Category: Writing

Quick writing update, Oct. 2010

In case you haven’t been following me on Twitter/facebook (why not?), here’s an update of where I’m at: I’m writing! A lot. (relatively) As I mentioned before, over the last year or so I’ve been getting an increasing number of direct requests from readers/fans of the first Untrue Tales… trilogy about if/when Book Four (and the rest of the series) will be available. A couple of phone calls and txt messages received this summer finally pushed me over the edge, and in July I began work on Untrue Tales… Book Four. Then in August I stagnated. But as I recently re-discovered, I really work best & write fastest & most creatively while fueled by hyper-sweet coffee drinks. (Did you know you can now gift money directly to my Starbucks card via Facebook? Weird, I know, but… hey, you’re welcome to!) So by mid-September I was occasionally popping over to my local Starbucks for a few hours of writing at a time, as budget allowed. Then I was gifted a Starbucks card for my birthday, and since then I’ve finished writing Book Four. If you’ve read the first three books and would like to be a Beta Reader for the rest of the series, I’d appreciate your feedback. I’ve already done an initial edit (hundreds of small changes, additions, and consistency corrections), and Wednesday night I read the entire book through, aloud, in one sitting, making a few more notes. Book Four is in pretty good shape, but I’d like a few more people looking at it before I release it as an eBook. Comment/email me if you’re interested.

I started work on Untrue Tales… Book Five on Thursday, and when Starbucks closed & kicked me out last night (Friday), I’d already passed 10k words. My current goal is to finish Book Five before the end of October so I can go into NaNoWriMo with a blank slate & have a more relaxed schedule (a whole month?) for Untrue Tales… Book Six. Which will be the end of the series. Two trilogies. I’m making good progress toward my goals of getting them done, one right after the other, so I can get the entire second trilogy out in paperback in the Spring of 2011.

Depending on time availability I’m planning to start podcasting Book Four on the Modern Evil Podcast starting Friday November 5th, which puts Book Five’s start in mid-January, so I’ll probably hold off on the Book Five eBook release until January as well. Then I can aim to release the Book Six eBook and the 2nd-trilogy paperback around the end of March / beginning of April (April Fool’s day?), 2011… That sounds good.  Gives me time to edit & get feedback, lets me do the audiobook versions before the print version (recording the audio version always catches a few more flaws, trust me), but doesn’t make my audience wait too much longer to get the rest of the story. People who can’t afford to buy the eBooks (they’re just $5.99 each!) or the paperbacks ($24.99/trilogy retail, $50/trilogy signed & author-direct) will be able to hear the whole thing for free on the podcast before summer. (Or read the free eBooks not long after that.)

After I finish writing the end of the Untrue Tales From Beyond Fiction – Recollections of an Alternate Past series (fingers crossed; by November 30th!), I can maybe get back to doing research for that alternate/zombie history series I was talking about this time last year. I have at least 10k more pages to read before I’ll be comfortable tackling that one. Lots of histories, biographies, and philosophy books, plus probably another stack of zombie books, and almost certainly a stack of steampunk (since I intend to invent the ‘solarpunk’ genre with the series). But that’s later. Right now, I’m writing about Trevor. Last night I wrote Trevor’s first confrontation with God. It was neat. Trevor and Toni got to go to Heaven, then God took them for a walk in the midst of the Garden. I think you’ll like it.

Numbers for September 2010 & Q3

Podcast audiobook downloads are WAY down, dropping 40% to 60% for nearly all titles over the last three months. My total podcast downloads has been dropping all summer, by up to 21% each month, and after dropping at a slower rate per month over the spring is fully 64% lower than at its peak in December of 2009. The 3 new audiobooks I’ve released since then have not helped much to offset this trend, contributing less than 5% to the total downloads so far this year.

Here are the eBook and Podiobook download numbers, as usual giving the total of eBook downloads, the total of Podiobook downloads, and the more-accurate (re: # of people who dl’d a full book) total downloads of the final episodes of each Podiobook, as: eBook/total-PB/final-PB

  • Lost and Not Found: 49 / 457 / 18
  • Dragons’ Truth: 98 / 572 / 55
  • Forget What You Can’t Remember: 104 / 1,765 / 51
  • Untrue Tales… Book One: 69 / 1,594 / 134
  • Untrue Tales… Book Two: 76 / 1,852 / 122
  • Untrue Tales… Book Three: 55 / 877 / 94
  • Cheating, Death: 6 / 2,988 / 197
  • Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut: 2 / 260 / 37
  • More Lost Memories (full): 2 / 362 / 39
  • More Lost Memories (ind. stories, eBook only): 0
  • Time, emiT, and Time Again (full): 1 / 943 / N/A
  • Time, emiT, and Time Again (ind. stories, eBook only): 1
  • Total for all titles: 463 / 11,670 / 747
  • Total YTD: 4552 / 174,653 / 12,031
  • Total all-time: 12,974 / 354,754 / 23,150

Free eBook downloads have remained relatively flat all year, much more stable than during either 2008 or 2009. eBook sales, actual paid sales, are still small enough that a shift from selling four or five to selling three in a month is not statistically relevant. I sold 3 eBooks in September, one copy of Untrue Tales… Book Three on kindle, one copy of Cheating, Death at Smashwords, and one copy of the TeaTA short story Oracular Offspring at Smashwords. (I also had 10 free/coupon eBook downloads at Smashwords, half of them Cheating, Death.) That makes for $8.78 from my cut of eBooks sales in September. Wheee, the kindle 70% royalty makes a big difference – & is now also coming to me from UK sales (none of which I’ve ever/yet made).

I forgot to mention it last month, but since it’s happened 2 months in a row: I also sold 2 paperback copies of Cheating, Death via wholesale/LSI in each of August and September. I net $2.44/copy, so that’s $4.88/month or $9.76 for all four. While looking that up, I noticed that in June I sold 2 copies of Forget What You Can’t Remember via wholesale/LSI, earning $4.50. Not sure where these sold, exactly, but probably not Amazon, where their sales ranks are in the multi-millions (and could drop into the hundreds of thousands with just a couple copies moving per month, from what I hear); maybe book stores I’ve never heard of (or a certain horror book store I have) are shelving/selling them.

I should ask. *scoots off, sends a DM* If an actual bookstore is shelving/selling my zombie book, I’ll keep the discount at 50% indefinitely, rather than follow my new plan of dropping the discount to 20% after the book has been out a year. *twiddles thumbs* *waits for DM reply* Because really, yes, it’s still cool that a bookstore ever voluntarily shelved my book. The ~$3 more/copy I’d get from online stores doesn’t seem worth the cost of removing it from a physical bookstore, especially if it’s actually selling there. Plus, as an author, a reader, and a publisher, I’d rather do something nice for an indie bookstore who was willing to do business with me than to do something that was only intended to bring in more money from online bookstore sales. As you may have noticed, I almost always prefer doing something nice over making money.

In other news, I just finished writing Untrue Tales… Book Four. Now I just need to read, edit, re-read & copyedit, share with my Beta Readers & incorporate their feedback, design a cover, write copy, and do eBook layout & conversion for it. While writing Book Five. Before the end of the month. So I can write Book Six for NaNoWriMo. (because I’m crazy)

a little advice for writers

The following is excerpted from an email I just sent to a young, aspiring writer who was asking for advice on writing (who specifically mentioned they liked SciFi & that when they tried to write stories, they ran out of things to write before the story was done). I’ve been thinking a lot about how to write about writing for a book I want to do on how I managed to write (and moreso, went on to publish) a dozen books (so far), and perhaps will include something along the following lines of thought:

As far as advice that will help you with your writing, I can only recommend two things that I know will work for everyone. I’m sure you can find thousands of pieces of “sure-fire” advice from writers to writers, if you look around the internet (and dozens of books on the subject in the “Writing” section of your local book store), but different things work for different people. The only things I know work for everyone are the things you’re already doing: Read more. Write more. In that order.

Read as many books (and short stories and magazine articles and blogs and textbooks and whatever else you can get your hands on) as you have time for. When you find a piece that you really love, read it again. Think about what you love about it, what the writer did that really spoke to you, what works and what doesn’t. When you find a piece you really hate, do the same thing – try to figure out why you don’t like it, and how you think (specifically) you could improve it. Then read some more. Read new books, read old books, read books outside of your favorite genre (instead of SciFi, try a Western or a Mystery or a ghost story – or if you want to ease yourself into it, try Stephen King’s The Gunslinger; it’s a (great) SciFi/Western/GhostStory), and -if you want to be traditionally published someday- read books (and web sites) about what it takes to get published. (It’s hard, and takes a long time, and doesn’t pay well.)

In the midst of all that reading, write. A lot of people say you should write every day. If you’re able to, and if that works for you, then do it! Writing more is the best way to get better at writing. If you’re having trouble writing long stories, try shorter ones (more on that later), or try writing essays for a while, or write book reports, or write newspaper articles, or write blog posts, or write letters (or emails). It wouldn’t hurt to write a little of each of those things. Contemporary writers have been doing a lot of great things with really, really short stories that might be a good stepping stone if you’re finding yourself running out of words too quickly: While most publishers think a short story is 3000-5000 words (and some writers think they’re 5000-15,000 words), you can tell a complete story in what’s called “Flash” fiction, which is usually fewer than 1000 words (often just a few hundred words), and of you practice at it, it’s possible to tell quite an excellent story in only SIX WORDS. I know my wife sometimes teaches the six-word stories in her high-school English classes. Remember that most stories (even the shortest stories) still need a beginning, a middle, an end, and a reason to exist (Why are you writing it? Why would I read it?), even if that’s just to convey a particular image or idea or character/theme/setting. Trying to write a good story in a few hundred words can be a lot more difficult than using several thousand words, as I’m sure you’ll discover when you try it. Remember, though: If at first you don’t succeed, write, write again!

It’s good you’re starting young and (hopefully) have been writing stories since you were a child. Malcom Gladwell’s recent book, Outliers, talks a bit about how the difference between doing something well and being truly great at it may simply be a matter of accumulating enough practice. Gladwell pegs the line between good work and truly great work at around ten thousand hours (or about ten years’ worth) of practice. At one thing. So before anyone heard of The Beatles, all day every day for years they were playing together, practicing, getting better and better and -around the time they first hit it big- they happened to have put in around ten thousand hours of practice together. Before Bill Gates reached a point where he could write world-changing software and found Microsoft, he spent around ten thousand hours working with computers and developing software. –Of course, that’s just if you want to be world-changingly great. To be merely good (say, good enough that most of the time you start a story you’re able to finish it) probably only takes about one or two thousand hours’ practice. Don’t be discouraged that you’re not there, yet! Think of all the progress you’ve already made, just by doing your homework, writing emails, and *trying* to write stories (trying is more than most people ever do) – you’re well on your way to becoming a good writer. I consider myself to have quite a lot more practice yet to go, as I’ve only got three or four thousand hours’ practice writing so far, myself! ((The trick, I think, is that to be a *really* great writer, you’ve also got to get in thousands of hours of reading along the way – we’ve got it twice as hard as everyone else!))

I do tend to get carried away with my writing, though, in case this nearly-thousand-word emailpost didn’t make that clear. I apologize if my rambling was too long, or went off-track, or seemed discouraging. If 10,000 (or 1,000) seems like too scary a number, think instead about 1: Write one more story; you’ll always be a better writer for your next story than you were when you started your last.

getting my mind right

I’m in the midst of working through something, mentally and emotionally. I’ve been working on this for a long while. This was a significant contributing factor to my taking some time off from showing at art walks & art fairs a couple times a month (though getting to a point of running in the red month after month (probably due to the down economy) was the most significant factor), which I paused in March of this year. It’s the effect of commercialism/capitalism on my creative output.

I don’t believe in capitalism. I hate money. I don’t like business. Accounting rules are literally insane. Marketing makes me nauseous. Sales, inasmuch as I can do it honestly, is moderately acceptable, at best.

I’m concerned with the questions of ‘why’. The ‘why’ of my art, of my writing, of my publishing, of my life – none of it has to do with money. I’m not interested in wealth. I don’t want those concerns to alter or infect the ‘whys’ of my creative work, or my life in general. When I need to address a question of ‘why’ I created this book or that work of art, I don’t ever want the answer to be something like “to make money.”

This has been easier to maintain with my books, possibly because they’ve never been “profitable” in any financial sense. They’ve always been works of love, the ideas behind them and the effort going into them based on expressing myself and writing the books I wanted to write rather than the books I thought were going to sell. For a long time, this was true of my art, as well. Then I began doing the art walks every month. Twice a month, at times. Investing as much or more time in selling my art than I was in creating it.

The mini-paintings were literally a money grab. The reason I bought small canvases (mostly 4×4″, but up to 8×10″) to paint was so that I could have items for sale under $20 at the art walks, where people often balked at paying realistic/appropriate prices for art. One problem with this was that, after a while, I would get down to a day or two before an art walk and -in a panic- paint half a dozen mini-paintings at once, almost entirely at random, just so I would have something that might sell. Another was that they became an overwhelming percentage of sales. In 2008, where I only did art walks for four months, they made up 28% of my unit sales and about 3.6% of my revenue from art. In 2009 where I showed probably 18+ times, they were 66% of unit sales and 25% of my art revenue. If I exclude the sale of the original artwork created for my book covers (and sold explicitly to people who wanted to support the publication of my books), for 2010, which I only showed at 3 art walks before pausing, mini-paintings make up 100% of my art sales. (Actually, looking at my spreadsheet, I also sold a crocheted mobius strip for $5 and a crocheted zombie to a fan of my books at Comicon, and I consider my crocheted creations to be sculptural artwork. If I account for those works, the mini-paintings only make up 71% of unit sales and 52% of revenue for 2010.)

So, even when I first began to create the mini-paintings, I was already uneasy about the significantly commercial nature of their existence. Certainly they were each an original work of handmade art, created with my own style and ideas. Just as certainly, I was creating them for the express purpose of making sales at art walks. When they began to make up a larger and larger proportion of both my creative efforts and my actual sales, it made me very uneasy. The point of showing at the art walks wasn’t really supposed to be about finding something that would sell and making that, over and over again, just for the sake of sales. The point was supposed to be that I already create art and the only way to sell it is if people know it’s available. I believe (though I’d have to go to my other computer and dig around in Quickbooks for a while to give accurate numbers) that I made more sales online via Twitter/Plurk/facebook in 2008 and 2009 than I did at art walks (not in volume, but in revenue). My art walk sales were mostly, then, works I’d created from a drive to have something to sell, rather than from a drive to express myself or to create what I wanted to create. Which makes me a bit sick.

My wife and I have been working on our financial situation fairly diligently for the last ~3 years (we’ll have been married 3 years on 12/1), and I’ve been working on structuring my “business model” for Modern Evil Press so that I’m not running further in the red the more books I write (see: selling paintings to pay for the cost of publishing, specifically the original cover art (and possibly interior illustrations, in future) for the book in question), and this year we reached a point where we’re slightly better than breaking even both personally and in terms of the business. I’ve got us on track, barring unexpected negative changes (apocalypse, housefire, expensive car repairs, pregnancy and the like), to have all our debt (was close to $45k when we married) paid off except Mandy’s student loans (another $40k) by mid-2013. That’s without Modern Evil Press earning another dollar. That’s without selling any more art. If I could make money from my art and books, we could get there faster, but it isn’t necessary.

This is what what I’ve been working on, mentally and emotionally. This is how I’ve been trying to get my mind right; to deeply realize that making money from my creative output isn’t necessary. With a model similar to what I did with the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut, going electronic-only (eBooks & audiobooks) until/unless sales (generally: the original cover art) cover the cost of going to press, I can write as many (or as few) books as I’d like. With the amount of canvas & paint & yarn I currently have stockpiled (from excellent sales at local stores), I’ll have a debt account or two paid off before I need to go shopping for real (expensive) art supplies again – so I’ll be able to afford it, even if none of the art I create between now and then sells. I need to fully return to a point of creating from inspiration rather than from profit motive.

I’ll accept profits, if and when they appear, but that isn’t -and shouldn’t be- why I work.

Fuel for writing

So, I’ve been trying to work on Untrue Tales… Book Four for the last …month and a half or so, but not making much in the way of progress since Vegas. Part of this is to do with other distractions, priorities, and time-sinks in my life. Part of it has to do with procrastination, generally. I’ve certainly (as I said) been working through ideas for it, which is better than simply setting it aside and ignoring it. Alas, progress has been grindingly slow. Like, less than 1300 words in August slow.

I know that for Book One and Book Two (not to mention: Forget What You Can’t Remember, More Lost Memories, all versions of Lost and Not Found, and a good chunk of Dragons’ Truth) I got my most productive work done while spending time at a coffee shop all day, drinking overly-sweet coffee drinks. ((For Book Three, I wrote the bulk of the book in a single 60-hour session, in my bedroom, while using modafinil to stay awake and only white tea to drink.)) While in Vegas I had 3 days to write. The first day I tried writing in the hotel room, drinking water, and barely passed 1k words all day. The second day I went to Starbucks and, after spending an hour updating podcasts/etc, I tried to get by on cheap iced tea drinks… slow. Then a bit after mid-day I ordered a super-sweet espresso drink I’ve dubbed ‘liquid awesome’ and proceeded to write at over 850 words/hour for the remainder of the day. The third day, feeling the crunch on my wallet from a few of days in Vegas, I tried switching to the cheaper drip coffee and iced tea, and only wrote ~1500 words all day (though that’s partially because I spent a couple hours chatting with a stranger).

What I’d like to be able to do is to take my laptop to a local coffee shop in the morning, sit all day drinking fancy drinks (and eating coffee-shop sandwiches/etc) and working on the book, and repeat that day after day until at least Book Four is done. ((Preferably until Book Six is done.)) I wrote most of Book Two over about a week of such days, and expect to be able to repeat that performance for the rest of the Untrue Tales… series. The only (big) problem standing between me and this goal is money. As you know from my other posts, this writing gig doesn’t exactly pay the bills. Not even close. And while my wife’s income is sufficient to cover our monthly expenses, allowing me to be a full-time creative, after going to Vegas and San Diego Comicon this summer our “disposable” money is used up for now. So while we aren’t behind on any bills, and we can afford groceries, there’s no extra money (at least for a couple of months) for spending days/weeks in coffee shops.

You can help, and I’ve thought of a couple of possible options:

First, easiest, is that you could buy the $50 signed paperback copy of the first trilogy of the Untrue Tales… series from modernevil.com. I currently have 6 copies of this edition “in stock.” Sales of the last couple copies have to pay to re-order,  so they don’t help as much with coffee unless even more people order. I also have a limited number of copies of the not-currently-in-print individual paperback first editions of Book One, Book Two, and Book Three available signed for $25 each. Order any of these 4 books directly from modernevil.com at these prices and I will personally sign it (and can personalize it) and ship it to you, then add you to the acknowledgements / Special Thanks page of the second trilogy (and of the individually available eBooks)… and use the proceeds to do the coffee shop thing, for as long as the money lasts.

Second, if you run a local (Phoenix, AZ), independent coffee shop (or are friends with someone who does) and would like to sponsor or co-sponsor my writing, I would be glad to give you my loyalty, Special Thanks in the books, and lots of mentions on twitter/facebook/yelp/this-blog/my-podcasts as I work on, publish, and later podcast each book remaining in the series. I realize this isn’t a traditional way to advertise, and doesn’t reach a vast/huge/mass-media audience, but the majority of my paperback sales are hand-sales in the Phoenix area, most of my facebook friends are in Phoenix, and a reasonable chunk of my twitter followers are in Phoenix. If you’d like to be seen as an author-friendly place to be, this could help. Even something as simple as first-drink-free/day would go a long way to stretching the dollars contributed by supporters who take advantage of the first option, though if you’re a coffee-shop-owner and a reader, I’d be glad to work out a books-for-coffee exchange, too.

Third, even if you can’t afford a signed paperback right now (or already have one and can’t think of anyone to gift a copy to), or aren’t a coffee shop owner, you can help: Spread the word. Link to this post. Give people my email address. Tell someone at your favorite Phoenix-area indie coffee shop you know an author looking for a spot, or just tell me what/where your favorite local coffee shop is so I can go talk to them myself. Tell your friends who read books about my books, and about this offer.

Until something happens on this, or until November (when I should begin to have a bit of “disposable” income again), I’ll keep slogging on at home, a couple hundred words at a time. The current setup of my desk/home, while great for podcasting, just doesn’t seem conducive to writing books in the Untrue Tales… universe.