Category: publishing

Unspecified – Kickstarter fundraiser

I meant to post about it here sooner, say, a week and a half ago when I started the fundraiser, or last Thursday & Friday when I was having a bit of an emotional breakdown (visible here and there, depending on whether you’re my friend on Facebook or Google+, or happened to see me in person) which related directly to the experience of running a Kickstarter fundraiser… the emotionality of which led directly to my not posting anything about it over the weekend. Then something began to come together (more on what, below) which led me to not post or say much about the whole project until today. Anyway, here we go:

The new poetry collection, Unspecified by Yoshira Marbel, which I’ve been posting about for the last couple of weeks, is currently trying to raise funds to cover the costs of creating a print edition of the book. I posted a little bit about the costs involved in that (setup, proofs, initial printing, shipping to me, shipping to South Africa, ISBNs, et cetera) and in running the Kickstarter project itself (shipping rewards to backers, Kickstarter takes 5%, Amazon takes a few % to process payments), but I guessed I’d need $330. I decided to run a shorter Kickstarter fundraiser than average, since statistically most pledges come in the first few days and on the last day, only about two weeks long, ending at 9PM MST, Friday September 16th, 2011.

As of last night, we reached our funding goal. (This is presuming no one removes their pledge in the next two days.) There are still two days for you and your friends and family and pets to pledge to the project, knowing confidently that the book will have a print edition which should be delivered to me by the first week of October and then forwarded on to you post-haste. Knowing that Yoshira’s dream is coming true and her poetry and message will be reaching people who never would have had a chance to have contact with it otherwise, and that as a backer, you are contributing to that dream fulfillment (and you’ll have your name in the book’s Special Thanks section in acknowledgement of that).

Continue reading Unspecified – Kickstarter fundraiser

‘Unspecified’ book cover, et cetera

This is, tentatively, the book cover for Unspecified. (See my last post for more information on this heart-wrenching poetry collection and the paintings I’m trying to sell to raise funds for a print edition.)

Click to see it a little bigger. That, of course, is the full wraparound cover. This is the front cover by itself:

Continue reading ‘Unspecified’ book cover, et cetera

Some poetry from ‘Unspecified’

As I hope you already know, I’m working with South African poet Yoshira Marbel to publish a collection of her work, entitled Unspecified. (I blogged about it here.) We’re getting nearer to being finished with the production of the book itself; I think we’ve got the order of the poems in place, the pages laid out, eBook formatting set up, front and end matter written, and I’m nearly done with the cover design. (I’ll post the cover soon.) It looks like the print edition (if/when we can raise sufficient funds to print it) will come in at 66 or 68 pages. (68 pages if I need to include an extra Special Thanks section with a long list of Kickstarter backers.) As I posted before, If I can find a buyer in the next couple of days for either of the paintings we’re using for fundraising, we won’t have to do a full-on Kickstarter fundraiser, which would be a load off my mind, and we could send the book to the printer next week instead of a month from now.

To give you some idea of what sort of poetry you’ll find in the collection (what you’ll be helping share with the world through your purchase of the art or, later, the book itself), I’m going to share a poem or three from it, along with the (current version of the) description I’ve written for the book.

Released Pain

Tiny slit
Sweet release
Blood droplets
Hypnotize me
A fountain of blood
Dancing on the crystal water
Floating away
Darkness has destroyed the pain
End is near
Now free
Blood has released me

I picked that poem to start because it speaks to one of the recurring motifs of the collection, something also addressed by one of the paintings we’re hoping you’ll buy, ‘without you’.

We’re asking just $239 (plus tax & shipping) for this original work of art, and the buyer will also receive a copy of the finished paperback book. It’s mostly acrylic on canvas, though technically, because of the real razor blades which are cutting into (and affixed securely to) the canvas, it’s really “mixed media” artwork. The purchase price of this piece would nearly cover all the costs of publishing a print edition of Unspecified; close enough that I’d be able to send it to my printer immediately.

Continue reading Some poetry from ‘Unspecified’

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.