Category: publishing

2013 Break-even Challenge

As you know if you’re a regular reader of this blog or a follower of my work, I’ve been tweaking my operating procedures over the last few years so that new titles (generally) are profitable before ever going to print. Whether this is through fundraising campaigns (Kickstarter, et cetera), through pre-sales, through sale of the cover art, or when those fail through digital-only release pending sufficient interest to fund a paper release, the idea is that rather than investing several hundred dollars to put a new title in print and maybe never earning it back, to invest money the title has already earned. (Or, in some cases, money other titles have earned above and beyond their own costs.) Most of the titles I’ve released since the end of 2009 have either broken even and begun earning a profit already (several before even being published!), or are very close.

Unfortunately, most of my titles published prior to Cheating, Death have not been as lucky. I’d been operating on that old, trusted idea that one must invest money to make money, and that with perseverance I could profit in the long run. Sadly, the more I try to apply old, trusted ideas (or really anything resembling “mainstream wisdom” or following “the rules”), the more I prove that they don’t work for me. Anyway, I keep track of the discrete per-title expenses and revenue for every title I work on, and for seven titles and the Untrue Tales Series, I’m still “in the red”. The money I’ve spent specifically on publishing them has not yet been earned back, let alone have they earned enough revenue to begin to cover overhead. (Or to fund the publication of future titles.)

Untrue Tales is a sort of special case. It comprises six different novels, written over a period of almost seven years and released as at least eight different paperback books, each with their own costs, not to mention the eBook and audiobook versions. Book One, Book Two, and Book Three were released as individual paperbacks, there was a combined edition containing Book One and Book Two, then one with Book One, Book Two, and Book Three, there was a super-cheap saddle-stitched galley/magazine-style version of Book One, and then last year the re-release of The First Untrue Trilogy along with the first print release of The Second Untrue Trilogy. Individual eBooks used to be available for Books 1-5, individual audiobooks are still available for all six books, and the current eBook editions include the two trilogies and (on kindle only) book one. Added up individually, Book One, Book Two, Book Three, and Book Five have earned more money (since I started doing this full-time in 2008; I could not find earlier records when I started seriously building my spreadsheets) than I’ve spent on them, Books Four and Six are very slightly in the red, and because of the cost of the re-release (just over half-paid-for, so far), neither trilogy is technically profitable. But: If I add together all the expenses across all versions and editions of all the books and releases of the series, the whole series is only about $208 in the red right now.

The other books are more (generally) straight-forward.

So here’s the goal/challenge I’m going to try to tackle for 2013: I want to get the eight titles I currently have in the red at least to break-even.

I’ve set up a page over at modernevil.com to track the challenge’s progress. Right now, having not sold any books so far this year, it’s all zeroes on the earnings lines. Some titles will be easier to reach break-even than others (Dragons’ Truth, for example, is only $9 from being “profitable”, while my poetry books have effectively never earned any money and have a long way to go), so I hope to see some early successes and some dragging-on. I’ll try to keep the page updated as frequently as is possible; I get trustable updates from eBook resellers about once a month, from Podiobooks.com at irregular intervals (though donations there to my titles are even more irregular), and if/when I make direct sales I can update it immediately.

To a certain extent, this is practice for the new periodical anthology I’m trying to put together, where I’ll need to publicly track the total-earnings-over-time because author payouts will be tied directly to reaching earnings milestones. Theoretically I’ll have to put together a similar page which tracks the earnings and goals across multiple periodical releases; I’ll probably put together something more graphical for that. Something reminiscent of Kickstarter and stretch goals and all that. In fact I might update the page I just linked to, if I think of a better/more-graphical way to do it. As it is now, it’s a pretty dense page.

The other side of this is that I’ll actually have to put some effort into marketing, into making people aware of these books and that I’m trying to reach these (relatively reasonable) sales goals for this year. I’ll probably try to make it coincide with another marketing idea I’d had, which is that I have enough different titles available now that I could focus on one specific title per week and not repeat myself for at least six months – or give each title a couple of weeks and have things to say all year. I don’t want to do the terrible sort of promotion where it’s just a title and a link and “buy my stuff!!!”, but instead to talk about each story/novel/project in a way that’s more meaningful. Write blog posts about what I was thinking of when I wrote it, what went into it, and perhaps go ahead and give away all the cool little things I put into my books (that no one ever seems to notice – or at least they aren’t telling me (or mentioning it in reviews) if they do), explain the connections, explain the relationships and imagery and themes… Though with the 2013 Break-even Challenge, I may want to start with these 8-ish things, and then repeat some of them later in the year if they aren’t reaching their goals… I’ll have to see how it goes. I’m not sure I’ll actually be able to maintain a single, focused promotional/marketing push for an entire year, but making it closer to something I don’t mind doing (writing, and writing about my writing) should help.

Oh, and to wrap up about the 2013 Break-even Challenge: If you want to help, the easiest way would be to order the paperbacks directly from me, and signed is better. You can buy copies for your friends and families as gifts, too; shipping costs are more reasonable if your order more than one thing. (And if you’re in the Phoenix area, I can hand-deliver your purchases!) If you want to pay more than the asking price for anything (if, say, you want to buy signed copies of Both Untrue Trilogies, but you want to pay the same $25/title I put on all my other works, giving me $150 for the two books) don’t hesitate to email me directly and we can work something out. Or if you want to commission a new piece of art (or buy a piece of my existing art) and have the money go toward one of these books, I can do that, too. Or if you already have the book in your preferred format, all your friends already have it, and you just want to donate some money to show how much you loved it, we can work something out for that, too – let me know. With a little luck and a little perseverance, I’m confident we can get these titles into the black before the end of 2013.

Well…

…maybe not the poetry…

Numbers for Q4/2012

Again, I don’t feel like making a thorough posting of all the numbers – but if you’re interested, you’re welcome to email me and I’ll share them all with you. I have an exhausting number of numbers about my books. With regard to free downloads, Q4 was a big uptick over Q3 and for the audiobooks, a massive increase over Q4 last year – not so for eBooks, which had a major spike last fall due to a couple of inbound links. For the quarter I’m looking at a total of 142,888 podiobook episode downloads, from probably about 8.8k complete title downloads. There were also 3,582 free eBook downloads last quarter, which is more than Q3 but less than Q1, Q2, and less than half of Q4 of 2011.

My only new books in 2012 were Sophia and Emily. They were made available in hardback and eBooks in May, and as podiobooks in the last week of October. In eight months as both free and paid eBooks, they were downloaded a total of 333 times, combined. Of that, 21 copies of the Sophia eBook were purchased and 8 copies of the Emily eBook were purchased; they each had around 150 free downloads. In about 9 weeks on Podiobooks.com/iTunes, Sophia had a total of 19,702 episode downloads (probably about 681 complete copies) and Emily had a total of 16,005 episode downloads (probably about 591 complete copies). That’s 4x as many copies of the free audiobook downloaded in about 1/4 the time. Also interesting is that instead of a 20% to 50% attrition rate after the first episode (people who download 1 episode and no others), which is the range my other books tend to float in, Sophia and Emily are looking at attrition rates in the 66% to 75% range. Up to about three out of every four people who listen to the first 15 minutes of either book decide not to listen to a minute more. Still the complete-title download numbers are bigger than for all but a few of my oldest titles, so they’re off to a good start, even if they are reviled by most who give them a try.

(It occurs to me now what this may be: I wrote these books and designed the marketing around them to try to appeal to the greatest possible audience. I was aiming for something which would appeal to mainstream audiences, genre audiences, teen audiences, Christian audiences, et cetera. They’re relatively easy to describe, they’ve got great covers, and they’re some of my most readable text to date. I was trying to reach a wider audience. Anyway, what I’m thinking I might be seeing here is that the surface stuff, the cover, description/blurb, genre, et cetera is, in fact, reaching a wider audience than I normally reach. More people are trying it. But my books are still only appreciated by the same narrow audience I had, before, and the rest are rejecting it. The marketing works, but the books aren’t as mainstream/readable as I’d hoped. They’re just … more of what I always write. sigh.)

But you probably want to hear about money, right? Well, I seem to have forgotten to add up the numbers for the quarter separately for you, so here’s the numbers for the year: I sold 106 eBooks (down 20% from 2011) and my cut of those sales was $243.49 (down 9% from 2011), which means I sold fewer eBooks but made more money per eBook – and that with my steadily-dropping-eBooks-prices; people want to pay more for eBooks. I sold 71 physical books directly and 9 books wholesale via LSI (80 books is a 308% increase over 2011) and earned $1742.96 revenue (a 360% increase over 2011) from those sales. I also had 6 Podiobooks donations made to my books, with my cut totalling $31.10. Additionally I sold 22 pieces of art for $1,170 (although my records show $450 of that is still owed me, so it’s money earned in an accounting sense, but not in a “money in my account” way), most of it at discounts as deep as 90% off, to try to get rid of as much of my old stuff as possible. That comes to a total of $3187.55 revenue from [art + books].

That means this is the first year I made more from books than from art. It represents a 260% increase in book revenue, a 20% drop in art revenue, and a 143% overall increase over 2011’s [art + book] revenues. (2011 was an increase over 2010, and 2008-2010 were all in the $1.5k-$1.7k range) Since the beginning of 2008 (which is when I started doing this full time) I’ve earned $10,259.18 in revenue from [art + books], 31% of which is from 2012. My business was profitable (on paper) last year, but came out meaningfully ahead, this year. I’m way behind, over the course of the last 5 years (or the last 10+, if you want to go all the way back to when I started publishing & selling art), but as I said when I started doing this full time in 2008, I’m in this for the long haul. Grow a little at a time. Figuring out how to grow my profits without needing to grow my audience has been a big part of the last five years’ journey. According to my accounting software, at this rate I’ll actually have “retained earnings” some time in the next 3-5 years.

Of course, I don’t have an premium hardback limited edition book to try to sell at Phoenix Comicon, this year, which is where I made more than half of this year’s revenue (about 80% of my book revenue). At best I expect to have one new paperback. Maybe also paperback versions of Sophia and Emily if I catch an optimistic streak between now and April, but considering I’ve only moved 2 copies of the hardcover (and only earned $68 from the eBooks) in the last 7 months… probably not. Possibly a new anthology, but only if I get a whole mess of submissions in the next 60 days; I fully expect that project to drag on all year, maybe longer. The year should still be profitable, barring the purchase of a new computer, simply by keeping expenses within the realm of what I know my books actually earn.

One more point worth noting, which bubbled up out of the numbers: Putting some of my short stories up for free on iTunes and Smashwords for 60 days related directly to an increase in the number of free downloads of the corresponding (free) short story collections on my website, and via Podiobooks.com. Maybe they got one story for free and came to my site to get the rest. Wish they’d tried one for free and decided to spend money, too. Ah, well. Maybe they’ll like my stories enough to become fans, and will buy things later, right?

Now accepting submissions for an anthology

I’ve been thinking, off and on, about doing this for the last 6-18 months or so. I’ve just updated the Submission Rules page at modernevil.com though, so I guess I’m going to try to make this thing happen. With any luck, the 20th (or so) book I publish will be an anthology of mostly/all other people’s work. If the first one works out, and authors continue to submit, additional publications will follow.

My ideal would be for the anthology to include a short novel (20k to 45k words), one or two long short stories (7,500 to 20k words each), two to five short stories (1k to 7,500 words each), three to eight flash stories (under 1k words each), and a whole mess of very short things: six word stories, poetry, haiku, probably at least five and up to a couple dozen such very short works. (Actually, I’m open to longer (epic?) poetry, but it would fit into one of the other length categories.) This would bring the book to about 250-350 pages, and I could price it at about $12.99 for paper and audio versions and $6.99 for the eBook.

I’d eventually like to release it under Creative Commons and for free, but depending on the attitudes of the authors might compromise and not put out the free versions until everyone’s paid at least a little (i.e.: at the projected $1500 earned level). Philosophically, it just doesn’t make sense to me not to offer a free version for those who are either unable to pay or too unethical to pay. I’ve long-since lost my illusions about a free audio version bearing any relation to eventual paid purchases, or free eBooks being good marketing, except in the sense that some fraction of a percent of downloaders will become fans – and it’s a good thing that “as a good marketing technique” was never the reason I released my work for free.

“What genre of work are you looking for,” you may ask, “what theme?” Right now I haven’t specified one. If you’ve read my work and think I’d like to publish yours, submit it. “How should I format my submission? Double-spaced? Some specific font?” Look, if you know the standard formats, great, use them. If you don’t, just be sure your work is readable and in a universal format. Worst-case, I’ll copy/paste it into a new file and format it myself; I’d have to do that to publish it, anyway. If you send me unreadable, inaccessible garbage, keep in mind no one will publish you until you get that part figured out on your own.

I’m rambling, already? I’m not even 500 words into this post, and I’m rambling? I guess this is part of why I’m launching this project now: I’m taking some time off from writing my own stories to focus on some other projects (art, mainly, for now). I’d rather be reading and editing other people’s work, right now, than trying to write my own – at least until my mind gets a few of its current kinks worked out. Let me try to finish covering the bases of this project:

Why I can’t just pay authors up-front for their work: I don’t want to have the whole thing hanging on a successful Kickstarter, and paying $0.05/word makes a book-length anthology cost me around $3k-$5k. I don’t have $3k in my business to invest in that sort of gamble, right now, and I’ve never had a title earn more than even $1,500 in total revenue (before expenses!) so it would be a ridiculous risk to make such an investment. If the eBook/digital-audiobook earn enough to cover the setup costs (about $100) for a print version, I can afford to put up the money to have the first 50 copies printed (for direct sales, about a $400 investment). I could even then sell paper copies to the authors at cost, for them to hand-sell for their own profit (above and beyond the maybe-payouts of $0.05/word).

Unfortunately, even paying a paltry $0.01/word would cost me another $800-$1,500 (depending on lengths) … so as I’ve outlined on the Submissions page, I’m planning on paying authors as the anthology’s sales reach various earnings targets. If it earns $500, I can pay the novelist $0.01/word. If it reaches $1,500 I can pay everyone $0.01/word – and I’d still be up to $400 in the hole, myself, at that point. If it earns $3k I should be able to pay the short story authors the other $0.04/word their stories are worth, and if it reaches $5k I’d be able to pay the novelist their remaining $0.04/word. Now, for some people $5k in earnings for a title (about 1,000 copies, if I can price them to earn an average of $5/copy – I’m projecting $12.99/paper and $6.99/eBook) is easy to reach. For me, that’s more copies than all the copies of all the books/ebooks/shorts/audiobooks I’ve ever sold, put together, and it’s more money than all the revenue from all my combined book sales, as well.

So chances are, the novelist would never get their big payout. And the short story contributors probably won’t get their big payout either, and might never get paid at all. Heck, even the novelist might not get their initial payout, based on my past sales of short story collections.

On the other hand, with 12+ authors promoting the anthology, with their paychecks depending on it, perhaps it would do better than my own books do – I’m only one person, and I hate marketing and am uncomfortable with blatant promotion; imagine what a dozen or more people, some of whom might not be uncomfortable with promotion/marketing, could accomplish. Perhaps it’ll pass 1k sales quickly, and I’ll actually make some money in the end.

Realistically, unless this thing passes those big numbers (1k sales, over $5k earnings), this project represents a net “loss” of both time and money for me. I’m not doing it to make money for myself. I’m doing it because it’s something I think might be worth doing. Because it sounds interesting to me. Because I think it will be a good use of my time, even if it never earns me anything but grief. And because I’m me, I know that if the first one goes over those numbers, I won’t be taking money for myself – I’ll be reinvesting it. That’ll pay for advance payments to authors for the next release, and the next one.

So if you’ve a short story, or flash fiction, that you think I’d like, or you’ve read my stuff and think you can write something I’ll like, go ahead. Submit. Or if you wrote a novel for NaNoWriMo, and already have edited out the worst of it and found it to be too short, perhaps when you finish editing it you’ll have something the perfect length to submit as a short novel. Or perhaps you think you can write a particularly good six word story. Or you’re a poet. Or whatever. If you’ve read my work and think I’d like yours, submit it. Unless you’re just looking for a big payday; that may never happen. But a moderate one just might.

End of the year lists, except I haven’t really got any proper lists…

It’s the time of year when a lot of people put together their end-of-the-year lists. Their favorite new books, movies, or music. The bests and the worsts of the year. I never know how they manage it. I’ve tried, and the only way I can figure it is if you work on the thing all year, every year, as you go. Even that, I lost track of before a year is out, usually.

The current world of constant, tiny, digital updates about everything I’m doing ought to help, but for most things there aren’t really any good filters. The best one I can think of, and I think I used it the last couple of years, too, is Goodreads, because I definitely “check in” every book I read, there, and I usually rate what I read, and frequently review them, too. So at the least, I can say things like “I read (finished) only 38 books in 2012.” I only gave one of them five stars, and then sadly gave its sequels 3, 2, and 2 stars each.

I did give 10 books four stars, though, so there were several good books, this year. Almost a quarter of what I read! The first 3 Circle of Magic books, the first 2 Young Wizards books (I haven’t read 3+, yet), The Diamond Age, The Search for Wondla, The Graveyard Book, The Eyes of the Dragon, and Dan Ariely‘s The Honest Truth About Dishonesty.

I also read all 13 books in the Series of Unfortunate Events and, sadly, couldn’t give a single one of them more than 3 stars. In fact, I gave almost half of the series 2 stars or less. It was a real disappointment.

So what about other stuff? Movies, TV, games, et cetera? I check in on GetGlue, but it doesn’t really break that down by year, and there’s no real rating/review mechanism there. I can scroll through my check-ins, my likes, et cetera, but most of those pages don’t have a time-stamp at all, and those that do are all relative & vague (2 days ago, 6 months ago, a year ago). I can say that I’ve been playing a lot of The Secret World, this year, not much Star Trek Online, and that I started playing a lot of (and burned out on) Star Wars: The Old Republic within the last 3 weeks. I played Mass Effect and enjoyed it, then tried going directly into Mass Effect 2 and hated the changes to the basic gameplay mechanics so much I stopped playing within a couple hours and haven’t touched it since.

I’m enjoying the final season of Fringe, though perhaps less than the middle years. The latest season of Misfits has been interesting, and Rudy has really grown on us (which he better, since not a single member of the original cast now remains on the show). I started watching Bones with Mandy a season or two ago, but I feel the current season has lost its way; the characters are acting out-of-character, some to the point of seeming schizophrenic not just episode-to-episode but within the course of a single hour. Castle is back to being light and fun this season, which is good – going too serious and dark was a major misstep.

Cloud Atlas and Life of Pie were amazing attempts to film difficult texts. Looper and Prometheus were fun to watch. The Master was an interesting experience. The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, Skyfall, Resident Evil: Retribution, Underworld Awakening, Cabin in the Woods, The Amazing Spiderman, Men In Black 3, Dark Shadows, Total Recall, The Hunger Games*, Moonrise Kingdom, and even The Devil’s Carnival were … neither better or worse than was to be expected; I didn’t love or hate any of them, I wasn’t surprised by them or really engaged by them, they were just … the next one either in the series you know or from the team you know, and if you’re familiar with the old ones, you knew what to expect with the new ones. (*I included The Hunger Games, because it felt like it was just executing what we were already expecting & familiar with, and the rest of what I said was true.) Brave felt like yet another step down for Pixar; the 7 films from Monsters Inc. through UP were amazing, then Toy Story 3, Cars 2, and Brave have been incrementally steps away from their former creativity, depth, character, and meaningful storytelling. I don’t have high hopes for Monsters University. Safety Not Guaranteed was fun and quirky and better than expected, considering Duplass. Oh, and my standout favorite from the Phoenix Film Festival (which I should have done a post about right afterward, considering I saw close to 50 films that week) was How Do You Write a Joe Schermann Song, which doesn’t have distribution (yet).

Oh, and then there’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It’s the first new film from Fincher I have little/no interest in owning. Not because of the filmmaking, which was amazing and beautiful and I’m sure painstakingly executed, but because the story was dull and predictable and needlessly violent – though not as violent or shocking as many viewers had led me to believe. I know it came out in 2011, I’m not sure, I think I waited until January to see it, but … sigh. The score/soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross though, I have been listening to a lot since its release. It’s excellent to write to, for example.

The new version of iTunes seems designed around emphasizing how badly previous versions of iTunes have screwed up my music collection, especially re: cover art. I’m thinking of maybe taking a few dozen hours to go through and clean everything up. The art is frequently wrong, it thinks a lot of files are missing but when I hit ‘Locate’ they’re right where they ought to be in the iTunes folder, and because of various changes to how compilations are handled over the years, those tracks are shotgun-scattered across my library. With the new interface, these problems make iTunes practically unusable.

Oh, and then there’s me. I finished writing, and published, two new novels in the first half of 2012: Sophia and Emily. I did a lot of research toward writing YA adventure books, and still have quite a bit of research left to do. I spent some time trying to develop a tabletop / deck-building game, and look forward to completing that project in the future. I wrote a book in the Death Noodle Glitterfairy Robot Saga, which I need to edit and will probably publish in the first half of 2013. I attempted to write a book about people who accidentally discover the cure for aging and death, but it fought me at every turn, and crashed and burned, and took my sanity with it – I’ve spent most of the last three weeks trying to get back to a moderate level of functionality, after that painful ordeal. I will probably attempt to re-write that book from scratch, some day, but not until I have more distance. My business has had more revenue and realized more profit this year than ever before, though it’s still small potatoes. I ran another unsuccessful Kickstarter, and have so far failed to sell out a tiny 50-copy limited edition of my latest book. Mandy and I have been happily married for a little over 5 years now, and will be celebrating Christmas (and, belatedly, our 5-year anniversary) at Walt Disney World next week.

Next year, I think I’ll start by not working on books for a while – I want to just focus on creating new artwork, at least at first. I’m planning on getting the DNGR book published in time to sell at PHXCC’13, but do not otherwise have plans to write/edit/publish anything else next year… though realistically, I don’t really have any plans, at all. I’ve been tossing around an idea about putting together a sort of anthology/periodical full of “short” works by myself and (primarily) other authors, so maybe I’ll work on that over 2013. After 5 years of doing this full time, I think I’m finally beginning to accept that I can just work on whatever I want to work on, without really paying too much attention to what people want, or what will sell; doing more-commercial work doesn’t actually result in more sales, but it does result in more stress and anguish for me. If I end up doing nothing but sketching and doodling and drawing all year -without producing any art to even try to sell- I’ll still probably profit, the way I have my business set up, and I’ll be that much better at drawing, for when I come up with something I actually want to create.

I think what I’m saying is: I’m giving up on the constant-release schedule I’d set for myself. I’m no longer aiming for 2-4 new books a year, every year, or to have 35-40 titles “under my belt” by 2020. (Which, you may not realize, has been part of my over-arching goals for the last several years.) If I have books to write, I’ll write them. If I don’t, I won’t. If I’m ready to write when November comes around, great, and if not – no NaNoWriMo for me, and that’s okay.

Stressing myself out to the point where I’m losing my ability to function day-to-day, that’s not okay.

I guess I could blog…

So. November came and went. My 2nd novel crashed and burned at around 32k words – if you follow me on Facebook, or are in my NaNoWriMo circle on G+, you already know the details. It took a wrong turn within the first 2 chapters, for example, veering away from my initial conceptual intent. Then, at nearly every opportunity, the characters & the writing veered the book away from any opportunity for plot, conflict, or in some cases for meaningful character growth/development – usually by skipping beyond the need for it. Solutions were cropping up before I’d reached the problems, nullifying whole sections of the plot. Interactions and conversations were demonstrating depths of character before I’d been able to express the flaws which the events of the book were meant to turn into that depth. And so on. Right now, I don’t even want to read that draft. I’m considering sharing it with a few trusted people (Let me know if you’re interested; you’re willing to give constructive feedback and can be trusted not to share a terrible, unedited, unfinished book around, right?), to get them to read it and tell me what they like about it, what they hate about it, and what they think I can do to improve & develop it into something that works – and then still not read it, but instead, later, write the whole thing from scratch. Probably with a plan, an outline, or some such thing prepared, first, rather than running in blind and on a very tight schedule.

The Death Noodle Glitterfairy Robot Saga book came out fine. I haven’t read that yet, either, but I know at least the first half is quite good. (The half I wrote this summer, which I did read, before beginning to write new material.) Tentatively titled Deep Noodling, I’m definitely looking for Beta Readers for that book, which I hope to have in print this Spring. I have a feeling that some of the descriptions need clarifying, and that my arguments on both sides of the Extreme-Copyright-Enforcement vs. Everything-Is-A-Remix argument could use some work, but I’m pretty sure the emotional arcs, the tone, and the world-building all turned out better than I’d hoped. Reading/writing this book made me want to read the rest of the books in the DNGR Saga… None of which exist. Yet.

If you’d like access to the Google Docs Drive document where I copy/pasted the first draft chapter by chapter as I wrote it, let me know your Google email address so I can share it with you. I’d love to get as much feedback as possible before going to print. And this one, I think, needs a lot more work than Never Let the Right One Go did.

I also need to ‘get off my butt’ and get to work on drawing. I’m hoping to create a series of illustrations for the DNGR book, as well as a cover unlike anything I’ve attempted to date. I just need to start by figuring out how to draw a set of characters whose descriptions were, at best, still quite surreal. I mean, how can a noodle, while remaining noodly, also become skeletal? What does it mean for my protagonist to be a noodle? Is he a humanoid version of something like the FSM? Does he have hair? And Glitterfairy… I’m pretty sure she’s basically just a cloud of glitter which appears to express the silhouette of a fairy when you look through it. Except she can play musical instruments and interact physically with people and the environment. And then there’s Robot. Who is a robot, of alien design/origin, at least vaguely humanoid, capable of excellent drumming, and … metallic, I think, may have been the only physical descriptor I used?

Maybe I won’t try to draw them … but then what do I put on the cover?

I don’t know…

Anyway, after my brain broke over that 2nd novel like Batman’s spine over Bane’s knee, I’ve spent the last couple weeks recuperating. Too crazy and messed up to accomplish anything much. Playing video games, mostly – did I explain that here, before? About how I’ve been using video games this year to distract myself from thoughts of suicide and other mental/emotional danger zones? I’m still super-broken, right now.

I mean, yesterday (or the day before, or … some time this week – time/space/dates are flowing/blurring together for me, lately; was it last week?) I read someone’s brief blog post about how they’d approached publishing a book in an out-of-traditional-order way, by podcasting one set of stories before going to print with another (related) story, and were considering some third route for their next book. All stuff I’ve done, mostly stuff I’ve seen others do, even the stuff they’re thinking of as new/original, just things I naturally did in those untraditional ways from day one (over a decade ago, now) of my publishing adventure. Anyway, there was some throwaway line in the middle about how their podcasting had helped them build interest in the book before it went to print so they were able to sell 1,000 copies as soon as it was available – and characterizing that as not having been enough to consider the book’s launch a success.

So, then I spent a few hours (days?) having a slow-burn anxiety attack. At first, I didn’t even realize what was happening, or why. I just felt like dying, like being crushed, like death, like pain and acid and suffocation, and like failure and disappointment and giving up. Because, in a way which oughtn’t be so deep down, it hurts me that my highest-volume title has sold fewer than 80 copies, and that my highest-revenue title has netted me around $450, while other people sell 1,000 copies in a day of their first book and don’t consider it a success. I’ve built a profitable business out of my dozens of sales; can you imagine what I could do with hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of sales? And this doesn’t feel like jealousy; it feels like failure.

And I know, I know, and am handily reminded by people like Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer, that what I create is worth creating, even if there are plenty of other creators out there, and even if my work doesn’t have mass appeal or doesn’t have a broad reach. And I know that even affecting one person’s life means that my work was worth producing. And that there are (at least) a dozen people I’ve never met who have been moved enough by my work to reach out and let me know. Probably dozens. I have no way to count, not really, and certainly not right now. But there are some. There are people who have been moved by my work. Changed by it, their minds or hearts thinking differently, beating differently, even just for a little while, because of what I’ve created. I know there are people who are very happy to hang my art on their walls, and/or who are very excited to read my books. It isn’t hundreds of people. (That I know of.) It isn’t thousands of people. But I tell stories that only I could tell, in ways only I could tell them, and when I put them out into the world, they enter and alter people’s lives. And I know this. I know this.

I know.

But still, my heart aches sometimes. My heart aches to be stilled. I ache. To give up. To end.

I’m a bit broken, right now.

Perhaps I’ll be well enough to create more great work in January. To finish the DNGR book. To get back to my YA Adventure research & planning (or at least to definitively give it up). Soon enough to move forward with one or the other of the big projects I pushed back for NaNoWriMo, only to go from a little broken to completely shattered in just a few short weeks. A few more weeks, and … well? Well enough, anyway?