Off to Grandmothers House We Go....

The kids and I have gone to Bryan to spend Saturday at Nonni and Daddo's house. Pictured above, Rowan is delighted for any chance to visit her grandparents. Rowan and Sheridan will be in the little kids parade they have every year. I'll be sure and get pictures.

Oh well, for now it's off to bed.

Sigh!

...and of course, as soon as I get the first draft printed out and sent to one of my proofreaders, I discover a cringeworthy screwup that pulls the reader right out of the story. It's easily fixable, but it's the kind of thing I should have caught before. Argh!

Progress

The first draft of "Death and White Satin" has been finished. This will likely be the first story in the horror anthology pictured above. I'm rather pleased with it, as it has struck the right tones and I think it has achieved the effect I was striving for. It is a little over eight thousand words long, but that will fluctuate with rewrites and editing. It still needs editing, and I will edit it thoroughly because I'm really trying to craft the stories for this book the best I can.

After a cursory edit for passive voice, I'll print it out and send it to proofreaders. Then I'll consider my next move. One possibility is to pull up an old story of mine called "The Tragedy Man" and see what I can do with it. It was written for a particular anthology that it never made it in, and had a theme shoehorned into it that never really fit the story well. A revision of that story could result in a product well worthy of this anthology. It's a good story...it just needs to be recrafted, have a couple of awkward elements removed, and expanded in a couple other areas. It will also need to be retitled since I would be removing the part that the title comes from.

I had considered putting "Storm Chase" in this anthology since I had the rights back for it too, but decided against it. That would make two stories involving wedding dresses, since Charlotte March was buried in hers, and I didn't want to take anything away from "Death and White Satin." Besides, it's only four thousand words long, and I wanted the stories for "4" to be a little longer.  Instead, I think I might try submitting "Storm Chase" to an ezine. That way it could be advertising for both me and "Middle of Nowhere."

Oh well...work, work, work!

Musings at the Bookstore.

The competition is pictured above. This is just a random shelf in the scifi/fantasy section at Barnes and Noble. I don't know if it's possible for the prices to show at this resolution, but they are almost all 7.99. That's not sale price, just the price on the book.

It sort of makes me wonder about the role of the print book for the independent or small press author. If you can't sell it at the fifteen dollars, because the competition is at half that, what do you do?

 One possibility is selling it at cost. If I were to self  publish, that would be the route I would be tempted to go. Just give up on the idea of making money on print books, and sell them at cost in the hopes that at least they get out there to act as mobile billboards advertising my name. It makes more sense than having them priced at a level nobody is going to buy them, and I wouldn't be making money that way either.

Then focus on marketing the ebook. Undercut the big names, and try to compete in that market. There is a lot I need to learn about that market though, so this isn't exactly a final conclusion on my part.

Oh well, this is all just musing off the top of my head.

Good Morning

Today is Rowan's new "therapy day," which means I'll be gone for most of the day. She will be taken to the Woodlands and dropped off at her new school at nine oclock, then picked up a little after noon to be taken to her two therapy sessions at Children's Hospital. That means I may as well hang out in the Woodlands for the day.

I'll probably hang around Barnes and Noble, and the Mall. That way I can do a little more research, if nothing else. B&N has wifi, so maybe I will take my laptop.I have a huge 17.3 inch laptop, so it's not all that mobile. Maybe I'll look and see if there is some store there with a better carrying case for it. That would be good, since the one I have can barely have the laptop squeezed into it and there is little room for accessories or anything else.

On another note, I may have finished the first draft of the wedding dress story. I say "may" because I'm not sure if I want to add one final part or not. It could end where it is now...but it would be kind of abrupt. It actually ended up going a different direction than originally envisioned, but I like this version better. That's the way these things tend to work out. Stories take on a life of their own when being written.

What We're Up Against

This is my recently released novel. A work I'm proud of, and I think it to be of high quality. But it is still from an unknown author, as much as I hate to admit it.
This is a also a recently released novel. It is in hardback, and is a top twenty seller from a major publishing house.

Do you see the problem?

This is challenge that all independent authors and small presses face. A trade paperback from a relatively unknown is only nineteen cents cheaper than a best selling hardback. And it gets worse. I went to Barnes and Noble recently and discovered that the average paperback was selling for about eight to nine bucks. And these were big name authors in the genre. So how do I, or a small press, compete with that?

Well, the truth is...I can't. Not in print. These big publishers run off thirty to fifty thousand books in a single run, driving the cost per book way below what a print-on-demand (POD) book is going to cost a small press or indie author to make. And there is really very little we can do about it. I'm sure that POD will come down in price over time, but it will always be more expensive. And that's a big problem. It's the reason I tracked over a thousand potential customers over the internet when they were led to my website by the recent ads I ran, then watched as over two hundred were successfully persuaded by the site to proceed to the buy button at Amazon.com...only for the vast majority to balk once there. At that point, they knew what the book was about, had read excerpts...and even a free sample...and even were introduced to the cast and charactors. They found all this interesting enough to proceed onwards....so there was only one thing left to stop them. The price.

So I'm doomed, right?

Not necessarily. Thanks to technology, there is a now a new playing field...and one that the big publishers aren't terrible happy about. Check THIS out. LL Dreamspell is my other publisher, and they are getting into ebooks in a big way. And notice the prices. That bestseller from before is 9.99 on the Kindle, because those big houses still have that overhead and those agents, editors, CEOs, and marketers to pay. But now the small press and the indie author can find their own small status to actually be an advantage. This is why New York authors were grouching about the effects of ebooks on hardbacks at Apollocon. And thisis the great leveller of the playing field between the small press and New York.

And this is the future.

Thoughts on Apollocon

The Dealers Room

Authors Alley

Well, now that Apollocon is in the past and I've had a little more time to cogitate on it...not to mention let my hands settle down...I have a few thoughts on the matter.

1. The average age of the attendee was much older than I expected. This was not like the conventions of old, with teenage and college age kids dominating the demographic, while the occasional oldster was usually found to be behind a dealers table or sitting on a panel. I'm betting if you averaged all the ages of the attendees this weekend, you would end up with a number north of forty.Even a quick peek into the gamers room showed a population that I would blend in with better now than my younger days.

2. I did okay, sold a few books, and my table partner, Cherri Galbiati, did well too. Now the interesting thing here is that she is a mystery writer, and this was a scifi convention, yet she did good for herself. It would be interesting to ask her later what she remembers of the demographics of her customers. Mine were primarily male, and in their thirties. There was an exception or two, but I knew them so I'm not sure that counts.

3. I saw no kindles or other e-readers, although a couple of people professed to have them elsewhere.

4. Word was the panel of authors views on ereaders was surprisingly negative. I notice though that a couple of authors on that panel were New York published. I wonder if there is a relationship? Probably so since I can't picture small press authors bemoaning the effects of ereaders on hardbacks.That's hardly a consideration in my calculus, that's for sure.

5. I also have a few thougthts on cost, but I'll save that for another post.

Overall, the most interesting part of this convention was sitting on the other side of the authors table. When I first attended conventions, back in the eighties, I thought authors were those people who descended from their places on high to sit on panels and benevolently share their lofty opinions on things with us little people. Then they graciously showed up in the dealers room afterwards so we could bask in their glory and get an autographed copy of their latest masterpiece.

Now I've learned it ain't exaclty like that. Oh well, that's what happens when you actually chase a dream and catch it. It turns into real life. But that's okay. It's still all good.

It's Over

Apollocon is behind me, and I'm pretty much a wreck.

Despite Cherri's heroic efforts in finding me a gluten free brownie yesterday...the damage was done. After three days of stuffing on glutenized foods, AND all the excitement of the convention, I'm a mess. I came home and went to bed at 4 PM and slept straight through to 9:30 AM. My hands are shaking so hard I can barely use the computer mouse (guess how many corrections I'm making while typing this). The world still seems to be on the other end of a tunnel. And I still have to get my daughter to her therapist here in a little while.

Sigh.

The convention gave me a lot to think about, and I will go into that later this afternoon. Hopefully my hands will have settled down a little by then. I just needed to get this post written before my mom started calling, wondering what happened to me.

Apollocon Saturday

Spent another day in the dealer's room of Apollocon. Met a lot of very interesting people, and sold a few books. I'm beginning to wonder if anthologies don't do better as impulse buys than as something sold on the internet. The anthologies seem to get the most attention by people who stopped and handled the books. Maybe that's why you see anthologies sometimes at airports and truckstops.

Just a thought.

I've been eating gluten because there really isn't much choice at the convention, and my brain is slowly draining out the bottom of my skull. I should have a double digit IQ by tomorrow afternoon. Fortunately, that's all I have to make it to. Then I'm done. And that will be it for the marketing for a while. It's time to get back to writing.

That will be nice.