Category: Marketing

Cheating, Death – unboxing the paperbacks

Wow. I didn’t intend for it to work out exactly that way, but it looks like Cheating, Death went from word one to paperback book in my hand in exactly a month. On September 23rd I started writing, and today (October 23rd) I received my initial shipment of paperback copies. I blogged about writing it as I wrote it, a chapter or two at a time (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 & 7, 8 & 9, 10, 11, 12, 13), and about a few other things, in between. I actually finished writing the first draft on October 8th, only 15 days after beginning it. I edited it, copyedited it, and had a couple of people beta-read it, designed the cover, and then submitted it to Lightning Source (my printer) on October 13th, they “approved” it on October 16th, then they printed my order of 52 copies, shipping it Monday, October 19th. Since I selected the cheapest shipping method, UPS Ground, it took all week to get here. So, from first word to finished book in 15 days, to edited book in another 5 (which is when it was available as an eBook, via Smashwords and on the Kindle, for $4.99), and now it’s available for order directly from me (yes, and from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, et cetera) in paperback for $9.99. I’ve already recorded the audiobook (though it needs to be edited and mixed into 3 different versions), and will be podcasting it as soon as my current audiobook is done, beginning 11/13.

But now to the unboxing. I ordered 52 copies. Why 52 copies? I don’t know. I’m crazy. Or… Well, I got a nice discount per copy by ordering more than 50, and 52 was the most I could order for less than $150 (including shipping). Yes, they cost roughly $3 each, to me. So when you buy from me for $10, I get $7 per copy. If you buy from someone other than me, I get $2.42 per copy sold. ($9.99 x 50% wholesale discount = $4.99 – $2.57 print charge = $2.42) Please, buy from me, and if you don’t buy from me, buy from a local independent book store (they can order it, just give them the ISBN: 978-1-934516-05-8). Anyway, I ordered 52 copies which is less than a single case, so here’s the box they sent me (click any image to see it larger):

And here’s the book, in my hands, and front and back (see full cover) side-by-side:

And here’s what 52 copies looks like, on my bed:

Now, one of those is already addressed to the Library of Congress, and I’m giving 5 away via Goodreads. Anyone who pre-ordered a copy from modernevil.com, I’ll ship out this weekend. Have you ordered your copy, yet?

Ooh, or are you a book blogger interested in reviewing a zombie novel? I can send you a free PDF of the book (or give you a Smashwords coupon, if you have a preferred eReading format) immediately, and if you’re interested, will also send out free paperbacks to bloggers who want them. I haven’t nailed down a plan or limit for this yet, so if you’re interested, or know a book blog/blogger I should contact, please let me know. Post a comment or send an email to teel@modernevil.com.

Cheating, Death – cover preview

I’ve been working on the book cover for Cheating, Death, tweaking the copy, et cetera, and would appreciate any feedback you have.  Note that this is the full wraparound cover, so the front cover is on the right and the back cover is on the left, with the spine in the middle.

Click the image to see a bigger / readable version:

If you saw this cover, what would you expect from the book?  Would you want to read it?  Would you want to read Appendix Z immediately?  Any reactions & first impressions are appreciated.  Thanks.

Cheating, Death – chapter 13 (ie: complete!)

Go read Cheating, Death now.

Whew.  Done!  Now I just have a whole stack of things to do!  But at least the 1st draft is written!  One of the first things I have to do next is print it out and read it for the first time.  I’ll do this out loud and make notes as I go.  It’s a pretty good way to see if it all works, and whether any sentences need work.  I actually read quite a bit of it out loud as I was working on it; since beginning podcasting all my fiction, I pay a lot more attention to making a good read-aloud book.

Speaking of the podcast:  No voices, for this one, just narration and enough vocal variation to be able to tell any two lines of dialogue apart.  Also, based on a schedule I’d just laid out, I should be able to start this one on the Friday after Untrue Tales… Book Three is complete and then post two chapters a week (one chapter per episode, like FWYCR) from 11/13/09 to 12/25/09.  Because, yeah, I’m going to post the stunning conclusion to the novel on Christmas day. :p

Oh, in addition to writing chapter 13, I’ve also written Appendix Z, included here:

Appendix Z: About the Zombies

Some helpful information about the zombies in this book:

Zombies are slow.

Zombies are stupid.

Zombies do not use tools.

Zombies do not use language.

Zombies do not experience romance.

Zombies are not just old, hungry vampires.

Zombies do not want to exact revenge on the living.

Zombies do not have any magical abilities or super-powers.

Zombies can only be killed by damaging or destroying their brain.

Zombies eat the living, and are attracted to the motion and commotion they make.

Zombies like eating brains, but are not possessed of superhuman strength, so how are they supposed to bite through your skull?

Zombies who did manage to eat the brains of their victims wouldn’t be much of a threat, since they’d prevent the spread of zombie-ism by doing so.

Zombies are created when a human has had fluid contact with a zombie; primarily via saliva transmitted into a bite wound.

Note: Hell is not full, zombies are not a sudden and global phenomenon bringing all unburied dead to life, the dead are not clawing their way out of graves, and this book’s cover is intentionally misleading.

Zombies spread quickly because the living are stupid, too.

I’m posting it here because it’s at the end of the book, which means it isn’t in the free preview.  Which still contains (roughly) the first four chapters of the book.  Have you checked it out, yet?  You should.  The full book’s price is, as promised, at the full eBook price of $4.99 (subject to change) over at Smashwords.  It is currently in its first-draft, unedited state.  Please let me know if you find any problems or errors in it, so I correct them before I send it to press (probably next week).  When it’s corrected, I’ll update the Smashwords copy again, and release it to “Premium Distribution” as well.

Time to go throw it into InDesign, so I have a page count to submit for the PCN request.  I hope you enjoy it.

Go read Cheating, Death now.

Cheating, Death – chapter 11

Go read Cheating, Death now.

Only one chapter, again, today.  Still on track to finish the book this week, but it’s slower than I’d expected.  I think most of the resistance I’m running into at this point comes from something I’ve had trouble with for as long as I can recall:  I know the story.  I know the story, so it’s harder to write the story.

When I just sit down and write, when I don’t know what’s coming next or where things are headed or even, in some cases, anything about what I’m going to write at all, it often flows quite freely.  Even with the Untrue Tales… where I know the basic character/story/universe arcs as well as I know my own past, I don’t know how it’s all going to come together on the page, and it comes pretty easily.  With Forget What You Can’t Remember, the most difficult parts to write came after I’d realized how it was all going to come together at the end, because then I had to push these characters through those situations and lead them to be at the right places at the right times … and that’s less like watching the story unfold as it is hammering cold iron into shackles.  And it’s always felt less like creative expression to me and more like work.

I’ve been doing somewhat better with this book than I expected, considering I’d had the bulk of the story outlined months ahead of time.  In fact, the parts of the story I knew the best, toward the beginning, were some of the easiest to write.  This may have had to do with the extent to which they were unconstrained; I knew what had to happen, and I knew what the last scenes of the book would be, but everything in between was unknown.  And until I’d reached the middle of the book, I didn’t even know how long it was going to be or how much more time/space/words/chapters I’d have available to get Melvin and Stacy and Frances to where they needed to be, when they needed to be there.

It was after that I slowed down, I guess.  After I’d more thoroughly outlined the remainder of the book.  After I’d created a bit more of a financial plan for the book.  Something vital happened in chapter 11, and getting everyone and everything in place for it has been a challenge.  Then, writing it was a challenge.  Now I’ve only got two chapters left: Chapter 12, in which I have to get everyone in place for chapter 13, in which Melvin has one more important place in the story to be, and Stacy’s final fate (in this book) is revealed.  I expect the core of chapter 13 to be technically exacting, but easy to write; this is my favorite moment, the brilliant thing that makes me love the book (and that I think will lead many to despise it/me).  I expect the vignette that closes out the novel to be reasonably easy to write and, in case I haven’t mentioned it, I plan to write a new short story to include in a 2nd Edition of More Lost Memories that expands on something that happens in that vignette. ((Actually, I plan to write two more stories for MLM; one based on that something in ch.13, one written from a zombie’s POV in the Denver outbreak.))

Ooh.  I’ve just had an idea about the length of Cheating, Death.  I could add a 2nd appendix which includes all these blog posts.  (I’m already planning on writing an “Appendix Z – About the Zombies” where I detail what the zombies are and are not in my book.  ie: they are dumb and slow, they don’t use tools or language, and they are spread by infection/bites, so the uninfected dead are just dead, and no one is coming up out of graves (Contrary to the cover image. Hah!))  They seem like they might be an interesting/relevant addition to the book.  I’ll look them over and consider it when I get to doing the layout.  Tell me what you think of the idea, in the comments.

Go read Cheating, Death now.

Problems of Perception

At the latest Art Walk, for the first time, I had some chapbooks/mini-books to sell at a lower price point than I normally have product at. I had two different, complete, individual short stories put together as 32pp & 44pp mini-books. I printed up 50 copies of each, signed & numbered them, and set the price at $2 apiece. The primary motivating factor here was to try to make sales to all the people who implied they wanted to buy one of my books but that they didn’t have the $13 or $14 required or a credit card (I totally take credit cards). I thought, perhaps incorrectly, that some of those people would have at least a couple dollars with them. I only moved 5 mini-books at the Art Walk.

The fact that people didn’t have (or lied about not having) $2 to buy a short story isn’t what struck me the most about the experience that night. Instead it was this: People assumed they were free.

Now, I could have used a color and/or cardstock cover to clarify that they weren’t simply photocopied brochures or flyers, though I suspect there may still have been some people who assumed they were free. A lot of people picked the mini-books up, looked them over, and managed to ignore the price marked on it in 70pt type. Over and over again. They grabbed, they looked, we discussed what it was, and they moved to walk off without even considering that a product at a vendor booth might have a price.

I thought this was bad enough, then when the crowd had thickened a bit later in the evening, it got worse. People started grabbing the mini-books and moving to walk off with them without so much as slowing down or asking what it was they were grabbing. Upon final inventory Saturday morning I confirmed that I’d caught everyone who’d tried to walk off with an unpaid copy, but the experience further illuminated some problems with perception I’ve been having pretty consistently with my business.

Another aspect of the problem that also manifested itself last Friday at the Art Walk comes across in the oft-voiced assumption that the art I’m showing is prints (as opposed to the handmade originals they all actually are). I’d thought this might be related to my relatively-affordable prices, so this month I didn’t post any prices. More people than ever asked whether my art was prints before (or without) asking about pricing.  I know that some of the other artists at the art walk offer both prints and originals, and that some even offer prints exclusively.  I just wonder what is driving this assumption about my work.

In thinking about this problem, it occurred to me that it might have something to do with the precise nature of my recent work, and of how carefully I’ve worked to produce clean, crisp, bold intersections and interactions of color fields.  That some of my recent work is so well-crafted that it appears to have been created in (or cleaned up in) a computer and then printed out.  That the sharp edges I create with my hand-carved tape-stencils are clearly not created with manual brush strokes.  I really don’t know what it is, I can only guess, and these are what I’ve come up with in the last few days.

The other possibility is that people are projecting on to the work what they want from it.  That they don’t believe they can afford original artwork, so project the idea that the art they want is available as an affordable print.  That they can’t afford a couple of bucks for a chapbook, so they project the idea that they’re free.

Other perception problems I’ve had potential customers express: People who have been to my websites (modernevil.com, wretchedcreature.com) and who honestly are not aware that they can buy my books and/or art online (or in some cases, that they’re available for sale at all).  People who have my business card (and/or are looking at one of my websites) and don’t know my address, phone number, or email address to contact me.  (Literally: My name, address, phone number, and email address are on every single page of both of my business sites.)  People who have purchased an handmade original piece of art from me, given it away to someone else, and come back to buy another copy of the same thing for themselves – sincerely believing that what they bought was a mass-produced (or at least multiply produced) item.

I don’t know what to do about these perception problems. Putting “all artwork original” on a sign at my Art Walk booth and on wretchedcreature.com doesn’t seem to have helped to communicate that I’m not merely selling prints.  Offering prints isn’t the answer, either.  Not only do I not like the idea of it, preferring each piece to be handmade and unique, but I’ve also looked into it and found the costs to be prohibitive.  I’d have to at least double the prices on all my art, probably up to double the normal prices (ie: quadruple or more the current prices), or some of the prints would actually be more expensive -just to print- than the prices I’m asking for the originals.  I’ve been thinking of changing my prices, but downward, not upward.  I want my art to be selling briskly more than I want individual pieces to be gaining value.

Feel free to chime in with your own thoughts on these quirks of perception; I mostly just don’t understand them.  Book pricing, perception of value of the printed word, perception of value of chapbooks, these  are a separate discussion I’d meant to get to earlier today, but haven’t yet made time to.  Perhaps tomorrow.  I thought I needed a nap 5 hours ago; by now I need a full night’s sleep.  Good night.