Category: Journal

Numbers for 2009 (and 2008)

I’ve spent the last few days gathering numbers and putting them into a spreadsheet. Now I’m going to take a few of them and try to communicate them to you here. The numbers come from several places, representing podcast downloads, eBook downloads, and sales of books and of art. Since I didn’t make a post about it for 2008’s numbers, I’ll probably include some of them as well, for comparison. I’ll try not to turn this post into a spreadsheet, just numbers, but will try to make it more like my usual rambles.

To begin, a snapshot of right now. As of 1/1/2010, I have 13 titles in some form of publication or other. 5 standalone novels, 2 poetry journals, 2 short story collections, 3 books in the Untrue Tales… series and a single edition containing those 3 books. One of the novels (the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut) is currently only available as an eBook. One of the short story collections (Time, emiT, and Time Again) isn’t yet finished, but I’ve released one of the short stories that will be contained in it as a standalone chapbook.  The 3 individual Untrue Tales… books aren’t technically “in print”, though I have a few copies, printed by Cafepress & sans ISBN. I am not counting The Vintage Collection, though it is another book I’ve put together, had printed, and sold at one time. (I plan to edit and re-release it at a later date.) Seven of my books are available as podcast audiobooks, and all but the poetry is available as eBooks. Continue reading Numbers for 2009 (and 2008)

“new” book: Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut

I’m becoming more free, more liberated in how I think about and how I operate my publishing company. So Monday morning when I saw yet another review of Lost and Not Found which seemed to have misunderstood the entire point of the book and to have interpreted the heart of the book to be a mis-step and an incoherent disappointment… I realized that instead of just thinking about releasing an alternate edition of the book, it was fully within my power to actually release it.

So I took some time on Monday and put together a quick “Director’s Cut” that had all the love story and fantasy adventure that had ended up being the last third of Lost and Not Found, cut out the few scenes that had connected it further to the confusing-and-irrelevant characters-who-get-found-and-forgotten, and re-attached the part of the story that goes to Skythia (released earlier this year as a short story in More Lost Memories). I wrote a few words about why I was creating the Director’s Cut, put them up on modernevil.com. I wrote a quick marketing summary so I could put the book up for sale as an eBook on Smashwords. Whoosh, from frustration at people misunderstanding my book to publishing a version of the book that those frustrated people would hate outright, in the space of an afternoon.

Yesterday I sketched for a while & then painted an image for the cover.  I’ve been thinking about doing this with other books (have you seen the covers of More Lost Memories and Cheating, Death?) and I’ve finally decided to do it with the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: I’ve put the painting I did for the cover art up for sale at a price that will allow me to fund a paperback release of the book. If you buy the art, I’ll make the book available on paper. ((Alternatively, if I can get, say, 25 people to pre-order a paper copy, I’ll make the book available on paper.)) Otherwise, it’s going to remain available only in formats that cost me nothing to make available: eBook (and probably audiobook, later this year, especially since I’ve already recorded most of it).

I’m thinking of trying this with some of my future books:  Release them as an eBook and if 1) enough eBook copies sell or 2) the original painting for the cover sells or 3) enough people are willing to pre-order then I’ll put out a print edition.  Because realistically, right now, I’m not even breaking even on the publishing costs.  I sell too-few copies.  I’m not saying this is permanent/final, especially since I sell a lot more paper copies by hand (and make more money per copy) than I sell eBooks, but I figure it’s worth a try.  It’s my publishing company, I can do what I want, right?  The only rules to follow are my own.

So, here’s the brief marketing summary I wrote for Smashwords:

A non-traditional story; no real conflict, no struggle, no antagonist, and -some would say- no plot. A love story of fantastic proportions, of two people who realize that the less-than-comfortable normalcy they’d felt responsible to is the only thing keeping them from achieving true bliss. With a faerie, titans, a two-headed monster, a flying city, amazing museums, unusual time mechanics, & more.

And here’s the page-or-so I wrote “About the Director’s Cut”:

Lost and Not Found was the first look at the storybook universe expanded upon in Forget What You Can’t Remember, More Lost Memories, and Cheating, Death. This “Director’s Cut” of Lost and Not Found comes closer to my original intent, and to the original first draft of my 2002 NaNoWriMo novel, originally released in limited edition under the title Forlorn. Forlorn was written in the final 8 days of November, after a similar ordeal to the fictional one presented in Lost and Not Found.

In response to the criticism and feedback from a very vocal and adamant subset of the people who read Forlorn, and based on advise about what “all” fiction “needs” I spent the following year trying to find ways to give the story I’d written in Forlorn things like conflict, character arcs, and a three-act structure. I ended up cutting Skythia out completely, and writing a significant amount about the writer’s life and the journey toward the heart of the story, which I’ve always believed starts with the word ‘Forlorn.’

I released the First Edition of that expanded, “fixed” book as Lost and Not Found in 2004, and I’ve been receiving two kinds of feedback from readers in the five years since then: One group of people liked the book right up until the word ‘Forlorn.’ This group thinks the rest of the book is a “wrong turn”, and they were disappointed by it. The other group of people typically don’t even remember what happened in the book before the word ‘Forlorn.’ They understood the heart of the story to be the same thing I did, and they loved it.

This “Director’s Cut” of Lost and Not Found is bound to divide readers in the same way, though I expect to a more significant extreme. The people who would have been disappointed by the end of Lost and Not Found will be disappointed by this entire book. The people who would have loved the end of Lost and Not Found will probably love this entire book. And I, increasingly emboldened to do what I want to do with my books and with my publishing company, love the idea of releasing a Director’s Cut of the book, one that I prefer and that I think my true audience will prefer.

Solar energy thoughts re: scarcity

I’ve been doing some (very, very rough) calculations for the last hour or so, to get a concept of what sort of scale my thoughts should be working from as I brainstorm the “post-singularity” future. I was thinking about the idea of scarcity. Lou Dobbs was on the Daily Show & he kept insisting that America is fragile & America doesn’t have unlimited resources, and yadda yadda, Obama will literally destroy America before we have a chance to vote again… Anyway, the direction my brain went was toward the question of how much solar energy was hitting the Earth, and how much matter that amount of energy represents, in matter-and-energy-are-two-forms-of-the-same-thing terms.  You know, the old E=mc2 thing.

Based on my calculations, on average, pretending that all the energy from sunlight could be captured and then that all the energy could somehow be converted to “matter”… the amount of solar energy that falls on a square mile of the Earth in 12 hours of daylight (yeah, yeah) converts to about 1.5 tons of matter.  Yes, this is Star Trek tech, the replicator, and we’re not actually near any practical application that could make use of it.  And, yes, we’re almost as distant from being able to make use of 100% of the solar energy that reaches the Earth.  And, of course, there would be inefficiencies in the system (ie: entropy exists), so it wouldn’t be all, all, all… ooh, but as long as we’re pretending:

If we had a solar-powered replicator that operated at 85% efficiency, one acre of solar collection (on Earth) could replicate about 3 meals a day.

Ooh: Just did another calculation. Disappointing, I suppose.  If Skythia (the utopian city featured in Forget What You Can’t Remember) had no other energy/fuel/material source than solar, even if it was 100% efficient, it couldn’t support more than about 20,000 residents – and certainly a lot fewer than that, considering the high-energy and high-consumption activities they did there on a regular basis.  Even if the “gravity lenses” that levitate the city were passive (ie: not consuming energy to keep the city afloat), the hundred thousand or more people I described as living there would be significantly too many!  Lucky thing it definitely also uses magic and trade to supplement its existence… I guess.  Maybe I’ll reduce its population in a future edition.  Or maybe they also use some sort of nuclear power in addition to solar.  Ooh: the definitely make use of satellites.  Perhaps they have some large solar arrays in high polar orbits that beam energy down to Skythia.  Because the solar energy that hits the Earth represents only about (4.5 x 10-8) percent of the solar energy that the sun gives off.

On the other hand, when we have energy-to-matter tech, we’ll likely also have matter-to-energy tech as well, which means that the 4.4lbs/day of trash the EPA estimates the average American produces equates to around an acre’s worth of solar energy… and that the energy contained in the matter of about 10k Americans’ daily refuse is enough to power the Earth. Pretending it could be easily converted directly to energy. Hmm… Of course, by the time we reach that technology (25 years, Kurzweil?), a lot of other aspects of our lifestyle will have changed dramatically, too.

Oh, and as far as “America is fragile” – we’re just beginning to come out of a recession that wasn’t as bad as the one we had in the early 80’s, neither of which holds a candle to the global depression of the 30’s… none of which came close to breaking America.  Not world wars, not the end of slavery (a foundational change in our economic structure), not the further social changes brought about with the introduction of birth control…  America is not fragile.  America could certainly survive (and I believe would be better off with) universal health care.  The rest of the civilized world does.  But that isn’t even what’s on the table, right now.  No one in power is even coming close to actual Health Care Reform – all they’re doing is mucking about with Health Insurance Reform… These are not the changes that America is calling out for, and they’re nowhere near enough to “destroy America.”  You’re crying wolf.  I can only consider it a good thing, because hopefully all the people you’re riling up about this now will know better than to listen to you when real reform comes rolling down the pike in years to come.

why, goals

I’ve always been interested in the answers to procedural whys. Why is it done this way, why not that way? I’ve also been interested in asking the deeper meaning whys, usually still about the way the world works and what it asks of me.  Why do I have to do this at all?  Why do people behave the way they do? I’ve rarely been good at answering why.

I’m still thinking about my life, my work, money and motivation and all the rest.  I recalled reading several places lately talk about a dichotomy they perceive in reasons for writing, and knowing that it is a common conception – and a dichotomy usually brought up to paint one side as pretentious and tell them to get on the other side or they’re going to fail.  See, there’s this idea that writers are in it to make money or they’re in it for the art (at least two bloggers in the last week spelled this “ahht” – just to be sure their readers understood they consider art-for-arts-sake pretentious and despicable).  I keep reading people who believe that anyone who is writing “art” or who feel they “must” write, but who aren’t serious about doing whatever it takes (and here they usually have a plan or idea for how low one must go, how hard one must work, and exactly how to accomplish “whatever it takes”) to make money is in for the dreaded “rude awakening,” and they’d better start thinking like a businessman or else.

Of course every time I read such a thing, every time that dichotomy is presented, my initial reaction is something like “what if neither of those is my reason?”  What if I don’t even know what my reason is?  What if I’m not interested in or motivated by money?  What if I think “serious” art and literature seems mostly pretentious and/or unreadable, too?  What if the closest thing I have to an answer to why I write is that … I was going to write, anyway, I may as well sell it?  Wait — that doesn’t answer the question!  That’s why I’m running a publishing company & putting out & selling books, not why I write.  I have no idea why I write!  I just know I do.

I write.  I’ll keep writing.  I’ll write >1 book a year, even if I have to work a soul-crushing job, for however long I survive such a hopeless situation.  Since switching to being a full-time creative, I now write 2-4 times as much (and paint >5 times as much) as I did when it was just in my off hours.  (oh, and I podcast my writing twice a week, every week – which I never had time for before)  I may be earning next-to-nothing (so far) doing this, but I haven’t found a job yet that was worth my life – though I have found that most other jobs would cost it.  That may be reason enough, I suppose, for doing things the way we are – that if I have to stop doing this and rejoin “the workforce” I’ll soon die.

I don’t really “get” goals.  Goals.  I don’t get it.  Add that to the list of things I don’t grasp.  Ooh, there was this one time, for four or five years straight, where I tried to figure out “goals.”  Eventually I hit a philosophical roadblock of breaking it all down until it was clear that “goals” and “values” and such were all totally arbitrary – usually unconsciously given to people by their families and their cultures, but almost never actually, meaningfully, reasonably and independently developed.

I’ve never been very good at goals.  I’m good at action, at doing things.  Getting things done, I can do.  Having goals and priorities… not consciously or intentionally, no.  You may think it’s just a difference in phrasing for me to say, for example, “I didn’t set a goal of writing Cheating, Death.  I decided it was time to write a zombie book, I thought about what I wanted to write for a while, then I sat down to write it and, two weeks later, it was done.”  With art, I usually just start with a blank canvas and see where it takes me.  With all my other books, I haven’t usually decided what they’re going to be about before I start; I just start writing and find out what the story is as I write it.  Inasmuch as I have goals, they’re either immediately carried out or I procrastinate for a while first, and then immediately carry them out.

What’s my “5 year goal”?  I was thinking about this a bit lately (I was extrapolating from a more current train of thought, to try to wedge the way I actually think into the “goals” thing that everyone else is so fond of), and came up with something like:  After 5 years (by the end of 2014 or so), I hope to have 20 to 30 books in print (Cheating, Death was my 11th book) and to have created 300+ new pieces of artwork.  (Which got me thinking about how I’m going to need to redesign wretchedcreature.com in the next year or two, to accommodate so many new pieces.) Not much other detail has come to me re: 5-year-goal, since then… but I don’t usually think in terms of goals.  And this is really just an extrapolation of “I’d like to write 2 to 4 new books a year, and to try to create at least 5 new pieces of art every month.”  Which is a set of goals I’ve created for public appearances – literally, I set down and drafted those so that when people asked, I would have something to say.  It’s based on factors such as past experience with my own writing speed and professional artists’ statements about minimum production levels.

Speaking of which, I’m beginning to run into problems with overproduction.  I have a huge inventory of blank canvas just waiting to become art, but a big factor in my procrastination is that I’m running out of wall space.  I’m not selling as fast as I’m painting.  I’d like to be painting more.  I’d love to be able to be painting every day.  I can’t. It’s unreasonable.  Not only do I not have a dedicated space to paint in right now (ie: I paint in the living room, which is a high traffic area of the house), but if I did paint that much, I would be producing art significantly faster than I’m currently able to sell it.  (Did I mention I just dropped all my art prices? Seriously – significantly lowered!  Go!  Look!)  So part of why I picked 5 for my fake goal was that if I did manage to hit it (and if half or more of that was mini-paintings) I wouldn’t find myself up to my neck in art.

Of course, a solution to that problem is probably obvious to you business-minded folks.  Obviously, if I would just sell more art, I wouldn’t have trouble storing new art.  Gosh, why didn’t I think of that?  It’s the same thing with the income problem I mentioned yesterday – if I would just sell more books, sell more art, et cetera, I wouldn’t have this problem.  If I would just write more commercially, or if I would be more outgoing, get better at marketing and at publicity and at putting myself in front of people, and a dozen other things that give me panic attacks…  yeah, maybe. Continue reading why, goals

statistics, perspective, perseverance

I’ve been seeing a bit more of statistics hitting the web lately, with regard to different independent authors’ successes at finding audiences and making money online.  There is only a tiny percentage of people who are comfortable revealing such statistics, but as more and more authors begin to use the internet to get their words in front of people, the pool grows and -with it- the number of numbers available.  I have considered, now and again, posting my own statistics.  My numbers.  My facts and figures.  Sometimes I have given a few numbers.  Here and there.  I’m still considering it.

All these numbers, they’ve helped me get a bit of perspective on my own numbers.  Working in a near-vacuum, it’s been very difficult to tell whether my numbers were good or bad.  Whether they painted an average picture, or a below average one. Whether my struggle was a result of the medium, its newness, and the fractional nature of the cutting-edge (it is, by definition, not mainstream) – or whether my struggle has been a result of some failure on my part. The more numbers I see, the more clear it is to me that I am -at least in part- to blame.

(This may be my severe depression talking.)

I am aware I am not even trying to write fiction with mass-appeal.  I’m not trying to write like other authors.  I’m not trying to fit into any particular genre or genres.  I do things with my books that no one sees, no one notices, no one thinks about (or if they do, no one mentions – and those I’ve asked are oblivious), and while I’m doing unseen things I require readers to carefully parse sentences and to consider meanings, just to get through the books.  I use “big” words, uncommon words, and I use them in long sentences to express complex concepts.  I am aware that I am not writing easy books, or books for everyone.  It’s my fault I write this way.  I’m to blame.

It’s also a choice.  I didn’t choose to be an author because I thought writing would be a good way to make a living, or because I thought I’d be good at cutting off a slice of the multi-billion-dollar worldwide publishing market.  I chose to try to find a way to make money selling my books because I know I’m an author, and because I’d rather be doing something that comes naturally than struggling just to survive every day.  (2007 was the soul-crushing, creativity-wrecking breaking point – I was still writing, but could barely manage to write more than a haiku’s length at once, and it was mostly about how painful working my corporate desk job was: I published it anyway, it’s Worth 1k.)  … and though the struggle still exists (in fighting with a world that still expects me to pay the bills in months when people aren’t buying what I’m selling, and in fighting the traditional publishing world, and in fighting my own severe aversion to business and marketing), it is significantly less here, and distant. Continue reading statistics, perspective, perseverance