Modern Evil Press – Page 13

Numbers for Q1, 2011

I was wrong about not posting another long post today; I forgot I needed to write up the numbers for Q1. A quick summary: Total eBook downloads were up, though that has a lot to do with my continuing to put out more books (and my putting the rest of my books up as free eBooks when the new year started), as downloads on a per-title basis were flat or dropping (except for Dragons’ Truth, which had about double the previous quarter’s downloads and 3x the year-ago-quarter’s… mostly in PDF formats). The same is true for podiobooks downloads; the total downloads were a tiny bit up, but each show was flat or down, and the difference comes from the two new books I’ve launched during the period.

What about paid eBook sales? I’ve been doing a price experiment, as you may recall; at the start of the year I dropped all my full-book eBook prices into the $2.99 to $4.99 range. After three months, how did sales change? Sales went down, actually. Fewer copies sold at the lower prices. The only title whose sales increased was Untrue Tales… Book One, which I had reduced down to $0.99 (with the rest of the series at $3.99/book), which sold a total of 5 copies in 3 months. (And no one went on to buy the rest of the series – only a single copy of Book Three sold, of all the books after One.) Seeing that sales had not improved (and in some cases had become much worse) with the lowered prices, rather than leaving them a full six months, or even a full three months, I put through price increases on all my full-book eBooks with about a week left in March – at the same time I pulled the individual Untrue Tales eBooks and uploaded them as two trilogies (for parity with the print version, and so they’d have more attractive pricing). My eBooks are now all in the $6.99 to $9.99 price range. I made half as much money in 1 week at the higher prices as I had in 12 weeks at the lower prices. Which is what I expected, and expect to continue to see over Q2.

Here are the eBook and Podiobook download numbers for the Q1 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: 302 / 2,684 / 126
Dragons’ Truth: 695 / 1,874 / 237
Forget What You Can’t Remember: 422 / 6,742 / 189
The First Untrue Trilogy: 59 (eBook, only available 7 days)
The Second Untrue Trilogy: 66 (eBook, only available 7 days)
Untrue Tales… Book One: 283 / 5,165 / 370
Untrue Tales… Book Two: 283 / 5,359 / 349
Untrue Tales… Book Three: 223 / 2,899 / 269
Untrue Tales… Book Four: 314 / 4,366 / 377
Untrue Tales… Book Five: 265 / 1,787 / N/A
Cheating, Death: 284 / 6,750 / 439
Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 245 / 610 / 114
More Lost Memories (full): 252 / 1,271 / 134
More Lost Memories (ind. stories, eBook only): 10
Time, emiT, and Time Again (full): 248 / 1,201 / 68
Time, emiT, and Time Again (ind. stories, eBook only): 6
Last Christmas: 4
Total Q1: 3,961 / 40,708 / 2,672
Total all-time: 19,654 / 433,070 / 28,125

So, there’s that. I’m approaching half a million episodes downloaded via Podiobooks.com, across my current 12 titles, with something in the range of 5.5k-28k listeners downloading at least one full book. (I’m guessing around 6k, but I have a lot of numbers to look at, here.) About seven one-hundredths of 1% (0.07%) of Podiobooks.com full-book-downloads resulted in a donation to one of my books. I’m also approaching 20k eBook downloads across 28 titles (half of the titles are short stories; I’ve only written 15 full books/trilogies available as eBooks), and about 1% of those are paid, rather than free, eBook downloads. In Q1 I sold ~40 eBooks for a net income (after Amazon / Apple / Smashwords take their cut) of ~$58, and I had 3 Podiobooks donations totaling $6.53 (again, net to me). I also gave away 14 paperback books (the Untrue Trilogies) in Q1 (which cost me over $100). Also during Q1 I opted my books out of Smashwords “Premium” distribution to Apple and Barnes & Noble, and I set up direct relationships with both, via iTunesConnect and Pubit, respectively. Apple is slow, and a bit opaque about their setup process, and the result is that most of my eBooks have been unavailable via the iBookstore for about 3 weeks (so far)… and a downside I didn’t take into account with B&N was that all the salesrank data for my eBooks would no longer be associated with my eBooks – when I set them up directly (even though it’s the same title/ISBN/eBook), B&N considers it a totally separate entity from the version they’d received from Smashwords. In fact, for a couple of days, both versions of each eBook were available in the B&N/nookbook store, side by side. So … I suspect that’s why my B&N sales also stopped completely after the changeover. We’ll see how that goes.

I currently project that I’ll sell about twice as many eBooks in 2011 as I did in 2010, and that I’ll earn up to 10x as much from eBook sales. Which would be nice, if it proved true, since that would cover the expense of having all those paper copies of the Untrue Trilogies printed. Actually, I was running the numbers, and for all versions of all the Untrue Tales books (2007-present; I don’t have solid numbers for prior to 2007), with all the expenses and all the income, I’m roughly $700 in the red for the Untrue Tales series. All I need to do is sell 50 more sets of the eBooks (at $9.99/trilogy & 70% net) or 14 sets of the paper books (at $25/trilogy, selling by hand… it’s over 50 sets if they sell through Amazon/other-bookseller) (or some combination therein) and the Untrue Tales series will have broken even. Have you bought your set?

My unfocused mind

In the heat of the moment, I’d nearly forgotten my plan for this year. In the busy-ness of the business of getting the Untrue Tales series written, edited, and published, then made into an eBook, and now into an audiobook… In the sudden long moment of everything involved in my Kickstarter project (My Life in the Future of Publishing) and its promotion… In thinking about (now planning the structure of, now worldbuilding) my upcoming vampire duology and in considering whether it’s a good fit to be made into a graphic novel… In signing up for, researching, and trying to decide on a project for Script Frenzy (which is like NaNoWriMo, but for scriptwriting – and I’ve next to no experience with scriptwriting)… Not to mention the beginning percolations of ideas for fresh art projects beginning to bubble up…

With all these projects and ideas and such burning to the fore of my mind, keeping me continuously busy for the first quarter of 2011 (and beyond), my initial plan for the year nearly faded from my thoughts. If you’ve also managed to forget it, it went something like this: My general goal is to write/publish 2 to 4 books per year and I’ve already done that much (with the Untrue Tales series), so there’s no real pressure (from my own goals) to try to finish any new books this year. This gives me the freedom to spend more time reading, to make progress on my “reading list,” as it were, not just books for pleasure but books for research (for several upcoming books I’ve got in mind, but don’t want to write without a lot of appropriate reading first). I’d also like to get some time invested in working again on my art, in taking it in a new direction, and in trying to produce beautiful artwork free from commercial concerns.

This last thought is perhaps the central one; to move to a place where the work I’m doing is no longer driven by commercial concerns. I think I’ve got our finances structured now in a way which will allow me to fully realize that mindset before the end of 2011. …though not if I continue to allow myself to obsess over things like getting funding, like promoting & marketing my creations, and/or like trying to learn how to write commercial/normal/formulaic books (or screenplays).

Anyway, I’ve been having some trouble keeping my mind focused, lately. I’m pretty sure the proliferation of projects preceded the present peripatetic propensity of my thoughts. Either way, it’s too many things, within and without. All things I want to accomplish, but I’m not confident a hurry in any way enhances or improves those accomplishments, so I’m going to try to slow down and take things one at a time. Try to focus on each thing in turn, if I can, instead of focusing on none of them at all. I’m significantly less stressed than I ever was working for someone else, or working for money, but those things are like infectious splinters, wedging their way into everything and poisoning even the good in life – and I am more stressed than I’d prefer to be because of them.

If my Kickstarter project gets funded, I’ll try to focus on that. If not, maybe I’ll try to focus on screenwriting for a month. Otherwise, I’m just going to focus on reading and on gradually developing the ideas, structure, and meaning of my upcoming vampire duology… while I try to adjust my frame of mind.

Author Self-Interview

Okay, so I stole these questions from Pat Bertram, to answer on my own site… so it’s only partially a self-interview. I’m pretty much too shy to actually do interviews, but answering questionnaires, that I can do! Of course, I could have then sent my answers to Pat & pretended she’d interviewed me, but I’m almost too shy to actually make contact with people – I mostly keep to myself, these days. So… instead I’m just posting it here. Because so many of the questions assume I’ve only got one book to talk about (though really, I’m putting my 15th book out this month, along with paper-book re-issues for the entire Untrue Tales… series, and I just launched a Kickstarter project for yet another book), I’ve selected … the entire Untrue Tales series as “my book” for the purposes of this “interview.” Also, Pat suggests answering 10 or 15 of the questions, and I’ve answered every one. That’s 46 questions, and this post is over 4300 words. Enjoy.

What is your book about? I never know how to answer this question about my books, and that failure is probably the biggest reason my book sales are consistently slow and low. If I had to answer, without going into great length, I’d say perhaps that the Untrue Tales series is about watching reality unfold around you and the uselessness of trying to control anything. Ask me again in a week/month/year and I’ll probably have a different answer.
How long had the idea of your book been developing before you began to write the story? Ooh, this is a good question, for this series. I actually started “working on” what became the Untrue Trilogies over twenty years ago. All through my youth (I can’t be sure when it started, but perhaps age 10 or 12?) I was a storyteller, often with myself at the heart of the stories. Rather than writing my stories down, I practiced oral storytelling, and I told my stories as though they were true stories about my life – and believe me that trying to tell the story of how I accidentally bested Satan at age 12 and was forced to take over the day-to-day operation of Hell in a realistic and convincing way was a learning experience. All the basic threads of story which ended up in the Untrue Trilogies (and quite a few which didn’t) were part of these overlapping narratives I developed primarily during my high school years (roughly age 12-16), which I then adapted into a new story, not about me, beginning in 2004.
What inspired you to write this particular story? I guess I partly answered this, but the development of these stories was in large part an attempt to gather people’s attention. Prior to high school I had been largely an outcast and picked on to the point that it got me kicked out of school (you can read a modified/compressed/fictionalized account of this, buried in my first novel, Lost and Not Found), and when I finally got back into school, a new school, I was determined to do things differently. Developing these stories, largely in collaboration with the friends I was making, seemed to help cement my role in several social circles. Years and years later, after I’d written a couple of novels, I decided to try to resurrect those stories, rather than allow them to be forgotten, and thus began the seed that led to these six books.
How much of yourself is hidden in the characters in the book? Around the time I wrote Untrue Tales… Book One I was likely to be heard saying that all the characters in all my books are me, and that’s still true, in some ways. Without giving away the ending of the last book, I’ll say that there’s quite a lot of me in Trev.
Tell us a little about your main characters. Who was your favorite? Why? My favorite character? Is it cheating to say it was my daughter? Err… Trev’s daughter, Neyal’h… Except, she almost isn’t in these books at all. She’s practically peripheral, the entire journey, despite being central to all the action in most of the books. Why is she my favorite? Don’t you love your daughter? … If you check with me here in “reality” I don’t even have a daughter, so I suppose this answer doesn’t make sense. But if you’d read the stories I was writing, all the way back to when I began writing stories, you’ll find her there. Maybe someday I’ll re-release an updated version of The Vintage Collection (everything I wrote as a teen, which I’d made available in paperback for a few years), and you can see for yourself. Continue reading Author Self-Interview

One thing at a time? Nah…

I’ve heard rumor that other people, especially people who want to maximize … blah blah blah… attention, focus on one project at a time. I know of several authors who spent several years focused on marketing a single book, before moving on to their next project. For some of them, this was a successful way to build an audience. It’s not for me. I’ve put out 3 new books in the last ~4 months, in audio and eBook formats, have combined them for a print trilogy, have created a second edition of the trilogy that preceded those books, and before I even get those new paper books in my hand, I’ve already begun work on yet another new book/project. Here’s a video about it:

I’ve put the Kickstarter widget, which gives a brief image/blurb and tracks the progress of the funding, in the right-hand column of this blog and on the front page of modernevil.com, hoping that’ll increase its visibility. I’m going to be putting a brief audio promo for the project in all my podcast/books. I’m blogging about it. I’m Twittering and facebooking about it. I may become annoying about it in the coming weeks, depending on how funding goes.

To prevent being annoyed, please, pledge today. Tell your friends to pledge. Post the widget around. Surely, you know people who are interested in writing & publishing. Or people who like rainbows, beards, and/or suspenders. Show them my video.

Oh, and there’s still over a week to enter the contests to win copies of my the Untrue Trilogies, on this blog or via Goodreads. Because I can’t seem to do only one thing at a time.

Oops, my new books are available

As I posted about recently, and as expected, my books are available now, well in advance of their “official publication date” of April 1st, 2011. They’re currently listed at full list price at Amazon, and at a 42% discount at Barnes & Noble, and they’ll be popping up at other online retailers’ sites in the next week or two, mostly between those price points. If you can’t wait, you don’t care about supporting me (the author), or whatever, you could order both trilogies right now. OR:

I’ll have my copies of the books this Thursday (March 10th, 2011), and will make them available for purchase from modernevil.com as soon as possible after they arrive. As detailed in my last post, I’m planning on offering them at the following price points:

$50 for both Untrue Trilogies, unsigned
$50 each ($100 for both) Untrue Trilogies, signed

No additional shipping/handling charges, sent via USPS Priority Mail with delivery confirmation, packed and shipped by the author… signed & personalized by the author, if you pay for it. Is my signature worth that much? Maybe, but that isn’t the point: The point is to give people the option of becoming a patron / benefactor / philanthropist / supporter of an independent creator, rather than just a blind consumer looking for the best price. If you want the best price, currently $28.92 for the pair, go buy at B&N (or wherever), and I’ll get about $13.88 of that. If you order unsigned from me, depending on what shipping costs me (I don’t have the final weight of the books yet, and it depends on where you live, but it’ll be somewhere from $6-$11 for the pair), I’ll net $25-$29. If you order the signed copies, I’ll net $75-$80. See how that works?

Oh, and in case you didn’t read my last post (because it was over 2k words long?), you may have missed that I’m giving away FREE copies of the full Untrue Tales… series. You can enter right now on Goodreads, or you can go back and comment on that post and have a much better chance of winning. (Currently, I’m the only person eligible. Maybe I’ll win copies of my own books…)