Category: Modern Evil Press

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.

Cooking, eating, bathing, and dressing; touchstones in my writing

I noticed recently (while working on the audio versions of the books) that Sophia contains all the main touchstones I’ve found I add to many (not quite all) my novels, going back all the way to Forlorn. Namely, my main characters will have a scene where they cook something, a scene where they eat something (usually what they cooked), a scene where they bathe, and a scene where they get dressed.

The most obvious in Never Let the Right One Go, part of the mirrored-activities-to-draw-comparisons between Sophia and Emily, was shopping for clothes and getting dressed. Emily is a shop-a-holic, and buying and wearing fashionable clothing is a major part of her social life (and her identity, before meeting Nicholas). Sophia, upon moving out, decides to buy a whole new wardrobe. Sophia later goes on several dates and pays particular attention to her wardrobe; one of her dates even takes her shopping for clothes, and buys her a complete outfit. Sophia ends up meeting a world-class fashion designer and having clothes custom made for her childlike body.

Going back to my older works, in Lost and Not Found, the main character’s first attempt at writing a novel contains a long description of a superhero designing his own costume – and at the end of the book there’s a chapter-long section where he and Tinkerbell are going through a magical closet full of clothes trying to decide what to wear. In the Untrue Tales… series there are several getting-dressed scenes, including Hannah’s unfortunate rushed morning before her accident, and Trevor in the locker room before his first dodgeball match. Melvin helps dress his children before they leave the safety of their homes to go face the zombies in Cheating, Death.

Of course, the most obvious are in Lost and Not Found, and specifically in the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut, where perhaps fully half of the narrative is concerned with these four touchstones. (Warning: SPOILERS ahead) After the main character whisks Tink away from Never-never land, and after they finally arrive at Haven, their first morning is first full of cooking, then of eating, then of bathing (in a magical bubble bath), and then of getting dressed, before heading out to visit a museum. (Trevor and Toni visit a museum in Untrue Tales… Book Four, as well, and there’s a museum visit in Worth 1k — Volume 2.) (Update: I’ve just remembered (10 hrs after posting this) that Sophia visits a museum, too! After going to the opera, Sophia’s date takes her on a private tour of a sort of history museum. She really gets all of them, doesn’t she?)

I like that order, as it’s a very natural one, but I don’t stick religiously to it, adding these relatively-mundane scenes in wherever they belong along the way. The main character of Lost and Not Found also spends some time cooking at the beginning of the book, while waiting for the day he can begin writing a novel. Lance, one of the major characters of Forget What You Can’t Remember, becomes a chef and opens his own restaurant – giving Paul and Job one of the only opportunities for anyone to eat in the entire book, and not until the penultimate chapter – then he gets an entire short story, ‘Self-Serve’ to himself and his restaurant in More Lost Memories, where the unique/unusual nature of his cooking, and of the eating of it, is given more room to breathe.

In Never Let the Right One Go, Emily doesn’t do any cooking. Alternatively, gourmet cooking is one of Sophia’s hobbies/passions. Early in the book, she cooks meals for her family (though she does not partake), and after she moves out she has more opportunities to prepare food for other people. Putting together a tray and fruit and cheese for her suitor is a big highlight of one of Sophia’s many frustrating dates, for example. Sophia’s relationship with food isn’t a perfect one, though, which I’ll cover below, as I address scenes of eating:

In another story from More Lost Memories (a story later re-integrated into the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut), ‘Happy Anniversary’, the main character from Lost and Not Found and Tink, on their wedding anniversary, go out for an exquisite meal at one of Skythia’s top restaurants. There are quite a few poems in Worth 1k — Volume 2 about eating (and its harmful/wonderful effects), just as there were poems in Worth 1k — Volume 1 about finding and eating food on the road. I won’t attempt to get into all the different meals (some described in nauseating detail) Trevor and his companions experience during the course of the Untrue Tales… series; they are numerous and sometimes unusual. Then there are the zombies in Forget What You Can’t Remember and in Cheating, Death, which are always going around eating people and/or brains.

In Never Let the Right One Go, Emily hardly eats at all (which is in keeping with her character) – I think the only times she’s described as eating are a few pieces of cut-up fruit the morning she arrives in Washington, D.C. for the big protest rally, a Frappuccino on the closest thing to a real date she ever has with Nicholas, and a single bite of popcorn on her terrible date with Austin. Sophia, on the other hand, spends half the book concerned with eating and not eating. As a vampire, she’s capable of eating human food but not capable of absorbing nutrition from it; anything she swallows merely passes through her body and exits undigested. Unfortunately, her super-senses turn that into a disgusting proposition, and by the time the book starts, Sophia knows better than to actually swallow any of the food she cooks. She loves cooking, loves food, loves the aromas and flavors, but can’t swallow anything but blood. The amount and frequency of Sophia’s blood consumption are thoroughly detailed throughout her story, along with the long periods of fasting she goes through, burning with hunger, so she’ll be able to donate her organs safely.

Bathing I cover a little less (though the magic bubble bath in Forlorn was, as I said, chapter-length in its detail), but I still see it as a touchstone. Real people bathe. We can identify with it, with how showering or taking a bath makes us feel. How nice it is to be fresh and refreshed and clean – or how desperately we feel the need to bathe after going through something particularly (even just emotionally) grueling. I don’t think Emily bathes at all in the text, but Sophia takes at least one shower, and right after a scene which may make you want to take a shower, too. I won’t give any more away.

I knew, going in, that Sophia was my favorite of the two novels, but I didn’t realize that I’d subconsciously include all these touchstones in one book and leave them almost entirely out of the other. Looking forward, I don’t expect to include any of these touchstones in my next four books… and I also don’t expect them to rank among my favorites.

Have you read my books? What scenes have I failed to mention? Did you remember Mary showering in ‘Pay Attention -A Zombie Story-‘, and how it marked a major turning point for her, as a character? What about the particular food eaten in ‘They Stole God’ and the trouble its eating caused?

OnlyIndie’s variable pricing

(This was originally a G+ post, but then it got long, so I thought I ought to copy it to my blog.)

The Indie eBook site, OnlyIndie, uses a variable pricing model which starts at free. After 15 “sales” the price goes to $0.01, and increments up by $0.01 per reader (up to a maximum of $7.98). Unless the book goes 24 hours without a sale, and then the price starts dropping again. (They don’t say how much or how quickly. For the following calculations, I’ve decided it’s probably “quick enough” since it’s rare for any of my eBooks to sell two days in a row (or, really, two months in a row).) Most of my eBooks sell between 0 and 6 times per year, across all available platforms – though Untrue Tales… Book One sold 9 copies last year, and Cheating, Death sold 14 last year.

Based on a quick look at my spreadsheets, and pretending that 1) getting 15 people to take a book for free is easy, 2) once a title hits a price of $0.01 it doesn’t actually drop to free again, and 3) demand for my eBooks would have been the same at $0.01 as it was at all the different prices they’ve been at in the last 3.5 years (Okay, this one is actually based on some data, where I’ve lowered and raised and adjusted prices between $0.99 and $9.99 for months at a time, and seen that interest in my books drops when they’re below $2.99 but doesn’t really change much between $4.99 and $9.99.), I would have made roughly $3.25 $1.62 if 100% of my eBook sales in the last 3.5 years had been made through OnlyIndie. (They take 50% of all sales under $2/each. Not even my most popular $0.99 short story has sold 200 copies, ever.)

Since Amazon price-matches, Apple won’t allow books below $0.99 and won’t allow you to undercut them on other sites, et cetera, et cetera, saying 100% of sales had to be through OnlyIndie isn’t even relevant: The earnings would be the same. Maybe this tool/site/scheme would work as a way to “build a platform”, but it seems like it would need a lot of attention, just to keep prices from falling to useless levels.

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.)