publishing – Page 13 – Teel McClanahan

Untrue Tales… Book Five cover, progress

Untrue Tales... Book Five - cover image — Cover image Copyright © 2011 by Teel McClanahan III, based on the image ‘Disk Around a Massive Baby Star (Artist's Concept)’ by ESO/L. Calçada.

At right you can see the cover image I’ve just put together for Untrue Tales… Book Five, which will be available (if all goes well) this Friday, January 14th, 2011 as an eBook and as a serialized audiobook. Which is to say the first of ten episodes of the serialized audiobook will be available Friday, on the Modern Evil Podcast, and in February on Podiobooks.com. Why is the cover of the book an image of a black hole? (Yes, I know, the artist was thinking “baby star,” not “black hole,” but if I say “black hole” then when you look at the cover you see a black hole, complete with accretion disc and reletivistic jets, which is what I wanted my cover to show.) Because the prison Trevor and his tiny army are trying to break into in Book Five, the Oubliexxe, is built into a black hole. The corporation has to keep adding cell blocks to the end of the prison which sticks out, because the whole thing is being gradually drawn into the black hole’s event horizon. Pretty terrible prison, right?

Well, as you know if you’ve read/listened to the end of Untrue Tales… Book Four, that’s Trevor and the AIs’ best guess for where Nirgal and Neyal’h have been taken by the corporation. So that’s where they’re going, to try to break them free. Of course, they first have to recruit all the exiles on Earth to build their army and defeat the corporate security forces between them and the Oubliexxe… it’s all very exciting. ((If that was a spoiler for you, why haven’t you bought the eBook ($3.99) yet, or at least subscribed to the Modern Evil Podcast?))

I’ve been through a couple rounds of edits to the text and have been recording the audiobook version of Book Five this week. If you’ve been following me on Twitter or Facebook, you know I’ve been making acceptable, if not amazing, progress – as of right now I’ve finished recording about five and a half of the ten episodes, plus all the intros and outros for the 3 different versions of the audiobook I make. I haven’t begun to edit the audio yet, but I only need to get one episode done by Friday (at the least), so I can actually do that editing Friday morning (at the latest) and still update the podcast on time. Of course, I also needed to design the cover (2 versions, since Audible wants a square cover), so when my neighbors started playing their bass-thumping music in the middle of my recording today, that’s what I worked on. I think it came out pretty good.

Now I just need to write/record a promo, record the rest of the book, update the eBook with any additional changes to the text, edit at least 1 episode, and I’ll be ready to submit it to Evo, for Podiobooks.com. If all goes according to plan (ie: I have the episode ready for Friday’s MEPod, and thus will also have it ready for Podiobooks.com.) I should still be able to snag the Feb. 16th launch date I have penciled in for PB, so it’ll launch one week after Book Four finishes there.

Are you ready for it? Untrue Tales… Book Five is coming, 1/14/2011!

eBooks 2011, addendum 1

I didn’t mention HTML.

Prior to this week, one of the versions/formats my eBooks were available in on modernevil.com (for the books which were available there) was HTML. It was basically just the .rtf dumped into a single huge web page. I didn’t do anything to it to make it more web-readable or web-friendly or whatever you want to call it. I’m not doing weblit. I author the book/story/whatever first, edit it / et cetera, and then I share it with the public. Fully formed. Eight of my eleven novels (including all 6 Untrue Tales… books) don’t even have chapters, and in those few with chapters, they aren’t as short as people expect web pages to be. The only chapter in Dragons’ Truth (a YA book) short enough to be a single web page has always felt like an anomaly. Even the chapters of Forget What You Can’t Remember are almost all ~2500 words (though some of them even further sub-divided), which is about 5 times too long for a single web page (for most people – obviously not me on this blog!). How to make my books easily readable online is a bit of a conundrum, as far as I’m concerned. So I never really tried to do it right, myself.

This addendum to my main post about my eBooks in 2011 is to say that this year I’m thinking about (practically planning, now) going to the effort of putting together proper HTML versions of all my books. I’m only in the planning stages right now (though could be moving forward with this as soon as this week, depending on how sleep and other projects go; I’m also planning on beginning recording of the Untrue Tales… Book Five audiobook this week, but that work requires very specific circumstances) but at this point I’m thinking I need to do a separate WordPress installation for each book, and divide the book up into bite-size/page-size chunks (250 words? 500? same as the paperbacks?) which will each be their own WP post, and possibly use Commentpress or digress.it to enable per-paragraph commenting throughout all my books.

I’m also thinking about deep linking the books one to another, and possibly to outside resources. If I go with the Commentpress/digress.it installs, I can add a link in the comments on a paragraph, rather than in the text itself, which feels better to me – especially in the Lost and Not Found universe of books, I feel that the books are really more of a conversation with one another than directly linked, and parallel rather than serial. With the books so granular, connecting subtle repetitions of a phrase or idea, or even connecting obvious things like the short stories in More Lost Memories with the specific scenes and characters they’re spawned from, would be relatively straightforward.

In fact, building a comprehensive, nearly-chronological version of all the stories in the Lost and Not Found universe (something I’ve been toying with putting together for a limited-edition hardback release, or an expensive eBook, for fans) would be relatively easy as well, once I’ve got everything chunked like that.

I look forward to playing with my options, getting a feel for what works, and seeing where the possibilities take me. Not to another whole-book-dump-single-HTML-file for each book, though. That was silly/terrible. I’m not sure whether the 13% of downloads of the .html versions of the eBooks were ever actually read, or just seen as awful and abandoned for something readable. Hopefully this year I’ll develop a working alternative. Ooh: and once I have that settled, I’d like to use something like the setup I’ve described here to pseudo-live-write my books. Would you be interested in reading them (and commenting on them, pointing out errors, questioning the story/characters/pronouns, as I write them, et cetera) in a setup like that? Heck, would you be interested in reading my existing books in a setup like that?

Numbers for 2010

As I’ve mentioned, starting in 2011, unless I notice something unusual in the numbers I feel is worth reporting, I’m going to be cutting these posts back to (probably) once a quarter. I’ll still be gathering all the data once a month and putting it into my spreadsheets and thinking about the numbers, but I’ve got an idea that the balance between total transparency and boring blog readers out of their minds lies somewhere closer to infrequent statistics-based posts. Plus, if I only post once per quarter, all the numbers will look bigger, right? Heh. Anyway, I’m not going to give you the exact numbers for December here. If you want to see all the numbers, email me and I can either tell you what you want to know or send you the huge spreadsheets. Here’s an overview:

For December, Podiobooks downloads were down across every title, roughly to where they were in September & October. I added a new row to my spreadsheet to divide the “number of people who finished downloading a book” (an estimate, based on the number of downloads of the final episode) by the number of finished Podiobooks I’d had available that month. As you know, my downloads have been gradually dropping off over the course of 2009 (they peaked in December 2009, when Cheating, Death was completed), and around that peak I was getting about 300 people listening to each book each month. My March 2010 it was below 200 people/book/month, by August 109 people/book/month, and in December (with 10 complete Podiobooks) only about 75 people listened to each book. (Close to 200 listening to Cheating, Death, 100-120 listening to each Untrue Tales book, and as low as dozens listening to books like the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut and More Lost Memories.) ((The finished/titles number for 2010 (sum of each month’s estimate) is 1,809 people/book.)) It’s a bit sad to see this number dropping off so precipitously, though it is nice to know that something in the vicinity of at least 5,200 people have listened to my free audiobooks in the last 3 years, and up to over 25,000 people. I know that’s a big range, but there’s no way to know how many people downloaded more than one of my books; if every listener has downloaded all my books, it’s closer to the lower number, and if most listeners only download one or two books, it’s closer to the higher number. I do know that, since starting Untrue Tales… Book Four on the Modern Evil Podcast, its subscription numbers have about doubled (from around 30-40 to around 60-80) … based on the number of people downloading new episodes from the feed within a week of being posted.

December’s eBooks numbers were interesting. They were roughly flat with October and November’s numbers, but here’s the interesting thing (to me): I put the new versions of the eBooks up less than 2 days before the end of the month/year (to be sure they were there before the new year), including 5 titles I’d never offered for free directly on modernevil.com before, and there was no hesitation in finding and downloading them. In fact, the 5 new titles, which I haven’t mentioned anywhere but here on this blog (and I’ve only mentioned the blog post about them on Twitter and facebook), were downloaded somewhat more than any of my other books. Untrue Tales… Book Four was downloaded almost 3 times faster/more than the other Untrue Tales books have been in the last 3 months. Also of note is that eBooks download numbers for 2010 were almost exactly double those of 2009; that’s pretty good growth. I look forward to seeing how my eBooks numbers look in 2011, both as more people begin reading eBooks and with the easy availability I’ve created for all my books.

Here are the eBook and Podiobook download numbers for the entire year of 2010, 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: 1,015 / 14,808 / 693
Dragons’ Truth: 1,574 / 11,766 / 1,277
Forget What You Can’t Remember: 1,316 / 39,767 / 1,152
Untrue Tales… Book One: 1,103 / 31,564 / 2,682
Untrue Tales… Book Two: 989 / 34,991 / 2,586
Untrue Tales… Book Three: 1,043 / 18,073 / 1,644
Untrue Tales… Book Four: 26 / 434 / N/A
Cheating, Death: 67 / 45,931 / 3,276
Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 20 / 3,641 / 439
More Lost Memories (full): 22 / 5,032 / 385
More Lost Memories (ind. stories, eBook only): 67
Time, emiT, and Time Again (full): 15 / 6,254 / 200
Time, emiT, and Time Again (ind. stories, eBook only): 6
Last Christmas: 8
Total YTD: 7,271 / 212,261 / 14,334
Total all-time: 15,693 / 392,362 / 25,453

Here are some year-over-year comparisons for you, in 2008 / 2009 / 2010 order:

Total eBook downloads: 4,849 / 3,573 / 7,271
Total Podiobook downloads: 14,364 / 165,737 / 212,261
Total Podiobooks finished: 1,351 / 9,768 / 14,334
Podiobooks donations: $0 / $22.49 / $59.78

# of eBooks sold (not free): 5 / 38 / 100
kindle eBooks income: $14.61 / $38.06 / $69.25
Smashwords eBooks income: N/A / $33.11 / $54.96
Total eBooks income: $14.61 / $71.17 / $124.21

# of paper books sold wholesale: 0 / 22 / 17
income from wholesale books: $0 / $56.35 / $52.16
# of paper books sold by hand: 21 / 39 / 51
income from hand-sold books: $292.91 / $383.97 / $534.99
Total # of paper books sold: 21 / 61 / 68
Total income from paper books: $292.91 / $440.32 / $587.15

Total income from all books sources: $307.52 / $533.98 / $771.14

I have growth in every area but selling paper books wholesale (ie: via Amazon.com, bn.com, or actual brick&mortar book stores), which is a segment that has consistently earned me less than eBooks (and insanely less than selling paper books by hand). I haven’t included my art sales numbers, though it might interest you to know that, despite only painting 2 things since “taking a break” in February 2010, I had $775 in art income in 2010 ($60 of that for crochet art)… Which actually means my art income has been falling off almost in lockstep with my books income ramping up. My total income from art+books for the last three years is: $1691.52 / $1607.98 / $1546.14. My net income after expenses is nowhere near those numbers; recall I’ve said that 2010 will be my company’s first profitable year, and by about $33. Next year should be better, just by doing more of the same things I’ve been doing. …Obviously art is more profitable than books. I already know that. If I cared about money, I’d put my focus for 2011 on making and selling art.

I also keep track of income and expenses on a per-title basis. (I heard it was what all the cool publishers were doing.) I’ve already added the cost of keeping each book in print for 2011 to these numbers ($12/title/year) though none of them have been billed yet. I also don’t track the number of hours I spend working on each book, or assign an arbitrary “value” to my time; I’m not getting paid hourly, so those hours don’t count as expenses right now. (In the event the “total income for year n” for my company ever reaches tens of thousands of dollars, maybe I’ll start paying me a salary.) Right now I’m tracking 15 titles, 12 of which are available for purchase as eBooks, 2 of which are poetry books only available in print, and 1 of which is a short story only available as an eBook. 5 of these titles are “profitable,” and 4 of those are only available as eBooks. (Okay, 3 of those are the first three Untrue Tales… books, which I made available individually in print via CafePress back in 2004-2006, and have no idea how much they cost me prior to 1/1/2007 (for the purposes of this calculation), so that as individual titles they’re effectively only available as eBooks.) Time, emiT, and Time Again is the only book I have in print which isn’t still in the red, and that’s because -through a Kickstarter fundraiser- I raised the money to pay for its printing before putting it in print. The combined paperback edition of Untrue Tales… Books 1-3 is about $40 away from breaking even, after strong sales at Phoenix Comicon in 2010. My poetry books are each down around $200 (though if their original journals sell, that’ll be covered… which is the idea behind selling them, and pricing them that way). Lost and Not Found, Forget What You Can’t Remember, and More Lost Memories are each down around $150, since they don’t sell well. Cheating, Death has had better sales, and is only down about $75. I miscalculated when I priced the cover art for the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut, so while it’s not down $200, it is currently about $65 in the red. …and then there’s Dragons’ Truth, which is $400 in the red because back in 2008 I spent a couple hundred dollars on materials and equipment for putting together Audio CD and MP3 CD versions of the audiobook… and I think I’ve sold 1 copy of each in the last two and a half years… Yeah. So.

So… the eBook-only books cost me time (currently counted as free, since making these things is what I want to be doing with my time, anyway) and the cost of an ISBN (currently $9.15 apiece, since I bought them in 2007, well before the recent price drops plummets), then produce a gradual trickle of income. Getting out of $10 in red ink is much easier than getting out of $100 of red ink (just to get a book in print) or $350 in red ink (if I want to have copies for hand-selling). Last Christmas is one of my best stories (financially) to date: the only expense was the ISBN, but the original cover art sold before the eBook was even ready to go online, so it’ll be forever in the black. That’s more than most of my books can say.

Of course, only a handful of people have read or heard Last Christmas. I’m much happier to see that I’ve given away over 21,000 eBooks and audiobooks in the last year. I’ve got two new books coming out in the next few months (and who knows what I’ll do later in the year), both of which will be eBook/audiobook only at first, and then as part of a combined trilogy for print later… though if I didn’t expect them to do well at the Phoenix Comicon, I might have indefinitely put off printing the Untrue Tales books at all. I make more money hand-selling books than from any other income source, but not nearly enough to cover the cost of having those books printed in the first place. Not yet, anyway.

I think that’s all I have for now. I don’t think I intended to go on and on like this, but I feel I’ve included a fair amount of clear data. If there’s something you feel I’ve left out, don’t hesitate to ask. I’m not trying to hide anything; I’m trying to avoid overwhelming you.

eBooks update for 2011

I’ve just finished two days work updating all the pages at modernevil.com with the new eBooks links, prices, et cetera… if you notice any inconsistencies at modernevil.com, any links that go to the wrong book/site, or any incorrect prices, let me know so I can fix them. So you know what to look for, you may want to read the rest of the post:

First, you can no longer get my eBooks for free through Smashwords using coupon codes. They all expired 12/31/2010, and I pulled them from all my eBooks pages. I’m not replacing them. Instead, you can get all my eBooks for free right on modernevil.com.

In 2008 I’d manually coded and converted and cleaned up eBook versions of all my books and put them on modernevil.com. By early 2009 I was using Smashwords, and for one of my books I took the conversions their meatgrinder gave me to use on my site, but after that I just started linking to Smashwords for new books and hoping for sales. Then in 2010 I started putting Smashwords coupon codes on my site to give the new books (and later, all my books) away for free to anyone who wanted to go to the trouble of putting in a coupon code. It was an experiment, and my determination has been that it didn’t work. People don’t seem to be willing to click four times instead of one to get a book for free, and my opinion of Smashwords has significantly soured over the course of 2010 (I no longer see them as wonderful and revolutionary; merely somewhat-useful and frustrating), so I’m not going to go out of my way to drive traffic away from my site and toward theirs.

Helpful in this endeavor are several advancements related to eBooks in 2010, not only in an increased adoption of eReader devices, devices which largely support the ePub format, but also updates to software for creating ePub (and kindle) files. Scrivener, which I already spent a fair amount of time in 2010 getting all my books into (to output the .doc files Smashwords now requires – I’d been feeding it first .html files and later .rtf files, and do not use Word. Yech) and normalized for eBooks, got updated to 2.0 and gained the ability to output both ePub and .mobi files. (Apple’s Pages also got the ability to output good ePub files in 2010.) It could already output good looking .rtf and .txt files, along with basic PDFs, and if I add the really-nice PDFs I make in InDesign to send to Lightning Source, it covers most eBook bases. I updated all my Scrivener files again this month (adding Untrue Tales… Book Four and Book Five to the “Books by Teel McClanahan III” page, and adding a couple of paragraphs on the subject of “pay what you can” to the free versions) and output over a dozen versions of each of my books (only 3 versions of each short story, which won’t be offered individually for free or in half a dozen formats through my own site) and began uploading the fresh ePubs to sites like Google and Goodreads in December. I’ve now got 6 versions of each full title (including the latest, Untrue Tales… Book Four) available as free eBooks (under a license) on modernevil.com. Share and enjoy.

In addition to updating all the free versions of my books, I’ve adjusted all the prices on my eBooks. Up until this point, I’ve been maintaining them at 1/2 the paperback cover prices. Effective today (or as quickly as the various eBookstores update the price changes I put through), all my eBooks are less than $5. In fact, I’ve made Untrue Tales… Book One a mere $0.99, to encourage people to try the series. The other books in that series are all $3.99 now. Lost and Not Found (both the original and the Director’s Cut), Dragons’ Truth, and Cheating, Death are now only $2.99. Forget What You Can’t Remember, More Lost Memories, and Time, emiT, and Time Again are each only $4.99. I didn’t change the prices of my individual short stories, which are all either $0.99 or $1.99. ((Of note: Google was doing bizarre discounting of all the prices I gave them, and Amazon may try to shaft me by offering “price parity” with those seemingly-random prices, so I decided instead to raise the list prices on all my Google eBooks. If/when Google gets around to updating my eBooks (I sent them the ePubs over a week ago & they haven’t touched them yet), they’ll be discounting from a list price based on “80% of the lowest print list price Google could find” … because I figured if the prices are going to be irrational, let’s make them as unfounded and bizarre as possible))

I decided to go with lowering my prices (instead of maintaining them, raising them, or something else) with the following (admittedly vague) reasoning: When thinking about potentially raising prices, it seemed reasonable because I’m not really concerned with selling a lot of copies. We’re in a position, as a family, where my business doesn’t need to turn huge profits to support us, and Modern Evil Press is in a position, as a business, to not need to sell very many copies of any given book to break even, under the enhanced-pseudo-freemium model (sell art to afford to publish books) I’ve been using lately. Plus, the sort of people whose price-inflexibility would keep them from paying $9.99 for an eBook are either 1) savvy enough to go get the free copy or 2) greedy fucks who wouldn’t like my communist-leaning utopian books anyway. Of course, if I don’t care how many copies sell, or how much money I make from eBook sales, I suppose futzing about a couple extra dollars per copy doesn’t make much sense… so I opted to go into the $2.99-$4.99 comfort zone that insane readers have decided is the maximum price range for eBooks by unknown authors. What the hey? I’ll leave them that way… indefinitely. 6 months? A year? Until I have a reason to change them again? Another thought was that for most of the people who see my eBooks for sale on some eReader or stumble upon them (without searching for them because they’ve heard of them/me), it’s better to have them at low/impulse prices than at high/books-have-value prices… and they’ll probably never know the books are available for free at my site.

I’ve also added links to most/all the sites/eReaders where you can buy each eBook to each book’s eBook page, along with the links to the free eBooks and a simple explanation of “pay what you can” – ie: “The eBook edition is available under for those who can’t afford to pay, or who have never tried one of my books before. If you can afford to pay $4.99, you have your choice of eBookstores and eReaders…” Pretty straightforward, I think. And… that’s about it. Updated copies of all my free eBooks, updated (lower) pricing, share and enjoy.

slight book titles adjustment & eBooks update

I already wrote a long post about my long book titles, but I thought I’d give you a quick update about the decision I came to after another 5+ weeks of thought. As you can see by visiting my page on Amazon or on Goodreads or on Smashwords, I decided to go with the following format for the eBook titles of the books in the Untrue Tales… series, putting the 3 book names first and the 2 series names & the book number in parentheses afterward:

An Introduction to Dodgeball or Conception and Induction or How to Begin an Apocalypse (Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction – Recollections of an Alternate Past, Book One)

The Twofold Invasion or Penetration and Destruction or How to Make Love With Twins (Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction – Recollections of an Alternate Past, Book Two)

Escape from Exile or Confusion and Contraction or How to Get Out of Hell (Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction – Recollections of an Alternate Past, Book Three)

Explorations of Ridiculous Realities or Corporation and Collusion or How to Subvert Corporatocracy (Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction Recollections of an Alternate Past – Book Four)

This complies with Smashwords’ (inconsistent) interpretation of Apple’s apparent policy of requiring a pseudo-exact match between the title in the cover image and the title in the ‘title’ metadata field. I also left the old style of writing the titles in the books’ descriptions. We’ll see how this goes…

Though actually, in the last week and over the next week I’m rolling out a few other changes regarding eBooks for which the idea “We’ll see how this goes…” more readily applies. For example: I’ve uploaded ePubs of all my eBooks to Goodreads so you can buy & read them there (or preview them there, EX: Last Christmas – hit the ‘read ebook’ button!) in addition to the Amazon / Apple / Google / Barnes & Noble / Kobo / Sony / Diesel / Smashwords eBooks stores where you could already get them. I also uploaded the same ePub versions of my books to Google for their eBookstore; they only had PDF versions before… and after a week they’re all still PDF, so I assume someone at Google is manually … approving?… the ePubs I uploaded? Isn’t that a job a computer can do? Anyway, they’re all available as “scanned pages” right now (which actually means the PDFs I sent to my printer to print; no scanning has taken place to produce the version available now) and will be available as “flowable text” at Google … as soon as they get around to it. And everywhere else, now.

So in the next week (or so, and I’ll do another post on 1/1/2011 with more details) I’ll be uploading fresh free versions of the ten (maybe eleven) of my books you can get as free eBooks, re-writing all the eBooks pages at modernevil.com, adding links to the GoodReads (and maybe Google) eBooks versions to all the ‘pay what you can’ bars across modernevil.com, and removing the Smashwords coupon codes (which expire 12/31/2010, anyway) from all the eBooks pages. I’m also considering/reconsidering my eBooks pricing scheme, though I’m leaning toward keeping everything where it is (half the paperback cover price for eBooks)… except maybe for Untrue Tales… Book One, which I’ll likely semi-permanently drop to $0.99 and/or free, depending on what’s allowed (ie: kindle doesn’t allow indie publishers to price eBooks at $0.00) and where. Other thoughts include: rounding everything to whole dollars (ie: $5.99 becomes $6.00), rounding everything to $n.99 (ie: $6.50 becomes $6.99), adjusting full-book prices downward (so that my most expensive single eBook is $4.99), adjusting all prices upward (since people who can’t afford $9.99 probably can’t afford $4.99 and either can’t afford an eReader or will just go get the free copies anyway), and giving one or more books away at all times (perhaps rotating which title is free on the pay sites by quarter). Any thoughts you have on these (or related) ideas are welcome.

Oh, and I must have missed something somewhere when I was going through the numbers, because I just did a quick run-through of the hrblock.com tax interview with my business data for 2010 & it said Modern Evil Press made $33 taxable income in 2010. I was expecting to have an “official” loss again, by about that amount. I’ll be buying TurboTax in January or February and very carefully and thoroughly going through everything, but that’s pretty good news, if it’s right. It also matches with my experiences and projections for the year, of being just-barely-profitable. So that’s good.

Oh, and maybe I’ll write a more personal blog post at some point… ?