Turning 5 books into 1

In case you don’t follow me on Facebook and Google+, one of the projects I’ve been considering (in the midst of my existential crisis) is a Revised, Omnibus release synthesized from the full text of all five books in the Lost and Not Found universe (Lost and Not Found, Forget What You Can’t Remember, More Lost Memories, Cheating, Death, and the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut) … a project I’ve apparently started working on, already. In fact, I’ve been tinkering with it, off and on, for a few days now.

I’m (nearly) done putting all the scenes from all five books of the Lost and Not Found universe into (mostly) chronological order. Looking at how things are coming together, a new concern is that readers won’t be able to follow all the jumping around; it was relatively limited within each book, but for a 86k-word section in the middle, there are jumps across all the books and stories, mixed together. Some of the scenes are just a couple hundred words.

In a premium hardback edition, I could use different fonts & styles and even extra info in the margins to communicate setting and character changes. In an eBook, which is really just one long stream of text, any clarifying information would fall in between paragraphs/scenes, potentially interrupting what little flow the story retains in this configuration. I mean, what we’re talking about is things like:

* * * Meanwhile, in Denver… * * *

And then the next scene. Or “Later” instead of “Meanwhile” when it’s a time break instead of just a location break. Except then if the following scene is with a different set of characters in the same setting (i.e.: a scene break from the original book, rather than a break between what had been separate books), it would be something like:

* * * Elsewhere in Denver… * * *

And I think that very quickly it would give the whole thing a campy feel. Worse, it introduces another set of problems, where a lot of things are taking place in non-specific locations.

Gha. I’ll try just using a simple break marker (* * * or such) and hope my readers are smart enough to figure out what’s going on. Next problem to tackle: Editing/revising the text, not just to make it coherent in synthesized form, but to improve on it, generally, as almost half of the text was written a over a decade ago, and I’ve certainly improved as a writer/author/storyteller since then. I’ll also double-check for continuity problems, but I’m extremely confident that I won’t find any.

Also, it occurred to me as I was writing this that, if I put this book out there, it will technically be my 20th book. In the Scrivener file I’ve created to put it all together, I’ve tentatively titled it More Than Lost: An Omnibus Revised version of the first five books in the Lost and Not Found universe.

I suppose coming up with a way to summarize a ~257k-word amalgam of 5+ stories in 400 characters or less is going to be pretty challenging, too…

What’s the point?

I thought of another way to put the question. The question I don’t know the answer to. Not for most of my books, not for most of the books I’ve ever read or ever wanted to read. “What’s the point?” What was the point in writing this book? What’s the point in reading this book?

Some authors, I know, have real answers to these questions. Very real, very specific answers. They know what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and why readers should be involved.

For me, most of the time, the closest answer I have is something like, “I dunno, it was just an idea I had.”

Like, tonight my wife and I got to see an advance screening of World War Z. (No, I haven’t read the book yet; back in 2009 when I was preparing to write Cheating, Death, people who owned it kept promising to lend it to me, then it never turned up… and then I was burned out on zombie books after reading so many others and writing my own.) The zombies in WWZ are fast, and more importantly the incubation period, the time between being bitten and being a fast-running zombie, screaming and running after the living, is ridiculously fast. Twelve seconds or so. And just the thought of it reminded me of, and gave me the urge to return to the other zombie stories I had an idea for back in 2009, where the first premise was for a mutated zombie virus with a very long/slow incubation time a la HIV turning into AIDS. Where someone could be exposed to the zombie virus and not show any symptoms for months, years, even decades, perhaps not even being aware they’d been exposed. So very different from WWZ’s zombies.

It had apparently been so long since I set the project aside that when I mentioned it on the car ride home, my wife couldn’t recall the ideas at all—and they had been extensive. At least three books, and possibly a three-book series followed by two tangential sequels, where the last of any of them is the one which covers my first set of ideas for the world. My world-building to get to the mutated, slow zombie virus ended up requiring a complete rewrite of history from about WWI on, and in the Fall of 2009 and the first half of 2010 I spent a fair amount of time doing historical and biographical research toward that project. (Technically, this is part of why my books-per-year average is so low, and my apparent-hours-worked looks so low; I spent about eight months working toward a project which has yet to come to fruition, much like the way I spent most of the last year working toward a Dragons’ Truth rewrite I’ll likely never do.) I determined that the amount of research it would require to do as well as I thought I wanted to do it was more than I was prepared to do (especially with the time requirements I was facing; the “need” to keep putting out two to four books a year, every year, and to always have something new to show at Comicon), and I set the project semi-permanently aside. I mean, I was projecting that it would take me two to four years to get the first book out, which was the inverse of the rate I’d set myself at working.

Anyway, thinking about that project, then describing it all again for my wife tonight, got me almost feeling like I really wanted to unearth the project and get back to work on it. Except that describing it also brought up the same sorts of problems I was going into last night: It isn’t really about anything, not any one thing. There’s no single, central theme. There’s no point to it. It’s just a bunch of ideas I had, which I kinda liked. Sure, I wanted to address ideas like environmentalism, functional communism, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic mixing and mutual appreciation (more than plain tolerance, or silly hatred), international cooperation, sexually transmitted diseases, coming-of-age personal growth, fear of ‘otherness’ (specifically fear of becoming the ‘other’ in contrast to being truly oneself, esp. re: coming-of-age), and how to cope with the existence of religions whose beliefs and/or believers one believes to be dangerous (literally and/or figuratively)… in addition to a bunch of neat/interesting/different thoughts I wanted to explore around the existence/knowledge of zombies in a functional, modern society, but there isn’t really a point. It’s all just … some ideas I had, which I thought were kinda neat. Which I thought might make a book or three (or four, or five).

Yes, I believe in things like the possibility of running a modern world entirely on free/renewable energy resources, and that communism, separate from totalitarianism, is a functional economic system, but the book would not exist to try to convince anyone of those things; not any more than the point of writing a steampunk story is to convince the reader that they ought to convert their car to run on burning coal and steam power. Putting the protagonist of one of the stories through an STD scare isn’t intended as a way to convince readers to practice safe sex, it’s just a way to explore the idea that if a zombie virus mutated to be carried/transmissible for a long time before killing & reanimating the host, it would have different effects on society and culture than are explored in traditional zombie narratives.

…and I guess that’s the closest thing I usually have to a point: The point of writing (or reading) the story is to explore these ideas I had. Not necessarily to entertain, or to make money, or even to fit in with a particular genre or style, but simply to explore some ideas. It’s “speculative fiction” in its purest form, I suppose, in that the entire point of the exercise is to chase the tail of “what if?”

“What if ‘The Death Noodle Glitterfairy Robot Saga’ was a thing which existed?”

“What if a child vampire were asked to donate her organs to save living children’s lives?”

“What if you could literally buy time?”

And I don’t always have even that much. A fair portion of my books have begun with little more than a random sentence on a blank page followed by a few thousand answers to the question “And then what happened?” There’s no “why” it happened, why it was written. Just “this happened, then that happened, then the other thing happened,” and so on.

So… Is that enough? Is ‘exploring ideas’ a good reason to write and/or read a book? Without regard for any other reasons, purpose, or point?

I have the impression (mostly from what people write about writing) that it isn’t. That people don’t believe it’s enough. That they want, or at least expect, stories to do more.

Basic doubts; have I written this here before?

I know I’ve written all this down before, in one form or another. I believe the most recent time was in a draft of the book I was going to put together of my experiences with writing and publishing books, the one which never got off the ground. Maybe I’ll write that one next, now that I’ve a full decade of experience publishing books, and make it my 20th published book. Maybe not.

(Right now, I warn you, I’m at a point of my depression where the strongest urge is to give up everything. To give up on everything. To quit. To quit writing, painting, creating. To quit trying. To quit living. So perhaps that’s a lens with which to view the following, possibly quite dismal, long (warning: over 5k words long), rambling post inspired by doubts about my writing.)

That’s a good enough place to start, I suppose: A decade writing novels. Two decades seriously creating and sharing my stories with those around me. Over a dozen novels. Roughly twenty complete books to my name; more than that if you count all the different versions, editions, and compilations I’ve put out over the years.

All self-published. From the days of my youth, when I would pass around floppy disks or pages printed on our dot-matrix printers to get the stories into my friends’ hands (I remember I even faxed a story, one time), I have always been the primary distributor of my own words. For the first five years I had my novels available, they were only really available through my own website. When I finally “got serious” and bought ISBNs and signed up with a major printer and distributor in 2007, they still weren’t actually in book stores; people found out about them because of direct contact with me. Most people ordered them directly from me.

I never tried to be “traditionally published.” Literally never tried. I’ve never submitted my written work to a publisher, or agent, and until last year I’d never submitted anything to any contests, either. (Technically, a high school teacher once submitted a short essay I wrote (along with every other classmate’s essays) to a contest, and mine got an “honorable mention” and published; I tend to dismiss this since it was not my choice to submit it.) I did not choose to publish my own works because I had tried-and-failed the traditional route; I never set foot on the traditional route. There was a period, around 2004-2005, where I considered heading that way, studied what needed to be done, the correct order of things, and then my life broke… and when I was reassembled-enough to move forward, I was not strong enough to face those challenges.

There is a certain popular wisdom, risen up from the modern wave of “independent publishing”, which holds that for self-published authors (somehow more so than for traditionally-published authors), their market success will be the true measure of their books. If their work is good, they say, it will find its audience—without regard for who published it. The corollary, that if the work is no good it will simply not sell, is assumed. Assumed, and applied in reverse, especially in my doubts: That if a book does not sell well, it must be shit. Continue reading Basic doubts; have I written this here before?

Site redesigns

Pardon our dust, as the saying goes.

I’ve got to redesign all my websites. It’s been stressing me out, when I should be calming further down. Con is over, the last book is out, the house is bought and lived-in, I was coming back down from 5+ months of insanity-level anxiety, and bumped into the stress of this on the way back down. Stress because of what I talked about months ago (years ago?), how I haven’t done any serious web development in years and years and the world has moved on and I don’t know how to do a good job, any more.

And I’ve got to get the sites redesigned, now. This is the time. The lull between books (and before spending hours setting up the old style of pages for the new book, just to have to re-do them in the new style in a little while), the short time before Google turns off Checkout (this Fall), the first mental break I’ve had since my last mental breakdown (last Fall); this is the time to do it.

After several days of sitting, staring, sketching, studying, reading through code with glazed-over eyes until I couldn’t take it any more (and either went to lay down and cry, or bootcamped over to Windows to play SimCity), I figured out what I ought to do first. Before trying to re-design modernevil.com using semi-modern web design techniques and philosophies, likely having a half-functional site for several days while I futz about and try to work things out, I’m going to do most of the futzing over here. On my blog. Because it’s just a blog, right? It’s not like it’s my business; it’s just my heart and my soul in my words. If it looks a little funny, or doesn’t quite work the way it should, that’s not out of character, now is it?

Though with any luck, and with my extremely-small-audience, few if any people will even notice anything going wrong as I screw around with things. Wish me luck!

Updated @2AM: That’s about all I can handle, tonight. It’s pretty close to where I wanted to take this site. Minimalist, easy to read, focused on the text, no comments… I’ll have to think awhile longer about modernevil.com, but I think I’m on track, here. The key thing over there is reducing from almost a hundred pages to twenty-five or so; the per-page design, then, must serve first the new information architecture in addition to the simple/minimalist aesthetic you see here.

I’m supposed to be dieting, but I think I’m going to go eat all the cookies and watch Arrested Development (while thinking about non-linear, limited-POV storytelling, which was the whole reason I watched the first 3 seasons this month).

Publishing Virtual Danger

Well, the fundraiser for Virtual Danger is over, now, and it was a stressful yet resounding success. I mentioned it here when the fundraiser began, I think. Stressful in large part because it went right up to the last day looking like it wouldn’t even come close to the goal, even while the costs of the project continued to increase. My initial $300 goal was based on just the cost of setting up and printing Virtual Danger, but then I ordered DNGR T-Shirts for my wife and I to wear at Phoenix Comicon (and otherwise), which cost me about $60, and I ordered a bunch of DNGR business cards to hand out to people, which linked back to http://modernevil.com/DNGR/, which explains a bit about who/what DNGR is, links to the book, and lists & encourages derivative works (currently just the one song, but I’m hoping it’ll be more before PHXCC’13)—cards to give out myself, but also to give out to other people who bought the shirts (With an extra push the day after the fundraiser ended, based on a great/surprise Zazzle coupon code, there will soon be 6 people with DNGR T-Shirts in their wardrobes.) or otherwise might want to spread the word about DNGR.

I ran all the numbers today (okay, this is pen-and-paper rough math stuff; I won’t have all the real numbers until the end of the month) and it looks like I got $506.76 (after cc/processing fees) from 7 contributors (the 8th contribution was for a different project; don’t ask, but thanks again, if you’re reading this!) who paid for 8 copies of the eBook, 6 copies of the signed paperback, 2 DNGR T-Shirts (the other two were sold at cost, after the fundraiser, and are not included in these numbers), 1 copy of the Virtual Danger audiobook on MP3 CD, and 1 new work of art. After paying for setup of the paperback, printing 50 copies, getting the shirts made, the cards ordered, and paying to have the paperback listed in bookstore databases (i.e.: getting it on Amazon, et cetera), plus the cost of producing the MP3 CD, the (estimated) raw materials for the painting, and the cost of the ISBNs I’ve assigned to the eBook & paperback, the Virtual Danger fundraiser looks to have come out ~$37 in the black.

This is a very good thing, even if it is a little close. This means that any and all money I earn from selling the remaining 43 copies (6 for backers, 1 for Library of Congress) is (effectively) pure profit. I’ve listed the book at $12.99 for bookstores, but since the cost of this set is already paid, I’m planning on charging $10 for direct sales (same as the fundraiser; $5 for the eBook, $10 more to add the signed paperback)—for example, at PHXCC’13. Same for eBooks and audiobooks; all the revenue which makes it to me will be profit. Profit is good, but from my perspective it feels a lot better to know that even if this book completely fails to find readers, even if not a single other copy sells, it hasn’t cost me anything (financially). It isn’t a loss. I have books which are still at a lossVirtual Danger is not one of them, and this is a very, very good thing.

((As an aside, there was a small problem with one of the files I uploaded to LSI, and I had to re-submit it. Something I’ve never had to do before, they wanted me to “flatten” the image before saving to PDF. No trouble, took but a minute, yet … they may charge me an extra $40 for re-submitting the file, and then Virtual Danger is … well, a bit in the red. Like, sell one more copy and we’re back in the black, red, but red nonetheless. It is not my current expectation to be assessed this fee, but even if I am, the book is still in good shape. I’m pretty sure I can swing one copy.))

Anyway, I sent the files to Lightning Source (LSI) on Sunday as planned, it got approved even earlier than expected (today, rather than tomorrow), and my order for 50 copies went through this afternoon. Hopefully it won’t take them too long to print them. Could be anywhere from one day to one week, in my experience. Then there’s waiting a week for UPS Ground shipping. And then, the exciting moment when the book is in my hands for the first time, in print. Still a nice feeling, that. Anyway, that means they’ll be here some time between the 15th and the 21st of this month, which is cutting it a little close, since I’ll be “loading in” for PHXCC at the convention center on the 22nd, and the convention is open to the public on the 23rd. I love it when a plan comes together. I also love that I’ve got enough experience with this whole process to be able to schedule things so closely without real fear of random errors; I know how long each step takes, and I know how to do my work to get excellent and timely results.

On the “every copy sold is profit” note, if Virtual Danger does do well, it should mean I won’t have to run a fundraiser for my next book. In fact, if I hadn’t put all our money (including all the money Modern Evil Press earned from sales of Never Let the Right One Go last year) into buying and furnishing this house, I wouldn’t have had to run a fundraiser this time, either. There was plenty of profit from sales of the limited edition hardcover book to cover publishing one or two new paperbacks (or part of a computer upgrade), and if/when we can afford to pay my business back, it ought to be in the black for quite a while.

Some of that depends on how PHXCC’13 goes, of course. Pretending that they’ll keep prices the same for another year, it’ll cost me another ~$250 to have a Small Press table again, next year. If I don’t earn at least that much revenue at con, I certainly won’t consider returning, and if I just barely earn that much, I probably won’t consider returning. Half (or more) of my books aren’t at a point of “pure profit”, yet, so sales of things like, say, my poetry books, effectively count as $0 toward paying for the table. Most of my other books are priced between $8 and $15, but only represent $2-$4 profit applicable toward table fees. Selling the last 6 remaining copies of Never Let the Right One Go at full price covers most of it (and is effectively ‘pure’ profit), but the first 8+ Untrue Trilogies I sell contribute almost nothing. So there’s always math to do.

Importantly, I currently have no idea what I’m going to be doing over the next year, or whether it’ll be something that could even be sold at PHXCC’14. If I spend the next year crafting video games, or an interactive novel, or just working on my art, I might not have any new physical product to offer. If I happen to write another book or two, great, that’s easy. If I actually follow through on on the the board game ideas I’ve been rolling around, that might be very popular at Comicon (but represents a massive change in skill sets, manufacturing and distribution partners, and scale of capital outlay), and could become my best (or worst) year yet. Right now, I have no firm idea where I’ll be (creatively) a year from now, so it’s hard to say whether paying for a booth next year is a particularly good idea. Worst case would be showing up with the same exact inventory as I leave con with this year, and hoping to find enough new readers/buyers to make it worth my while, I suppose.

Coming back to the subject of Virtual Danger and profitability, I’m saying that, while it’s nice to think that 43 copies of the paperback will sell at $10 each and earn me $430 to put toward another book, the reality is that I have other overhead costs to cover. Not including Comicon, I have hundreds of dollars a year of overhead (reduced as much as possible, already) above and beyond the costs of publishing new books; web hosting, business licenses, office supplies, et cetera. Some of the $430 would have to go toward re-ordering Virtual Danger, as well, same as I just re-ordered Cheating, Death. Part of it would almost certainly go toward another Comicon table. …and this is why I need to do fundraisers. This, and the fact that my average book seems to sell fewer than a dozen copies in its first year (and fewer thereafter), so it’s more likely that Virtual Danger will earn $100 or $200 than the $430 or $1k needed to think about paying for the next book without a fundraiser.

*sigh*

Anyway, it’s still exciting to have a new book coming out, and doubly so to have it be coming out already profitable. Thanks to all the people who supported the project financially, and everyone else who has offered their help along the way. Most of this wouldn’t be possible without the lot of you.