Coffee heat rising

Economics of Changing Horses in Mid-Stream

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!

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?

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

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!

 

The New Writing Empire: Promising!

Yesterday afternoon I sat down and began the project of dividing the epic (not to say “endless”…) Fire-Rider novel into chunks that can be serialized on Amazon. At the end of the day, I had 19 “bookoids,” as I’ve taken to calling them. That doesn’t count the front and back matter.

Our porn king’s bookoids, which he tries to post daily, are 5000 words apiece. Fire-Rider serials average a little over 8,000 words, with the shortest in the 5,000-word range.

To my delight, I found the book deconstructs beautifully into perfect little stories, each with a beginning, a middle, and an end. And strangely, the format seems to make the saga more interesting, more engaging. Instead of feeling like oh, God, here’s another chapter plod…plod…plod…plod, your sense is w00t! I’ve finished this and now I get to start a new one!

Rather than wondering when is this ever going to end?, you find yourself wanting to move forward to the next stage.

In the morning I talked with my graphic designer — the artist, not the e-book dude. He really likes the idea.

He feels we can use the existing cover image, which is extremely cool IMHO, as a kind of “brand” identity for the entire series and, without a lot more expense, adjust cover lines and a few graphic details to produce a unique cover for each bookoid.

This afternoon I’m going to divvy up the MS into the 19 segments. With the introduction and the afterword, the total will create 21 items to post on Amazon, but I think I also will put the intro (at least) and maybe the afterword online through Plain & Simple Press, giving me something freely accessible to post on Twitter, FB, and LinkedIn. Assuming that doesn’t violate Amazon’s ToS. If it does, then Amazon doesn’t get those two items; WordPress does.

Tomorrow — or Saturday, since tomorrow and Friday will be busy — I’ll download and install Scrivener and begin learning how to use it to create e-books. That or something like it is what the Porn King is using: we’re told he farms out some of the content production (“writing” may not be le mot juste) to freelances and uploads the things to Kindle himself.

Dang! I’m excited!

Amazon Sales: Is there gold in them thar hills?

justineSo this weekend a friend threw a party to celebrate the return of her prodigal son. This was good. Even better: a strange conversation that came up, a real eye-popper.

My friend says a man she knows publishes 5000-word pornographic novelettes on Amazon. He tries to upload one a day — about thirty a month. So far he has 265 of these things for sale on Amazon. And…

…hang onto your hats, fellow frugalists…

AND the guy says he’s earning thirty grand A MONTH from sales on this stuff. Price is $2.99 a title, of which he gets 70%. That would work out to gross income on sales of $2.09 per sale per title. If each title sold once a month (about what Slave Labor is doing), he’d make about $530 a month. To generate $30,000, he’d have to make 15,000 sales a month: on average 57 sales per title each month.

That’s outrageously high, but for porn? Maybe not so much. One woman — a stay-at-home mom with a gift for fantasy — at one point was scoring (heh) a hundred thousand sales on a truly goofy concept.

In 2013, Amazon claimed to purge its offerings of the spicy stuff, but that appears not to have been so: a search of Amazon > Books > erotica brings up this amazing selection (avert your eyes if you’re the nicey-nice type!).

Lordie! There’s a hundred pages of hits! As it were.

Well. I don’t know that I could write porn, or that I would want to.

However, if what’s selling is 5,000-word pamphlets (in print, 5,000 words comes to about 12 or 14 pages), why not serialize the fiction that I do have???

FireRider, which is ready to go and has been languishing because my e-book guy is doing essentially nothing for me, would yield 32 installments if it were broken into 5,000-word chunks.

And what should I discover but a vast line-up of FREE Word-to-Kindle converters on the Web. You can use Amazon’s converter, too, which might be more likely to produce something that will work. What if I divided FR into 30 serial installments and mounted one a week or even one a day on Amazon?

I do not need to earn $30,000 a month. To achieve my life’s dream, my heart’s wish — never to read another freshman comp paper as long as I live — could be accomplished with $1200 a month.

At $2 a hit, about what our porn-writing informant says he takes home from Amazon, each of FireRider‘s 32 serial installments would have to sell just 19 times.

That’s a lot, in the world of Amazon. But it’s not impossible.

And now, my friends, the plot thickens:

Considering what I have that I might put online in small pieces, I went in search of the Novel Under the Bed: to wit, a story I wrote in graduate school, when I was trying not to stare at the train wreck I was making of my life by getting a Ph.D. in English literature and history.

And lo, way in the back of a dust-filled garage cabinet, I found the damn thing!

This manuscript, folks, is so old it was generated on a typewriter!

Yes. My first out-of-the-writing-seminar, in-the-wild-effort at writing fiction.

It’s just AWFUL! As a grad student, I could not write to save my life, apparently. However, it opens with a crazy action scene. Its heroine’s co-conspirator is a pimp. One of her mentors is his favorite ho. She falls in love with a gangland leader. And wouldncha know it, she’s a Ph.D. candidate.

Sociology, though. Not English. 😉

Well, I’m thinking it wouldn’t take very much now to pump this thing into a Word file, rewriting on the fly and adding some serious sex scenes, thereby coming up with a bad novel that could be sold on Amazon.

Et voilà! Two bad novels to serialize: FireRider and this other thing, whose title was “Neither Be for Him” (it’ll need something catchier than THAT!). Supposedly it came to 71,500 words, but that’s probably an estimate. Assuming it’s in the ball park, though, we could figure that  serialized in 5000-word increments, it would yield another 14 bookoids. Now we’re up to 46 things to peddle.

And as for porno novelettes, life has handed me quite a bouquet in the form of my career and my students.

When I was teaching at the Great Desert University, one of my little chickadees described her life as a high-end call girl. She was working the resorts in Scottsdale by way of earning her tuition.

At Heavenly Gardens Community College, I met a very interesting young woman who worked as a pole dancer to support her little girl and send herself through school.

At Phoenix Ragazine, the most successful ad space sales agent during my tenure was a brassy broad whose out-of-the-office life can best be described as, uhm, active.

Back at GDU, we had the serial marriers: tenured faculty who would go through one graduate student after another, marrying, divorcing, and marrying again. One guy came back from a research trip supposedly spent in English archives with a new woman in tow. He showed up at the front door of his home with this lady at his side and informed his wife — late one of his graduate students — that she was out and the new kid was in. Literally threw the wife out of the house so he could install the new model.

Oh, and there was the sanctimonious full bull who liked to invite nubiles into his office to kneel and “pray.” No joke.

And the uproar that ensued recently when the president’s office issued an edict to the effect that diddling a student would henceforth be a firing offense…oh, my!

So extreme…in the early 80s, it took running a whorehouse out of your office, staffed by students, to get yourself fired. What is academe coming to?

There’s a lot to write about here. Quite a lot.