Category: Journal

Q3 Numbers, NaNoDecisions, and taking risks

Looking back, I see I didn’t make a proper numbers post for Q2, this year. This post is also a couple of weeks later than it ought to have been. Meh. Q2 looked a lot like Q1, except for a spike in Podiobooks downloads for the last few days of June. eBook downloads continued their gradual descent from the highs they’d hit after being linked to by some “free eBooks” listing sites last year. Q3 looks a bit odd, but in understandable ways.

For example, that spike in podiobook downloads coincides with the launch of Apple’s new Podcasts app for iOS – separating podcasts out of iTunes and improving visibility and ease of use for a lot of the people who wanted to listen to podcasts and podcast audio fiction. That spike actually turned out to be a new baseline level of downloads – until Podiobooks.com went down completely for a little while, torn apart by malicious, hacking spammers. All Podiobooks.com titles were de-listed from iTunes for a week or two while they rebuilt the site. When things were back online, many of my titles’ downloads continued at rates higher than they’d been prior to the launch of the standalone Podcasts app, but none of them were near the levels they were at before being temporarily de-listed, and some of them went right back down to their pre-Podcasts-app trickles. Oh, well. Easy come, easy go.

Without listing out all the totals of all the downloads for each title across multiple formats (I’ll gladly share the numbers with you if you’re interested, just ask me), here are some highlights: 124,867 total Podiobooks downloads (across all titles) for Q3, which compares favorably with ~35k in Q2, ~27k in Q1, and ~151k in all of 2011. The final episodes of the various books were downloaded a total of 9,015 times in Q3, so that’s probably the maximum number of new people who have heard an entire book, though if everyone who finished one of my books also downloaded all my other available titles it might have been as few as 693 different people downloading those 9k books – which is to say the number of new listeners my books found in Q3 via the Podiobooks feeds was somewhere in the range from 693 to 9,015. Not taking in to account things like repeated downloads or other errors, of course. Still, 124k downloads in Q3 represents fully 17% of the 731,086 total downloads (as of end-of-Q3’2012) I’ve had via Podiobooks.com over the years; hopefully the coming months will bring a steady flow of downloads and an increase in orders of the for-purchase versions of my stories. Podiobooks.com added up all the donations from all my titles for Q1 through Q3 into one payout, and my cut of the 2 donations came out to a total of $10.46; for the purposes of this post, we’ll consider them both to be Q3 donations.

eBooks did not see that dramatic up-tick. In fact, they saw the continued decline of downloads I’ve been witnessing since last fall. My eBooks were downloaded a total of 2,705 times in Q3, and only 11 of those were purchases. (This compares with 4,689/24 in Q2 and 4,992/36 in Q1.) Those purchases netted me $26.90, and the most popular title was Sophia. Alternatively, there were only 40 or 45 copies of Emily or Sophia (respectively) downloaded (in all of Q3) including the purchased and the free copies; aside from my own poetry, they are my least-popular free eBooks. (The Sophia Podiobook has been available for less than a week and has been downloaded my more than twice as many people as the eBook was downloaded in Q3. I am confident both eBooks would be downloaded more if I made them available in PDF.) Alternatively, I sold 2 Never Let the Right One Go hardbacks in Q3, earning $70. That makes a total of 15 “book sales” for Q3, earning $107.36.

Oh, and for those of you who haven’t put two and two together: Lowering prices, adjusting eBook prices down, down, down, hasn’t helped sales at all. I’ve been lowering my eBook prices the more copies they’ve sold and the more money they’ve earned, and my sales volume has gone right down with them. As an experiment, I’m thinking of putting my “floored” eBooks (those which have already earned out their expenses) “on sale” at $0.99 for November and December, rather than holding them at $2.99 for the remainder of the year, just to see what happens. Either way (barring some miraculous turn of events where my eBooks suddenly start selling thousands of copies a month at $0.99 apiece) I plan to raise all my prices back to reasonable and appropriate levels at the start of 2013, and to give up the the pricing experiment we began nearly a year ago. For the nth time (at least 3 major experiments I can recall, and several shorter or less-rigorous ones) I’ve shown that lowering my prices reduces my sales. (Not just less money, but fewer copies sold -by far- every time.) I don’t think I’ll be messing with prices in this way again any time soon. Lower prices is not, apparently, what my readers want. Continue reading Q3 Numbers, NaNoDecisions, and taking risks

Projects getting backed up

I haven’t been making the progress I’d hoped on some parts of my ongoing projects, and they’re beginning to back up on one another. Some projects have been put on “back burners”, indefinitely postponed, others have changed scale, scope, or purpose, and still the ones I have remaining are giving my timeline trouble.

Here’s the main problem: Research, reading, and getting ready for writing YA/middle-grades adventure books – it’s taking too long. Or, at least, taking longer than expected. Or, if not “expected”, then at least … hoped.

Well, here’s the rub: NaNoWriMo is in November. I’ve been participating for a decade now, and whenever I can, I try to line up my personal writing schedule in such a way that I’ll be working on the writing part of a project during November – in such a way that I begin writing on November 1st, or at least write at least 50k words before November ends, if at all possible. November begins in 11 days.

Back to the reading: I’m pretty sure I’ve written about it here before, but one of the things I’ve been working on is reading a lot of YA adventure books. Saturating myself in them. Studying them. Making observations and notes about what works for me, what I love, what I loathe, and what I absolutely want to avoid. Enjoying them, as much as possible, certainly, because that helps teach me what’s enjoyable about the best of them. Struggling through them, when that’s not possible, because that helps me focus on the worst elements of commercial fiction. I developed a long reading list, and I’ve been working my way through it, but I have at least two dozen more I’d like to try to get through before I actually start working on detailed plotting and planning of my own YA adventures. I can get through about one a day. One and a half, maybe even two, if they’re short and I’m having a good day. Less than half of one if it’s a bad day, or an over-long book, or one that’s a real struggle to get through.

It’ll almost certainly be mid-November (at the earliest) before I get to the end of my current (already significantly truncated) reading list. Without going into details of the project I’m working on (my initial plan was to simply re-write Dragons’ Truth as a commercial-fiction-style YA adventure, building it to support a sequel or two this time, but that’s one I’ve indefinitely postponed; what I want to accomplish with it has been growing grander than the scope of my current capabilities), I can say that the time I’ll need for preparations before beginning to write the first story may be extensive. Certainly days, possibly weeks, hopefully not months. With the nature of the multi-story arc I’ve got in mind, I’d really like to get all the background and world building done first, then detail all the plots of all the stories from the beginning to the end of the entire series, all the character arcs, the relationships, the twists and turns, adventures and stakes, climaxes and resolutions, et cetera, before putting the first word of the first book down. …and the world-building and background is getting pretty extensive, already. I may have to produce more material during “pre-production” than will end up in the entire project put together. I may have bitten off more than I can chew.

Likely scenario: I’ll keep reading for the next week or so, continue thinking about the backgrounding, and get so stressed out about the impossibility of accomplishing all I’ve set out to do (I haven’t even mentioned the part where I need to complete the entire project, from beginning to end, including editing, illustration, fundraising, and [redacted], within the next six months – so I can have at least part of it on hand to sell at Phoenix Comicon.) that I give up and try to finish all the “pre-production” work in a few days so I can start writing at or near the beginning of November. And then, despite my sincere belief that I need more preparation to do it well, the whole thing will probably work out fine, anyway.

Still, where I am right now, I’m having a hard time seeing it, feeling it, or accepting it. Right now I feel like I’m being gradually crushed under the weight of all the things I haven’t done… or at least that I haven’t been able to do within an artificial, arbitrary, external timescale. …which I’m the only one trying to fit myself, my ideas, and my plans into. I suppose this is part of a struggle within myself to accept another degree of the freedom I actually live within; that I’m free to set my own schedules, my own deadlines, and that whatever constraints I think or feel myself within, they are only the ones I’ve selected or accepted. Time. What a thing it is.

This is a reminder for myself (which I probably won’t see again after I post this): If/when I reach that point of breaking stress where I’m about to compromise my creative intent, I should consider adjusting (revising, rebuilding, extending, and flexibly recreating) my current plan/schedule for this project, even at the expense of participation in NaNoWriMo with any portion of this project. Consider also the taking of a break on the big projects for November and pantsing the whole thing.

Actually, I already have some ideas about what to do (at least at Comicon, if not for NaNoWriMo), if I can’t get this project off the ground before the end of November, so … I’ll keep thinking about it. And about what I’ve just been writing to myself about managing my own time and projects.

Stepping away from all this interconnectedness

I think I may need to declare a general Internet/connectedness/social-media bankruptcy née blackout née vacation for the next few months.

Which may seem odd, as I am already nigh-silent most of the time, but what you may not realize is that I am a lurker: I spend hours a day keeping up to date with emails, with social media, with news, technology, blogs, science, forums, et cetera. Then two or three times a week I add my own thoughts to the mix.

I just don’t think I can afford those hours, any more. In part I’m sure this is related to the 90 minutes a day, 3 to 5 days a week I’m exercising – but as long as I’m able to keep that up, I don’t want to give it up. Right now though, the looming thing seems to be work.

Tonight I sat down at my computer and lost hours and hours trying to catch back up with my inbox and with Google Reader. I mean, I watch my inbox, I see every mail come in as it comes in (usually on my iPhone or iPad, with a glance), and the few which require immediate attention get it… But there are hundreds more which, when I’m deeply involved in a project, just get skipped over, put off until later. I hadn’t realized it until tonight, but apparently last Wednesday when I got intensely involved in fleshing out an early/first prototype of the game I’m building, everything else just stopped. All those connectivity things, the keeping up with the world, plus things like cleaning or planning meals, their priority dropped and I didn’t even notice I wasn’t keeping up. Not until the brain fever subsided, anyway.

Now I’m facing a massive project. I “woke up” to find a dry-erase calendar (3’x4′) on the wall above my desk, filled in with 7+ months worth of (rough) plans for how to execute that project and meet my deadlines. Plus huge amounts of unread email, news items, blogs, and never-ending-scrolls of social media sites. Plus a messy house, and piles of laundry.

I’m thinking that if I make the intentional decision to cut out most of the Internet-time-suck stuff, to start treating Facebook and Google+ like I do Twitter (more like a river constantly rushing by, where the best you can do is see what’s rushing by now, this moment, than like a newspaper or newsletter you could actually expect to keep constantly up-to-date with and read cover-to-cover), to select a tiny subset of my feed subscriptions to actually follow, and to set up some aggressive rules in Mail (and go on yet another big unsubscription spree) to winnow out only the “real” mail, then for the time being, while I’m working on this massive project, at least, I mightn’t feel awful when I can’t keep up with the flood. When I can’t swallow the entire river.

This month might be the hardest, on my apparent/proposed calendar, partially due to NaNoWriMo-related constraints. I’ve got a little over two weeks to finish all my research (which feels barely begun / half-done) and do all the planning for the entire massive project. Which is massive, and I don’t want to tell you about until I have all that planning (and probably at least a month or two of work) done on it. Plus there’s the work of winnowing. Cutting back on connectedness.

There’s also the danger I won’t care to re-connect, on the other side.

I suppose it’s a way to measure the value these connections represent, to cut them off/back. If I go four or six months without, and am not diminished thereby, perhaps connectedness as implemented now is/was/will-have-been more vice than value. Facing my own inbox, my own unread subscriptions, I began having a sort of slow-burn, extended anxiety attack, tonight. I worked through it, I got caught up, but I’m unable to sleep right now because I’m still wound up by the experience. I imagined what it would be like if I actually committed myself so fully to the execution of this project that I failed to notice (or make pre-emotive decisions about the management of) such backing-up of information for several months, rather than mere days; it was a gruesome thought.

Ah, well, I suppose tomorrow I begin to fade away, a bit. Or dim the world, at least.

Call me, if you need anything.

Kickstarting creative projects

In response to a conversation on Facebook about ROI for Kickstarter Backers, where the responses were alternately about Kickstarter being a money-sink and about seeing lots of interesting products available there, I responded:

Kickstarter has to keep reminding people (and modifying the way things are worded & presented) that it is not, and should not be used as, a store. Backers aren’t Buyers. Rewards aren’t Products you’re purchasing.

At its core intention, Kickstarter is for this: A person has a creative project they’d like to execute, but not the funds to do so. Other people pledge money toward that person being able to create what they’ve envisioned; if enough people think the idea is something they want to exist (enough to put up cash), the creator gets funded.

As an aside, creators may offer rewards to backers who pledge significant funding toward their project. What a backer is paying for is always the execution of a creative idea, and any rewards delivered are equivalent to a tote bag or mug you’d get for pledging to PBS. The biggest problems I’ve seen in the discussions around Kickstarter come from creators & potential backers who deny what Kickstarter says it is, and try to treat it as a marketplace/store – and Kickstarter letting them.

I’ll admit that I have trouble with this last point/problem, myself – largely due to financial reasons; I’m not a wealthy patron of the arts, but a sort of ‘starving artist’. I don’t have a lot of room in my normal budget for making meaningful pledges. Roughly half of my pledges have been for the minimum amount: $1. None of my pledges have been over $15 and only one over $10. Where the problem of my budget meets the problem of seeing Kickstarter as a store selling products is this: I look at the rewards on a project I want to back, and if the “cheapest” reward is more than I can afford to spend, I typically just back $1 – it’s a way of showing that I believe the project is worth backing (though I can’t afford to do so properly). Projects I see near the beginning of the month are more likely to get my backing than those near the end of a month, because of how we do our budgeting; if we have $45 for [books + music + movies + games + apps] each month, it’s pretty easy to not have even $25 left (for a product we may not see for half a year) by the time even mid-month rolls around. Likewise, there are projects where I know the creator, I want to support their work, but I have no interest in the specific project they’re Kickstarting.

For example, there are two current Kickstarters by authors I know, The Way of the Gun and Dead of the Union, which I’ve been debating backing. On one hand, especially for Scott Roche‘s The Way of the Gun, I want to support the creators – Scott Roche and I have worked together on several projects over the years, helping Beta Read and/or edit one another’s stories/novels, discussing business, religion, and more, and in principle I’d like to see all his creative projects succeed. On the other hand, I have no interest in westerns. At all. I don’t know anything about Bushido. The core concept of his project is lost on me. I’ve never read/heard anything by the other authors whose stories are in the anthology, either. Likewise, I don’t currently crave historical fiction or zombie novels, though I have a couple more of my own to write, so while I would like to see Dead of the Union succeed, I don’t really want to read it.

Still, in accordance to what I wrote above, the point is the support, not the rewards. If I had the room in my budget, I could pledge more and tick the ‘no rewards’ box at Kickstarter, but I think the best way I can support these two projects is to: 1) ‘Sign my name’ by backing them, and 2) Spread the word. So I’m pledging a bit to each project, and I’m blogging about them here. I’m also sharing the projects on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. In a few years, when we’ve paid off our debts (we’re still on track to pay off our consumer debt (not student loans) by mid-2104) and have a little more financial freedom, I’ll almost certainly upgrade this sort of behavior to include more substantial pledges, but for now my best effort is to try to encourage you, dear readers, to consider making your own pledges to these projects. Continue reading Kickstarting creative projects

Brainstorming future projects, Fall 2012 – Spring 2013

I have Facebook Pages set up for myself and for Modern Evil Press, but I don’t really make good use of them. I also have subscriptions turned on, on my personal Facebook account, so fans can just subscribe to my updates there and … well, that’s probably the best option, if you actually want to see all my updates, and know what I’m doing, what I’m working on, et cetera. I do have a couple apps pulling the feeds from this blog, my podcast, and any updates to modernevil.com and wretchedcreature.com onto the official Facebook page for me (though not the Modern Evil Press page), so if you Like me there, you’ll know most of what I’m doing, but I rarely make direct updates/posts. Sometimes I try.

A little while ago I began trying to write an update for my page, from my iPhone, and … it got a bit out of hand. Here’s what I wrote (with a few tiny adjustments):

Trying to decide what to attempt this year for NaNoWriMo, and how to publish it (in print) in time for PHXCC’13 without going broke in the process. Possible ideas:

1) Rush to be ready to re-write Dragons’ Truth by November 1st
2) Write a ‘tentacle novel’ for NaNoWriMo (specifically to sell at PHXCC, partially via a tentacle-themed-crafts collective I’m tentatively a part of).

These two ideas each lead to spin-off ideas:

3) The Dragons’ Truth re-write is supposed to include designing it to allow for a sequel – actually I’m planning a trilogy. Due to timeline issues, I’d like to have all 3 written before the first goes to press. (At least for the paper version; eBooks are easy to change/correct/update.)
4) Should I write one long-ish tentacle novel (say, 75k+ words) or two or three short ones (under 40k words each), which can sell for pocket money (target: <$7.99)? Doesn’t “The Tentacle Trilogy” sound good? “Introducing: The Mystery of the Missing Manacles, Book 1 of The Tentacle Trilogy“

5) Printing trilogies is expensive. Triple the setup costs, trouble moving inventory for later books in the series… And while I really like the idea of doing the individual books (for either trilogy) as cheap paperbacks and adding a combined hardcover limited edition that would sell for a premium price, that makes for a very expensive spring, next year.
6) If I really put my mind to it (and didn’t spend the whole of the next 3.5 months on the tabletop game I’m also developing) I could theoretically write all six books (How did I go from one or two books in the next few months to six? Six!?) in time to have some or all of them at PHXCC.

How those books are presented/sold becomes the conundrum: Do I only release the first book (of each series), and give specific release dates for the others? Do I make the first books available as paperbacks, both series available in combined LE hardbacks, and conditionally print the other paperbacks if/when the cost of doing so would be covered? Do I break the bank & print up 6 new paperback and 2 new LE hardbacks, all at once, and hope enough of them sell?

It would be difficult to set deadlines appropriately without knowing my publishing plans, or to begin building marketing hype for those unknown future releases.

Then there’s always the thought of kickstarting: I could write the books, edit them, prepare them for publication, and release the first book as an eBook (or just link to the free interactive version I’m planning, for Dragons’ Truth), then kickstart to try to raise funds for printing paper versions, with stretch goals for the various mixes/release-schedules postulated above, and the main reward being the “best version” printed.

This is getting longer than I’d planned. Maybe I should go do a blog post.

So… here I am. Doing a blog post. Continue reading Brainstorming future projects, Fall 2012 – Spring 2013