I’m excited to announce that I will soon launch a new novel on my site and out to the web at large. The book is called Disappearances and it has been long in coming, the product of years of work, and I’m nearly bursting at the seams to finish and get it out to readers.

Disappearances tells the story of a young man mentally disconnected. Early one morning he’s awoken from a restless sleep by a plane crash outside his apartment window. Rushing down to the scene, the young man is unable to find anyone – no people, no rescue workers, no survivors. He is alone. Everyone he loves, everyone else on the planet as far as he knows, has disappeared.

Frank’s task is to listen to the young man’s story, help him discover the secrets behind the disappearance of everyone he loves, and most importantly, to reconnect the young man with the rest of the human race. But before the young man can do that, he needs to learn the most important lessons about himself, his father, and how to move forward with his life.

In preparation to launch a new title, there is an endless list of preparations after the story is finished – extensive editing and cover design are first among those. I’ve listed people I’d like to thank in the Author’s Note after the novel, but there is one more person I’ve recently added that I’d like to personally thank here: Levi Montgomery.

Levi Montgomery, aside from being a self-published author and blogger, is also a photographer. I originally approached Levi in hopes of finding a fitting cover photo for Disappearances. He told me that he was interested in helping me, but would first have to read the novel before he knew if he had a suitable photograph. Thus, I sent him my novel and held my breath.

Barely a few days later, Levi responded to me. He’d already read my book in that short time, and although he regretted he did not have a fitting photograph for my book, he sent me a list of every single typo and error he found in the novel. In short, Levi provided another edit of my novel for me. He asked for nothing.

I’m completely blown away by the amount of work Levi put into editing my novel and I can’t thank him enough. Once Disappearances is released, if you like the work and want to contribute to those who made it happen, you can support Levi through purchasing his work, which he sells on his site. If you’d like to support me, you can help me spread my book around the net. But please buy a one of his novels from him, too.

So now I’m in the final editing stages of the work, trying to tease out extra awesomeness from Levi’s suggestions. I’ve also created the cover for book, though I’m still tweaking it. Instead of going with a photograph, as I originally intended, I decided to go with this design:

(clicking thumbnails opens larger images – warning: big files!)

I feel like it conveys the sense of the book in a way that a photograph could not.

Please check back soon – Disappearances will be a big release for me, my biggest so far, and I can’t wait to serve it up, all hot, awesome, and willing.

Thank you for reading.

Hello, friend. I feel a bit embarrassed – you’ve walked into the middle of a conversation here. No, please don’t go. It would mean a lot to me if you stayed and participated. I’m eager to hear what you think.

However, before you do that, there’s a lot of backstory that you should probably wade through. I’m not trying to give you homework or anything – all I’m suggesting is that you’ll understand this post a little better if you read this, this, and this first. If you don’t want to, that’s okay. But don’t say I didn’t warm you.

And now, without further ado, I need to reply to Levi Montgomery:

Okay, let’s narrow this back down to novels and digital fiction again, since that’s where this whole debate started before we escalated it away from the point.
I don’t know that I’ve done the best job I can to describe how digital text pricing should be levied, so I’m going to take another crack at it.

To start, let’s assemble a ballpark cost involved with being a writer. We can take as a given that to survive as a professional writer, one must have an income from that writing. This number varies depending on where you live and what other help you have, but let’s take 40,000 dollars a year as a target number. That seems like a pretty fair income for one person who gets to do what they love for a living. I don’t mean to suggest that this is what all writers should make, and I don’t want to get too caught up debating that number, but it gives us a ballpark figure to start working with the math.

Now, let’s talk workload and resources. Take a writer that writes 2,000 words a day, which is what Stephen King does (according to his writing memoir).Levi, I’ve seen your twitter reports about your daily writing – sometimes you write more, sometimes less, but I feel like 2,000 words a day is a reachable goal if writing is a full-time job. At 2,000 words a day, I’ll finish the first draft of a 100,000 word novel in 50 days. Now, that’s pretty fast, and it doesn’t allow for any rewrites, cover design, digital posting, breaks, or anything like that, so let’s double that figure and say that an industrious writer working every day can finish a novel and get it out there every 100 days. Since there are 365 days in the year, that puts a good writer’s output at about three novels a year, with some time in there for vacations and extra editing, if needed.

If I know that I can publish to the internet, in digital form, three novels a year if I’m working full time at being a writer, that gives me some data to start thinking about pricing. I know that in order to write full time I need to make 40,000 dollars a year. I have 3 novels with which to make that money. Since we’re talking about digital releases, the only costs involved for me are time. Writing, layout, design, editing, and distribution are all time costs, not resource costs.

In order to make my living, I have to sell:

at least 4 units for 10,000 USD or
at least 40 units for 1,000 USD or
at least 400 units for 100 USD or
at least 4,000 units for 10 USD or
at least 40,000 units for 1 USD

Keep in mind, this is total copies, so if I have repeat readers who might buy all 3 releases in a year, or any back releases, hitting those figures gets easier.

Now, just to give us some data, let’s pretend that the combined downloads of my current work through all online sources (that I can track) in the last year were actually sales. 2000 on scribed, 2000 via bit torrent, 100 from my site, 1200 on feedbooks. Let’s pretend that it was 5300 sales that I made in the last year.

Dividing that out, I would have needed to price my books at about 7.5 USD per unit to have made my target income for last year and support myself as a writer. Of course, my downloads weren’t actually sales. I’m using those numbers as what I have to start doing some math, not to say that I could really push that many units a year. My stuff isn’t good enough for that, and the resources I need (storefront and so on) aren’t available yet. Not to mention all the hassle of getting a bigger audience, piracy losses, and all that stuff. Those issues relate, and I know people will be upset if I just dismiss them without addressing them, but I’m going to do that, at least for now. We’re just talking here, after all. I’m trying not to get sidetracked.

So, anyway, my numbers are 7.5 USD for 5300 units so I can make my 40,000 USD and continue to write. I can afford to price them at whatever I can afford to make my living, since there is no physical production cost floor. As long as I can hit my 40,000 dollars a year, I can price them at whatever I want.

Now, say that next year is even better than this one – say that I’ve got some great content coming out and I’ve been building my name – I expect 10,000 downloads in the next year. If that’s the case, in order to maintain my target income, I only need to price my books at 4 USD per copy. Now I can offer the same thing for cheaper while still maintaining my lifestyle. Everyone wins. (It seems like there is a “devaluing” fiction conversation a lot of people are having lately that would fit in here, if I was going to try to fit it in.)

If for some reason I had a banner month, a crazy month where I got all 10,000 sales in one month at the beginning of the year, then I can now afford to price my stuff for free for the rest of the year.

I understand some planning is needed for something like this – projections, that sort of thing, but it’s worthwhile for me to do it if I feel like I can get more work to more people. As long as I can feel somewhat comfortable with the numbers, it would be great to be able to plan a little, too.

I’m sure that if I was a Google-level engineer I could figure out some pricing system and website module that dynamically priced content on my website based on how many sales I’d made and how many I needed to make to hit my goals of remaining a professional writer. Some awesome and wonky math that priced different novels at different prices to maintain their sales rank, all while lowering or raising prices as I needed to maintain my income, yet still offering my work as close to free as possible. Even not being a Google-level engineer, I’ve taken a crack at it to see if I could figure it out.

But the real point of the thing is that I’m not trying to steal work from people. I don’t advocate that. I just advocate only taking what you need. I have a copy of your novella on my hard drive right now, Levi, a copy you gave me for free so I could review it. I wouldn’t dream of releasing that work without your consent, no matter what I think you should do with it. It’s not my place to decide what you should do with your work. I can judge you or not judge you, but my judgment is not allowed to turn into action you don’t condone.

I don’t see pirates as Robin Hoods on some moral high-ground quest. The group is too diverse to lump all together. You’ve got your competitors who do it for the name, the people who just want stuff for free, your revolution folks, and people who just can’t afford content otherwise. They don’t all go together, even through their actions are all the same. And they aren’t Robin Hood.

But I also don’t see corporations pricing their content to only take what they need, either. So, I’ll happily condemn them both. I believe in working things out from the bottom and trying to come up with numbers to support it. If corporations need to price their books at 10 bucks a pop to stay in business and pay their employees and writers an acceptable wage, then fine. But right now I don’t believe it and until I see some numbers, I’ll continue to not believe it.

But I don’t think that I have the right to take from people what they aren’t willing to give away, either. However, I see that it is a moral obligation for people to price things fairly, based on maintaining the ability to release more. That’s a personal choice, I get that, so I will happily call out the guy who has the cure for cancer and is selling it for 10,000 bucks a pop, even though his costs are only 5 bucks a pop. That guy is a jackass, and deserves to be lampooned and made a public spectacle. But beyond that, I wouldn’t steal it from him. I’d try to shame him into doing the right thing. Failing that, I’d try to get some laws changed, since laws are supposed to be there to aid the common good, even if they routinely fail short of that lofty goal.

For me, right now, that means I can release what I can for free, even though I have to spend the majority of my time at a day job. That day job severely limits the amount of time I have to produce content and release it. However, that job also provides me with an income, so I can afford to release my content for free. It’s a trade off that I’m willing to make right now. Maybe later, when I’m ready to try writing full time, I’ll have to charge. But I know that I’ll do my best to keep my prices as low as I can afford and still be professional.

I hope that makes sense.

Wow, what an exciting day! Mark at Ditchwalk posted a great entry furthering the discussion we’ve been having about piracy and copyright. With his support, I feel like the discussion is going somewhere. In this post I want to directly respond to what he wrote, so please read his post first. Once you’ve done that, let’s talk:

Both of Mark’s scenarios that don’t involve the taking of something from someone else, but still involve physical piracy (free newspaper and concert), stem from the same given: content creators have a right to decide how, why, when, and where their content is experienced, if for no other reason than they created that content.
I’m not sure I agree with that given as it stands, and I’d like to use a silly example to illustrate why. There is an anti-corporation argument that has a place in the piracy debate and I think this is also the place to bring it into our discussion. I want to use some examples to talk about where I think that argument comes from, but also what I think it means that the argument even exists in the first place. I hope that this will also help address Mark’s ideas about stealing.

We’re going to need two people for this discussion, so let’s pick polar opposites to try to tease out the implications of the thing.

First, we need someone who’s rich and can pretty much buy and sell whatever they want. Let’s use Bill Gates, since I seem to have been thinking about him lately. I don’t know why – it might have something to do with him recently joining twitter and also donating billions of dollars to charity (although those two events might be unrelated).

Second, we need someone who’s not rich. Anti-rich, even. For this, let’s use Marian, referenced in the same blog post I’m responding to. Since we were put up as mutual mouthpieces there, that seems fitting. Marian, unlike Bill Gates, cannot buy and sell whatever she wants. She’s limited by her limited income.

So here’s the scenario:

Say that I’ve just finished writing the next great American novel. It’s the best thing since sliced bread, full of the bees-knees, wisdom, humor, and great ideas. Not only is it gonna be a best seller, a strong member of the Oprah book club, and adored by the mainstream and counter-culture alike, it’s also full of life-changing ideas that everyone on the face of the planet, young and old, should read. Say that’s what the book is, just for example.

Now say that, before it’s released, word gets around that all the hype about the book is true, that it really is better than Shakespeare, the Bible, and Twilight (for the mass market appeal) rolled into one and my publishing company and I decide to set the price of the novel at 10 billion dollars a copy, because we think, for some reason, that we can get Bill Gates to pay that price.

Lo, the novel is realized. My publishing company and I sell three copies to the three richest people in the world. We retire in luxury and never work again. Bill Gates gets to read the book, being one of the three who bought it, but poor Marian never does, because she cannot afford the price of entry.

This is an extraordinarily silly example, but a necessary one, because it demonstrates some talking points:

People should only have a right to distribute content if their profits from said content are reasonable. What right, beyond the creation itself do I have to price my novel at such an exorbitant price? I created the content, but if the book is so good that it might improve lives, what right do I have to price it so only a few lives can be improved?

That’s the point about sticking it to corporations and where it originates. Just because I create something, do I have the right to completely control access to that thing? Maybe, but only to a point. After that point, the social contract says that the work should be freely available, or at the very least, as widely available as possible.
That’s what this is really about. Did Bill Gates really have the right to make 40 billion dollars because he started a software company that provided the right thing at the right time? Does he have the right to become the wealthiest person on the planet because he won big on a social roulette game?

I don’t think so. That’s too much. Letting someone profit that much from the creation of a single thing is absurd, whether it’s a company or a novel. Now, novels aren’t as absurdly profitable as the amount of money Bill Gates has, but you get the slippery-slope gist of the thing.

Now, Marian’s point was this: if the content isn’t priced affordably, she knows how to get it for free.

I think she’s right. It’s easy to get it for free. And digitalization of work brings that into a whole new perspective. Because although piracy might be described as the theft of a sale, the hard fact is that after the content is created, an additional digital copy costs the company nothing. NOTHING.

So how in the hell can they justify pricing a book at ten dollars? It’s an unreasonable profit margin for their investment.

If a publishing company spends 150,000 dollars to pay the author, the editor, the layout person, and the web guy who throws it up on the digital store – they only have to sell 15,000 copies at 10 bucks a pop to recoup that investment. Now, for a novel that they are willing to spend 150 grand on, they are easily going to sell 15,000 copies. It’s more likely that they are going to sell 100,000 copies or more, since they are banking on it being a best seller (otherwise, they would have paid 15,000 or less for the advance, layout, and editing fees). 100,000 copies at 10 bucks a pop gets them 1 million gross and 850,000 net. That’s an absurd margin.

This is simplistic, but basically how it works nonetheless. Now, if they price the book at one dollar, not only are they going to sell way more than 100,000 books, they also put it in reach of a bunch more people. They probably aren’t going to make the same margins, since they’d have to sell a million books at one dollar to make the same as selling 100,000 books at 10 bucks, but it’s possible.

And if they do sell a million books, it’s time to lower the price. Thus spake the social contract and the social contract mote it so.

(Beyond that, there is also the issue of the payment of the writer versus the payment of the publisher, but that’s another whole big thing that probably needs its own post.)

So, my belief is this: content creators have a right to distribute their content as they wish, as long as they price that content so the most people can have access to it (which means as cheap as possible) and still maintain a comfortable lifestyle that lets them continue to create that content. If you want to charge me ten bucks for a copy of a digital book, you don’t get to have a private jet. I’m sorry. No. That’s not feasible or socially responsible. Instead, people in my generation will steal your book. So it goes.

In the above scenario, I would be an asshole for writing something that could help people and then pricing it so only a select few could afford it. That’s capitalism, you say. Fine, I say, well capitalism is an asshole, too.

Information, content, entertainment, whatever you want to call it, should be priced so that the highest number of people can access it and the people who made it can live and continue to create it. When that happens, then content creators have a right to control their content. Until that level of social responsibility is inherent in the system – content creators shouldn’t have a right to do what they want with their content.

That’s the “right” of creation – bringing good to people, and as many people, as possible. If you don’t do that, you have no right to create.