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MattDaddy
Apr 10, 2006

You can do it. Run Mr. Pug, run.

leb388 posted:

I see this coming up again and again, so I want to get it off the ground too. Can I be co-editor? I can contribute a short story and ebook formatting/fixing typos.

Once we have everything set up to take submissions, I think we should post in Creative Convention and invite everyone to submit a story. For a charity, what about Doctors Without Borders/MSF? They seem to do good work.

I'll be happily donating $250-300 dollars to DWB once my December payment comes through. It was part of my donation drive, and even though I doubt many people purchased with the intention of making a donation, the money will be going to DWB nonetheless.

It's nice as hell to have extra money coming in and being able to send some to people that need it! I volunteer as much around my local area as time/work/etc allows, but sometimes I would wish I could have some spare money for other causes; now I do. It's a great feeling.

The goon anthology, 'Kindle All Stars' seemed to be quite successful and, even though I have no idea how much money it made, every dime is going to a worthy charity.

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OrangeKing
Dec 5, 2002

They do play in October!
I just added my books to Barnes and Noble through PubIt, and I've made one sale there. Given the price of the commission, I know which book sold...but is there actually any way to know which books are selling there, other than estimating based on sales rank? I don't see any link to a useful list like the one Amazon gives you.

Edit: Never mind, I'm an idiot who needs to, you know, look closely at the screen.

Damnitologist
Sep 21, 2003

I haven't written a story yet; but I am making 1000 posts a day plus title change expenses to think about it. You keep this until you write. I can outspend you. Cuz I'm writing.
So, I've got the GYOA thing set up and running; no one much seems to care yet, or even to have made the call whether it's offtopic for this thread; of course, the site could still be propagating [in your region].

I've filled in a few things to get the story started—the first page, with a couple exit strategies, and a couple branches thereafter; there's lots of room for improvement, whenever anyone else wants to jump in and get involved.

It might not be the worst idea to start at the Rules: http://goon.your.own.adventure.gremlin.net/index.php?title=Goon_Your_Own_Adventure:About

From there, click on the grenade I've [?temporarily] borrowed to hit the homepage and start the story. When you see an unwritten page you feel qualified to write, knock yourself out.

Note: Registration should be open. I'd recommend using whatever pen name you want to be listed under within the eventual KindleBook; if you've got an Author Page at amazon.com, add that under your UserPage so people can find you and make you rich.

psychopomp
Jan 28, 2011
A bit of idle procrastination math:

Assuming that an author has equal interest and proficiency in both short and long works, ideas for both, that he charges .99 for works of up to 15k words, 2.99 for works up to 45k words, and 4.99 for longer worth, and that he writes a conservative thousand words a day, and that he sells most copies at Amazon...

A short story will earn him $.35 per copy sold. Assuming he bundles them together into 5 story collections for $2.99 he'll earn another .42 per story per collection sold, and if he bundles them into 10 story collections for $4.99 he'll earn another .35 per story. All told, a short story will earn the author an average 37 cents regardless of format (single, collection, omnibus), slightly less if he scrapes the bottom of a 3000 word story, slightly more if he writes 10000 word stories (as that bumps up the size of the collections to the next price point).

Earning that $.37 cents per copy takes him 3 days for 3k word story and a $.11 per copy/per day profit, 5 days for a 5k word story ($.07 per day), 8 days for an 8k word story ($.05 per day), 10 days for a 10k story (also .05 per day due to the higher price point of collections).

It's therefore much more efficient in terms of $ earned per day to write shorter stories.

Looking at longer works, and assuming that we don't bundle them together, we find ourselves making $.03 a day per copy sold for 20,000 word novellas, $.02 a day for 25,000 word works, $.03 again for 45000 word works due to the price jump, and then back down to $.02 a day/copy at 50k plus, and down to a penny per copy per day of writing at 80k or more words.

Analysis:
Of course, this doesn't take into account the fact that different works sell better at different lengths. To really get a feel for the earning potential of different length works we'd need to have a good idea of how well short fiction sells vs longer works. Anyone have any general figures on that? Will a 80,000 word novel sell 100 times the 3000 word short to have the same words/day/copy profit? The top short story collection on Kindle is in the 500s, and the top short is in the 700s. Can't say if that holds true, generally, throughout the form, but it looks like longer works sell significantly more.

The question is, though - if I can write 10 short stories in the time it takes me to write a single novel, is it worth the time spent to write that novel?

Answer: If you can sell 40 times as many copies as you could of each story, then yes. This also doesn't take the effect of backlog into account. Writing short stories is a quick way to establish a large backlog - it'll take (at 4000 words a day) 15 days of labor to work up a 10 story backlog, whereas it'd take 5 months to do the same with novels.

psychopomp fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Jan 14, 2012

Roar
Jul 7, 2007

I got 30 points!

I GOT 30 POINTS!
You're way overthinking it. Thousands of books don't sell any copies at all regardless of price. All of my short stories (<10k words) have had increased sales since being raised from 0.99 to 2.99.* I think it all comes down to writing what makes you happy. If you have a good story to tell and it's novel length, write it and sell it for what you think it's worth (judging on industry standards as needed, of course). Same thing if you enjoy short stories.

If you start basing your writing with profit in mind, you run the chance of losing your focus on the story and writing an inferior piece.

*erotica, but still.

MattDaddy
Apr 10, 2006

You can do it. Run Mr. Pug, run.
This is why I adopted a serialized approach to my work. You get the best of both worlds.

You also get the added benefit of a kick in the pants every time you delay working on your book. Why? You have readers out there waiting for the next part to come out, so it provides additional motivation to keep writing.

I was lazy (I did have a lot of RL poo poo going on, but I was still lazy). My sales started to slip and I realized I needed to get back into it and finish the drat thing.

Now I have a completed, full-length work I can sell for $5.99 and four shorts. If I had stopped at 3, I'd have a bunch of pissed-off readers and not much money to show for my efforts.

MattDaddy fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Jun 22, 2013

Damnitologist
Sep 21, 2003

I haven't written a story yet; but I am making 1000 posts a day plus title change expenses to think about it. You keep this until you write. I can outspend you. Cuz I'm writing.

psychopomp posted:

Anyone have any general figures on that? Will a 80,000 word novel sell 100 times the 3000 word short to have the same words/day/copy profit?

I dunno. I was just getting used to the idea of putting shorts [if I could write one] on my site for free, notwithstanding advert revenue, to remind people that I usually write books. Just because magazines are kinda history now.

The idea of releasing a KindleBook maybe ten or twenty pages long seems really strange, to me. Not that I'd hold it against anyone; I just can't personally make sense of it.

As of now, I'm looking at a 600,000 word thing I did a few years ago, which should fit entirely on the Kindle, and contemplating releasing it as four separate serials averaging 150,000 words each; I haven't even fully committed to that, since it sounds kinda cheap to me.

I guess I shouldn't be perplexed by the idea of people grabbing a short story for a dollar. I mean: I know that people will grab a whole magazine for five, just for one article in it. Maybe I just assume some level of justification in that—that they're getting their thing, plus the adverts for watches, or something.

As to the precise question: I'm not sure it could be measured, in the longterm. Day to day, things will always fluctuate, leading toward an average; over the course of ten to fifty years...even if we move on to some better method after the Kindle37 is released, a given work should still be trickling in whatever profit. I guess the breakdown is spend whatever time writing something, put it up there, and get paid from it for the rest of time.

MattDaddy
Apr 10, 2006

You can do it. Run Mr. Pug, run.

Damnitologist posted:

As of now, I'm looking at a 600,000 word thing I did a few years ago, which should fit entirely on the Kindle, and contemplating releasing it as four separate serials averaging 150,000 words each; I haven't even fully committed to that, since it sounds kinda cheap to me.

600,000 words? 4 parts?

Why do all that writing if you aren't gonna max out your revenue?

You easily have enough content to split that up into 6 separate novels and further split those into 25k word segments.

Offer each novel for $4-5.99 and the shorter parts for $2.99 each.

psychopomp
Jan 28, 2011

Roar posted:

You're way overthinking it. Thousands of books don't sell any copies at all regardless of price. All of my short stories (<10k words) have had increased sales since being raised from 0.99 to 2.99.* I think it all comes down to writing what makes you happy. If you have a good story to tell and it's novel length, write it and sell it for what you think it's worth (judging on industry standards as needed, of course). Same thing if you enjoy short stories.

If you start basing your writing with profit in mind, you run the chance of losing your focus on the story and writing an inferior piece.

*erotica, but still.

Writing everything makes me happy.

Okay, yes, this is largely mental masturbation, but I am literally overflowing with ideas suitable for works of all lengths.

Obviously if you feel more passionate about one thing than another you should write that... but I've just wrapped up a project and I'm wondering which to pick up next. My biggest need, from a business perspective, is a backlog - I've got 3 stories published, one in proofreading, and I want to stay productive.

I've got a few ideas that appeal to me pretty strongly - do I work on the 70s-crime urban horror series of shorts, one of the the novel-length thrillers, or start working on the CYOA? I dunno man, it all seems viable. I'm equally interested in any of those things, so I'm looking at the "what would benefit me most" factors.

Also I guess I'm wondering how comfortable I'd be with not producing anything for a month or so while working on a longer piece.

quote:

This is why I adopted a serialized approach to my work. You get the best of both worlds.

Strongly considering this. I've gotten a short collection of steampunk mysteries written, and I was considering a followup novel - but releasing a series of cliffhanger-y shorts with a bit of penny-dreadful flavoring would be strongly in-genre.

psychopomp fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Jan 14, 2012

Damnitologist
Sep 21, 2003

I haven't written a story yet; but I am making 1000 posts a day plus title change expenses to think about it. You keep this until you write. I can outspend you. Cuz I'm writing.

MattDaddy posted:

600,000 words? 4 parts?

Why do all that writing if you aren't gonna max out your revenue?

You easily have enough content to split that up into 6 separate novels and further split those into 25k word segments.

Offer each novel for $4-5.99 and the shorter parts for $2.99 each.

I really couldn't. I'm only entertaining the idea at all because the layout as it's been since 2004 is Book One, Book Two, Book Three, and Book Four; it's technically episodic by design.

What's bugged me since then was that, at fifteen hundred pages, it was impractical to impossible to print and bind. So I tried cutting it down through editing—badly. Meanwhile, everyone was telling me then to cut it into two or four books; I didn't want to create sequels out of it. I still don't: it's just one bigassed oneshot.

But, this idea of serialising it into four parts for $X each, and then releasing the whole thing for $Y at the end...I'm thinking it over.

One flaw is that there's a prologue before Book One and an epilogue after Book Four. Another is that the title of Book Four is the title of the whole book; I'd end up with, like, TITLE: BOOK FOUR: TITLE in the end. So I'm not sure how to play this.

Oh—and I wrote it because I wanted it to exist; that's why I write anything. The money's kinda unrelated.

MattDaddy
Apr 10, 2006

You can do it. Run Mr. Pug, run.

Damnitologist posted:

I really couldn't. I'm only entertaining the idea at all because the layout as it's been since 2004 is Book One, Book Two, Book Three, and Book Four; it's technically episodic by design.

What's bugged me since then was that, at fifteen hundred pages, it was impractical to impossible to print and bind. So I tried cutting it down through editing—badly. Meanwhile, everyone was telling me then to cut it into two or four books; I didn't want to create sequels out of it. I still don't: it's just one bigassed oneshot.

But, this idea of serialising it into four parts for $X each, and then releasing the whole thing for $Y at the end...I'm thinking it over.

One flaw is that there's a prologue before Book One and an epilogue after Book Four. Another is that the title of Book Four is the title of the whole book; I'd end up with, like, TITLE: BOOK FOUR: TITLE in the end. So I'm not sure how to play this.

Oh—and I wrote it because I wanted it to exist; that's why I write anything. The money's kinda unrelated.

I understand not being able to break it up since you wrote it that way. You can still split up each of the 4 books into smaller parts and sell those separately. Serialized parts don't need to have such clear division as full-length novels. I've found readers generally don't get upset about this at all. They're just glad the next part is out so they can find out what happens next.

Rename Book four? I dunno.

Damnitologist
Sep 21, 2003

I haven't written a story yet; but I am making 1000 posts a day plus title change expenses to think about it. You keep this until you write. I can outspend you. Cuz I'm writing.

MattDaddy posted:

I understand not being able to break it up since you wrote it that way. You can still split up each of the 4 books into smaller parts and sell those separately. Serialized parts don't need to have such clear division as full-length novels. I've found readers generally don't get upset about this at all. They're just glad the next part is out so they can find out what happens next.

Rename Book four? I dunno.

I'd really have to look at it—both the edited suck version and the full original—to see if each subbook even could be chopped up. But, on average, each would be around 325 pages; that's a shortish novel already.

And there's a sequence to the subbooks; renaming the final one from BOOK FOUR: TITLE would be a bit like calling it BOOK YELLOW: MONIKER. It's a mess.

psychopomp
Jan 28, 2011
Keep the prologue and epilogue only in the collected work as an added value for people who've bought the component parts.

Damnitologist
Sep 21, 2003

I haven't written a story yet; but I am making 1000 posts a day plus title change expenses to think about it. You keep this until you write. I can outspend you. Cuz I'm writing.

psychopomp posted:

Keep the prologue and epilogue only in the collected work as an added value for people who've bought the component parts.

I've considered that. I'm not sure it would work. The prologue kinda sneakily spells out things you'd need to know a hundred pages later, when those things get implemented in the story. It's almost only a prologue because that's what I said it was; it's required reading for roughly everything after it.

Incidentally, I'm not certain how long the thing will be once I get it back together. The primary story is set here in 2012, though I wrote it before twitter.com existed. So, in repairing the damage the editing did, I'm also gonna update anything laughably outdated; it'll read as Copyright © 2004, 2012 in the end.

Anyway: it's academic. I wrote this thing, chopped it badly, wanna restore it, wanna update it, and might consider releasing it in stages.

Though there is the kinda good news. This was the last straw in getting me to stop putting up with anyone else. There's a weirdness in going from You can write whatever you want to I hadn't really meant you could write a damned phonebook.

HiddenGecko
Apr 15, 2007

You think I'm really going
to read this shit?
I'd think about serializing that beast. You've got 600k of words to play with and assuming you can edit it/clean it up/are willing to tear up and sell it in chunks that's around 10-12 average length novels.

I don't think it will detract at all from your story to serialize it. A lot of quality fiction is serialized and sold in small chunks. For example, "The Dresden Files", G.R.R Martin's books, and Dune to name a few.

Readers appreciate a cohesive story that successfully references something in the first novel during book ten and can successfully foreshadow events in the final novel during the prologue. Just break it up and see how it looks.

bollig
Apr 7, 2006

Never Forget.
So I have put some stories up on Amazon, and because I had a free Saturday I thought I'd open it up on Smashwords. I uploaded a couple and they weren't flagged for any reason to go to premium review.

But then I uploaded a story that had pretty much the exact same formatting and they flagged it for tab indenting and difference in paragraphs.

First question. How am I supposed to indent without tabs? I must be missing something pretty fundamental here, because I'm extremely confused. Yeah the trend seems to be the paragraphs separated by an empty line, but they go on to say that most people prefer first line indents and then go on to say not to use tabs. I am confused. Any help here would be great.

I guess I only had one question. HOKAY!

psychopomp
Jan 28, 2011
The Smashwords style-guide covers this fairly well, but the short answer is basically you set your paragraph indents in Word rather than using tabs.

bollig
Apr 7, 2006

Never Forget.

psychopomp posted:

The Smashwords style-guide covers this fairly well, but the short answer is basically you set your paragraph indents in Word rather than using tabs.

Well a couple of things, I use Libre Office. Am I screwed?

Does that just get taken care of in Word?

HiddenGecko
Apr 15, 2007

You think I'm really going
to read this shit?
Smashwords is a little draconian in their formatting requirements because the meatgrinder has to spit your work out in several different formats.

You'll want to check out the Smashwords Style Guide. Specifically the chapter on avoiding and fixing Autovetter errors. It took me several tries before I was able to format my piece successfully so don't get discouraged.

Libre office should be sufficiently similar to Openoffice which I use. The process is almost identical to the process they describe for Microsoft Word in the Styleguide, other than the relevant menus you'll need are in different places.

psychopomp
Jan 28, 2011

bollig posted:

Well a couple of things, I use Libre Office. Am I screwed?

Does that just get taken care of in Word?

Nah, you have to muck around a bit. Not sure how to do it in Libre Office either - I set up my story template file in MS Word, but I mostly write in Open Office, so idk man.

I've been considering Scrivener - does anyone know if its output works with ebook formatting?

bollig
Apr 7, 2006

Never Forget.

psychopomp posted:

Nah, you have to muck around a bit. Not sure how to do it in Libre Office either - I set up my story template file in MS Word, but I mostly write in Open Office, so idk man.

I've been considering Scrivener - does anyone know if its output works with ebook formatting?

Yeah I just checked it out and Libre can do it. Right now I'm trying to delete all of the tabs which has been described on the internets but I'm having trouble doing it IRL.

bollig
Apr 7, 2006

Never Forget.
GOT IT!

What I had to do was allow the search/find field to use regular expressions. This is a critical step missing from the first 6 tutorials that I found.

bollig
Apr 7, 2006

Never Forget.
OH MY GOD. It's still saying I have indent/block paragraph problems. gently caress this. I'm out for the weekend.

Maybe it will fix itself using magic. Internet magic.

Roar
Jul 7, 2007

I got 30 points!

I GOT 30 POINTS!
Smashwords has the most infuriating system I've ever worked with, gotta say.

MattDaddy
Apr 10, 2006

You can do it. Run Mr. Pug, run.
Last time I just copy pasted everything to notepad and then copy pasted back into a blank document.

Everything should go to block format.

Then I just highlight everything except the Title and cover and change the paragraph to "first line indent".

Soulcleaver
Sep 25, 2007

Murderer
I registered for Goon Your Own Adventure but it's not letting me edit pages. Damnitologist, do you have to whitelist me or something?

Edit: Nevermind, I just had to confirm the e-mail. I will contribute, I promise!

Soulcleaver fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Jan 15, 2012

Damnitologist
Sep 21, 2003

I haven't written a story yet; but I am making 1000 posts a day plus title change expenses to think about it. You keep this until you write. I can outspend you. Cuz I'm writing.

HiddenGecko posted:

I'd think about serializing that beast. You've got 600k of words to play with and assuming you can edit it/clean it up/are willing to tear up and sell it in chunks that's around 10-12 average length novels.

I don't think it will detract at all from your story to serialize it. A lot of quality fiction is serialized and sold in small chunks. For example, "The Dresden Files", G.R.R Martin's books, and Dune to name a few.

Readers appreciate a cohesive story that successfully references something in the first novel during book ten and can successfully foreshadow events in the final novel during the prologue. Just break it up and see how it looks.

Probably. What's really bugging me, I suppose, is that this isn't the only place I'm hearing this. Which in fact should make it all sciencey if people are only hearing that it's half a million words so, whatever it is, it should be some arbitrary number of comicbooks.

I'm getting the same thing from people who literally can't pronounce things in the novel looking to chop it up into X Number of forty-seven-minute television episodes and, apparently being too lazy to read and retain the whole thing, stopping to ask inane questions like Does this [major] character really have to exist? and instead of the whole thing where this guy gets pushed to the breaking point, couldn't he just admit that he's the badguy?

At some level, I get that it's two different things. People in here recommending releasing half a million words as, like, thirty-two leaflets have different logics and motivations than people trying to dumb everything down so it can be flashy buffers between adverts; but it all kinda sounds the same to me, like I'm just hearing that each word is a commodity, whatever that word is, so bundling these X,000 together naturally cost $2.99 down at the Word Market.

It makes me wonder [again, and always] whether anyone actually reads this poo poo. I've joked [darkly] for years that, in hearing that the cover matters more than the content, I don't write books so much as produce coffeetable sculptures. It makes me wanna write a funnyish, deplorable skit in which a group of people in a parlour all marvel at this novel they're centred around, noting the artwork and quality and whatever intellectual elements; after a few moments, one accidentally drops it, and it turns out that the novel opens up, and the whole lot react like alarmed chimps learning that they can hit eat other with bones, or something.

All that said [whatever it was], I'm getting the point, and not even really disagreeing with it. What I probably should do, just to remain sane, is to do things my way [winning or failing] with this specific thing, and then entertain the idea of serialising the new stuff as I write it. I've got no real problem with the idea, if I know that that's the plan from the beginning; it's the idea of retrofucking something I'm okay with as it is that rubs me the wrong way.

MattDaddy
Apr 10, 2006

You can do it. Run Mr. Pug, run.
It's so loving easy to purchase something on the Kindle, people often buy poo poo and never read it - or, they still haven't read it yet.

Collectors. Impulse buyers. Newbs. Old people that forget poo poo easily.

I honestly would rather them read my work and enjoy it, but if they buy a copy and it never gets read, I'm fine with that, too.

Damnitologist, you should do whatever you want with your books. You already said your goal is not to make money (at least not off the 600k word series). Make them beautiful and as perfect as you want. Split them up or don't. Sell them for 99 cents or 99 dollars or give them away for free. To hell with all the statistics and greed and blah. It's your art, man, do what the artist in you tells you to do. Honestly, I'd loving love to read your book and I don't even know what it's about!

I guess the only reason I offered my input was because I know that if I found a previously unpublished, 600k word book just lying around, I'd tear that fucker apart and sell it to the masses in the most economical fashion possible.

Greedy? I don't think so.

I enjoy writing, but with the things I write, I don't pretend they are literary accomplishments. They are more than just dollar signs to me, too, though. Perhaps my creations fall somewhere in the middle. I like to write. If I can make money doing so, awesome.

Damnitologist
Sep 21, 2003

I haven't written a story yet; but I am making 1000 posts a day plus title change expenses to think about it. You keep this until you write. I can outspend you. Cuz I'm writing.

MattDaddy posted:

It's so loving easy to purchase something on the Kindle, people often buy poo poo and never read it - or, they still haven't read it yet.

Oh, I know; I'm guilty of that myself: I've got a couple hundred things I've never yet opened. Including I think one of yours [I'll get that to the top of the list though].

MattDaddy posted:

Damnitologist, you should do whatever you want with your books. You already said your goal is not to make money (at least not off the 600k word series). Make them beautiful and as perfect as you want. Split them up or don't. Sell them for 99 cents or 99 dollars or give them away for free. To hell with all the statistics and greed and blah. It's your art, man, do what the artist in you tells you to do. Honestly, I'd loving love to read your book and I don't even know what it's about!

I don't really pretend that it's art; I've been trying not to come off as though I do. But it is something you have to read to understand, in much the way the logo on a pack of gum is; with these television twonks looking at the overall thickness of the thing and trying to guess how much money it can make them, it's like people noting that Trident is green and never conceiving that it's got the same name as a deital pitchfork or missile or...it all makes me wonder whether people have any actual reason for doing anything at all, I guess.

What it's about is actually the real punchline. It's a loving zombiebook. It's...if I had to think up a plotline real quick, I guess it's kinda the twenty-eight days chopped out of Twenty-eight Days Later. I wanted, for once, to have something about the zombigeddon which didn't leap infuriatingly from zombies can exist to the world is now fully overrun in the blink of an eye. So it [lengthily] moves from Patient Zero on Day One [following a couple introductory days before even that] to about a week later, once the world has gone fully batshit. The prologue, by the way, is set in the Jurassic, the last time [one assumes] that the zombiebug ran its course zoonotically leaping whatever theropodic species.

So, again, I was lied to told I could write whatever I wanted. I wanted a zombigeddon with a little more to it than zombies exist; they fight and...wound up where I am now.

MattDaddy posted:

I guess the only reason I offered my input was because I know that if I found a previously unpublished, 600k word book just lying around, I'd tear that fucker apart and sell it to the masses in the most economical fashion possible.

I actually totally appreciate that; I'm not denigrating your idea at all. I think I only ever brought this thing up in the first place to mention that, even before i saw this thread, I was getting suggestions to serialise the thing, to a lesser extent in print and to far greater an extent in television. Everyone just focussing on the wordcount instead of what those words are kinda made me wonder if, functionally, I'd just done that Travis Tea thing: here's X words, so it's a book, so go me.

MattDaddy posted:

I enjoy writing, but with the things I write, I don't pretend they are literary accomplishments. They are more than just dollar signs to me, too, though. Perhaps my creations fall somewhere in the middle. I like to write. If I can make money doing so, awesome.

My thinking, inasmuch as I think about it, is that I write things for free, just to make them exist; I release them for money. I guess I just don't value these things by weight.

EDIT: Two funny things I should mention.

One: I know I don't pretend that this stuff is art; I kinda wish I did. At least, then, I could be that pretentious fuckstick ordering everyone to look at what I've done [for money] instead of being so sick of a book by the time it's done that I actually hate doing interviews.

I actually almost timed this just about correctly, having written the thing eight years ago and having to butcher it. Now that it's when the story occurs, I'm just about unsick enough of it to talk about it again. Luckily, I'd predicted the availability and fungibility of EBooks back then, and always assumed that, by about now, I'd be able to release the whole thing correctly after all.

Two: I've actually done a serial. Kinda. In 1990, before I had any real writer cred, I wrote something about seventy thousand words long, because no one was gonna let me do the whole thing; by the end of the century, that was ten separate books in length. A couple of those books are back up at two hundred thousand words, but each is enough of a standalone [by design] that I'm okay with them being a saga of ten things; I wouldn't for example make an effort to merge them all into a single ISBN, whether I could or not.

So I totally get the premise. I just still don't view it as X,000 words automatically equals $X.99; it's more complex than that, to me.

Damnitologist fucked around with this message at 05:14 on Jan 15, 2012

psychopomp
Jan 28, 2011

Damnitologist posted:

So I totally get the premise. I just still don't view it as X,000 words automatically equals $X.99; it's more complex than that, to me.

It's infinitely complex so gently caress it and set arbitrary price points. Charge what you think it's worth, charge what you think people will pay, charge what you think the market will bear.

Then tweak the poo poo out of that price in an attempt to ride the ebb and flow of sales and pretend like it matters when it's really just luck anyway.

Damnitologist
Sep 21, 2003

I haven't written a story yet; but I am making 1000 posts a day plus title change expenses to think about it. You keep this until you write. I can outspend you. Cuz I'm writing.

psychopomp posted:

It's infinitely complex so gently caress it and set arbitrary price points. Charge what you think it's worth, charge what you think people will pay, charge what you think the market will bear.

Then tweak the poo poo out of that price in an attempt to ride the ebb and flow of sales and pretend like it matters when it's really just luck anyway.

Yeah. Though that's a little weird to me too. The first KindleBook I uploaded was $8.99 [EDIT: Technically, it was 99¢ for the first month, to give the fanbase a chance to get it for close to free; then I kicked it up to nine bucks for the casual consumers], because it no longer had to be $9.99. No one minded, really; people paid that for it. But, eventually, it occurred to me that it made no sense to charge that for a book not losing half its profit margin to materials, so I dropped it to $2.99 and thought of it more as something of a KindleApp [before KindleApps later became a thing].

I wonder sometimes whether everyone who got it for $8.99 wants me dead now.

Damnitologist fucked around with this message at 07:46 on Jan 15, 2012

FingerbangMisfire
Feb 17, 2007

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, honesty, and decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
Not to be a dick, but are all 600k of that piece really the words you want to publish? It just seems ... enormous.

Full disclosure: The longest piece I've written was a 65k novel.

Damnitologist
Sep 21, 2003

I haven't written a story yet; but I am making 1000 posts a day plus title change expenses to think about it. You keep this until you write. I can outspend you. Cuz I'm writing.

FingerbangMisfire posted:

Not to be a dick, but are all 600k of that piece really the words you want to publish? It just seems ... enormous.

Full disclosure: The longest piece I've written was a 65k novel.

I'm not sure what the final wordcount will be. I'm thinking that, of the words I've got, The waitress brought him an ashtray could be dropped, the story taking place this year; I might replace them with others—possibly more than those six—as needed.

I'm not too concerned about the thing being too long, from the readers' perspective. With the shortened, butchered version [769 pages] I've got perfectly accurate feedback about, say, CharacterX going from being an arrogant dick in one chapter to being fully psychotic the next time he shows up, just because I slashed the hundred pages supporting the moodswing, but couldn't remove the character entirely. In any case, I haven't heard a lot of whimpers that 769 pages was too long, as such; I really don't expect anyone to complain that something twice that long [but a better book] is unreasonable, and that they demand a lesser number of words for the same money. But, who knows.

That aside, I've been thinking about the larger and future idea of doing shorter things, as serials or as glorified articles, and seeing what happens with that. I'm not real comfy with short stories as a rule, since every idea explodes automatically into a novel. But, in thinking about it today, I realised something funny: I like everyone else have a daily webcomic; using stupid, metaphorcial logic, the four daily panels are four thousand words a day. If I can maintain that, however recklessly, I suppose I could translate the ideas [probably not the same exact ones] into roughly daily oneshot stories hovering beneath five thousand words each. So I might see whether that works for me; if it's a huge disaster, I'm perfectly allowed to delete most of the evidence that I ever tried it. So, like, wish me luck on that, I guess....

Aureliano
May 10, 2006
This is madness, Aurelito

Damnitologist posted:

But, in thinking about it today, I realised something funny: I like everyone else have a daily webcomic; using stupid, metaphorcial logic, the four daily panels are four thousand words a day. If I can maintain that, however recklessly, I suppose I could translate the ideas [probably not the same exact ones] into roughly daily oneshot stories hovering beneath five thousand words each. So I might see whether that works for me; if it's a huge disaster, I'm perfectly allowed to delete most of the evidence that I ever tried it. So, like, wish me luck on that, I guess....
Good luck! I love your metaphoric logic, gotta say. I don't know if I'd be able to write as much as you do ever, though. That is some crazy production.

Roar
Jul 7, 2007

I got 30 points!

I GOT 30 POINTS!
And here's something from me not based on erotica! Buh-wuh!?



Wanted

quote:

A slave from a young age, Max Kananov does what her adoptive father tells her to do in order to survive…until a run-in with a corrupt police officer forces her to fight back. With the help of a young man named Colt, she manages to escape her father’s compound and try for a new life in their small town of Everett.

When the police officer is murdered in her old bedroom, however, she now faces the threat of recapture from both her father and the Everett Police Department. With Colt’s help, Max has to clear her name if she ever wants to win her freedom.

Amazon

Not Smashwords because I'm mad at their stupid formatting rules.

psychopomp
Jan 28, 2011
Working on tightening up my blurb-writing skills.

psychopomp fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Apr 13, 2014

vseslav.botkin
Feb 18, 2007
Professor
Would you like to work on the SELF-PUBLISHING GOONS ANTHOLOGY? leb388 has generously volunteered to help me out and I'd like a third vote for submissions. Email me at goon.anthology@gmail.com with your prior experience if you're interested.

OppositeOfLove
Feb 11, 2009
If I put a :smug: in my post - that means I'm right no matter what.
My next boondoggle is getting my title onto iTunes. My wife's powerbook is Mac OSX 10.4.2 and I need at least 10.4.6 and I'm too cheap to buy an OSX upgrade just to run this software ... borrowing a friend's powerbook instead.

workingdogv1
Jul 10, 2001

:catdrugs:

psychopomp posted:

Working on tightening up my blurb-writing skills.

Old blurb:


New blurb:


Better? Worse? Any general blurbling tips?

I definitely like the second one better. It's pretty much convinced me to give the story a shot. The first one, while interesting, felt a little less specific and more generic, for lack of a better word. I know earlier versions of my blurbs tended to be more vague in what I thought was an attempt to preserve the "mystery" of the story, but I realized they were a little too vague for readers to make a decision.

Also, I'm getting really close to having a finished cover for my next story and while I've put this through the ringer with several writer and non-writer friends to get to this stage, I'd like to get some objective goon critiques. What do you guys think? Keep in mind this is a dark fantasy/paranormal romance kind of mash-up thing. It's lighter than my last work (though still retains some horror elements), and so I wanted something that reflected that when someone glanced through my catalog. At the same time, apparently the color purple is a professional short-hand for a paranormal novel. Anyway, I can offer more details on this scene if it helps.

Thumbnailed, of course. And edited so it actually works!

workingdogv1 fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Jan 17, 2012

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Roar
Jul 7, 2007

I got 30 points!

I GOT 30 POINTS!

workingdogv1 posted:



Pics broken. Try imgur.

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