by john | Nov 24, 2010 | Real Life
Just as I decided to rip apart the back cover blurb for Hard Day’s Knight, I find this post on the Publetariat today. Pretty nice, so I re-wrote the back blurb to more closely follow that format, and posted it on KindleBoards to crowdsource some feedback. I think within a day or two of working with the folks over there I should have a decent blurb ready to go. Then of course I’ll have to re-do the back cover, adding on the blurb, order a proof and approve it, and then the new copies will be ready sometime next year. Not a big deal, frankly, since I’ve got about 30 copies on order and ten in my truck, so I have plenty to sell until then. Once I’m done with HDK, I’ll probably re-do the back cover to The Chosen to incorporate some of the great reviews the book has gotten. Then maybe they’ll both be pretty much ready for public consumption.
HDK should be good to go in digital format next month. Rob tells me that we’re still on track to get the conversion done this month, and he’s the man, so I trust it will happen this week or next. Then it’s on me, and with Thanksgiving, a trip to Atlanta for work and a trip to NYC for vacation coming up I can’t make any promises. I would like to go ahead and release it for Kindle so that I can get some recommendations going before all those e-readers are given as Christmas gifts. I think the e-book market is going to see a huge swell this January as people load up the kindles and iPads they got for Christmas, so it’s fairly important to have as much product on the market as possible to catch the wave. I also really do believe that we’ll see this happen every year for the next several years, so it doesn’t kill me to only have two books out. That’s about all I can manage with a day job, anyway. And I’m a long, long way from not needing a day job. Speaking of which, I should go do that for a while instead of screwing around on here.
Happy Thanksgiving, folks! I’ll catch up with you after the holidays!
by john | Nov 23, 2010 | Real Life
So the crud that I am now getting over has passed into the wife, and apparently the crud is in reality bronchitis. And my wife, being much more sensible than me, decided to go to the doctor for it. She got a course of anitbiotics and some codeine-laced cough syrup. Unfortunately for her, this was the end of her good decision-making for the day.
Upon arriving home and reading the instructions, she saw that she was to take 5 ml of cough syrup every six hours. Now my first answer would have been to find out how many teaspoons are in a ml, or vice versa. Or alternately to just turn up the bottle and take big swallow. But Suzy did neither of those things, instead deciding that two tablespoons seemed about the right dosage.
Which is correct. If you’re a wildebeest.
So after ingesting 30 ml of codeine-laced cough syrup, my wife is at home high as the proverbial kite, and not enjoying it. You see, while 3-4 times the normal prescribed dosage is about right to catch a nice buzz, six times the normal prescribed dosage makes you itchy and twitchy, at least if you’re my wife. So I’m at work, still coughing up the last dregs of my illness, while she’s at home, looking at the pretty colors on the wall and finger-painting the dog. (I might be exaggerating, but not much).
Good times, kids, good times. In other worlds, I’m now about 5,000 words into Volume 2 of The Black Knight Chronicles. In this episode, our boys fight trolls. Real ones. Real BIG ones.
by john | Nov 22, 2010 | Real Life, Travel, Vegas, Writing
It’s going to be a busy few weeks around the old Casa de Hartness (since the last few months haven’t been chock-full AT ALL). This week is obviously Thanksgiving, which we’ll be spending in South Carolina with mi familia. It’s either a note on how frugal I’ve become or what a cheap bastard I am that I’d really like to take a Cheesecake Factory Pumpkin Cheesecake with us for dessert, but I’m balking at dropping the $50 on it. It’s not that $50 is a huge sum, but it’s a lot of money for one 10″ cheesecake, and I’ve gotten cheap about things like dessert recently.
Then Sunday I have a book signing at Park Road Books, which is one of only a couple of independent bookstores left in the Charlotte area. I’ll be signing anything anyone wants to buy, hopefully my restock order will be in by then (and hopefully I’ll need it!).
Next week I’ll be in Atlanta the first part of the week for work and then when I come back to Charlotte Suzy and I will be getting on a plane to go to New York for our 15th wedding anniversary. Sometimes it feels like just a few months ago that we were in college down at Winthrop together, and now we’re going off to the Big Apple to see the big tree at Rockefeller Center, check out America Idiot on Broadway, and go shopping at Mood fabrics in the Garment District (I’ll take a book, hopefully they have chairs for husbands). Suzy and my sister Bonnie are HUGE Project Runway fans, so this trip to Mood is a real highlight for her. Me, I could meh about the whole thing because I don’t know anything about fabric, but if it makes her happy it’s worth the trip.
And then I’m home for a couple days and then I turn around and head off to Las Vegas for the annual WPBT debauchery-thon. I’ve got a room at the MGM and would like to do a small book signing there for some folks if people let me know that they want copies of books. That will take some logistical figuring out between now and then.
And then there’s Christmas. We’re probably not doing much in the way of gift exchange, because there’s not much we want, and because we’re going to NYC a few weeks before Christmas. I think the whole family is pitching in together to get my parents a new TV (which I can blog about here because my parents are blissfully internet-free), so that will be a nice upgrade over their 20-year old Zenith console TV. We’ll have to get a stand, too, because despite my sister’s protestations, having a TV sitting on top of the old, busted TV is never acceptable.
Oh yeah, speaking of sister – she’ll be staying with us for the week after I get back from Vegas because of her second hip replacement. Yeah, her second hip replacement this year. Sucks to be her. Except that she came through the first one with flying colors and now is in a lot less pain, so I guess it sucks less to be her. But anyway, that’s neither here nor there, since Suzy is the one with the caretaker gene and my contribution to having her in my house for a week is mostly whining about sleeping in the guest bedroom.
So that’s life here lately. As you can see, I’m trying to make a more concerted effort to revive the blog. At least this week. I’ve started on the sequel to Hard Day’s Knight, so hopefully it will be ready to go sometime in the spring. And I got word from Rob that the ebook conversion for HDK should be finished this month, so it will come out on Kindle in time for Christmas, which is exciting. I have about enough story for five books with those characters right now, and I’m working on a couple of other things intermittently. I don’t see me becoming Hocking-level prolific anytime soon, but maybe in a few years I’ll generate some real revenue from this little side gig and be able to focus on it more full-time.
by john | Oct 27, 2010 | Poker, Real Life, Vegas, Writing
But this is what you get. And you’ll like it, too! Or not, but you probably won’t be pissed enough to tell me about it if you hate it.
So most of October has been spent getting Hard Day’s Knight ready to go, and yesterday I got home to find a box full of books waiting on me! So the book is available from Amazon and via CreateSpace, with ebook coming in November. Place your orders now by clicking here. I’ve booked a table selling books at a local Halloween carnival for Friday night, a NC Writer’s Network meeting next weekend, and a comic book convention in Raleigh on 11/12-14. So feel free to stop by any of those events and see me, too! I’ll have copies at each event to sign for folks, so either bring your copy or buy one at the event.
Speaking of buying, the lease was running out on the Element after almost four years, so I traded it in a couple weeks ago. 
The dealership bought me out of the lease, which was great since I was 10,000 miles over the lease (with 6 months driving left), and I picked up this beauty. She’s a 2008 Chevy Silverado with all the electronical type gadgets, and only 55,000 miles on her. She rides like a dream, and has a ton of room in the back seat. It’s a shortbed, but that’s all I need for the errands I run around the house. So far I’m loving it.
Last week saw me in Las Vegas for a conference, and wouldn’t you know it, I had a little time to play the Venetian noon tournament while I was there. Some of you may recall my epic 20-way even chop performance in that same tournament last December. I followed that up with a 7th-place finish, good for $500 (and $30 in prop bets!). I got really lucky once whe I cracked Kings with my Jacks after all the money went in preflop, then got really unlucky later when my Aces got cracked by Kings. I was crippled, but quintupled up on the next hand when I flopped a boat in a 6-way limped pot. So I made it all the way to 7th before I ran pocket fives into pocket tens and headed off to dinner. I played a little more over the week, ending up about $350-400 for the trip.
I of course used my winnings to book my flight to Vegas for December, and I’m looking forward to seeing all my degenerate friends again! I get in on Thursday and fly out on Monday, and I’ll be staying at the MGM. I also have a trip to NYC the weekend before to celebrate Suzy and my 15th wedding anniversary. We’re using Marriott points to stay at the Marriott Marquis in Time Square, and we’ll see American Idiot and something else while we’re there.
So that’s what’s going on here – now go buy a book!
by john | Sep 9, 2010 | Real Life, The Chosen, Writing
So here we are, looking for insight into the mind of the self-publishing bazillionaire.
Keep looking, I’m still working on breaking even.
But I’m getting close. I ran the numbers for you a few posts ago, so we won’t go into that again, but we’re three weeks from the removed from the release of The Chosen and I’ve made $140 from the book so far.
Stunning, isn’t it? Now before you get all disheartened for me, there’s another $8 in Kindle revenues coming my way, and I haven’t gotten any reports from the Apple store yet, and likely won’t for a while, because those reports have to trickle down to me through several different accounting departments. So let’s call it $148 in revenue so far, of which roughly $30 goes to my editor (remember, she’s on commission with a cap).
I spent $521 on making the book happen, and I’ve recouped 28% of the cost of the book in the first three weeks. I’m pretty happy about that, actually. I know the real dollars and cents aren’t huge, but I figure by the end of the fall I’ll have covered the costs of development and production, and then will begin making money. Which is a pretty quick return on investment.
I saw something posted on the KindleBoards today that really summed up how I feel about the measuring of pennies that I’m doing right now. Someone posted something, and I’m too lazy to go look it up for attribution, that said that we’re looking at a tortoise and hare situation here. Serious writers will work on developing their backlist and promoting their work, while people who are looking for a quick buck will publish one book, get discouraged by the numbers that I posted above, and fade away.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to make a quick buck (or barrel of bucks). But I know that The Chosen isn’t going to be a huge best-seller. It’s not genre enough to be a fantasy novel, and it’s too genre to be a literary novel. It’s the kind of book that people don’t know how to categorize, and that means that selling the book will be all on me. And I’m okay with that. At the Arts Market last weekend, I told people that the book had a “no-suck” guarantee on it. If they bought the book, read the whole things, and hated it, I’d give them their $10 back. This served as a good ice breaker, and I don’t expect anyone to actually ever take me up on it for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the book is pretty good. But it’s not marketable enough to be a huge seller. So I’ll learn a lot of lessons about publishing, and as the vampire novel comes together (a little less than halfway through) I can capitalize on the experience.
And maybe make a few bucks in the process. If you haven’t bought your copy yet, what are you waiting for?
by john | Aug 23, 2010 | Real Life, Writing
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!
