Modern Evil Press – Page 12

Preparing to publish a new book of poetry

Exciting news: After nearly a year without a response (hopefully, people saw my submission guidelines & took my advice about going the self-publishing route for electronic publication), Modern Evil Press finally received its first submission, and it was a good one. A poetry collection. Within just a few minutes of reading the poems, I immediately thought to myself, “Hey, I think this person actually read my submission guidelines – this is just the sort of poetry I’d publish! This reminds me of my own depressing poetry!” (My guidelines include things like “read my books” and “know what I publish” before getting to anything like technical requirements.) I continued reading, and continued to appreciate what I saw, and have been going back and forth with the author for the last several days, and it looks like I’ll be publishing a new collection of poetry soon. The title is Unspecified, the author is Yoshira Marbel of South Africa, and the poetry cuts deep.

As you probably know if you’ve been following my work (or this blog) at all, my publishing model (to be sure books are, if not profitable, at least don’t lose money) has two parts: 1) Electronic publishing, which doesn’t cost me much money, and I’ll do for any book I publish (eBooks and audiobooks, for free and for sale), and 2) Print publishing, which costs a couple/few hundred dollars for setup & initial printing), and I’ll only initiate printing after I’ve raised sufficient capital to pay those up-front costs, usually through the sale of the original artwork I design for each book’s cover. The time and effort it takes to get the book ready for publication is roughly the same whether I’m only doing one or I do both, and since I only publish books I either love or wrote (preferably both), I don’t count the time & effort spent to publish a book against its profitability. (Yet. Perhaps someday I’ll sell enough books to be able to pay myself a salary. Heh.)

As it is with my own books, so it goes with the new one. Yoshira and I would really like to do a print version of the collection, so while we’re still selecting poems and crafting their order, polishing the front matter and end matter, designing the cover and writing the copy, I’m getting started on the fundraising. Immediately upon reading her poetry, which hews toward themes of heartbreak and sadness, I knew I could use my painting ‘without you’ to raise at least part of the funds.

If you haven’t seen it before, yes, those are real razor blades. They really cut into the canvas. I actually forced red paint (no, not blood) through the cut canvas to get the drips just right. I painted it specifically to capture an emotion I was sure razor blades were the only answer to. Alas, it was not really appropriate for the cover of this collection… Still, it matches well enough with the book that proceeds from its sale are definitely earmarked for covering the costs of printing this collection. Continue reading Preparing to publish a new book of poetry

Numbers for Q2+, 2011

So, I haven’t been on top of my bookkeeping/accounting/etc for the last several months. I did go through and enter all the data from my physical sales at PHXComicon, which I posted about, but until this week I hadn’t processed any of my eBook sales numbers into Quickbooks since April 2nd. I’m all caught up, now.

So, imaginary audience who actually reads all these posts, I bet you’re wondering how my pricing experiment went, aren’t you? To recap: I lowered my eBook prices to $2.99-$4.99 for Q1, then raised them to $6.99-$9.99 for Q2, then moved them to somewhere in between after Q2 – to $3.99-$5.99 for individual books & $9.99 each for the two Untrue Trilogies. (These current prices are all $1-2 below what I had my eBooks priced at last year.) So, when I lowered prices to what the most vocal eBook readers & indie authors proclaim is “the sweet spot”, sales dropped about 35% quarter-over-quarter (all comparisons are on a unit basis). When I raised prices several dollars for Q2, sales increased quarter-over-quarter, but were still about 22% lower than Q4/2010. Q3 is only a month in, and sales already look like they’re back at Q4/2010’s levels. i.e.: for my books, the “sweet spot” seems to be around half the paperback cover price. Lower and sales drop significantly, higher and they do better than lower but stay depressed. This matches the results of my last significant pricing experiment, a couple of years ago, where I lowered all my eBooks’ prices to $0.99-$1.99 for 3 months and saw sales stop almost completely.

Oh, and then there’s the free eBooks, always available at modernevil.com. In Q1, when prices were at their lowest and sales were down 35%, free eBook downloads were up 46%. In Q2, when prices were at their highest and sales were up slightly (only down ~22%), free eBook downloads went down slightly (about a 17% drop, quarter-over-quarter). In July, with prices (and sales) almost back to where they were before my pricing experiment, free eBook downloads were also back down around where they were last year. It seems that there is a meaningful connection between paid eBook sales and free eBook downloads, that when people don’t want to pay too much or too little for an eBook they’ll go get it for free, and that if I wanted to maximize the number of people downloading my books (theoretically maximizing my readers), I’d drop the prices down so low people stopped buying my eBooks and watch my free eBook download numbers soar… because people are crazy? Anyway:

Here are the eBook and Podiobook download numbers for/through Q2 of 2011, as usual giving the total of eBook downloads, the total of Podiobook downloads, and the more-accurate (re: # of people who dl’d a full book) total downloads of the final episodes of each Podiobook, as: eBook/total-PB/final-PB

Lost and Not Found: 340 / 2,163 / 121
Dragons’ Truth: 832 / 2,039 / 221
Forget What You Can’t Remember: 372 / 6,533 / 152
The First Untrue Trilogy: 504 (eBook only)
The Second Untrue Trilogy: 289 (eBook only)
Untrue Tales… Book One: 1 / 5,810 / 424
Untrue Tales… Book Two: 1 / 5,427 / 372
Untrue Tales… Book Three: 1 / 2,918 / 264
Untrue Tales… Book Four: N/A / 2,547 / 231
Untrue Tales… Book Five: N/A / 4,116 / 427
Untrue Tales… Book Six: N/A / 3,157 / 87
Cheating, Death: 244 / 6,864 / 421
Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 210 / 450 / 48
More Lost Memories (full): 231 / 1,170 / 82
More Lost Memories (ind. stories, eBook only): 18
Time, emiT, and Time Again (full): 233 / 1,225 / 58
Time, emiT, and Time Again (ind. stories, eBook only): 7
Last Christmas: 4
Total Q2: 3,287 / 44,419 / 2,908
Total all-time: 22,941 / 477,489 / 31,033

So, downloads were up for all the Untrue Tales podiobooks (except Book 4, which “completed” in Q1 – that always causes a spike), plus Dragons’ Truth, Cheating, Death, and Time, emiT, and Time Again – but were down for Lost and Not Found (and its Director’s Cut), Forget What You Can’t Remember, and More Lost Memories (i.e.: nearly the entire LaNF universe of books was down, with downloads of Cheating, Death just-about flat). On the eBooks side, downloads of Dragons’ Truth continue to rise and stand out, at roughly double last years’ numbers and almost double those of any of my other books. Downloads of The First Untrue Trilogy were way up, but The Second Untrue Trilogy was flat. Lost and Not Found was up, but ForgetWYCR, C,D, MLM, and LaNF-DC were all down. Not sure what’s to be learned from that, except people are drawn to the new, and the Untrue Trilogies appear new. (Books 4-6 are new, and I understand new readers will want to begin at the beginning…)

The most statistically significant shift I’ve seen this year, both in Q1 and Q2, has been in what file formats are being downloaded. In 2008-2010 I offered each of my eBooks in 7 different formats: PDF (5″x8″), PDF (8″x10″), txt, rtf, html, mobi, and epub, and in those years PDF (5″x8″) got 18%-20% of the downloads while the other 6 formats were roughly even at 11%-15% each. mobi (i.e.: kindle) and txt tended toward the 15% end of that while rtf and PDF (8″x10″) tended toward the 11%-12-% end, but for 3 years it was pretty evenly balanced across all 7 formats. In 2011, 47% of my eBook downloads have been of the 5″x8″ PDF, 17% from the 8″x10″ PDF, 12% the txt, and 8% each from rtf, mobi, and epub. Really, rtf, mobi, and epub have only slightly reduced download numbers – it’s that the PDFs have such significantly increased downloads that skews this (and most of those are of Dragons’ Truth). Really, PDFs have jumped way into the lead for every title except for The First Untrue Trilogy, for which txt seems to be the leading format.

Oh, and because the number interests me, I’ll share that the number of people who appear to have finished downloading my podiobooks seems to have leveled out so far this year and is holding steady at a rate of about 80 people per (complete) title per month. Of note, in 2008 and 2009 and most of 2010 it was 179 people downloading each title each month, and then it slipped down and has held steady around 80/title/month since September 2010. To a certain degree this represents a few very unpopular titles bringing down the average; LaNF-DC currently averages ~17 listeners/month, and each of my two short story collections gets ~20-30 listeners/month, but at the other end I have only 3 books which draw more than 100 listeners/month… so maybe 80 is fair.

Piling on the challenges

Well, I started. Interestingly, I started work on my new interactive comic project the same way I began work on The Second Untrue Trilogy, last year: in Vegas, while my wife was attending an educators conference… I had three days where, during conference hours (roughly 8-4), I had almost literally no distractions from my work and nothing else I needed to accomplish and virtually no internet access, and I started from a blank page on a project I expect to take a huge chunk of time and effort. The final aspect of The Second Untrue Trilogy’s work wasn’t completed until almost a full year after it began, with the posting of the final episode of the audio version of Book Six on Podiobooks.com, and as I expect to explain in this post, the project I’ve just begun will probably take me even longer.

By the end of the first day, I had basically nailed down the core idea and the story structure I wanted to use, as well as some detailed characters and settings, some of them well-visualized for the comic. I had ideas about exactly how the possibilities of multi-touch interaction combined with some limited animation and the infinite canvas could be used to more fully immerse the reader in the story while also being invaluable to conveying the inner lives of the characters as well as the exterior spaces which represent such a significant part of the protagonist’s journey. The next two days were spent filling in the story details, outlining, doing research on recent history and on interstellar physics, plus some preliminary sketching, and by the time Mandy was done with her final session I had a plan for every “page” of the comic, good ideas about the “panels” they’ll each be composed of, and excellent ideas about the transitions / interactions between them. Continue reading Piling on the challenges

I’m so glad it’s nearly over

For the last week or two, I’ve been quite tempted to just go upload all the remaining episodes of Untrue Tales… Book Six to Podiobooks.com and be done with it, forsaking the schedule I painstakingly designed and then promised to my readers/listeners. I’m sure some subscribers would have been happy to have the rest of the book sooner, but since the end of the book was available in print and as an eBook on April 1st, and was completely available on the Modern Evil Podcast about a month ago… they could have gotten it “early” one way or another. On the other hand, when I promised books four through six I said there would be new episodes of Untrue Tales every week through the end of June, and I haven’t missed a week yet, and we’re there. I suppose that I could release the last episode today, since it’s the last week of June, and not be contradicting myself by putting it up a couple of days early? Bah. I’m going to stick to my Wednesday-release schedule for Podiobooks.com.

Either way, I’m glad it’s nearly over. I’ve been wanting this series to be behind me for quite some time. Also, this is the last remnant of any ongoing work for any of my existing projects. After the final episode of Book Six is uploaded to Podiobooks.com, everything is potential future projects. Stories I haven’t written yet, books I haven’t read yet, art I haven’t thought of yet… no schedules, nothing set in stone, nothing ongoing or weekly or really even seasonally or annually, since my plan for this vampire duology doesn’t neatly fit NaNoWriMo, just… nothingness. Err.. I’m supposed to say “possibiltity” instead of nothingness, right? Make it seem less suicidal to be happy to be clearing my plate?

Anyway, the final episode of Untrue Tales… Book Six, the final episode of the entire six-book series, goes live at Podiobooks.com this Wednesday. Perhaps I should write a paragraph or two to hand Evo to post on the Podiobooks blog when it goes up, commemorating the end. I’ll think on that.

Numbers for PHXComicon 2011

Phoenix Comicon 2011 was this weekend, and for the second year in a row, I had a small press table there. Let’s start with raw numbers, then get into a description of the experience. I’ll get into a bit of detail below, but in addition to the following book sales I sold two paintings during the course of the con, and traded a crochet sculpture for $50+ of merchandise from another local creator.

Here are my total sales (all paperback, except where noted), with last year’s comparable sales (in italics, in parentheses):

Lost and Not Found: 1 / $14 / (0 / $0)
Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 0 / $0 / (1 / $10)
Dragons’ Truth: 2 / $26 / (4 / $49)
Dragons’ Truth MP3 CD: 0 / $0 / (1 / $13)
Forget What You Can’t Remember: 1 / $14 / (5 / $70)
More Lost Memories: 0 / $0 / (0 / $0)
MLM/Pay Attention chapbook: 0 / $0 / (1 / $2)
Cheating, Death: 7 / $70 / (6 (plus 2 given away) / $55)
Cheating, Death eBook (collectable card): 1 / $7 / (N/A)
Time, emiT, and Time Again: 3 / $42 / (N/A)
Untrue Tales… Book One (OoP): 1 / $6 / (1 / $12)
Untrue Tales… Book Two (OoP): 0 / $0 / (0 / $0)
Untrue Tales… Book Three (OoP): 0 / $0 / (0 / $0)
Untrue Tales… Books 1-2 (combined, OoP): 1 / $6 / (0 / $0)
Untrue Tales… Books 1-3 (combined, OoP): 1 / $12 / (8 / $200)
The First Untrue Trilogy: 6 / $144 / (N/A)
The Second Untrue Trilogy: 3 / $70 / (N/A)
Total Comicon book sales: 27 / $411 / (27 / $411)

…that… didn’t total out the way I expected it to. I apparently sold the exact same number of books for the same amount of money, compared to last year. Weird. Anyway, based on my rough estimate of the same thing, I did pre-pay for a small press table at the 2012 Phoenix Comicon, so I’ll be there again next year.

((For reference, ‘OoP’ is ‘Out of Print’ and is the out-of-print first editions of the Untrue Tales books, which I’d had printed along the way as I’d finished each book – and which, with the new editions of the complete series out, I want to get rid of. Thursday and Friday I tried “Name your own price” but found people don’t like to do that, so Saturday and Sunday I said “50% off” and sold a couple of them.))

In addition, I brought a couple of paintings with me to show at the con: The original artwork I created for the cover of Cheating, Death, and my latest, ‘RainbowAwesomeUnicornWow’. I bought an easel specifically to show these paintings at this con, and I suppose it worked out alright, because the unicorn painting (which I had at/above eye level throughout the con) certainly brought more visibility to my booth than I would otherwise have had, and before the convention was through, both paintings had sold, for $400 apiece. I’ve still got to deliver them (this week), and both buyers will be working out payment plans with me over the next few months, but they’re also repeat customers who are also friends I trust. I’m sure that part of what made up their minds about buying the art this weekend was that I was showing pieces they were interested in, and that other people were expressing interest in buying them. So… not technically sales I made / money I took in at con, but certainly sales which mightn’t have happened any time soon otherwise. I feel a bit bad about it; it hadn’t been trying to pressure those particular people into buying those pieces, I simply wanted to sell the art. I haven’t done any Art Walks or other shows in over a year, so wanted to take advantage of the opportunity. :/

On the other hand, if I add the art sales to the book sales total (using accrual method accounting, of course), my sales at this year’s con are nearly triple last years… even though they were actually, eerily flat. (Come to think of it, the only non-book I sold at last year’s con was a crocheted artwork, sold for $55, and this year I brought a single piece of crocheted artwork to decorate my table which I traded, at the last moment, for roughly the same value.) Eerily flat.

Of course, there are also expenses. The cost of the table, of gas to and from downtown every day (or, as others do, of renting a room downtown for the duration), the cost of parking (last year I was trying to use free street parking ~1mile away & ended up getting a ticket – this year I paid to park in a garage adjacent to the convention center & ended up paying much less), the cost of food while captive downtown for ten and twelve hour days, the cost of the new easel, a few display materials, hundreds of business cards, and (I never account properly for this) the value of my time. I’ve been coming out a bit ahead each year, though realistically -if I want to do any better- I’ve got to spend significantly more money. Buy bookmarks or postcards or the like to try to sell or simply give away. Buy big, full-color signage; at least with my company name, possibly with my book covers, et cetera. Pay for a full-size booth instead of a small press table. Worse, perhaps worst of all to me, and most-recommended to me by other creators and by fans/attendees alike, is to show/sell at more conventions. Leprecon, San Diego Comicon and Emerald City, Tuscon Festival of Books and TusCon, Saboten-Con (really?), CopperCon, and on and on… Each one a big up-front cost for a space, tied to the hope/dream that I’ll sell enough to earn it back, and most with travel expenses far, far beyond both booth costs and my best sales experiences, ever. Hotels, gasoline and/or flights & shipping, and the cost of eating out multiplied severalfold (I could eat breakfasts at home, this weekend, and make/pack lunches, which is difficult or impossible from a hotel room in a strange city) and I doubt I could make enough sales to break even with such expenses. Yes, it’s a problem of confidence. It’s also a problem backed up with data, as in: $400 in book sales doesn’t cover $1000+ in expenses for a non-local show. Heck, a standard 10’x10′ space at SDCC is listed at $2200 for 2011. (The Leprecon & TFoB web sites are so terrible I can’t quote prices for you here; I can’t find them.) If I were motivated by money, I’d likely either have some terrible plan to make conventions profitable or have given up on the whole thing by now…

Realistically, I wouldn’t be doing Phoenix Comicon, either, if my wife weren’t in love with the whole thing. It’s a lot of effort, it results in a tiny amount of profit and a huge amount of stress and a small number of new readers. (For comparison, I sold books this weekend to only 20 new readers and gave away roughly 200 business cards (most of which have probably already been thrown away) – while each of the 13 of my titles which are available as free eBooks and podcast audiobooks finds nearly 200 new readers a month, every month.) There are roughly 3 people I met and talked with this weekend who I expect will, upon reading the books they bought from me, turn into “true fans” of my work (though 2 of those are teenagers who I’m not sure qualify in the sense of a small number of “true fans” being sufficient to financially support an independent creator, yet) – and that’s great… but I wonder about how much time and effort and money ought to be invested in acquiring one more fan… and I really need to get some sleep.

I’ve just looked up and it’s after 2AM… and I’ve been running long, hard days at the comicon since I woke up early Thursday morning. I probably won’t get much more good thoughts out of my now-almost-painfully-tired brain until I’ve slept. Feel free to insert your input in the comments, or by email, or by calling/txt’ing me… Or by buying my books… or art… *sigh* Enough trying to sell. Hopefully for a long time.