I used the covers as shown, so I’m not going to re-post them here. I worked hard, I found a lot of errors, I made a lot of small changes and tweaks and improvements, and I got 6 books ready for print publication last month. (The official release date isn’t until 4/1/2011.) I didn’t quite reach all my over-the-top goals; I didn’t finish recording & editing the Book Six audiobook in time to listen to it while doing a very-close-read through the text to find even more errors. Though I did use that technique with books one through five, and I did record 40% of Book Six. Plus, I got the books done in time to make the LSI deal for free setup and justified (in my mind) the cost of ordering 50 copies of each of the two trilogies. Continue reading New books, coming soon!
Category: Marketing
New Untrue Tales… covers
I’ve been working hard at getting these books ready to send to Lightning Source by the end of the month (to get that deal I mentioned; I think having a good, definitive version of these books and enough inventory to last indefinitely is worth it – the trick being to get a good, definitive version ready for print in about a month), and I’ve finished writing Book Six, done two editing passes on the text already, have it in the hands of (or already back from) 4 Beta Readers (not all the people who usually assist me with reading have read the Untrue Tales… series, or had time to get it done this week), and will be beginning recording of the audio version this week, if all goes well. Next week at the latest. (Recording & editing the audio version requires 2-3 very close reads of every word & sentence in the book, and it’s been my intention for the last several books to finish those steps before putting the book in print.) So, for the last couple/few days I’ve been working on designing the covers for the paper (re-)release of the six books of the Untrue Tales… series as two trilogies. Here are the current iterations of the covers I’ve designed, side by side:
Untrue Tales… Book Five cover, progress
At right you can see the cover image I’ve just put together for Untrue Tales… Book Five, which will be available (if all goes well) this Friday, January 14th, 2011 as an eBook and as a serialized audiobook. Which is to say the first of ten episodes of the serialized audiobook will be available Friday, on the Modern Evil Podcast, and in February on Podiobooks.com. Why is the cover of the book an image of a black hole? (Yes, I know, the artist was thinking “baby star,” not “black hole,” but if I say “black hole” then when you look at the cover you see a black hole, complete with accretion disc and reletivistic jets, which is what I wanted my cover to show.) Because the prison Trevor and his tiny army are trying to break into in Book Five, the Oubliexxe, is built into a black hole. The corporation has to keep adding cell blocks to the end of the prison which sticks out, because the whole thing is being gradually drawn into the black hole’s event horizon. Pretty terrible prison, right?
Well, as you know if you’ve read/listened to the end of Untrue Tales… Book Four, that’s Trevor and the AIs’ best guess for where Nirgal and Neyal’h have been taken by the corporation. So that’s where they’re going, to try to break them free. Of course, they first have to recruit all the exiles on Earth to build their army and defeat the corporate security forces between them and the Oubliexxe… it’s all very exciting. ((If that was a spoiler for you, why haven’t you bought the eBook ($3.99) yet, or at least subscribed to the Modern Evil Podcast?))
I’ve been through a couple rounds of edits to the text and have been recording the audiobook version of Book Five this week. If you’ve been following me on Twitter or Facebook, you know I’ve been making acceptable, if not amazing, progress – as of right now I’ve finished recording about five and a half of the ten episodes, plus all the intros and outros for the 3 different versions of the audiobook I make. I haven’t begun to edit the audio yet, but I only need to get one episode done by Friday (at the least), so I can actually do that editing Friday morning (at the latest) and still update the podcast on time. Of course, I also needed to design the cover (2 versions, since Audible wants a square cover), so when my neighbors started playing their bass-thumping music in the middle of my recording today, that’s what I worked on. I think it came out pretty good.
Now I just need to write/record a promo, record the rest of the book, update the eBook with any additional changes to the text, edit at least 1 episode, and I’ll be ready to submit it to Evo, for Podiobooks.com. If all goes according to plan (ie: I have the episode ready for Friday’s MEPod, and thus will also have it ready for Podiobooks.com.) I should still be able to snag the Feb. 16th launch date I have penciled in for PB, so it’ll launch one week after Book Four finishes there.
Are you ready for it? Untrue Tales… Book Five is coming, 1/14/2011!
On the subject of Book Titles
I write books and stories. I’ve been doing it for a while, now. My first full novel, Lost and Not Found, was in its first draft in 2002 and first published in 2003. I wrote Dragons’ Truth in 2003, publishing it in 2004, and then in 2004 I wrote and published something else. Something which I gave a really, really long title to, as follows:
Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book One:
An Introduction to Dodgeball
-or-
Conception and Induction
-or-
How To Begin An Apocalypse
At the time I’d not yet begun thinking about marketing. Not the way Marketing people think about marketing. Perhaps a pinch of the way Salesmen think about sales, but really I was mostly thinking about writing the stories I wanted to write and giving them titles I thought were appropriate. The idea, when I titled it originally, was that the book took place in the universe of the “Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction” of which many various stories and series may eventually be written, and that the series I’d just begun was called the “Recollections of an Alternate Past.” The first book, “Book One” had three titles, each of which was an appropriate title and none of which, I felt, properly encompassed the full scope of the book. That part, I can understand, might be confusing at first. Most books have only one title or, at most, two titles. Three is just, whew, confusing?
After that, in 2005, I wrote and published the next book in that series. I gave it a title commensurate with the first book:
Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book Two:
The Twofold Invasion
-or-
Penetration and Destruction
-or-
How To Make Love With Twins
Again, with the two series titles and the three book titles. In 2005-2006 I wrote (& in 2006 published) the third book:
Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book Three:
Escape From Exile
-or-
Confusion and Contraction
-or-
How To Get Out Of Hell
Yep. 5 titles. Again.
In 2007 I decided to take my publishing company into the major leagues by buying ISBNs, registering with the Library of Congress, properly registering as a business with the state, and signing up for printing & distribution with Lightning Source (LSI). Based on my research at the time, the choice between Lulu.com and LSI was a false dichotomy, since all of Lulu’s printing was done by LSI. Cafepress wasn’t (and still isn’t) taking publishing seriously, and Amazon’s CreateSpace/whatever cost a bit more than LSI & limited distribution to Amazon, which seems more like bush league than major league.
In 2008 I began working full-time as a creative, and began to look into marketing a bit. As I’ve recently written about re-realizing, I had accidentally let myself slip into a mindset of thinking sales & marketing were important. In two years of frustrating myself, I did get a smidgen of understanding about marketing. By 2009 I was aware that it was considered a bad idea for a book’s title to be longer than 3 or 4 words. If you look at the New York Times Bestsellers this week, in Hardcover Nonfiction four of the top five books have a one-word title. (Did you notice none of them is a word over 5 letters long?) In Hardcover Fiction, four of the top five have two-word or three-word titles, and that trend covers most all mass-market books by all major publishers. It’s good marketing, you see, to have a short, memorable title.
In 2010, I’ve begun to come to terms with the fact that the entire publishing world (both in books and in music/audiobooks) has been built around the assumption that all publishers follow that sort of thinking. The relevant metadata fields for books, eBooks, audiobooks, et cetera are small. On some eReaders, books’ titles simply get cut off if they’re more than about 25-30 characters. On some eBook stores, book descriptions can’t exceed a few hundred characters. I can still name paper books whatever I want, but in the transition to digital, I lose a certain degree of creative freedom with regard to titling books. I “can” put my full titles in the title fields of my eBooks, but I can’t guarantee potential readers will actually be able to see the full titles there. (In fact, in 2009 I discovered that I literally can’t use my full titles on my audiobooks because of how RSS/WinXP handle the titles of podcasts episodes. I compromised on an abbreviated title because not doing so prevented people from hearing my books. (ie: not about money, but about readership))
This year I’ve also been going back and forth with Mark Coker / Smashwords on the subject of titles. Smashwords didn’t like how I initially named my short stories from short story collections. I thought about it for a month or so, then decided to change the way I arranged the titles of my short stories (going from collection first to individual story title first), trying to make it more clear, in light of my discoveries about how eReaders display the titles. I also decided to use a similar tactic to rename the eBook versions of my Untrue Tales… series according to the compromise I’d made on the audiobooks, waiting until Book Four was released, 11/5/2010. The full title of Book Four is:
Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book Four:
Explorations of Ridiculous Realities
-or-
Corporation and Collusion
-or-
How To Subvert Corporatocracy
But in the “title” field I put the abbreviated version, “Untrue Tales… Book Four” when I uploaded it to Smashwords, the Kindle store, and when I gave Bowker the information for the eBook. At the same time, I updated the titles of the first three books to the abbreviated versions on all sites, putting the full titles in the books’ description fields instead. I feel that, under the circumstances of the limitations placed on book titles for eBooks, this is a good compromise, allowing me to communicate basic info (this book is in a series whose name begins with “Untrue Tales,” and is book number “Four”) in the limited space of the title field, along with the full title to people who click through, look at the book cover, or actually download the book and look at the title page.
Mark Coker disagrees. In fact, as someone with a background in Marketing, his opinion is that I ought to just rename my books. I complained a bit about this current disagreement on Twitter and someone chimed in to the same effect; if it helps sales, change the titles. To me, this is like a teacher asking a parent to rename their 6-year-old because it might confuse the other kids at school.
Yet, even after working on this blog post for 3-4 hours, after spending another while writing another response to Mark Coker via email (highlight: “As far as I’m concerned the only problem is when retailers decide not to display the correct/full titles. Since they seem to accurately display covers and descriptions, but not titles, I moved my titles to where they could be seen: the book covers and the book descriptions. I then put an abbreviated (as your reviewer noted: incorrect) title in the title field, in order to fit the limitations of the system.“), I still don’t know what I’m going to do. Usually I write posts like these to work through sticky ideas, and after a thousand words or so, I know what I mean to do. I’m still a bit conflicted. Only about the metadata, though. The other two books in the series are all going to get the 3-titles-each treatment, and the series still has two titles. Here’s what I’ve got for the recently-finished Book Five:
Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction
Recollections of an Alternate Past
Book Five:
The Bloodless Battles
-or-
Conscription and Revelation
-or-
How To Break Into Prison
I’ll start work on writing Book Six pretty soon. Hopefully I’ll have it’s ridiculously long title by the end of the month (or early December, at the latest).
getting my mind right
I’m in the midst of working through something, mentally and emotionally. I’ve been working on this for a long while. This was a significant contributing factor to my taking some time off from showing at art walks & art fairs a couple times a month (though getting to a point of running in the red month after month (probably due to the down economy) was the most significant factor), which I paused in March of this year. It’s the effect of commercialism/capitalism on my creative output.
I don’t believe in capitalism. I hate money. I don’t like business. Accounting rules are literally insane. Marketing makes me nauseous. Sales, inasmuch as I can do it honestly, is moderately acceptable, at best.
I’m concerned with the questions of ‘why’. The ‘why’ of my art, of my writing, of my publishing, of my life – none of it has to do with money. I’m not interested in wealth. I don’t want those concerns to alter or infect the ‘whys’ of my creative work, or my life in general. When I need to address a question of ‘why’ I created this book or that work of art, I don’t ever want the answer to be something like “to make money.”
This has been easier to maintain with my books, possibly because they’ve never been “profitable” in any financial sense. They’ve always been works of love, the ideas behind them and the effort going into them based on expressing myself and writing the books I wanted to write rather than the books I thought were going to sell. For a long time, this was true of my art, as well. Then I began doing the art walks every month. Twice a month, at times. Investing as much or more time in selling my art than I was in creating it.
The mini-paintings were literally a money grab. The reason I bought small canvases (mostly 4×4″, but up to 8×10″) to paint was so that I could have items for sale under $20 at the art walks, where people often balked at paying realistic/appropriate prices for art. One problem with this was that, after a while, I would get down to a day or two before an art walk and -in a panic- paint half a dozen mini-paintings at once, almost entirely at random, just so I would have something that might sell. Another was that they became an overwhelming percentage of sales. In 2008, where I only did art walks for four months, they made up 28% of my unit sales and about 3.6% of my revenue from art. In 2009 where I showed probably 18+ times, they were 66% of unit sales and 25% of my art revenue. If I exclude the sale of the original artwork created for my book covers (and sold explicitly to people who wanted to support the publication of my books), for 2010, which I only showed at 3 art walks before pausing, mini-paintings make up 100% of my art sales. (Actually, looking at my spreadsheet, I also sold a crocheted mobius strip for $5 and a crocheted zombie to a fan of my books at Comicon, and I consider my crocheted creations to be sculptural artwork. If I account for those works, the mini-paintings only make up 71% of unit sales and 52% of revenue for 2010.)
So, even when I first began to create the mini-paintings, I was already uneasy about the significantly commercial nature of their existence. Certainly they were each an original work of handmade art, created with my own style and ideas. Just as certainly, I was creating them for the express purpose of making sales at art walks. When they began to make up a larger and larger proportion of both my creative efforts and my actual sales, it made me very uneasy. The point of showing at the art walks wasn’t really supposed to be about finding something that would sell and making that, over and over again, just for the sake of sales. The point was supposed to be that I already create art and the only way to sell it is if people know it’s available. I believe (though I’d have to go to my other computer and dig around in Quickbooks for a while to give accurate numbers) that I made more sales online via Twitter/Plurk/facebook in 2008 and 2009 than I did at art walks (not in volume, but in revenue). My art walk sales were mostly, then, works I’d created from a drive to have something to sell, rather than from a drive to express myself or to create what I wanted to create. Which makes me a bit sick.
My wife and I have been working on our financial situation fairly diligently for the last ~3 years (we’ll have been married 3 years on 12/1), and I’ve been working on structuring my “business model” for Modern Evil Press so that I’m not running further in the red the more books I write (see: selling paintings to pay for the cost of publishing, specifically the original cover art (and possibly interior illustrations, in future) for the book in question), and this year we reached a point where we’re slightly better than breaking even both personally and in terms of the business. I’ve got us on track, barring unexpected negative changes (apocalypse, housefire, expensive car repairs, pregnancy and the like), to have all our debt (was close to $45k when we married) paid off except Mandy’s student loans (another $40k) by mid-2013. That’s without Modern Evil Press earning another dollar. That’s without selling any more art. If I could make money from my art and books, we could get there faster, but it isn’t necessary.
This is what what I’ve been working on, mentally and emotionally. This is how I’ve been trying to get my mind right; to deeply realize that making money from my creative output isn’t necessary. With a model similar to what I did with the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut, going electronic-only (eBooks & audiobooks) until/unless sales (generally: the original cover art) cover the cost of going to press, I can write as many (or as few) books as I’d like. With the amount of canvas & paint & yarn I currently have stockpiled (from excellent sales at local stores), I’ll have a debt account or two paid off before I need to go shopping for real (expensive) art supplies again – so I’ll be able to afford it, even if none of the art I create between now and then sells. I need to fully return to a point of creating from inspiration rather than from profit motive.
I’ll accept profits, if and when they appear, but that isn’t -and shouldn’t be- why I work.