Mary Sisson's Blog, page 95

Progress report

Yes, there's been leaky roof, a power outage, and a balky furnace--must be fall! But today, there was also PROGRESS!

1680 words! Huzzah!

Living off windfalls

In Kris Rusch's series on why writers disappear, she mentions that many writers can't handle how differently money flows when you are your own boss than when you are an employee and you get a nice, predictable check every week or every two weeks.

She notes:

No business—not one—earns the same amount of money month in and month out. Employees do, because the employer guarantees the paycheck. But if the employer can no longer meet payroll, the employees get laid off.

The employees never see the business’s uneven income (unless that employee works in accounting), and so rarely understand how normal this is. Most people, in fact, have no idea how precarious their regular jobs really are. (Although, after this recession, more people know now than before.)

When people who’ve had steady work move to freelancing, they expect the freelance income to behave the way that their paychecks did. They expect regular and on-time.

Because indie writers get regular checks from their distributors, this problem gets compounded. The checks feel like a salary, even though they aren’t.

And so when the money decreases, or dries up, it feels personal. It hurts. What has the writer done wrong?

Nothing, except fail to plan for normal business ups and downs.

"Normal business up and downs" are why when credit dries up, it damages the entire economy--many businesses have a line of credit and borrow money to meet their payroll during the slow season in the normal course of events. It's not something they do only when business is bad; it's something they do every single year--because they don't make money in the summer, or they don't make money until the summer, or whatever. That's how their industry is, so they have developed methods to cope with it.

Most individuals haven't developed these coping skills, though. Most people are trained to expect a regular paycheck, and they have developed spending habits that align with that regular income. The way life usually operates for people with regular jobs is:

Regular money in => regular money out

Monthly rent or mortgage payments. Monthly car payments. Monthly bills. Every month, like clockwork, your expenses are X many dollars, and that number does not vary by much.

It makes total sense, because your income is Y many dollars a month, and that number doesn't vary much, either. Maybe you even get a little silly about it, leasing fancy cars and always making payments on everything because those things don't make the X number bigger than the Y number.

But what if Y is completely unpredictable? What if some months it's a HUGE number, and other months it's teeny-tiny? Well, then, you have to take a different approach.

(Actually, you don't have to--you can do what you want. I'm not your financial advisor, and I know SFA about your specific financial situation. In other words, if you go broke following my advice, that's on you--consider this my disclaimer.)

The strategy I used when I was a freelancer could be described as:

Erratic money in => strategic money out

What do I mean by strategic money? Well, I knew that my monthly income was going to go waaaaaay up and waaaaaaay down. So the goal was to get my essential expenses--the expenses that I absolutely had to pay every single month like clockwork or there would be some horrible disaster--down as low as I could.

Of course we're all human, and the temptation with a windfall (especially after a lean period) is to spend it on fun stuff. What I did was to allow myself one indulgence--something I really, really had been craving and feeling sorry for myself over. That usually took the edge off (especially if I wound up never using it, or using it and realizing that it kind of sucked). It couldn't be outrageously expensive, or something that would lead to greater monthly expenses (so, nothing I had to go into debt for). I also tried to buy it used if I could--pawn shops are excellent places to get jewelry, by the way, and there's a whole cautionary tale to be had by seeing really fancy crap that had to be hocked for 10% of what people paid for it.

The rest was spent strategically. Spending strategically meant that I took the windfall from the months with a big income and invested it into things that would bring down my essential monthly expenses. A good example of this is paying off a car--that's something that's usually pretty doable, and getting rid of that car payment is a big help for most people. Paying off debt in general also falls into this category--not only do you wipe out the payments, but then you have that line of credit available later if times get tough.

Paying stuff off isn't the only thing, though--you want to start living like some combination of a left-wing econut and a right-wing survivalist. Forget the arguments against buying in bulk--those apply to people with regular incomes. When you're flush, stock up on nonperishable essentials. Also, spend the extra money on energy-efficient appliances and reusable household goods--they will bring down your monthly expenses.

I realize that normal people with regular incomes sit around with their calculators and try to figure out when exactly these things will pay for themselves. That math is far less important to someone with an unpredictable income. If your income is erratic, getting your essential expenses down has value in and of itself, because it means that when you have very little income coming in, you'll still be able to pay your bills and live in a decent sort of way.

The sticky wicket here is always housing. In the vast majority of cases, the windfall isn't going to be anywhere large enough to pay for a place outright, and the way mortgages are usually set up, you have to make a minimum monthly payment even if you've just paid off a large chunk of the thing. If you rent, you could pay a year's worth of rent to your landlord, but I wouldn't recommend it because in my experience most landlords will happily pocket 12 months' of rent, and then come back to you in three month's time wondering why you stopped paying your rent. (No, I've never had an intelligent landlord--and I know people who tried paying two or three months' rent at a time, and their landlords were too dumb or too dishonest to cope with it.) So I would just go with having a special account dedicated to housing. Try not to raid it because you simply must go to Tahiti this year.

Yet another thing to do is to take your erratic money and turn it into predictable money. If you know that once a year you need a bunch of money to [pay taxes, buy Christmas presents, whatever] then things like certificates of deposits can be very helpful. I know the rates are very low nowadays, but you can use a CD to put money you'll need in the future someplace where you can't get at it (at least not easily) until you have to have it.

Now, if you have a really serious windfall, you can actually turn that into regular monthly or quarterly income--that's called "income investing" or "investing for income." I'm not going to get into the specifics, because different strategies work for different people. But when you see some entertainer make $20 million one year and file for bankruptcy the next, a failure to invest for income is usually the culprit. 

Reviews, competition, and the whole soap opera....

Real life has come back to bite me in the ass--the roof is leaking again, in more than one place, so I'm bringing in the actual professionals. Ugh. This house is such an attention whore.

Finding a roofer is not something I usually do (it's a metal roof! Those things are supposed to last forever!), and I have other large house projects coming up that are beyond the ken of my regular contractor, so I signed on to Angie's List and was immediately faced with the are-these-reviews-bullshit-or-not? question. (Lessee, a bunch of A-grade reviews all posted at the same time, all by people who have only one review on the site. Hm....) So, I was happy to see that Yelp is actually conducting stings on companies that pay reviewers. That's nice to see.

There have been a couple of interesting stories on all the competition that's happening in the book industry now. Jay Manus notes that competing standards make life hard for DIYers. I agree, which is why I don't plan to prettify my books past --every complication has the potential to...complicate things. I do aim for making the book look like it doesn't have mistakes in it, but I don't sweat having everything be a particular size or proportion, because that's never going to happen, and there's nothing I can do (or should do) about it.

The other story is a Wall Street Journal piece on how Amazon's imprints haven't been a slam dunk, at least not when it comes to paper sales. E-book sales may be doing fine, but of course there's no data, so.... Yeah. We don't actually know that Amazon's imprints haven't been a slam dunk, or maybe they've been a complete fiasco--it's a total mystery at this point, and unless Amazon starts breaking out its revenues in greater detail than they do now, it's going to stay one. What we do know is that Barnes & Noble's boycott is hurting paper sales, that other retailers are reluctant to carry Kindles, and that author Timothy Ferriss is plotting his revenge. Stay tuned for our next exciting episode of As the Publishing Industry Turns!

Composite heroes

HOWARD MOON: The thing is, we clicked, Vince, we just clicked, you know. And that is something you can't fight, you know--chemistry. Yeah, I've got the dark, fractured, broken, paranoid sort of side to me, and he had the light, sunny, simpleton feel. Together we made sort of one whole person--together.

VINCE NOIR: But that's our angle!

                                                         --The Mighty Boosh, "The Power of the Crimp"

It's notoriously hard to analyze comedy--or rather, it's supposed to be, but I feel that's more because the people who analyze literature tend to be pretty humorless and do a really horrible job with comedy, assuming they even recognize something as comedy to begin with. In fact, one thing that drove me crazy when Seinfeld was on the air was the assumption made by just about every cultural commentator out there that the characters were created and envisioned as serious role models--you know, of course the people who wrote the show thought the world would be a better place if everyone acted like George Costanza, and of course everyone was watching the show not to laugh at George's foibles but because they wanted to be just like him.

I guess if your job is to come up with reasons to bemoan The State of Things Today, that sort of "analysis" makes sense, but not otherwise. Another aspect of comedy that is often analyzed in a really dumb way is the prevalence of buddy comedies--instead of one protagonist, you have two (or many more). The "reasons" critics often give for this is 1. everybody is secretly homosexual, or 2. men hate women. (You're wondering about female buddies in comedies? Lucy & Ethel? Bridesmaids? The Bennett sisters? Oh, silly you, those don't exist.)

When I was an undergraduate, I read the comedic novel Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding. The full title of the book is The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams--so, you know, it's a buddy comedy, and for me, it was the first buddy comedy I ever tried to analyze.

Joseph Andrews is a spoof of Pamela, with the hilarious premise being, Here is a young man trying to defend his chastity! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!! OK, fine, that's hilarious mostly by 18th-century standards. But despite the unpromising premise, Joseph Andrews turned out to be a surprisingly worthwhile novel about a young man trying to navigate the world of sexuality--think of something along the lines of American Pie or Another Gay Movie, but far less explicit.

Like the characters in those movies, Joseph Andrews is trying to channel his sexual impulses in a functional way--he's very much in love, and he does not want to sabotage that relationship. He is, however, a young man with a full complement of young-man hormones (and apparently quite the looker), so he is faced with temptations on all sides.

Helping him navigate those temptations is his buddy and parson, Abraham Adams. Whenever Joseph starts to stray, Abraham pulls him back into line. Abraham isn't perfect either--he's super-gullible. If it weren't for Joseph riding herd on him, the parson would give away his life savings to the first sharpie with a sob story he met.

You see how that works for a comedy? You're never faced with Mr. Super Perfect Guy or some boring allegorical character. ("I am Chastity!" "Hello, Chastity! I am Charity!" "Hello Charity! Let us trod upon Sinner and walk up to Heaven upon the Path of Righteousness!") In fact, you're faced with quirky people who do wacky things that you would never do.

On the other hand, you're also not faced with a situation that turns so horribly serious that it is no longer funny--Joseph doesn't destroy his hoped-for marriage, Abraham doesn't starve to death after losing all his money to a con artist. It's not a classical tragedy, where a character's flaws lead to his destruction. In a buddy comedy, a character's flaws make him go awry for a little bit, but eventually his buddy gets him back on track.

I like this

Dean Wesley Smith notes that if a book sells well, perhaps that's because it's a good book.

Of course, we've all seen books we don't much care for sell well, but that's just further evidence that readers can't agree on what constitutes a good book. I would argue that once a book reaches a certain level of sales, there are people reading it just to see what all the fuss is about. But getting it to that level of sales is a group of readers who really, really like that book.

That's also why I think it's important to have a healthy dose of skepticism about one-size-fits-all marketing programs. Books are not all the same.

Struggling to respect the process

(I couldn't write today because of a family obligation, so instead I got angsty!)

Kris Rusch is doing a series on why writers disappear, and one of the things that comes up in a variety of forms is that many people, once they start writing, discover that they just don't like it much. They don't like the isolation, maybe, or they just would rather be doing something else.

I think in a way that's one of the dirty little secrets of writing (or, I suppose, any art form)--being able to do it all the time is privilege that generally must be earned, but sometimes once you reach a place of privilege, you realize that it's not where you want to be. In addition, you can be very good at something and still not enjoy it much. (Exhibit A of this phenomenon is probably Douglas Adams, but I'm sure there are others.)

For the most part, I enjoy writing, and sometimes I enjoy it very much. Other times it kind of drives me crazy. In particular, my process is something that can annoy the hell out of me. I throw out a shitty first draft, and then I beat it into something approaching a decent story.

When you're cranking out a newspaper story on deadline, that's actually a very efficient process--spit it out, revise, and you're done. When you're writing a 100,000-word novel...oh my God. I was a famously fast writer when I was a reporter. As a novelist...not so much. Most recently with Trust I cranked out a 100K-word draft, and then I had to cut probably about 30K words and add in about 40K more. That took time.

So it's bothering me that Trials isn't coming out perfect the first go around. Of course it's not going to--intellectually I know that. But the irrational part of me would just love to be able to spit out a perfect third novel in, oh, about a month, and give it to all the people who have expressed a desire to read the next book. (I guess this is the problem with starting to actually find an audience--suddenly there are people out there who have expectations. People you could disappoint. Yoikes. Before nobody cared!)

But it's just something I have to go through--it can't be avoided, and attempts at aversion will just make the whole thing take longer. In addition, it's not like the first draft of Trust was a bust--one of the things I like about that book was how the A plot and B plot kind of merge at the end and help resolve each other. That was never in my outline--that was something that developed as I was writing the first draft.

Right now I feel like Trials has a lot of odds 'n' ends that aren't jelling into anything, or they're intended to become something in the fourth and last book, but I really don't want the third book to be one of those padder novels whose only purpose is to extend the series by another book (coughcough Order of the Phoenix coughcough), so I need to figure out what these things are going to actually do in the course of this novel.

And that's frustrating, but on the other hand, that's how it always is at this stage. That's my process--I throw a bunch of stuff at the wall, and later on, I see what sticks. It always works out eventually.

Another good post on scams

Lila Moore guest posts on Anne R. Allen's blog. And doesn't give me a stroke.

That sound you hear is me hitting my head against the wall

There's a guest post by writer Erin Kern (via PV) that was apparently designed specifically to give me a stroke.

The short version: Kern wrote a book. No one would publish it. She self-published. Following the patented Darcie Chan Method To Screw Yourself Out Of The Most Money Possible, she priced her book at 99 cents and left it at that price even after it took off. The book got huge--she sold 38,000 copies in a single month--despite Kern doing absolutely zero promotion. So she signed with a publishing house so that someone would do promotion, because obviously a book won't sell--certainly not to the tune of 38,000 copies a month--without promotion. Oh, and she wants to do a paper version of her book (because e-books are only a tiny fragment of the market, and when you're selling only 38,000 copies a month, you obviously have grounds to worry about your reach), and we all know that's completely impossible to do without a publisher.

Boy.

OK, for one thing its really obvious from her post that Kern loves the status of being published by a fancy house. And she doesn't want to do anything except write, so she is willing to sacrifice potentially enormous sums on the alter of I'm An Author (And That Is All I Do). So, you know, she's rather fond of prestige.

But the thing I want to look closely at is, What are the sums she is sacrificing? And that brings me to my major issue with the 99-cent price point as a permanent price for a longer work (promotional pricing or short stories are another matter).

Like I wrote about Chan, Kern found a gold mine, sold her gold at the going rate for nickel, and then convinced herself that she needed help with the business end of things because she's just a nickel miner. I can't help but think that if she had made $76,000 in the month she sold 38,000 copies instead of just $13,000, she would have been that much more reluctant to change business models. You look at $13,000 a month, and that averages to $156,000 a year--good money, to be sure, but for someone who is already pretty comfortable and perhaps is worrying about the long term, that might not seem like enough to bank on. (What if my books stop selling? Where's my nest egg?) But $76,000 a month means $912,000 a year--close to a million dollars. 

As I've mentioned before, people will throw away potentially huge sums of money if that money is not in hand. If it's abstract, future money? Forget it. That money's gone because in our minds, it never existed. We are hard-wired to hold on to what we have and to devalue what we don't have. That is called loss aversion.

You can see how loss aversion works with writers like Kern. First, they lock themselves into a situation where they are making as little money as it is possible to make from self-publishing.

Then as a result, they devalue their self-publishing business. Kern looked at her work and said, Oh, well, the most I could possibly hope to make on my own is $150,000 a year! That's no great shakes, and it's a lot of work--I want a traditional publishing contract instead!

She never saw the potential to be making $900,000 a year, because she wasn't actually doing it--it's too abstract, it's just me, some whiny blogger, second-guessing her and making projections that might never come to pass, yadda yadda yadda.

But if she had been willing to play with her prices just a little bit once sales took off, then Kern might have had a very different idea of how much her self-publishing business was worth. (Or perhaps she would have discovered that she could never make more than $13,000 a month--but at least she would know that for a fact, rather than just assuming that the worst-case scenario is the only possibility.) If it turned out that Kern could make close to a million dollars in a year--well, that's some real money. That's getting to having enough money so you can invest it and live comfortably off the investment income without having to work.

In that case, loss aversion would have started working for her instead of against her. Very few people, even rich people, are willing to throw a million dollars away, even if they love prestige and have long yearned for a traditional publishing deal.

And that, my friends, is the value of experimentation--with prices and with other things. Experiments = knowledge. Knowledge (like, how much is my self-publishing business actually worth?) is key to making good business decisions--both because you'll have the data to make logical decisions and because your gut will be telling you Don't let this go!!!

Progress report

750 words, which isn't a lot, but I really have to think about how I'm going to structure the next part....

Oh, Superman

A while back I did a post on why characters need to have flaws, and that resulted in a discussion in the comments about Superman, with Jim Self writing, "I'd like him a lot better if he used his power selfishly once in a while, then felt bad about it."

Well, apparently back in the day, Superman DID use his power selfishly, although he NEVER felt bad about it! Holy smokes!