Monica Valentinelli's Blog: booksofm.com, page 109

Branding the New (Old) Apex Book Company

Jason and I have had a few conversations about branding Apex Book Company that have resulted in a few, very positive changes. I reminded him that as a small press publisher he can really dig in and give something to his readers in a way that some larger publishers can't.

You see, Jason has a valuable asset that he brings to the company: his heart. He truly loves and cares about his business because he's very passionate about the stories he's selling and the authors he's promoting. While some businesses can afford to be more formal, I felt that Jason could not due to the size of his staff and the personalities of the people who help him.

Although there's a lot of love here, the core business has to be soluble so he can strengthen his bottom line and grow the business. So Jason has an interesting challenge. How does he encourage people to buy without ramming his products down their throat?

So far, a number of business-facing changes we've discussed have occurred to achieve that goal.

+ Offer lower price-point products for e-readers (Alien Shots)

+ Set basic guidelines for bloggers to sharpen the overall focus and keyword market

+ Erase charity term "support" from terminology

+ Set monthly goals for subscriptions and internally express those

+ Tweak website to make it easier to navigate

+ Discuss internal rewards program for volunteers/interns

After two weeks, Jason is hearing excellent feedback and is already starting to see things move in a positive direction. The best part about all of this, is that Jason doesn't have to do anything he feels uncomfortable with. In other words: my advice has been based on what he already had, not with what I think he should have.

Last week, he wrote an excellent post about Dru Pagliassoti talking about her new book release An Agreement With Hell. He's still doing all the other things a publisher has to do to spread the word, but this? This is the type of publisher I'd want in my corner.

Check out his introduction:

The first time I met Dru Pagliassotti, she rejected me.

To clarify, this was years ago when I was a naive writer-wannabe (as opposed, you know, to now) and was cranking out crap short stories and shooting them off to publications without much thought or peer input. Good grief, I look back at those early submissions and cringe. Especially after running a short fiction magazine in some shape or form for the past 6+ years. But here I am making this about me when this is about Dru. –SOURCE: Dru Pagliassotti and Me

He then goes on to talk about Dru, her work and what he feels about it. The relationships that he's building. The way he cares about books.

This type of messaging is what will permeate throughout the year in everything Apex does. While its readership will change, its core focus will be on highlighting and fostering relationships to strengthen its customer base and allow its dedicated cabal of readers and fans to grow.

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Do Good Deeds. Submit a Story for Australia

Hi,

Just wanted to pop in today to mention that due to the massive flooding in Australia an editor has put together a charity anthology. To read more about what happened in Australia, check out my post on the Apex Book Company blog.

The fantasy and science fiction community has been affected by this flood. A charity anthology with one hundred stories is being put together as we speak by native Aussie Jodi Cleghorn to benefit Queensland. Apex Book Company has published stories by other authors living in Australia; we have not been able to confirm whether or not they're in the middle of this, but our hearts go out to them anyway. Many of you may have recently traveled to Australia for conventions and may have met an author or editor affected by the flood, too. — SOURCE: Australia Flood Relief: Reaching Out to Friends Across the Sea

The details for this charity anthology have been posted in a press release. You can read that on FlamesRising.com.

100 Stories for Queensland is headed by Brisbane resident and co-owner of eMergent Publishing, Jodi Cleghorn, and UK author, Trevor Belshaw. The management team is made up of Maureen Vincent-Northam, David W Robinson and Nick Daws who all worked on the Haiti and Pakistan anthologies with McQueen. They are assisted by a growing band of 20 volunteer readers and editors from across the globe. McQueen is working behind the scenes, organising the audio book and podcasts in conjunction with UK author and podcaster Em Newman. — SOURCE: 100 Stories for Queensland: Writers across the world rally for flood victims

The deadline for submissions is January 31st. While they are asking for uplifting stories, the length is only 500 words. I hope you'll consider donating your stories to this fundraiser.

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Writing the Future, the Slow Creep of Ages

My friend (and incorrigible Scrabble player) Maurice Broaddus and I had a long conversation last year about setting goals. One thing that he tries to do is have twelve short stories out in the wilds. Good idea! I was up to half a dozen, but right now I'm back down to three, since the others got picked up by various publishers.

Two of those three are set in a far-flung future that was going to be a game. (That's another story…) Anyway, this setting was developed about ten years ago. To create it, I took three basic elements: economy, politics, and overpopulation and spun them out about five hundred years into the future. For some of the physical setting elements to make sense, the time period is noted 1,000 years ahead.

Here's what I predicted back then:

+ The Republican Party will splinter, creating new political groups. One portion will be based on a platform for gun rights and will be funded by the NRA. The other, a religious-based group with a heavy emphasis on Christian fundamentalism.

+ Credit card companies will collapse. Due to poor economic conditions, more people will rely on credit cards to survive. Unfortunately, their combined inability to pay these bills will result in a massive institutional collapse. This has a permanent effect on the economy and credit cards are no longer issued to most individuals.

+ Indentured servitude will return, replacing minimum-wage jobs. To erase debt and ease the financial devastation caused by massive debt, some corporations will offer indentured servitude in exchange for a clean slate.

+ Corporations will emerge as families. Instead of having a corporation that you work for, bills to pay, housing to find, etc. My characters have campuses they live on. Everything is provided for them as long as they are loyal to the corporation. It's a skilled worker's best chance at having a decent life.

+ Government will fracture into city-states. Five hundred years from now, the expansion of cities and the problems they deal with will be handled moreso on a local than a national level. My characters live in, for lack of a better explanation, micro-countries. While the government is still present, they occupy three spaces at that time instead of one in D.C. They're in Chicago and L.A. specifically. Part of the reason why these centers exist, is because after a while our Federation of States begins to creep into Canada and parts of Mexico.

+ We ration. Everything. Overpopulation is a drain on all our resources, so goods–including water, basic foodstuffs, clothing, etc.–are not readily available. There is a very visible division between the rich and the poor. No middle class. No lower class. In most places, either you have or you don't. Over ninety-five percent of the population has nothing. As as result, we do some interesting things to try to survive and help one another.

For this world, many countries degrade through a series of events and factors that we do not work together to prevent. Um, yeah… I did make predictions for multiple countries… The two that I focused heavily on were Russia, due to the huge find they'll one day discover beneath Siberia, and China.

Now, this is fiction. None of these things may happen, but I feel that they could. Hence, as a writer, I feel I can provide a more realistic setting that you can really relate to. Here, there is no apocalypse. Just the slow creep of time and the aggregation of multiple events.

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[My Guest Post] Are You Owning, Renting or Leasing Your Writing?

This month at the How To Write Shop I was inspired to talk about content ownership. As in: your content ownership.

Although the internet is filled with tools to publish and produce stories, blog posts, images, etc. not every tool is creator-friendly. In this case, I'm not talking about copyright. Instead, I'm talking about something much, much more frightening. Many places that you post your words online–including Facebook–spell out the fact that you do not own your own content. What's worse, in some cases you rescind your rights even after you delete your content.

Why does this matter? Writers, artists, photographers, illustrators, musicians, etc. make a living not only by the creation of original content, but by its distribution. For people like us, our words are valuable because it's what we get paid to do. In other words–your content is your greatest treasure. –SOURCE: Do You Own, Rent or Lease Your Content?

In the article, I also offer five tips on how you can ensure that your content is exactly where you want it to be. To read them, visit Do You Own, Rent or Lease Your Content? at the How to Write Shop.

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Bored? Love SciFi? Creating an Alien Language with me at Apex Book Company

For the past six months or so, I've been exploring and sharing my process to create an alien language. This series has been extremely popular on the Apex Book Company blog and it's been picked up by several places including i09.com. To me, the creation of an alien language is fascinating because it can evolve into the cornerstone of an entirely new culture with its own rules, beliefs and way of life. I'd like to test that theory, but I need your help to do it.

So, for 2011, I would like to extend a friendly invitation to all those of you who love science fiction. Whether you're an author yourself or are looking to do something fun, I hope you will join me in what may prove to be an exciting adventure in worldbuilding.

To participate, visit my post Talk Like an Alien. Create a Language With Me and simply respond to two questions. Easy! And…fun. (I hope.)

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My Horror Short Story and The Zombie Feed

Hi everyone,

I am thrilled to announce that my horror short story entitled "Tomorrow's Precious Lambs" has been selected for the debut anthology from The Zombie Feed. This story was a lot of fun to write; the words sounded like music when I wrote them down. If I had to give this one a rating, though…it'd definitely be more on the "R" side.

Anyway, thought you might want to check out the Table of Contents to see some of the other authors.

The Zombie Feed, Volume One

Zombie Anthology Table of Contents

Cold Comfort by Nathaniel Tapley
This Final December Day by Lee Thompson
What's Next? by Elaine Blose
Rabid Raccoons by Kristin Dearborn
The Twenty-Three Second Anomaly by Ray Wallace
Not Dead by BJ Burrow
Tomorrow's Precious Lambs by Monica Valentinelli
The Fare by Lucien Soulban
A Shepherd of the Valley by Maggie Jamison
Broken Bough by Daniel I. Russell
The Last Generation by Joe Nazare
Goddamn Electric by Ken Wood
Hipsters in Love by Danger Slater
The Sickness unto Death by Brandon Alspaugh
Lifeboat by Simon McCaffrey

The anthology will debut in February or early March. I'm going to talk to the publisher to see if we can't post a preview for you to check out on www.flamesrising.com or elsewhere.

More to come!

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Your Business Model is not Your Neighbor's

I've been in a lot of discussions recently with other authors and a few game designers about pricing. Over and over again, I hear comparisons to the iTunes model or whatever Amazon is doing. If "free" is not the golden calf, then ninety-nine cents is the deal of the decade.

From my perspective, pricing right now is being determined not based on the content that is being created, but by its ease of distribution and the potential market reach a website has. The iTunes model worked for music, and now it's being applied to fiction and games, too. While I understand why this is happening, I'm disappointed that the pricing is based on availability rather than its intrinsic value. Impulse buy? Sure, but in my opinion, some things are worth paying more than ninety-nine cents for.

Just for the sake of argument, say that it takes a composer as much time to write a good song as it does an author to write a short story. Should they be priced the same? From a consumer standpoint, you listen to a song, regardless of what you're doing. You can consume this song over and over again, and don't have to drop your activities to listen to it.

Ninety-Nine Cent Pricing Should Work for All Publishers, Right?

Readers who purchase a story are making an investment because they are committing their time to the product, much like a movie. Games are another beast entirely, because they often require a larger time investment depending upon the type of game. Also, many games require multiple players and have a much higher production value in terms of formatting than a story does.

Just for a second, take a game and price it at ninety-nine cents. Is it text-based? Typically, no. There's often art, tables, borders and even color. What happens to your sales when you strip out all of that formatting? I honestly don't know. Phil Reed was recently speculating about that, too. Would you pay the same price for two products that are identical in every way, with the exception of the formatting?

Now, to be clear, I am not advocating that hobby games publishers shouldn't experiment with their product offerings. However, I am suggesting that ninety-nine cents is too low for the standard price of a game. If I had a hobby game company and my production costs were low, I would experiment with structuring themed games for four to six players with a suggested running time and package/develop/market it like that. (Renting, on the other hand, is a different beast entirely and I don't want to get into that here. And yes, some publishers, like WoTC, are already going with boxed sets. My idea is nothing new. I just like the idea of playing around with a streamlined digital version.)

Lastly, a publisher's inventory also comes into play. Say I own a gaming company and I have a total of twenty products. Would it make sense for me to price them that low? What if I had two? Or five hundred? What then? Of those products, how long are they? Core books or supplements? What value do they provide to my players?

Now, one thing that fiction publishers are doing is offering short stories from an anthology as individual downloads and then bundling them together in an anthology. This is interesting to me, because now instead of having one product to sell, you have eleven or thirteen. In this way, the "singles" idea from music increases a publisher's inventory. Even though singles have always been sold, traditionally we have purchased albums or CDs from musicians or, in other words, an anthology of an artist's music. Here, there's a loose correlation to fiction based on how a product is structured.

I have also heard some use "piracy" as a low-price argument. My two cents: Pricing your products at a lower price because you think they're going to be stolen is not a business model. Why? Because you are defining your sales goals on either making more than nothing or generating revenue to cover losses you have not experienced. To quote Spock: This is not logical. By structuring your business around whether or not you think your product will be stolen, you're predicting that your potential customers could all be thieves. Ugh. That's a crappy way to treat your customers. (On the receiving end, too. Went to two, different businesses for returns this holiday season and I felt like a criminal.)

But Biff is Doing It, So Why Can't I?

I have never talked to a creative professional that deeply and truly did not love to write, design, paint, program, photograph or draw, but I have talked to people who hate running and owning a business. When you write or edit and sell that work, even if it's in your spare time, that's pretty much what you're doing. Many people, including myself, are thrilled that the internet gives them the chance to collaborate or see what the next guy is doing to keep up on the trends. However, what works for your neighbor may not work for you, which is why I strongly encourage you to think before you leap. Yes, you have to take risks and believe me I understand that now more than ever. This is where your business acumen comes into play. Run the numbers. Do the cost analysis. Ask yourself those important questions. What percentage do you need to increase sales by at a lower price to break even? Do you know what your production costs are? Can you look at historical trends? Is there a segment of your business you can safely experiment with? How long can you offer this promotion before it hurts your bottom line?

To be clear, I am not saying that some sort of industry standard for pricing is bad. What I am saying, is that I believe the standardization of a popular business model is not a healthy or reasonable expectation for any business. You can't take a template and mold businesses that have been around for a year, five years or even ten years and expect them to change overnight just because something is working right now. Unfortunately, like offering things for free, the market (e.g. customers) may react that way even if the reality is very different. Take social media for example. It's the hot thing that everyone's talking about, but no one knows why. Does every business need to be on Facebook, Twitter, etc.? No, because like any other business venture there are pros and cons to doing it and social media doesn't always equate to sales. Does it mean that that business is evil? Not at all. They're doing what works for them. Same is true with ninety-nine cent pricing or offering free product, etc.

Can You Give Me An Example?

Recently, I brought up this topic with Jason Sizemore over at Apex Book Company. What I told him was, that even though Apex publishes science fiction, horror and fantasy books and may be the same size as other small press publishers, he has his own modus operandi, goals and future. It's great to talk shop and be inspired by like-minded businesses, but no one should immediately run out and change their business structure because someone else is doing something that appears to be successful without thinking it through. I feel that Apex has a better chance of emerging as a leader because Jason is concerned with forging his own identity and he has good people to help him do that.

One big change that I recommended, was to stop offering the magazine for free and go to a subscription-based model. This was in place already, after a fashion, but I had suggested the semantics were confusing. Many creatives use the word "support" when talking about their artwork or music or whatever. You support a team or a cause. You buy from a business or you purchase something you want. In order for the magazine to be profitable, the donation suggestions needed to be removed and the subscribers rewarded. This was a great example of how free stuff works for some businesses, but too much free can distract a reader from converting into a buyer. In the end, Jason's decisions aren't solely based on his gut or my suggestions, they're inspired by data, which gives him something to work from.

For extra credit, here's some additional reading material and tools on the subject that pinpoint different issues through the past year:

DriveThru's Take on App-Pricing RPGs, January 2011, a hot topic for hobby game publishers.
Apex Magazine News and Subscription Drive, January 2011, Jason offers an explanation as to the change and provides some insight for readers
UK Customers Protest e-Book Kindle Prices, November 2010, pricing went back into the publisher's hands and customers rated books poorly because of it
Why Do People Want More Expensive Backlist Books?, February 2010, Tobias Buckell offers an in-depth look at a backlist pricing debacle last year

Your comments are welcome. Please respect Biff.

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Announcing Scenes of the Embrace and Our Design Notes

Hi everyone, I am pleased to announce that Scenes of the Embrace was just released from White Wolf Publishing for only $2.99. This was a stand-alone project that I had worked on with developer Eddy Webb, who was the developer.

To celebrate the release, Eddy and I compiled a few of our design notes for Scenes of the Embrace and released them, along with a preview, at FlamesRising.com. I really enjoyed writing these notes, because this particular collaboration didn't start out smooth. When you work online, writing a new project, that does happen more often than you might think. The product turned out great, though, and I'm really happy that Eddy loved the results.

Included with Scenes of the Embrace are fourteen, stand-alone scenes that a Storyteller can use. For those of you who aren't familiar with the terminology for Vampire: the Requiem, this product has a narrow focus on the moment when a vampire transforms a mortal into a new vampire. As Eddy had mentioned, although the word "toolkit" seems to be a buzzword now-a-days, that's really what this product was designed for. There's a lot of fodder in here for Storytellers that also ties back to a sire's covenant, too.

If you're interested in Scenes of the Embrace, you can purchase it as an e-book. To read more about this new supplement for Vampire: The Requiem, take an Inside Look at Scenes of the Embrace at FlamesRising.com.

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Liz Danforth and Neoncon

Last year I virtually met Liz Danforth through Facebook and we had exchanged a couple of e-mails. We ended up being not-so-secret santas, primarily because we both thought it'd be something fun and geeky to do. I had given Liz what all women normally want (A chocolate care package… Hah!) and she had been kind enough to provide me with a few prints of her artwork which now adorn my walls.

Liz's artwork is a study in line art perfection. No, I'm really not just saying that, because it really and truly is. I knew Liz was a professional illustrator, but I was not aware of the breadth and depth of her abilities. She's brilliant and I'm happy that she's decided to step back into freelancing.

Well, a year passed by and Liz and I had chatted online a bit about how she wanted to get back into illustrations. (You can imagine I was cheering her on.) Then, we happened to meet up at Neoncon in Las Vegas and we were able to chat about her new beginnings.

Neoncon is a convention held in Las Vegas that has, at its core, a vision that isn't just about gaming. It's also to connect creative professionals with others to help them in their quest to develop their careers and find new opportunities. This year, I hosted a few panels to share my knowledge and see how people might respond to my style of speaking. I was happy to finally meet Liz for the first time; we had a great conversation and she seemed really excited about new possibilities.

Well, a few weeks ago Liz had posted Gearing up in the Next Expansion at LizDanforth.com. Earlier, I had asked her to provide some insight about my talk, because that feedback helps me grow.

I've met plenty of razor-sharp women and men over the years, many of them willing to share their knowledge. Monica is particularly good at what she does, in my opinion, pragmatic without being dogmatic. –SOURCE: Gearing up in the Next Expansion at LizDanforth.com

As you can imagine, I was pleasantly surprised. As I've gotten older, I've tried to adhere to a simple philosophy: There are six billion people on the planet. Everyone has a different way of doing things. That way is not my way. Instead, I want to listen to their stories. Sometimes it's challenging to balance the listening part with the advising part, but that's an area that I'm growing in. It was nice to hear that I'm achieving that goal.

I'm hoping to make it out to Neoncon next year, too, though I'm not sure what I'll be doing. Such is the life of a creative professional, but one that is a lot of fun. After all, I probably wouldn't have been able to meet Liz otherwise.

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New Short Story and Stoneskin Press

Hi everyone,

I am pleased to announce that my short story entitled "Fangs and Formaldehyde" will be published in an upcoming anthology from the newly-launched publisher Stone Skin Press. The theme for this anthology is about iconic characters. The idea is so "big" that they're publishing two of them!

The iconic character I created goes by the name of "Atlas" and he's a vampire who helps other vampires. In my setting, vampires are not the romanticized kind that well… Glitter. They are the kind that feed (and feed regularly) on humans. To them, we're food.

If you've read any of my other stories, you know I often build worlds for my characters to live in. This story is no different and could easily be part of something bigger. I won't give any more away, because to tell you what my vampires are all about will spoil the surprise.

Be sure to watch for news about how you can get your hands on a copy of New Heroes or New Heroes Two, edited by Robin Laws. With names like James Lowder, Matt Forbeck, Ed Greenwood, Alex Bledsoe, Kyla Ward and Monte Cook in the mix, I can guarantee that you won't want to miss out.

- M

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