Broken Typewriter Press

Poem - Fifty-Three Years

2019-04-27T05:00:00Z

On the twenty-seventh day of National Poetry Month, I wrote a poem about my marriage. When I was getting married to my spouse in 2000, we talked about renewing vows. I wanted to renew every decade to give them a safe and easy “out” if they were ever tired of me. They wanted it to be forever… and maybe into the next life if possible.

Side note, I'm still trying to figure out how to haunt her to keep with her after I die.

We compromised on a fifty-year marriage. In 2050, we'll decide if we want to keep going or walk away. After fifty years, chances are, I'll stay, but the same thought remains: I don't want them to feel obligated to be married to me “because.”

This is the same philosophy I have with authors from Broken Typewriter Press. They can walk away if they feel the need. Yeah, I'd hope they pay my costs but right now, if it doesn't work, then don't continue it.

I almost ended this poem with the way Buckminster Fuller died, but didn't.

Fifty-Three Years

Fifty-three years as of this midnight.
So many years of looking into his face
And seeing the wrinkles spread across
And the eye glaze over with age.
So handsome.

Fifty-three years as of this midnight.
So many years of holding her tight
And seeing her breasts drop
And her hair go gray.
So beautiful.

Fifty-three years as of this midnight.
So many years of living together
And seeing our rings tarnish
And our children grow.
So wonderful.

Fifty-three years as of this midnight.
So many years of saying "I love you"
And repeating our vows
And remembering how to love.
So joyful.

2018 Writing Monies

2019-04-01T05:00:00Z

For the last few years, I've joined other writers in documenting our writing incomes. The main reason is to help come up with a better expectations. If the only time you hear about income is with the million-dollar advances, it can get rather depressing when you are looking at a five dollar royalties check. Or at least, it was for me. The first of these posts that I had seen was Jim C. Hines (well, this is his 2019 version).

Here are previous years:

2015
2016
2017 didn't happen because of depression
2018

Background

I'm neither traditionally published nor do I have an agent. Instead, I post much of what I write online in hopes that someone will enjoy it. Over the years, those stories have gotten me a semi-steady measure of income writing commissioned works for individuals though I have stopped accepting commissions for over a year now.

In 2010, I realized that I had plateaued with my writing skill with commissions and published a book. It was followed by a few more.

To hamper my potential as a writer, I'm also a dual classed Programmer/Writer. I write a lot of programs that contribute to writing, business, or just because I like finishing code. This also means that my free time is split between writing and coding.

I would consider myself to be the bottom tier of professional writers. I'm nowhere near making this a living and it doesn't look like that will change any time in the near future. However, I still love writing so I do it. It might considered a “hobby job” still.

Delays

Normally I try to get this post done in January. This year, it ended up being in April for a number of reasons:

I've been trying to maintain one chapter a week for the last few years. With certain pressures of work, family obligations, and snow days, one thing lead to another and I'm struggling to keep that up while doing other things.
I ended up redoing my accounting system to fit it better with industry practices. I also wanted to switch from doing monthly statements for Typewriter Press to per-author websites that give breakdowns of every sale I've managed.
Writing ultimately is my third priority in life. A long time ago, in a doctor's office, I read advice from “Writer's Digest” that said pick three priorities and stick with those. Mine are: family, work, and writing. In that order.

Precision

All these numbers are rough estimates. I have exact dollar amounts because I have a fairly detailed accounting system set up to manage it, but it doesn't really add much.

Summary

In 2018, I had a gross income of $3,761. Most of it ($2,414) was related to publishing books for other authors. On a more personal side, I made $15 for 8 physical and 2 ebook sales. $55 was from Patreon. I got $581 for commissioned writing. The remaining $696 was from various services I provide (monthly writing obligations, final commissions). Previously the bulk of my income came from commissions which I stopped accepting last year.

This is contrasted by expenses of $4,452. The biggest was printing physical copies for $2,632. This was mainly other authors, who also got $547 in royalties checks from me. I spent $99 last year on advertising, which I also include convention costs (tables mainly). The other big expense was $588 for Internet services (virtual machines, domains, etc).

This means in 2018, I had a net loss of $691. With the depressingly few sales of books (… ten), it pretty much means my second worst year since I've been reporting income.

In contrast, 2017 has a income of $5,241 and expenses of $4,999 for a new income of $242.

Commissions

I stopped accepting new commissions some time ago. I knew that it would impact my income and I wasn't disappointed. There was a relatively sharp drop in what I was bringing in, though I have some periodic income from two final commissions. Both of these were bigger ones that required monthly payments because of size or limitations of the commissioner.

2019 should see at least one of them being paid out. I expect that to happen by the middle year which means another drop. The last one… I honestly expect them to ghost me but it doesn't happen. The final commission is a large one, about 500k words, so it will take a while to finish it.

Publishing

Typewriter Press is my little publishing effort. This was mainly created to manage my commissioned writings and to get me a FEIN but it ended up being used to help publish books from local (to me) authors since I enjoy the process of formatting, typesetting, and managing books.

... I like accounting.

I wouldn't mind if publishing ended up being a steady income, but that isn't going to happen any time in the near future.

One of the main reasons there are a large amount of expenses is because I decided in the beginning not to treat my time as “free”. When it comes to publishing, I take into account how long it takes and give it the same rate I charge others ($20/hour). There are also costs for ISBN numbers, hosting services, and printing costs (all of these books are available in print).

Rutejìmo

My first trilogy (Sand and Blood, Sand and Ash, and Sand and Bone) started off as a “world building piece” while I waited for Flight of the Scions to be published however it ended up being a significant hunk of four years when I got it out through Broken Typewriter.

Sand and Blood: $2.71 (2 print)
Sand and Ash: $6.81 (3 print, 2 ebook)
Sand and Bone: $5.85 (3 print)

This was not a good year for sales.

Patreon, Flattr, and Donations

Patreon has brought more money than printing this year however I had no change in patreons or income throughout the entire year. I still make $9/month from 4 patrons.

Conclusion

Writing remains a “hobby job” for me. It takes up a significant amount of effort but I enjoy it. There is something about getting the accounting, business, and writing processes together. It gives me a sense of purpose sometimes, just knowing that I've helped others get books published and also moving forward with my own efforts.

That said, 2018 was a very discouraging year for me. More than once, I had periods of depression as I doubted my skills as a writer and for business. There will be more in the future, I have no doubt.

Just keep swimming. - Dory, Finding Nemo

2017 Writing Monies

2018-01-12T06:00:00Z

For many years, Jim C. Hines has done a fantastic service to the writing community as a whole by publishing his income from writing over the years. Of course, he was inspired by others doing the same thing and has inspired others to do the same. While his first year's post is higher than my current year, I think even my own numbers give a data point to those who are curious if they measure up to various authors.

In 2015, I decided to add my data points to the list. I also did it in 2016 but not in 2017 (I'll explain below why).

Background

I write because I enjoy doing it and others seem to like what I put together. I'm neither traditionally published nor do I have an agent. Instead, I post much of what I write online in hopes that someone will enjoy it. Over the years, those stories have gotten me a semi-steady measure of income writing commissioned works for individuals.

None of these ever see the light of day once I send them, so I realized I was plateauing as a writer and started to focus on more traditional pieces in 2010 though it took a few years before I actually published a book.

Summary

All these numbers are rough estimates. I have exact dollar amounts because I have a fairly detailed accounting system set up to manage it, but it doesn't really add much.

In 2017, I brought in $2,500 after most expenses. Most of it ($1,900) came from my commissioned work. I also made about $264 on novel sales, $41 from Patreon, $221 publishing other author's books and authorial services.

Thanks to the joy of rather detailed accounting, I can show the slow accumulation of both income and expenses for my writing over the years. This includes everything and shows that I've managed to keep a low but positive net for writing since 2006 (four years after I started writing for money) and every year except 2016.

Breaking it down to just money made and lost over the year, you can see I'm doing more as the years go on. More money made but also more money spent. The green line is my net, which I strive to always keep positive throughout everything.

Commissions

Commission writing has continued to dwarf most of my income. I've been lucky to have a number of commissioners who continually request large stories, but in the last few years, it has become less of a one-off payment and instead monthly or biweekly installments for larger pieces. The largest is for a quarter million word serial which will take me about three years to complete.

Despite not being able to share my work, I have gotten a steadily increasing amount of work through commissioned writing. In most cases, there is a higher payout for individual works (my average length is twenty to fifty thousand words for a one-time payment of three to five hundred dollars). However, there is no long tail for commissioned works, once paid, it doesn't contribute to the back catalog nor will there be another payment.

While most commissioners do not request a third-party to edit my work, I do have the occasional one where I end up getting it edited. That is why you see expenses show up on the chart above.

Even with the private nature of commissions, the only reason I can afford to do anything is because of those works. This pays for everything else I do and keeps me in the black, which is one of my primary drivers since writing is a hobby at this point in my life.

Publishing

Broken Typewriter Press originally was created to help me manage my commissioned stuff and also give me a place to “hang my hat” since I was going to be self-publishing Sand and Blood. I figured I could also offer services for formatting and typesetting, two things on the programming side of writing that I enjoyed. Along the way, I was asked to manage online stores and publish other authors in the Cedar Rapids, IA area. Since I like accounting and the other detail-oriented stuff, I ended up being a “small press” along the way.

I wouldn't mind if publishing ended up being a steady income, but that isn't going to happen any time in the near future.

These numbers are in aggregate among all the authors and books I publish. This is a relatively recent occurrence in my writing career so it has the semi-predictable downward turn that starts to curve up as things get established. I've seen this a number of times, both in my overall income but with other companies.

The more books I publish, I know there is an accumulative effect that will make this profitable. I've seen that with the more recent ones though I only have one book that is in the black.

Rutejìmo

All three of the books have the same rough pattern of a surge of initial expenses which are then slowly matched by sales and income. These aren't as fast as I want, but I do hope they will eventually end up in the black.

I almost released Sand and Blood as a Creative Commons-licensed book but didn't at the last minute. Instead, I went with a more traditional approach and only gave a few chapters away and spread it out to everywhere I could.

After a few years, I realized that I'm was having difficulties getting readers to start the book. It could have been the cover, the accents in the names, I wasn't sure. Since I didn't have many sales, I decided to make it a CC-licensed book and release it a chapter a week, much like a web comic. Once I finished, I did the same with Sand and Ash and Sand and Bone (and now Second-Hand Dresses).

I have noticed that the second and third books haven't not made as much money as the first one. I don't know if it is making it free that caused that problem or the fact few people have read the first one.

Another observation is it pretty consistently cost me $2,000 to get a book out for these three books. That includes cost for editing, publishing, and the small amount of advertising that I've done. The reason Sand and Blood has a large expense in 2016 is that I went to WisCon but only had one book to spread the costs across.

Patreon, Flattr, and Donations

Which leads into the alternative payment for the books. Because I don't charge anyone to read them, I created a Patreon to give others the opportunity to support me if they did like the book. In the beginning of the 2017, I had two patrons, at the end of the year, I doubled it to four. This also meant I went from $6/month to $9/month.

Missing 2016

I didn't do a writing post in 2016. I had a lot of expenses over the year, mainly because I put out five books: two of mine, one commission that required major edits ($1,400 for a 180k word commission), and two other author's books. Those expenses coupled with low sales basically put me dangerously near being red, which triggered certain of my aspects (depression being one of them) and I just couldn't write the post and still be positive.

Thankfully, 2017 was much better.

Slow Rise

I can't afford to take certain risks. In specific, I'm the primary income for my family and I'm uncomfortable making decisions with writing if I can't substantiate them with income from my writing. This means that I have not gotten as much advertising and marketing as I wanted because I haven't sold enough books or written enough commissions to keep everything in the black. Of course, you have to spend money to make money. I'm just not in a place where I can “push” my writing other than social networking.

Of course, selling via my social presence is difficult because I find frequent advertising to be detestable which means I don't think I have a large network to work with. I also screw up and say the wrong thing too often, so I'm always afraid I'm going to alienate people who know me so I don't strive to interact as much as I cold.

My commissions and sales are what drive not only my ability to advertise but also to get books edited. At this point, I have a queue of stories that are written but waiting to get funded enough to have them edited.

This also means that my weekly chapters aren't fully edited. If I did that, I wouldn't be able to produce anything for a number of years because I have to follow that mandate of staying in the black. I'd really like to be able to produce fully edited weekly chapters but I need a steady income stream to provide it.

Conclusion

Writing is a “hobby job” for me. I love doing it, I love writing for others and I love seeing my book in print. I also spend hundreds of hours a year on it. Because of my personality, internal rules, and distractions, I continue to see a very small but steady growth across the board. It may take me a few decades to get where I want. It's frustrating but I'm still going to do it and I'm still going to enjoy it.

Just keep swimming. - Dory, Finding Nemo

The Overhead of Blogging

2017-03-02T06:00:00Z

After nearly burning myself out to finish 10k words before the end of the month, I decided to switch back over to working on my publishing business and getting ready to release my own books but also the next book I'm publishing.

With some recent realizations, I found out my current incarnation of generating EPUB, MOBI, and PDF files was fragile. In specific, it required my laptop to be set up properly. If I lost it—not an unreasonable suggestion given that it has a hernia and a cracked shell—then I would be significantly impacted.

To fix that, I decided to rewrite the system (again) using TypeScript and NodeJS. This time, the packages are pushed up to shared servers which means others can contribute (yeah, right) but I also can rebuild the entire environment without having my specific machine.

This also means that I can set up my GitLab installation to automatically build the EPUB, MOBI, and PDF files whenever I check files in. This also means the authors who have access to their own books can also make small corrections and see the results. In the end, it should reduce the work it takes for me to publish which helps more than just myself.

To simplify the logic, I'm building everything with HTML (EPUB's native format and MOBI's second language). However, there is not a good XeLaTeX conversion from HTML so I decided to try out wkhtmltopdf which I use for BTP's monthly statements. That worked out pretty well… up to the point I found out I couldn't do inner and outer margins.

Those are kind of important for books.

When one thing creates a block, try a different one. After a while, I found a nice library called WeasyPrint. This handled inner and outer margins but… it couldn't handle recto chapter pages (chapters opening on the right side) nor could it handle chapter-specific leading pages (no headers).

So I have two ways of getting past this. I figured I could either hack the code by assembling the book and doing a bit of magic with the WeasyPrint code or do the “right” thing and teach that system how to handle recto and page numbers. I don't know which one is “easier” but I'm pretty sure there is a good chance I won't have time, but I'm willing to attempt it.

I can always go back to XeLaTeX, I know how to convert that relatively quickly.

Which… leads me to my 974 Problem. I wanted to do a quick blog post about the stuff above. However, I didn't want to spent twenty minutes looking for an image to tag the post. My alternative was to create a “generic” image for posts that I didn't find an image. My novel posts will still probably have appropriate images.

Instead of spending twenty minutes for an image, I spent two days writing a generic system including properly documented and tested library to integrate into my build system. Because ten hours verses twenty minutes is somehow better when I get lost in the forest.

2015 Writing Income

2016-01-10T06:00:00Z

Last year, I did a post on writing income throughout the entire year. It wasn't exactly the shining example of “success” but it was progress when it came to writing.

I'm doing the same thing again for 2015, just not in as much detail. The main reason I'm focusing on progress over time is that the data was getting a bit obnoxious. Not to mention, it probably wouldn't be as useful.

Some of the numbers changed from last year, mainly because I spent my New Year's Eve re-entering all writing accounting from 2002 into a proper accounting software (GnuCash) but with a focus on individual projects instead of everything as a whole. So, the numbers I'm talking about are net after income from royalties and expenses for advertisement, editing, and illustration.

Because of how most accounting works, you typically don't leave year after year in the same file. Since I'm working with limited data, I kept it in a single file but then had to extract it. Since I've been working with NodeJS, I wrote a program that parses the gzip-compressed XML data and pull out an annual breakdown of each project. Well, it does month too but it wasn't as useful or pretty.

In 2015, I made a net profit of $978.10. It isn't that much of money compared to others, but I have to remember that I'm really only working against myself. In that case, it was a good year since my net monies since 2002 is $3,365.58. This means that this year had contributed to almost a third of my current all-time profits.

In the above graph, the red line was the net profits over time. Now, these projects includes the expenses and income, which means many of my initial books were negatives since I paid for editing and covers. It also means that when I bought a large block of ISBN numbers, it lowered my profits for the year.

In 2015, my project could be broken down into the following:

As usual, the bulk of my writing income ($1,356.22) comes from commissions and ghost writing.

This pretty much paid for what ended up being a major change in my writing, which is publishing other authors as part of Broken Typewriter Press. It was fun, but I made a few mistakes (two significant typos that caused recalls) but I'm getting better at it. Hopefully it will start to come out of the hole, but this is still in the early years and the $-632.47 won't be an general trend.

I wasn't able to get a second book out in 2015. There were a lot of reasons for that, but it was something I knew would happen. Sand and Ash only needs editing and a cover to get it out, but I had other obligations and projects that made it unreasonable. At the end of the year, I decided to use Patreon to help get my books out. I started rather late, so in 2015, only one person gave me $50.00 toward it, but hopefully that will change in 2016 (it already has).

I also had a number of friends who are really helping me get readers and I have to thank Shannon, Cassie, Tyree, and Barb for that.

And to the one book I do have out: Sand and Blood. Looking at the yearly breakdown, it isn't exactly a good year for having a book out, I only made $83.70, but it was the first year that I had a profit for the year, so I can't honestly argue. That brings the net value of Sand and Blood to $-1,255.37.

Well, that's my 2015. It isn't exactly an example of a shining success but it is an improvement that is the only thing I can aim for. At the minimum, my writing should bring in more money that it costs. And, given that I've been doing this steadily since 2002, I'm going to say that I'm just leading into a slow introduction to a much bigger story.

Not unlike my novels.

Changes

2015-06-22T05:00:00Z

It's been a while since I've posted, I have to stop doing that. But, most of the time it is because I'm working on some project or dealing with life's little trials that make it hard to sit down and talk about them (or they are ones I choose not to share online).

Trials have an interesting affect on me. I break out of my routine to deal with it and, when I go back, I realize that things I've done religiously are no longer things I want to do. A good example is that I used to play Kingdom of Loathing. I love that game and played it every morning as part of my ritual. But, then I was flooded out of my apartment and spent three months without a laptop. When I came back, the joy had disappearing. I realized I was no longer playing the game but enjoying the puzzle of automating playing the game. So I dropped it.

The latest trial popped out a few things that don't really work.

Penflip and Wattpad

I love the idea of Penflip and Wattpad. I've gotten a number of fans from posting frequently back before I wanted to be serious about writing.

The problem is simple: pride. I want to produce the best piece of writing I can, but I simply don't have the skills to self-edit. Which means I need beta readers and editors before I feel I'm not throwing out garbage. At the moment, I don't have an army of fans who work for free, which means if I post my works-in-progress (WIP) on those sites, I'm posting “not my best quality.”

This is a purely mental issue, I'm sure, but I don't want to be an author who puts out things with a “few mistakes.” I try to hold myself to a higher standard of not having mistakes or having very few (I still remember the single typo I found in my copy of Deeds of Paksenarrion in 1,024 pages).

Before I had Sand and Blood re-edited, my dad read a copy. When he said “there weren't that many typos,” it actually bothered me a lot. And it was the other reason, besides the Immerse or Die review, that I decided to have it re-edited.

The only way I could see posting on either of these sites is to complete them, have them edited, and then post online as a weekly or monthly serial until it completes. I'm considering doing it with Sand and Blood if I ever make it Creative Commons licensed.

Until then, I'll probably removing the pieces I have up already. I don't really have anyone reading them, so I don't mind. I'll keep the Journals of Fedran issue #0 up until I get it edited, but issue #1 (which will be based on in-world religion) will remain offline until I can afford to get it edited.

Mailing Lists, Disqus, and Discourse

Another thing that is changing is my site comments. Previously, I used Disqus for the page comments. It is a useful service for smaller sites (which I'm very much one of them), but they also have some limitations such as being non-commerical for the free services, a constant push to buy their product, and linking all the sites together. Since they are free, I'm actually okay with that but that doesn't mean I have to stay with them.

What pushed me over was getting DreamCompute from DreamHost, where I host my sites. It was mainly to have a GitLab instance but I had a second instance and I figured I'd go with the free alternative I've seen on a number of sites I liked, Discourse. It took me a little while to get it installed (had to learn Docker and a bit of Ruby) but I'm pretty happy with the result.

If you are on my site, you can see it on the bottom of a number of pages. When you comment, it shows up at discuss.moonfire.us but you can add new topics over on the discussion site.

Having Discourse installed also meant that I could unify my mailing lists from Google Groups over to Discourse. That way, anyone interesting in commenting or reading or just talking about my world can post over there. And it handles email replies, which means it can also function as a full-blown mailing list for those who don't care for web forums.

I'll be shutting down (i.e., deleting) the Google Groups probably by the end of the month or so. Or at least marking them as “read only.” If I have contests, they'll be posted over there (along with a blog post).

The one drawback of Discourse is that it creates a topic as someone visits one of my pages. The steady stream of new posts has dwindled lately, but there is probably another 300-400 empty posts going to show up in the next few months. I never realized how much I wrote until I saw them popped up. It was also disheartening to see all my failed projects too.

My Time Has Value

The last one is a mental framework and less changes. I have a small publishing company called Broken Typewriter Press (BTP). It is what I use for doing ebook formatting, print typesetting, and all the little writing-related services that I offer (including commissioned writing, actually). I only have to pieces there, but my goal is to have a 1:10 ratio of my stuff to other author's.

I have three books in the pipeline which will bring me to a 1:2 ratio (if you including my short story, Casting Call).

I'm treating it as a proper publishing company, which means I that if I'm publishing it, I don't charge the author and I recoup my costs via sales. Previously, I never included my time in making covers, typesetting, or formatting books I'm publishing. In effect, treating my personal time as having no value.

I didn't have a problem when it was a one-off, those have invoices and I treat them as such.

I can't really treat my time as zero anymore, it isn't fair to me or my family.

This weekend, I went through and created some accounting sheets (avoiding doing the “proper” GnuCash until this becomes more of a business) to handle the profit/loss reports for individual authors. This time, I'm putting in items that I work on (in six minute intervals) so I can tell when I'm truly in the black verses when I've simply paid for the printing costs.