Having a bit of time management problems this last week. I have a number of projects, both personal and professional, and they were stepping on each others toes.

At work, I’m in the middle of trying to solve a problem for a demo on Monday but things keep breaking. And, the major project I just finished is getting back some bug reports. I hate that. I try really hard to write solid code, but apparently I missed three things when I refactored out a nasty snarl of code. Both of those were on the schedule though. I have another project that wasn’t on the schedule but needs to be done by the 26th or 27th or I have to wait another year to try. Just a bit of pressure.

On the personal projects, I still have my serial but my buffer has finally run out and I’m writing week-to-week. And a 15k word commission has a deadline looming and I haven’t really gotten too far into it. I keep having to rewrite the first thousand words because nothing felt… right.

I also am trying to figure out how to get interest in Casting Call. I’m doing something wrong, I know it, but I don’t know what to do. One review, no comments, no questions. I think it was just lost under the overwhelming press of other things going out. I figured I’ll fumble for a few more weeks on Call and work on getting BAM out the door. Maybe a full novel would attract more interest in either.

During my lunch breaks, besides a short 1-2 km walk, I’m editing Flight because I should be getting a response “soon.” I’m getting a bit depressed by that, mainly because I keep thinking I have a great story, but I keep finding stupid little things I missed the last two years I’ve been working on this iteration. Flight isn’t there yet. I haven’t gotten it to the point where someone can’t put it down or obsess about it. A quarter of my beta readers didn’t even bother returning it and two won’t answer my emails asking for a status (it has been six months) so I can only infer that it isn’t there.

I’m still editing it, because there is a chance it is good enough for the Publisher Who Shall Not Be Named (PWSNBN) might like it. Plus, I need to clean up a couple references, a few rounds to edit some really minor things, and another attempt at killing a couple thousand words from the length.

According to PWSNBN’s website, I’ll get a response in 4-6 months. Since they should have gotten it January 15 or so, that means I’m looking for a response May 15 to July 15. That means I’m calling my mailbox place every few days, both terrified and anxious to get that letter. I’m afraid of succeeding just as much as rejection at this point. Editing helps with some of the anxiety and nervousness because I’m Doing Something™. It also helps (slightly) with the fear that I have ruined the one and only chance I have to get published by PWSNBN.

Originally posted on Moonfire Thoughts. Feel free to comment here or at the site.

Whenever I write, there are various points in a story where I’m afraid people are going to throw the book aside and never read my stuff again. This is true with all stories, but with serials there is a week (in this case) between each post and during that time, people talk about their favorite characters, what they think what will happen, or even a debate on motivations. All in all, I absolutely love hearing people debate my stories.

This also means when there is a major plot twist, any opinions are magnified because of the anticipation. This week, I hit one of those points with one of my bylines. Thirty chapters into the story, I killed off a character.

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Originally posted on Moonfire Thoughts. Feel free to comment here or at the site.

For the last week, Casting Call was free for everyone. Now, for the next 83 days, it will be a free lend for Amazon Prime people and $2.99 for everyone else. In the week it was free, I had 182 downloads and 1 review. It was my second review ever and also a 4-star one.

The plan after that is to move it over to Smashwords and/or Lulu to see if it can get a bit more exposure.

I was also happy to see that it go on the High Tech bestsellers list for the last two days with a peak just under the front page (#21) but as soon as it ceased to be free, it dropped completely off the list.

Thank you for whoever gave me a review and also for everyone who downloaded. I hope that it will equate into some sales some day, but right now, I’m just happy that it got into people’s hands.

This was also a chance to explore a few new areas of the Internet. I created a link over at Reddit and over Kindle Boards. Both are interesting, but I’m liking Reddit almost as much as Twitter.

Originally posted on Moonfire Thoughts. Feel free to comment here or at the site.

One of the reasons I published Casting Call on Amazon was to try out the Kindle Select program. It is in there for 90 days and Amazon Prime members get to “borrow” it for free for all three months. During that period, I get one five day period to make it free and pimp it out as much as I can.

This week is it. I’m not going to ask my friends to pay for my story, so if you want to see what I wrote, this would be the week to do it. Hopefully, it will show up on a few people’s radars and maybe get a bit of interest.

Pimping out my stuff is not a skill I have yet. (Actually, my results to date are… pathetic.) I haven’t figured out the right mixture of community and charisma that most of my writerly friends seem to have. Since there is no magic formula, I have to figure it out, but I think the best way to do it is the same as my writing: just keep swimming.

Originally posted on Moonfire Thoughts. Feel free to comment here or at the site.

Casting Call is now available for the Kindle (and their cloud reader, PC’s, etc) for $2.99 (or the equivalent).

For the last six years, Marla was a fixture of the wildly successful Donna’s Teddy Clubhouse, a show aimed for competitive Caucasian Northern American Girls 14 market. But, age betrayed her and she was fired for not having a profitable enough body according to the exacting standards of the production company. Eighteen years old and alone, she has no future in the holographic markets and no skills to find new employment. Does she abandoned her love of acting and find a new job? Does she just survive on the paltry incoming from her investments? Or are there shows out that don’t belong to the standard, cut-throat markets?

Casting Call is a short story set in a cyberpunk world of ubiquitous computers, razor-thin profitability, constant advertising, and microsecond management.

(I didn’t translate it into these languages (not that good), but this is where they are located in the country-specific Amazon sites.)

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Originally posted on Moonfire Thoughts. Feel free to comment here or at the site.

This was a brief introduction to eBooks for my writing group.

What are eBooks?

eBooks are, simply said, electronic books. There are a wide variety of formats that are all underneath the umbrella of “eBook” but the two most common formats today are EPUB (also known as OEBPS) and Mobi, but there are variety of other formats still in use. The most basic eBook is the simple text file or a single HTML page. PDFs could also be considered eBooks, but most PDFs are not suited for the smaller screen sizes of hardware readers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_formats

eBooks can’t do everything a printed book can. Today, most formats cannot handle tables of any form. They also can’t do sidebars. Also, because of the varied sizes of hardware readers, the concept of a “page” is different than on a physical page.

eBook Readers

The popularity of eBooks has risen in the recent years because of the availabile of hardware and software readers. There are readers for both EPUB and Mobi formats for PC, Mac, Android, and even iPhones. Amazon provides a cloud (online) reader for purchased Mobi books from their store.

Hardware and many of the software readers are connected to a store and are part of an ecosystem of commerce. For example, it is very easy to purchase a book from Amazon and have it show up on the phone, cloud, or Kindle. The same with the Sony reader and the Sony store and the iTunes store with the iPad and iPhone.

Most readers allow for “side-loading” or putting books on that weren’t purchased through the integrated eco-system. This can be relatively easy to do or complicated depending on the reader. To combat the complexity, there are programs such as Calibre that manage and load books onto readers. As a note, the Amazon cloud reader does not allow side-loading of files.

There are businesses that are based on side-loading, such as Smashwords. Smashwords and related businesses provide a variety of formats and can give additional value to the simple purchase. They also have different formatting rules, market penetration, and impact on the writing market.

Length of eBooks

In the printed world, the length of a piece impacts the ability to sell it. It is harder to sell 30 page chapbooks on a mass scale just as it is economically infesible to sell 300k word epics. Not to mention, the physical form of the trade paperback (6” x 9”) or mass-market paperback (4.3” x 7”) would be difficult to bind with 1,000+ pages.

However, in eBooks, the size isn’t important. And the length of the piece is only displayed to the user if the reader decide to. For example, the Kindle shows a number of dots for length and the Sony readers change the shadow. Other than that, a short story has the same screen presence as an epic, a single picture in the library. This means that both shorter pieces and longer ones are viable in the market.

Pricing eBooks

Pricing is actually one of the major factors on eBooks. You’ll notice that most of the prices end in “9,” just like the gas station. In some cases, such as the Apple store, they mandate it ends with “.99”. The reason for this is pretty much psychology and probably out of the scope of this.

The price of eBooks is not set in stone. For example, this is what is recommended by Dean Wesly Smith (who produces a lot of shorter pieces):

http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/?p=6391

There are a large number of other methods for pricing eBooks, this is just an example of someone who produces a large number of eBooks. To use an example, Sam’s Dot Publishing currently sells most of its books for $2.99 regardless of length.

Creating eBooks

Most eBooks are fairly easy to create, but like everything else, can be difficult to make it look good. The EPUB format is XML-based inside a Zip container object. This means that you can rename a “.epub” file to “.zip” and then look inside it. The files are a limited subset of HTML and CSS. There is also a variety of programs to verify the correctness of creating a file.

One of the most common programs for creating Mobi files also uses the same XML files as EPUB, but compiles them into a binary format. The program involved (kindlegen) is freely available, but documentation is basically Google searches and keyword guessing.

Once created, the file is uploaded. Amazon provides a very simple interface for uploading books. After uploading to Amazon, a book is typically available 24-48 hours later.

Smashwords, on the other hand, uses Microsoft Word as their format. They use a specialized program called Meatgrinder to generate EPUB, Mobi, and a large number of other formats. Smashwords will also push out the books to Apple’s, Sony’s, and other stores. We have experienced, using Shannon Ryan’s book as an example, that it can take a while for the books to arrive at some stores like Barnes & Noble’s to make it available for the Nook.

There are people who format eBooks for pay. These people take your document, such as a Microsoft Word, and create a properly formatted EPUB and/or Mobi file for uploading. From examples on Smashwords, this usually costs $30-45 dollars an hour with most books only taking 1-2 hours.

Making Money on eBooks

When selling an eBook, the provider (Amazon, Smashwords, etc.) takes a percentage of the money and hands over the rest. This is usually done via electronic funds transfer (EFT).

Amazon gives either 35% or 70% royalties based on the price of the book (70% requires $2.99 to $9.99 price) and pays 60 days after the month there is at least a $10 balance. Amazon will, however, lower a price if they find the same book available for a lower price than $2.99; when they do this, they’ll also lower the royalties to 35%.

Smashwords has a similar guidelines and methods for payment.

eBooks also provides a flexibility to make changes. On Amazon, adjusting the price can take up to 48 hours to take effect, but it is easy to increase or lower the price to take advantage of markets or experiment with sales.

Amazon also has the Kindle Select Program. This is a publishing pool where Amazon provides a large pool of money (somewhere around $600k/month) and every download is a “share” into that pool. There are some limitations to have a book in this program. In specific, to be in the Kindle Select Program requires exclusivity for 90 days. If you want a shot at the large amount of money, you can’t upload it to Smashwords or anywhere else for a period of time. Also during this time in the Kindle Select, you can make a book free for five days to boost sales.

Reviews

Because it is so easy to get a book into a market, there is a glut of eBooks out there. There are companies that simply produce garbabge in eBooks and throw it out there, hoping to make a sale. There are also authors who think they are wonderful writers but in reality, can barely write their way out of the bag. In reverse, there are under-read authors who are brilliant for a small market.

The natural method for selecting books is reviews. Reviews are critical in eBooks because an unreviewed book typically has less sales than one that has a thousand. Interestingly, negative reviews do not impact sales quite as badly as in the physical world, but it really helps to gave overwhelming good reviews (4 star or higher on Amazon).

Since selling books is dependent on reviews, there are people who will give good, “insightful” reviews of a book in exchange for some money ($5-10 according to brief searches).

Running a give-away is also a good way of getting books into people’s hands. Most people like free and some of them (not everyone) would be willing to throw up a small review in exchange for a free book. If you go this way, you can’t say “I’m giving away five books if you review it” since that seems to create ill will in the reader’s market. I’m not saying it can’t happen, just seems to be bad form to be that blatant.

How to Market

Marketing is different with eBooks. Because the market is flooded, the personal touch seems to be a really effective way to sell a book. The first one is just a teaser and you won’t get a lot of sells. The second book might sell a bit, but also bump up the sales of the first one if it is good. Likewise, the third will boost the first two sales.

All the eBook formats allow you to put links in. This is a good thing to put at the back of a book in a section “if you liked this” along with links where they can just press a button and buy your old/new book. Because of the simplicity, it makes it easier to upsell to another book.

Also, the personal touch helps encourage sales. Just as you are more likely to buy a copy of a friend’s book (even if you don’t ever read it), that can help boost it up to the point someone else might buy it. From my experience, people are more likely to give a positive review if they “know” a person. It can be from social networking, meeting them in person, or even hawking or doing panels at a convention.

Covers

One of the components of eBooks is the cover. eBooks don’t have back covers, just a front. This means that the cover has to be rememberable or distinctive. It also has to look good at full size (Amazon requires 1,200 pixels on the longest edge) and for thumbnails for the reader’s library view.

This can be a difficult thing to do, but it is also what helps sells a book. The adage, “judge a book by its cover,” is doubly true with eBooks simply because you can’t pick up the book.

Succeeding

Just because creating an eBook is easy, it doesn’t mean you are guarenteed riches. Like all things, when it is easy to get something done, it means you have to work that much harder to stand above the masses. Editing, (limited typesetting), and covers are all critical to selling a book and it is easy to do it poorly and lose sales.

There is a lot of leeway with these, though, since you can just upload a new version at any time and change the cover, price, or even sections of book (though not recommended) as you correct it. But, you only get one first impression and if you lose it, you may never get it back.

Originally posted on Moonfire Thoughts. Feel free to comment here or at the site.

One of my plans this week is to get a short story out called “Casting Call”. I’ve never done a Kindle book as myself, so it is an experiment but also a chance to do something fun. I think the writing is pretty solid, though I keep fussing with the last line, but stories need a good cover. I posted two covers on Twitter and got some good feedback from Melanie Nilles (she also has some enjoyable books) and my coworkers (who are supportive in general). After various ideas, I realized that the two covers I came up with were less than amazing and a bit busy to boot. So, I came up with two different covers that were completely different in design. And, since I’m a fragile little beast, I thought I would ask those who read my blog if they were willing to give me some opinions on them.

This is the blurb I wrote for Casting Call:

For the last six years, Marla was a fixture of the wildly successful Donna’s Teddy Clubhouse, a show aimed for competitive Caucasian Northern American Girls 14 market. But, age betrayed her and she was fired for not having a profitable enough body according to the exacting standards of the production company. Eighteen years old and alone, she has no future in the holographic markets and no skills to find new employment. Does she abandoned her love of acting? Or are there shows out that don’t belong to the standard, cut-throat markets?

Casting Call is a short story set in a cyberpunk world of ubiquitous computers, razor-thin profitability, constant advertising, and microsecond management.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Originally posted on Moonfire Thoughts. Feel free to comment here or at the site.

Well, that took a bit longer than I expected, but I’ve managed to parse the Git and Subversion logs and turn them into a nice intermediate (I said “normalized” too much last post) format and then wrote another tiny little program to tag all my stories.

All that work just to figure out the answer:

How many words have I written?

Now, this answer isn’t exact nor entirely accurate. It doesn’t including the four complete rewrites of Flight of the Scions (a.k.a. Wind, Bear, and Moon). It also doesn’t include the 100k words I pulled out of Flight for KK. Or the re-writes, struggles, and everything else. It also doesn’t include the two novels or anything else I wrote in high school including my two books of poetry.

What it does take is the “final” version of every story, chapter, and commission (I actually kept good records of that) I’ve written since 2001 and gave me an idea of how much I’ve written.

1,784,085 words from a total of 195 stories and 228 chapters in 7 novels.

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Originally posted on Moonfire Thoughts. Feel free to comment here or at the site.

I had someone ask me why I’m writing these blog posts. It started with just a question I wanted to know (how much have I written), but it lead into something more. Over the years, I’ve ended up parsing a lot of data. It was my job for twenty years to take customer’s files for any operating system, any database, and just about any format, and create normalized and consolidated reports. I wrote programs to take normalized data and produce more data which lead into the rest of our business processes.

Parsing data isn’t really rocket science. For me, most of it means taking different input (say the Git and Subversion logs) and normalize them into a common format. And then use that common format to process data.

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Originally posted on Moonfire Thoughts. Feel free to comment here or at the site.

It took me a number of days to clean up the output from the Git repository parse. I could have written a parser that handled the renames through Git but it was easier just to juggle data and handle the format changes which were never a Git rename (for example when I went from an XML-based system to Open Document and then again to a Creole-based system).

However, there was an interesting problem: the day 2012-06-26 showed up a lot.

$ wc -l git.csv
606 git.csv
$ grep 2010-06-26 git.csv | wc -l
421
$

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Originally posted on Moonfire Thoughts. Feel free to comment here or at the site.