Coffee heat rising

Publishing

Happy Fourth of July! And…next?

by

Welp, we’ve made it to another Independence Day without self-destructing. That’s something.

What are you doing for the holiday? Moi, I’ve been invited to a party at the home of some friends who live in a mid-town high-rise. Their place overlooks the Phoenix Country Club and the Steele Indian School, which host the two largest fireworks displays in the central part of the city. And from their balcony you also can see the large show at Tempe Town Lakes and several other smaller shindigs.

An old, halfway-long-lost friend who lives in that apartment building shows up at these evenings, so I’m looking forward to seeing her again. It promises to be a nice evening.

But between now and then:

Students have turned in their “extended definition” papers. In the world of people who recycle their high-school English essays, this means they’ve picked some exceptionally sappy and ill-focused topic such as “what is love” — apparently inflicted on them by  teachers following a required curriculum. The results would be painful to read even if they fit the assignment, which by and large they do not. So {sigh} we have to plod through 23 of those.

Then there’ll only be one more assignment — 2500 words of like drivel — and I’ll be DONE. Never to read another brain-banging freshman comp paper again! 😆

I sincerely hope, anyway.

I’ve started a second racy book — spectrophilia, Ouija board! This should be good. And last night while watching a couple of episodes of some TV show streaming through Kodi, poured another several Fire-Rider bookoids into Friedlander’s Word template. Now am up to book 13, leaving only another five to do. As soon as the cover images are delivered, I’ll be ready to post!

Almost: still have to write “Our Story So Far” blurbs for most of them. And get their ISBNs.

To re-jumpstart the entrepreneurial spirit, I’ve made a list of what I call “foot-draggers”: tasks that need to get done before I can make any headway but that I keep resisting because I know they’re going to be complicated as hell and require some sort of learning curve and I’m just effing learning-curved out. Videlicet:

1. Move Funny and other sites from Jesse’s server to WordPress.com
2. Upgrade WordPress.com service
3. Assign remaining ISBNs to books in progress
4. Buy 100 new ISBNs
5. Buy a month’s subscription to shutterstock. Make a list of general categories for future images and download the maximum allowed.
6. Organize these images on disk and in database by category & book title.
7. Read Friedlander’s template documentation carefully. Figure out how to do the Kindle conversion. Download a Kindle reader app to the laptop so layout can be checked before publication.
8. Learn how to publish epub versions on Barnes & Noble
9. Find the specs for Kindle and Nook covers; relearn how to do this in PowerPoint.
10. Upload diet book to Kindle.
11. Send Slave Labor to Snowfall press for PoD prep
12. Using PowerPoint and stock photo, make Biker Babe cover; create and edit Kindle version. Store to disk.
13. Develop new, more efficient record-keeping to keep track of ISBNs, titles, artwork, and freelances & subcontractors.
14. Develop task flow routine for publication of each book, w/ checklist.

So I figure if I do three of these a day, in less than a week I’ll be up and running.

Which sounds good until you recall that we have 23 student papers sitting on the server right now and another 23 incoming shortly. All told that comes to 58,250 mind-numbing words, the length of a short novel, to be read, commented upon, used as a teaching tool, and assessed. And most of them are high-school papers turned in because the students don’t feel called upon to bother to do the course’s assignments. With just a few exceptions, a total, unutterable waste of the instructor’s time.

But since the instructor’s time is worth less than minimum wage, I suppose no one accounts that as much of a loss…

If I start on the current raft of sea foam today, I won’t get to three of the tasks on the list above today. But if I put it off, it’ll drive me nuts, and whenever I run up against a tight deadline, invariably some student has to make a special case of him/herself and create a major problem. So the only question is, which day would I prefer to have wasted?

Miamifireworks

 

It Lives!

by

And it just quit its job.

Mayo PxYesh. I survived the surgery, apparently (to judge from the nurses’ and doctors’ commentary) better than most old ladies. Other than an overall sensation of having been run over by a truck, I feel pretty good. The tubes are out, everything is out but the IV connection, which they flat refuse to remove until I’m walking out the door. I even managed to figure out how to use the shower, which in its environmental correctness barely trickles out enough water to get your body damp.

In theory, I’m supposed to be discharged at noon, when M’hijito will kindly take MORE time off work to come schlep me around. The surgeon said I could pick up the dogs, which will make it possible for me to deal with them. And if that’s the case, I should be able to handle the pool, since nothing involved in its maintenance weighs more than 20 pounds.

Food is going to be a problem: I have to avoid high-fiber foods, and in my “real food” diet that’s mostly what I eat. The doc favors fake “food supplements,” which I flat refuse to eat. Somehow I’ll have to pick up some things I can cook that will be soft, high in protein, and low in fiber.

And that, I believe, will be chicken à blanc with rice or pasta. Heh. And I happen to have a lifetime supply of Costco chicken in the freezer…

My drinking habits will have to abate for a few weeks, alas. (How will I survive??) But that’s hardly the end of the world. In fact, it may be a good thing.

And: While I’ve been sitting here fielding sass from the current batch of students, some of whom have shown themselves to be exceptional douches, I’ve had a full-blown epiphany: I am NOT going to teach any more!

I’ve had six surgeries over the past year, one of them for a life-threatening condition. Enough is enough: I fail to see any reason to continue making myself miserable for a net income of $1,120 a month, max, averaged over 12 months.

So… I just sent an email to the departmental chair telling him I can finish out this section but wish to be relieved from duty this fall. If I just can’t make it without that $1,120, then I’ll go back in the spring. But somehow I don’t think a $13,400 drawdown from something over $600,000 is going to break me up in business soon. That’s a 2% drawdown. There’s enough in the credit union to cover six months’ of living expenses without any teaching income. So the soonest I’d have to start a drawdown is next January. Probably not even then, with any luck at all.

And with any luck, my proposed new enterprise, which promises to be pretty lively, will generate at least that much. And more, I hope.

Economics of Changing Horses in Mid-Stream

by

Or of bailing out of the sinking canoe? Of the Eng. 102 papers graded so far — about half — 36 percent have D or F grades. Actually, only one of those has a D. All the rest are flat-out failing.

Schoolroom2
Before the Online Course…

Why? Because they don’t bother to read the assignment, and they’ve found a way to rack up the full score on the quizzes over the textbook chapter without reading the book. They haven’t the faintest idea what they’re doing, and they don’t care.

I am so sick of this. Reading a failing paper is really a painful process, because you have to justify everything you’re doing that marks down the paper into the 69% or lower category. You can’t just scribble “this is sh!t” and give it a goose-egg. If you find they’ve plagiarized, you have to locate and document’s source and demonstrate exactly HOW copying word for word is plagiarism. If they haven’t done the documentation (or any documentation) you have to point out where they’re lacking and explain how to fix it and refer them to websites that explain MLA style for all perpetuity. If they’ve used Glamour Magazine as a scholarly source (I kid you not…), you have to explain why Glamour is not a scholarly source (can you imagine having to explain to a grown man or woman why a fashion magazine for 20-somethings  is not a scholarly journal???) and then explain to them how to recognize a scholarly source and then refer them to several websites that explain how to find and recognize acceptable sources. On and on and drearily on it goes.

Got to get out from underneath this job!

Yesterday I came across a podcast interview with a woman who writes romance erotica under three pen names. She discussed her business model in detail, and it is highly replicable.

With a hundred novels and novelettes online, she’s earning about $5,000 a month. That, I think, is a lot more realistic than the $30,000 figure, which may or may not be a one-shot event but is unlikely to continue forever. And I’ll tell you, if I were turning five grand a month from Amazon, I would be beside myself with joy.

She said that she made a conscious decision to treat the enterprise as a job, not as a side gig to gainful employment. She quit doing any other kind of work and began to focus her workday hours on writing erotica and publishing it. Like others, she designs the covers herself (apparently high art is not what these readers seek), converts them to e-book formats herself (there are tools for that), and rides herd on things herself.

She did not mention hiring people to write some of the bookoids.

So, I’m thinking I could capitalize the p0rno venture with funds in the S-corp’s checking account. There’s not enough to underwrite an entire semester off the teaching job and cover start-up costs. However, this fall I will be forced to take a required minimum withdrawal from the big IRA. Since I’ll have to pay taxes on that anyway, I may just tell the chair I’m not teaching this fall because I’m sick or some such — trying not to burn that bridge behind me — and use a few thousand bucks from the RMD to live on this fall. Then spend every single day writing or managing other writers.

I would like to keep capitalization costs down to $5,000, but that may be unrealistic. Adding up what I think it will cost to start up and run this business, here’s what I get:

StartupCosts

In the best-case scenario, operating costs would run about $1,700 a month. Actually, they would run $1,700 to $4,450 a month. I could sustain this over two quarters, assuming it takes six months or so for revenues to reach a noticeable level, but only if costs were kept at the very barest minimum. That is, only if Murphy’s Law never strikes.

Heh. We know about how realistic that scenario is.

Assuming a 30% cost overrun, in the best of all possible worlds monthly operating costs would run around $2,430; in an OK scenario, around $5,785. Over two quarters, the latter would not be sustainable. The former — costs are kept in the basement and I do most or all of the work and I do never anything black-hat like hiring people to write reviews, would drain most of the S-corps funds. At a 50% cost overrun, the whole project is untenable, no matter how you look at it.

Unless, of course, the stories that people tell about generating untold riches in the p0rn bidness are true.

Sappho, the Tenth Muse

Let’s say it takes six months to start cranking a $5,000 monthly income. That’s assuming I succeed in spinning out 20 to 30 books a month, to the tune of $100 apiece. At the end of the 2nd quarter, our first $5,000 check comes in.

Then, in our very best-case scenario — costs kept to a minimum and no Murphy’s Law attack — we’re $3369 in the red ($8,369 in costs offset by $5,000 revenue). This is not good, but it’s not unsustainable yet. If, at the end of  Q1, $5,000 actually does start coming in monthly, by the end of the next quarter we should be the black. In one quarter we make $15,000. It costs $8369 to run for a quarter and we’re $3369 in the red: a total of $11,738 to make up. So $15,000 less the $11,738 of red ink gives us a profit of $3262 after four quarters.

Folks. Four quarters is a whole year…

None of the other scenarios look as bright as this.

However, the Bowker (ISBN) and Shutterstock charges would be annual, not monthly, so that would reduce costs by $470 to $650 in most months. If I wrote most of the books myself — a lot more than 10! — that also would cut a major cost significantly.

As a practical matter, there’s no way I can write 20 or 30 bookoids a month. I would need to farm out at least 10 and probably more like 20, certainly to reach the 30-squib-a-month goal.

Our spy in the p0rn bidness claims his books are 5,000 words. Another writer, posting on some message board, says his/hers average 3,000 words. Either of those would take me at least a couple of days to write. The woman who spoke in the podcast — the one who says she’s turning five grand a month — said her bookoids are 10,000 words long and that she takes two days to write one and one day to edit, create the cover, convert to e-book formats, and post. Five thousand words a day is a fair amount of copy to churn out! It also means she’s only putting out ten a month, assuming she works on weekends.

Heh.

I’m about half- to two-thirds of the way through my first effort in this fine genre, Biker Babe. (Yes…obviously that working title will need improvement.) It’s taken me two days so far. More like two half-days, actually: yesterday I had to knock off to trudge through dreadful student papers.

The book, though, is a hoot. I expect to finish it today.

Then, a travel series…

Biker Babe and BillyBob Do (heh) the Grand Canyon
Biker Babe and BillyBob Do Mazatlan
Biker Babe and BillyBob Do Vegas

Or how about mystery erotica?

Biker Babe and the Mystery of the Sunken Canoe?
Biker Babe and the Mystery of the Missing Heiress?

Multiple Men erotica?

Biker Babe Goes to Sea
Biker Babe Learns to Play Rugby

The podcast interviewee says she writes about four hours a day. To which I say, Seriously?? You’re REALLY cranking out 5,000 words in four hours? How? Channeling from Anaïs Nin?

At ten or twelve bookoids a month, it’s anyone’s guess whether you could generate enough revenue even to stay afloat, to say nothing of not having to EVER TEACH ANOTHER FRESHMAN COMP COURSE AGAIN. At 30? Probably the bidness could generate enough to replace teaching income and maybe even then some. But it’s going to take several months for that to happen.

In the interim, I have to eat…

Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin

At Last: A little traction!

by

FINALLY am getting a little traction on the Boob Book!!! Yesterday was a true Day from Hell, in which I got exactly nothing done, despite arising at 5 a.m. and planning to spend all of Friday on constructive work. Goddamn Wyrd completely crashed my computer…thought I’d lost several days worth of work in files that were live when the system went down. And naturally at the same time a (temporarily) dormant client resurfaced, in a tizzy and seeking rescue.

Now.

Right now.

But today… Just finished Chapter 2 and tossed together the ToC and a chapter outline. So now I’ve got most of the package:

Table of Contents
Chapter Outline
Introduction
Chapter 1: Mammography
Chapter 2: “Something Suspicious”
Appendix A: How to Read a Scientific Article
Appendix E: The Komen controversy and alternatives to donating to Komen

Now all I have to do is write the cover letter and the marketing pitch, toss it all together, and find someone at William Morrow to send it to.

I remembered that my late business partner, Phil Harrison, packaged a book for HarperCollins West. HarperCollins hasn’t got the greatest reputation among writers — in terms of working with them, I mean — but I don’t recall Phil complaining. Anyway, if this bounces from Wm. Morrow I may send it to HarperColllins, since I can say with some truth that “i” (i.e., my company) worked with them in the past. But I also need to dig up an agent. My plan is to pay for access to LMP online and build a list of about a dozen agents and a dozen publishers; then start shipping the package out.

A standard advance for a book like this is about  25 grand. If I get anything close to that, I’m going to stand down off the teaching for a year (actually, $16,800 would buy me out of the teaching job…but I expect that’s what I’d net after taxes on twenty to twenty-five thou, since I’m being forced to do a required minimum withdrawal from my IRA this year, which will really jack up the tax rate). At any rate, if I don’t have to teach, then I should be able to write the book AND work on building the proposed…ahem…racey publishing empire.

At any rate, I’ve gone as far as I can today, because I’m tired, hungry, and have other projects in hand. Food is on the grill. As soon as I finish lunch/dinner, I’m going to start writing outlines of the zingy (if that’s the word…) stories downloaded from Amazon > Books > Erotica on the current free trial subscription to Kindle Unlimited. Actually I’d better download a few more, too.

From there I’ll create guidelines for writing the…uhm, what we might call the “quickies”…so that they can be turned out in a uniform way and with any luck speedily.

Believe it or not, three people have actually volunteered to write these kernels of p0rn!!!!! One of them, o mirabilis, is magnificently gay and highly creative.

Things are beginning to shape up (heh) in budding p0rn empire.

I’m out of money and out of food. So tomorrow, when the new AMEX billing cycle starts, I’ll have to spend most of the day running around town restocking the pantry and the fridge; then cook another week’s worth of dog food (Ruby and Cassie out out of food, too). And then it’s off to some friends’ house for father’s day. While I’m chasing around, I’d better pick up a gift and some wine for him.

And Monday: student papers. Two have turned in their essays early, but that leaves another 21 to trudge through…

All of which is to say it’ll be next Tuesday before I’ll get to the next phase of the Boob Book project: write the cover letter and marketing pitch, unearth the names of new editorial staff at William Morrow and HarperCollins, and send the proposal package off.

How Much Would One Have to Earn to Prosper in the Raunch Bidness?

by

So I continue to contemplate the possibility that one could make a living and then some (maybe a lot then-some) by self-publishing “spicey” literature. Note how cleverly we avoid the “p” word here by way of avoiding endless annoying spam.

Not that the site’s several spam-catchers don’t do fine in that department. But one supposes it wouldn’t be good to bring oneself to the attention of, oh, say, the NSA or some other black-helicopter set. 😀

Where were we? Yesh. Raunch.

Pour moi, I wouldn’t need to crank 30 grand a month. Far from it. Thirty grand a year would get me out from under having to teach freshman comp and also bring an end to the editing jobs.

To continue to live in my present crimped lifestyle, I would need to gross (not net) $2,440 a month, on top of Social Security.  This would pay the bills — all the bills — and keep food on the table most of the time.

It would be nice to see that income float in the door all through the rest of my life, not just while I still have enough ginger to churn out two or three unclean novelettes a week.

Our spy in this business tells us that he hires out some of the writing to freelances who will scribble 5,000 words of formulaic smυt for $100. Another source I’ve come across keeps the length to 3,000 words.  Even though I probably write more than 3,000 words every day, most of those words are undirected. Hiring “content providers” would guarantee that you could keep the business going into your dotage, assuming you could hire a trustworthy project manager…which I do believe I can.

So let’s consider what the business would have to gross to cover projected costs, per month:

$3,000: 30 novelettes at $100 apiece = $3000
$500: Contract business manager: + commission on revenues above a certain level
$300: Contract accountant/bookkeeper
$400: Editor/e-book template checker (make contract providers use template)
$500: Overseas artist to create cover art
$300: Marketing agent: + commission on revenues above a certain level
$2,450:  Payout to me
$7,450

While that sounds like a lot, it’s not six figures. It really isn’t much more than I was earning at the Great Desert University, especially when you add in the side gigs I had going on at the time.

At the outset, expenses would be lower than those shown, because I can do my own formatting and I can write the “content” myself.

As the business grows, the manager and the marketer would be motivated to ramp up their efforts by commissions on revenues over, say, $8,000. So, supposing the business made $10,000 in a month and each of these worthies got a 10% commission on the $2,000, they’d each make $200 extra, adding up to $2,400 a  year apiece.  If the business actually did make 30 grand (why do I doubt it so?), then each of them would make $2,200 in that month ($30,000 – 8,000 x 10%).

And that would surely make their efforts worthwhile. Mine, too:  $30,000 – 8,000 – (2,200 x2) =  $17,600 of pure gravy.

Heeeee!

Best not to eat that Thanksgiving dinner before the turkey’s hatched. But isn’t it fun to think about?

Profit & Loss in the Micropublishing Biz

by

Using the new Word templates that my little micropublishing business contrived to purchase for a modest price (one was under $50 for a permanent, no-holds-barred license!), I now have hard-copy layout for Slave Labor done and in PDF for the printer (I hope). Friday I met with the beloved graphic artist, who thought the result was pretty decent. He’s going to do a wrap-around cover for the desired trim size, accommodating the present cover art and cover-4 copy. Then it’s off to a local print-on-demand outfit.

If your bookoid is low on images, or if you’re willing to print the images in black & white, the cost for print-on-demand services is amazingly low. To put the whole thing together and perfect-bind it will run $3.33/copy for 10 copies. Per-copy price stays the same at print runs of 100 and 1,000.

This is good, because we would all be mightily surprised if Slave Labor sold even ten copies, to say nothing of enough to create an economy of numbers.

Slave Labor, being my sandbox project, is costing something but not much: I traded out the e-book design in exchange for editing the designer’s upcoming book on marketing e-books. So the only cost has to do with the cover design and with the experiment in Wyrd layout — I did have to pay something for the template. But not much.

How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months, the diet guide & cookbook, is now in what we might call rough-draft layout. All the content is poured into the template, and now I need to go through and polish all the formatting, write the back-page bio and the cover copy, figure out how to make the table of contents function work, and make one version for e-book emanation and another for print-on-demand.

We might call 30 Pounds the stage-two sandbox. Every time I work on this stuff, I discover something new. No doubt at all that mounting these things in digital and hard-copy print will add up to a marathon learning experience.

So I regard the costs for these two books as tuition for Micropublishing U. Once I’ve done a couple of the things, it should be pretty easy to put the rest of them online.

And I do have a “rest of them”!

As soon as Slave Labor goes off to the printer and 30 Pounds goes to Amazon and to the printer, I’ll start working on packaging the eighteen books that Fire-Rider has lent itself to serializing. These I hope to put online at the rate of one every week or two.

And that will put 23 titles (including the three that have emanated from real publishing houses) on Amazon  under my name. How amazing IS that, anyway?

The people at Romance Writers of America claim you start to make a noticeable income after you’ve posted about eight titles — of any genre, fiction or nonfiction. So they claim. We’ll soon see if that’s true.

I had to stop working on the Boob Book and the Revived First (Awful!) Novel when an exceptionally difficult project came in from a new client. Lordie! It truly is the single worst, MOST difficult editorial project I’ve ever had the misery to work on. And as  usual, Author is a graduate student with no concept of what other people’s time is worth. She wants it back in 10 days. I figured I could get through my part in four or five days by reading 28+ pages a day; then pass it along to The Kid to do the References section.

Well. Each 28-page segment took five or six hours to plow through. By the time I was done, my brain cells were effing FRIED. One of the reasons the formatting has gotten done over the past week or two is that I simply could not do anything that required more than manual fiddling.

Ugh. How do I need to have this enterprise fly? Let me count the ways!

And it doesn’t have to fly very high. Hell, I’d be on Easy Street if it earned $30,000 a year, to say nothing of 30 grand a month.

To replace the teaching income, I’d need to net $1200 a month on book sales. To replace what I’m making on editorial work would require net $833 a month. Two thousand thirty-three bucks a month, about $2440 gross: how hard can this be?

By God. If it requires cranking out 5,000-word Fifty Shades of Gray knock-offs from now until I shuffle into the grave, I’ll do it!