The New iPad...and a writer's life...

Last Friday, being a dutiful Mac cultist, I drank my iCool aid and headed down to my local Mac store to buy the latest version of the iPad, creatively titled The new iPad. I already owned a first generation iPad (which I blogged about here) and had found it absolutely essential to my life as a writer. I waited for the 3rd generation because I was looking forward to the rumoured retina screen (a fancy way of saying a very high-def screen) and the camera (which was lacking from the 1st generation iPad). I bought the 32GB white wi-fi, because I thought that would be enough storage space for me and I don't need a G4 connection. Wireless is most everywhere (and I do have portable Mifi wireless when needed).

The Screen

Let's start with the screen. It's amazing. There, we're done with the screen. Okay, I'll leave it to others to explain exactly how many pixels it takes to make your eyeballs vibrate with explosive colour. But side by side it's very clear how much more "high def" this screen is. The icons for the apps have no pixelation. Does that make them easier to tap on? Nah, but it somehow makes them see more real. Netflix looks clearer. Movies sparkle. Youtube is ... well, still full of freaky videos. But they're even clearer and grosser now.

Reading Apps:

I'm an ebook-a-holic (along with a paper-book-aholic and an audiobook-a-holic). My apps on my iPad for reading (and buying books) are as follows: Kindle app, Kobo app, iBooks, Nook, Nook for kids, Play Books, Stanza. These apps are pretty simple so I didn't notice a big difference in the speed in which they open. There is a difference in the fonts and how clear they are now to read. And I am especially impressed at how much more colourful the picture books that I have on my iPad look. Nothing replaces a "real" picture book, but the images on the iPad do leap off the page (Especially in Splat the Cat). I do have a few kids books apps that were designed for the iPod and I never noticed a big difference in clarity when they were on my old iPad, but now that I have The new Ipad, the blurred edges of the images becomes very obvious. So reading is even more of a pleasure on The new Ipad as long as what you're reading has been optimized for the iPad (though if I'm reading an ebook I often choose my Kindle because it's smaller and I'm not tempted to zoom around the internet). The new iPad is heavy enough that I usually have to prop it against my legs when I read.

Facetime and Skype

This machine is brilliant for using both these communication programs. The speaker on the back is able to put out more volume than the 1st generation iPad so it's easy to hear whoever you're Facetiming with and the mic seems to pick up fine. One could easily use this to Skype with a classroom just sitting in your reading chair or out in your back yard (assuming there wasn't much background noise). And, last night, my wife's bookclub was discussing Meg Wolitzer's latest novel and she was kind enough to do a Skype visit with the book club. It worked perfectly and in the hour and a half talk it burned 18% of the battery power. I set up a battery-powered speaker so that she could be heard clearly. I was tempted to set her up on a chair and put a coat around her, but decided that would be silly.

Social Networking/Web browsing

There isn't much difference between the iPads. I still use Hootsuite for most of my social "outreach": twitter and Facebook, that is. Things are faster, of course. The biggest difference is that Google+ is more accessible on this machine. Again surfing around the net does appear to be a smoother experience. I don't know if it's the extra speed of the machine or that there are more and more websites optimized for the iPad now.

Keynote

I still use Keynote for my school presentation. This is by far the best aspect of the iPad for me. I can carry all of my presentations with me, and all I need extra is the VGA connector. No power cords, at all.  I connect my iPad to the projector and plug in the sound and the iPad does the rest. I'm very impressed at how it runs everything I can throw at it: book trailers, mp3s, and SFX all embedded in my slides. I use my iPod Touch to run the presentation from the front of the classroom. And I can do a whole day of school visits without having to charge up. I don't miss the days when I had to lug my laptop and my projector and, sometimes, even my screen. There isn't a big change in how Keynote runs on the new iPad. Which is good, because it was running fine before.

Pages

If I'm doing any writing on my iPad (and I do a little, usually with my wireless keyboard) I use Pages (which is my main word processor on my iMac, although I do all my first drafts in Scrivener). It's perfectly functional on the iPad, though obviously the screen is smaller. Apple's iCloud is effective, automatically updating documents between different iPods and iPads, but if I make a change on my computer it doesn't appear on my iPad. I have to upload it to icloud.com (simple drag and drop) and the new file appears on my iPad. I do hope someday there is full synchronization between all mac devices, of course. But this is workable.

PDF's

I teach an online class through the New York Times Knowledge Network. One of the things I was curious about was whether or not I'd be able to mark papers while I was on the road with my iPad. It turns out I can. I download the document, convert it to a PDF using Pages, then use an app called iAnnotate PDF to do all my fancy mark ups. It has  handy highlighting and note-making features. Plus you can circle words in red just using your finger. Such fun! Then I can email it to my student and hope they don't weep when they see all the marks.

So that's my first impressions of The new iPad, so far...

Art

Funny Answers to Odd Authorly Questions II

These are inspired by a few questions I've been asked...actually some of them are real...

Q: I have this great idea. If you write it, I'll split the money with you, 50/50. What do you say? Answer #1: No. Answer #2: No. And don't come to my parties anymore. Answer #3: I'll think about it. What? You're a brain surgeon? Well, is it okay if I perform half a brain surgery on you before we begin? It shouldn't take long.

Q: What's your address? Do you have any children? What are there names? A: You're scaring me. And I think you meant "their names."

Q: Will an agent steal all of my money? A: No. In fact an agent will make you more money. But you have to get the right agent. There's an easy formula for figuring out whether an agent is the right one. E=MC2 x .15% x worldwidesales x your talent quotient / the chance of a Hollywood movie - your personality quotient + your agent's personality quotient x luck. Easy to figure out, eh? Oh, but make sure you don't get the wrong agent. A small percentage of agents will take 15% of your life force and use it to feed their gerbils. Good luck!

Q: How long does it take to write a book? A: 60,000 minutes to start with. That's if you dedicate a minute to each word in the average book. You also have to dedicate a minute to each sentence. That's another 8333.33 minutes. There's another 65,000 minutes for rewriting each word. Add 2500 minutes for computer malfunctions. Then another 4700 minutes for fretting about characters you're going to kill. And 2700 minutes killing them. Only 250 minutes for crying about them, though. I mean, really they were getting on your nerves. Add in the minute that you hover over your email with the MSS attached before you press send. That's 143484.33 minutes. Or about 59.785 work weeks. Maybe add in about 2467 hours of depression if your book is rejected. Then start all over again.

Q: Will I make a million dollars if I publish an ebook by myself? A: Yes. You only have to sell 1 a day for the next 487,804 days. If you sell two a day you'll make the money in half the time.

Art

Dust wins the Governor General's Award (Ten years ago, that is)

Recently, I was going through a few old VHS tapes and I—what why are you interrupting me? Oh, what's VHS you ask? It's the video recording format that conquered Beta—what's Beta you ask...ah, just Google it. Anyway, I discovered a dusty tape of the award ceremony for the Governor General's awards in 2001. My novel Dust won the award for Children's Literature that year and that meant a trip to Rideau Hall in Ottawa to see the Governor General and attend an extremely fancy ceremony (Oh, and pick up a cheque for $15,000.00). Money, free food and a mini-holiday! It's every author's dream. Here's the video: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pjHVUMGscg]

Oh, wait! I wish I was at that ceremony! Actually, the Governor General's ceremony is the closest I'll ever come to getting a medal from Princess Leia. Here is the actual video. The two hour ceremony has been edited down to 5 minutes (in other words I cut everyone else's presentation out).

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JX7fYs6aIg]

This is still the highlight of my career. Ten years later I'm surprised that all of this happened and that Dust received so much attention. When I finished writing the book I remember wondering who would want to read a slow-building, dark fantasy? 

Ten years! I'm a little grayer and waiting for that wisdom that is supposed to come with age.

Art

A Modest Ebook Update: November Sales

No major news this month on the ebook front. But I do have an amazingly interesting graph:

Okay, it's just a graph. I apologize for calling it amazingly interesting! As you can see after the big "sale-apalooza" in September (1467 copies) sales have levelled out to 493 in October and 586 in November (actually my second highest sales month now). So sales are beginning to trend upwards, though part of this is due to the fact that Tribes was "free" on Amazon last month and that brought the sales of other books up (and the sales of Tribes rose once it went from free to paid status). What's interesting to me is the colour of the November column. Psychedelic, eh? Well, actually I point it out because each colour represents a different book. A variety of my books are selling consistently now, which is a good thing (the blue colour represents DUST which is still by far my bestselling book). And my monthly income will be just over $800.00. Hey, that's a mortgage payment!

If only I had 1000 books on offer. I'd be a millionaire!*

Art

*Actually I did the math. If my 9 books make me 800 dollars a month then 1000 books only make me 88, 888 dollars a month. Hmmph. What a rip off. I can't even buy a jumbo jet with that...

There's $$ in them thar hills: October Ebook Update

I'm always looking for a clever title for these updates. If anyone has any clever titles please send one my way. I can't keep using Stephen King in my title! He'll come to my house and challenge me to a write off! I can't keep up with that guy! I figure people like the $$$ sign so maybe I'll just keep using that.

Anyway, here's the report on my ebook experiment for October. What you say? You're late! Well, I decided to move these reports to the middle of the month because that's when Amazon sends me my monthly sales records (up until that point it's a bit of guesswork as to exactly how many copies I've sold). So here is your first chart!

Aha, you say. Your sales dropped in October! Ha, so much for that yacht you were dreaming about when you sold all those copies of DUST in September. But wait, I say, let's celebrate the good news first. There have now been over 3000 copies of my self-pubbed books sold. As we speak 3000 people could be reading my words. Or playing games on their iPad. Anyway, that's a nice milestone to pass. It's also important to note that October was the second highest sales month so far.

I did expect sales to slow down after that first bump that I received in September. Mostly that's because I raised my prices. Dust was no longer $1.49 but was bumped up to $2.99. At that price I get the 70% royalty from Amazon. So for each 1.49 book I am making .52 cents (because any book priced at .99-2.98 is a 35% royalty), but for each 2.99 book I'm making $2.09 (or 4x as much). That means I only have to sell 1/4 of the number of books to make the same amount of money. That's math even I can do!

Ah, so let's talk about the money. And about the beautiful American dollar and the lovely British pound. Doesn't the image above make you all teary eyed? Anyway, wipe away the tears. In September my income from U.S. sales on Kindle was $557.64 and from UK Kindle £216.49 which, once converted, adds up to about $897.98 US (I won't further complicate this by converting to Canadian since our dollar is nearly the same as the US). That's a nice tidy sum for very little work (err, if you don't count the weeks it took me to figure out all the various ways to convert files and upload all that ebook "stuff").  So I made $898 dollars by selling 1467 books in September. In October I made $251.96 from US Kindle store and £339.35 from the UK Kindle store for a total of $785.12 U.S. Except this time I only sold around 493 copies. And obviously it's easier to sell fewer copies than it is to sell more.

Two other short observations. One is that the October sales were partially propped up in the UK store because I was giving The Hunchback Assignments away for free for two weeks of that month. The second is that I'm starting to have more sales through the UK store because I have 10 books available there and only 7 in the US (I'm publishing my three Hunchback Assignments books in the UK Store but they are published through Random House in the US).

The only problem with higher prices is that you drop out of the bestseller charts faster and therefore fewer eyes are seeing your books. Already I see that my November sales are slowing. I have yet to have a book "stick" in the charts for a long period of time.

What you want another chart? Look I don't just have charts up my sleeve! Oh, wait there's one right there:

This is the Amazon ranking for The Hunchback Assignments on UK Kindle charts. As you can see it was selling a copy every once in awhile, thus the zig-zag pattern. Then it went "free" on Sept. 23rd (creating that straight line) and became "paid" around October 16th and jumped up to about 1000th spot on the charts (which made it one of the bestselling kids books for a few weeks). It's continuing to slowly decline but it pops back up every once in awhile.

Does anyone have any glue? I'd like to stick it in the top 500 at the very least.

Until Kindle sticky glue is invented, I'll keep on keeping on!

Art

P.S. I do refer to Kindle a lot. My books are sold on other sites. In October I sold 1 book on Kobo, 1 Book on iBooks, and 5 books on Barnes and Noble, so obviously it's easiest to talk about Kindle.

Outselling Stephen King II: The September eBook Results

Well a few posts ago I told you how I miraculously sold more books than Stephen King (in a 48 hour period)!

Well, now I can report to you the amazingly stupendous results. Yes, this is breaking news folks! Last month DUST sold a whopping 1355 copies. Since the highest monthly total before that was 360 copies, I was bountifully pleased by this result. 

Now Dust was selling for $1.49 (that's .52 cents per book for me) for the majority of those sales and then I bumped it up to 1.99. (or .70 cents a book). The book has slowly dropped down the sales charts (from a high in the 600's) and seems to be levelling out at about 10000 on the sales charts in the US (and 4000 on the UK charts). That equals about 10 sales a day (but since I've bumped the price up to 2.99 I am making 2.05 per sale). I don't know how long it will hold at this level. What, you want to see an amazing chart? Here it is:

That chart shows dust jumping up from abut 160,000th place to 600th. Then slowly falling back down. Apparently what goes up must come down. Thanks a lot for the gravitational laws Newton!

At one point I had told myself I'd be happy if I made about $1000.00 in the space of a year. Since that goal was surpassed in the space of a month...well, I'm green with happiness. I don't expect next month's sales to be anywhere near the same amount as September. But if they continue at the level they're at today (about 10,000 on the charts) I'll actually make as much money through fewer sales (because at 2.99 I make a 70% royalty, at .99-2.98 it's a 35% royalty).

Here's the overall sales chart:

Isn't that pretty? And it has different colours, too. The blue colour represents the sales of DUST. But you can see that a few of my other books are starting to pick up a bit (in fact every book had increased sales over last month). The total for all books was 1467 copies sold.

So last month was a good one. And this month I now have all three of The Hunchback Assignments books available on kindle UK (in fact I'm giving away the first one to get my British cousins to try the series). We'll see if that strategy works.

Over and out,

Art