Filed under: Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Failure, Guns, Health, Marketing, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
. . . looking over my New Years post last January is just mostly painful. Because 2011, while it had some good things about it, was mostly just painful. Literally. In many regards, I’d just as soon forget the bulk of it.
But this look-back is something of a tradition, so let’s get it out of the way.
Total downloads of Communion of Dreams dropped off a fair bit in 2011, with just an additional 5,444 versions of the book zipping across the aether. I have long since lost track of the exact number of downloads that makes, but it’s something in excess of 35,000. Yay.
What also dropped off was my focus on the book, as I waited for The Publisher Who Shall Not Be Named to return any of my emails or calls, and turned my attention to other projects. Like getting Her Final Year published. And doing the big BBTI tests and site revamp. And doing a bunch of writing for Guns.com. So it’s not too surprising that interest in CoD waned a bit.
So, not a great year, particularly since most of my other projects didn’t work out like either I hoped or predicted. Still, I stubbornly refuse to learn from my failures, and hope to have a self-published version of Communion of Dreams available “soon.” Maybe even “real soon.” We’ll see.
Meanwhile, let’s all work to make 2012 a better year. Deal?
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Failure, Feedback, Guns, Marketing, Music, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
I’m a blockhead.
No, really. Samuel Johnson’s quote establishes it beyond a doubt:
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”
For years I listened to people go on and on about how beneficial my writing about being a care-giver was. All the praise, the sharing, the requests to write more, to collect my writings into a book. The final result has been for Her Final Year to sell a grand total of 32 copies, after years of work and months of flogging the book. What a staggering success.
Yup, a blockhead.
Also for years now I’ve listened to countless proclamations of how incredible and valuable Ballistics By The Inch is. How it is an amazing resource for anyone interested in hard data. This has been in discussions on different forums and blogs which I have stumbled upon. And it’s reflected in the hits & usage of the site, as well, with over 8 million hits total and something on the order of 500,000 unique visitors. There’ve been plenty of people who have written me, thanking me, telling me that we should accept donations to support our work. So, for the re-launch we have done just that – added a way for people to show how much they value the site with a small donation. And in the short time we’ve had the new site up we’ve had over 5,000 unique visitors, and gotten just one donation of $10. At that rate, we’d have gotten a stunning total of $1,000 in donations since the start – it wouldn’t even cover the cost of hosting the website.
Yup, a blockhead.
My novel has been downloaded over 35,000 times in the last 5 years. People have told me they love it, that it’s brilliant and just like the classic SF of the golden era. Sometime in the next few weeks we’ll offer a self-published version of the book in hardcopy and for the Kindle. And I’m not so much a blockhead that I expect to actually sell copies of the thing. But I bet – I just bet – that somehow I’ll manage to be disappointed, nonetheless. Probably when I start getting complaints that the book is no longer free.
Screw it. I swear, I am seriously tempted to just shut down all the websites. Yup, BBTI too. Just leave a brief description of the project up with an email address where people can contact me to buy access to the data. Like the song says:
Little Joe never once gave it away
Everybody had to pay and pay
A hustle here and a hustle there
New York City’s the place where
They said hey babe, take a walk on the wild side
They said hey Joe, take a walk on the wild side
But being a blockhead, we’ll see what happens.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Failure, Feedback, Gardening, Hospice, Marketing, Predictions, Preparedness, Promotion, Publishing, Society, Travel
A good friend was visiting last weekend. We see each other fairly often, communicate regularly. But there are things best discussed in person.
“How’s your mom doing?”
“Not bad. I think we’re getting to the point where we need to have that conversation about her driving.”
“Ah. That’s a hard one.”
“Yeah. But my sister largely drives her everywhere as it is, anyway. So that will make it easier.”
* * * * * * *
I mentioned a week ago that I was surprised that Her Final Year hasn’t done better.
Well, I had been waiting for a couple of additional pieces to appear in different publications in the hopes that would spur awareness of the book, as well as sales. One of those being my college alumni magazine. Yesterday I saw that they had posted the Fall 2011 issue as a .pdf on their website, so I took a look.
It’s a blurb, not a review. You can find it at the bottom of page 39, if you want. Next to another book blurb, and one of about a dozen in this issue. My fellow alumni are intelligent, accomplished people.
* * * * * * *
After discovering that, I went out to pick tomatoes from my garden. The very wet summer we had meant that there was a big delay in a bunch of the tomato plants blooming and setting fruit. But I am lucky, since many people I know have had a horrible year for tomatoes, while mine were just delayed.
I was able to pick about 25 pounds of tomatoes, a nice mix of Lemon Boy and Brandywine and Black Prince and Better Boy. Most look great, have a wonderful taste. We had some with BLTs last night for dinner, and I made up two quarts of sauce from the ones with slight blemishes. I’ll probably go ahead and can or sauce the rest in the next day or two.
But I didn’t get to picking them for about two hours, because first I had to completely re-do the netting around the garden (about 40×50). Deer had gotten in, then tore the hell out of everything getting out.
Yeah, they munched on the tomato plants, and that was annoying. But they also ate the tops out of my habanero plants. Well, not all of them. Just the ones which had done the best.
See, as bad as the summer was on tomatoes, it was worse on the habaneros. They just started setting fruit a couple of weeks ago. And it was a race to see whether any of the pods ripened fully before I leave for New Zealand.
Now I doubt whether any of the pods will ripen. Oh, the deer stayed away from the fruit. But with the bulk of the leaves eaten out of the top, I don’t know whether they can ripen. We’ll see.
* * * * * * *
A dear friend used to always say “Live as if you were going to die tomorrow. Plan as if you will live forever.”
She passed away over 20 years ago from breast cancer.
* * * * * * *
“Still, once you tell her that she has to stop driving, things change.”
“I know.” He looked at me. “I got copies of your book for all four of my siblings. Told them to read it.”
“Thanks.”
“No, thank you – I don’t think any of them have really thought through how this is likely to go with Mom.”
“Every experience is different.”
“Yeah, but at least having *some* idea of what to plan for, what to watch for, will help.”
Jim Downey
*from this. Cross posted to the HFY blog.
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Bipolar, Book Conservation, Failure, Marketing, Publishing
I mentioned a week ago that I felt “flat”. I still do.
On our walk this morning I was thinking about it, after mentioning to my Good Lady Wife that I felt about ‘half a bubble off’ and that I just didn’t ‘fit into my skin right’ that this is likely just my normal lowpoint in my bipolar cycle. The timing is right, the feeling is right. I hadn’t really noticed it because I had been working so hard to stay focused on getting Her Final Year ready for publication, with all the creative energy that generated.
Work that meant I got very little other, paying, work done, I should add. Meaning that I’m feeling more than a little financial pressure to boot, of the ‘short-term-cash-flow’ variety. That we’ve sold a grand total of 9 books so far isn’t helping my frame of mind – making me more than a little nervous that this is all going to turn out to be one more of my brilliant ideas which is a complete fiasco.
Like I said – hitting or heading towards the lowpoint in my bipolar cycle. Charming, isn’t it?
Ah, well. I know how to walk through this. Focus on the things I *can* do. Conservation work. Marketing the book by writing about it in the proper venues. Water my garden. Put one foot in front of the other. Try and stay healthy, and hope for the best.
We’ll see what happens.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Gardening, Guns, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing
So, as my last couple of posts have indicated, almost my entire focus has been on . . . well, a lot of things, to be honest. The first part of May was the marathon BBTI testing, then there was another weekend of that in June. And a major push to get the garden in and secure from the deer and other critters. Weekly articles for Guns.com. Even a bit of conservation work here and there. But yeah, the vast majority of time and energy has gone into working on Her Final Year, the care-giving memoir.
So, almost all of my attention has been turned inwards. Which isn’t a bad thing, but it does show up in how things have been going for the two projects I tend to track: downloads of Communion of Dreams, and hits to the BBTI site.
I must admit, part of what’s happened with Communion of Dreams has been due to frustration with the publisher who had been wanting to publish the book. After all the work I put into multiple revisions, he went silent on me in the middle of sorting out the minor contract issues. Not a “we’ve reconsidered” or anything, in fact the last thing I had heard was a confirmation that they were committed to doing the book. But for six months now I haven’t had a response to my emails. I’ve pretty much just given up on it, poured my attention into the other projects. And that has been reflected in declining downloads – just 231 in May and 181 in June.
BBTI is a different matter, since my excitement over that hasn’t changed. We did get a bunch of excellent data during the last two test sequences, and plenty of people are eagerly waiting to see that – and we’re eager to provide it. But I haven’t done any real ‘support’ of the site, and so monthly hits have dropped off there to 279,656 in May and 256,179 in June.
But soon, soon I’ll turn my attention back to these things. First a revamp of the BBTI site to include the new data sets and freshen it up a bit. Then with CoD, we’ll see what happens – if Her Final Year launches successfully, it may mean that I’m able to attract a different publisher. Or, having gone the route of self-publishing once, I may just decide to do the same with the novel. Like I said, we’ll see.
As noted last week, we *are* closing in on being done with Her Final Year. I think it will be a very polished & professional product, much more so than most self-published books. Certainly, the amount of work which has gone into it has been massive. We’ll probably have the book(s) ready here in a couple of days, and then may have the supporting website ready for a test drive this next week – I’ll keep you posted.
Cheers to one and all . . .
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
Filed under: Amazon, Failure, Jeff Bezos, Kindle, Marketing, Predictions, Publishing
News item of interest today:
Kindle Books Outsell Print Books on Amazon
* * *
Before the Kindle, Amazon started selling traditional paper books in July 1995. But now, Amazon has announced that Kindle books are outselling paperbacks and hardcovers.Since April 1, Amazon has sold 105 Kindle books for every 100 print books sold. These numbers include books that have no Kindle edition. Also, for all of 2011 so far, Amazon has had the fastest year-over-year growth rate for its books business due to the overwhelming Kindle sales and steady print book sales.
* * *
“Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO. “We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly – we’ve been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years.
When the Kindle first came out, I was *very* skeptical that it would replace conventionally printed books. Here’s what I said in November 2007:
I think it is still a hard sell. $400 is a chunk for something which only kinda-sorta replaces a real book. And if you drop it in the mud, it isn’t just $7.95 to buy a new copy. But it does seem to be an intelligent application of the relevant tech, and sounds intriguing. There will be those who snap it up, just ’cause – but Amazon has a long way to go before it is mainstream.
That’s my guess.
Well, I was wrong, and Jeff Bezos was right. Well, sorta.
The Kindle 3, which came out last summer, is a lot different than the original Kindle. It’s smaller. Lighter. Works better. And costs less than half what the original did. In fact, just yesterday I ordered one for $189.
Yeah, let me repeat that: I ordered a Kindle yesterday.
I had been doing research into the e-reader in preparation for publishing Her Final Year and part of that preparation was going out and playing with the latest version of the Kindle at a local store. I’ll be honest, I was flat-out impressed with the current machine.
As I’ve noted before, I’m a ‘late adopter’ of technology, always willing to wait for things to mature enough that the bugs are worked out and the price comes down. And I’m also a professional bookbinder & book conservator. When *I* am willing to buy an e-reader, then things have changed. As I said 18 years ago:
For me, the book is a codex, something that you can hold in your hand and read. From the earliest memories of my science fiction saturated youth, I remember books becoming obsolete in the future, replaced by one dream or another of “readers”, “scanners”, or even embedded text files linked directly to the brain. Some say ours is a post-literate culture, with all the books-on-tape, video, and interactive media technology. I think I read somewhere recently that Sony (or Toshiba or Panasonic or someone) had finally come up with a hand-held, book-sized computer screen that can accommodate a large number of books on CD ROM. Maybe the future is here.
Maybe. Lord knows that I would be lost without a computer for all my writing, revisions, and play. The floppy drive that is in this book was taken from my old computer (my first computer) when a friend installed a hard drive. It is, in many ways, part of my history, part of my time at Iowa, and all the changing that I did there.
Yeah, the future is indeed here. Mine should arrive the first of next week.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Feedback, Hospice, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Writing stuff
I’ve written a lot here over the last few years on the disfunctional nature of the publishing industry today. This blog was ostensibly started to chronicle the process of finding an agent and/or publisher for Communion of Dreams, after all. That was four years, and almost 31,000 downloads of the book, ago. Trapdoor Books is supposed to publish Communion of Dreams sometime soon, though that has been pending (and driving me somewhat nuts) for four months.
Also pending for four months has been a submission of Her Final Year to a publisher. They were supposed to get back to us a month ago, according to what they told us in our initial submission. A number of other publishers and agents we’ve also contacted have not bothered to respond at all.
Now, I’m not ready to give up on Trapdoor – they seem to be honestly working hard to establish themselves in the “geek fiction” world, and whenever everything comes together to get Communion of Dreams actually published, I think it’ll work to my benefit (and theirs).
But my co-author and I are giving very serious consideration to publishing Her Final Year ourselves. And I would appreciate your feedback on whether we should or not. Let me outline what I see as the advantages and disadvantages
First, and foremost, it gets the book out there where it can do some good. This is actually very important to us – there is a great need for more “nuts & bolts” care-giving information regarding Alzheimer’s/Dementia in general, and from a male care-giver’s perspective in particular. So, immediacy.
Next, there’s cost. Particularly if we concentrate on e-book sales (predominately through Amazon), we can likely keep the price down a fair amount over a conventional paper book (though we would likely set it up so that people could get a Print-On-Demand version if they wanted it). This will help get the book to people who need it. We could designate some portion of all sales to go to charities such as the Alzheimer’s association and still get a fair payment akin to conventional book royalties for myself and my co-author. There’s cost.
We would have more direct control over not just the book, but also for an associated website which could function as a support group for care-givers and their families. We’ve intended to do this from the start, but by bypassing a publisher we avoid issues related to control over the site. That’s control.
The disadvantages? A lot more work. We would probably form a small corporation to function as the umbrella under which all of this would be done. That doesn’t bother me, as I know how to do such things from previous experience with the gallery, but it would be more work and some cost. We’d have to do all the promotion ourselves . . . but these days, authors are expected to take a very active role in promotion, anyway. We wouldn’t have the gravitas of an established publisher behind us, and that would mean limitations in getting the book distributed though conventional bookstores. We wouldn’t have the benefit of an in-house editor and design team. Those are the big disadvantages that I see.
So, I’d like your thoughts. Do you think a niche book like this could be done successfully as a self-publishing project? Would you trust it enough to buy a copy, or would you want to see a ‘name’ behind it? What price point for the electronic version would compensate for that? $9.99? $4.99? Would say a pledge to donate $1.00 from every sale to the Alzheimer’s Assn or a Hospice organization make a difference?
Like I said, we’re giving this serious consideration – but it is a big step. Part of my motivation to do this is just based on how long the whole process of getting Communion of Dreams published has taken (and continues to take). Do you think I am letting my frustration over that outweigh more practical considerations?
Let me know, either in comments here, on Facebook, or in a private email.
Thanks.
Jim Downey
I mean, he’d be perfect:
Sleepy shopper upset over Columbia Mall ban
A Holts Summit man caught catnapping at Columbia Mall was banned from shopping there for a year, and he’s not happy about it.Roger Wheat was at the mall with his wife Friday when, he said, he stopped to rest. Surrounded by packages containing their purchases, he said he was sitting as his wife shopped when security guard Ryan Tripp approached.
* * *
When Tripp walked away and conferred with other guards, Wheat called his wife. They moved their packages to another area with chairs, he sat down, and she resumed shopping. Wheat, a former corrections officer, said because of a back injury and leg problems, he tires easily and cannot keep up with his wife during weekly trips to the mall.
Tripp returned, this time with Columbia police officers. Tripp wanted to take Wheat’s picture, which Wheat refused. He then made a trade — he took pictures of Tripp and the two officers, then allowed his picture to be taken. That’s when Tripp gave him a “Notice to depart and forbid re-entry.”
Wow. Give people a little authority, and some just can’t wait to abuse it. He kicked a guy out (and banned him for a year) because he was having a nap while his wife did more shopping. A week before Christmas. With that combination of poor public relations skill and an instinct to push people around in petty ways, this clown should get a job with the TSA when the Mall finally fires his ass over the public uproar.
Good lord.
Oh, if you would like to communicate to the Mall administration just exactly what you think of this kind of stupidity, here’s their contact page: http://www.visitcolumbiamall.com/contact-us
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Feedback, Marketing, Music, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction
Well. Post 999. Who woulda thunk it?
I started this blog one month short of 4 years ago, ostensibly to discuss the process of revising, then submitting for publication Communion of Dreams.
Of course, along the way it became something much more than that. Another book emerged from it. I made a lot of friends. I connected with old friends. I documented the twistings and turnings of my life and fortunes. Stared into my navel far too much. Stared into the bright sun upon occasion. Started a new project, and watched it become insanely popular (though not exactly remunerative.)
I’m still waiting for final confirmation of the publication date and details from the publisher who is interested in CoD – even at this late date in the whole process, things could fall through. But with a little luck, the book will actually be out sometime in the new year, and we’ll see whether the over 29,000 downloads it has had since I first launched this blog translate into actual sales.
Wow – 29,000 downloads. That still amazes me, given that it has all been word of mouth and informal promotion.
So, thanks for the ride, everyone.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 