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.

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.

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.

Today we’ll hear from Levi Montgomery, a self-published writer who also blogs at The Write Rants. Levi was gracious enough to allow me to post his opinions here, and I appreciate it. So, without further ado:

The biggest single barrier to the wide-spread acceptance of self-published books is the staunch voice of the traditional publishing industry, crying in the wilderness: “But you need us! We protect you from the riff-raff!” The argument is that the industry performs a valuable service, acting as a gatekeeper to the public square, keeping trashy novels, misinformation, and radical error from being published.

This argument is rife with errors of its own, not the least of which is the assumption that traditional publishers do, indeed, act in such a manner; that they keep worthless fiction and incorrect non-fiction from making it to market. However, rather than shoot the half-dead fish in that particular barrel, I’d like to address another point: the issue of whether such a gate-keeping service should be performed at all, or if we, as a society, even want such a service.

The argument that this is a valuable service of the publishing industry would seem to be based on the putative existence of some sort of qualitative analysis of input, and would seem to derive its justification in keeping the perceived value of published output above some acceptable minimum level (both of which are arguable, but there are those half-dead fish again). But who is it that decides? Who decides that a book isn’t good enough for me to read, if not me? How do I decide, unless the book can reach me?

The underlying assumption in any gatekeeping function of the publishing industry is that the very reason publishing exists as an industry at all is that this function was so vitally needed that the walls were built around the machinery, to protect us all from those who might dare use it to voice a disagreement. But the fact is that the industry exists because the machinery became so large, so complex, so valuable, that publishing was outside the reach of all but the select few.

When publishing was a matter of standing in front of a large enough audience and telling a story, publishing could be assayed by literally anyone. If a storyteller wanted to tell a story, he did so. If he was good enough at it, he got the accolades and respect of his audience, and perhaps even payment, in the form of food, shelter, etc. The developments of technology, beginning with written languages, continuing through such crude printing technologies as woodblock and hand-cast metal type, and eventually reaching block-long high-speed web-fed printing presses, took this immediate access away from the average storyteller. Now, in order to put his story in the hands of his audience, the storyteller had to do one of two things. He had to acquire a printing press, or he had to go to someone who had one.

There were, perhaps unfortunately, more storytellers than the printers could handle, and they (like all industries) learned how to say no. The perceived function of the owners of the printing presses as a gatekeeper has its actual origin right there: the printers simply could not hope to publish everything. Nor could they hope to attract all the readers in the world, and in an attempt to differentiate their services from those of their competitors, they began to add what they perceived as value. They added editing. They added color. They added illustrations. And they added snobbery.

But the question remains unanswered: do we want a gatekeeper to the public square? Do we want a not-so-disinterested third party telling us what we can and cannot read? Remember the fireside? Remember the storyteller who stood there, regaling his audience with the story of how he conquered a saber-tooth? Aren’t we capable of deciding for ourselves whether we want to spend our time listening to him? I said that if he was good enough, he got respect and accolades. What I didn’t say was that if he wasn’t good enough, he got ignored. He lost his audience. He either stood by the dying fire alone and spoke on and on to nothing and nobody, or he went home and hoed his potatoes. His publishing career was over. Market forces did him in, not some gatekeepers somewhere, standing with crossed lances, turning him away.

And make no mistake, the problem of selectivity in publishing is not new. Since Og the Mighty first sat by the fire and told of how he’d killed a mammoth single-handedly, there have been people telling bad fiction and erroneous non-fiction. The night after Og told his story, there was another fire, smaller, lesser-known, and at that fire Ig the Skinny tried on Og’s story. He got laughed at.

Edward R. Murrow rather famously said “Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn’t mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.” But it doesn’t mean your audience is any dumber, either. Search the web long enough, and you will find a website telling you the best thing to do for a burn is to put butter on it. Bad advice, of course, but is it proof that the web is creating bad advice? No, because I have a book, printed in 1923, that says exactly the same thing. Did the famous gatekeepers keep that out of the hands of the unsuspecting public then? No. Do they do so now? No.

When Og told his story, we all believed him because we all knew him, and when Ig stole the story the next night, we all laughed at him because we all knew him. So what’s the problem we face today? Bad information? No.

Rule Number One, life’s General Order Number One, is “Always identify the problem.” You can’t fix it until you know what’s broken, and what’s broken today is simply this: we don’t all know Og and Ig any more. We can be heard to the ends of the Earth and beyond, we can listen to the voices of people we will never meet, and we have no way of telling the truth from the fiction. The village has grown too big.

So how do we fix that? We apply the same forces we’ve had since the days of Og and Ig. We have tools at our disposal that can handle the tasks. We have market forces to separate good fiction from bad, and we have peer review to separate truth from falsehood in the arena of non-fiction. These are not new tools, and they are neither inherent in, nor dependent upon, the function of the traditional presses as gatekeepers to the public square.

The fact is that, while publishers have been guarding the gates, technology has torn down the walls, leaving them looking suspiciously like the keepers of the toll gate in Blazing Saddles. You no longer need a printing press, you no longer need a distribution system, and you no longer need to stand in line at the gate. There are POD services galore that are more than eager to put out your book. If you want to tell, in excruciating detail, every minute and every second of the life of your grandmother, you can. For free. If you want to revive the old adage of butter on a burn, you can.

And do we want the owners of the presses to keep us from reading these things, or do we want something more robust, more reliable? Do we perhaps simply need to take out the same old tools, market forces and peer review, and let them do their jobs?

The question of legitimacy in self-published books is not a new question, it is simply an old question taken to a new arena. The answer is the same answer. The tools are the same tools.

Consider the illogic in saying that a “book” shouldn’t be published, unless it has the approval of the traditional publishing house, and then not extending that ban to all other forms of saying whatever it is that the “book” says.

Suppose I write a long series of blog posts, telling the story of John And Jane And How They Fell In Love And Lived Happily Ever After. Suppose that this series of posts is poorly written, filled with bad diction, bad syntax, bad grammar, empty similes and mixed metaphors, cardboard characters, sad clichés, and all of the other boogymen of modern fiction. I’m just a bad storyteller. I’m deluded and arrogant, and I have no audience, but no one is going to say that there should be some concerted effort to keep me off the web.

Suppose I build a website that claims to give medical advice, and I tell people to put butter on burns. So what? There are a million places on the web giving bad medical advice. It’s just another quack website.

But suppose I have the audacity to publish either of those as a POD book. Now I need to be kept out of the public square, somehow. Someone needs to Do Something. But what changed? Nothing. I simply chose to make a “book” out of my bad story or my bad advice.

The problem (remembering Rule Number One) is not keeping such things out of the hands of the public, it is separating the chaff from the wheat, in all channels of communication. And the answer is to apply the same tools that served us so well before the owners of the printing presses built their walls.

Market forces and peer review.

Fiction is easy. If you want to publish it, publish it. When no one buys it, go hoe your potatoes. End of story.

Non-fiction is a little bit more difficult, but the tools are there. There’s a long-standing tradition of peer review, and it simply needs to adapt to the new technologies. There was no magic bullet to keep the butter-on-a-burn meme out of our wetware a century ago, and somehow we all survived. When a better meme came along, peer review, in the form of doctors voicing their opposition, killed off the old one. There’s no fundamental reason why that can’t work in self-published book, both ebooks and print books. In fact, it may become easier and easier over time as technologies adapt.

What we most assuredly no not need is a return to the accidental rise of the press owners as gatekeepers.

Levi can be reached at levi@levimontgomery.com or at The Write Rants.

Thanks for reading. Tomorrow we’ll hear from a contact from inside a major New York Publishing house.