Category: Journal

The possibilities of focus

I’ve been so scatterbrained, lately. Depressed, for sure, which has led to months without significant work, but which has also led to this recent paucity of focus. I spent most of 2011 reading, researching, and planning toward writing my vampire duology, with the intention of being able to write both books rather quickly – possibly within November, for NaNoWriMo. I wrote roughly half of the two books (most of one, and part of the other) in November, and have eked out another 6 chapters or so for them since then, but I still have about 20 chapters remaining to write.

There’s so much work yet to be done on these books. Beyond the 60+ good hours of writing it will take to finish the first drafts, there’s initial editing so I can send to my Beta Readers, then days or weeks waiting for them to get back to me with their feedback, then re-writes and edits based on that feedback and possibly (if I can convince anyone to re-read the books so quickly) a second round of the same. Once I’ve got the basic text in good shape I’ve got to do another close read (copyediting) before I begin recording the audio version – a step which always finds new errors and awkward sentences/dialogue in the text, and which I prefer to do before publishing, when possible. I’ve got to do the interior layout, which shouldn’t be too difficult at this point and with all the experience I have, but I’ve also got to design the cover in three ways, for each individual eBook as well as for the paper/limited-edition/flipbook, hopefully all as a single image. I’ve got to do fundraising (possibly via Kickstarter) to pay for the paper edition, which almost certainly takes weeks or more. Actually podcasting the audio version may take up to a year, though it’s the hundreds of hours of recording, editing, and assembling them which I’ll want to have done before publication. After all that, getting the eBooks ready will be a snap.

Why am I thinking about all this? I just noticed January has slipped away, almost without my notice, and February is at hand. Tomorrow I’ll process the data on January eBook sales and (possibly) update the prices on some of my books/eBooks, according to the formula I rolled out at the start of the year. This has reminded me that Phoenix Comicon is coming up at the end of May; hopefully the significantly lower prices this model affords my paperbacks will result in increased sales at Comicon. This has led me inexorably to the idea that, if possible, I’d like to have my vampire duology flipbook on hand and for sale at the Phoenix Comicon. Which led to thinking about everything in that last paragraph, and more.

Part of the ‘more’ is all the other projects I’ve been working on lately, in my lack of focus, especially the interactive book on writing and publishing. I mentioned on Google+ last night that, in addition to beginning to write that book, I spent some time mapping out its (quite complex) hypertext structure; it’s intended to be read in a non-linear way, like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book as well as a cross between a memoir and a how-to guide for independent writing and publishing, and it’s been percolating up through my mind for years. At the current stage of mapping and note-making, I’ve already got forty-plus chapters/chunks started; if no more occur to me, and they’re each the 1500+word chunks they’ve been becoming so far, it’s already shaping up to be book-length, complex, and interesting. I’ve got at least another 60 hours of work just writing the thing, and possibly over 100 hours, the way it’s been going.

(I won’t even mention each of the other projects I’ve had queueing up and being worked on by my scattered thoughts and efforts, except to say that if I continue on as I am, none of them -certainly not the vampire books- will be finished by Comicon.)

According to my calculations, if I seriously applied myself, I could finish the first draft of the vampire duology in six or eight solid days of work, since I’ve already got it all well-planned and developed. The same is roughly true of the book on publishing; six to ten long, hard days of dedicated work and I could have a first draft complete, from where I’ve already got it. The work would be intense, draining work, and would require me to (somehow) overcome the worst elements of my own insanity; what I have been trying to figure out is whether, if I actually applied myself and accomplished those things, would I have the time needed to get either (or preferably both) projects ready for sale in time for Phoenix Comicon. All that extra work I listed off in the second paragraph – can it be completed and the finished books delivered to my hands before the end of May? And if so, is it worth it to me to try to do so?

If I set myself to these tasks/goals, to this deadline, the aspect most at risk for being potentially short-changed is the editing/rewrites. Getting people, even family and close friends, to read a single book and give feedback (even just basic spelling & grammar, to say nothing of content) in as little as a week or two tends to be a huge fight and to carry a significant attrition rate. I dread sending out two (or worse, three) books with the intention of getting meaningful feedback on any limited timeline, for free. I don’t know how long professional editors would take to do the work, but I know I can’t afford such a thing right now. There are some other parts of the work I can accomplish while waiting for feedback, such as cover design, or working on the other title, but if I expect to incorporate any meaningful changes to the text, the bigger time-sink of recording the audiobook has to wait. I can probably start fundraising before completing the final edits of the text, which helps even out the timeline, some.

Let’s see what the hard deadline would be… Phoenix Comicon runs May 24-27 (Memorial Day Weekend, except without the Memorial Day), which means I’d want to have any items for sale there on hand no later than Tuesday the 22nd, for booth setup Wednesday. LSI typically takes about a week from when I send them the files before they approve a title for printing, then another 3-5 days to print, then I have them shipped via UPS Ground (because shipping heavy things like cases of books any faster is prohibitively expensive), so to be conservative I need to submit the files three weeks before I need the books on hand, at the latest. That means I have to have the book ready for print on or before May 1st.

Yow. 90 days.

If I go mad (in a good, hard-working way) for the next couple/few weeks, I can finish at least the vampire books by the end of next week, and possibly all three books the week after that, and get them to my Beta Readers before mid-February. I’ll need not less than a week after I think I’m done editing the book to work through the audio version, probably at least two weeks, plus time to make final changes to the layouts & text after that, so I should say I need to be done polishing the text by mid-April. That doesn’t sound so bad.

Of course, if I continue to have trouble focusing, trouble writing for long periods, or writing at reasonable rates, even with significant daily work it could take me until mid-March to finish the first drafts. Ugh.

What if I need significant re-writes? These books are important to me. Important that they express what I want them to express, even to casual readers. Not so important that they read like mainstream fiction… they’re not even in the same realm as that. But important to me that they’re good, that they do what they set out to do. Tell the stories they were meant to tell. I don’t know. I don’t really even know how to do re-writes. (Ooh; I’ve just added another chapter/chunk’s beginning to the book on writing/publishing, about my editing/rewriting process, or lack thereof.) If my Beta Readers all come back to me saying something like “we don’t really believe Emily is in love with Nicholas; you have to show it, make us feel it, it isn’t there”, or “we couldn’t buy in to anything Nicholas and his group were doing; it was obvious you disagreed with everything he had to say or tried to do”, I may just have a total breakdown, as that would mean most everything I’ve worked so hard to accomplish (in one of the books) I had failed at, compromising the work straight to the core. I might have to take another year on the re-writes, or I might just publish as-is, with the admission that I’m a shitty writer… I don’t know where my emotional collapse would leave me, after excellent feedback like that. (Although, really, I’m just kidding myself with ideas like that; I have never in my life received feedback of that caliber. I don’t know whether it’s because the people reading my books understand my intent and I’m actually doing what I meant to do, or whether my goals were so far beyond the beyond that no one even know what was wrong, and that I’ve secretly, quietly, been a dismal failure all these years. (On the other hand, based on the comments in the worst of my reviews, the one and two star reviews, the single-sentence reviews, the reviews from people who admit they quit reading in under 50 pages… the things those people hate about them are generally all the things that were so important to me to accomplish, or were at least intentional. Not failures of writing, but failure of readers to appreciate what the author was setting out to do. The polarizing effect of my work has become quite encouraging, lately.)) I feel like time is my enemy, at times.

Still, even with worst-case responses, if I can get any meaningful feedback out of people within a month of sending them my books, even that should give me enough time to accomplish significant rewrites, if necessary. Whole chapters, or plot-lines, could be replaced in the time remaining… So I suppose that’s what I’ll have to do. Start applying myself. Intensely. Finish three books’ first drafts in the next three weeks, and have them ready for publication within the next three months.

I’d be tempted to find some money in the budget to order a bunch of modafinil, but I suspect that, if all goes to plan, I’ll be done (or very nearly done) with the most intense part of the work before the drugs arrived from my international pharmacy. If I didn’t have an unnatural aversion to 1) seeing doctors and 2) dishonesty, I’d be much better off convincing a local doctor to write me a prescription for the stuff, and picking it up at my local pharmacy the same day. Somehow, violating federal and international laws bothers me less than either of the things involved in obtaining modafinil the way I’m supposed to. Oh, well. If I had modafinil on hand, I wouldn’t have even had to question any of this, as getting this level of work done would become nearly trivial. *sigh*

I’d better go get to work.

Debt pay down update, 1/2012

I ran the numbers about a day earlier than I normally do, on 1/30 instead of 1/31, but no payments are going through in the next day, so these numbers are effectively accurate. As I blogged about a year ago, I like to take a snapshot of our debts once a year, at the end of January. I also pay quite close attention to it all year, but these snapshots provide a nice point of comparison to see how much progress is being made year-over-year. In Fall of 2010 I also began keeping a huge spreadsheet with the balance, payment, principal payment, and interest payment for all our debt accounts, as reported on each month’s statements, and have used it to help planning our payment stacking, projected payoffs, budgets, savings, and for forecasting how changes, large purchases, et cetera will affect everything over time. Hooray, spreadsheets. This year is the first year I have a full year’s worth of data in the spreadsheet, so I have an extra number or two to share.

First off, the old numbers: Last year at this time we owed $29,439 in consumer debt (including our auto loan) and $39,840 in student loans, for a total of $69,279 in debt. When I posted last year, we’d just paid off one of our cars; a few months later we sold it to my sister. This year we’ve paid off another credit card, and expect to pay off our remaining car in March – plus we replaced two computers, which died, with an iPad 2 and a new Macbook Pro, and decided to buy an HDTV for my birthday. We’ve been getting far enough ahead on our debt payments that I’ve been able to add line items to the budget for things like future computer replacements, new tires (bought a full set in the Fall) every couple of years, vehicle license tax, and other annual-or-less-frequent expenses we’d always had to treat as an unexpected/emergency expense. This is a huge relief, and it’s nice to see our savings account growing and know that the next time a tire blows out or a computer fails, we’ve literally got money in the bank to pay for repairs or replacements. Not everything is covered by this, yet, but we’re a lot, lot, lot better off now than we once were in not just being able to afford living expenses but to plan for those big, rare costs. Of course, those budget items bit into the debt stacking and are eating the car payments from my sister entirely, so we didn’t pay down our debt as much in the last year as we did the year before. Here are the new numbers: Our outstanding consumer debt (including the car) is $21,855 and we owe $38,797 in student loans, for a total debt of $60,652. This means that since last year, we paid our debt down by $8,627, which is still quite a nice amount, even though it is only 57% of last year’s phenomenal number.

Since I have the spreadsheet full of data, I can also give a few other numbers. For the calendar year of 2011, based on numbers from the statements received in 2011 (which is to say that the following numbers represent a slightly different period and may actually represent several different periods): We paid roughly $10,268 towards the principal owed across all our accounts, and we paid roughly $6,488 in interest. Of that, $2,128 was student loan interest, which is tax deductible. If we want to look on the brightest, most skewed side of life, we can pretend that means we only paid an effective 6.15% interest rate on the $70,795 we owed in January 2011, over the course of 2011. On the other, more pessimistic hand, we paid nearly as much in interest in 2011 as our outstanding debt went down from 1/31/2011 to 1/30/2012. Still, we’re making headway.

Potentially big things ahead: We should hear within the next month (or two…) about whether Mandy’s application for a teach abroad program in Japan was accepted. If it is, this will incur some up-front costs (we’ve already set aside the known program costs) and some large expenses in the late summer (airfare for myself, plus living expenses for the first month there), but on the whole it will be a great experience and a good thing for our budget. Unless the economies of the US and Japan experience some radical and unexpected adjustments in the next couple of years, the pay for the position will comfortably pay for our living expenses in Japan while allowing us to pay down our debt significantly faster than we currently do, even accounting for the cost of currency conversions. If we don’t end up going to Japan, the money we’ve got planned for it will likely go toward taking a couple of road trips this summer, at least to visit Mandy’s family in Wyoming, and possibly to visit the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Florida. Either way, we should still end up paying down our debt by approximately $9k-$11k, or possibly more.

Things change. Things always change. I can’t be certain what the next few years will hold. Barring a lot of unknown unknowns, though, we expect to have our consumer debt paid off by mid-2014, and it looks like the student loan payoff has slipped to mid-2017. These figures are both about six months further out than I was projecting when I posted about all this stuff at this time last year, and it’s because of all the stuff I’ve added to the budget (along with the as-yet-unbudgeted versions of same, such as replacing our computers & tires). A little of it is in “disposable/entertainment” categories, but a lot of it is simply the things we were going to have to pay for anyway but hadn’t managed to plan for before. The tires, the VLT, oil changes & misc. repairs for the car, plus computer upgrades and replacements, plus most of the costs of running my business (web hosting & domain registrations, tax license fees, et cetera, plus a little budget for writing in Starbucks) in case for some reason it stops being profitable… And budgeting appropriately for food, clothes, and entertainment (books, music, movies, games, apps) is important to remaining in the black – we’ve lost over 100lbs between the two of us over the last two years, and the clothes costs kept wreaking havoc with our budget. I think we’ve got everything just-about-balanced now, and mid-2014 isn’t that far away. Being totally debt-free in time for our ten-year wedding anniversary in 2017 will be pretty nice, too.

Maybe to celebrate we’ll take out a mortgage on a house.

Scatterbrained, depressed, and overall doing really well, thanks.

Something’s gone wrong, or has at least changed – if not really, entirely for the worse. In some ways, I’ve experienced a reversal, a sort of reversion to an old problem. From problem to problem, I guess, then back again. The new (old) problem is a lack of focus. I’m scatterbrained.

Much of the time, I don’t even have the focus required to work at all, or to blog, or get much of anything done. For much of the last couple of months, though I’ve spent more time playing video games than most anything else, I’ve even had trouble keeping focus there – generally unable to play for more than a couple of hours at a time before my mind wanted to bounce to some other thing. Yet here and there, for a few minutes or an hour at a time, I have been doing work.

One of the problems with this is that nothing is getting finished, which I may address separately, but looming larger to me right now is the ridiculous number of different projects I’m working on (or procrastinating) in these little bits and pieces. I’ll work for an hour, or a chapter, on the vampire novels I’ve been working on for the last year, then later that day (or the next day – the next time I get any work done) I’ll be spontaneously working on some other thing. Outlining a new serial thriller, writing a chapter of my book on publishing, researching or brainstorming for a story I’m developing about an end to senescence, coming up with apps I want to develop on iOS (beyond the interactive comics I initially had in mind), et cetera. I made a list tonight (partially so I don’t lose track of all the different work I’m doing) and have found at least nine different projects I have at various stages of development. (Not including writing things like this blog post, or any thoughts about getting back into visual art.)

At the same time, and almost certainly related, I’ve been experiencing significant irrational emotional distress. Feeling good and bad at the same time. Happy and grateful for all the good things in my life; years of happy marriage, paying down our debt & being financially comfortable, being in the best shape & health of my adult life, free to do the work I want to do on the schedule my insanity allows without external financial or emotional pressure, and so on. Simultaneously I’m going through extremes of emotional overeating, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, full-body physical pain (yes, this is a symptom of depression), bouts of mania, antisocial urges, and a wide variety of effects relating to my libido, among other expressions of my depression. It’s all quite difficult to be going through.

Good mixed with bad. I stated earlier that this was, in a way, a return to an old problem, and that’s true. Working on more projects at once than I knew how to keep up with was something I struggled with in the middle of the last decade, though I don’t recall having quite so many different (big) things going at once. Then there have been periods where I didn’t have any projects going. Even most of last year feels a bit that way, though I know I was doing the work to prepare myself to write my vampire duology, I also look back and see eight-plus months where I didn’t produce anything obvious: No big word counts, very few paintings, no new audiobooks… Except I’m looking at it from my (most self-effacing) perspective, when I see it that way. In reality I put out multiple new books in the Spring, my podcast didn’t fall silent until Summer, I published my first book by another author in the Fall, and then immediately started the writing part of the work on two new books. Which was mostly one project followed by another. Now I’m back to a weird state of being unable to keep my mind from bouncing between quite a lot of things all at once. Good to have so many things going, but also bad that I can’t seem to keep focus on (and sooner finish) any one of them. Good to find myself so inspired by my life and the world, so full of ideas. Bad that I still feel (mostly, I’m working on it) like I don’t have a cause or a “purpose” or some deep passion driving me and driving my work – I’m not trying to “say something” most of the time, certainly not in any overall way, I’m just … expressing my ideas.

Good and bad. Challenged and successful. Engaged and distracted. Frustrated and content. Happy with my life and on the verge of suicide. All mixed up and exactly how I’m supposed to be.

Also: I’ve begun to suspect that perhaps I secretly live somewhere on Mars, or that I’m natively Martian, or something like that. Left to my body’s natural cycles, I seem to slip around the clock. In the past I’d estimated it was nearly one extra hour per day, that perhaps I was simply running 25-hour days – yet my actual experience seems to tell me it isn’t whole hours. I don’t reliably gain seven hours every week; It’s somewhat less. Mars has a day approximately 24 hours and 40 minutes long. I intend to develop a system for calculating and tracking Martian daylight & seasons in parallel with my own wake/sleep cycles, to see whether there is any correlation. If/when I figure out where on Mars I am (or that I’m actually running at some other regular rate, or a wildly irregular rate, which I also strongly suspect) I’ll be sure to post an update.

my web-based eBooks, and whether to leave them there

You may not be aware of it, but last year I created web-based versions of … looks like seven of my eBooks. It was a significant amount of work to get them set up, because of the way I wanted to do it – I used a wordpress modification which allows readers to comment on every single paragraph individually, and to divide the text into reasonably small “bites” of content. So for books like Cheating, Death I could break it up by chapters (most are almost exactly 2,500 words – long for a web page, but not totally unreasonable (e.g.: putting a whole novel on one long, scrolling page)), but you can go in and comment on any individual chapter of the book if you wanted. (Say, if there were a typo, or a plot hole, or other problem. Or if there was a particular scene you liked or didn’t like, and wanted to say so.) I like the idea of it, and while I’m not generally a fan of what commenting tends to be on most sites, I’ve seen this sort of setup put to excellent use and I can imagine a lot of good things coming from it.

On the other hand, it’s ridiculously difficult to try to track how many people are reading such a thing. I’ve tried fixing it several times, but Google Analytics doesn’t report it properly. I’ve been downloading my server access logs and manually parsing them (to get eBook download numbers) since February of 2011, when 1 and 1 (my web host) changed their Web Statistics to “Site Analytics” and removed all the usefulness from the tool for me. I tried parsing out the data about access to the 7 domains/subdomains which hold the web-based versions of these novels, to try to get any useful data about how many people have been reading them, and to start I just parsed out February and December’s numbers (rather than going through the full year before figuring out whether I can get anything useful out of them). (Yes, I know, I could maybe write a script/program to parse the logs for me. That might even work for the eBooks, despite at least half of the logs being garbage (it looks to me like zombies accessing hundreds/thousands of nonexistent URLs, possibly as some wasted DDOS effort), but for these sites … I’ll explain.) The logs are a mess.

I’d have to figure out which IPs are robots, first, I think, so I can get rid of all the requests from them – a lot, lot, lot of the requests are clearly spiders following every single link on every single page. Since every single paragraph has a unique URI for its location and a corresponding link to the separate comments associated with it, there are hundreds/thousands of links per book which I know no human would ever have clicked; they’re links to comments which clearly say there are zero comments. From what I can tell, there’s at least one Russian spider/bot following every link of every page of all these domains at least once a month, using a wide range of IP addresses to do so. Plus google, which isn’t as thorough or as frequent – which seems reasonable, since none of these sites have been updated in the slightest in a year.

ASIDE: Oh, yeah, that’s another thing. There hasn’t been a single comment anywhere on any of the books in a year. (Well, come to think of it, those Russian IPs are probably the SPAM bots posting SPAM comments Akismet has no trouble automatically moderating. There are huge numbers of those.) Whether or not anyone is reading these versions of the books, they certainly aren’t commenting on them. Or linking to them (no trackbacks), or emailing me / calling me / texting me about them. (Aside to the aside: While I was in the middle of writing this post, I received a phone call from someone asking whether I buy poetry. The person says they have, maybe, six or seven poems. Apparently, ever. It’s like people can’t read.)

So I can pretty easily see how much traffic a particular domain/subdomain received, based on the logs. A lot of that is bots, not humans. Worse, the bots make it so, if I try to total up access to individual pages of each book, I’ll have to manually filter out all the requests the bots made for things humans didn’t. There’s no easy script for that, because I have to make a human determination about which pages humans might have clicked on and which ones they clearly didn’t (or aren’t worth counting), and there are hundreds to thousands of those little decisions per domain per month of data. Some of it isn’t just bots, but bot-garbage (requests for non-existent pages). I thought I’d take a look at the 1 and 1 Site Analytics to see what it said, and at the way, way lower Google Analytics numbers to compare, but … they’re all so wildly different from one another. For reference, the 1 and 1 official Site Analytics tool reports fewer than 1/4 of the requests for my most popular eBook file (not the web ones, the PDF) versus the raw logs those analytics are theoretically built from, and for other files I’ve already parsed, even the variations are all over the board. Likewise, if the 1 and 1 Site Analytics tool were to be believed, in December 2011 around a thousand different people each read one chapter of the web version of Cheating, Death (pretty evenly distributed across all 13 chapters), and a small handful read every chapter. My access logs show almost 2k page requests (almost double what 1 and 1 shows) for the same period. Google shows … twenty page requests from 11 visitors… though admittedly, they’ve mixed together numbers from four other books in that (all the books in the Lost and Not Found universe are on the lostandnotfound.com domain, and I can’t get Google Analytics to properly separate out the subdomains) so that’s 20 page requests across the several hundred pages of five books… and only really from 9 different pages, only 1 from Cheating, Death… except it isn’t that, either. Google has no idea what to do with these web pages.

So how many people are actually reading these versions? While I don’t want to actually invest the dozens of hours it would take to parse the data, at a glance it looks like very few. Possibly none, depending on the bots. Maybe a dozen people a month. Why am I asking? Because I have to pay the domain renewal fees on those domains every year, really. Is it worth $9/year (and/or the hassle of moving them to modernevil.com, or moving the registrations to another registrar, or whatever) for zero to perhaps a dozen people a month to read these versions of these books, instead of the other sixteen ways they can read them (seven free)? This year I’m cutting out recurring costs for things which my readers don’t take enough advantage of for them to be financially worthwhile (see my posts on canceling distribution, if you haven’t yet), and I’ve got a few months but I’ve got to decide whether or not to keep paying to maintain the dragonstruth.com and lostandnotfound.com domains… and whether, if/when I release the domains, I should bother getting the web-based versions of the books back up and running on one of the domains I’m keeping.

Speaking of which, what do you think about my moving this blog to, say, teelmcclanahan.com/blog/ ? That site probably needs a revamp, anyway, but if I’m paring down domains, maybe lessthanthis.com is one to subtract, too. Considering I never/extremely-rarely get comments, I’ll probably turn off blog comments while I’m at it. I ask these sorts of open-ended questions, questions only readers of the blog can answer, and don’t get answers… maybe I’d do better about not bothering to ask (or feeling compelled to ask) if comments were just … gone.

Numbers for Q4 and 2011 overall

It’s that time again, kids! Time for a huge post with way too many numbers. Love me some numbers. You should see the spreadsheets I’m working with, here – if you think these posts have a lot of confusing numbers, know this is a tiny fraction of the data. If you want it all, I’ll gladly share it, just ask. I figure for most people, these summaries are more than sufficient.

Briefly, first, before we get into the hard numbers: eBook downloads were way, way up for Q4 of 2011. This is largely due to traffic from getfreeebooks.com, which linked to Cheating, Death on October 16th, to Unspecified on November 9th, to Dragons’ Truth on November 29th, and to The First Untrue Trilogy on December 23rd. Total eBook downloads (across all titles) were up more than 100%, quarter-over-quarter. Podiobooks downloads continued their decline; my numbers there only seem to hold steady or increase while I’m actively releasing new content, but mostly they’ve just been declining for the last two years. For Q4 I had roughly $29 in eBook sales, and Podiobooks lumped Q3 and Q4 donations together – my cut was $9.74 for the 6-month period (which equates to $12.99 in donations). I also sold a full set of the Untrue Tales series in paper for $50.

Now, so they’re in the same format as the other quarters of 2011, here are all the eBook and Podiobook download numbers for/through Q4 of 2011, as usual giving the total of eBook downloads, the total of Podiobook downloads, and the more-accurate (re: # of people who dl’d a full book) total downloads of the final episodes of each Podiobook, as: eBook/total-PB/final-PB

  • Lost and Not Found: 494 / 1,376 / 97
  • Dragons’ Truth: 2,123 / 1,527 / 155
  • Forget What You Can’t Remember: 729 / 5,828 / 140
  • The First Untrue Trilogy: 1,034 (eBook only)
  • The Second Untrue Trilogy: 557 (eBook only)
  • Untrue Tales… Book One: 1 / 3,032 / 198
  • Untrue Tales… Book Two: N/A / 4,015 / 264
  • Untrue Tales… Book Three: N/A / 1,656 / 144
  • Untrue Tales… Book Four: N/A / 1,301 / 113
  • Untrue Tales… Book Five: N/A / 1,140 / 113
  • Untrue Tales… Book Six: N/A / 1,076 / 102
  • Cheating, Death: 1,567 / 5,834 / 356
  • Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 260 / 345 / 29
  • More Lost Memories (full): 335 / 702 / 39
  • More Lost Memories (ind. stories, eBook only): 3
  • Time, emiT, and Time Again (full): 277 / 761 / 48
  • Time, emiT, and Time Again (ind. stories, eBook only): 6
  • Last Christmas: 3
  • Unspecified: 1,537
  • Total Q4: 7,390 / 28,593 / 1,798
  • Total 2011: 17,502 / 151,233 / 9,784
  • Total all-time: 33,195 / 543,595 / 35,237


re: Podiobooks downloads: It looks like about 200 people started the Untrue Tales series, I lost a good chunk in Book Two, more in Book Three, but the 100 people who made it to Book Four stuck with it to the end – which matches what I’ve previously observed. Downloads of my short story collections and the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut were off by about 50% quarter-over-quarter, to fewer than 50 people finishing each title during the entire quarter. Everything else is just less than flat, part of a gradual overall decline.

re: eBooks: Only about half of the people who downloaded The First Untrue Trilogy downloaded the second, which has remained roughly true since I released the eBooks (60% over the life of the eBooks). (This is unfortunate, as I believe books 5 & 6 are some of my best writing to date, and that the second trilogy is much better than the first.) Unspecified was released at the beginning of Q4, and has been downloaded more in Q4 than all but 2 of my titles, which is saying a lot, since it’s a poetry book. The only titles which did better where my YA novel and my zombie novel, and Unspecified was only 30 downloads (>2%) behind Cheating, Death. All free eBook downloads were up for the quarter, probably owing to the free-ebook-seeking traffic linked in as mentioned above, but eBook purchases for the period were down again. It looks like I only sold 21 eBooks across all titles and all platforms during Q4, 2011. Continue reading Numbers for Q4 and 2011 overall