Comments (0) Day 2 of NaNo, and already some people are starting to freak out. Don’t do that. Trust your instincts, know that you do have something to say, sit down, and start moving those fingers over the keys.
There is always something in the box. Trust that there is always something in the box.
Yup. 30 days of podcasting fury, brought to you by the fine folks at… GSG, which basically means me.
Hi.
I’ll be cross posting these here and at the old site – geeksurvivalguide.org – so you only need to follow one feed to get the episodes. I hope you enjoy them!
Download GSG NaNo Gaiden #1
I’d probably suggest you go read the story before I talk about the conceit behind it.
Done?
Great.
Well, you have less than 24 hours to read Athena and the Mechanic for free, because the new story (featuring Seth “The Sinner” McAllen) is done. The first Sinner Story, High Moon, will go up on Amazon/BN.com/etc as soon as possible. I’ve been getting the illustrations for Athena and The Mechanic, and as soon as I have those in hand, that’ll go to the online retailers also.
Now I just have to figure out a name for this Seth McAllen story…
Walking around today, I had a thought. When ever I hear people defend the prices on ebooks, one of the things they say is that the publishers’ costs aren’t all that lower with the production of an e-book as opposed to printing an actual book – that maybe it’s a dollar or so per copy.
That could be correct, and still not justify current prices.
Writing is a business, and at the end of the day, any business is going to come down to numbers, which is what I’d like to go over today.
First, let’s set a target – the amount of money I’d like to make from my writing every month. We’ll use a nice, round number – $5,000 USD / month.
Using Amazon’s royalty structure, I figured that each $0.99 short story gets me $0.297 USD. So, to make my $5,000 goal, I’d need to sell 16,835 stories at that price point. (EDIT: Amazon’s lower royalty rate is 35%, not 30, so the estimated royalty PER story sale goes to $0.3465, and total number of sales needed to hit that goal is 14,430.)
Still working on the next story, which is now clocking in at about 7800 words. It’ll easily be over 10,000, but it’s mostly written. I’m just adjusting, rewriting, editing, and polishing now. My anticipation is that if you want to read Cost of Duty without paying for it, you’ve probably got about 24 hours to do that. Because sometime tomorrow, I’ll be posting a story in the Wildspitze universe that Scott Roche and I created. A story of magic, machines, and mayhem in Meiji Japan. A story that combines traditional Japanese mythology, history, family, swordplay, romance, and Nikolai Tesla.
As my contribution to “Speak Out with your Geek Out“, there are a lot of things I could talk about.
I could talk about books – e- and otherwise. I could talk about gaming (PC, Gamecube, Wii, DSi, 3DS… Pokemon…). Or movies. (Star Wars…) Or anime… (working my way through Xam’d now – thank goodness for Netflix). Or writing.
But the point of Speak Out with your Geek Out is to talk about that secret geekiness that you aren’t comfortable sharing out in the wide world. Which for me, means talking about me being a geek about my church.
I know, I’ve talked about being LDS on the blog before, (see my post on Being Unpopular, for example), but I don’t know that I’ve talked about my geeky love for my church. Every morning, I make it a point to get out my scriptures and spend some time reading and thinking. And most of the time, I’m reading and studying in the Book of Mormon. If I’m driving somewhere in the car, chances are 50/50 that I’m thinking about something related to my church. Why?
Hmmm… so Scott Roche just suggested that we build a co-operative playlist. He starts with a song, (In this case, White Wedding, by Billy Idol – Spotify Link), and tags a person (me) to pick the next song based on that previous song – either similar in style, through a word association, or whatever.
So… song 2 should be White Lines by Duran Duran and Grandmaster Flash (Spotify Link). Passing the dutchie to the left hand side… and choosing Wicked Good Steve Loopipe!
It's a pretty nice desk.
Leaving my regular day job has been something I’ve been simultaneously looking forward to and dreading. Looking forward to, because the environment at the day job could be rather tense. Looking forward to because the kind of work that I was doing there, while challenging and rewarding, wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. And I’m not getting any younger.
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