Modern Evil Press – Page 28

New Video – On Margins

I should probably have posted this here last week when it went up on YouTube, but better late than never, eh? I’ll go figure out where to cross-post this to modernevil.com … when I get around to it? Look, posting this is effectively procrastination vs. editing tomorrow’s podcast episode. Ooh, I should go Twitter to procrastinate posting this. I love multi-dimensional procrastination, especially when every little step along the way is part of my job, part of building my brand/community/audience, and/or part of being a full-time creative.

What’s the video about, you ask? Umm… it’s about how I, Modern Evil Press, have decided to handle pricing of the for-pay text versions of my books, including the paperback & eBook versions through various sales channels. There is another video needed, to cover the alternatives being explored by other publishers, especially re: eBook pricing, and I hope to have it up in a week or two. (A lot going on right now – did I tell you I’ve started screen-printing T-Shirts?) Here it is, I encourage you to watch in “High Quality” if your bandwidth allows:

Productivity, Profitability

Still having trouble with staying focused. I feel like I’m not productive enough, almost daily. Things are getting done; the podcasts are all running on time, I’m doing two or more Art Walks/Fairs/Detours a month & I’ve painted a dozen new paintings since the first of the year. I’m even blogging semi-regularly, which you already know, reading this. But I could be doing more.

Yesterday I only did three or four hours of audio work, and even though I know I worked on other things, it feels like I didn’t get anything done, since it’s harder to tally the hours and to quantify what’s work and what isn’t. Does Twitter count? Reading publishing & other blogs? Blogging? It’s all part of connecting with people, with building an audience and building myself as a “brand” and educating myself about what’s going on, what’s working, and driving ideas forward. So in a way, yes. Then there’s the oft-repeated idea that everything an author does and experiences is a sort of reasearch for future books; this is somewhat true, but feels like a sort of excuse.

In addition to feeling that perhaps I’m not being productive enough, I also think a lot about my not being profitable enough. Even with the reduced up-front costs of doing business the way I am, not a single one of my books has even reached break-even, yet. The art, comparably, has been doing great – not bringing in enough to live on, but if not for the cost of going to Tools of Change in New York (ie: if not for a big, extra publishing expense), I’d already be profitable this year on art sales alone, with only bluer skies on the horizon. The margins on the art, even with prices basically cut in half & then frozen since 2004, are great – not just in money, but in time. It takes me hundreds of hours to produce a book, and somehow it’s harder to sell a copy of the book for $14 (or less) than it is to sell a painting (that took me less than 10 hours to create) for $150. Lately I’ve been creating a lot of “Mini Paintings”: 8×10″ for $20, 5×7″ for $15, and 4×4″ for $10, right now. Most of them are done in under 1 hour of work (though admittedly, some have taken up to 3), and they earn me as much as or more than a book does, usually without having to try to sell them at all.

Obviously, the art sales can only scale to the limits of my creativity & time to produce original works – I’m not sure what the upper limit is, but perhaps dozens a month. Certainly not hundreds. Whereas the book sales can scale without proportional extra work on my part – Lightning Source prints however many copies people order, whether it’s dozens a month or thousands. If/when I “hit it big” the books will quickly win in this regard. Not to mention I can sell a book more than once, and without doing prints (something I am currently opposed to), I can only sell an original work of art once. So it takes orders of magnitude more work to produce a book, but I can keep selling it over and over again forever, instead of just once.

If only my sales numbers were orders of magnitude better. Did I mention not a single one of my books has yet earned back the costs associated with its production, yet? That’s with $0 value associated with my time, no less. Which is to say: if I were more productive (of books), I’d perhaps only be digging myself deeper and deeper into a hole. Being more productive of art is good, but when I really need to figure out is how to be more productive of profitability. I need to produce more book sales. That’s a hard one. The podcasting thing is meant to be helping with that – it certainly puts my writing in front of a lot more minds than everything else I’ve been doing, even if it is for free, right now. Something approaching five hundred times as many people have downloaded Dragons’ Truth from Podiobooks.com than have purchased a copy of the paperback (not counting sales to family) – that’s a huge multiplier. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, it hasn’t translated directly into interest in my other podiobooks or in sales of my paperbacks or eBooks. Gotta keep it up, though. Gotta keep working on it. Gotta get back to work, right now – I’m supposed to be editing together next week’s episodes of Forget What You Can’t Remember, right now. Gotta go.

Failure to Follow Through

I was working on another idea I’ve got (it can wait – it doesn’t require any action until 2013, so posting about it here a few days later won’t make a difference), and I went back and was reading my blog posts from Fall of 2003 and I re-discovered something I’d forgotten. Now, if you go back and try to look at the original posts for yourself, please keep in mind that there were some problems converting the site from MoveableType to WordPress last year that I haven’t taken the 100+ (estimated) hours it will take to go through and fix, yet. So, some posts are just a mess, right now, and some are almost entirely missing. Still, from what’s there, I was able to piece this together:

I started recording and posting my first Podiobook online 16 months before the word “Podiobook” was coined. Heck, it was two months before the word “Podcast” was suggested, according to Wikipedia. (Consequently, I wasn’t trying to podcast it at that point – I was simply blogging about it & trying to sell it through my blog.) I had even found a way to monetize it from day one, with a now-defunct micro-payments system called BitPass – at 25cents per chunk or about $1/half-hour (ie: about the same price for the whole thing whether you buy it all at once or a little at a time). My plan, according to this post from September, 2003, was to simultaneously release the book in paperback, electronic format, and as MP3s (and possibly CDs). By the first week of December, 2003 I had the first four files recorded and available for purchase, right from this post (broken links now removed).

I was testing the waters, trying to see if anyone was interested in an audio version (trying to see if anyone was willing to give micropayments a try, too). The plan, as of December 11, 2003, looks like it was to post the rest of the audiobook serially, for micropayments, but also to offer options to buy the whole book as MP3s together, an MP3 CD, and possibly a set of audio CDs (since the MP3 Audiobook was unheard of at that point, I thought I should at least offer it in the old way). Unfortunately, no one bit. No one even commented to say they were interested. According to my posts about stats, my blog was getting between 10k and 30k “unique visitors” per month (in the months I mentioned stats) from September 2003 through February 2004, and had fewer than a dozen regular commenters. By March 2004, thinking there was no interest and it was taking WAY too much work to not be heard, I’d given up on the audio version of Lost and Not Found.

I didn’t persist. Well, I did keep working, I kept writing, I kept creating, I just didn’t try to do audio again until 2008. And by 2007-2008, when I looked into it, I discovered that what I’d thought of doing 4-5 years earlier had taken off and now I’m late to the party. In the intervening time, I’d never given up on the idea of someday recording audio versions of my own books in my own voice, but in the insulated world I lived in I didn’t know anyone else was doing it. And since I was working full time and splitting my off hours between having a life, writing, painting, and more, there wasn’t time to be doing the audio versions.

“If only, if only…” If only I’d followed through on my idea. If only I’d finished recording it, despite an apparent lack of interest from my audience. If only I’d heard of Creative Commons (founded in 2001? Who knew? Not me!), or thought to give away my content instead of insisting on trying to sell every copy in every format. If only I’d somehow thought of podcasting prior to its adoption and… umm.. yeah. ((I was SO reading RSS specifications in 2003/2004, and was only thinking of enclosing files for my online comics and my occasional “audioblog” posts, not for books.)) So. I have a long history of thinking of things a couple of years before anyone else, and then losing interest in them and setting them aside long before they suddenly hit it big. I need to work on my follow-through, and I need to work on persistence, even in the face of adversity.

I have good ideas, I even often know what to do with them, and I need to get myself to actually follow through. To carry my ideas to fruition. So that the next time I invent the next big thing, maybe I’ll be at the center of it instead of on the outside, looking in.

ForgetWYCR is Not a ‘Zombie Book’

Originally posted at modernevil.com:

Forget What You Can’t Remember is a book that has zombies in it, but it is not a zombie book. It is not a horror book. It is not a science fiction or a fantasy book, either, despite the existence of a flying city, robots, and elves in the world where it takes place. It is not an action book — in fact, it may be the antithesis of an action book, when you step back and look at the whole experience. What is Forget What You Can’t Remember, if it is not these things?

It is a novel about people. Some of the people in the novel encounter zombies and, in fact, survive a full-scale zombie outbreak in a major US city. Some of the people in the novel, after becoming rescued rescuers, find there are gaps in their memories; whole swaths of their lives and their histories that are entirely lost. Suddenly given limitless possibilities for the future and robbed of their pasts, each charater reacts -and interacts- in different ways. Some follow their dreams, some try to continue living in the past they’ve had to leave behind, and at least one loses his grip on sanity.

The bulk of the story is told, not through description of actions, settings, and characters, but through the dialogue those characters have about the settings they find themselves in and the actions and events they’re experiencing and planning. This is simultaenously so intimate that a reader can lose track of the boundaries between characters and so distancing that it can give the impression that you are only experiencing the story second-hand. That feeling of being both present and distant at once mirrors the way more than one of the main characters’ minds reacts in the wake of tragic, traumatic events. In the scene in chapter 17 which inspired the cover image, two characters discuss this experience which could probably be diagnosed as depersonalization disorder:

“Huh.” Paul couldn’t identify personally or exactly with Brady’s experiences, but somehow understood him, in a way. “Are you experiencing this disassociation from reality right now?”
“No, I,” Brady paused to consider whether what he was saying was true. He stopped walking, and stood in the street for a moment looking down at his body and back up to the world around him. He held his right hand up in front of his face, staring intently at it. “I’m trying to decide if it feels like I’m staring at my own hand or if I’m watching me stare at my own hand.” Paul was now also staring intently at Brady’s hand, trying to more consciously notice his own awareness of perception. “Though just being present enough to be able to think about the difference is probably both a sign that I’m not experiencing it, and what truly surreal experiences even its memory allows me now to have.”
“Truly.” Paul was now staring at his own hand and contemplating the separation between perception and awareness as though for the first time. “Consciousness itself is clearly not mere eyes and ears and instincts, but the thought of being able to be conscious of one’s own consciousness is a sort of Klein bottle with no boundary, zero volume, and which despite seeming to be immersed in the visible world always keeps some critical part in a higher plane of being, beyond our grasp.”
Brady now took his turn to stare at Paul, though more like an examination of another’s sanity than one’s own perceptions. Brady stood there, staring at Paul staring at his own hand, apparently deep in thought, then spoke. “I have no idea what you just said.”

Then, when the narrative takes a dramatic turn toward long description and to action, the character experiencing and initiating the action is turned increasingly away from it by his own apparent memory loss and the philosophical line of thought it takes him down. A strange and difficult twist near the end of the book then seems to erase all evidence of his action -of everything described in detail rather than in dialogue- from the book, leaving nothing behind but the second-hand and the distant. The reader, if they realize this post-modern slight of hand at all, is left in the same situation as the characters; what you thought happened hasn’t, and what has happened is at least out of arm’s reach.

In trying to create this meta-experience paralleling that of the characters, the book loses the ability to easily serve the expectations of mainstream readers. It loses the ability to meet the expectations of readers looking for a traditional zombie book. It loses the ability to serve those looking for it to fit neatly into a genre slot, any genre at all. Instead, it serves the mind. It encourages thought. It attempts not just to describe a thing, but to deliver it into the reader’s consciousness. Forget What You Can’t Remember is not a book for everyone, and it may not be what you expect, but it may be the only book you read this year that is what it says.

working out an idea

I’m working on an idea. I’ve mentioned it before, and I’ve worked through a couple of iterations, since. The idea has evolved significantly, as I’ve worked, and thought, considering the meaning and the purpose of such a project. And the meaning of my life, and of my work, in general. I like the direction it’s taking. Don’t know how capable I’ll be of either selling it, or of marketing it -each of which holds unique challenges- but I’m going to keep working on it anyway.

I’ve been vaguely considering designing a custom deck of cards, akin to tarot cards, for many years. I’ve never really wanted to simply design a tarot deck, as so many others have done before me, simply putting my own artwork on the traditional 72 cards. This has something to do with my understanding about about divination works, and what part cards tend to play in it (not to mention the other roles such cards tend to end up playing on the side). I’ve wanted to not just create artwork for an existing system of divination, but to create a new system from scratch. A wholly original deck.

Of course, I’m aware that Leviticus 19:26 makes it clear that God would prefer if I didn’t practice divination at all. The context that Isaiah 2:6 gives divination is as a “superstition from the East.” I’d effectively given up the practice a few years ago, after a brief, intense period of giving in to the temptation, but it’s been on my mind again, lately. Not in the context of wanting to do readings or divine knowledge/wisdom/future, but in wanting to design the cards, and to publish a book explaining them. So I started designing. I want through a couple of interesting ideas, did dozens of sketches, and decided to go a different direction.

I’ve been working on steering my creativity in a direction toward more Christian writing. Not entirely effectively, yet, but I’ve been trying to at the very least avoid going further in the direction of the sex, violence, and apparent lack of morality that the Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction was pointing me in (though that changes character in the final books). I have a partially completed book that literally explores the concept of the unforgivable sin mentioned by Jesus – with violence, sex, action, and all sorts of other apparent sins (and exploration of the meaning of ‘sin’) along the way. I would like to write several explorations of the complex, interesting, and challenging things I have found in scripture and in my own Christian walk. But first, I think I’ll start with something unconventional:

I’m designing a deck of Christian cards, and writing a book to explain them. As I conceive it now, I expect the book to have three pain parts: One part, the expected breakdown, card by card, of how to read the cards for divination – what this one means, what it means ‘reversed’, how to lay the cards out and to interpret them. One part, a theological and biblical exploration of divination, ‘Eastern superstition’, and related new age beliefs as a temptation for modern Christians, especially as for new Christians who prior to being born again practiced such things. One part, an alternative breakdown, card by card, that uses the deck of cards as a sort of flash cards for learning about Jesus, Christianity, and the early church.

Part of the idea (which will certainly be included in the book) is that most things of this world are neither inherently good or evil, but it is our individual choices, day by day and moment by moment, that we do right or wrong. That we imbue the things of this world with the good or the evil that we do with them. A deck of cards -the ones I am designing, or any deck of tarot cards- is not evil. It is not a tool of the devil, in and of itself. It can be used to do evil, but the cards themselves are not evil. If I do a good job designing them, if I write a clear and well-organized book, both of which I believe can only happen through him who gives me strength, then my cards will be able to do good by those who choose to use them for good, and to likewise allow those who choose to do so to use them for divination. A tool. A choice.

The production, distribution, and sale of the book is easy for me, right now. I’ve got 10 books in print already, and adding one only takes a couple of weeks, once it’s written. The production, distribution, and sale of the cards -especially as part of a bundled item with the book- looks challenging. There are several options for getting the cards printed. I could pay for a huge offset run, warehouse them somehow… There are a couple of companies that will do short-run decks of cards (hundreds instead of thousands or tens of thousands of decks). I found one place that will do “print on demand” of custom cards, but not like POD book printers do -they aren’t doing wholesaling, retailing, distribution, and won’t do one-offs- but they’ll print as few as 10 decks at a time, and they’ll print (but not assemble) deck boxes, too. And I found a place that sells microperforated playing card paper, so I can print a test deck or two on my own printer. So I’ll probably go with that last one at first, get the cards how I want them. Then go to the POD printer and get a small order (they have a price break at 50 decks) & have a matching print run at Lightning Source (who also has a price break at 50 copies of a book). Then try to get them carried by Christian and new age stores, I guess.

I’m considering some options like: Putting the book out with a high cover price & one page being a coupon you mail in for a free deck of cards. Doing all the distribution myself, so I can bundle them manually, and don’t have to worry about people who buy the book through other channels & don’t get the cards. Writing the book in such a way that it stands alone, without the cards, but tells you how you can order the cards, and using the same distribution setup I have for my other books. And… uhh… do you have any other ideas? I’ll be thinking about it for a while.

The current plan is to do the research (ie: read the bible, concordances, and other bible resources) so I can write 2-4 pages (minimum) for each of the cards (at least 1 page for each of the two parts that break down each card), and to paint an individual painting for each card’s art. I’m hoping to do each painting 8×10″ or less, so I can do a high resolution scan with equipment I already own, do additional work in Photoshop as necessary, but then to have an original painting for sale that corresponds to every card. To make packaging & distribution easier (and because it fell together in the designing of the deck), I’m doing a 52-card deck, currently as follows:

5 ‘Major’ cards: God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, Death, & Devil
14 Apostles cards: 1 per apostle, including both Judas & Matthias and Paul
11 Miracles cards, each featuring one of Jesus’ miracles
11 Ministry cards, each featuring one group of people to whom Jesus ministered
11 Message cards, each featuring one basic, foundational, repeated part of Jesus’ message

I think the hard cards will be the Apostle cards. I need to do the research, but I’m pretty sure there are a few of the apostles there isn’t two pages’ worth of information about in the bible. Hopefully I’m mistaken. Either way, I’ll have to figure out how to represent each of them visually – I plan to research how they’ve each been traditionally and historically depicted in the last two millennia. Still, they effectively represent 14 paintings of “a man,” which, if you’ve seen my art, you know hasn’t exactly been something I’ve been perfecting. So probably 14 abstracted expressions of what each man represented or something they did or … inspired by whatever was used to depict them historically. Your suggestions are, again, welcome.

I have a list, a flexible, mutable list, of what I expect the 52 cards to be. I’m thinking of creating 52 blog posts -perhaps in a separate instance of WP, or perhaps merely in their own category- one for each card, where I can write out my explorations of the concepts. I’ll have to think about that, too. What do you think would work best? Are you interested? What would hold your interest? What would annoy you about blogging it?

Up late again. Didn’t do any audio work today (now I’m not actually “ahead” of the podcast, anymore – a lot of recording done, but no finished episodes ready to go from here on out), but absolutely have to do some tomorrow. Who wants to try to get me up in the morning? Say, around 8? sigh.