Category: Journal

Productivity, Profitability

Still having trouble with staying focused. I feel like I’m not productive enough, almost daily. Things are getting done; the podcasts are all running on time, I’m doing two or more Art Walks/Fairs/Detours a month & I’ve painted a dozen new paintings since the first of the year. I’m even blogging semi-regularly, which you already know, reading this. But I could be doing more.

Yesterday I only did three or four hours of audio work, and even though I know I worked on other things, it feels like I didn’t get anything done, since it’s harder to tally the hours and to quantify what’s work and what isn’t. Does Twitter count? Reading publishing & other blogs? Blogging? It’s all part of connecting with people, with building an audience and building myself as a “brand” and educating myself about what’s going on, what’s working, and driving ideas forward. So in a way, yes. Then there’s the oft-repeated idea that everything an author does and experiences is a sort of reasearch for future books; this is somewhat true, but feels like a sort of excuse.

In addition to feeling that perhaps I’m not being productive enough, I also think a lot about my not being profitable enough. Even with the reduced up-front costs of doing business the way I am, not a single one of my books has even reached break-even, yet. The art, comparably, has been doing great – not bringing in enough to live on, but if not for the cost of going to Tools of Change in New York (ie: if not for a big, extra publishing expense), I’d already be profitable this year on art sales alone, with only bluer skies on the horizon. The margins on the art, even with prices basically cut in half & then frozen since 2004, are great – not just in money, but in time. It takes me hundreds of hours to produce a book, and somehow it’s harder to sell a copy of the book for $14 (or less) than it is to sell a painting (that took me less than 10 hours to create) for $150.  Lately I’ve been creating a lot of “Mini Paintings”: 8×10″ for $20, 5×7″ for $15, and 4×4″ for $10, right now.  Most of them are done in under 1 hour of work (though admittedly, some have taken up to 3), and they earn me as much as or more than a book does, usually without having to try to sell them at all.

Obviously, the art sales can only scale to the limits of my creativity & time to produce original works – I’m not sure what the upper limit is, but perhaps dozens a month. Certainly not hundreds.  Whereas the book sales can scale without proportional extra work on my part – Lightning Source prints however many copies people order, whether it’s dozens a month or thousands.  If/when I “hit it big” the books will quickly win in this regard.  Not to mention I can sell a book more than once, and without doing prints (something I am currently opposed to), I can only sell an original work of art once.  So it takes orders of magnitude more work to produce a book, but I can keep selling it over and over again forever, instead of just once.

If only my sales numbers were orders of magnitude better.  Did I mention not a single one of my books has yet earned back the costs associated with its production, yet?  That’s with $0 value associated with my time, no less.  Which is to say: if I were more productive (of books), I’d perhaps only be digging myself deeper and deeper into a hole.  Being more productive of art is good, but when I really need to figure out is how to be more productive of profitability.  I need to produce more book sales.  That’s a hard one.  The podcasting thing is meant to be helping with that – it certainly puts my writing in front of a lot more minds than everything else I’ve been doing, even if it is for free, right now.  Something approaching five hundred times as many people have downloaded Dragons’ Truth from Podiobooks.com than have purchased a copy of the paperback (not counting sales to family) – that’s a huge multiplier.  Unfortunately, for whatever reason, it hasn’t translated directly into interest in my other podiobooks or in sales of my paperbacks or eBooks.  Gotta keep it up, though.  Gotta keep working on it.  Gotta get back to work, right now – I’m supposed to be editing together next week’s episodes of Forget What You Can’t Remember, right now.  Gotta go.

Failure to Follow Through

I was working on another idea I’ve got (it can wait – it doesn’t require any action until 2013, so posting about it here a few days later won’t make a difference), and I went back and was reading my blog posts from Fall of 2003 and I re-discovered something I’d forgotten. Now, if you go back and try to look at the original posts for yourself, please keep in mind that there were some problems converting the site from MoveableType to WordPress last year that I haven’t taken the 100+ (estimated) hours it will take to go through and fix, yet. So, some posts are just a mess, right now, and some are almost entirely missing. Still, from what’s there, I was able to piece this together:

I started recording and posting my first Podiobook online 16 months before the word “Podiobook” was coined.  Heck, it was two months before the word “Podcast” was suggested, according to Wikipedia.  (Consequently, I wasn’t trying to podcast it at that point – I was simply blogging about it & trying to sell it through my blog.)  I had even found a way to monetize it from day one, with a now-defunct micro-payments system called BitPass – at 25cents per chunk or about $1/half-hour (ie: about the same price for the whole thing whether you buy it all at once or a little at a time).  My plan, according to this post from September, 2003, was to simultaneously release the book in paperback, electronic format, and as MP3s (and possibly CDs).  By the first week of December, 2003 I had the first four files recorded and available for purchase, right from this post (broken links now removed).

I was testing the waters, trying to see if anyone was interested in an audio version (trying to see if anyone was willing to give micropayments a try, too).  The plan, as of December 11, 2003, looks like it was to post the rest of the audiobook serially, for micropayments, but also to offer options to buy the whole book as MP3s together, an MP3 CD, and possibly a set of audio CDs (since the MP3 Audiobook was unheard of at that point, I thought I should at least offer it in the old way).  Unfortunately, no one bit.  No one even commented to say they were interested.  According to my posts about stats, my blog was getting between 10k and 30k “unique visitors” per month (in the months I mentioned stats) from September 2003 through February 2004, and had fewer than a dozen regular commenters.  By March 2004, thinking there was no interest and it was taking WAY too much work to not be heard, I’d given up on the audio version of Lost and Not Found.

I didn’t persist.  Well, I did keep working, I kept writing, I kept creating, I just didn’t try to do audio again until 2008.  And by 2007-2008, when I looked into it, I discovered that what I’d thought of doing 4-5 years earlier had taken off and now I’m late to the party.  In the intervening time, I’d never given up on the idea of someday recording audio versions of my own books in my own voice, but in the insulated world I lived in I didn’t know anyone else was doing it.  And since I was working full time and splitting my off hours between having a life, writing, painting, and more, there wasn’t time to be doing the audio versions.

“If only, if only…” If only I’d followed through on my idea.  If only I’d finished recording it, despite an apparent lack of interest from my audience.  If only I’d heard of Creative Commons (founded in 2001?  Who knew?  Not me!), or thought to give away my content instead of insisting on trying to sell every copy in every format.  If only I’d somehow thought of podcasting prior to its adoption and…  umm.. yeah.  ((I was SO reading RSS specifications in 2003/2004, and was only thinking of enclosing files for my online comics and my occasional “audioblog” posts, not for books.)) So.  I have a long history of thinking of things a couple of years before anyone else, and then losing interest in them and setting them aside long before they suddenly hit it big.  I need to work on my follow-through, and I need to work on persistence, even in the face of adversity.

I have good ideas, I even often know what to do with them, and I need to get myself to actually follow through.  To carry my ideas to fruition.  So that the next time I invent the next big thing, maybe I’ll be at the center of it instead of on the outside, looking in.

Not about Tools of Change

Last week I was in New York, NY for the first time in my life.  I won a free conference pass to O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing conference from Booksquare, managed to afford the airfare and hotel (Would you believe I flew to NYC, stayed for 3 nights within 1.0mi of the conference at Times Square, was fed the entire time, and flew home for under $550?), and had a great time.  I have tweeted a bit about it, from the conference, and I have many, many pages of hand-written notes I took over the two days of the conference I attended, but this post is not about Tools of Change.  I may (or may not – but probably will) blog extensively about it later.  There’s a good chance I’ll write a thousand words or more per page of notes, not to mention anecdotes about everything that happened between sessions and at night.  This is not one of those posts.

This post is about everything else.  This post is about how, in between the last two First Friday Art Walks (ie: basically in January), I painted 6 new paintings, recorded the audio for the podcast version of FWYCR (inlcuding 6 chapters ahead of where I needed to be), wrote 5 (mostly long) blog posts, did my taxes, et cetera, et cetera.  This post is about how, since the February First Friday Art Walk I haven’t painted anything new, have only written this blog post, and have only finished the single chapter of MEPod that was due today.  This post is about how I don’t know when my next book will be ready for publication, or what book it will be.  This post is about how I occasionally notice that I don’t have a “marketing strategy.” This post is about feeling insignificant, helpless.

After this month’s First Friday Art Walk in downtown Phoenix (I show among the vendors known as “Roosevelt Row” – the booths in the blocked off streets of Garfield between 4th & 6th, on 5th between Garfield & McKinley, and starting next month on 6th as well – I’m there every month, I pre-paid for all of 2009, and you can see/buy my art and/or books in person there for cash), I sold two paintings.  Did not sell them at the Art Walk, one because I don’t take credit cards on site, the other because there wasn’t a convenient ATM, but sold them after being seen there.  Gladly drove across town on Saturday to deliver one (after processing the payment through Google Checkout) and to a different part of town on Sunday to deliver the other.  I’m always glad to put my creations into the hands of people who appreciate them.  People who love them.  People who are excited to be able to see them again and again.  These kind of sales are awesome.

Very early Monday morning I left for NY. Thursday evening I returned to Phoenix.  Friday I did laundry and tried to recover from the conference & the trip.

Saturday I had another Art Walk / Art Fair, this time at Angel’s Serenity in North Phoenix/Scottsdale.  The Angel’s Serenity Art Fair is a Saturday, daytime event.  It had better turnout when the economy was in better shape (and when there was an open coffee shop involved – since gone out of business), but I still feel it’s worthwhile to show there.  It certainly doesn’t cost anything but my time and effort.  Sold a few books (You’ve seen the new books, right?), about half to returning customers.  That’s my favorite and most reassuring sort of customer, the ones who have bought my books before, read them, and want to buy the new books, too.  That’s the basis for my publishing model; to build an audience of people who will continue buying my books as I continue to write them.  Didn’t move any art at the Art Fair, but a past customer and I spent a lot of time discussing the 5 or 6 pieces he wants to buy – if only I catch him at the right time of the month.  I’ll follow up with him after the first of the month.

Writing it out, I know it hasn’t been a lot of time – especially since the conference was actually work.  Yet I feel unaccomplished, so far.  Dilligent, yes.  I recorded three more chapters of FWYCR yesterday, and worked on trying to figure out what to do about the final main character’s voice – it needs to be distinct, striking, but not distracting or confusing.  I edited, mixed, compressed & posted chapter 15 today, went to two banks and a book store, and am writing this blog post.  I’ve been working on some other ideas (more below) as well.  Still, I feel I haven’t done enough.  On the other hand, a big part of why I chose not to buy the big TV was so that I would be able to work longer without stress and worry – so that I would be able to go at my own pace without having to freak out about whether my art & writing were bringing in enough money on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis.  So I’m trying not to freak out.

I’m also looking at some new projects.  I’m considering designing a deck of cards – you can think of them like tarot cards or fortune telling cards, though I’m developing them largely from scratch.  I’m working out some planning and manufacturing ideas already, starting work on basic artwork & meanings.  Probably a set of 50 cards – thinking of maybe putting it out as a “deck” of moo business cards, actually, though I haven’t fully considered all the different custom card-deck printing options out there yet.  Feel free to suggest someone in the comments.  Then, in parallel with developing the deck, write a book explaining the cards, their meanings, and how to do a “reading” from them.  Publish the book & make the cards available – because I can, and it interests me to do so.  Not sure how to market such a thing, and certainly can’t bundle the cards with the book via Lightning Source, but it’s an idea.  If I decide to paint the images for the cards, that could mean up to 50 new Mini-Paintings – I’d want to do them at a size I could scan with the equipment I have, so probably 8×10″ or smaller canvas or canvas boards.  Or perhaps illustrations on paper, but then I’d have to mount/mat/frame them.  bleh.  But either way, that could be a gallery show I could shop around.  Hang the originals on the walls, sell the cards & books (& originals), and have me (someone) do readings for guests all night/nights.

I’m also increasingly thinking of trying to put together a music “album.”  Probably a “Christian music album,” at that.  I keep having to compose my own music for the podcasts (because I’m quite stubborn and independent) and thus to think about music, to design music, and to practice with its creation.  I’ve been vaguely thinking about creating music since middle or high school, but have rarely stuck with any physical instrument for more than a few weeks at a time & have never studied musical composition.  Having Garageband in front of me several hours a week, listening to music I’ve composed play behind my audiobooks, it’s been pushing me more and more toward writing songs & putting together an album.  That, I don’t have outlines or plans or marketing plans for (yet), unlike the cards/book thing above, but it’s rolling around in my head, closer and closer to the front all the time.

Which brings me around to what may be a lack of focus.  If I’m writing/composing/recording/producing an album of Christian music, am I focused on art?  On writing?  On publishing?  I’ve squeezed the designing of a deck of fortune cards (did you know the Old Testament  condemns divination?) into the art/publishing worlds with the hand-painting of the art & the writing/publishing of a companion book, but has my focus slipped?  What happened to the anthology of short stories I was working on last year?  When is UTFBF-RoaAP: Book Four going to be written?  Will I paint anything other than these cards any time soon?  What about my next podcast novel (due in April)?  What about marketing?

Marketing?  Fuck.  I knew I was forgetting something.  I still haven’t figured out how to do marketing.  Sigh.

In other news, since my books are increasingly apparent as some sort of idealized-communist propaganda, I’ve begun slogging my way through Atlas Shrugged.  The Fountainhead is next.  Then probably the Communist Manifesto, Wealth of Nations and Mein Kampf.  I’ve never read any of these, but time for reading is part of what I bought myself when I didn’t buy a 73″ HDTV.  Speaking of which, I’m going to go work on Atlas Shrugged right now.

Opportunity cost

This is a post about money.  Over the years I’ve discovered that generally the “haves,” the people who have money, do not like to talk about it, not in any meaningful or personal way.  They find discussions of one’s own money to be distasteful, perhaps even vulgar.  The “have nots,” on the other hand, are not subject to this problem.  Perhaps there is some distinction we (the people who don’t have enough money) can’t yet see between talking about our own money and talking about other people’s money – because the “haves” have no problem talking about other people’s money and what they think should be done with it.  If you are among those who will experience a bad taste in your mouth reading me writing about my own money, either go away or become a benefactor/patron-of-the-arts so I can get out of this “have not” situation and stop bothering you by mentioning money.

Note: this post is over 2600 words long.

Continue reading Opportunity cost

Unhappy with my art, lately

Not that I’m especially unhappy with the art I’ve been creating lately, as compared with how much I’m unhappy with the art I used to make (with an exception I may not get into, but let’s just say Winter ’00 / ’01 was a unique period of creation for me), but that lately I’ve been feeling unhappy with all the art I make.  Lately, I’ve been trying to figure out what’s been nagging me about it all.

I think I figured it out.  I think Mandy helped me figure it out.  ((ie: I blame her.  I blame her for making me hate myself in a new way.  For making me see just what’s wrong with me.)) How we got there:

Among other things, primarily I am an artist and I am an author.  Every year in November, for the last seven Novembers, I have participated in National Novel Writing Month.  NaNoWriMo is pretty all-consuming, most years, so psychologically there’s an entire month where I’m not doing anything but writing and thinking about writing from day one to day thirty.  Then in December, suddenly I’m not writing and all the pent-up everything else gets a chance to gush because (especially after such intense writing every day, all the time) I don’t even really want to be writing.  In several years I’ve done more new paintings in the last two weeks of December and/or the first two weeks of January than the entire remainders of the years.  I’d hoped to be able to continue that tradition this year, because I’d also been working on a novel from about July through October and hadn’t done much painting after September.  I really wanted to get some new painting done.  And then for the first 2-3 weeks of December I was editing and otherwise preparing for print two new books (the novel and the NaNoWriMo project, More Lost Memories), so I didn’t really have time for painting (or for the mental space to allow for it).

Over Christmas break (my wife is a high school English teacher, for those of you who don’t know her), I’d intended to try painting something with Mandy.  This was part of my hope to be able to get some painting done.  I’d be able to finally get back to painting (I have a couple of unfinished pieces from last Autumn staring at me all the time, right now), I’d be churning out new work on some of the dozens of new canvases I’d bought on Black Friday, and maybe Mandy and I could work together on one or two of them.  Except that didn’t happen.  I didn’t much paint over Christmas break.  A couple of mini-paintings at the beginning of the month that didn’t sell at First Friday (well, not that month, which was what I’d made them for – they both sold at this month’s First Friday), and some godawful yellow thing.  Then, in January, after she’d already started back at school again, I started painting something new.  Mandy came home from school one day, saw me painting this, and reminded me I’d said we would paint together.

So that night I set aside my painting, set up the table and got out some materials and asked her to paint a background with the extra blue and green paint I had still-wet from the piece I was working on, while I cooked dinner.  After dinner, when the background was dry, I asked her to pick a color and a shape (this is a method I’d used several times in the past to get paintings started when I didn’t have ideas, I’d call people up out of the blue and ask them for a color and a shape and just start from there.  For this project to be collaborative, I’d fully intended, when I asked, to go back and forth with her, for me to paint whatever she suggested and then let her paint and then me and so on) and she picked orange and oval/egg-shaped.  And I went and got orange paint and promptly remembered I was supposed to be heading out the door for a vendor meeting with the Roosevelt Row people, so I gave her a couple of brushes, the paint, and told her to paint her orange egg.  I came home and immediately felt terrible.

My wife, who has no prior painting experience and no formal training, who insists she can’t draw and isn’t and artist and is terrible, had surpassed me on her first attempt.  There were things about how she had painted it that I have been looking at in other people’s art for decades and wishing I knew how they did that.  She’d actually gone through my paints and … well, her grasp of color and of how to use and mix paints to create the desired colors surpass most first-year art students I’ve met.  Except she did it unconsciously.  It wasn’t a master work, it probably wouldn’t have won any awards, but the moment I saw it, my heart dropped.  Almost as much as it did when I saw his first 2 paintings.  (Come to think of it, that’s around when I’d stopped painting much, last year…)  I’ve been painting off and on my whole life, and increasingly over the last 12 years, and my wife’s first nothing of a painting crushed me.

I stared at it.  I tried to talk her into telling me what else should be in the image.  More insistently, I tried to talk her into painting whatever else should be there.  I didn’t want to touch it.  I didn’t know what to do with it.  (That’s not entirely true – that first night, the only thing that occurred to me is pretty much what I did with it, but I pretty much don’t like it or think it’s a good idea.)  I stared at it for hours.  I stared at it for days.  Day after day it stood there, in the living room, taunting me, and I couldn’t put my finger on it.  Finally, finally, a week later, I set to work on it.  It took me several hours, and I really feel it’s pretty much just derivative of the other painting (which I’d finished after another few days), and I’m not sure if it’s done.  You can take a look at it.  I’ve been looking at it for most of a week, trying to figure out what to do with it, whether it’s done, whether it needs anything, et cetera.

Tonight, staring at it frustratedly, feeling awful and wanting to go to bed and wanting to be painting or otherwise getting something done, I think I figured out the problem.  I think I figured out what, about my art, has been making me so unhappy lately:

All my art is flat.  As I said earlier on Plurk at the moment I figured it out: “It’s all flat. There’s no light. No depth. No space, just the plane. Not just 2D in medium, but in conception as well.”  I thought about my art.  I looked at the art in the room (about a dozen of my finished paintings are in my living room right now).  I walked around the house looking at my art.  I went to wretchedcreature.com and looked at the art I’ve since sold.  All of it.  Flat.

Sure, yes, most of it isn’t “figurative” as such.  You could even go so far as to say that’s my “style” of artwork.  But it doesn’t change the fact that the difference between what Mandy painted and what I painted is that it created the illusion of depth, of light interacting with something.  Yes, something floating strangely in a color field without a shadow, fine, but have you seen what I paint?  Even when I do something semi-figurative (EX: ‘audacity of hope’, ‘eat to fill the void’, ‘low moan, wide hat’, ‘darkness looming’), it’s completely two-dimensional.  No light, no shadow, no depth, no weight.  Just color.  Just line.  Just image; no thing.  I paint nothing.

Lately a lot of my work has been consumed with words.  With painting excessively stylized representations of words.  Taking the lines of the letters, stretching them, distorting them, aligning and mis-aligning them, transforming the lines into borders and the borders into shapes and the shapes into maps of color.  Geometric, sure, fine, and simple, yes.  Not just the old ideas of ‘pussy___’ and ‘puppy___’ or the actually conceptually interesting ‘SEX&LOVE’, but something more pure (more purely simplistic) with pieces like ‘bleh’, ‘begin’, ‘cold’, ‘gaping’, ‘red joy’, and ‘big kiss’.  I’m no Rothko.  Yet somehow I’ve basically just been painting color fields.

I don’t know what I want to do.  I don’t know what I want.  I don’t know.

But I’m unhappy with this, right now.