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.

Arrr, me hearties, it be talk like a pirate day. So affix yerself solidly to the mast while we weather these rocky e-book reviewing waters. When last we spoke, I told ye if ye sent a parrot to me ship, a scrolled version o’ yer e-book clutched in its talons, I’d affix my eyeglass to studyin’ yer jet black prose.

Soon after, a scurvy seadog by the name of Levi Montgomery sailed an e-scroll of his short tome into my harbor. So screw yer courage to a place that sticks and let’s get on with the review of his novella, “The Death of Patsy McCoy.” Arrr.

Alright, enough of the pirate talk. I’d considered writing the whole review that way, but it doesn’t seem respectful to the author, so let’s do this legit. Arrr…ahem.

“The Death of Patsy McCoy” is an ambitious work. Telling a story through the eyes of five separate characters is difficult, and this is what the novella does. The book focuses on the events of one tragic summer – a new kid comes to a dying mill town, tries to fit in with a rough gang of country boys, and suffers the repercussions of being a pudgy and awkward outsider. The boys name the new kid Patsy, violently haze him, all the while assuring him he’ll eventually be one of them if he does what they tell him to do.

The story is advanced through five separate sections (with a sixth conclusion section), and each section focuses on a different viewpoint. The book purposefully toys with the reader, sowing misinformation, hinting at clues to the timeline of Patsy’s death and slowly revealing more as each character takes up the mantel of the story. We get to see several of the same events through the eyes of different characters.

When it works, it works well. Of the five characters, the most strongly written is the second, a mentally challenged kid named Spittle. In high school I spent a semester working in a buddy system called the SELF program – a program that paired mentally challenged teens with regular teens for gym class. The mental confusion Spittle experiences from peer pressure rang true to some of my experiences with the higher functioning teenagers I worked with in SELF. Spittle’s was a believable viewpoint.

However, the voices of several of the characters don’t ring as true, breaking immersion. Getting the voice of a character right is one of the hardest things to do. Take John Updike’s classic short story, “A&P”, which is one of the best examples of character voice that I know. Updike first line is, “In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits.”

Instantly, we have a feeling for the voice of the character, just from that line. It could have been, “Three girls in nothing but bathing suits walk in,” which would have told us nothing. But with a simple inversion, we already understand the voice of the character. We understand how he talks.

Montgomery’s novella gets some lines right. In the third section, which focuses on Babyface, the most malevolent of the five hazing boys, says, “Can’t believe he went on to become a judge. Same age as me, dead already. Who blows your brains out at 37?”

From this line know this character. He’s flip and disrespectful, a fast-talker, a guy who only cares about himself. The hypothetical question gives no credence to the dead, and by extension, to the idea of death, which dehumanizes him. Now we know who he is.

However, only a sentence or two later, the same character suddenly waxes philosophic, “It lies within each of us to choose the time and place and manner of our own death…”

We all have our different sides, but I struggled to follow a character who could instantly transform from flip to hallmark card within the span of two sentences. I didn’t buy it. And for a novella that depends so much on the strength of each characters’ voice, these moments of uncharacteristic armchair philosophy made it difficult for me. I felt like I was hearing Levi Montogomery, not Farm Boy, Babyface, Bowels, or Patty.

Of course, even for a novella that depends on character voice, voice isn’t the whole shebang. Story matters, too. So was the story in “The Death of Patsy McCoy” good? Did I learn anything? Was I entertained? I’m not sure, but this uncertainty isn’t a drawback, it’s a plus for the novella.

For example: American History X is a powerful movie, one that everyone should see, but it’s not good. It doesn’t make you feel warm and fuzzy inside. It doesn’t entertain you. It makes you feel squirmy and nauseous, but also that you are somehow better for feeling awful. And that’s how I felt about “The Death of Patsy McCoy.” It didn’t make me feel good. It made me feel sick to my stomach. But it made me feel like I had stuff to think about.

Whenever I finish a book, I always set it down on the bedside (yeah, I read in bed – my bed is soft and I like it) and stare up at the ceiling for awhile and think about it. If the book didn’t make me think, I’m up and taking a whiz inside of five minutes, whistling while I circle the bowl. If I feel like I have something to think about, I can stare at the ceiling for hours. Those long ones are the “thousand page stare” (like the thousand yard stare, but way less haunting).

“The Death of Patsy McCoy” made me stare at the ceiling for twenty-six minutes, give or take four minutes (it’s not a precise science here). Do with that what you will.

So, overall, I’d recommend “The Death of Patsy McCoy” to a reader who was willing to look past its flaws in character voice. If a reader is willing to do that, there’s something of value inside those digital pages.

Thanks for reading.

Arrr.