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[alexandraerin]

So, one of the lessons I've learned over the past few years is that not everything works as a serial. This should be obvious. I mean, among the reasons I started doing serials is my belief that not every story's suited to be a novel. Form should follow... I don't know, not function exactly, but the form of the story should suit its needs.

And yet the bulk of my stories and attempted stories have fit into a few very narrow confines. Serials and flash fiction being the most common... extremely long, open-ended stories and extremely brief ones. I've written a few short stories. I've attempted a few novels. I'm not really sure I have it in me "to novel", though. I'd go into that more, but that's really a side point.

I've been talking a post about Gift of the Bad Guy and my plans for it. These are also, incidentally, my plans for Dustball Ramblers and possibly The 3 Seas and a very evolved version of that story I started writing one time with a bunch of my D&D characters that maybe six of you have read. And possibly the book about the woman who is a wizard, though that one I might live to novel yet.

None of these projects are going to work as the sort of open-ended serial I write. That isn't to say they could be serialized; it is to say they don't lend themselves to the Tales of MU style, which means I'm not the right person to serialize them. But there are things about the serial format that I like. I like the immediacy, the instant gratification for both author and audience. I like not having to wait to get paid, for that matter, and having my full body of work continue to generate income passively.

And I'd like to diversify my income a bit more, branch out from cup-rattling and into selling content... without putting a subscription gate on my principle work, Tales of MU, naturally. What I'm planning wouldn't have worked three or four years ago, when nobody knew who I was. I have a name to trade on now, but having other options doesn't make my original plan less sound.

So what am I talking about? A series of unfortunate events of very short, very cheap e-books. In a few weeks to a month, I intend to put Gift of the Bad Guy up for sale in this form. It might not be called that. I haven't worked out if that's the name of a series or of the first part or a title that will work better for something later in the series.

This will be part 1 of a series. It'll be between 25,000 and 30,000 words in its final form, most likely. Maybe between 50 and 70 pages. Smaller than a NaNoWriMo-winning novel, and that always seems to me to be a respectable size for a novella. I've been seeing the term "novelette" lately, and it might fit, though I still have some qualms about using any novel-derived label as to me a novel is a specific form.

This story will be self-contained and it won't be. I mean, you'll read it and I hope you'll be satisfied that it doesn't just stop in the middle of a scene, but it will very clearly be a part 1, and not in the sense that The Matrix would have been a part one if they'd ever gotten around to developing the rumored sequels for it that they never actually produced ever. There's no fight scene or big resolution. It'll be more like part one in the sense of being an introduction.

I'm thinking it will debut at about $1. Unless I give in and go the Retail Mind Tricks route and make it 99 cents. Future installments in the same series will be more like the $2 range, because you already know what you're getting. I want the buy-in to be cheap on the first book, you see, and I want it to be affordable to continue reading.

Print editions will happen when there are enough volumes to make an edition worth printing. If demand is high enough, I might shop around for something other than self-publishing, or at least do a pre-order dealy so I can do a volume print run to save everyone involved some money.

So, anyway, that's the deal. As I suggested above, I'm planning on reworking The 3 Seas into this format... no idea yet if any of my other gestating/failed/malingering serials will go the same route. If you've ever been a supporter/sponsor of The 3 Seas serial version, you'll be getting courtesy copies of any e-books that include material adapted from the stuff I've already published in that version. You've already paid for it. I'll be letting you know when I have more of an ETA on that. Editing is slower for me than writing, and that's basically what the 3 Seas job is going to be.

These things'll come out between 1 and 3 a month, depending on muse and ability. My intent is that after I've been doing it for a while, there will be something like a snackbar people can order from a la carte. Some of the stuff might be truly stand-alone. Some might end up being only two or three installments before being brought to a close. I'm going to be eschewing a one-size-fits-all solution here. I may or may not end up attaching share-alike type licenses to the books, since I'm obviously not going to be overly bothered about piracy of my $1 e-books.

Like everything else I do, it's an experiment. I think it could be big, but I won't have to invest too much in finding out, as I've already got most of the first offering

(And I'm going to be taking its results into account as I consider what to do with my RPG project.)

Answer To The Fully Anticipated Question:

Definitely PDF, probably also EPUB.

Comments

[m.m. (from livejournal.com)]

Hey, sorry if this is kind of off-topic... But I was wondering if you/the US are using a different definition for "novel" than we/Europe is? According to what I know of the definition, a novel is inherently different from a short story/novella (sorry, I'm a bit fuzzy on the English terminology) in the way it is built up. Supposedly a novel is not only characterized by length, but multiple threads of activity (or in other words, complexity), several character stories and development and, well... depth. Not to say that a novel is considered "better" than shorter forms. It's just more fussy than a short story, which usually has one main theme and one main character, no complex jumps in time and space etc.

Just something that always confuses me when US people talk about length and word count, was wondering about your take on it. Obviously Tales of MU is what I and the European classification would consider a novel, a long-form, complex work.

Also, wooo! Great ideas all around, I would be insanely happy to get 3 Seas in that form. I think many, many people would enjoy your proposed format of cheap chunks of story.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

A lot of people focus on the length in casual discussions or things like NaNoWriMo, but I don't believe anybody who actually works with words/books believes that exty-thousand words strung in a row automatically constitute a novel. I think most people's informal internal definitions of a novel would involve the structure in some way.

I don't consider Tales of MU to be a novel because I believe both structure and length to important, and a number of other unspoken assumptions about the story and the conventions it will follow. And of course there's the most basic part of the definition, which states that a novel is a book, which Tales of MU isn't.

[raymond arnold (from livejournal.com)]

There's an indie game developer named Jeff Vogel who's written a few articles about the pricing of indie games, and I think some of his points may be worth considering in the e-author world. I'm not sure how long these various e-books are going to be, but basically, be wary of undercharging.

This might be a little less relevant if you're considering the opening book to be a "demo", but a lot of times the money you gain from selling extra copies at $1 is outweighed by amount you'd gain if you sold fewer copies at $3. By now you probably have a dedicated enough fanbase that you can count on a certain number of copies at fairly high prices (depending on how substantial a story you're talking about, possibly $5), and then another bunch of people who might try it on a whim if it were cheaper, but not necessarily five times as many as the dedicated fans.

Basically, don't be afraid to charge what you think you're worth. There are always going to be people complaining it's too expensive or not updated enough or whatever and you'll never be able to satisfy them all.

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/04/indie-games-should-cost-more-pt-2.html

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

I am going to be selling them for $1-$2, but that's based on what I feel is a fair prize for the size of the offering. I wouldn't expect to pay $5 myself for a 30,000 word story unless I could see where the production costs would be going.

Still, thanks for the link and food for thought. You've helped an idea gel for me.

[cluudle.livejournal.com]

In some cases, some industries, pricing something lower can be detrimental to its sales. This is a function of 'I don't have to pay very much for this, so it isn't worth very much, so it's not very good quality work. I'll buy this more expensive one instead.'

I'm not sure how that translates to ebooks etc. Just throwing it out there.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

...

Do we all understand I am talking about a 50 page book?

[raymond arnold (from livejournal.com)]

I think part of what happened is the number I actually remembered as "70" (you did say 50-70) and I mentally rounded that up to 100, which was a big enough number that I lumped it in with things from 100-300 pages.

But I've also noticed a trend on the internet to race to the bottom with prices, and I've read enough articles about how the math actually works to know that the bottom price isn't the best one, especially when you have a pre-existing fanbase. So when I'm giving unsolicited advice to random creators that I don't know well, I tend to err on the side of encouraging them to price higher. (Also, as a random artist myself, it's to my benefit to keep overal expectations of prices higher, so I can sell my stuff for more).

I have no idea how much of the following applies to cluudle.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

You could benefit in the long run from falling expectations of price, though.

Granted that transaction fees put a floor on this, but as the price people expect to pay for an acceptable work falls, the perception of a lower-priced work as being lower quality also falls.

If we reach the point where two dollars and fifty cents' worth of book is being seen as being the same as $5, it seems likely to me that we'd more than double our sales by havling the price. Why? Because more than twice as many people will have $2.50 to spare and feel like taking a chance on spending it on a work of unknown quality from an unknown quantity.

And even if the total profit stayed the same while the "sweet spot" for the pricing point migrated downwards, well... same money + wider audience is a net win for me as an artist.

But then you'll have to bear in mind you're talking to somebody who's thoroughly dedicated to the idea of giving content away for free in the first place. I'm already in the lowest circle of art-devaluing hell according to some people.

[raymond arnold (from livejournal.com)]

First - having looked at the actual numbers again I fully agree with you on the pricing for the particular product you're talking about. I also agree there's a range in the "sweet spot" zone and that the section that yields bigger audience is superior to one that has an identical profit but smaller audience.

In general, I see a difference between free content and paid content. By now free stuff on the internet is pretty ubiquitous and its not going away. But I think people have different mindsets of how they approach free content vs paid content. In my own experience, I perceive three gradations:

•  Free content that I genuinely feel entitled to, whether I actually deserve it or not. This includes mindless entertainment and information. Thanks to wikipedia, I genuinely don't feel any obligation to pay for information ever. (Rationally I disagree with it, but that's my gut feeling)

• Free content that I feel an emotional connection to and would be sad (as opposed to just annoyed) if it were no longer available. This includes most webcomics, Talesofmu, and certain video content. I can get the raw entertainment for free, but I pay extra for the experience of feeling directly connected with the artist and responsible for the continuation of something I love. I don't contribute to everything I enjoy this way, but I feel guilty about the ones I don't. I know that I have a limited budget and I donate what I can, and hope that other people are donating to the stuff that I'm not. I think that "$1 impulse buys" mostly fall into this category, but I usually avoid them because I know Paypal isn't very efficient with them.

• Quality products that are worth paying for and owning. I recently finished book 1 of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. It's a fanfiction published pretty much the way TalesofMu is, without any pretense of making money. But the first section ends extremely powerfully, in a way that felt complete (even with cliffhangers), and there's a snazzy PDF available with a polished, e-book feel. Because of all those factors, I felt motivated to donate $25 to a charity I know the author cares about.

I've periodically donated to you to assuage my guilt for getting quality free entertainment for the previous several months. Usually when you go out of your way to say "hey guys, I kinda really need money right now." Usually not as much as I feel you deserved. But there's a limit to how much warm fuzzies I can buy for myself my sending money out into the etherwebs for nebulous, and I have other bills to pay. So I ended up rounding down to a number that feels safe to donate, rather than up to a number worth paying for a complete experience. You can get a lot of impulse and guilt money in small chunks, but telling the story in the meandering way that you have so far, you're reducing income from people willing to pay premium for something complete. So the reason I jumped at this particular discussion and got so excited about a 50 page book is that for the first time, you looked to be offering the sort of thing I've been wanting to purchase from you.

I apologize for the wall of text. You're clearly already aware of these issues. I can also see that you ARE trying to shape MU in a similar direction. I've been liking the recent story arc and hope it gets a satisfying conclusion.

A lot of my motivation for writing this was sorting out my own feelings and thoughts. (Once I started writing I realized I HADN'T actually thought this through before and wasn't sure what I believed or why). Hopefully you either got something out of it or at least got renewed motivation to do what you're already in the process of doing.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

You can get a lot of impulse and guilt money in small chunks, but telling the story in the meandering way that you have so far, you're reducing income from people willing to pay premium for something complete.

And yet my instincts tell me that I'm making more money this way than I could have by offering complete "premium" works for the past three years.

I mean, I don't have any numbers to back that up specifically. I couldn't, without peering into an alternate universe where I got an agent and started peddling manuscripts or something. But by comparing my figures to ones I've found researching the industry and what I know of my peers at similar stages of their careers... heck it wasn't that long ago that an honest to goodness award-winning author of my acquaintance had to hit the internet panic button in a similar way that I have on occasion done.

(I'm pretty sure that in the alternate universe where I skipped the agent and peddling manuscripts and tried to make a living selling ebooks for $5-10 as an unknown, I died penniless. That dog don't hunt.)

The money I'm going to make selling finished works*... I think it's going to be pretty respectable. I'll be honest about that. My goal for it is to cut down on how much I rely on a few big supporters, and lessen the chance that I'll have to hit the internet panic button in the future. (That's also why I'm embracing fun/audience participationy things like the derby when things start to get lean, instead of waiting until things are dire.) I think this is going to be a significant revenue stream for me.

But I think it's going to be respectable because of a variety of factors, including my audience and name-recognition, my experience with unconventional e-commerce, and my chosen price point and size. If this ends up being wildly successful and eclipses the money I get from Tales of MU, it won't be a vindication of this way over the other way... it'll just be one more step in the ongoing triumph of the other way.

And I put the * up there because I'm not sure you won't find yourself vaguely disappointed with the actual completeness of my 50-70 page novelettes. Like I've said about the post-shift volume two of Tales of MU: it's still me writing.

Gift of the Bad Guy is not the same kind of ongoing story as TOMU is, but... well, I'll put it like this.

A dollar will get you the first installment, and when you buy it, you're buying the pilot of a show that's already got a season order, not the made-for-TV-movie that hopes to launch a show but is designed to stand on its own just in case.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

Also, thank you for the support.

[zukiraphaera.livejournal.com]

The way you're describing the Gift of the Bad Guy and so forth it comes across as a sort of middle ground between MU style and novel style, to me. Puts me in mind of more recent projects such as Stephen King's Green Mile, which as it was produced was being released as chap books, and later you could get it as a whole novel. It happens to be very akin to how authors in the 19th century often publicized their works. Dickens is a fine example, as is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of writers who've done so. Dickens and Doyle originally wrote for magazines so the more chapters the more they got paid.

Kudos on the project ideas, and I hope you're feeling better.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Stephen King's shown a wonderful willingness to try this sort of new/old idea... he also did Riding The Bullet, an early experiment in e-fiction. Unfortunately his name kind of skews the results in two directions. One, anything he undertakes is going to have a lot more attention on it than if anybody else did it, and two, the bar for success is higher.

[natalief.livejournal.com]

Can I add a vote for "EPUB but please not PDF"? My ebook reader (Sony Reader Pocket) does not play well with PDFs. EPUB is now the cross-platform standard, it seems. I like the way MCAHogarth does it via both Amazon (.com and .co.uk) for Kindles and Smashwords for other formats. I also have an iPhone and the Kindle reader app for that (and for my mac).

I also think this could be big. Share-alike FTW as well.

The ones I was reading but seemed to stall was the superheroes one (I forget its name) and the OtherToMU about Jamie and Iason. Then again I am sure I read some or all of everything you have out there at one point or another!

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

I'm currently planning on offering both, as I can't see a downside to that. It seems like PDFs can be snazzier than EPUBs, because of the cross-compatibility issues.

Can you tell me, are you able to alter the display font on your reader with EPUBs? Or does your reader otherwise override the specified font?

[natalief.livejournal.com]

Sadly, it only displays the font that the EPUB specifies. Otherwise, I would change all fonts to sans-serif because I find serif fonts hard to read. Hubby's iPad (the iBooks app) can change the fonts. Ah yes, I have iBooks on my iPhone as well but that does badly with PDFs as well. Yes, PDFs can be snazzier but I think many eReaders cannot render them well because the PDF hard-codes too much, in our experience.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

Okay! I knew that some readers can change fonts, I didn't know if it was standard. So I'll be sure to offer both fonts in both formats.

[natalief.livejournal.com]

Okay, that is weird. I wrote a long coment and it has not posted and it is not still in the edit box. *sigh*

Suffice to say EPUB not PDF please because my eBook reader (Sony Reader Pocket) does not handle PDFs at all well.

I have Kindle reader app on iPhone and Mac.

MCAHogarth haikujaguar uses Amaxon (.com and .co.uk) and Smashwords to sell her eBooks in many formats with and without DRM.

Share-alike FTW. $1 or $2 FTW.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

I have screening on for non-friends by default to keep trolling to a minimum. I've added you so you can comment without delay.

[natalief.livejournal.com]

Still weird, when a comment is screened elsewhere I can see it with a dotted line around it. Thanks for explaining, anyway!