Category: Modern Evil Press

Subscribing to middlemen

Over on Google+, I lamented briefly at not having a good option for offering pre-orders; last night I put in the order with LSI for the 50-copy Limited Edition hardcover print run for Never Let the Right One Go, and won’t be able to sell any of those copies until after they’re actually here (and signed and numbered and ready to ship). Payment services like PayPal (yech) and Google Checkout don’t technically allow pre-orders; you must not charge customers until your product is ready to ship (or shipped), or you violate the TOS.

Someone commented, asking, “Have you looked at http://backmybook.com/? It’s what Scott Sigler’s using — and Scott Sigler pushes preorder of his books pretty heavily in his podcasts.” This was my reply, and I thought it worth re-posting, here:

I never get past the front page, where it says they charge more per month than I earn from my books most months, just to set up a store, and double that to try to build a community around the books. You have to keep in mind I’ve not got lots of eager, paying customers: A clue is my recent Kickstarter – which I used as a way to sell pre-orders of this book, actually – which failed because I could only come up with 14 backers.

The pre-order system I’m looking for needs to be cost-effective at selling as few as half a dozen books. Really, any store I set up needs to be that way, right now. Last year I sold 26 paper books and 133 eBooks, or an average of just over 13 copies a month. That’s across all platforms and venues – I can’t afford any platform which costs more than the <$25/month I make in sales across all platforms (most months); even $10/month is really too much.

I sell more copies each year than the last, and for most titles each new book is more popular than the last – I’m building an audience, slowly but surely. (Last year an average of over 1,500 people/month downloaded my free eBooks, and a little over half as many downloaded my free audiobooks.) I’m in this for the long haul. In another five or ten years I expect to have passed the inflection point where my books sell enough copies that I can throw money at services like Back My Book and MyWrite, and where a signed numbered limited edition hardback release doesn’t take several years to sell 50 copies. (Which, frankly, is an optimistic outlook for Never Let the Right One Go, right now. Could take a decade.)
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This also precludes services for hosting/selling digital goods (there are several out there, most charge a minimum monthly fee) such as ZIPs of my audiobooks (without all the extra intros/outros/chatter that you get on podcasts), or eBooks. In fact, it also means I don’t have a business checking account, because the minimum monthly fees would cancel out half my monthly business (and the situation was much worse four years ago when I started doing this full time) – I still do everything through my personal accounts.  As a general rule, if a service provider between me and my customers operates on a subscription model or on upfront costs, rather than piecemeal (per transaction costs), I can’t afford it. My business is not regular enough, yet.

As I keep posting, even the upfront costs of printing paper books (and the subscription-type costs of keeping them available for “market distribution”) no longer make sense to me; the 50-copy print run of Never Let the Right One Go could, potentially, wipe out this entire year’s revenues, if few copies sell. I don’t expect to create paper versions of my next 4 (planned) books, three of which are YA novels. By the end of this year, I’ll have cut off the “Market Distribution” for every single one of my (paper) books; the eBooks and audiobooks will still be everywhere, but the paper versions will only be available directly from modernevil.com. With any luck, this will help maintain my gradual, but steadily increasing, distance from losing money on every book, every year.

First FREE day for Untrue Tales… Book One, at Amazon

So, today (Saturday, April 28th, 2012), Untrue Tales… Book One is available for free in the Amazon Kindle store. I would love it if you would click over to Amazon and click the Buy button -even if you’ve already read it, or listened to it, or if you have no intention of reading it, or reviewing it- because everyone who “Buys” it helps increase its Amazon Sales Rank. It would be even better if you then read and reviewed it, but that’s not really the point of this FREE day; the point is to increase visibility for the title, and if you have an Amazon account, you can help. (If you’re reading this after 4/28/2012 and before 5/5/12 – it’ll be free again 5/4 and 5/5, so you’ll have another chance to help!) Here’s the book description, in case you actually want to know what it’s about before you click through:

High school Sophomore Trevor believes he’s got a rich and detailed imagination. When his wandering mind shows him visions of car-size insects, arcane rituals, and odd-looking people talking to other creatures who don’t seem human at all, Trevor doesn’t think it’s any different from his sexual fantasies, or his daydreams about what it would be like to know what the girls from school were really thinking. When an afternoon of such intense mental wandering proves to be a real out-of-body psychic experience, Trevor soon finds himself literally teleported into an unseen world of magic and Mentalism – the science of reading other people’s thoughts and memories he didn’t know he had a natural talent for.

Transferred to a school where they teach subjects ranging from the mathematics of magical ethics to the secret histories of the magical world, Trevor tries to fit in to a student body who believes his existence has been foretold by prophecy – and that he might cause the end of the universe as they know it. Some of the students, and even a few of the teachers, are willing to risk lives and their own ethical balance to stop Trevor from fulfilling his potential, while he just wants to get through his first day at a new school.

Add the menacing conspiracy of three dark figures -two of whom work at the school- and the fact that Trevor accidentally got a girl pregnant when he thought he’d only been fantasizing about her, plus a P.E. teacher who thrusts him into a game of dodgeball where Trevor has to quickly adapt to avoiding balls of fire, lightning, and worse, and the first book of Untrue Tales gets the series off to a potentially apocalyptic start.

Please, go to Amazon and “buy” Untrue Tales… Book One for FREE, today!

Update: The book peaked at about #40 in Contemporary Fantasy (2,250 overall)… as a free eBook… and has now, apparently, lost all visibility as its sales rank has reverted to only include paid copies? Perhaps this is a failed experiment. Alternatively, perhaps some of the people who “bought” it for free weren’t just my friends/family/contacts, and they’ll actually read it. And perhaps some of them will want to read more, and will buy the full Untrue Tales series… Incidentally, it only took 85 “free” buyers (78 Amazon, 7 Amazon.co.uk) to reach #40 in Contemporary Fantasy and #2,250 overall at Amazon. I wonder how many “sales” it would take to get into the top 10.

Never Let the Right One Go is nearing completion

I managed to finish recording the audio version of Never Let the Right One Go on Friday, finished updating the text, updated the InDesign version for the hardcover, did four or more passes over every page of the book to be sure it was ready to go to print, double-checked that I was happy (enough) with the dust jacket design, and uploaded the book to LSI – I should be getting a proof copy sometime this week. Then I also got the two eBooks ready (twice) and sent out updated copies to all the First Readers who never finished, and copies to my Beta Readers and a couple of book bloggers who expressed interest in reviewing the books (still looking for more book bloggers, if you can recommend any you think would be interested). I had to build/polish/test the eBooks twice because I was sending different versions as ARCs than I’ll be selling, later; I added a couple of chapters of the other book to the end of both Sophia and Emily, so readers who only bought one will (hopefully) want to go buy the other–but I didn’t need to include those preview chapters at the ends of the ARCs, since I knew I was sending both books to everyone getting the ARCs. Anyway, then I sent the “finished”/current versions of the eBooks to Apple, to get them set up for pre-order through the iBookstore – Apple is the only eBook retailer which allows me to do this; for Amazon, Smashwords, BN, et cetera, I have to upload the files on the “release date” and hope they get processed in a reasonable period of time (Amazon can take 2-3 days!).

Remaining to complete: I have to edit the rest of the two audiobooks; I’ve only done about 10% of the audio editing so far. I need to update the Book Trailer I created for the Kickstarter, to post when the book is actually available, and to point people to where they can buy the eBooks. I have to go over the proof copy very carefully and then either approve it or prepare corrections – and once approved and the 50-copy limited edition is ordered, I’ll have to sign and number every copy (and cut one page out of each copy, incidentally). I’m considering putting together a couple/few copies of the two audiobooks as a single audiobook-package of audio CDs; it would be 14 discs, and I’d have to charge at least $35 for it; it would also be a fair amount of work, and need to be done before Phoenix Comicon. I should probably also record several versions of audio promos for the books, to run on all my existing Podiobooks – I have no evidence that any ad I’ve ever run there has resulted in a single person spending a single dollar, but … I guess I just have to keep trying, eh?

There’s a stack of things I’ll need to do when the May 12th, 2012 release date rolls around, including uploading the eBooks everywhere, uploading the new Book Trailer, and updating a bunch of pages at modernevil.com to reflect that they’re out/available, and then there’s the “marketing” I’m “supposed” to do after that, to actually get people to be aware of the books’ existence… but the actual creation of the books is nearly complete, and that’s what I consider my real work. Then, over the following six months or so, I’ll also be podcasting the books on the Modern Evil Podcast, but since the whole thing will already be written, recorded, edited, and (probably) assembled, it’s just a matter of uploading the files and creating the posts. Which is good, because I really want to be working on my next 3-4 titles, and some art, too!

Audio production frustrations

Audio. There are limits on how rapidly I can work through the recording of an audiobook which don’t exist for phases of creation such as writing, editing, cover design, layout, or even editing and assembling the audio itself; most of the creative work I do, if I want to bear down and power through a week or two of sixteen-hour-plus days, I can accomplish amazing things at an astounding pace.

There are only a limited number of hours in the day during which I can record, for a start. Between 9 or 10 in the morning and a little after 11AM, my sister is awake and getting ready for her workday – unpredictably doing noisy things like showering, making breakfast/lunch, and sometimes adding a workout video to the mix. After 1PM most days, the level of traffic (where I mean vehicles with intentionally-loud engines, revving aggressively as they cruise slowly through the neighborhood, alternated with vehicles which have ridiculously-amplified sound systems thumping away as they go by) goes up significantly, adding a lot of pauses waiting for silence to any attempts to record, though not unbearably so. After 3PM on weekdays, between kids getting out of school and more people getting off work, the traffic noise does become nearly-impossible to record through. After about 5PM, and until about 7AM, my wife is home and we’re either doing other things together, usually noisy things, or she’s sleeping (in the room where my recording setup is), and even though the neighborhood goes quiet after a certain point (on nights without any parties), I can’t realistically get any recording done at night. This leaves 3-4 hours a day when I could potentially record.

Interestingly, this corresponds pretty closely to the other major limiting factor on my recording: my voice/quality only holds out (at most) 3-4 hours a day, anyway. Whether I go hoarse, or my mouth becomes exceedingly tacky, or my nose clogs up, I can’t seem to get more than a few short hours of high-quality voice work done on any given day. I haven’t taken the time to experiment with it, but I have the impression that when I do more recording/talking on one day, it reduces the number of good hours I have the next by a corresponding amount. Recording every-other-day seems the best at reducing incidence of sore throat by the end of a week, though it isn’t always possible.

Between these two factors, there are hard limits on the amount of recording I can get through in a given period. In addition are factors such as my irregular sleep schedule (for example, I slept until 1PM yesterday), my wife and/or sister’s days off work (weekends, spring break, sick days), and everything else in life I need to accomplish, not to mention the time lost switching to/from different activities. (The last factor meaning that generally, even if awake, having only 7AM-9AM and 11AM-1PM to record only gives me two and a half or three hours of good work, generally.) In the end, I can’t actually record the theoretical-maximum 20 hours a week; at best I can probably do 12 hours, and 6 to 9 hours a week is more realistic. (Keep in mind an hour of recording translates to at most half an hour of finished audio, after another couple of hours of editing.)

Alternatively, as you may recall, I recently wrote almost 48k words in nine working days, and I once wrote about as much in under 60 hours of continuous, uninterrupted work. Coming to terms with these sorts of limits on my creative work is proving to be difficult. Scheduling the part of publishing a book which requires it to be recorded continues to throw me off, usually by weeks. With the work on Never Let the Right One Go, I’m currently more than a week behind my initial projection for having finished the audiobook and I’ve recorded fewer than half the chapters. For my next book, I’ll try to remember what rate I can actually make progress at, and schedule appropriately.

I’m still on track to get the hardcover flipbook published in time for Phoenix Comicon, and with the numbers I had in Q1, financially, I’m not worried about my business being at a loss for the year – even if zero copies sell, which would probably be both shocking and super-depressing, Modern Evil Press should stay in the black in 2012. If a bunch of them sell, I’ll do a lot better, of course. I still can’t afford that font I want (unless some more art sells in the next week or so), but otherwise everything has come together quite nicely.

Oh, and I’m working out a plan/schedule for podcasting Never Let the Right One Go which may have the first episode going out on the Modern Evil Podcast as early as yesterday. Which doesn’t make any sense. I better bump that up to … today at the earliest. I may put the first episode of Sophia on the Modern Evil Podcast as early as today. (Savvy readers who have been following the project closely may already have listened to chapter 1 of each book, and/or read the first two chapters of each book.) Depends on how the next 14 hours or so go, I suppose.

Numbers for Q1 2012, Book Pricing update

Well, if I’ve learned anything about not looking at my numbers every month, it’s that I need to look at (at least some of) my numbers more frequently than once a quarter. Libsyn makes it significantly more difficult to get stats more than two months old, for example. It took me about eight hours of work to enter all my data into Quickbooks and my various spreadsheets, yesterday, since I hadn’t done any of it in about 3 months.

Big, vague observations: The spike in eBook downloads (remember, directly attributable to being linked by freeebooks.com) we saw in Q4 of 2011 really was just a spike. Most of the extra traffic had dissipated by January, then February was extra low and March was near the average for the first three quarters of last year. Podiobooks downloads were a little more interesting. Averaged across all 13 of my available titles, PB downloads were almost flat – but a couple of titles (FWYCR, Cheating, Death) saw a significant increase in downloads in March, and others (Untrue Tales… Book Four, Book Five, and Book Six) decreased by almost half in March. Since the only thing I’m doing differently is talking about Never Let the Right One Go, I’m not sure what would cause the increase in interest in my “zombie” books – the updated descriptions for Lost and Not Found and Forget What You Can’t Remember haven’t been applied to the Podiobooks (yet), so … I’m not sure.

As usual, most of the downloads of my eBooks and audiobooks were unpaid/free. Last year when I gave you updates I finagled the paid numbers to match the counting method I use for free downloads, but from now on I’ll just be giving you the numbers the way I track them for actual bookkeeping/accounting purposes – that is, because sites like Amazon and iTunes and Smashwords’ Premium channels don’t give me final numbers until at least the following month after the books were bought (in case of returns, but also because businesses follow all sorts of crazy rules about billing one another), I don’t count them as sales until my balances are updated (not paid, just updated). Anyway, so far this year (this includes a paper-book sale I made yesterday) I show I sold 4 paper books directly for a total of $57.99, I sold 39 eBooks for a total of $75.24, and 2 people donated to my Podiobooks (technically in Q4, so I may already have mentioned this) and my cut of their donations was $9.74. That’s a total of 45 “book sales” for $142.97 in revenue. So far in my name-your-own-price art sale I’ve found homes for 21 pieces of art for $970. (Note: There are still 27 pieces available at wretchedcreature.com – please take a look and see if there’s anything you’d like!)

Now, here are all the eBook and Podiobook download numbers for Q1 of 2012, 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: 318 / 945 / 93
  • Dragons’ Truth: 1,076 / 1,926 / 218
  • Forget What You Can’t Remember: 336 / 5,230 / 158
  • The First Untrue Trilogy: 798 (eBook only)
  • The Second Untrue Trilogy: 252 (eBook only)
  • Untrue Tales… Book One: 1 / 3,552 / 242
  • Untrue Tales… Book Two: N/A / 2,031 / 152
  • Untrue Tales… Book Three: N/A / 1,686 / 143
  • Untrue Tales… Book Four: N/A / 1,448 / 125
  • Untrue Tales… Book Five: N/A / 1,588 / 152
  • Untrue Tales… Book Six: N/A / 1,256 / 112
  • Cheating, Death: 448 / 5,843 / 364
  • Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 177 / 318 / 47
  • More Lost Memories (full): 194 / 545 / 58
  • More Lost Memories (ind. stories, eBook only): 5
  • Time, emiT, and Time Again (full): 172 / 668 / 36
  • Time, emiT, and Time Again (ind. stories, eBook only): 8
  • Last Christmas: 2
  • Unspecified: 1,204
  • Total Q1: 4,991 / 27,036 / 1,900
  • Total all-time: 39,723 / 570,631 / 37,137


So… people still don’t like short stories much, especially on the audio side. Yoshira’s poetry book is still doing really well – it had more downloads than any other eBook last quarter, including the ever-popular Dragons’ Truth. Dragons’ Truth has now been downloaded at least 13,750 times, which is almost 4k past my next-most-popular title (though still less than 10x my least-popular). I suppose I need to finally get around to posting eBook versions of my Worth 1k poetry books, at some point; people seem to like downloading (if not paying for) poetry.

The pay-what-you-can model isn’t making me a lot of money, yet, but that was never the point. The idea that 6,891 copies of my books were downloaded in Q1 and only 45 of them were paid for implies that 0.65% (one in 153 people) could both afford to pay and were honest about paying for my books. What portion of the 99.35% of people who didn’t pay (but had access to the technology to download an eBook or listen to a podcast) do you suppose were actually unable to afford the few dollars I’m asking per title, and what portion do you suppose are just dishonest people?

In related news, there were enough sales in March (including last night’s sale) to adjust the prices on several of the books. (It may take a few days to see the prices updated across all the sites/stores they’re available on.) Here are the new prices: paperback / ebook: