really have problems with, and try to focus on those things.

Be pro-editing, if it’s unedited and poorly edited books that bother you.

Encourage and educate people re: using Circles more effectively, to share posts only with those who are interested, if you don’t like your social media to be full of NaNo updates Oct-Dec.

Maybe just try to realize that there are power laws at play: Roughly/over 80% who attempt NaNoWriMo don’t finish (not even the word count, let alone an ending), and after doing it for ten years I can tell you that around 80% of those who do finish (as well as nearly everyone who doesn’t) have no interest in publishing their books – often they barely want it seen beyond their family/friends, if anyone. Anecdotally, I’d say that of the fraction of a fraction who have any intention of their book seeing the light of day, probably 80%+ know they need to spend time editing & polishing it (which is why NaNoEdMo exists, since much of the same need-a-goal-and-deadline still applies to any non-dayjob activity for a lot of people).

Oh, and then there’s the fact that, for me and most everyone I know who enjoys NaNoWriMo, it’s primarily about being social and having fun meeting other like-minded people while we all work on our own creative projects. Even the most curmudgeonly-anti-NaNoWriMo people I know tend to encourage activity of the same description, as long as it isn’t NaNoWriMo. Being social and collaborative and creative and building a network of thousands of local community groups all doing the same thing, all over the world, each allowing people to express themselves and make and meet creative goals and meet new people… Who cares if a tiny fraction of the creative work that comes out of it is professional quality? Do you rag on your grandmother’s knitting circle for not being aware of the market realities of the textile industry? Get a grip. Stop being anti- and find a way to be pro-.

NaNoWriMo ’11, et cetera

Been quiet around here, lately. It’s November, which means NaNoWriMo. This year is my tenth year participating in NaNoWriMo, and at this point it’s my sixth win, though I didn’t meet my personal goal. As I’ve written about before, I’m working on two new novels, a duology. Two books set in the same world, around the same time, but telling two different stories to illuminate different perspectives on a sort of SciFi/Paranormal/Dystopian/Utopian/Vampire world I’ve been working on for about the last year; I’d set myself the goal of writing both books this month, for NaNoWriMo. (Technically, the goal is to write any one novel, of at least fifty thousand words, between November 1st and November 30th. That’s relatively easy for me, so depending on what else I’m doing, I like to set myself variations on the goal, though I’ve never actually succeeded when I set the goal at writing two books.)

When I started outlining the first book, a few days before November, I determined that at least the first book wanted to be over 65k words. Because of what I’m planning on doing with them, I want the books to be roughly the same length. Consequently, my word count goal for the month was set at, roughly, one hundred and thirty thousand words. Which is about 4,334 words/day, every day. I kept up a pretty good pace for the first week, almost ten days, then began to taper off. This was largely due to difficult things taking place in the story, but once I’d lost my momentum, around 50k words, actually, I wasn’t able to regain it. Different things kept happening, coming up, interrupting, et cetera. I didn’t finish the first book, yet. I wrote to the point that one of the main characters from the other book is introduced – I need to know what he’s like, what he’s been going through, where he’s at, and how the events about to take place in Sophia’s story are going to affect Emily in hers before I can write them. So I stopped that one and started working on the other.

The outline for that one seemed to imply that it wants to be shorter, which is especially frustrating since Sophia’s story seems to have gone even longer, currently on track for somewhat over 70k words. We’ll have to wait and see how that one actually ends up, but so far the chapters want to be short, too, which is frustrating – but maybe later chapters will want to be longer. Meh. I’m sure it’ll all work out alright. When I get around to writing it. Probably slowly over the next month or so. I predict a lot of workdays writing. Maybe not 5k-10k words/day, but some.

It’s more important to me to get the books written well than to stress out over any artificial deadlines. I recently determined that, by the time I’m done working on these two books, I’ll have spent around a thousand hours on them, between research, planning, writing, editing, recording/editing, and publishing them. Trying to rush any part of the process for books I’m investing so much time in seems inappropriate. So, I’m trying to get back into the right frame of mind for writing these books. This one is a tough one, for a whole stack of reasons I’ve mentioned on Google+ as I run into them, but I’m dedicated to doing it, and doing it well.

Anyway, I’m over 60k words so far on the novels this month, so I’m a “winner” of NaNoWriMo. I may write more this week, depending on what else is going on, perhaps another 10k-20k words… but I don’t expect to finish the first drafts of the two novels for at least several more weeks. If you’re interested in helping me with them, in becoming a ‘Beta Reader’ of my unfinished books, to give me feedback on them before I move into the final editing/layout/recording stages, comment or email me, and I’ll add you to the list, then send you copies of the books when I’m finished writing them.

Different approaches to writing

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is coming up pretty fast here, again. This will be my 10th year participating – I haven’t missed a year since I first tried (and won, in 8 days and after two false starts, not to mention taking on the role of Phoenix ML & getting press coverage in 2 cities) in 2002. (No, I haven’t been an ML since; in 2003 I was out-of-region, and when I came back in 2004 Phoenix had 2 good MLs) I’m not sure I’ll be anywhere near following the “rules” of NaNoWriMo this year, though I rarely do, because the writing project in front of me, as I keep mentioning, is a dystopian duology (with vampires) which I’ve been thinking about and researching/studying-for all year – that’s two books to write, I don’t know how long each will be (probably longer than 50k words apiece), and it doesn’t particularly matter to me whether I begin and end writing them in November.

Anyway, as happens in NaNoWriMo circles as November approaches, a familiar meme has arisen in recent discussions with friends and family members; the idea of pantser vs. plotter (or pantser vs. planner – interestingly, I like both plotter and planner as words, but not pantser at all, so having a choice between two frustrating formations is worse than having no choice at all?). For those of you not in the know, this is a question of whether one writes “by the seat of their pants” or one plans/plots out their book ahead of time.

My sister, who was recently named one of the MLs of the Phoenix region (after only 1 year’s participation!), attended a pre-planning meeting with several other Phoenix NaNoWriMo participants a couple of weeks ago. One of the things which frustrated her was their assertion (the other writers in the group) that if you weren’t planning out every little detail of your books ahead of time, down to a minute level, you were a “pantser”. My sister doesn’t feel like a pantser; she has a plot laid out, outlines her chapters, and has a firm grasp on what her book is about, who the characters are, and what they’ve got to go through. She and I agree that a pantser doesn’t really have all those things. A real pantser probably doesn’t have any of those things. I’ve done that several times, myself, sitting down in front of a blank page/screen with literally no plan -no characters, no plot, no setting, no theme, nothing at all but the blank canvas of the page in front of me and my imagination behind me- and watched a book flow through me and onto the page as if by magic. When it works, it works splendidly. I often, in that situation, find myself startled, surprised, and delighted as I read the words a sentence or two behind where my hands are working and learn what happens next only after I’ve written it. In fact, in my most-planned novels, the full outline for the book and the plot and the characters and the conflicts, the chapter-by-chapter breakdown of events and pacing … has all fit on the front of one piece of paper… but has been a hundred times more planning than the books I’ve “pantsed”, with structure, length, pacing, and character arcs all carefully crafted ahead of time and the rest of the story and details fleshed in as I wrote. But I always knew where I was and where I needed to be and in how many words and what route to take, and I considered myself a planner, even if the exact words to get there, the characters’ exact thoughts and dialog and a lot of the specifics were unknown to me until I wrote them.

Which leads me around to what I wanted to post about tonight; I think the line between pantsers and planners is really a false division. Divided that way, it certainly isn’t black and white, and the division isn’t particularly helpful or useful. I know that part of my sister’s reaction to the other writers’ views (and the way they express those views) is because they believe that plotting is superior to pantsing, that their way of plotting is the right way, and everyone else isn’t as good at writing. I’ve certainly met plenty of writers who hold similar views, in my time. It’s a position I believe is artificially supported by the weight of words about writing and how to write which have been published (I include blogging as publishing, here), in that the plotters and the planners, the ones who have a formula, a method, or a list of rules or guidelines they follow, are the ones who can most easily document those ideas about “how to write” – whereas the pantsers, especially the real pansters like I sometimes am, when they try to tell you (or write down) “how to write” have nothing to say, or only something vague, quasi-mystical, and often poorly understood (both by the one trying to share and those trying to learn). So the plotters write more and write more often about “how to write”, and what they write is easier to simply follow/obey, and over time it is this disparity in documentation which has given the plotters the veneer of being “right”. And which has, thus, created an us/them mentality and needless strife amongst authors who feel they aren’t really authors, or aren’t doing things “right” or don’t belong, somehow.

Here’s what I think is a better way of looking at it, a better question to address what is basically the same idea, but which I hope paints a more full picture and which paints different ways of storytelling as equally valid. This is not the complete picture, but consider: Are you engineering a story, or are you growing a story?

When I write, I’m growing a story. Sometimes I’ll build a lattice (an outline) to give the story the support it needs to grow in a particular direction, but the real shape of the story is not something under my direct/conscious control. I usually get to pick the seeds from which the story grows, but the stories then grow and change and thrive (or wither) according to their own designs. My job is to give the story a healthy environment in which to grow, to give it the characters and settings (and conflicts, et cetera) it requires, to prune it here and there, and mostly to stay out of its way and enjoy watching it unfold and expand according to its natural beauty.

Other writers, especially toward the more precise end of the plotting spectrum, prefer to engineer a story. Before they begin writing they create a detailed schematic (outlines, chapter details and synopses, notes, and more), a parts list (characters, usually with full biographies, settings, props and gadgets, et cetera), planning committee approval (careful, detailed world-building, sometimes writing/researching centuries of history and family lineages and architectural details of buildings and drawing/finding maps), and on and on so that, when the time comes to finally begin writing, nothing will be left to question. Often these writers are carefully engineering their stories to fit a very specific set of guidelines, ranging from economic viability in traditional publishing markets and established genre conventions to trying to express a particular political point of view or express a theme which is important to them.

When growing a story from the seeds of the theme and genre and characters and settings of your choice, there’s always the possibility that things won’t go as planned: That the book will be too long, or too short, to be considered by traditional publishers. That it won’t strictly adhere to the established conventions of a single genre, and will have trouble finding an audience because of it. That the characters will do unexpected things, take the story in unexpected directions, introduce new themes and come up with an ending you never imagined. Sometimes it turns out wonderful, sometimes you can get a publishing deal, or find an audience, or express a theme you didn’t even realize you cared so much about, in spite of all the randomness and unpredictability of growing a story. Other times you wish you were a story-engineer, because they at least seem to have some real control over their stories.

I can’t write as much, or as well, or as accurately, about those who engineer their stories, since I usually don’t. As I said earlier, my most-planned books have had little more than a lattice pointing the right direction and a few sketches guiding the placement of the seeds; when I try to engineer a story, or really even consider engineering a story, I get a little sick. (Nowhere near as bad as when I try to engage in Marketing; just a little … unwell.) Planning out every little thing, every scene in every chapter, every action, interaction, motivation and development, knowing it all in advance… just doesn’t work for me. (It occurs to me that the same is true, generally, of my life.) So I’ll not attempt it. There are already a lot of words out there about how to engineer a story, and what you’ll get when you do.

I’m just suggesting that the pantser/plotter division doesn’t really fit as well as that between engineering a story and growing a story. (Though there are positions even beyond those two, in this shape; the real pantser is probably more exploring a story; wandering around sniffing wildflowers, observing the shape of wild stories in their natural habitat, not really gardening or growing, and certainly not designing and constructing, but discovering and observing.) Every method of getting to your stories is a good one, as long as the result is a story told by you in the way which was right for you. Don’t let anyone try to get you down about being a grower of stories, or an engineer, or a wandering explorer. Embrace who you are and get good at it.

Remember, you won’t get any better at gardening by practicing drafting engineering schematics, and you won’t get any better at requisitioning parts and getting past the planning committee by wandering in a field of wildflowers. Try different things out, figure out what fits, and commit.