Category: Marketing

DNGR, and other projects I’m thinking about

Right now I feel like I ought to be writing, but I also feel like crap. I feel like I’m suspended, floating, somewhere between a deep depression and intense procrastineering. Last week I was closer to the procrastineering side, so I was getting a lot of things accomplished. This week I’m closer to the darkness. Sleeping around 12 hours a day, stopping whatever I’m doing to cry for a while, overeating some… And, importantly, not getting any real work done. Hopefully by this time next week I’ll have pushed myself in the direction of mania; as I tweeted, I think this is a book I could get written in a matter of days.

Before I get into the book I’m talking about, which, unless you follow me on Facebook/Google+, you’ve never heard of, I want to write a little about some (hopefully temporary) alterations to my writing process that I’m attempting this year. The biggest element is that I’m studying The Hero’s Journey – I’ve been reading Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces this month, and have been looking over a few online resources covering putting its ideas to use in storytelling, screenwriting, novel-writing, et cetera. Why am I studying The Hero’s Journey? Well, as I said on Facebook, “I need practice doing formulaic writing for my Dragons’ Truth rewrite, which I want to be hyper-formulaic commercial tripe. I mean, if Dragons’ Truth is going to be my least favorite of my books, I’d much rather hate it (and everything it represents) than merely be disappointed in it, right?”

What’s that? You hadn’t heard me mention I’m planning on (slash/ thinking of) re-writing Dragons’ Truth as a proper children’s/YA adventure book? Or that part of the point of the re-write is not just to make it possible to write sequels, but to just go ahead and write a trilogy? Well, that’s been a thought I’ve been mulling over and developing these last few years, and we’re nearing the culmination point of those thoughts. Among them is to study both children’s/YA adventure books (such as Rick Riordan’s and Lemony Snicket’s books,  and perhaps other top-selling books in the category) and to study (and follow) the formulae of the worst of the “all good books must…” insistences; the latter primarily concerning itself with things like following The Hero’s Journey, or scene-writing according to guides like Jim Butcher’s livejournal, or thinking about story in terms like those in Syd Field’s Screenplay. Now, there are limits to the number of different “rules” any one book (or series of books) can follow before it keels over under the weight of all that garbage, so I’ve been trying to narrow down to a limited set which can be made to work together without contradicting one another too severely. (And without destroying my soul, in the process; I’m only trying to do something very, very painful to myself, not actually suicide via bad writing.) So that’s been somewhat penciled-in on my calendar for as soon as I was done with Never Let the Right One Go – which was, effectively, done by the end of May. (Only 7 copies left, right now! Order while you still can!)

Step one is to do the research, read the books, the blogs, learn the formulas and the structures and the concepts behind them, read also the actual adventure books, plan out the trilogy (along with the marketing plan, book blurbs, et cetera – an important part of the method of writing I’m attempting to channel/emulate is to start with the marketing and work backwards to the book), and otherwise prepare. Step two is to write the books. Step three is the editing and marketing and publishing and all that. So, having barely reached step one, I’m beginning the research. With the looming deadline of “have physical products (preferably new) to sell at Phoenix Comicon 2013”, the deadline for at least one (and maybe all three – though that’s another blog/conversation/conundrum) of the books in the New Dragons’ Truth Trilogy is May, 2013. Except, look: I’m working on other things.

(As an aside: I’ve already outlined the hyper-structure of the interactive eBook I’m writing about my experiences writing and publishing, and I’ve already begun writing it. I’ve got a title, some elaborate plans for the various editions, and really just need to invest a few dozen hours in writing to get it ready to be built and published. So, there’s that. But unless it makes a lot of money and I decide to release it as a CYOA, I don’t foresee a future for it as a physical product to sell at Phoenix Comicon.)

Summer is here, and among the other things that means, it means Mandy and I are able to attend a few of the later-night social happenings we get invited to all year, such as a weekly Game Night our friends in the East Valley host every Thursday. During the school year, a social event that runs from 7PM or 8PM until 1AM-3AM and which requires a half-hour drive each way to attend is untenable; Mandy has to be up at 5:30AM on school days to get ready and get to school on time. Most school nights she’s in bed between 8:30PM and 9:30PM. During the summer, there’s a little more flexibility. So, a couple weeks ago, for the first time in months, we went to Game Night. About half of the friends involved in this event, including myself, are also involved every year in NaNoWriMo (and other literary projects) – we’re writers, we’re editors, we’re publishers, and we also happen to enjoy playing tabletop games together.

Toward the end of this particular game night, on the cusp of June, Owen mentioned that he’d signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo (Write a novel in the month of June! Or August! – For people whose summers are easier to find free time in than their Novembers, I guess) and, it being after midnight, was already technically behind. So we got into a conversation about writing and story ideas, and I brought up (after fighting with my phone for a bit – Simplenote seems unreliable on my iPhone for some reason, though I use it all the time on my iPad & have no trouble syncing it with Scrivener) an old, pending idea for a book I’ve had lingering on my to-do-list for at least a year (or several): Write a sequel to “Book 1 of the Death Noodle Glitterfairy Robot Saga”

Now, over the course of the conversation which ensued, the nature of the goal shifted a tiny bit, as two or three other people there declared their interest in tackling this goal. Here’s how I explained it on Facebook and Google+: “…so rather than all of us attempting to write “Book 2 of…”, we’re each writing an indeterminate sequel – and we’ll figure out what order they go best in later. Then we’ll all write Book 1 (and possibly a concluding story) collaboratively, something which can sensibly lead to all those other stories. Then we’ll edit them and publish the saga, probably via Modern Evil Press, and almost certainly in print (in some form or another), eBook(s), and audiobook(s); we would love to have these to sell at the next Phoenix Comicon.” I also added the following vague guidelines:

  • We’re looking for short novels (the easier to compile them into a massive single volume), and to have first drafts done quickly – since at least two of the participating authors were already doing Camp NaNoWriMo, I’d recommend aiming for about 50k words, and having a draft done by the end of June (or July), 2012.
  • We’re hoping for family-friendly (or at least YA-friendly) books, if possible – this basically just means we’re hoping to avoid any explicit erotica and/or explicit horror-porn, though addressing serious/mature themes and situations would be awesome, if handled and written well. If one or more authors writes a really, really compelling book where the NC-17 content is absolutely vital to expressing their plot/characters/themes, we’ll adapt, but it would be best to aim for a general audience.
  • We’re looking for art inspired by (and inspired by the vague idea of) the Saga; I’ll probably make another call for artists when there are actually books written, for the cough uninspired cough artists who actually want to depict something one of us put in one of the books. Realistically, if we could get any sketches or art within the next few days/weeks, it could influence the direction of the stories.
  • I’ll probably be the big-E Editor for the Saga, since I’ll probably also be the publisher. Write the best story you can, and know I’ll be working with you (and probably so will all the other authors) to make it even better. Depending on who actually finishes any books and how it all comes together, we’ll figure out money/etc later on.

Now, if the idea of “write a sequel in the Death Noodle Glitterfairy Robot Saga” doesn’t immediately give you some ideas about what to write, you probably aren’t the right writer for this project. If you want a series bible, to help prevent the inevitable contradictions about things like “is Death Noodle Glitterfairy Robot one person, or three? Or four?” and “does the DNGR Saga take place on contemporary Earth, or some other time/place?”, this probably isn’t a project you can work on (yet). I think, maybe, some (not necessarily all) of the authors currently “working” on the project have some conception of what they mean when they agree that DNGR might be a band (Robot is clearly the drummer, I hear) who solves crimes/mysteries. Realistically, if you didn’t want to have that part of your book, it’s just a page or two to explain away, in the inevitable Epilogues&Prologues bridging our wildly disparate books. There’s so much leeway, and it’s such a fun (for me) sort of book to write, I got to work on it right away.

That is to say: The next day (or so) I started studying The Hero’s Journey. I started thinking about what sort of story in the DNGR Saga I wanted to tell, who would be the Hero, what would the theme of the book be, what would it be “about”, et cetera. Within a week I’d finished the meat of Joseph Campbell’s book, re-read several online essays I’d bookmarked over the last few years, and outlined Death Noodle’s journey in lockstep with the monomyth… while telling an important/exciting story about excessive copyright enforcement. Then I went through and fleshed out and expanded the outline with the scene-by-scene formulas recommended by Jim Butcher (among others). I set up the project in Scrivener, sync’d it with Simplenote, divided up my fleshy outline into each chapter’s file, and it’s now sitting there, waiting, ready for me to start writing at any moment.

Right now I’m filled with dread and anticipation of two distinct sorts: The first will begin to resolve itself as soon as I begin writing, and will have evaporated as soon as I reach the end of the first draft. (It will then condense into the more terrible dread and anticipation which fills the cracks between writing and publication.) The second may not ever be resolved; it is the dread that this sort of terribly formulaic, painfully structured prose is what readers actually want (i.e.: dread that this book will be loved), mixed with the dread that after over a decade of writing novels, by the time I get to my 19th book (which this will be), even sticking to bad formulas won’t keep me from writing a good book (i.e.: dread that this book will be loved) and I won’t be able to tell whether they like it because it’s formulaic or because I wrote well in spite of the formulae, and further mixed with the anticipatory dread of finding out what people think of it – the anticipation that very few will read it, and/or even fewer will like it, and I may never know one way or the other. This, I can assure you, is a terrible place to be in, as an author.

I’m trying to write the best and most interesting book I can, while also trying to wedge in all this other garbage, these rules, these patterns, this structure within a structure (neither of them my own, or determined by the story, but handed down from on high by “experts”), and it’s a struggle. Worse is being in a position of dreading that my book will be enjoyed. What a stupid thing to not want. Especially while wanting and working so hard to realize its opposite. Might be related to some of that procrastination. Might even be connected with the depression, the tears. Anyway, any day now (maybe next week) I’ll begin work on my (first) entry in the Death Noodle Glitterfairy Robot Saga – and hopefully will have the first draft done before the end of the month (at the latest) and will keep you updated as the work progresses.

I really do think people will like the book I’ve come up with – I just won’t know what to think about their liking it, and if they like it for the “wrong reasons” I might want to quit writing, is all.

Post-PXHCC’12 post (numbers, new prices, et cetera)

Phoenix Comicon 2012 was this weekend, and it seems to have been wildly successful, all around. They haven’t released a final number yet, but current estimates of attendance seem to be falling around 30,000 people. Every exhibitor I spoke to said they had a great year, and I did, too. Suddenly the pressure is on to have new books available to sell at next year’s Comicon (I’ve already paid to get a Small Press Table there, and unless they wildly re-arrange the space, pre-paying so early should have secured the same location I had this year) because the hot seller I had this year (Never Let the Right One Go) will certainly be sold out by then.

Here are my total sales (all paperback, except where noted, and all including sales tax), with the last two years’ comparable sales (in italics, in parentheses):

  • Lost and Not Found: 1 / $11  (2011: 1 / $14, 2010: 0 / $0)
  • Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 2 / $16 (2011: 0 / $0, 2010: 1 / $10)
  • Dragons’ Truth: 3 / $47 (2011: 2 / $26, 2010: 4 / $49)
  • Cheating, Death: 9 / $45 (2011: 7 / $70, 2010: 6 (plus 2 given away) / $55)
  • Time, emiT, and Time Again: 2 / $14 (2011: 3 / $42)
  • The First Untrue Trilogy: 3 / $33 (2011: 6 / $144)
  • The Second Untrue Trilogy: 3 / $55 (2011: 3 / $70)
  • Worth 1k — Volume 2: 2 / $20
  • Unspecified: 1 / $5
  • Never Let the Right One Go (hardcover): 33 / $1250
  • Never Let the Right One Go (MP3 CDs): 1 / $20
  • Never Let the Right One Go (eBooks): 2 / $40
  • Total Comicon book sales: 62 / $1556 (2011: 27 / $411, 2010: 27 / $411)
  • Total minus NLtROG hc: 29 / $306

I haven’t included every title I have, or everything I had available, or everything that ever sold at any Comicon, just the things which sold at this year’s Comicon. (Books I had with me but sold zero copies include: Forget What You Can’t Remember, More Lost Memories, Worth 1k — Volume 2, and the MP3 CDs for Dragons’ Truth and Time, emiT, and Time Again.) Book sales were up by almost every measure: I even sold more paperbacks than previous years (even without counting the limited edition hardcover I was featuring this year), though the revenue on that was lower because of my new pricing system. Including Never Let the Right One Go, sales were more than double the last two years at Comicon, by volume, and more than triple by revenue.

Each day’s sales were better than the last, and they started with a bang: Thursday (Preview night, which in previous years has been just that – people coming around to see what’s there, and spending little) I had about $238 in sales (2011: $60, 2010: $0), which almost covered the cost of the Small Press Table ($229+tax) before things really got started. Friday I made $299, Saturday $442, and Sunday $578, including a sale after con was over: I was packed up and on my way to my car – someone spotted me rolling my boxes of books out & flagged me down to buy one.

Most of this was because of my new book, Never Let the Right One Go, and how I was marketing it. Designing great covers (thanks to getting permission to use those great photographs) was a big part, and just having the book on display brought a lot of people to my table – people would stare, mesmerized, by Emily and Sophia’s direct gazes, then find themselves drawn in. Also, creating a unique product, the flipbook, and standing there for most of the four days of Comicon, manually flipping the book over and over as though I were one of those people who stand on street corners trying to catch drivers eyes by flipping and spinning their signs/ads around, but really just to show off that it was two books in one binding, created a fair amount of interest; a surprising number of people had never seen a flipbook of any kind, before. Far and away the most important parts of my marketing efforts were in how I described the books (which I really believe worked only because of how I wrote the books), and the promotional chapbooks I gave away the first three days: I put together the first two chapters of each book, along with the synopses and the information on the limited edition and my table number, and handed them out to anyone who was interested after hearing about the books, but not ready to buy – like an eBook preview for the physical books; getting the readers hooked on the story, the characters, the world-building, and wanting more. Quite a lot of sales were to people who walked up to me with determination after having read the preview, with no doubts about needing to buy the books, and no hesitation about the price.

That was something else I was pretty sure of before Comicon, but am really glad to have seen proved out: People are willing to pay more for a good book. I didn’t put the price of the book on the book itself, or on the signs I made up, or in the promotional chapbook; I only put it on the price list I keep on my table during Comicon, which shows all the books’ prices, each relatively small, and usually unnoticed. I talked about the books and their stories and structure and characters first, and about the price last, and only when asked. For most of the people I gave the chapbooks to, especially those who came back eagerly ready to buy after having read it, they didn’t even ask the price until they walked up with cash in hand, and then didn’t blink when I asked $38 ($35+tax, rounded down to whole dollars) for a book. For most of the people who heard the price and didn’t buy, it wasn’t because they thought it was too expensive, but because they didn’t have enough cash left after their other Comicon purchases; their disappointed looks were quite crushing. (I pointed those customers to my website, where the eBooks are a lot cheaper than a limited edition hardcover – free, even.) The lesson is: If the story is good enough, the price doesn’t have to be low.

That said, while I’m tempted to keep the price of the Sophia and Emily eBooks where it is ($8.99/each), knowing that the stories are good enough to deserve that valuation (or, obviously, more – people were happily paying almost double that for the hardcover), I still want to stand by the pricing model I introduced this year, which adjusts the prices down as books “earn out”. So, with sales from Phoenix Comicon 2012 now accounted for, here are the updated prices for my books: paper / ebook:

It’ll take a few days for me to get the prices updated everywhere, which is probably a good thing considering I sold some copies of the Never Let the Right One Go eBooks at their $8.99 prices at Comicon – I don’t particularly want people who paid that price to see it so much lower when they get online to go redeem their codes; that sort of thing tends to create a feeling of buyer’s remorse. I’ve also got to go update all the pages on modernevil.com with accurate inventory levels, including things like: There are only 8 copies of the Never Let the Right One Go limited edition hardcover left, and I only have 5 more copies of Cheating, Death – and I haven’t decided whether I want to re-order any more copies of Cheating, Death. Probably I will; it’s sold more copies than any of my other books (77 copies, including paperbacks, eBooks, and Podiobooks.com donations) and is currently at a very attractive price point for hand sales… though I’m not expecting to do another event where direct sales will happen until Phoenix Comicon 2013, so maybe I’ll wait to order more until it’s time for that.

All in all, Phoenix Comicon has been a real blessing and a great opportunity for me. Meeting readers and being able to engage with them directly, often repeatedly (both day-by-day over the course of the con and year-after-year), about my works and my ideas, and often about their lives, their work, and their ideas, is awesome and rewarding on its own. As I kept telling people (usually right after handing a teenager my card and telling them they can get the eBooks for free), I’d rather have more readers than more money. Making a lot of sales, more sales each year than the year before, is certainly nice, too, and parallels what I’ve been seeing with my business overall – the beginnings of the fruition of my long-term plans; keep writing great books, keep making great art, keep connecting with readers and fans, and appropriate rewards will follow.

Now I’ve just got the next six to nine months to figure out exactly what new thing(s) I’ll be showing off at Phoenix Comicon 2013. If hundreds, or thousands, of copies of the Sophia and Emily eBooks sell, maybe that’ll include individual paperback editions of those books. If I can get the research, planning, writing, editing, and design done quickly enough, hopefully that’ll include the re-written Dragons’ Truth – and better yet, the entire new Dragons’ Truth trilogy I’ve been planning. If the book about writing and publishing does well as an eBook, and if I can figure out how to put it together as a paper book, maybe that, too – there are always aspiring authors asking me questions at Phoenix Comicon, so I know at least a few copies would sell there. Maybe a couple other, entirely different, things. Lots of time to figure it out, but even more ambition than time, so … time to get back to work, I suppose.

Anticipation, optimism, disappointment

Phoenix Comicon is coming up quickly. I basically have to be done/ready by tomorrow afternoon; my best opportunity for exhibitor setup is Wednesday evening, after Mandy gets off work. Thursday afternoon I’ll have a little time to finalize setup, but considering our schedule (we probably won’t be able to get there until 2:30 or 3PM), I don’t really want to be loading in any product or display elements that close to the event; Preview night / Thursday night, the exhibitor hall opens at 4PM. Then from 4-9PM Thursday, 10AM-7PM Friday & Saturday, and 10AM-5PM Sunday I’ll be stuck at my booth (small press table #227), trying to sell my books.

I decided not to try to get on any panels again, this year – intellectually, I know I’m an expert in several relevant areas, but emotionally I feel inadequate, and financially (which is a lot of people’s key yardstick for measuring someone’s worth) I’m downright anemic. Also, like last year, I’d rather be at my booth than attending a panel, since I’d just be worrying about not being at my booth the whole time; I definitely lose sales by being away, sometimes even within a few minutes for a bathroom or food break. I come back and hear stories of the someone who wanted to meet me, wanted to buy a book & get it signed, and who says they’ll be back – but they almost never come back. So really, I’ll be at my booth nearly the entire weekend. If possible, I won’t even leave for meals.

I’ve been working pretty hard to get things ready in time (especially if you count the last several months’ work getting Never Let the Right One Go written, edited, and printed in time for Comicon), and the anticipation has been steadily building. Right now it’s fairly intense, which seems a bit weird to me, considering how basic my participation is. I’ve really boiled it down to a very straightforward, low-key experience for myself. No real pressure to make a certain sales target (last year’s sales covered this year’s fee, and if the sales aren’t there to justify exhibiting, I have no problem simply not buying a table for next year), no major or elaborate displays (more on that in a moment), just me and my books and ten or fifteen thousand potential customers. I know I can’t really afford to hand things out for free to ten thousand people (I only made 200 copies of the promotional chapbook for Never Let the Right One Go, I only have a thousand or two business cards on hand), so one of my biggest concerns is trying to get what I do have into the hands of the right few hundred people, and hope it translates into new readers and/or sales.

(The promotional chapbook, by the way, is a little flipbook containing the first two chapters each of Sophia and Emily. Like an eBook preview, but on paper, and specifically for Comicon – to try to sell the hardcover.)

Along with the anticipation seems to be coming a (potentially inappropriate) sense of optimism. Ideas like “maybe I’ll sell the entire Never Let the Right One Go limited edition” and “having to tell people I’d sold out would be an awesome problem to have” keep crossing my mind. Right now I only have 41 copies left for sale, so it isn’t entirely unfeasible to think they might all sell over the con. Unlikely, given my sales history, but not impossible or unreasonable. Key elements, like the cover design, the subject matter, and the target audience for the books should help. As should the book display I’ve envisioned and outsourced – I haven’t seen it yet, and we’re getting pretty close to the deadline, so I’ve been preparing myself, mentally, for not having it, but theoretically it’ll be functional and delivered on time: It’s a rotating book display, being bolted on (and designed to fit perfectly with) my book shelf/display (purchased from a closing Borders last year), which rotates the book end over end to show off the flipbook/two-books-in-one nature of Never Let the Right One Go. The constant motion and unusual nature of the display and the book should draw the eyes of passers-by, and, between that and the preview chapters and my own ability to talk about the books to people, I seem to be getting my hopes up a little.

It feels the same as it did before I launched the Never Let the Right One Go Kickstarter campaign – like, maybe this is the book, the event, where I’ll finally reach a wider audience. Before the Kickstarter, the most optimistic part of me was able to unabashedly envision exceeding a 500-copy limited edition and needing to build the unlimited-edition paperbacks to handle the demand. Obviously, with the actual 50-copy print run, there’s now an upper limit on my optimism – but I still feel hopeful about selling those 41 remaining copies, plus a bunch of my other (radically cheaper than last year) books.

Which brings me around to the disappointment. I was disappointed by the Kickstarter campaign. It didn’t prevent the book’s publication, but it didn’t push my new work to the next tier of popularity and financial success, either. (In terms of meaningful success, I believe Never Let the Right One Go was successful before it was even published, as evidenced by the reactions of readers who both understood and appreciated the two books for the things I worked so hard to create in/with them. See Scott Roche’s review for an example.) Even as I approach Phoenix Comicon with an immense sense of optimism, the feeling that I might actually sell most (or all) of the hardbacks I have left … I am also anticipating disappointment. If I invested $250 in the booth, bought $65 worth of copies for the free chapbooks, and spent up to $50 (I don’t know how much it’ll be, but I told them before they started I couldn’t afford more than about $50) on what may be a single-use mechanized book display, plus time, plus gas and parking and food… If I don’t make at least $350-$400 in sales (10-12 copies of the hardcover book, btw), I won’t just be disappointed, I’ll be in the red. (Sorta; as I said, the booth rental was paid with last year’s sales.) With all this optimism, though, will only selling 15 copies, or 20, be disappointing because it wasn’t 40? Or what if, with ten or fifteen thousand people walking by, I can’t manage to find 200 people interested enough to take even a free chapbook? Last year I barely gave away a couple hundred business cards (if I remember correctly), despite having thousands available. How disappointing, if I can’t even give my work away?

Trying to accurately balance my anticipation on this end with nearly-inevitable disappointment on the other side of the con is tricky. How much (of either) is appropriate? Do I care more about sales volume, or revenue? More about selling, or about making connections with new/potential readers? Am I more happy to have Never Let the Right One Go available for sale at Comicon, or more disappointed I didn’t finish my book on writing&publishing in time? It’s all quite complicated, inside me. Luckily, within a week, the event itself will be over and I’ll be able to move on to worrying about something new.

Book pricing update / Phoenix Comicon price list

I’ve had about $131 in book sales since I last updated prices (I think $110 of that is from selling 4 paper books), but it looks like it was only enough to lower one of these prices. (The closer a title is to its price floor, the more copies need to sell to drop the price again.) Unless I sell more paper books (other than Never Let the Right One Go, whose $35 price is fixed) in the next week and a half, the prices in bold (rounded to the nearest dollar, for cash sales) will be the price list for anyone looking to pick up some of my books at Phoenix Comicon, May 24-27.

The prices for my books are: paper / ebook:

Looks like the only things I’ll have priced over $10 are books which contain more than one novel. Hopefully, that’ll help spur sales. The Lost and Not Found Universe 5-pack of books is only $39.95 at these prices. The full Untrue Tales… series can be had for just $0.99 more than I was asking for each trilogy this time last year. The complete Modern Evil package, containing a copy of every single book, would only be $139.89 (a little over $150 with tax, so I’ll say $150 for cash customers) – that’s for all 18 books, containing over 825k words.

(Ooh, just realized that, with the books I’m planning on writing next, I’ll jump past 1 million published words within my first decade of publishing. It won’t even be hard; if each book of the new Dragons’ Truth trilogy is around 60k words, that’ll cover the distance alone – and I’ve already got another book well under way that I expect to be again as long as that. What a fun milestone this will be.)

Never Let the Right One Go – release date is looming

The official publication date for Never Let the Right One Go is 5/12/2012, which is this Saturday. In about 26 hours, I’ll be uploading the eBooks to Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, Goodreads, and Indie Aisle. Around the same time, both eBooks should become automatically available (or earlier, depending on your time zone! They’re available worldwide) in Apple’s iBookstore – Both Emily and Sophia are already in the iBookstore, available for pre-order, right now. Then I’ll have to update modernevil.com to say that they’re available, too. I’ve been waffling a little about whether I ought to start giving away the eBooks for free immediately on modernevil.com, or wait … some as-yet-undecided period; I’m leaning toward uploading the free versions to my site immediately after uploading the paid versions everywhere else. I’ve also re-worked the book trailer (the original one referred specifically to the Kickstarter campaign, the new one says the books are available), so that’ll be replacing the old one on YouTube Saturday. Lots to do, tomorrow night after midnight.

Some things getting started even earlier: I’ve finished the editing of both audio books, though they still need to be mixed thrice, and I’ve begun podcasting them on the Modern Evil Podcast. The first episode of Sophia went up last Friday, the first episode of Emily goes up tomorrow, and then starting next week there’ll be a new episode on the feed every Monday (Sophia), Wednesday (Unspecified), and Friday (Emily) through Halloween. According to the current version of my plans, both books will then appear on Podiobooks.com (complete) on Halloween, 2012. I keep trying to figure out how to sell the full audio books directly from modernevil.com (no intros or outros on each chapter, just a straight audio book like you’d get from Audible, or on CD), and I’m really close. Maybe not “ready to launch on Saturday” close, but … nearly.

One (big) thing getting launched a little later: The limited edition hardcover has been ordered, and printed, and shipped, and is apparently currently on a truck slowly making its way across the country to me – the books should get to me on Monday, May 14th, 2012, just two days after their official publication date. Then I have to sign and number them all (and cut one page out of each one) and then I can put them up for sale on modernevil.com. Actually, as soon as I have the boxes of books in hand I’ll probably add the ‘Buy buttons’ to the site, since I’ll certainly be able to get them out by the end of the next postal day, at the latest. I expect to film myself signing and numbering the books, then edit together a (mostly time-lapse) video of the process – look for that, some time next week.

Lots to do, lots going on, and that release date just keeps getting closer and closer. (With Phoenix Comicon approaching at an eerily similar rate of one day closer per day… Hmm… Do you suppose they’re working together?) I think I’ve got all my ducks in a row, though. It ought to be a smooth launch, even though some of the parts are coming a couple of days late. (I don’t expect to sell out of the hardcovers within a couple of years, so a couple of days at this end just seems like a big deal. It isn’t, in the long run.)