JohnHartness.com

So if you want to get my book, The Chosen, on your iPad or iPhone and don’t want to wait until it’s available in the iTunes store (sometime in September we hope) here’s a post for you!

And if you don’t want to buy my book, but still want to put other e-books on your iPad, this will help with that anyway, and because I’ve given you such life-affirming advice that made the sun peek out from the clouds, birds sing and your car’s exhaust smell like lilacs and rose petals, you’ll go buy my book anyway.

So here’s how to put PDF files onto your iPad or iPhone in a few simple steps.

1) Buy your favorite new book in PDF format. Click here to do so.

2) Open iTunes.

3) Add the PDF file to your iTunes library. It should automatically show up under “Books.” If it doesn’t, drag it over there.

4) When you open iBooks (if you don’t have that app, go to the App Store and get it, it’s free) you will see a new tab that says “PDF.” Click that, and you’re ready to start reading.

There you go!

So I don’t have any idea if anyone is interested in a breakdown of what it costs to self-publish a book (and the answer is not $0), but I’m going to give you a breakdown anyway. We’ll ignore the cost of time, because with any artistic project your time is basically given away for free. The four months it took me to write the book and the months it took to edit and polish are gone, and we can’t really assign a worth to them. So ignore that for the moment.

Let’s look at labor for people I hired to help on The Chosen. I paid $200 for the cover design, and that included a bunch of revisions, resizing, color changes and multiple formats. I think I got a good product for the fee, and since the fee negotiation was basically me calling up a friend and saying “Can you do this for $200?” I can’t really argue about it. I’ve poked around a little and that seems to be middle of the road for cover design.

The ebook formatting is costing me $150. I have no idea how much time I’m paying for, but I’m paying for a specific set of skills that I don’t possess and have zero interest in developing, so that seems like a fair price to me.

I’m paying my editor a commission, and because she’s a relative she was willing to work on spec. I’ll have to sell a bunch of books to get there, but eventually she’ll make $1,000 for her work. And she worked her ass off for weeks on this project, so I think that’s a perfectly fair fee for her services.

Ordering proof copies so far has cost me $130. I screwed the pooch and ordered 5 copies for reviews from Lulu of an early version, and then realized I had incorrectly set the margins and my books all looked like ass. So that was $70 down the drain. Then I got a proof that I liked, but needed to make a couple of tweaks. Then I moved over to CreateSpace to get the book listed on Amazon and get cheaper author’s copies, so I needed another proof from there. $20 each by the time they’re shipped. The first proof was missing page numbers, so I had to get another one. It should arrive today, and if I like it, I’ll order my copies to have at signings and things.

Author’s copies. If I use Lulu, they cost me about $9 each. Since I’d like to make about $5 per book, I’ll be selling them for $15 online after Lulu’s free shipping offer expires. Until then, the book is $20, because you get free shipping and the overall cost to you is the same. So buy today and I get an extra Happy Meal!

But if I buy my author’s copies from CreateSpace, they cost me less. Waaaayyyyy less. Like $4 each. So that allows me to sell copies at signings for $10, and hopefully move the book pretty well. That would put me at a competitive price point to what people are spending for a paperback book, so that should be a good price. But I have to have books on hand to do that, so once I get a proof I like, I’ll probably order about 50 copies.That’s another $175 by the time I pay shipping.

Getting listed on the Amazon Kindle and iPad won’t cost me anything, and the book will be available through all of Amazon’s distribution channels using CreateSpace’s Pro publishing package. That cost another $40, but the discount I get on author’s copies makes that worthwhile in the first order, so it’s almost free. Except for the whole part where I have to pay for it.

So at this point I’ve spent, or committed to spend, right at $1,700 to publish my first novel and get myself 50 copies. I think it’s a fair investment, especially since once the ebook gets going I’ll get $2 per ebook sold without any additional fixed costs. So sell a thousand ebooks, and I’m in good shape. So tell all your friends to buy the book, or hell, if you have any rich friends in the film business, they can buy the rights!

Well, kinda, I guess. From time to time I’ve led workshops on all sorts of things over the years, almost all of them having to do with theatre in one way or another. As all of you know, I enjoy the sound of my voice, and with an ego like mine, I can’t help but think that my pearls of wisdom will do the peasants before me some good in their lives. Unfortunately for those of you who want to tame my ridiculous self-image, other people keep feeding that delusion.
This week the company I work for hosted a Lighting for Worship workshop in Atlanta. We had 18 attendees from a dozen or so churches listen to a day-long series of lectures on experts in the worship lighting field. We’ve done this twice before, and I think this was the best attendance we’ve had. It’s also the largest city we’ve done one in, so that stands to reason. We’re doing it again in Greensboro next month, so that should break even more attendance records. We brought in in real experts (and me) from all over the country for this thing, and imparted some great information to the attendees, and did some good PR for us and the vendors that showed up. So I spent all day Wednesday and Thursday in work mode, focusing on what I was teaching and how to fine-tune the delivery.

Then yesterday I shifted gears entirely and worked with the newbies in the cast of the Renaissance Festival on character development. I spent an hour with them on physicality, paying attention to their surroundings, creating a backstory for their character, the difference between their role (the job) and their character (the person they’re trying to create). The goal was to get the newbies into mid-season form at the beginning of the season, to make for a better experience for the customers. I had a lot of fun and got some great compliments on my workshop, which is good since I’m already signed on for two other weekends of more advanced instruction.

Then this coming Thursday I shift into another mode entirely as I spend the evening at a local Mont Blanc pen store reading Mark Twain for a literary festival they have each year. They wanted somebody to read Twain for the people at the reception, and they agreed to pay me a little bit, so I’ll be reading selections from Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and some of Twain’s short stories while people look at pens that cost more than my entire wardrobe.

Book sales are picking up, word of mouth is starting to spread a little and Otis pimped my book on his blog, which always helps. I’ve gotten a few responses from folks that will let me do a blog tour stop on their site, so I’ll be kicking that off in September. Probably after Annie opens, because that’s going to tie up a lot of my time in the coming weeks. But feel free to hustle on over to my Lulu storefront and buy your copy now, because the free shipping offer ends Monday, August 23rd.

Today the world ended. Well, not really, but certainly we reached a big point in the world of e-readers, the magic sub-$100 price. Sears is selling the Sony e-reader for $99.99, which a lot of people (I dunno, experts? whatever) have decreed as the magic number that will change the world and make e-readers and e-books really take off.

I think those experts are late. I think the magic moment happened a few months ago, with the release of the iPad. No matter how cool it is that the Sony reader is available from Sears for a hundred bucks, I think it’s largely irrelevant to people who weren’t already interested in buying an e-reader, and wanted to buy it from Sears. And who are those people, exactly?

No matter what you think about products from the Turtleneck Brigade (and in the interest of full disclosure, I drank that Kool-Aid a long time ago), their marketing is monstrous. They’ve sold over 3 million iPads in the first few months the product was on the market. And all those people that bought iPads are just figuring out that they can read books on it, and they don’t have to buy those books through iTunes. So while it’s cool that the Sony reader is cheap, I think it’s just one more piece of the pie in the emergence of e-books.

And don’t bother telling me how much you love books, and will never buy an e-reader, and will only ever buy books in analog format. Because I won’t believe you. You also told me that albums would always be better than digital music and that you couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to carry an mp3 player around with them. Then you got an iPod and never went back. So while I know that books will always be around, the e-readers are going to be an ever-increasing part of our book-selling world, especially since there are apps for most smart phones now that can be e-readers.

So if you’re looking for a cheap e-reader, check out the Sony unit. If you’re looking for an e-reader app, check your phone’s app store. If you’re looking for a great book, buy mine!

Because that’s the word you use when you’re starting a journey, right? And in our vernacular, it’s become the word for the end of one thing and the beginning of another. So yesterday the transition happened, very quietly, from potential to actual in my status as a novelist. When I got the proof copy of the paperback edition of The Chosen, and it was a good proof, I decided that now the real work begins. Writing the book was fairly easy – I battled all the built-in distractions of living in this century with all these toys, chained myself to the keyboard and wrote the damned thing. Then came the editing, which was less painful by the addition of my niece Dianne. Then came the cover design, by Lindsay, and then the proofs.

Now I have to sell it. I’ve booked a pair of signings so far, and am trying to decide on a plan for a book release party. I’m also working up a plan for a blog tour, and would love it if those of you out there with blogs would open up your sites to me for a day to post about the book and the process of self-publishing and self-promoting. If you’d like to promote the book on your site, feel free to swipe the image below and link to my Lulu Storefront. Any love you can give would be appreciated. If you buy the book, and like it, I’d love it if you’d send me a note to that effect because once the ebook goes live on Amazon (hopefully September) I’m gonna need reviews to promote it there. I can’t offer payment for reviews like some big publishing houses do, but since I’d probably buy you a drink the next time I saw you anyway, I’ll offer up a free drink in exchange for a review.

I’ll be signing at the NoDa All Arts Market in September, and at the Newberry Oktoberfest in, well, October. Hopefully I’ll have more dates to announce here soon, but you can also keep up with all Chosen-related news on the Facebook page I set up for the book. So go order your copy now, and let me know what you think!

So this year, at 37, what do I think of life in general?

It sucks getting old and fat all at the same time. I can’t do anything about the one (except die, and I couldn’t bear to deprive you all of my wit), so I’m trying (again) to reduce the other. Ten pounds in a month may not seem like much, but it’s really quite a lot. I figure now that I’m continuing to try to lose weight it will slow down, but if I can drop five pounds each month, that will put me close to goal weight in a year. And since it took me two years to put this much weight on, if I can lose it in half the time, I’ll be thrilled. I’ve kinda reconciled myself to fighting with my belly for the rest of my life, because I like food and I don’t like to exercise. That combo means that I’m going to be going up and down pretty much for the duration, I need to just limit the swings. So if I can get back down to around 210-220, I’ll be happy bouncing around there. I’d love to see the first number in my weight be a 1 again, just once, but I’m not gonna sweat it.

One thing I’m trying to work on is balance. I’ve spent the last several years (and if we want to be honest about it, my whole life) bouncing between obsessions. Theatre to poker to weight loss to work to writing to poker to cycling to whatever. Well right now I’m trying to do less of a lot of things so that no one thing co-opts all my time. I’m trying to write for at least half an hour a couple times a week. I’m trying to focus on work when I’m at the office, and ignore it when I’m not. Poker has become an enjoyable social activity, rather than something I spend hours every week on. So I’m working towards balance. I’ll let you know if I get there.

I still have hopes that I can turn writing into the career eventually, and getting The Chosen out is the first step. I’m checking the mail every day for my proof copy so I can make it available for purchase, and begin the process of promoting it and trying to sell a few copies. I’m thinking of doing a promotional blog tour for the book, where I pop in on blogs of readers and friends and do a guest post about the book. If you have a blog, and would be willing to let me have a post there to promote my book, drop a comment and let me know. Who knows, I may even put up a post on Pokerstage about it, since that site still gets a little traffic each month.

I’m 37 and not sure of where I’m going with my life. So far it’s been one long string of happy accidents and fortunate outcomes. So since I’ve made it this far without a plan, I see no reason to make one now. Thanks for coming on the ride with me, I’m glad you’re here.

This was in my email box last night, and it was pretty exciting -

Shipped on Mon, 09 Aug 2010  via Mail
All items in your order have been shipped.

In This Shipment
===========================
1 of The Chosen by John G. Hartness (Printed)

This is my proof copy, so hopefully by the weekend I’ll be ready to release it for print and purchase. For a limited time, in a sheer profiteering ploy by yours truly, the book will be $20. After a little while, probably September, the price will drop to $15. These are paperback prices. I’m still waffling on the hardcover price, but most folks don’t buy hardcover anyway, so I’m only moderately concerned.

Here’s the reasoning behind starting off at a higher price – you’re going to pay roughly the same amount out of pocket regardless.

Right now, and through the rest of the summer, Lulu is offering free shipping on any orders over $19.95. So if I price my book at $15, they tack on $4 and change in shipping, and you pay about $20. If I price it at $20, you get free shipping, and you pay about $20. This way you pay the same amount, give or take a buck, and I get the extra cash, which I think we can all agree has no real downside, right?

Now as to the ebook pricing, here’s my reasoning behind the pricing. I want to sell a buttload of books, and I know that isn’t going to happen with hardcopy print-on-demand services. People that don’t know me aren’t going to spend $15-25 on a first novel by someone they’ve never heard of. And there are a lot more people that don’t know me than people that know me. So since a lot more people that don’t know me are buying e-readers nowadays, my best path to reach those people is to market an ebook and price it cheaply.

So why $2.99 and not $1? Because I get more than double the cash at the higher rate. Amazon pays 70% of the purchase price to the author on books over $2.99, while paying only 35% of the purchase price for books under $2.99. I don’t know why, but that math puts me making about $2/book. I’m good with that. I only need to sell 50,000 books at that rate to pay off my mortgage. I don’t really expect to sell 50,000 copies of The Chosen, but what’s the point in making goals if you’re going to make little tiny goals?

So why is it going to be more expensive on iTunes than on Amazon? The path to market is different. To get a book listed in the iTunes store, they recommend using a third-party aggregator; someone that has a contract with Apple to provide them with digital content. Those people provide a service, and they charge accordingly. So to pay the aggregator, and make sure iTunes gets their cut, and still leave me making my $2/book, that adds a buck to the price. But frankly, you can get the Amazon Kindle app for the iPad and buy your book at the cheaper price, and the app is free. So eventually iTunes will wise up, or not, since the same thing applies to albums and they still charge more for albums on iTunes than on Amazon, so more power to them making as much as they can.

So there’s the pricing strategy for The Chosen – if you buy a print copy this summer, you’ll pay a higher cover price but get free shipping. If you buy a print copy this fall, you’ll pay a lower cover price but pay the difference in shipping and I don’t get the money . So watch this space for updates, hopefully this weekend we’ll see a launch announcement!

Last night marked the return to action of the degenerates of the Falstaff home game, albeit not in the Casa de Falstaff. We were at a secret underground bunker (Skoon’s man-cave) rather than my den because Suzy’s been laid up after foot surgery a couple weeks ago. She’s had issues with plantar fasciaitis (sp?) for several years now and had a procedure done where they send shock waves into her heel to break up nodules that have grown into the tendon. She’s healing up nicely and I expect she’ll be able to return to regular housecleaning and lawnmowing duties soon.

But the game coincided with some travel on the part of our merry band of goofballs. Special K is headed off to the desert to do his part making computers safe for democracy again (keep your head down and your butt dry, pal!) and A-List blogger Bobby Bracelet has now relocated to Charlotte, so it was a sendoff game for the K, and a welcome game for the Bracelet, and I’m pretty sure they were both happy with their results on the night.

I built a big stack early by catching cards and playing relatively tight, but the cards I was catching got me into a ton of hands, and the tiny bit of fold equity I had developed vanished before too long. I’ve played so fast and loose in this game for so many years, pretty much all I have to do is look at  flop with chips in my hand and I’ll hear “call” from at least a couple of spots. And I don’t mind that. Most nights. When I’m not getting snapped off.

WARNING – BAD BEAT STORY – if you don’t like them, don’t read. But you’re not getting $1.

So I pick up Aces (for the second time on the night – first time I got the blinds) on the button. I raise from .50 to $4. SB calls, BB pops it to $8. Folds around to me, and I shove (not that impressive, since I only have about $30 more in front of me). SB calls, BB thinks for a while, puts me on the Hammer, calls. I turn over Aces, SB turns over AK, BB shows 88. Flop comes down something like 3-J-9. Turn 7. And you know what the river was right? Since I did put in the disclaimer that it was a bad beat story, it can only be the 10-ball coming from on high to piss me off and send me reaching into my pocket for a 3rd buy-in.

I had pissed away all my profits earlier by catching a set on the river against one of the more aggressive and bluff-happy players at the table, only to find out that he’d turned a bigger set. I hate it when you think you’ve rivered somebody only to find out you were drawing dead on the turn. And I blew the rest of my first buy in playing bad. So after having my aces cracked for my stack I sat out a couple hands, thought it over and remembered something that I read on somebody’s blog a long time ago – my job is to get my money in ahead. That’s all I can do. So I reached in for another buy-in, and reloaded. This was gonna be my last buy-in, since I have long since run out of real bankroll paying for real-world events and now can only grab a little cash when it’s time for a home game.

So then I went on a run, and then I got chirping chips, and then I started to play hands blinds in Omaha, and I got stupid lucky and ended up ahead for the night. But since there was a bad beat story, I figure it’s only right that I relate a couple of winning hands as well. I’d been flopping big hands all night and underplaying them and getting run down because of it all night. Flop two pair, play it too slow and lose to a bigger two pair or flush – that kind of thing. So I decided that the next time I hit a flop hard, I was gonna bet the shit out of it. So I call a preflop raise in late position with 55. Button calls behind me, and three of us see a flop of J-5-x. Original raiser (same guy that turned a set of kings to my rivered set of fives earlier) bet out about a pot-sized bet, and I shoved all in over the top for $106 more. Button thought for a minute and called all in for less. Original raiser thought for a little while and folded. Uncle Phil was the button and turned over his cracked aces, and my set held up. At that point I was about even on the night.

A little while later I called a preflop raise with 87s, and the flop came down 8-J-x. T led out with a bet, and I called, hoping to catch something. Jim the Knife came along as well, and I hit another 8 on the turn. T led again, I called, and Jim stuck around. River was the case 8, and this time I pulled the trigger and raised when T led. Jim thought and thought but finally threw away 99. T thought for a minute and called with her Jack, and I showed my quads to drag a very healthy pot.

I picked up Aces one more time, for three on the night, and won about a $20 pot with them. So for anyone keeping score, that’s Aces for -$50, and 55 for $200. It’s never been said that I play cards well, but I sometimes play bad cards very well. I felt pretty good about last night’s game after I got off tilt for getting my aces snapped off and getting run down for the fourth or fifth time. My reads were usually pretty good, and that’s due in part to spending a couple hours every night playing on Full Tilt. I’ve been doing a bunch of little SNGs and have double my roll to a whopping $100 there. So I’m actually working on my game for the first time in a long time, and I’m seeing some results. Now let’s see if I can go another session without losing everything.

So I got proof copies of The Chosen in yesterday, so that I can send a few to local writers to get cover blurbs, and I was all excited. Yay! Hard copies of the book! Then I looked inside and saw that the margins sucked and the print was so small you couldn’t read the damn thing. Boo! The same thing happened with the proof copy of Red Dirt Review, and I thought I had taken care of that, but obviously not so much. So I spent a couple hours last night fiddling with the formatting, and ordered another proof copy. Hopefully it looks good. But on the up side, at least now my proof copies will have the right cover art, because my designer and I have finalized the cover. Check it out below. I think it’s fun, and captures enough of the spirit of the book to get people interested, and I like the red/yellow contrast. So check it out.

And I have decided to make a hardcover available, so there will now be three release dates for the book. Hardcover first, then paperback about a month after that, then ebook a little later. I’m not sure how long it will take Rob to get the ebook conversion done because I know he’s stacked up right now, so I’m still hoping for September. So hopefully for my birthday (next Friday in case you haven’t marked your calendars yet!) you’ll be able to order hardcovers. Then by Labor Day hopefully paperbacks and ebooks will be ready. I’m not sure how long it will take the ebook to be available in the Kindle store or iTunes, but it’ll be available on Smashwords as soon as the formatting is done. So now check out the cover by Lindsay, and lemme know what you think!

And I don’t just mean two blog posts in the same month, although that might qualify as well.

Last night, after a production meeting for Annie (funny the kind of shows we’ll accept when we have to pay for a new roof, isn’t it?) I headed over to the auditions that my buddy Jimmy was having for his company’s season. Jimmy was auditioning a bunch of stuff throughout the year, and I basically put on my audition form that my schedule was retarded but we’d work something out if he needed me. I like Jimmy as a person, and respect the hell out of him as an artist, so I’ll work for him in bit parts and for no money just to be around the kind of energy he has going.

But after I’d read a couple of things for him, something odd happened – he asked me if I was going to sing. I don’t sing. Well, I do, but I’ve been told (repeatedly) that I don’t do it well. At all. But here was a guy with more parts than actors making it a welcoming experience to audition for his musical. And since it’s Cannibal: the Musical, it might be okay to be a little off-key to go with the off-color. So I went out back of the bar (auditions were in a dive bar on the back patio) with Mimi, the musical director, and sang an audition.

Let’s be clear – I have NO musical training. Like, none. So when she said, let’s sing your range, I barely had any idea what she was talking about. But she was patient, and apparently I matched notes with the keyboard well enough for her to get an idea of what I can (or more likely can’t) do musically, and it was a good experience.

But the new part, or at least the part where I was reminded of what it’s like for most people, was the vulnerability I felt auditioning. I haven’t really auditioned for anything for a couple years, and even then it wasn’t a big deal. I put myself in positions where I’m either one of the best people in the audition pool, or at least one of the best people for the role, or I’m pre-cast without auditioning because I run the company, or I audition on a lark and don’t really care if I don’t get a part. It’s been a long time since I actually felt like a real actor feels when I’ve auditioned. Like I wanted to do well, and had no idea if I was doing well or not. It brought back a lot of those early-actor fears and insecurities and wonders and newness and was overall very, very cool. I still don’t know if my schedule will let me do the show even if they do want me, but after going through that, I kinda really want to do the show now. It feels like it would be really interesting to go back to something so far outside my comfort zone and try to master it.