Marketing – Teel McClanahan

T-Shirts, now online

I need to re-take those photos… well, probably get some photos of the shirts being worn/modeled by people, really… but I’ve finally got the T-Shirts I’ve been screen printing listed on wretchedcreature.com. I’ve decided that, for now, Etsy is not for me. They only integrate with Paypal for payments, right now. Paypal has stolen hundreds of dollars from me in the past, and attempted to steal more than that, again, and if I have the choice to avoid doing business with them, and with eBay -their parent company- I do. (I still refuse to sign up for Skype.) Instead, I use Google Checkout for sales of my books on modernevil.com. It’s now also integrated into wretchedcreature.com – at least for the shirts. After spending some time at the post office & on USPS.com, I’ve decided that I’m not going to overcomplicate my shipping fees – $3 per item is close enough to what most of my products cost to ship domestically, and too low, if anything, rather than too high.

But you want to see the shirts, yes? Just follow these links (really, you could just follow one of them, and then use the navigation on that site from there – no need to come back here):

I’ll also have all these shirts available with me in a variety of sizes at the Phoenix First Friday Art Walk, every month, and I also accept credit cards in person. (Though I prefer cash.)

Contest, contest, who’s got my contest?

As you may already be aware, my last contest (Tell me what Forget What You Can’t Remember is about, and win a prize!) didn’t reach as many people as I’d have liked, didn’t have as broad a response as I’d have liked, and didn’t give me as many well-thought-out answers to the question as I’d have liked. There was a lot not to like about how it went. Since that time, I’ve been thinking about what to do about it. I’ve only recently responded to the two winners, letting them know they’ve won and requesting their information so I can send them their free books.

Now, I’m going to try to turn something disappointing into something a little bit better. I’m going to change the nature of the contest, and the reward. The idea now is to have an open-ended opportunity for anyone who reads my books and wants to try another. Anyone, at any time, for any of my books, who can provide something to help me sell my books that’s better than what I’m currently using can win a free paperback of one of my books of their choice.

If that’s a better answer to the question “What is this book about?” – great! If that’s better marketing copy, a better “elevator pitch,” a blurb from another author that I can put on the cover & the website, or even an entirely new cover image – wonderful! If that’s an insightful blog post, or a detailed review (not necessarily positive), or a thoughtful analysis of character, theme, plot (or lack thereof) – I look forward to it! Be creative! Write a spin-off or sequel, a short story in the same universe, a song or a poem, shoot a video, or create any other derivative work (automatically allowed for non-commercial uses, since all my novels are available under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license) – and you’re a shoe-in!

As before, simply email your entries to me at teel@modernevil.com – perhaps containing your entry, or perhaps linking to your blog / a review / a video – and I’ll consider all entries using my personal judgement as to whether you’re doing a better job marketing my book than I am (which shouldn’t be hard – Marketing is not one of my strengths). Every time I receive an entry that I believe will help sell books, I’ll send out a signed paperback copy of one of my books (their choice) to the entrant, and I’ll get my marketing efforts updated to incorporate the new materials. So go, read or listen to one of my books, and think about how you might let someone else know about them.

Void where prohibited. No purchase necessary: You can read the eBook or listen to the podcast for free. Officially open to US Residents only – but only because I don’t want to deal with shipping books internationally. You can still enter from anywhere and, if you’re willing to help me with international shipping, get your free book. Winners will be selected by whatever method I want – probably I’ll just pick the entries I think are best, but I’m not ruling out asking people on Twitter or some such. Contest runs until I don’t feel like it anymore – which probably means it never ends, since when wouldn’t I want to sell more books? By submitting an entry you are granting me an unlimited, nonexclusive right to use your entry and any derivations thereof for any purpose, including commercial – ie: the point of having better marketing material is to be able to get more people to read and/or buy my book, so I need the right to use the best entries to that end. If you create a derivative work & would like to license it for commercial use (ex: you want to be able to make money by writing a sequel and selling it yourself), we can talk. I’m open to that, too.

Swine Flu Sale – Pandemic Prices!

In light of the WHO raising the Pandemic Alert Level to Phase 5 (on a scale where Phase 6 is a “Global Pandemic” characterized by “widespread human infection”), I’m starting a Swine Flu Sale – Save 20% off any purchase. This is a special offer for 1) People who read my blog or follow me on Twitter 2) People willing to ignore WHO’s recommendations to stay away from large congregations of people in public places.

Details for those afraid of Swine Flu (or not in the Phoenix area):
Browse my books at modernevil.com and my art at wretchedcreature.com. Email me at teel@modernevil.com and mention the “Swine Flu Sale” along with whatever books and/or art you want to order, and I’ll take 20% off the full price of your order (before any sales tax & shipping costs, if applicable). Offer not available via the shopping cart on modernevil.com – I’ll have to manually invoice you to give you this discount.

Details for brave Phoenix residents:
Come out to the Phoenix First Friday Art Walk May 1st – you can find me among the vendors in the street closure one block South of Roosevelt between 4th & 6th Streets, usually just south of the corner of 5th & Garfield. Mention the “Swine Flu Sale” and receive 20% off your entire purchase. Plus, by showing up in person there’s no possibility of shipping cost, and I won’t charge you sales tax if you pay cash.

The sale lasts as long as the WHO Pandemic Alert Level for Swine Flu is Phase 5 or Phase 6. I’m still happy to deliver purchases to people in the Phoenix area free of charge, myself. If I think of anything else, I’ll edit this post later. Stay healthy, everyone!

background noises

I’m sitting in my living room, listening to the early morning sounds. Birds chirping, neighbors revving their truck engines, planes flying overhead, the refrigerator running…. And now that I think about it, these sounds are present throughout the day, more or less. Sounds I am aware of because, time and again, I record audiobooks at home. Audiobooks that I don’t want full of birds tweeting and engines revving and dogs barking. Audiobooks in which the thumpa-thumpa of a car stereo’s too-loud bass competing with its ill-tuned engine (well-tuned to produce the most noise, that is) is simply not appropriate. My hearing is not perfect, not by far, and I often have trouble making out speech over background noise – a cocktail party is basically a place where I have no idea what most people are saying to me. (Not to mention, I’m not much good at small talk, which is all the talk most people in such situations seem to want to have.) Still, my hearing is good enough -attuned enough- that little noises like these become big annoyances.

There seems to be less traffic noise in the mornings, after everyone has gone to work and before they begin to be released from it, so I tend to try to record in the mornings. My sleep schedule has been bizarre, of late, and I’ve been sleeping starting at roughly 3AM-7AM and -despite my best efforts (hampered significantly by an ongoing and severe bout of depression) to get out of bed after only a few hours- running through the middle of the afternoon. Today it’s further off – I put myself to bed last night at 10PM, managed to fall asleep somewhat quickly, but then my mind woke me up at 2:30AM. I tried to sleep, I fought against waking, I felt quite … I don’t know whether I’m physically or mentally tired, but … tired, but at 3:30AM this morning, I gave up on it. Got up. Started laundry. Played the Free Realms Beta for a while…

Mandy’s up now, eating a breakfast I made for her, and as I finish writing this, she’ll be getting ready for school today. I don’t think I knew how noisy getting ready for the day is until I started recording audio books. So, in an hour or so, she’ll be done with that and I can try to begin recording. I’d like to get a couple of hours of recording done today, if my voice works that long. I need to get ahead of my podcasting; trying to record at the last minute doesn’t always work, especially when I’m depressed and/or my sleep schedule is severely kinked. Last minute is where I’m at right now, actually. I don’t have today’s podcast episode edited yet. Realistically, I give myself until midnight of the day I’ve said it will go up. Preferably, it always goes up on the morning of that day. Which, for episodes longer than a minute, means I have to have it recorded ahead of time.

((For the episodes going up on Podiobooks.com, I really need to be done ahead of time – in my experience, if I fail to have my episode uploaded & ready to go there by late Thursday night, chances are it won’t hit the site until Monday. Which feels like I’m three days late, even if I uploaded it at 7AM Friday. Even if it was on my own feed at 7AM Friday. Podiobooks.com feels like the “real” venue for my audiobooks. So I really need to be ahead. Consequently, I think I’m going to let the Podiobooks feed run a week or so behind my direct feed for the next few books.))

Recording a half-hour episode takes a lot longer than half an hour, by the way. (Assuming I’m not doing multiple voices, which takes even longer.) The actual recording part tends to take me about double, so about an hour. (Last night I tried to record in the evening, since I seemed not to have a choice, and it took me over 100 minutes to record what will be about 30 minutes of text.) Editing what I’ve recorded – selecting takes when I’ve recorded multiple takes, cutting out dead air, background noises, mouth noises and the like – takes about double that, so about two more hours. With my new computer, mixing together the intro, outro, multiple sections of an episode & transitions between them, leveling everything so volume matches within and across episodes… actually only takes a few minutes. I haven’t timed it, but I seem to be able to do both versions (MEPod & PB) in under half an hour, now, including compression. Then I have to listen to the entire episode, to be sure I didn’t miss anything during the edit. I usually do this while uploading it to both servers & writing the episode description. So, for a typical 30-minute episode (without character voices), it takes me 4 hours of work. All of it while listening carefully not just to my own voice, but also to tiny background noises.

This is not work I can do eight hours a day, five days a week. And not merely because wearing the over-the-ear headphones becomes annoying well before the 4-hour mark. I am certainly going to try to put in a few long days over the next few weeks, though. I am certainly going to try to get the other 8 episodes of this book recorded, edited, and ready to go just as fast as I am able, and on to the next book. Theoretically, it should only take me a total of 40 hours to complete this entire book (not to mention I’ve already got the first episode done), so why not? The next two books in the series are each almost exactly the same length book – so three 40-hour work weeks and I should be done with the entire series, right?

Except I’m also an artist. And I’m also writing a book on my Self Publishing experiences. And I’m also creating a deck of Christian cards (and a book to go along with them). And I’m also a househusband – cooking and cleaning and the like are part of my responsibilities. And I’m also a marketer. And a web developer. And a blogger. And a filmmaker. And involved in social media. And emotionally unstable, currently depressed & off-kilter.

It’s only 1 week until the next First Friday, when I have another Art Walk to show at. (If you’re in the Phoenix area, come down and see me! I’m among the ‘Roosevelt Row‘ vendors, and I’m usually near 5th & Garfield.) I’d like to produce some more new art before that happens (though I have plenty in stock, right now – more than I could possibly show), so that cancels out part of the next week. I’ve only just begun writing that book on MicroPublishing, and I’d like to build some momentum in the writing of it, instead of letting it perhaps wither with only a couple thousand words. I can’t record every day (I can’t recall now which day it was, exactly, but one day this week I managed to stay up late enough that I thought I could record in the morning, after Mandy left, at the end of my waking hours – but apparently that was when Bulk Trash Pickup decided it was time to slowly and noisily scour my neighborhood.) and I can’t usually stand to work on audio all day, when I do. Oh, and because I want to continue posting two episodes a week to my feed, I’m doing poetry episodes again – a one to two minute episode of which seems to take 30-45 minutes to create.

So maybe I’ll get ahead by a couple of episodes in the next week. And hopefully I’ll get ahead by the rest in another week or two. Mandy just walked out the door. I’d better get to it.

Contest: What’s FWYCR book about?

“What’s the book about?” – It’s the question everyone asks, and they want a quick and easy answer. People who think like marketers want it in the form of an “elevator pitch” and people who browse in book stores want my book covers to fit neatly into the patterns they expect – but everyone wants a fast, easy way to make a snap decision about the book.

The problem I have with this is that if I could have expressed what I wanted to express in a hundred words or less, it wouldn’t have been a book, it would have been a business card!

So, I’m having a contest:
Tell me what my book is about, and you could win a prize. As Forget What You Can’t Remember draws near to its final podcast episode and people all over the world hear its convoluted conclusion, I thought the time was right to ask readers and listeners this oft-repeated and oh-so-important question. But what are the prizes?

One (1) First Prize: I’ll name a character after you in my next novel & let you decide whether that character lives or dies, plus send you a signed paperback copy of one of my books (your choice).
Two (2) Second Prizes: I’ll send you a signed paperback copy of one of my books (your choice).

How to enter:
Email your answer to the question “What is Forget What You Can’t Remember about?” to teel@modernevil.com. The deadline for entry is May 1st, 2009, two weeks after the final chapter goes live at Podiobooks.com.

Void where prohibited. No purchase necessary: You can read the eBook or listen to the podcast for free. Officially open to US Residents only – but only because I don’t want to deal with shipping books internationally. You can still enter from anywhere & if you win I’ll still name a character after you… and… I don’t know, maybe look up international shipping rates & customs paperwork? Winners will be selected by whatever method I want – probably I’ll just pick the answers I think are best, but I’m not ruling out asking people on Twitter or some such. By submitting an entry you are granting me an unlimited, nonexclusive right to use your entry and any derivations thereof for any purpose, including commercial – ie: the point of having a better answer to this question is to be able to get more people to read and/or buy my book, so I need the right to use the best answers to that end. I will be running a very similar contest for both Lost and Not Found and Dragons’ Truth in May, in case you want to go read and/or listen to those books & prepare your answer in advance.