Category: publishing

Never Let the Right One Go – release date is looming

The official publication date for Never Let the Right One Go is 5/12/2012, which is this Saturday. In about 26 hours, I’ll be uploading the eBooks to Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, Goodreads, and Indie Aisle. Around the same time, both eBooks should become automatically available (or earlier, depending on your time zone! They’re available worldwide) in Apple’s iBookstore – Both Emily and Sophia are already in the iBookstore, available for pre-order, right now. Then I’ll have to update modernevil.com to say that they’re available, too. I’ve been waffling a little about whether I ought to start giving away the eBooks for free immediately on modernevil.com, or wait … some as-yet-undecided period; I’m leaning toward uploading the free versions to my site immediately after uploading the paid versions everywhere else. I’ve also re-worked the book trailer (the original one referred specifically to the Kickstarter campaign, the new one says the books are available), so that’ll be replacing the old one on YouTube Saturday. Lots to do, tomorrow night after midnight.

Some things getting started even earlier: I’ve finished the editing of both audio books, though they still need to be mixed thrice, and I’ve begun podcasting them on the Modern Evil Podcast. The first episode of Sophia went up last Friday, the first episode of Emily goes up tomorrow, and then starting next week there’ll be a new episode on the feed every Monday (Sophia), Wednesday (Unspecified), and Friday (Emily) through Halloween. According to the current version of my plans, both books will then appear on Podiobooks.com (complete) on Halloween, 2012. I keep trying to figure out how to sell the full audio books directly from modernevil.com (no intros or outros on each chapter, just a straight audio book like you’d get from Audible, or on CD), and I’m really close. Maybe not “ready to launch on Saturday” close, but … nearly.

One (big) thing getting launched a little later: The limited edition hardcover has been ordered, and printed, and shipped, and is apparently currently on a truck slowly making its way across the country to me – the books should get to me on Monday, May 14th, 2012, just two days after their official publication date. Then I have to sign and number them all (and cut one page out of each one) and then I can put them up for sale on modernevil.com. Actually, as soon as I have the boxes of books in hand I’ll probably add the ‘Buy buttons’ to the site, since I’ll certainly be able to get them out by the end of the next postal day, at the latest. I expect to film myself signing and numbering the books, then edit together a (mostly time-lapse) video of the process – look for that, some time next week.

Lots to do, lots going on, and that release date just keeps getting closer and closer. (With Phoenix Comicon approaching at an eerily similar rate of one day closer per day… Hmm… Do you suppose they’re working together?) I think I’ve got all my ducks in a row, though. It ought to be a smooth launch, even though some of the parts are coming a couple of days late. (I don’t expect to sell out of the hardcovers within a couple of years, so a couple of days at this end just seems like a big deal. It isn’t, in the long run.)

Never Let the Right One Go is nearing completion

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

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

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

Audio production frustrations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never Let the Right One Go – full cover preview

I’ve been having trouble getting much recording done, as expected. Hopefully next week will go better. I think I’ve decided that “Beta” readers (of which I have few, having converted most of my old ones into First Readers) will be getting the file late (still probably a month or more before “publication” but without much time to give me feedback before I print the hardcover version) and any errors they find will be corrected in the eBook versions, only.

Today, unable to get any recording done due to noise issues, I worked in Photoshop, instead. I’ve finally received permission from both of my preferred photographers to use their images on the covers of my new books, so I spent the afternoon re-altering the image for Sophia with the full-resolution original and I spent the evening laying out the full-spread dust jacket for the flipbook. Here is a preview of what the book’s cover will (probably) look like:

I reserve the right to continue tweaking it, as needed. In fact, if you have constructive feedback, I’ve got time to work improvements in, as needed. The image I’ve uploaded is around 1/5 the actual resolution I’m working with, and it’s still probably too big to fit on your screen; sorry.

Trying to fit perfection in the schedule

Disillusionment, depression, the distractions of spring break, and the aforementioned disappointing response to the Kickstarter campaign have altered the timeline/schedule I’d penciled in for the remaining work on Never Let the Right One Go. I can’t allow it to push back so far as to not have the paper books on hand, ready to sell at Phoenix Comicon at the end of May, which means that if I end up being too far behind, it’s only certain aspects of the quality which may suffer. Allow me to explain:

The worst-case scenario has the text of Never Let the Right One Go at only the same level of quality as my other recent books, and not better. I keep trying to extend and expand my workflow, to add as much quality as possible between my first draft and my published product. The flow I’d mapped out for this book added a set of “First Readers” to the “Beta Readers” I’ve worked with in the past, in the hope that, were the book in need of significant re-writes, I might be able to correct the content before moving on to correcting the text. Then I wanted to record and edit the full audio version of both books, as doing so requires me to go over every single word at least 2-3 times (and sometimes several times as many), which is a great way to find almost every little error in the text (along with any remaining awkward sentences or clunky dialog) – this is a step I’ve been intending to do with all of my books since early 2010 (some I’ve managed, some I haven’t), but it’s also a step which takes several weeks of work. My intention for Never Let the Right One Go was to finish that step before sending the books to my Beta Readers for final feedback and proofreading; many eyes looking at text they’ve never read before find errors my eyes (having read the books quite a few times by this point) easily miss. I’ve since decided that, to get as many early reviews as possible, and since I won’t be sending any of the limited-edition hardcovers for free to reviewers, I’ll send the Beta (read: ARC) eBooks to reviewers at the same time, and ask all my First Readers and Beta Readers to post a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads as well.

On my initial calendar (filled in after finishing the first draft) I’d laid everything out so, all things going well, I could send the Beta version out by the end of March, in the hope of getting at least some feedback before the end of April – which is my hard deadline for sending the books to LSI for printing, if I want to be sure I can have them in time for Comicon. Then I kept wanting to give my First Readers more time (I had most of the feedback I would end up getting within the first week, but have still only heard from about a third of them six weeks later) and didn’t plan to start on recording the audiobook until last Monday… which I forgot (in my multi-month planning) was my wife’s spring break (she’s a teacher), and I only got a few hours of work done (I prefer to spend time with my wife, when possible; imagine that!) all week. This pushes everything back a week. If I record very aggressively, and spend a heckuva lot of time editing, I could theoretically finish “on time” to get the Beta version out by the end of the month. I’ve actually been telling most people “first week of April” for the Beta version lately, but even that would be a challenge for my voice (and ears, and mind) holding out for the next couple of weeks. I’ll try, for sure, but something’s got to give.

Either the Beta version is going out later than I’d hoped, reducing the amount of helpful feedback I can get before publication, or the Beta version is going out before I can finish recording and editing the audio version, potentially increasing the number of errors in the text I send to reviewers (and the number the Beta Readers would need to locate). I should still be able to finish my own passes over the text before publication, certainly, and the audiobooks with them, before reaching my hard deadline, so that makes the books about as good as I can make them. Where quality suffers by this compression of the schedule is in potentially getting less feedback from Beta Readers. In potentially getting worse reviews for having errors in the text, errors which may or may not be found before publication.

Oh, and then there’s the other goal I’d set, which might find itself incomplete before Comicon: Writing & publishing my book about my experiences writing and publishing. I’ve already put a fair amount of work into it, not just over the years but over the last few months, and now it’s largely a matter of writing from my “outline” the remaining 40k-50k words I haven’t written, yet. (No content editing needed for a book like this, it’s my honest life experience – likely no real Beta Reading, either, though since it’s digital-only the deadline is much closer to the end of May, to promote it at Comicon, so there may be time.) I might be able to do it as quickly as I finished Never Let the Right One Go, after I finish the audio recording of the next couple of weeks, and if I’m able to stay focused. There’s time while I wait for Beta feedback to get it written. In theory. To get it written, and coded for basic eReaders, and “enhanced” for iBooks, and maybe even time to figure out how to market an eBook in person at a con.

All in all, still enough time to get everything done, and done well enough – just not, perhaps, enough time to reach perfection. Hopefully enough time to straighten out the covers situation. Still only halfway there. I’d better email the other photographer again today. If I don’t hear back from him by the end of March, I’ll be assuming I need to use a different image for Sophia. Trying not to stress out about it. I’ll maybe put together a first alternate to show you, soon. To show me, to convince me all isn’t lost, that other photos would work. I guess I’ve got a month to convince me.