Tag: book report

If we’re being honest about it, I mostly slept in and generally spent the day off. But I did get the final pencil sketch version of the book cover, and it looks good! Can’t wait for people to see it — and, hey, buy the book it’s wrapped around.

I’ve decided that for the next week or so I’m going to be working on a variety of existing short stories in the same universe as FROZEN DREAMS while I wait for various feedbacks and whatnot to come back. This is partially because the financials took less time than I expected to firm up and the infrastructure stuff I have left to worry about mostly involves advertising. And that’s something that I have to think about, first.

You see, there are a lot of metrics involved in ‘success’ here: do I lose money for the family? Do I make back the money that I put into the project? Do I make more money than I spend? A bad advertising campaign can change the answers in a flash. So I have to figure out what a reasonable ad campaign costs, and whether I’m willing to front that. I do not know if I will be.

Today we looked at updated expenses for the book itself, and how they affected calculations for when to hold the Kickstarter. And by ‘we’ I mean my wife was looking over my shoulder, as she’s kind of smarter than me and does budgets and stuff already like that. This is turning into a fairly impressive spreadsheet, in its way.

Continue reading 02/06/2020 Book Report.

Got deeper into the weeds of pricing out PoD books, and looked at Backerkit costs. The latter, first: I’d have to do a couple hundred bucks’ worth of add-ons and so forth to make Backerkit worth it, at any level of funding. A lot easier to do if I’m just doing no-shipping items, but I’d likely be better off just… not.

As to PoD: I made an error in the spreadsheet, and when corrected it turns out that my profit on PoD books goes down to one-third the profit on each e-book, and if I raise it a buck it only hits one-half or so. That doesn’t bother me, but: why the hell aren’t the big publishing companies actively prioritizing e-sales over paperback ones? Unless I calculated something incorrectly, the reduced printing costs more than justifies a significant cut in sticker price, then you just keep selling e-books to that market until you need to buy another set of trousers*. Somebody’s missing a bet here.

Moe Lane

*Classical reference.

Today I figured out how to compile books into Kindle format from Scrivener! It was very exciting, because for about ten alarming minutes I was starting to worry that I had reached that point where computers were now weird and scary and didn’t make any sense. Fortunately, I was able to reset my brain in time, and I even know how to keep my damned italics italicized and my bloody underlines underlined in the final compiled form. This is very welcome news for me!

I also updated Scrivener itself. And I’ll probably have to update it again, when they go to version 3 this year. Ach, well, at least then it’ll be a business expense.

Today I signed up for Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. I also established a checking account for publishing-related expenses. That seemed the smartest way to keep everything straight from the very start. So far, everything seems to be going according to plan.

Creatively, I finished revising the old story last night and am now finally getting around to working on another one in this universe. It’ll be this month’s Patreon offering, too. Efficiency, that is. …Hrm, I kind of need to join an online writer’s circle, or something. Yeah, that sort of thing makes sense now. Go figure.

This is another ‘nothing really to report’ report. Today was a day for a routine meeting with the school and getting the monthly Patreon stuff ready to publishing and having the kids go to the trampoline place where they could jump on trampolines. Oh, and I worked some more on that short story, because I kind of want to see where it ends up. February starts tomorrow, and so do the production bookmarks. We can work with that.

Mostly finding this on my phone, honestly: Business for the Right-Brained: (A Guide for Artists, Writers, Musicians, Dancers, Crafters, And All the Other Dreamers). The business aspects of all of this publishing stuff will be the primary focus of my February, probably. And I am so looking forward to it.

Yes, that’s sarcasm.

Not much to report today, either. I’ve slept on the designs that the artist sent, and decided that we’re going with what she put together. Pretty much at this point it’s a matter of finalizing the financials and the production schedule. This goes a lot easier when you already have the money for it: God bless my Patrons. I should do something extra for them this month, because they’re going to be my primary revenue stream for paying for book costs.

Mostly, I looked at preliminary artist sketches. The cover promises to be pretty good, I think. I’m also fiddling with various short stories for a potential side project / Kickstarter stretch goal — well, actually, even if it isn’t part of the Kickstarter I suspect it’ll be the next book anyway. February’s gonna be a lot of infrastructure until I hear back from the beta readers, I think.

That’s pretty much it, so no bullet points.