Writing Plans For The Coming Year
This is partly here so people know what will be coming up on this blog, but mostly so I have an aide memoire I can refer to myself. These are the projects I’m working on at the moment or planning to do this year:
Finish proposal for a traditionally-published novel in a series in someone else’s world. May or may not ever get past the proposal stage. If it doesn’t, I’m going to rework the ideas into a new novel of my own.
Get PEP! 3 out the door – possibly as early as next week, if all goes to plan. (I know I’ve said that before)
Finish the Kinks book. Probably by March
Finish How We Know What We Know – hopefully by the end of next month
Finish Doctor Who: Fifty Stories For Fifty Years – before Xmas.
Finish Bigger On The Outside – some time in the next few months.
Finish Time Detective to novella length
Write books two and three of the Beach Boys series, and if necessary a second edition of book one – waiting for details on the reissues and new albim before I do anything definite.
Book on Cerebus. I’m scrapping what I did last year, and restarting this in the style of my Seven Soldiers book.
A second and third Doctor Watson Investigates, to make enough of them to fill an omnibus paperback.
Possibly a second Time Detective novella if people like the first one enough.
More short stories.
I also want to write more political stuff, but I don’t think I could do a book on that. Politics is too depressing right now, all things considered. I’m actually more politically active now than in a long time, but have very little to say…
On Ebook Pricing And Promotion
This post will really only be of interest to other people who self-publish or plan to. The rest of you can ignore it. It’s a little addendum to the post I made last week.
There is nothing more likely to get arguments raging on self-publishing discussion boards than the question of pricing one’s book (and it’s almost always ‘book’ singular. Very few of the people involved have written more than one). One group insist that the right thing to do is to publish books at 99 cents – or give them away for free – for ‘exposure’. The other group think their work is too valuable to give away at such a low price – “my book is worth more than a chocolate bar.”
Both sides are, ultimately, arguing from a lack of evidence. The first side can point to the occasional success story – writer X whose first novel sold 100,000 copies, and she sold it for only 99 cents – while the other side can say “the major publishers don’t sell anything for under $10. If I sell mine for $5 that’s still only half their price.” But basically they’re going from instinct.
My case is a little different from many of these people. I write entirely for pleasure. But I publish for business. This is why I post almost all my writing to my blog first and let people read it for free if they want to. But if they want to have a physical copy or an ebook of it, then they need to pay me for the time and effort I put in for cover design, typesetting, formatting, uploading and so on, because unlike the actual writing that stuff is hard, tedious work that I don’t enjoy and am not very good at. So I’m looking at pricing entirely from the point of view of what will maximise revenue.
The tactic most often endorsed by self-publishers is to write a book, put it out cheap, for ninety-nine cents, and promote the hell out of it on all the social networks for as long as you can, and only then start writing your next book.
Now, this tactic would be painful for me, because I find it almost impossible *not* to write. I can’t always write the thing I intend to write (I’ve got my half-finished MindlessWho post that should have been up a week ago as proof of that), but the only time I’m not writing something is when I’m physically incapable of doing so. But imagine that I could.
So you have your ninety-nine cent book and you spam everyone about it. Let’s imagine a best case scenario here, and say that you don’t get blocked by everyone on Twitter and Facebook. We’ll further imagine that pricing at ninety-nine cents is actually an effective way of getting noticed at this point (it isn’t, because literally millions of people are doing the same thing now). So let’s be optimistic and say that your book sells a thousand copies a month for the year you’re promoting it.
Many of those sales will be to people who won’t particularly enjoy it, and will give it bad reviews. The sales are mostly coming from social networking, so once you stop that to write the next book (if you ever do), sales drop to zero or close. So we can take the first year’s income from that single book as being a year’s income from writing. 12,000 ebooks at ninety-nine cents, at a 35% royalty, comes to $4200.
So write a single book a year, sell it for ninety-nine cents, spend the rest of the year promoting it, you can get $4200 a year, in an ideal world.
Now let’s look at what I do.
I wrote five full-length books last year, for which I’ve priced the ebooks at $5. I did essentially no promotion for any of these – one blog post, a tweet and a facebook post is about it. I did do a couple of guest blogs promoting my fourth book, but that’s all. I spent the time writing instead.
Now, none of them are selling anything like a thousand copies a month. But this month, between them they sold 87 books as ebooks alone (not counting for the moment either paper copies or revenues from stores like Apple which haven’t reported for this month yet). Admittedly, this is one of my better months, but also I write stuff for *incredibly* niche audiences in most part. And those books sold that much without any additional promotion on my part. I used that time to write instead.
Eighty-seven books at five dollars a pop, at a seventy percent royalty (actually some are at a higher royalty because Smashwords pays better, but let’s keep this simple and stick to Kindle royalty figures) is $304.50 . The single-book author who’s promoting rather than writing makes $350 from her single book.
I’ll actually surpass what she makes with her thousand downloads, because I’ve also got a couple of short stories up for ninety-nine cents and a longer story up for three dollars (I’m not saying never to price something at ninety-nine cents – I use the price if the ‘book’ I’m selling is under ten thousand words or so, because it would be cheating the readers to charge more), and I’m selling paper books (most of the ninety-nine centers don’t) but even if we take that figure as all I’ll make, I know I can write at least five more books this year. (In fact I’ve got at least eight that are either in the planning stage or partly written, most of which should come out this year, along with a few more short stories and novellas. I’m aiming to get *something* at least e-published every fortnight this year).
So next year, assuming the average sales stay the same and I do another five full-length ebooks, I’ll be on $609 a month from ebook sales. The year after, $913.50 . Meanwhile, the natural audience for the ninety-nine cent book by the one-book-a-year (or less) author has already been exhausted, and that author is essentially starting from scratch with the next one.
Now, not everyone can write as fast as me – I’m lucky in that I write extremely clean copy, and I’m very good at structure, so I don’t need to rewrite much, and I think very, very fast. My books are also mostly on the short side (my natural medium is the essay or the short story, rather than the novel or series, though I think my two best books are the ones where the essays build and reflect on each other in a novelistic structure). And these numbers obviously don’t apply to everyone. But I think this shows that there is certainly a *very good case* for the best strategy for self-publishers to pursue being to charge a relatively high amount, but to write a lot, and let the promotion take care of itself.
Opinions?
Linkblogging for 30/01/12
Sorry for the lack of proper posting – I know I’m behind again on MindlessWho, but I’m practically dead of exhaustion. Have some links instead.
Can’t believe I’d not heard of this before yesterday (via Andrew Ducker), but Daily Science Fiction is a site where each day they post a new science fiction story. The quality varies, but free stories every day can only be a good thing.
Debi continues her series on Buddhism with a post on right action.
Lib Dems led by Shirley Williams have managed to get even more concessions made in the NHS Bill.
A speech Neil Gaiman gave on C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton.
Slacktivist on how so-called Biblical literalists have actually rewritten the Bible to remove mention of a female priest from Paul’s letters.
Time Detective Chapter Two
[For part one of the story, click the "time detective" tag]
So I should probably explain what it actually is that I do, shouldn’t I? I’m a private detective, but I started out as a physics student. I was planning on a relatively dull career in academia, as a matter of fact – I was interested in doing some work in gravitational physics, which was hardly a cutting-edge whizz-bang area, and the Brian Cox career path had yet to be invented. My plan was to finish my Master’s, get a doctorate, then settle into a life of producing three or four papers a year which nobody would read.
But I made two big mistakes. The first was putting a chemistry module down as one of my optional modules, because I didn’t like the look of electronic engineering. The other was actually paying attention.
A chance remark in an organic chemistry lecture about an unusual property of thiotimoline caused me to think about what would happen to the shape of the molecule in a Gauss-Riemann geometry. I put that together with a couple of other things – which I’m not going to mention here, obviously – and suddenly found I had worked out a way to travel through time. And not one of those “build two black holes ten thousand light years apart and rotate one of them” jobs. This required practically nothing – you probably have most of the equipment to build a small time machine yourself, though you could probably only go back a week or so on a domestic power supply without blowing a fuse.
I posted something on USENET, not saying exactly what I’d done – I didn’t want to pre-empt publication and risk that Nobel prize – but posting a couple of the calculations in a different context, as a gedankenexperiment, just to make sure I hadn’t done anything incredibly stupid.
Two hours later, a man I didn’t know, in an immaculately-tailored suit, one that fit so well that the gun he had in his pocket was extremely conspicuous, showed up at the door of my room in Halls and asked me to take a walk.
As we walked through Sackville Park, he explained the situation to me.
“You’re not the first to figure it out, you know. Feynman knew the trick, and Von Neumann. Godel probably did as well, though by the end he didn’t know much of anything. We get about one undergrad every three or four years figuring it out now.”
“So why haven’t I heard of it before?”
“Oh for God’s sake, man, I thought you were meant to be clever. It’s too dangerous ever to be made public.”
“Dangerous? But I’ve proved that changing history and paradoxes are both impossible. This would only work in a universe with a single consistent history.”
“Exactly. Think about what that means, for a moment, man. Say you want my PIN number. You say you’ll try 1111, and if it works, write it down on a piece of paper and send it back to yourself five minutes earlier. If it doesn’t, you write 1112 and send it back to yourself.” He sat down on a bench. “The only consistent history where that works is the one where you instantly get a piece of paper with my PIN on it. All cryptography becomes useless. All national secrets are instantly open to anyone. The whole fabric of civilisation comes under threat.”
“So, what, you want me to stop investigating this stuff?”
“Not at all. We know that you can’t get the truly curious to ever stop experimenting. You want to build a time machine for your own personal use, we can’t stop you – the components are too easy to get hold of. What we want you to do is to sign the Official Secrets Act – you never tell anyone else how to do it, and any attempt to misuse the technology gets you convicted of high treason. Also, you quit university, today. We don’t want you slipping bits of these ideas out, even by accident.”
“Quit university?!”
“Yes. Drop out. Find another job. Whatever you want – the government will pay you thirty thousand a year to keep your mouth shut, anyway, and you can carry on your research in your own time, so long as you pass all your work on to the government. That’s the deal, take it or leave it.”
“You offer that to everyone who figures this out?”
“Yes, it’s our standard offer.”
“And has anyone ever turned you down?”
“Oh, one or two, one or two…” he stood up,“I’ll be round tomorrow with your copy of the Official Secrets Act.”
As he went, he patted the statue that he’d been sitting next to on the bench. The statue of Alan Turing.
I did as he asked.
So now, I work as a private detective. Not because I need the money as such, but just to give me something to do with my brain now that physics isn’t an option. Not that most of my cases require much of a brain. But a few require a little investigation, and that’s where I have the edge over my competitors. With my personal-sized time machine I can only go back in time a week or so, and I have to be careful not to give myself too much information about the future (the government keep a very close eye on trans-temporal communication – any sudden lottery wins and I’d be the richest man in the graveyard), but it does mean that if someone says their husband came home late last Wednesday, for example, I can go back and follow him and see where he went.
Those are the neat cases, of course. This one was worse. This time someone was dead, and it was my fault, somehow. And I was going to have to go back and meet this man, knowing he was going to die, and knowing there was nothing I could possibly do to stop it.
It’s days like that that make me wish I’d gone for electronic engineering after all.
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