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alexandraerinTomorrow I'm going to do another behind-the-scenes post for Tales of MU like the one about things that changed in the execution, but for now here's Yet Another Update On Gift Of The Bad Guy/the snackbar concept. I'm excited about this.
First, Bookman Old Style is almost definitely going to be the serif font. The number of people who've said "ooh" when I told them what I'm planning on using is impressive, and what's more, I like the reasons I'm hearing. It seems to be a genuine aesthetically choice... you don't have to be educated about why it's a good font to think it's a good font.
Second, at some point I absorbed and internalized a very wrong internal benchmark for estimating the page count of a work. Someone early on in MU's existence did a quick-and-dirty estimate using 500 words per page, and I thought that sounded about right and never questioned it. Turns out that 250 words of a standard 12 point font fit much more nicely on a printed page.
So my little fifty page book? Is a hundred pages long. I'm re-examining the price point question based on that, but it's possible that the results of my examination will be "No, I still want people to have a dirt cheap buy-in." Never fear, gentle readers... I wouldn't be giving it away at a penny a page if I wasn't sure I could make money off it.
And if it doesn't exactly sell like gangbusters? Meh. I've had a good month. If it starts slow, it starts slow. It's not like I've invested thousands of dollars and there's a whole department full of people whose jobs are riding on my first quarter sales figures being outstanding across the board. This is the beauty of a one person operation: if I somehow only sell three copies of the book in March, it's not a failure... it's a book that has yet to succeed.
I mean, I still have money trickling in from the PDFs of the first five Tales of MU books, and they are not half as snazzy as this is. I'll be honest, I'm not proud of them. I put them up because people demanded them. I did not at that point have the skills to make a decent e-book. I'm sure I'm still not great, but when I load the mock-up I made of Gift of the Bad Guy onto my phone and look at it, I get chills. I've never believed in the collected volumes of Tales of MU to the degree that I believe in the serial, and it shows.
This thing... both the specific book and the publishing concept behind it... is something I believe in. It's something I think people are going to want. It's something I think people are going to enjoy. And maaaaaaaaan, I know and you know that my hard drives and the internet are littered with the bones of my projects that ran out of steam, but here's the thing: this is not just another entry in that long line. It is the ultimate entry in it. Because that's exactly what happened with Gift of the Bad Guy... until I threw out a bunch of my preconceptions and started making new shit up. And now I'm looking at a bunch of stuff I never finished and I'm seeing them with new eyes.
Honestly, I feel like I did when Tales of MU started to catch on. MU isn't my first crack at weblit... I was writing stories on the internet as far as back as my junior year of high school (spoiler warning: they weren't very good. Though Ariella's were a thing of brilliance.) I'd been writing serials online for like three years before I started Tales of MU, but Tales of MU is where a bunch of things just fell into place for me.
Anyway, I'm blabbing a lot about this but it's because I'm excited and because honestly it's killing me to have a story and not be sharing it with people. Among the reasons I'm not launching the book with my typical ready-fire-aim immediacy is that I've arranged for a proofreader to go over it first. The first chapter should be available in a finished state sometime this week, and when it does I'll be putting up PDFs of both versions (sans and avec serif).
And I'm going to cut this post off here, because I think it's been sufficiently established that I can ramble on forever about this topic.
First, Bookman Old Style is almost definitely going to be the serif font. The number of people who've said "ooh" when I told them what I'm planning on using is impressive, and what's more, I like the reasons I'm hearing. It seems to be a genuine aesthetically choice... you don't have to be educated about why it's a good font to think it's a good font.
Second, at some point I absorbed and internalized a very wrong internal benchmark for estimating the page count of a work. Someone early on in MU's existence did a quick-and-dirty estimate using 500 words per page, and I thought that sounded about right and never questioned it. Turns out that 250 words of a standard 12 point font fit much more nicely on a printed page.
So my little fifty page book? Is a hundred pages long. I'm re-examining the price point question based on that, but it's possible that the results of my examination will be "No, I still want people to have a dirt cheap buy-in." Never fear, gentle readers... I wouldn't be giving it away at a penny a page if I wasn't sure I could make money off it.
And if it doesn't exactly sell like gangbusters? Meh. I've had a good month. If it starts slow, it starts slow. It's not like I've invested thousands of dollars and there's a whole department full of people whose jobs are riding on my first quarter sales figures being outstanding across the board. This is the beauty of a one person operation: if I somehow only sell three copies of the book in March, it's not a failure... it's a book that has yet to succeed.
I mean, I still have money trickling in from the PDFs of the first five Tales of MU books, and they are not half as snazzy as this is. I'll be honest, I'm not proud of them. I put them up because people demanded them. I did not at that point have the skills to make a decent e-book. I'm sure I'm still not great, but when I load the mock-up I made of Gift of the Bad Guy onto my phone and look at it, I get chills. I've never believed in the collected volumes of Tales of MU to the degree that I believe in the serial, and it shows.
This thing... both the specific book and the publishing concept behind it... is something I believe in. It's something I think people are going to want. It's something I think people are going to enjoy. And maaaaaaaaan, I know and you know that my hard drives and the internet are littered with the bones of my projects that ran out of steam, but here's the thing: this is not just another entry in that long line. It is the ultimate entry in it. Because that's exactly what happened with Gift of the Bad Guy... until I threw out a bunch of my preconceptions and started making new shit up. And now I'm looking at a bunch of stuff I never finished and I'm seeing them with new eyes.
Honestly, I feel like I did when Tales of MU started to catch on. MU isn't my first crack at weblit... I was writing stories on the internet as far as back as my junior year of high school (spoiler warning: they weren't very good. Though Ariella's were a thing of brilliance.) I'd been writing serials online for like three years before I started Tales of MU, but Tales of MU is where a bunch of things just fell into place for me.
Anyway, I'm blabbing a lot about this but it's because I'm excited and because honestly it's killing me to have a story and not be sharing it with people. Among the reasons I'm not launching the book with my typical ready-fire-aim immediacy is that I've arranged for a proofreader to go over it first. The first chapter should be available in a finished state sometime this week, and when it does I'll be putting up PDFs of both versions (sans and avec serif).
And I'm going to cut this post off here, because I think it's been sufficiently established that I can ramble on forever about this topic.
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no subject
on 2011-02-06 01:40 am (UTC)no subject
on 2011-02-06 01:45 am (UTC)