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 30, 2010 | Writing
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!
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!
by john | Aug 22, 2010 | Real Life, Theatre, Writing
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.
by john | Aug 19, 2010 | Writing
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!
by john | Aug 15, 2010 | The Chosen, Writing
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!
