Marketing research!

The Gift of the Bad Guy is the first installment in The Gifters Saga, and also the first e-book I'm going to be publishing under a new imprint using a new combination of marketing concepts I've been putting together. It's a small book of a bit under one hundred pages, it will be available in both PDF and EPUB, and it will carry a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license. My current plans are to launch the book on March 14th. There are some details I need to iron out between now and then, and participating in this survey will help me do so.

Please note that the "would like to know more" choices refer specifically to "before making up my mind to buy it." If you're already mostly sure you're going to buy it but this has not blunted your desire to know more, please choose the result that signifies your willingness to purchase.

[Poll #1679177]

You can find more information (including a teaser snippet) by checking out the tag I created for the story.

To explain the concept mentioned in the third question: I've hit upon the idea of an "Author Appreciation Edition" to standardize the process for people who wish to give a little bit more, and also give them some recognition. Each AAE would include a personalized acknowledgment up front (your name and my thank-you, or someone else's name and a custom dedication if it's a gift) and would be individually numbered. The numbers would be for ego purposes, so you know where you were in line. As a DRM-free electronic document, your copy would be as unique or as ubiquitous as you want it to be.

Copies of the book sold after an AAE are purchased would include the buyer's name in a list of credits at the back, save for purchasers who wish to remain anonymous. This might not apply to copies of the books purchased through other venues/stores. I'll have to see how easy it is to update the manuscript in those cases.

If there's sufficient interest in this plan for me to actually do the AAE copies, there will be a pre-order period for them. People who pre-order will have the certainty that their names will appear in every copy in existence.

Feel free to use the comments of this post to give more specific feedback.

(no subject)

News For Today:

First, briefly, I'd really appreciate people filling out the survey in my previous post. I'm going to be linking this in the MU post that goes up today, too.

Second, if you've seen my mentions of the Rose And Bay Awards but couldn't make sense of the nomination/voting posts, you may be interested in this compilation post that links to each of the nominated works and the place to vote for them.

I'm moving forward with my plans to offer incentives to my sponsors. In addition to the current recognition offered to sponsors at the $5-and-up level, I'm going to be putting out a little e-mail newsletter beginning in March. If you're not interested in receiving this, it's easy enough to opt out when you set up your payment... existing sponsors will receive a confirmation e-mail that will allow them to opt out.

Why do you need a newsletter if you read my blog? Well, it'll give you a digest of the important stuff without having to wade through my rants and rambles. It'll also be my venue for sharing all those things that I'm itching to talk about but that aren't quite ready for public consumption. If I'd had the newsletter last month, the sponsors would have known more about The Gift of the Bad Guy, sooner.

I've also simplified the presentation of the sponsorship options, making three different forms for the three general levels (Good Will, Personal Sponsor, and Patron), with a drop down menu to choose your exact level of commitment.

Becoming a Personal Sponsor or Patron now gives you the option of joining the MU Alumni Association, a general sponsor list, or both. I'm formalizing something that's been more-or-less true for a while... I've been reluctant to remove names from the list because most cancellations seem to be automatic based on failed payments. A lot of the time the same person signs up again a week or a month later. I've also received heartfelt emails from people who want to keep up their support but can't. It's not like it costs me anything to maintain the lists, so I'm making the recognition permanent. Current sponsors will receive unofficial priority in being near the top of the list (unofficial in that there's no set timeline for me moving lapsed sponsors to the bottom), but if someone's given me $25 a month for a period of months I'm not going to strike their name from the records.

As I move the sponsor list over to my new personal website, I'll be re-adding the people who I've removed and titling it to reflect that it's current and past sponsors. If anybody canceled their subscription as a pointed statement of repudiating me and all my works, they can please email me at my contactme address and let me know. Otherwise I assume that my sincere gratitude is no burden to them, even if they're no longer reading.

I'm going to be going over the sponsor lists for my other stories at the same time I do that. Those who set up a sponsorship for one of my other, less current stories will be given the option of joining the Alumni Association or, of course, canceling their sponsorship. I'm going to keep a note of who has sponsored the other stories, and as I move towards continuing them in other forms I will keep those who supported them in the past in mind and recognize their generous efforts.

The timeframe for completing this migration/merging/restoration of the lists is by the end of March. At the end of that period my previous personal website (alexandraerin.com) will redirect to the new one.

You can find the new support page and its options here.

Personal Assessment

Stayed up all night, but this was after sleeping all day. I feel fine physically. I'm pleased and gratified to have had a productive and balanced day after coming down from my manic creative fugue over the weekend.

Dreams From Last Night

I'll make a separate post when I wake up, if I have any.

Random Link

melimuses is a community for lovers of honey and honey-themed creativity, "a place to savor honey, to transmute that pleasure into art, to encourage and share with each other. And so we welcome anyone desiring to sample local honeys, to share their local honeys with far-flung companions, to engage creatively with a substance of mythical proportions."

Tasks For Today

• Sleep.
  
• Finish and post the next chapter of Tales of MU. We're getting into some pivotal and climactic shit, yo. Like in this chapter, Mackenzie and Kent will have a conversation while walking through the foyer, and possibly even a hallway.
  
• Do some more tag-work on Tales of MU.
  
• Begin assembling the preview version of The Gift of the Bad Guy.
  

Spotted by haikujaguar in <lj site="livejournal.com" user="crowdf

An established writer who blogs on the business side of writing makes a strong case for why new authors might want to self-publish rather than seeking success through Big Publishing.

She seems entertainingly reluctant to come to this conclusion. There are some points I wasn't aware of/hadn't considered in my previous spiels on this subject, including the fact that publishers will use the electronic rights to keep a book "in print" indefinitely at a low cost with the result that the rights never revert back to the author.

I've been of the opinion that most authors who never hit the mid tier and even many who do are better off taking control of their back catalog and marketing their out of print books directly to the audience as e-books... seems publishers agree that this is where the easy money is.

Look at this quote:

Once a book sells into traditional publishing, it will remain a part of traditional publishing. Which means that, eventually, the writer will earn out his advance, and will make $10, $20 or $30 extra dollars per year on that book.

$10, $20, or $30 dollars a year from a book. Yeah, that's after you've earned your advance so it's not like it's the only profit the book gives you, but what kind of recurring income is that? People enjoy books for years, shouldn't they earn money for you for years?

One needs a big publishing house to produce thousands and thousands of dead tree copies and distribute them across the country, but there's absolutely no reason to be giving the lion's share of e-book profits to an army of middlemen. Is the publisher shouldering the hefty cost of electrons? No. And any talk about the big publisher having resources that we don't for promoting and getting the book into stores is just that... the whole point of these kind of slow lingering death deals is that most books will never bring in the big bucks that justify that kind of individual attention.

These are catalog fillers we're talking about, as most books are. Joe Blow's Self-Published E-Book #11 won't stand out from the crowd any less than Joe's Blow Generic Never-Broke-Out Non-Hit Book.

Now the thing that seems like a major blindspot in the post... and maybe somewhere in the series of posts preceding it this is addressed or explained... is that there seems to be a bit of a false dilemma between succumbing to the allure of Big Publishing or self-publishing with no examination of the options in between. If a weight loss company could figure out how to make an expansive middle region disappear as quickly as this post does, they could print their own money.

This blog series has actually been nominated for a Rose And Bay Award in the "Other Project" category. I'm probably going to check out the rest of it, by and by.

Finding And Building Your Audience Part 1: The World's Only Furry Author

This is part one in a series of posts about finding and building an audience as an independent author.

Imagine for the moment that you were the only person in the world writing furry fic.

Note: This is not a discussion of the merits/value or lack thereof of the furry community and fiction that follows its tropes. Nor will it become one.

I say again, imagine for the moment that you were the only person in the world writing furry fic. How this would come about in the first place is somewhat beside the point, but imagine what it would be like for a member of furry fandom to discover your writing. The world is full of books and stories, but here you are, writing works that speak to an aspect of their lives that nothing else in existence does. Your audience will not be the biggest but they will be the most loyal and enthusiastic audience you could ask for, because you give them something else they can't find anywhere else and something they desperately want.

The World's Only Furry Author would not be a New York Time's Bestselling novelist, but you would have a devoted fandom that would be more than capable of supporting you and your endeavors, and be perfectly happy to do so, too.

If you're trying to catch the eye of the publishing world, conventional wisdom would have you write conventional things. Sure, you're supposed to come up with something new to make your work stand apart from every other conventionally constructed novel with broad appeal, but you aren't supposed to be so different that you're not turning in a conventionally constructed novel with broad appeal.

"This could be a great story, but why is the main character a fox? Most adult will think it's a kid's book, we can't market a book with this much sex in it to kids... and the people from the internet will hate it because they'll get that it's a furry story. The furry audience just isn't big enough to support this kind of book."

See, in the conventional world of publishing, all the people that your sexy fox/foxy sex story might appeal to are being weighed against all the people it won't, and it will be found wanting because to the publisher, more copies are always better than fewer. They can afford to think that way, because they have a much larger supply of author and manuscripts to choose from than they have the ability to print, and to a degree they have to think that way, because they're trying to support themselves as an industry and pay a lot of salaries and do right by their investors and so on.

As an author? If you're not trying to break into big publishing, you can't afford to think that way and you don't have to. As the World's Only Furry Author, you don't have to pay anyone else's salary and you can't fire yourself and get a new story to tell if you wanted to... but you don't have to, because it doesn't matter how many people will reject your story for being basically unappealing to them or failing to comply with the conventions they're used to. All that matter is how many people will find it appealing. You aren't being fined a dollar for everyone who doesn't like your book.

Look at it this way: if you sold a copy to every man, woman, and child on earth and then suddenly we discovered a lost colony of humans with another six or seven billion people living in glass domes under the ice of Europa, would you be lamenting the fact that only half of humanity had read your book, or would you be celebrating the coup of having sold over six billion books in the first place?

So if you have two or three or five or ten thousand people reading your books and are making a nice bit of income off of it, what does it matter if six billion people don't know about and/or rejecting it?

But maybe The World's Only Furry Author is thinking, "But wait! If I can write a book that two thousand people will love, why not twenty thousand? Why not two million? I'll just write a new book that's like my last one but I'll change out the part that made people reject it."

So you take your fox tale and you make the the characters humans and you release your book and...

Nothing much comes of it.

Your old audience doesn't care because your new book doesn't speak to them. Your new audience never materializes because you have left the equivalent of a well-stocked private lake and are now basically casting your line into a parking lot that used to be a lake before it was drained and paved over.

It is a better career move to be The World's Only Furry Author than it is to try for conventional success as a conventional writer.

Obviously you can't be The World's Only Furry Author, because the internet is full of that shit and people do it for free because the publishing world only accepts stories involving be-furred protagonists in certain narrow contexts, which mostly don't speak directly to the interests of the diehard furry fandom. Some of the better furry authors are making money off their work in various ways, I'm fairly sure, and if they're not, they should be.

And the fervor with which the furry fandom embraces the multiple authors and other artists who produce work that speaks to them just underscores the real point here, which isn't actually about furries: you can rarely go wrong serving an under-served market.

Don't worry if your writing lacks broad appeal. If that's the case, just don't sell it to broads. You just need to figure out who it does appeal to, and figure out how to connect to them... or, alternately, get your work in a position where other people can figure out if it appeals to them and connect to it themselves. Doing that means letting go of the fear of rejection and any concern for those readers who won't find your work appealing, because for every one reader you attract, there may be ninety-some who click past without stopping for more than a second and a few who feel the need to tell you how disappointed they are that you've wasted their time.

I'll talk more about the process of connecting with an audience in part two.

The Importance of being Earnest, and vice-versa.

A conversation about Diane Duane and her problems that happened on an earlier post made me think to go looking for a post I once made about shame and the lack thereof. I was surprised to see that I made it almost a year ago... just over eleven months ago, in fact. I was surprised because it honestly took me a long time from making that post to actually being able to follow through on its resolution, so it still feels like a lesson freshly learned.

There's a lot of post-mortem being done on Diane Duane's e-xperiment all over the internet, as is natural. She's a published author with an established following and she tried a crowdfunding project. Those always get lots of attention. Her attempt seems to be being broadly counted as a failure even though it has apparently produced a book and it did, in fact, raise funds. In her own post on the subject and in the comments on Boing Boing (the top link, above) from her supporters/subscribers, it's clear that the failure was not in the model, nor in her lack of timely updates per se, but in her lack of communication.

I know exactly what this is about. The times I have come the closest to failing in my own experiment were not when I wasn't able to update in a timely fashion, they were the times when I wasn't able to update in a timely fashion and I felt helpless and alone. They were the times when I wasn't able to update in a timely fashion and I was wracked with guilt and didn't know who to turn to. They were the times when I wasn't able to update in a timely fashion and I was so ashamed.

They were the times I didn't update in a timely fashion and I didn't talk to you, I didn't let you in and tell you what was going on.

And when that happened, sometimes the troubles passed and I was able to resume work without comment. When that happened, I expected that the resumed updates alone would be enough to earn back the reservoirs of trust and patience I had begun with, but no... people saw me starting and stopping without a word of explanation.

Sometimes the troubles didn't pass and I reached a breaking point and I was finally forced into a position where I had no other choice but to open up... and when that happened, kindness and trust and patience flowed forward like a great gushing river of kindness and trust and patience and also water and some fish. And it was amazing. Money flowed forward, too... more than enough to alleviate the more immediate problems... but the outpouring of emotional support was a real revelation.

Not enough of one, apparently, because I remained reluctant to open up.

Anyway, Cory Doctor makes the interesting point in his post above that off the rails is the natural state of a novel. Books get delayed, they don't pan out, they veer off in unexpected directions or collapse under their own weight. This happens all the time. It happens with first novels and it happens with bestsellers. I hadn't considered it in terms of "The Industry" as a whole, only my own creative experience, but this is why I'm moving away from "I SHOULD MAKE A SERIAL OUT OF THIS!" as my model for everything to the literary snackbar approach.

It's a lot easier to bring a 20-to-50 thousand word book to life than it is to write a novel or sustain a serial. The Gift of the Bad Guy was originally intended to be a novel. Now that novel is three short books. The first one is substantially finished. The second one I've got a decent start on. If the third one never materializes for any reason... well, we got some story out of the idea, didn't we?

(I'm not doing cliffhangers, and the second one's going to have a more conclusion-y ending than the first one, just in case.)

I can develop a lot of ideas at once this way and see which one catches on in my mind. Tales of MU is going to remain my main focus for the foreseeable future and beyond. I'm not tired of it and I see no reason to end it. Even if the story of Mackenzie wrapped up or became unsustainable (not something I foresee, especially with the volume shift to liven things up) I wouldn't be done telling tales about MU and the MUniverse. But for my other ideas? Oh, maaaan... I know they're not all going to pan out, but I'm excited to think that some of them are.

There's a generalized lesson in this that all writers can take away something from, but damned if I know what it is because FedEx just showed up with my Kindle and I want to see how the title page of The Gift of the Bad Guy looks in it, then maybe take a look at the MU feed.

A sidenote about sidenotes.

I like using the first comment on a story/chapter to put up my announcements/reminders. It feels less intrusive and gratuitous than wedging the info in before or after the story itself, and I have a feeling it comes across as more conversational... also, it gives a central point on the page for people to reply to the announcement which makes it more likely that I'll spot questions and responses.

If anybody's wondering how I manage to get such wonders of TL;DR in the comment box right after posting, I save the story and open it up in a browser window, type the comment up, and then right after I post the story I submit the comment. Wordpress eats the comment if you try to submit it first.

Hopefully most of them won't be as long as the one I put up tonight. I just wanted to get the people who don't read the blog up to speed on some of the major things.