Like Unto a Rubber Tree is the Business of Writing

Folk hereabouts have rubber tree farms. Now the interesting thing about these trees is that before you can get any rubber out of them worth anything, you’ve got to plant the trees and grow them for five years until they’re ripe, then you can harvest the rubber and sell it steady for the next thirty years, and then you cut down the trees and make some really nice furniture. Some owners just hire people to harvest and sell the rubber in exchange for forty percent of the profit while they sit in the house counting their sixty percent. Or they plant some more rubber trees. It’s a good life.

So, what’s my point? Calm down, writer guy. It’s too hot. Work in the shade, stop looking at your sales numbers. You’re getting all anxious over something that ain’t ripe yet. Add to it, it’s lonely. Don’t even think about quitting for at least five years, and don’t huff the fertilizer you should be using to tend it and make it grow.

BAM! Spreadsheet --


Here’s a real basic spreadsheet. You can make it too, so long as you know where to find the SUM function in Excel. I’d make it interactive, but I’m super lazy. It’s all monthly, and I’ve set it up to do all the royalty math (using Amazon’s setup). At the top I input my basic minimum income, and included an hourly wage based on that. All that done, I just input how many of each product H2NH has at the moment and see what happens. This leads to two basic conclusions:

I don’t have enough rubber trees.
I need more titles to get to my basic minimum income, unless the lightning strike of sudden popularity hits me in the business (read: Magic! Fairy Dust! Bubble!). I can play with the numbers and see exactly how much more I’d have to write to get to my basic minimum income, but the inescapable conclusion is “I should write more.” Getting this result is a good test of any Writer’s Business Plan. Five hundred rubber trees will earn you one thousand baht a night...

My rubber trees ain’t ripe.
For the average monthly sales, I input the “scraping-the-bottom” benchmarks culled from Dean Wesley Smith’s various series. Right now I only have actual data for my short stories, and it’s a number that’s a little less than 2. Then again, the reason I only have actual data for short stories is that I’ve only been doing this for six months. That’s kinda the point. Nobody cares about a field of six-month rubber trees except some random people who happen to notice it while they’re walking down the highway. You can’t even sit under a six-month rubber tree to get shade from the sun. But, you spot a mature five-year rubber tree farm and you’ll wander in, say hello to the rest of the people sitting around. What else’ve you got to do? It’s hot.

So, here’s my plan: I’m going to Write for five years, give Amazon et al thirty percent to sell my writing, and then sit in my house counting the seventy percent. Or write more.

It’s a good life.

Cunning Scheme

The scheme is as follows: I want real sales data (including on 'price points'), and I want a series, and I want to do POD and my hypothesis is that having a series published electronically and available POD will provide me with plenty of real sales data. Even if it doesn't...well, I'll still have a series. So no loss there. And it'll be fun.

Procedure: I will write a series, "Tisroc", of eight short novels (~20,000 words each), 'Tisroc 1 to 8", and make them available online at $2.99. I will then package the novels into two books of four each, "Tisroc A" and "Tisroc B", which will be available online at $9.99. I shall then proceed to prepare these units for POD, pricing the print short novels at $7.99 and the print packages at $14.99.

Expected Results: Money, Adventure. Not necessarily in that order.

Annie Bellet may have a Refined Cunning Plan, but mine is a scheme. And it ain't refined, neither.

To that end I have drawn up the following...

H2NH Publishing presents "Release Schedule: ePub"

Timeframe: remainder of 2011

Play-world (Tisroc 1)
by David Barron
Available Now! Kindle, Smashwords


To roll anyway (Tisroc 2)
by David Barron
July 25, 2011

The spell of it (Tisroc 3)
by David Barron
August 19, 2011

A little astronomy (Tisroc 4)
by David Barron
September 13, 2011

[Tisroc 1, 2, 3, 4 as Tisroc A]

Zig-zagging (Tisroc 5)
by David Barron
October 8, 2011

Another black shape (Tisroc 6)
by David Barron
November 2, 2011

No time (Tisroc 7)
by David Barron
November 27, 2011

A cloud of atoms (Tisroc 8)
by David Barron
December 22, 2011

[Tisroc 5, 6, 7, 8 as Tisroc B]

I'll add cover art in later, if I feel like it. Or I'll just make this a Page for easy reference/anticipation. Once I know more about POD, I'll be able to make that schedule, but they'll probably just all appear one day as a big new release.

Timeframe Note: I give myself 25 days to write, copy-edit, and package 20,000 words, which might be overly generous, but nobody's going to complain if I finish early. I'm assuming there's a buffer of 5 days for disaster and drunkenness.

If I fail to keep to this schedule, you are all free to point and laugh, and scoffers may scoff.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go read "A Dance with Dragons".

Buy One or All of My Many Books

This article manifested itself when I realized I have one or more things that you all could be buying RIGHT NOW! I even called up Billy Mays, but then it turned out he was dead. Damn.

Oh, just look slightly to the right. I’m too lazy to advertise further.

That should have been the actual title, come to think of it. My basic philosophy has been that, aside from informing everybody where they can buy what I write, I should advertise my stuff to distributors (read: bookstores), after which the distributors would put the books on shelves (physical or ether) and browsing readers would stumble across books as they always have. My only real goal is to have as large as possible a section of that bookshelf devoted to my writing.

I base this, mostly, on the fact that that’s how I find books. If you actively advertise a book at me, I’ll probably not pick it up. Unless it’s awesome or has a great blurb? So keep advertising at me, I’ll buy anything.

I suck, but it'd be an awful short article if I admitted that.