publishing – Page 5 – Teel McClanahan

Thinking about interactive storytelling

Like a gear finally catching, and the machine lurching forward, a couple nights ago when I stumbled across inklewriter, my mind and momentum were altered. I’m still depressed, don’t get me wrong, I’m still overeating, feeling like crap, and being generally nihilistic – but instead of being distracted by video games, now I’m spending much of my time engaged in actual creative pursuits. The upside of which is much better than the upside for video games. My sleep schedule is off-the-charts weird, things have been extra stressful and difficult with my wife lately (she’s a teacher, it’s the first week of school, which I think is an obvious factor, plus her first attempt to get a reading endorsement didn’t work out as well as she’d hoped, so she’s having to sign up for additional classes… it’s a whole thing and I’m not posting about that right now, but I am dealing with it in my life), but at least I’m thinking about getting back to some creative work. Actually, I’ve been digging in a bit and getting my hands “dirty” with the tools.

Well, err, tool, anyway. inklewriter. It’s an authorship and hosting/sharing tool for choice-based interactive storytelling. (This is, apparently, as opposed to the sort of interactive fiction you got in the old text adventures, where your inputs were freeform and parsed; in the most recent popular, web-based wave of interactive storytelling, the reader is presented with explicit options to choose from, rather than a command line.) My brother has also been looking into creating interactive storytelling of his own, but where I want to create things closer to books or short stories (ie: longform narrative, closer to literature than to games), he wants to create things closer to the video games end of the spectrum (he’s a big fan of failbetter‘s Fallen London). failbetter themselves are working on adapting the tools they used to build Fallen London into StoryNexus, a platform for creating very game-like interactive fiction. Another developer associated with that team has been working on Varytale, which is geared toward more book-like interactive fiction, broken into small chunks they call storylets. (I recommend you read one of their sample interactive books, How to Read, about how to read interactive fiction but more importantly about the uses, implementations, and value of interactivity in storytelling.) I am also obliged to mention additional tools/platforms like Playfic and Choice of Games, both of which are very deliberately wading in the games end of the interactive fiction pool.

Some of these tools are publicly available now, some require you to request access or submit a book/game/project proposal, and others are still in closed beta. Some of them have very user-friendly, GUI interfaces that require little or no coding, others were clearly designed by programmers who think everyone thinks like a programmer, and a few explicitly require you to code all the interactivity in your stories by hand. The three I’m most interested in are inklewriter, Varytale, and StoryNexus – in that order. inklewriter is the only one of those which is open to the public right now. It and StoryNexus don’t require any real coding. It and Varytale are designed with more-booklike projects in mind. None of them, unfortunately, offer any tools/capabilities (yet) for exporting/saving/backing-up your stories, or hosting them on your own site. They’ve all got plans to integrate monetization, but none is actually up and running with those features, yet.

Of course, my books (especially my digital books) don’t actually make much money, anyway. So I’m seriously considering making my next project an interactive fiction project. As I said at the beginning of the post, I’ve been tinkering in inklewriter for the last few days. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to be able to have meaningful and responsive conversations with their Twitter account about the current features and future plans for the service. I’ve made several pages of sketches of plot structures made possible by the technology (most of which would be unimplementable on paper, ever, and unlikely to work within existing eBook formats), I’ve actually used the tool to implement one of them fully (though it’s just a skeleton, without much of the flesh of the story itself, so far), and others partially (to see how my initial ideas had holes in them, mostly, though also to wrap my mind around meaningful logic implementations for coherent narratives), and I’ve begun brainstorming about what sort of very-large (for interactive fiction) project I’d like to build.

I could flesh out (and design logic for) my initial insane idea. I’ve determined that for a target average-story-length of 3k-5k words, I’ll probably have to write 40k-60k words to fill out every possible path/branch/intersection/insanity I initially mapped. It’s only about 200 discrete story chunks with about 100 total decision points, but getting them all to play nicely with one another, the way I’ve designed it, would be … challenging. Probably what I’ll do is play with another few short projects, and share them freely with everyone (maybe enter them in one of the ongoing interactive storytelling contests – I’ve never really submitted anything to contests before…), and then do something … big.

What I’ve been thinking about most recently is building my possibly-pending adaptation of Dragons’ Truth as interactive fiction, in one way or another. Actually, it would be the whole trilogy (yes, I’ve been planning on turning it into a trilogy when/if I re-write D’T), and then the problems become things like producing print and audio editions. If I had a larger, engaged fan base and appropriate analytics tools, I could do something like tracking which choices readers make most often or polling people about their preferences, and let the readers decide what the “definitive” version of the books will be for the audio version and the limited-edition print runs… though if I do it this way, to me the interactive version will be the truly definitive version. And then later I can release a “director’s cut” eBook with the version I get from my own responses…

Of course, I’ve still got a huge backlog of research and planning to do before I can tackle that project, and then I’ve actually got to sit down and write it. (And write several times as much as “normal”, if it’s interactive.) So … it’ll be a while. But that’s what I’m thinking about now. My decisions in the coming days and weeks will certainly shape the nature of my research and planning in coming months.

As always, your responses are welcome, though not expected. Feel free to comment, email, text message, call me, or send a letter with your thoughts. Bonus points if your letter arrives by post and was typed on a manual typewriter.

Short rant on the “value of eBooks”, another rant on the value of MY books

The following is something I wrote as a comment on a TeleRead blog post, which was apparently a reblog, but I didn’t copy my comment to the original post. Instead I’m posting it here. Basically, it’s another article discussing how $2.99 is the “magical price point” for eBooks, and forecasting that all eBooks will eventually have to lower to that price, because … well, because that’s just how much the author is willing to pay, is why. Some eBooks are cheap, sometimes, therefore he’s never going to pay more than $2.99 for an eBook!

It’s all about value, he declares, and this idea is based on the premise that if an eBook will ever in its future be discounted, the full/original/list price was never an appropriate value. Which is ridiculous. Here is my response:

The whole discussion of eBook pricing is skewed by a very vocal minority who do not comprehend the foundations of the publishing industry’s economic model. First: One must realize, when trying to make sense of publishers’ attempts to price eBooks, that historically the majority of the profit comes from the sale of the hardcover release. There are plenty of people who have quite happily paid full price ($25-$35) for new books, and they are the ones who have turned publishing into an industry of note. Not you, oh vocal minority, oh ye who would (imagining that there may be a future sale) wait patiently for a lower price on the same book, wait to buy it until it reaches your “magic price point”. The most vocal of the “Cheap eBooks now! Cheap eBooks forever!” crowd seem to correspond to the same readers who would not only wait for the paperback, but the mass-market paperback, and often for the used paperback; for the biggest publishers, readers in these last two categories aren’t even their customers – mmpb is farmed out to companies which do just that (and know how to operate on the tiny margins), and used books, well, that’s another matter – something all large media companies are trying to wipe out in the shift to digital. Windowing has everything to do with selling full-value books to people willing to pay for quality ($30), then selling discounted books to people who value books less and are willing to wait ($15), then selling the scraps to the mmpb-producers ($7), who then sell the books to the people who value new books just a little more than the used-book buyers (who can be said to barely value books at all; $3). Thus: The fact that books are available at different price points at different times, that they go on sale, and that some customers are willing to wait until they’re paying what amounts to a nominal price (i.e.: paying in name only), is not a new (or eBooks-related) phenomenon. Likewise, the fact that publishers would like to continue to sell their books at something close to their full value to the readers willing to pay full price should not come as a shock or as an affront to those who have always stood as the least-valuable customers; when a publisher prices an eBook at $15, it isn’t about YOU – it’s about the people who have been gladly paying $15-$35 for books all along! They’re also buying $12-$15 eBooks quite happily, despite all the moaning from the other end of the price/value spectrum.

Is $2.99 the magic price for eBooks? Well, for a certain class of reader, the ones for whom mmpb and used were the first times they’d consider buying a book (magically quite near the same $3 price point), maybe. But not for everyone. Not for publishers on the first day of a book’s hardcover release. You $3 book buyers are not the market at that time; you’ll be the market later. Feel free to wait, as you always have. The publishers are not in business to serve you; they’re primarily in business to serve those willing to pay 10x more for the same story, and are willing to let you eat those customers’ scraps.

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In addition, since this is my blog, I want to add, about my books:

I write, publish, and sell books. Paper books, audio books, and eBooks. I’ve tried a lot of price points over the years, for each medium. I’m in the midst of another pricing experiment, right now (as you may know), where I lower the prices of my books the more money they make, until they reach the minimum price I can sell them at and still make a couple bucks a copy; this scheme is based on the rantings of the vocal minority derided above! This pricing scheme is founded on the oft-repeated claim about the marginal-costs of producing eBooks being close-to-zero, so why aren’t eBooks close-to-free? The whole “there’s no paper, so what am I paying you for?” argument – the one which insists that the writing itself, the story or information contained therein has negligible (not even nominal) value. So several of my books (the ones which have “earned out” and paid for their initial costs of production) are priced at this floor – $2.99 for an eBook, $5-7 for paperbacks; that’s as low as I can go. (Especially considering I give all my books away, too.)

With my most recent two books, Sophia and Emily, I started the eBooks at $9.99 apiece (largely because of Amazon rules/rates), and I priced the hardcover release at $35. Within the first month, I sold more than enough hardcovers to cover all the upfront/fixed costs of production, and I dropped the price of the eBooks all the way to $2.99. Theoretically, if the “Cheap eBooks now!” crowd is correct, dropping the price should have increased my sales volume. Of course, as I expected (based on my experiences with this price experiment and several others over the years), they did not go up – they stopped. I’d say they stopped altogether, but since dropping the prices to $2.99, a single copy of one of the eBooks has sold.

$2.99 is not a “magic price” for eBooks.

I consistently get more sales of my higher priced books, and see a massive drop in sales whenever I drop the price, even temporarily. I announce all around the books will be $0.99, or $1.99, or $2.99, but only for a day, or a week, or a month, and that day/week/month will have fewer sales than those before and after it. People want something of value, and they’re willing to pay for it. When I put my books out there with a $2.99 price tag, it says “This book is cheap! This book can’t compete! This book isn’t worth your money, or your time!” and they go buy one of the $8.99-$14.99 eBooks which, at those prices, must be a better book.

At Phoenix Comicon, I was certainly trying to push the hardcover books, the paperback books, the things I could easily sell, in person for ready money – rather than the things that people would maybe get later. Rather than the things people could go get for free. Yet, there are a lot of young people at Comicon – people without a lot of financial means (yet), who were interested in my stories, but maybe didn’t have the cash to buy the limited-edition hardcover (or even a paperback). So I gave them my card and told them that if they really couldn’t afford to buy, they could go to my website and get the eBooks for free. Or go listen to my podcast, and hear the books for free. All unabridged, of course. At least two young people, people who knew they could just go get the same exact book, the same story, for free on my website, came back later in the weekend having scrounged together the cash, and bought the full-price hardcovers. People are willing to pay more for what they value. Yes, they can go get it for free, but the book is worth something to them, and they’d rather pay what it’s worth than simply get the best deal.

Probably I’ll cancel this pricing experiment, soon, and raise all my eBook prices, again. Having low prices doesn’t really seem to get me more sales. Price, as they say, is the last tool in the salesman’s bag of tricks. What gets me more sales is writing great stories, connecting with readers, and building relationships with their imaginations. People who love my books are happy to pay for them. To pay full price for them. Even to pay more than full price for them, and support them in other ways. All those people for whom $2.99 is a “magic price” are probably happier getting it for free, anyway.

Never Let the Right One Go – One Month Out [Updated]

It’s been just over a month since the official release/publication date of my new book/series, Never Let the Right One Go, so I thought I’d do a post to go over its progress so far, in terms of reviews, sales (both paper and digital), and free downloads. All numbers in this post are based on the best data I have available, covering the period from when the books became available (on the podcast as early as May 4th, the eBooks between midnight on 5/12 and several days later, and the hardcovers since 5/14) and midnight at the end of 6/13.

First I’d like to address free eBook downloads: As I’ve stated before, I’ve only made ePub and mobi versions of the eBooks available for free, so far. Since for 2012 nearly 75% of all my free eBook downloads are of a PDF version (over half a version which is only screen-readable, not printable, and none of which have reflowable text), this puts both Sophia and Emily at a disadvantage regarding eBook download volumes. In their first month of availability, the free Sophia eBook has been downloaded 62 times and the free Emily eBook has been downloaded 55 times. The ePub version is 30% more popular than the mobi version, for both titles. Considering that Unspecified, a poetry book, is still getting around 400 free downloads a month, every month, nine months after release, these are disheartening numbers. Of course, over 87% of Unspecified‘s downloads are of PDF versions, so I suppose that tells me what I need to do if I want to increase the number of people reading Never Let the Right One Go for free; based on these numbers, I could expect each title to see 400-1,000 downloads a month, if PDFs (et cetera) were available.

Then there were the versions of the eBook available for purchase. As I stated in my Phoenix Comicon wrap-up post, I sold two copies (of each of the two books) of the eBooks at Comicon, via Indie Aisle redemption cards, at roughly $8.99 per eBook. In addition to those, I sold 5 copies of Sophia (and no copies of Emily) – two each on Amazon and the iBookstore, and one copy via Barnes & Noble. (It’s possible some copies sold via Smashwords Premium Distribution that I won’t hear about for months; I don’t count those as sold until my balance due is updated.) After Comicon, because of great sales there, and because of my current pricing scheme, I adjusted the prices of the eBooks down to $2.99 (effective on most stores around 6/1) – only one of the 5 copies of the Sophia eBook were at the reduced price; the four other buyers (plus the two at Comicon) thought $8.99 or $9.99 was a reasonable price for an eBook. I’ll write another post after a while, on this subject: I think the eBook buyers clamoring for lower prices are a tiny (vocal) minority, and that most eBook buyers see low price as an indicator of dubious quality.

In addition, at Comicon I sold 33 copies of the Never Let the Right One Go limited edition hardcover, and I’ve sold another 5 copies online, for a total of 38 copies sold of the hardcover book containing both complete novels. (Four copies were exchanged with the photographers/models as compensation, so there are only 8 copies left, though one of those is also spoken for; I have a buyer who has asked me to hold one copy, to be delivered by hand (and paid for) next month.) Plus, I made up two copies of the audiobooks on MP3 CDs, and sold one of them at Comicon, for another copy of each book in a reader’s hands.

Speaking of the audiobook, I began podcasting both books on the Modern Evil Podcast at the beginning of May. Each is currently only up to about chapter 6 (with 21 chapters to go of each novel, over the next 21 weeks), so I can’t really count how many people have listened to the novels, quite yet – but I can see how many have downloaded at least the first chapter of either novel; 172 have downloaded the first chapter of the Sophia audiobook, and 129 have downloaded the first chapter of the Emily audiobook. (45-55 each have downloaded the latest chapter in the feed, so that’s probably how many are very-actively listening; around 50.) All told, here is the breakdown of distributed copies for the first month (or so) of availability:

Amazon: Sophia x2 ($13.22)
BN: Sophia x1 ($5.84)
iTunes: Sophia x2 ($8.39)
Indie Aisle: Sophia x2, Emily x2 (~$36)
Hardcover: x38 ($1320)
Audiobooks: x1 (~$18)
Free eBooks: Sophia x62, Emily x55 ($0)
Totals (full book): Sophia x108, Emily x96 (~$1402)
MEPod (started): Sophia x172, Emily x129 ($0)
Total started: Sophia x280, Emily x225 (~$1402)

When given the option to acquire the novels individually, about 30% more people get Sophia than Emily, though when paying readers are given the same option, 100% of them only get Sophia (so far). But what do they think of the books once they read them?

Well, so far 100% of the reviews the two books have received on sites like Goodreads and Amazon have been from people whose copies were not included in the stats above; they were people who were involved as First Readers or Beta Readers of the books. (The latest reviews are from someone who didn’t have time to make it through the written texts, but was easily able to listen to the audiobooks once I had them completed; she is still one of my First Readers, though.) I mention this not because I believe their reviews are biased toward me (give me a moment, I’ll show they’re all over the board – rather than the oft-derided all-five-star reviews of “the author’s friends and family”), but because … I really don’t yet know what random people coming across the books think about them. I don’t yet know what any of the people who paid nearly $40 (w/tax) at Comicon think of them (and likely never will). Several of my First Readers and Beta Readers for Never Let the Right One Go had never read a book by me before, so they weren’t (yet) fans, and others had less-than-favorable reactions to some of my other recent work – and yet so far, most of their reactions have been, while reasonable and honest, not what I would have expected from each of them. Here is what my books look like on Amazon, right now:

Four-star average is fine by me, and none of the reviews are the sort of 1-star or one-sentence reviews I’ve been frustrated by in the past. Instead, there is no consensus (so far) about whether the books are good (or mediocre), or as to which one is better than the other (with Sophia taking a very slight lead), and after a month, I’m not really sure either book will (possibly ever again) receive additional reviews or ratings on Amazon. Most of my titles don’t have any reviews, and those that do seem to get them within a very short period after release and then never again – despite new people reading them, sometimes thousands of new people reading them. Interestingly, the numbers on Goodreads look a little different (though the reviewers are about 75% the same; their reviews copied and pasted between the two sites), with Sophia looking like a significantly better book than Emily. Here’s what the books look like on Goodreads right now:

Here, Sophia comes in almost a full star-rating better, though if you look at the details at the bottom of Emily, you can see the chart is out-of-date (there should be two 3-star ratings, not one) because the latest review of Emily was posted just a couple of hours ago. Sophia has the look of a good book, with all those 5-star ratings, something which isn’t showing up on Amazon.

Now, I realize you may not look at a lot of book reviews, so I’ve grabbed screenshots of a couple of other titles to give you an idea of commonly-seen ratings distributions for generally-popular books. Either most people really like them (top right, 90% 4-star or better), or they are polarizing, (bottom right, 61% 4-star or better, plus almost 21% 1-star), but there isn’t an even spread across all five star-ratings. Usually there are disproportionate numbers of 5-star (and sometimes 1-star) reviews, but that (I believe) has a lot to do with the nature of amateur reviewing; people tend only to speak up about things they feel strongly about. We see the first pattern beginning to form for Sophia at Goodreads, but not for Emily, and for neither at Amazon, which is where sales are likely to result (or not) from those star-ratings. When writing these books I’d been dreaming of a pattern like the second and hoping for a pattern like the first (and really just hoping to get enough ratings/reviews that any pattern at all appeared, so at least in that I’m making some headway!), so it’s a bit disappointing to see such an even spread of opinions about both books, so far. They are neither loved nor divisive. I’m not sure they’re provoking any conversation, either:

If there’s one thing I’m learning in the wake of the recent Prometheus release, it’s that creating something which leaves people with things to wonder about, to talk about, to complain about, and to leave the theatre/book/whatever scratching their heads about, it’s probably better than … well, apparently better than what it is I’m doing, where I do my best to explain everything, tie up all loose ends, fill all plot holes, et cetera. Where the characters’ motivations and actions and resolutions are clear and make sense (at least internally, even if you wouldn’t have done that in their position), and the world is well-thought-out and thoroughly-explained… Luckily, I suppose, the next book I’m writing, in the DNGR Saga, starts in the middle, goes all sorts of crazy places along the way, and ends up with plenty of unanswered questions. Unfortunately, I fear that’ll put it in with so many of my other books as being unreviewable – people just won’t know what to say (or think) about them. Killing word-of-mouth sales/interest. Nullifying the possibility of building a reputation.

Bah.

Now I’m rambling.

Enough: Good night.

Update: After getting some sleep (well, mostly what I’m about to write was things I continued thinking, while lying awake in bed, trying to sleep as the sun came up beyond my curtains), I wanted to clarify/summarize a few key points: Within one month of availability, Never Let the Right One Go has been more profitable and sold more copies than any of my other books (excepting Cheating, Death) across their entire lifetime (some approaching a decade since first printing), and in terms of gross revenue it is far and away the most successful book (or series) I have ever published. In terms of revenue from book sales (not including cover art) the only other thing in my history which comes close is by comparing the entire Untrue Tales… series to the idea that Never Let the Right One Go is (technically) a series of two books; and even then Never Let the Right One Go already has 50% more revenue than all editions and releases of everything in the Untrue Tales… series combined. Depending on how the Sophia (and Emily) eBooks do in the coming months, and how quickly the 7 remaining copies of the hardback sell, Never Let the Right One Go should surpass Cheating, Death in both profitability and copies sold before the end of the year. Without the benefit of the revenue from selling the original cover art, Cheating, Death is already beaten on that front. Also, I believe each of the two books have received more Amazon reviews than any of my other titles. Despite my frustration with the star-distribution, more reviews is better, and something I’ve been striving toward lately, and Emily and Sophia have succeeded there, as well.

All in all, this is my most successful book to date, by many measures. I feel it very successfully accomplished what I set out to do when writing the books, which is my paramount goal. In addition, it has sold more copies, faster, for more money, than anything else I’ve ever published. In part this is because of all the marketing efforts I built into it from the start (cover design, hooking first sentences and first chapters, et cetera), and in part as a result of the gradual building of my reputation/brand/audience/fanbase, so that each book I write does a little better than the one before it. Now I just have to figure out what the right first sentence/paragraph/chapter for my new book will be, and what the heck to put on the cover, right?

DNGR, and other projects I’m thinking about

Right now I feel like I ought to be writing, but I also feel like crap. I feel like I’m suspended, floating, somewhere between a deep depression and intense procrastineering. Last week I was closer to the procrastineering side, so I was getting a lot of things accomplished. This week I’m closer to the darkness. Sleeping around 12 hours a day, stopping whatever I’m doing to cry for a while, overeating some… And, importantly, not getting any real work done. Hopefully by this time next week I’ll have pushed myself in the direction of mania; as I tweeted, I think this is a book I could get written in a matter of days.

Before I get into the book I’m talking about, which, unless you follow me on Facebook/Google+, you’ve never heard of, I want to write a little about some (hopefully temporary) alterations to my writing process that I’m attempting this year. The biggest element is that I’m studying The Hero’s Journey – I’ve been reading Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces this month, and have been looking over a few online resources covering putting its ideas to use in storytelling, screenwriting, novel-writing, et cetera. Why am I studying The Hero’s Journey? Well, as I said on Facebook, “I need practice doing formulaic writing for my Dragons’ Truth rewrite, which I want to be hyper-formulaic commercial tripe. I mean, if Dragons’ Truth is going to be my least favorite of my books, I’d much rather hate it (and everything it represents) than merely be disappointed in it, right?”

What’s that? You hadn’t heard me mention I’m planning on (slash/ thinking of) re-writing Dragons’ Truth as a proper children’s/YA adventure book? Or that part of the point of the re-write is not just to make it possible to write sequels, but to just go ahead and write a trilogy? Well, that’s been a thought I’ve been mulling over and developing these last few years, and we’re nearing the culmination point of those thoughts. Among them is to study both children’s/YA adventure books (such as Rick Riordan’s and Lemony Snicket’s books, and perhaps other top-selling books in the category) and to study (and follow) the formulae of the worst of the “all good books must…” insistences; the latter primarily concerning itself with things like following The Hero’s Journey, or scene-writing according to guides like Jim Butcher’s livejournal, or thinking about story in terms like those in Syd Field’s Screenplay. Now, there are limits to the number of different “rules” any one book (or series of books) can follow before it keels over under the weight of all that garbage, so I’ve been trying to narrow down to a limited set which can be made to work together without contradicting one another too severely. (And without destroying my soul, in the process; I’m only trying to do something very, very painful to myself, not actually suicide via bad writing.) So that’s been somewhat penciled-in on my calendar for as soon as I was done with Never Let the Right One Go – which was, effectively, done by the end of May. (Only 7 copies left, right now! Order while you still can!)

Step one is to do the research, read the books, the blogs, learn the formulas and the structures and the concepts behind them, read also the actual adventure books, plan out the trilogy (along with the marketing plan, book blurbs, et cetera – an important part of the method of writing I’m attempting to channel/emulate is to start with the marketing and work backwards to the book), and otherwise prepare. Step two is to write the books. Step three is the editing and marketing and publishing and all that. So, having barely reached step one, I’m beginning the research. With the looming deadline of “have physical products (preferably new) to sell at Phoenix Comicon 2013”, the deadline for at least one (and maybe all three – though that’s another blog/conversation/conundrum) of the books in the New Dragons’ Truth Trilogy is May, 2013. Except, look: I’m working on other things.

(As an aside: I’ve already outlined the hyper-structure of the interactive eBook I’m writing about my experiences writing and publishing, and I’ve already begun writing it. I’ve got a title, some elaborate plans for the various editions, and really just need to invest a few dozen hours in writing to get it ready to be built and published. So, there’s that. But unless it makes a lot of money and I decide to release it as a CYOA, I don’t foresee a future for it as a physical product to sell at Phoenix Comicon.)

Summer is here, and among the other things that means, it means Mandy and I are able to attend a few of the later-night social happenings we get invited to all year, such as a weekly Game Night our friends in the East Valley host every Thursday. During the school year, a social event that runs from 7PM or 8PM until 1AM-3AM and which requires a half-hour drive each way to attend is untenable; Mandy has to be up at 5:30AM on school days to get ready and get to school on time. Most school nights she’s in bed between 8:30PM and 9:30PM. During the summer, there’s a little more flexibility. So, a couple weeks ago, for the first time in months, we went to Game Night. About half of the friends involved in this event, including myself, are also involved every year in NaNoWriMo (and other literary projects) – we’re writers, we’re editors, we’re publishers, and we also happen to enjoy playing tabletop games together.

Toward the end of this particular game night, on the cusp of June, Owen mentioned that he’d signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo (Write a novel in the month of June! Or August! – For people whose summers are easier to find free time in than their Novembers, I guess) and, it being after midnight, was already technically behind. So we got into a conversation about writing and story ideas, and I brought up (after fighting with my phone for a bit – Simplenote seems unreliable on my iPhone for some reason, though I use it all the time on my iPad & have no trouble syncing it with Scrivener) an old, pending idea for a book I’ve had lingering on my to-do-list for at least a year (or several): Write a sequel to “Book 1 of the Death Noodle Glitterfairy Robot Saga”

Now, over the course of the conversation which ensued, the nature of the goal shifted a tiny bit, as two or three other people there declared their interest in tackling this goal. Here’s how I explained it on Facebook and Google+: “…so rather than all of us attempting to write “Book 2 of…”, we’re each writing an indeterminate sequel – and we’ll figure out what order they go best in later. Then we’ll all write Book 1 (and possibly a concluding story) collaboratively, something which can sensibly lead to all those other stories. Then we’ll edit them and publish the saga, probably via Modern Evil Press, and almost certainly in print (in some form or another), eBook(s), and audiobook(s); we would love to have these to sell at the next Phoenix Comicon.” I also added the following vague guidelines:

We’re looking for short novels (the easier to compile them into a massive single volume), and to have first drafts done quickly – since at least two of the participating authors were already doing Camp NaNoWriMo, I’d recommend aiming for about 50k words, and having a draft done by the end of June (or July), 2012.
We’re hoping for family-friendly (or at least YA-friendly) books, if possible – this basically just means we’re hoping to avoid any explicit erotica and/or explicit horror-porn, though addressing serious/mature themes and situations would be awesome, if handled and written well. If one or more authors writes a really, really compelling book where the NC-17 content is absolutely vital to expressing their plot/characters/themes, we’ll adapt, but it would be best to aim for a general audience.
We’re looking for art inspired by (and inspired by the vague idea of) the Saga; I’ll probably make another call for artists when there are actually books written, for the cough uninspired cough artists who actually want to depict something one of us put in one of the books. Realistically, if we could get any sketches or art within the next few days/weeks, it could influence the direction of the stories.
I’ll probably be the big-E Editor for the Saga, since I’ll probably also be the publisher. Write the best story you can, and know I’ll be working with you (and probably so will all the other authors) to make it even better. Depending on who actually finishes any books and how it all comes together, we’ll figure out money/etc later on.

Now, if the idea of “write a sequel in the Death Noodle Glitterfairy Robot Saga” doesn’t immediately give you some ideas about what to write, you probably aren’t the right writer for this project. If you want a series bible, to help prevent the inevitable contradictions about things like “is Death Noodle Glitterfairy Robot one person, or three? Or four?” and “does the DNGR Saga take place on contemporary Earth, or some other time/place?”, this probably isn’t a project you can work on (yet). I think, maybe, some (not necessarily all) of the authors currently “working” on the project have some conception of what they mean when they agree that DNGR might be a band (Robot is clearly the drummer, I hear) who solves crimes/mysteries. Realistically, if you didn’t want to have that part of your book, it’s just a page or two to explain away, in the inevitable Epilogues&Prologues bridging our wildly disparate books. There’s so much leeway, and it’s such a fun (for me) sort of book to write, I got to work on it right away.

That is to say: The next day (or so) I started studying The Hero’s Journey. I started thinking about what sort of story in the DNGR Saga I wanted to tell, who would be the Hero, what would the theme of the book be, what would it be “about”, et cetera. Within a week I’d finished the meat of Joseph Campbell’s book, re-read several online essays I’d bookmarked over the last few years, and outlined Death Noodle’s journey in lockstep with the monomyth… while telling an important/exciting story about excessive copyright enforcement. Then I went through and fleshed out and expanded the outline with the scene-by-scene formulas recommended by Jim Butcher (among others). I set up the project in Scrivener, sync’d it with Simplenote, divided up my fleshy outline into each chapter’s file, and it’s now sitting there, waiting, ready for me to start writing at any moment.

Right now I’m filled with dread and anticipation of two distinct sorts: The first will begin to resolve itself as soon as I begin writing, and will have evaporated as soon as I reach the end of the first draft. (It will then condense into the more terrible dread and anticipation which fills the cracks between writing and publication.) The second may not ever be resolved; it is the dread that this sort of terribly formulaic, painfully structured prose is what readers actually want (i.e.: dread that this book will be loved), mixed with the dread that after over a decade of writing novels, by the time I get to my 19th book (which this will be), even sticking to bad formulas won’t keep me from writing a good book (i.e.: dread that this book will be loved) and I won’t be able to tell whether they like it because it’s formulaic or because I wrote well in spite of the formulae, and further mixed with the anticipatory dread of finding out what people think of it – the anticipation that very few will read it, and/or even fewer will like it, and I may never know one way or the other. This, I can assure you, is a terrible place to be in, as an author.

I’m trying to write the best and most interesting book I can, while also trying to wedge in all this other garbage, these rules, these patterns, this structure within a structure (neither of them my own, or determined by the story, but handed down from on high by “experts”), and it’s a struggle. Worse is being in a position of dreading that my book will be enjoyed. What a stupid thing to not want. Especially while wanting and working so hard to realize its opposite. Might be related to some of that procrastination. Might even be connected with the depression, the tears. Anyway, any day now (maybe next week) I’ll begin work on my (first) entry in the Death Noodle Glitterfairy Robot Saga – and hopefully will have the first draft done before the end of the month (at the latest) and will keep you updated as the work progresses.

I really do think people will like the book I’ve come up with – I just won’t know what to think about their liking it, and if they like it for the “wrong reasons” I might want to quit writing, is all.

OnlyIndie’s variable pricing

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

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

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

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