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A Brief Summary of My Awesome Life

This post won’t be news to most of you. If you already know everything there is to know about the Consortium, you can skip it altogether.

But I got an email this morning from an old blogging buddy, checking in. He started the message off by asking, quite offhand, if I had any interesting projects I was working on these days.

I read that first line of the email and thought, “I am going to blow his mind!”

Then I read the rest of the email and realized he’s no stranger to “ambitious.” He’s participating in some stuff at least as big as my experiment in open-art neo-patronage. So I didn’t get to blow his mind, but at least I could give him something interesting.

Here’s what I had to say:

You’ve probably heard by now that I’ve got a bestselling fantasy novel at Amazon. Taming Fire is selling several hundred copies a day. I’ve sold 30,000 copies since its release at the end of June. I’ve got over 100 days on the Top 100 Best Sellers in Science Fiction and Fantasy, most of that somewhere in the top 20. I’m currently ranked around 160th most popular book across all books sold at Amazon.

That’s my big exciting news, but it’s nowhere close to my most ambitious project. My big project would be my company, the Consortium. One subset of the Consortium is Consortium Books, the publishing group that produced my novel. I’m the head publisher, but we’ve got several professional editors, a couple graphic designers, painters and photographers for cover art, and a marketer/sales guy all pitching in.

And that’s really the emphasis of the whole company: collaborative art. We’ve discovered the amazing things artists can accomplish in the new (digital) market with very little in the way of resources, if they’ll just work together to fill in the blanks. Writers need cover art, musicians need lyricists, photographers need websites, and programmers need everything. (It’s astonishing how many people it takes to make a videogame.)

Right now, we’re a cooperative of artists. Long-term, we want to be an employer. My goal is to create a new patronage–to pay artists a living salary with all the benefits of a “real job” with the sole expectations that they pursue mastery of their craft, and share that mastery with their fellow artists. We’re using an apprenticeship model, we’re paying our artists for the production of the art (not for the commoditization of it), and that will allow us to release finished products into the public domain.

We’ll be able to support artists better than the current lottery system that the “labels” provide (whether we’re talking about record labels or New York book publishers or Hollywood casting directors), and we’ll be able to do it entirely without the arcane and deeply problematic copyright laws.

The only thing we’re lacking now is time and money, and the current success of Taming Fire, while it’s not exactly funding our grand plans, does suggest a real potential that we’ll be able to get things off the ground in the next couple years. It’s hard to wait, but it’s incredibly exciting to see the things we’re accomplishing even now.

I felt like that a pretty effective snapshot of the exciting projects that are keeping me too busy to even breathe, and I felt it was probably worth sharing.

What I Learned About Writing This Week…from Dreams, Redux

Trapped by dreams?

So, once upon a time, I wrote a fantastic blog post about dreams. I know you remember it, dear inklings, because that’s just the kind of sweet, attentive creatures you are.

And, if you’re really paying attention (and this might or might not be a sign of your true, everlasting love for me), you’ll recall that I’ve also scribbled my own blog full of the subject.

This week, I’ve had another confirmation that all of my conclusions about my dreams are true.

If you’ve read those aforementioned blog posts, you know that if I’m not writing, I go slightly crazy, and you know that when I go slightly crazy, I start dreaming all sorts of weirdness.

This week, I’ve started dreaming all sorts of weirdness. But before I get into that, here’s a run-down of recent writerly activities:

  • In August and September, I worked on getting Shadows after Midnight ready for publication. I also got my short story “Dead Reconning” up to snuff…
  • Most of September and October, I spent writing, re-writing, editing, re-writing, and agonizing over my short story “If This Were a Stephen King Story” for Kindle All-Stars.
  • Oh, and I also wrote, re-wrote, and agonized over my next short story for the next issue of A Consortium of Worlds, “Out of the Darkness.”
  • In between all of this, I’ve been painting cover art for The Dragonswarm, Aaron’s Taming Fire sequel.

This all makes for much artsy busyness, yea verily.

And yet, I’ve been dreaming all sorts of weirdness.

WHY HAPPENING?!?

Yes, I’ve been writing a lot. I’ve been engaged in the ins and outs of creating readable stories for all you happy people out there. This is the stuff I’ve been wanting to do since I was 8, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But.

Even though I have been doing writerly things, I haven’t been writing a new novel.

And I think that’s why my dreams have started getting all janky again. Lack of novel-writing causes the onset of insanity. My brain deals with insanity by gifting me with restless nights chock-full of loud, vibrant, Technicolor imagery.

Most recently, I spent last night tossing and turning to the beat of dreams about Kindle All-Stars. I don’t remember a particular storyline for these dreams, but I do know they involved editor-in-chief Bernard Schaffer’s staring out sternly at me from the Google doc of my short story.

So. All of this to say that I was right: not creating makes me crazy. More specifically, not creating novels makes me crazy, even though I’m most pleased at all the other creative wonderfulness I’ve been involved in of late. It just goes to show that what I’m really supposed to be doing is write books. It’s a good thing NaNoWriMo is coming up. : )

And that’s WILAWriTWe!

A Consortium of Worlds

I posted yesterday to complain about how busy I was. It’ll probably take me weeks to show up and post again, but in the meantime I wanted to brag about a couple of those projects that did get finished:

A Consortium of Worlds

A Consortium of Worlds is the new quarterly speculative-fiction short story magazine by Consortium Writers.

Coordinated, edited, and published almost entirely by Courtney and Joshua, I still got to participate a little bit in the publishing part when I taught them how, and in the writing part when I wrote an exclusive fantasy story that’s included in the collection.

Check out “The Bloodshield Betrayal” and some fantastic stories by our other up-and-coming writers for just $2.99.

Shadows after Midnight

I don’t remember if I mentioned it (though I’m sure Courtney did), but we also published Shadows after Midnight a couple weeks back.

It’s the second book in Courtney’s Christian fantasy thriller trilogy, The Demons of Saltmarch, and I enjoyed it even more than the first. With the setting established and focusing on a new protagonist (Auguren Peter), it hits the fantasy notes a lot harder and jumps straight into the action.

Definitely check out Courtney’s books if you haven’t already. And while you’re at it, marvel at the masterpiece of formatting and layout that I achieved as head publisher.

Work in Progress

This morning I found time to make a Twitter post.

That statement really ought to sound absurd. A Twitter post is barely a sentence. But I’ve made that one of my personal goals lately (“Make more Twitter posts”), and I’ve consistently failed at it.

Maybe this morning’s Twitter post will shed some light on why that is. Here’s what I had to say:

In the last 3 months I’ve written 40k words on one novel, 40k words on another, and 20k words in short stories. #Busy

“Busy” barely scratches the surface. I’m working 40 hours a week for my day job. I’m also president and CEO of the Consortium. Those titles in and of themselves don’t mean a lot, but I’m building a small business/non-profit out of nothing, and anyone will tell you that’s quite a chore. We’re thriving, too, and that doesn’t happen without a big time investment.

I’m also Head Publisher for Consortium Books. That’s another position altogether from the stuff I’m doing for the Consortium as a whole. We’ve already published five titles this year, and we’re going to try to do another five before Christmas. Most of those will be short stories, but from a digital publishing perspective there’s not a lot of difference.

I’m also taking nine hours of graduate work at the University of Oklahoma. Y’know, in my free time. I’m putting together a 30,000-word textbook proposal for my Nonfiction class. I’ve written two mainstream/literary short stories for my English class. And I’m writing the third book in the Dragonprince Trilogy for my Master’s Project. That’ll be about 100,000 words done by the end of the semester.

But I haven’t actually finished the second book in that trilogy yet! That’s the sequel to Taming Fire, and it’s already been promised to an adoring fanbase for publication in December. That’s the other novel I’ve done 40,000 words on, and I really think I’ll have a final draft ready for review by the end of October. That’s still cutting things awfully close.

I haven’t talked at all about spending time with my wife and kids. Or catching the occasional football game. Or maintaining relationships with any of my non-work friends. I haven’t talked about designing videogames, either, but I’m doing all those things.

(I haven’t talked at all about blogging, either…. And I’m not going to lie: That one’s suffering a bit. Thank goodness Courtney’s been around to keep the lights on!)

I’m also watching the calendar tick slowly toward NaNoWriMo, and I’m thinking, “That is going to kill me.” I’m thinking I really ought to sit it out this year. I’m thinking it’s awfully tempting to forbid my Consortium Books people from participating, too. I’ve got work for them to do!

I won’t do that. I probably won’t even sit it out myself. I love NaNoWriMo. And, y’know, even as overwhelming as they are, I really love all those other projects I’ve described, too. That’s why I committed to them in the first place. That’s why they haven’t gotten jettisoned as my life has gotten busier and busier and busier.

I’m looking desperately for some endings, but I’m just not willing to cut anything off unfinished. I’ve got an awful lot of work in progress, and it’s all got bestseller potential.

Wish me luck. I’ll do my best to keep you posted.

What I Learned About Writing This Week…from Being Irritable

grouchy?

grouchy?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from a myriad of sources over the past ten years, it’s that I should never ignore myself when I feel irritable.

I am not a person easily given to irritation. It takes a lot to push my buttons. Injustice is pretty much the only thing that can get me into a raging fury. (That and when drivers use the highway entrance ramp as a parking lot.) There’s a ginormous lot of space between my mellow and my raging fury, and I generally don’t stray too far from the mellow.

The husband might disagree with me on this point, but we’re not going to ask him. ; )

(Also, keep in mind that I’m talking about the emotional scale of mellow to irritation to outright anger. On other emotional scales–such as happiness, giddiness, excitement, anticipation, blah de blah–I can go from zero to passionate in two seconds flat.)

For example, as I wrote the above paragraph, I heard an odd noise and went to investigate. In the bathroom, I discovered a pile of cat vomit on the toilet lid. ON THE TOILET LID. Am I angry about this? No. Am I even irritated? Nope. What I am is utterly perplexed as to how this happened. And slightly amused that the feline in question at least knew the right room to go to. If only she could’ve lifted the lid….

Anyway, all of this to say I am not what anyone would call an irritable person. So when I find myself feeling grouchy about something, you’d think I’d know enough to pay attention.

Well, I’ve been working on a fantasy short story entitled “Out of the Darkness” for the past 8 weeks. And for the past 5 weeks, every time I’ve sat down to work on this short story, I’ve gotten ridiculously grouchy.

Of course, the grouchy affected the writing of said story. I kept getting stuck. My heroine didn’t want to do anything. My supporting character was such a nuisance, I considered having MC kill him just to get rid of him. My antagonist refused to show its (yes, its) face.

The stuck-er I got, the greater the grouchy every time I sat down to work.

Yesterday, after 5 weeks of self-torture, it finally dawned on me whence came all my troubles:

I did not want to be writing this story, plain and simple.

I wanted to be writing something else.

The something else in question happens to be the novel I’ve been saving for NaNoWriMo since last December. (Visit my NaNo profile page here!)

NaNoWriMo.org

And that’s really all there is to it. My inner artist child was throwing a fit because instead of letting her get her way, I was making her sit down and do all this work on this stupid-kenupid short story.

Whaddaya know. My grouchiness was a temper tantrum.

The cure for my ills was contained within the realization. As soon as I identified the source of the ridiculous grouchy, something loosened inside my creative brain. BAM! Heroine gets some gumption. Not to mention some smarts. BAM! Supporting character actually says something useful. BAM! Antagonist finally arrives on-scene with a screech, sparks flying.

Last night, I finally typed the two most important words of the story and called it DONE. Inner artist child capered most bizarrely at her sudden, short-story-less freedom. Yay, now we get to think about the NaNo novel! We hearts the NaNo novel! We LUVS the NaNo novel! BANGERANG!

And so forth.

So. Lesson learned: When irritable about a particular piece of writing, ask self if the source of irritation might be nothing more than a temper tantrum. If answer is yes, tell inner artist child to suck it up and get the work done. Playtime is just around the corner.

And that’s WILAWriTWe!

What I Learned About Writing This Week…from Kindle All-Stars

So. Thanks to Josh and a rollicking romp of insanity, I somehow got myself involved with the Kindle All-Stars Project.

In short, KAS is the brainchild of one Bernard J. Schaffer, who is putting together a short story anthology for Kindle of various independent authors. The proceeds of the anthology will go to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Who wouldn’t want to throw their writing hat into a ring such as this?

So, I did. I submitted a horror short story. And, two days ago, I got an email from Bernard.

He said he can’t accept the story as-is.

But he can’t reject it either.

He wants me to fix it.

His email gave me the freak-out.

Not because he was mean or anything of that sort. Yeah, the critique was tough to take (what critique isn’t?), but I came away from the email feeling like he respected the story and respected me as a writer.

No, the freak-out came from the realization that this was the first critique I’ve ever received from someone with whom I’d never had any prior contact.

I sent my story to a total stranger and actually got specific feedback on it.

That has never happened before.

  • I’ve sent novels to strangers (i.e. publishing houses) and received polite rejections.
  • I’ve turned in writing assignments to writer and long-distance writing coach Elizabeth Engstrom and received critiques in return. But this was under the umbrella of a writing course via correspondence, and I had at least communicated with her before sending her my stuff.
  • I’ve shared my writing with friends and family who gave me honest but kind feedback. But they were friends and family.

Mr. Schaffer was a stranger whom I’d re-tweeted a few times on Twitter. But we’d never exchanged emails before; he wasn’t friends or family; and he was telling me specifics on story-fixing instead of politely telling me I sucked.

Hellllooooooo, broadened horizon.

I love it.

I intend to spend today working on the fixes. I’m hoping to finish them and send the story back to Bernard by the end of the day. This is a wonderful and crazy challenge to set myself, and the writer kid in me is jitterbugging with the most cramazing glee.

In his email, Bernard did not say that if I make the requested changes, I’m definitely in the anthology. But even if I don’t end up making the cut, I won’t regret this experience.

I did a First. I got some great pointers on becoming a better writer. I got to look Fear in the eye and say, “Shove it, sugar. You’re not the boss of me.”

I got to squash that little voice in my head that is so given to negative self-talk.

Step outside the box?

I smash the box, y’all.

And that’s WILAWriTWe.

Taming Fire Sales Charts (2 of 2)

Lately I’ve been talking the hard numbers of indie publishing. I shared a sales chart last week showing the rise and fall of my bestselling fantasy novel Taming Fire and discussing some of the factors that drove those trends.

Then on Tuesday I took a little pause to tell you about my charitable publishing contract. I was really just trying to lay the groundwork for today’s discussion, but that post proved surprisingly popular. That bodes well.

Price Points

Now I’ve got to lay a little more groundwork. If you’ve never looked too closely into publishing with Amazon, this bit might be a little complicated, but it shapes today’s story. The heart of the issue is that Amazon believes an e-Book ought to cost $2.99-$9.99.

They believe it so much that, for a long time there, they were buying those books from publishers at up to $14.99 per copy and still selling them for $9.99. They were taking the loss to sell Kindles and get the public to really buy in to the whole e-Book phenomenon.

Then early last year Apple and the Big 6 Publishers went to war with Amazon and forced them to stop that–they forced a business arrangement called the “agency model” that allows publishers to set the final sales price. Amazon can’t discount below it, can’t take a loss even if they want to. And publishers have used that to keep e-Book prices artificially high.

Still, even after losing that war, Amazon certainly has some muscle to flex. They decided to do that in the form of financial incentives. Prior to agency pricing, the industry standard royalty rate for digital distributors was 35% of list price. After the change, Amazon announced that they would begin paying 70% royalties on any e-Books listed at $2.99-$9.99.

By pricing our books under $10, I automatically give Consortium Books a competitive advantage (price) over the major players in the industry. As Konrath loves to point out, lower prices mean more sales, and quite often they also mean more money. Many of the biggest success stories of Kindle Publishing have gotten their breaks by selling ’em cheap and picking up tons of readers.

The cheapest Amazon will allow a book to be published is $0.99. And that creates a really interesting strategic decision. Lower prices mean more sales. But the bottom end of the 70% royalties is $2.99. That means I can sell a book at $0.99 and take home $0.35, or I can sell it at $2.99 and take home $2.07. I triple the price, and I make six times as much money.

That fact forces a publisher to evaluate (at least) two major questions:

  • What’s more important: Gaining readers, or making money?
  • What’s the actual difference in sales between $0.99 and $2.99?

Those are two questions I’ve been thinking about very hard for three months now. I made a general policy decision last spring to price all “entry point” novels (the first book by an author or the first book in a series) at $0.99, and all full-length sequels at $2.99–that way we can capture a hung chunk of readers with the lower price, and then make our money off the ones who like the book enough to keep reading.

The Value of a Dollar

And I saw the benefits of that decision with Taming Fire. With no promotion at all, it took off. I think the low price played a major part in that. It’s a great novel, but indie books are generally considered risky, so I lowered the “risk” factor as much as possible by selling it cheap, and that paid off. For several months it was selling more copies every day than it had the day before.

That was exciting. And as I’ve mentioned before, seeing significant numbers finally gave me a chance to start looking for trends and testing hypotheses. I was really excited about that, and one big hypothesis I wanted to test was the price one.

The things was…I couldn’t bring myself to test it. As long as Taming Fire‘s sales kept climbing, I had no interest in messing that up. My daily sales went up and up, and my sales rank dropped and dropped, until at one point I was within 8 spots of being on the Top 100 bestseller list for all books on Kindle. I spent three days hovering under 110, and desperately wanted to break that milestone.

I didn’t. I got a 1-star review and my sales rank shot up into the 200s. That’s the story I told last week. When that happened, it really shattered my hopes of getting into the Top 100. But that also freed me up to finally try an experiment I’d been waiting three months to try. I raised the price on Taming Fire from $0.99 to $2.99.

And my daily sales dropped. The change went into effect on late in the day on September 14th, and I immediately fell from an average of 240 sales a day down to 175. If you look at the chart I posted last week, you’ll see a big square dip just to the right of the middle. That’s after I got my 4.5-star rating back. That dip wasn’t from reviews, it was from my price change.

Maximizing Profits

I left the book at $2.99 for one week. Late in the day on the 21st it went back to $0.99 and the daily sales recovered almost immediately. I’d lost the momentum from that initial, exhilarating rush, and I’ve never gotten anywhere close to the Top 100 again. Mostly I’m bouncing right around 200, but owning the 200th most popular book among all Kindle titles is still pretty satisfying.

Anyway! The point is that I got a full week of data at the $2.99 price, and as I said, I averaged a pretty steady 175 sales/day at that price. That means that even looking at my worst week of sales since early July, I made more than three times as much money as I had on my best week ever. In that one week I earned almost $2,400.

If I left the book at that price and it maintained that number of sales, we’d be talking about $130,000 a year from just that one title. Doing 240 sales a day at $0.99, it’s only earning $30,000. Yet I changed it back (and left it there). Why?

Cross-Promoting

It goes right back to those two questions I mentioned before:

  • What’s more important: Gaining readers, or making money?
  • What’s the actual difference in sales between $0.99 and $2.99?

The difference in sales wasn’t as much as I’d expected, honestly, but it was still a significant one (given the loss of 70 new readers per day). But, really, the deciding factor for me was the first question. Because without a doubt, gaining readers is more important to us than making money.

Now, I have to admit: Part of the reason I could make that big-picture decision and pass up all that instant cash is because I wouldn’t get all that instant cash. Like I told you Tuesday, I’d only get the first $30,000. I would get that $30,000 sooner that way, but I’ll be getting it either way.

But the real decision for me is more concrete, and it’s rooted in the wording in that statement up above: “we’d be talking about $130,000 a year from just that one title.” But we’re not talking about just that one title. Want to see another sales chart?

That’s for Gods Tomorrow.  The orange line is July. It started somewhere between 0 and 1 sales per day, which is where Gods Tomorrow had lived since October of last year.

But in the three months Taming Fire has been soaring, Gods Tomorrow has been steadily climbing, too. Right up until Taming Fire faltered, anyway. You can see August’s red line on the top chart start to dive right around the end of the month, and September’s blue line sagging all month long.

Gods Tomorrow is only making me about $100 a month, even after that big increase in sales. But Gods Tomorrow has two sequels already out, both priced at $2.99, and both of them are selling in proportion to Gods Tomorrow. So, all told, that series is earning me more than $1,000 a month. And there are going to be lots more books in that series, so anything I can do to increase its sales will pay dividends.

But that’s not the end of the conversation, because that extra $1,000 doesn’t come close to making up for the difference in money Taming Fire could generate. The thing is, Taming Fire is part of a series, too.

Come December, it will have a sequel out at $2.99, and based on the retention rate I’ve seen with the Ghost Targets series, I expect The Dragonswarm to do right at 50% of Taming Fire‘s daily sales. That means 120 sales a day from the moment I release it. Probably more, because the buzz around that book’s release will probably drive more new sales of Taming Fire.

But even without that boost, I can reasonably expect The Dragonswarm to earn me $90,000 in its first year. That means it’ll be “fully funded” before The Dragonprince comes out in June next year, and that one’ll do about $90,000 per year, too. And there there are my short stories. And my Ghost Targets novels. And the standalone books. And the non-fiction how-tos I’m putting together.

And let’s not forget Courtney’s books. Let’s not forget Joshua’s and Jessie’s and Becca’s and Bailey’s. I’m running a publishing company here, and if I can use the success of one book to cross-promote and get other books selling, I can build an empire. And suddenly it becomes pretty clear that those readers are worth way more than those extra dollars.

It just takes a mountain of patience and an iron-hard self-discipline and a single-minded obsession with getting my story to as many readers as possible. But, y’know, that’s what it takes to write a book in the first place, so I’m pretty well situated to make the right choice here.

See you next week.

What I Learned About Writing This Week…from Getting Published, Redux

You have this glorious idea for a story.

You want to create it, make it, craft it, write it.

You want to share the story with people and see their eyes light up as they tell you what they loved about it.

You want to hover nearby as clusters of readers analyze, discuss, and defend your characters.

If you’re doing your job right, you even want to hear from your readers what didn’t work for them, because you know that such feedback will morph you into a better Maker Of Things.

You want to have book release parties and hold the paperback version of your book in your hands. You want to joke with your readers about signing their Kindles.

You want the satisfaction of Finishing The Story. You want the feeling of accomplishment that drives you to write the next book and the next book and the next.

You are hungry for all of this.

Here is the only way you’ll get what you want:

Give up that show you “need” to watch.

Give up that DVD you “have to” see.

Turn off the TV. Leave it off.

Give up that videogame. Give up that RPG. Give up that MMO.

Pretend they don’t exist.

Give up Rockband, Garage Band, Guitar Hero.

Give up Facebook. Give up status updates and photos. Give up farms, bling, and aquariums.

Give up Twitter.

Give up those long chats on the phone. Give up texting. Give up emailing.

Give up reading blogs.

Give up reading news.

Give up reading magazines.

Give up reading books.

Give up social activities. Give up late night parties, walks at sunset, family dinners.

Give up eating out, working out, making out.

Give up cleaning.

Give up shopping.

Some of those things, you won’t need to sacrifice entirely. Some of those things, you should indulge in occasionally to keep yourself sane. Some of those things, you’ll need in order to recharge your batteries.

But.

How about these?

Give up the illusion of put-together.

Give up the illusion of can’t.

Give up the comfort of familiarity.

Give up that familiar voice inside your head that tells you you’re not enough.

Give up the words you tell yourself that keep you small.

Give up the words you tell yourself that keep you immobile.

Give up the words you tell yourself that keep you in fear.

Give up the cycle of negative self-talk you indulge in inside your head.

Give up the apathy.

Give up the shackles.

Give up the excuses.

Give up the doubts.

Give up the fear.

When you think, “I’m going to write,” there is something in your mind that starts listing reasons why you shouldn’t.

Give up that thing that lists reasons.

Give up that thing that tells you “no.”

Hey, love? All of this sacrifice?

It is going to hurt.

But it will make you more whole than you’ve ever been.

That is why it is worth it.

And that’s WILAWriTWe.

The Consortium Public Works Book Contract

Over the last two weeks I’ve pulled aside the curtain and given you a peek into the nuts and bolts of my nascent publishing empire. I know it’s considered uncouth to talk about money. (Sometimes it’s considered dangerous, too, especially to talk about it on the internet.)

But I also know where that particular bit of etiquette came from. It’s a handy method used by the Haves to keep the Have-Nots from figuring out just how much they don’t have. Management traditionally hates it when employees talk openly about their salaries. They say it engenders ill-will and low morale, but what it really engenders is legitimate requests for raises.

Traditional publishing has been playing the same game with writers for most of a century. They keep royalty statements deliberately vague, they keep their own numbers as close to the chest as possible, and they discourage writers from discussing earnings.

And as I mentioned last week, it’s largely because of the courage of other indie writers to break that convention and share their numbers openly (on the internet, even) that I had the courage to try it at all, and that I had the information I needed to make smart business decisions along the way.

I’m going to do some of that this week. I’m not going to get into detail about all the money I’ve made so far because that’s not really an interesting story yet. But I am going to get back into the numbers on my sales chart from last week, and discuss how those sales impacted my earnings (and projections), and some of what I expect for the future.

Before I can really get into that, though, I need to take a minor diversion. That’s because, unlike Konrath and Eisler and Hocking and anyone else from the indie revolution whose numbers you might stumble across…my situation is kind of weird.

Eighteen months ago I started talking about a business plan I was toying with. I called it The Consortium. If you know me personally, you already know about the Consortium. If you’ve bought one of my books, you might have seen the name before (the listed publisher is Consortium Books). If this is the first time you’ve heard it mentioned, you should probably at least take a look at the company’s website.

Here’s the company’s mission statement:

The Consortium is a nonprofit organization based out of Oklahoma City, OK, that supports the arts by encouraging the development of local talent and generating high-quality works of art that directly benefit the community.

There’s some high phrases in there (“encouraging the development of local talent” and “works of art that directly benefit the community”), but within the larger business plan those phrases have a very specific and targeted meaning.

The company’s primary goals are twofold:

  • To provide a desirable and reliable career path for working artists
  • To produce new, good art into the public domain

And those two goals go hand-in-hand. The aim of the Consortium is to create a new patronage and demonstrate how we, as a society, could support the arts without the incredibly broken and abusive concepts of copyright and intellectual property.

We do that by separating the value of an artist from the immediate commercial value of a discrete work product. The claim of copyright is that it will encourage the creation of new works of art by providing a (potential, future) commercial incentive tied to the individual work. We provide the commercial incentive in advance, and we make it real instead of potential.

We pay our artists enough, the whole time they’re creating a work, that they don’t need to make another dime after it’s released. The work has already been paid for. And that allows us to release it into the public domain instead of expending vast amounts of sales, marketing, and legal muscle to squeeze every last drop of profit out of it as a commercial product.

Those last two paragraphs are beautiful. They bring a tear to my eye. They’re also completely untrue. Or, rather, they’re not yet true. That’s the company’s business model, but before it’ll actually work, we need the capitol to start paying those salaries. Right now, everyone working for the Consortium is working on a volunteer basis. We’re working to create that beautiful future. And sometime in the last three months, I realized with a bit of a shock that we’re actually succeeding.

That’s where my book’s sales figures come into it. That’s where things get complicated. See, in a traditional publishing contract, the writer gives the publisher permission to produce the book (usually one version of the book, in one sales market), and the publisher agrees to pay the writer a certain percentage of the profits on every sale made.

It’s a very small percentage.

But if the book does really well, the royalty rate often increases. And, of course, if the book does really well, then even a small percentage can become a huge sum of money.

In the self-publishing world, the writer gets to keep a much larger percentage. (We’re talking about the difference between, say, 6% of paperback sales, and 70% of a self-published author’s digital sales). They might pay for some of the publishing services (editing, layout, cover design), but usually those are flat fees and one-time payments, and once a book has earned that money back, the writer gets 70% of profits forever.

But my books don’t fit either of those models. All my books that are currently available are produced under the Consortium Public Works Book Contract. At the heart of it, that contract is a way for me to turn my my creative work into a charitable contribution to the Consortium. A donation. Here’s how it works:

  • The Consortium pays all initial publishing costs.
  • The writer receives 100% of all proceeds generated by the book–so if Amazon pays us 70% of the list price for a purchase of Taming Fire, every penny of it would go to me, the writer. Okay, let me start over: The writer receives 100% of all proceeds generated by the book until the writer receives $30,000. At that point, the book is considered “fully funded.” At that point, the writer (me) agrees he has been adequately compensated for the effort that went into creating the work.
  • Once the book is fully funded:
    • The Consortium will release it into the public domain.
    • The Consortium keeps all proceeds generated by their sales of the book.
    • The writer promises not to self-publish the same work in competition with the Consortium.

From a business perspective, that’s a terrible publishing contract for a writer. $30,000 might sound like a lot of money. It is a lot of money. I designed that contract as the President of the Consortium, but I was careful to design a contract I’d be happy signing as a Consortium Writer.

Still, it’s a terrible contract. If Taming Fire makes a million dollars, I get $30,000 and the Consortium gets to keep the rest. If Taming Fire becomes the next Harry Potter and earns $200,000,000 dollars for the Consortium, I get $30,000. Those are the terms of my publishing contract, and they’re legally binding.

But as I said above, the contract isn’t designed to make me rich. It’s designed to compensate me for the work I put into writing this particular project, and turn the work’s commercial value into a charitable contribution to a grand social experiment I believe in deeply.

And as it turns out, I’m going to be putting my money where my mouth is. Unless something changes drastically, Taming Fire will be fully funded in less than a year. Its sequel, The Dragonswarm, might well be fully funded within the first three months.

(And I’m not the least bit alarmed. On the contrary: I’m thrilled at the thought of my little company having some actual operating funds.)

But those were some very specific projections up there, and some kind of weird ones (what with Taming Fire needing another year to outsell a book that won’t even be published for another three months yet). And, of course, there’s a story behind how that happens. And another chart, too. Come back Thursday, and I’ll tell you about the complicated mysteries of making money in indie publishing.

Taming Fire Sales Charts (1 of 2)

Last week I left you hanging with the promise of a sad story and some detailed sales analysis. I know you’ve just been waiting on the edge of your seat ever since.

Well…I’m more than a week late with the follow-up, but it kind of works out. Because I’m late, I can share all my September sales information with you. If I’d followed through on my promise last week, we’d’ve been stuck with a lopsided graph, and no one wants that.

Looking for Trends

One of the things I tend to mention every time I discuss doing business in the midst of this publishing revolution is the difficulty of making informed business decisions. That’s because there’s so little reliable data.

Thanks to the transparency of guys like J. A. Konrath it’s possible to make some guesses, and thanks to Amazon for updating their sales values in realtime and their sales rankings every 15 minutes, it’s possible to derive some worthwhile guesses. But those guesses are based on an incredibly complicated market as it exists at this moment in time, and not only are elements within the market changing, but the whole structural foundation of it is in a state of rapid upheaval.

Nonetheless, I’ve tried. As I mentioned last week, I’ve been charting sales from day one, trying to recognize meaningful trends. But before July, I was dealing in such small numbers it was difficult to separate the signal from the noise.

That all changed the moment I released Taming Fire.

I’d intended to just include that top chart there, but as I mentioned above I’ve benefited greatly from the willingness of other indie publishers to openly share hard numbers, so I’ve decided I can do as much here.

But the important bit (for today’s story anyway) is in the three colored lines on the top chart. You’ll see the yellow one that starts near zero on the left and climbs up over 200 on the right. Those are my numbers for July (10 days after the book was first released). The values represent new sales per day.

August is red. It started the month strong, climbed to a point just shy of 300 sales per day, and bounced around there. Then at the very end of the month you’ll see a “Big Dipper” shape. That’s the sudden plummet created by the 1-star review I talked about last week.

Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones

September is the blue line. Frankly, I’d prefer to stick with the red one. But if you look at the far left, you’ll see Taming Fire did fully recover from its late-August slump for a while there. It flirted with 300 sales a day for part of a week.

Then I got another negative review. This one wasn’t even as useless as the one I mentioned last week. It was openly hostile and blindly malicious:

I think this author hates his readers or he would not have produced something so rancid. There is no life to the story and its just icky. I would not ever purchase from this author again in the future. Dustin anfeald is a much better story with great action.
Update: Dustin anfeald was no better once I got halfway through it turned into pure defication.[sic]

The reviewer in question has only ever reviewed two books: mine and the Dustin Anfeald title mentioned there. Both of them were 1-star reviews, and they were both about as useful as that one.

On the internet, we call someone like that a troll. Good advice is to ignore them, avoid them, and by all means refuse to engage with them. Responding at all just provides the sort of attention they’re looking for and encourages them to do more.

Problem was, this review once again dropped me from a 4.5-star average to 4.0. The review came in on the 4th and I instantly slipped from 323 sales  to 248 on the 5th. (I’m not certain why I had another 300+ day on the 6th, but it’s the sole outlier across both incidents.)

After that, my daily sales went:

  • 226
  • 219
  • 208
  • 197
  • 191
  • 200
  • 208

And…y’know, I can hardly complain about that. It’s a devastating drop compared to the daily numbers I’d gotten used to back in August…but at the same time that’s over 1,400 new sales generated in the course of that week.

And then at the end of the week I caught a lucky break. Two complete strangers, totally unsolicited, both posted 5-star reviews on September 15th, and that same day my sales jumped from 200-ish to 230. It’s no 300, but it’s still a significant improvement.

Dolla Dolla Bill, Y’all

That’s not the end of the story, though. A week later the average daily sales dropped all the way down to the 160s, and this time it had nothing to do with my star rating. This time, it was all about the money.

But that’s another story of its own. Come back next week, and I’ll tell you what happened there.