failure ahoy

Self-Publishing and Failure: A Horrifying Look at My First Covers

As self-published authors, we don’t talk about failure enough.

Tobias Buckell recently wrote a piece about “survivorship bias” and its relation to self-publishing. He argues that the problem with self-publishing is we only hear from the winners. The survivors. When all you hear about are the successes, your view of how easy it is to succeed will be wildly distorted. His argument is based on this great article from You Are Not So Smart, which you should totally read.

Done? Yay. In response to Buckell, authors on KBoards have raised the interesting counterpoint that literally every single trad-published author is a survivor, meaning their whole perspective is skewed. Which.. is tough to argue with. On the other hand, I don’t think it nullifies his point.

A lot of people are self-publishing. Very few of them do well at it. And you almost never hear–and thus learn–from the failures.

Well, I named this blog Failure Ahoy for a reason. I think failure is awesome! Failure is what happens when you try. Fail enough, and you might even succeed. With that in mind, I’m going to post more about failure. I want to make it okay to suck. I have failed in many ways along my self-publishing journey, but there is no more stark or hilarious an illustration of that failure than my first covers. Man, I might need to brace myself here. Like with tequila.

Okay, ready if you are. Let’s dig up some corpses.

Breakers, Cover #1 – February 2012

COMMENTARY: Okay, this one isn’t really a corpse (don’t worry, they’re coming). It’s just the wrong cover for the book. I like it a lot, though. The way the text is broken up and the subtle map is very cool. Awesome concept. But what does this cover say about the book inside it? Looks literary, right? Perhaps something involving sidewalks? And thus a new genre is born.

But my book’s about the end of the world. Viruses and aliens. If my book were more like The Road and less War of the Worlds, I think this cover would be a great fit. However, this book came out during the Golden Age of Amazon Select, which I used to get rolling after 12 solid months of self-publishing failure. As I was planning and executing my free runs, I noticed a couple things.

First, it was kind of hard to get this book listed by the major freebie sites. Second, when my book was free, it didn’t do so well compared to other indie titles in my genre. Yet after its free runs it sold pretty well, relatively speaking, and I was getting some good reviews. After a couple months of carefully comparing my book to others like it, I thought I might have an all right book, but I was pretty sure my cover wasn’t properly expressing the genre.

Breakers, Cover #2 – May 2012

COMMENTARY: Take two. My giveaway numbers for my first three free runs with Cover #1 were 1000 copies, 1600, and about 2000. In its first three months, aided by those free runs, it sold about 800 copies.

When I first went free with this one, my second and current cover, I gave away 25,000 copies. In the 30 days following, it sold 2765 more (Select no longer works like this, unfortunately). Twelve months later, it’s sold over 20,000.

Those sales have also been aided by two sequels, a permafree novella, about 200 more reviews on book one, and plunging into the non-Amazon markets, but I think it’s pretty clear the second cover was much better at driving sales. Articles like this–“The Real Cost of Self-Publishing a Book“–like to play up the costs for cover art, editing, etc. That article says low-end covers start at $150 and can run as high as $3500.

This isn’t wrong, exactly, but I got this cover for $75. I was still very poor at that point, so I spent a lot of time hunting down every cover artist who charged $100 or less. This artist had primarily done YA and covers involving women in snazzy dresses. Not really what you think of when you’re looking for someone to put together a cover for a post-apocalyptic novel full of violence and aliens, but after poring over her portfolio, I thought she could do it.

This was probably the first time I had been right about anything. But it took me three self-published novels, several collections of short stories, and 15 months to reach the point where I had the resources, experience, knowledge, and motivation to sort through these artists, find the one I liked best, and hire her.

The White Tree, Cover #1 – February 2011

COMMENTARY: …and this was how it all started. I made this cover myself, and I’ll give myself credit for this much: I didn’t try to do too much with it. I knew my talents as an artist (none) and didn’t try to overreach.

And that’s about all I did right. Interesting choice on my part to leave the base of the trunk hanging there above the line. Was I unable to draw a couple plain white lines to connect them? Apparently.

I can’t remember exactly what I was thinking, but I was pretty satisfied with this cover at first. I thought it was kind of iconic. If nothing else, you couldn’t beat the production cost ($0). Also, in early 2011, there weren’t a lot of great self-published covers out there. It didn’t look as bad then as it does now. Most of all, it simply felt incredible that, after ten years of pursuing agents and editors, one of my books was finally for sale.

But enough contextualizing. This is not a good cover. Any fool can see that, but apparently I wasn’t your average fool. A part of me knew I’d need to do better once I could afford it, but I thought the writing inside the book was good enough to overcome its humble cover. Ha! Ha! Ha ha ha ha ha!

I sold about 100 copies of this in 2011.

The White Tree, Cover #2 – February 2012

COMMENTARY: I still like this cover. I think it’s pretty and captures the mood of the book. It was within my budget ($65) and paid for itself many times over. Thanks to it, and beneficial, now-defunct Select algorithms, I sold maybe 2000 copies of this book in 2012.

With that in mind, I will now reveal the lesson I was only just beginning to take to heart in 2012. This wisdom is so deep and hard-won that I’m not sure anyone else in the history of self-publishing has ever before expressed it:

SPEND SOME MONEY ON YOUR GODDAMN COVERS

I am deeply sympathetic to anyone working with a limited budget. I know what it feels like to make the reckless decision to spend your money on feeding yourself instead of buying a cover for some pipe dream self-publishing venture. But the good news is the market’s matured. It’s 2013 and you can get amazing pre-made covers for as little as $30. No matter how broke you are, find a way to save up that $30.

Incidentally, I might still be using this cover except I wasn’t happy with the way the cover for the sequel turned out. That meant redoing both of them.

The White Tree, Cover #3 – December 2012

COMMENTARY: This cover and the one for its sequel cost a whole bunch. Epic fantasy illustrations will do that to you.

I felt okay shelling out for a third version of the cover because I figured a) it would easily pay for itself long-term, and b) I’d never have to upgrade this series again. It’s been close to six months and I probably just broke even on them. Even with the new covers, these books only sell a fraction as well as my Breakers novels. I guess covers aren’t everything!

The Roar of The Spheres, Cover #1 – March 2011

COMMENTARY: HAHAHAHA

Now, in my defense, I was using this as a placeholder while my real cover came in, and it was only live for a week or two, but…no, you know what, that’s enough. This is what happens when you have no money and no experience self-publishing and you think the words inside are all that matters.

This is what failure looks like.

The Roar of the Spheres, Cover #2 – March 2011

COMMENTARY: The one cover I spent real money on in 2011. This cover cost $125 and I still think it looks great.

But apparently the world disagrees with me, because this is my worst-selling novel by leaps and bounds. So far, I have sold 3 copies of it on Amazon this month. It is May 29th.

To put it another way:

See that amazing downward line between July 2011 and February 2012? The reason that line isn’t jagged like the other parts of the graph is because it sold zero Amazon copies for six straight months.

Its failure to sell despite a sweet new cover is the main reason I didn’t pay to redo the cover on The White Tree for nearly a year. I had “learned” that a new cover doesn’t guarantee a damn thing. And it doesn’t, necessarily–but if you learn how to get your book in front of shoppers, which I had no clue how to do at that point in time, it can make all the difference.

But I wasn’t in position to learn better until the Select program allowed me to get my books in front of readers. It was only then that I started to get a feel for the impact a cover can have on purchasing decisions. And to imagine how my books look when they’re jumbled up with every other title in the store. How critically important it is to make them stand out from the crowd–while at the same time telling a potential reader, “Hey, this is a story about X. If you like stories about X, you might like this book.”

Oh, and for the record, I think Spheres needs a new cover. I love this one, but as with my first Breakers cover, it doesn’t capture the genre. Or maybe I really am the only person who likes it. There’s no guarantees I’m done failing with covers yet.

If I can ever convince myself it’s a good enough book to bother with, I’ll probably try something with a spaceship on it. That last sentence is ironic but also 100% true.

CONCLUSION

Don’t do what I did?

Seriously, that’s the immediate takeaway here: your first covers don’t have to be perfect, but sweet fancy Moses, make sure they’re professional. These days, “professional” doesn’t have to cost any more than $30-60. Later on, if you’re making some sales and feel more confident investing $150-500+ on a cover, you can upgrade. In all honesty, it won’t hurt your career to have a bad cover–because you have no career yet–but it will sure hurt your feelings to wonder why no one wants to buy the book it represents. Go without sales for long enough, and you might give up.

It’s the middle of 2013, and I feel like “Pay for a decent cover” is such widespread and commonsense advice that it’s hardly worth posting about. But I don’t know, maybe there are still lots of people out there it might help. We rarely hear from the people struggling to sell a single copy. If you see your stuff in my early covers, a small investment could make a big difference.

If nothing else, the ones I did myself are pretty funny.

But there’s also this. Some people have the sense, talent, and up-front funds to succeed immediately. But I think most of us are pretty crappy when we start out. It’s virtually guaranteed.

Meanwhile, if all you’re hearing about are the mountains of gold everyone else is making, and there’s not a word spoken about all the junk those former failures went through until they started to succeed now and then, it can make you feel pretty bad.

The real takeaway is that learning to self-publish is a process. In hindsight, the lessons and solutions look obvious, but when you’re mired in the middle of it, it’s never easy to know where to go next.

I’ve learned a few things about covers, but in other areas of the game, I continue to fail mightily. I look forward to talking all about it.

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No Rules, No Maps, No Dogma, No Limits: A Failure Ahoy! Manifesto

I’m about to spend a few thousand words to make a very simple point.

My goal, career-wise, is to make a living writing fiction. If that is your goal as well, we are very lucky to be alive right now! For one thing, by all accounts, the past smelled terrible. For another, we now have more paths than ever toward our destination.

But the more paths that crop up, the more rules appear about how they ought to be followed. And the problem isn’t that there’s many different paths. The problem is there are many different landscapes. And they aren’t static. Old ones change shape while new ones are summoned into existence every day.

This means anyone trying to sell you a map is probably pointing you in the wrong direction.

Last night, indie blogger/novelist/guru David Gaughran added another feather to his cap: he managed to get banned from a forum he hadn’t participated in for a year.

His crime? The moderators of AbsoluteWrite believed he was trolling their forums with sockpuppets.

Link goes to an account of the incident, complete with hilarious screengrabs. The gist is that an AW member made a joke, the joke got misinterpreted, and a highly dedicated moderator swiftly discovered the poster in question had some IP addresses in common with David Gaughran–possibly because they have both posted to AW from Ireland, which isn’t a super-big country. Regardless, the moderator accused the poster of being a Gaughran sockpuppet, and when the poster insisted he was a person instead of a sock, he got banned on the spot.

Nevermind that the accused, Michael Reilly, has his own book and author page (complete with photo) on Amazon, Smashwords, and more, along with a Facebook fan page, user profiles on other sites, etc. Quite a sting that crafty David Gaughran cooked up, fabricating a whole new identity–and writing a full-length novel–for the sole purpose of infiltrating AW and making subtle jabs at its moderators.

On the other hand, that would explain why we’re having to wait so long for Let’s Get Visible.

I have two points to make. First–and most importantly–this is really, really funny. Second, AW is a respected institution and resource for writers, and it is clearly insane.

Maps and the unchangeable lines drawn on them come in many forms. The reason David Gaughran is such a persona non grata at AW is that he’s an unapologetic advocate of self-publishing–and AW is famously and fanatically anti-self-publishing. The site apparently considers it the height of career suicide. Self-publishers are regularly banned from the site. Other figures booted from the site include indie supernova Hugh Howey, and Robin Sullivan of Ridan Publishing. Ridan has since…wandered off into the wilderness…but at the time of Sullivan’s banning, the company was cutting a trail made of hundred dollar bills.

These people would be valuable resources, authors and/or publishers making a killing from the shifting publishing landscape. They might possibly have some valuable insight into making a career as an author. But the dogma at AbsoluteWrite is that self-publishing is not a valid career path. So out these people go. Without their voices around as counterpoints, the AW forums become echo chambers warning each other about cliffs that aren’t there. Remaining members who could be making a living as a writer self-publishing right now may never give it a shot.

We’re not talking about the art of writing here. We’re talking about its business. When it comes to business, on what Earth is it more important to cling to ideology? Like the path is more important than the destination? This is about making a living writing, not bushido.

Why not encourage people to pursue whatever path might finally give them the career they’ve always dreamed of?

I consider Dean Wesley Smith a valuable source of information. He’s a hardworking, dedicated professional, and if you follow his advice about productivity, about regularly writing new books and putting them in position to sell, you’ll speed through the swamps or the deserts or whatever you want to call the long, suffering-filled slogs that begin most writer’s careers. That advice is pure gold.

But why does some of his other advice have to be so inflexible? So rigidly defined?

He believes an author should distribute to as many markets as possible. That includes ruling out the option of Amazon Select, which requires you to sell (ebooks) exclusively through Amazon. Granting exclusivity, he argues, is short-term thinking; every second you’re restricted to Amazon is one second you’re not building your presence in other markets.

This isn’t a bad idea. The problem is when it’s treated as an ironclad First Principle.

I launched my career through Select. Within the same year, I moved out of it, but I still think it’s a good play for beginning authors who don’t already have fans or a platform. It can be a pretty dang nice program for established authors, too–people like Ryk Brown and Debora Geary, both of whom sold 100,000+ books last year, are still in it, and they’re no chumps. Not to get too heavily into math, but being in Select directly sustains their success–their high visibility means their books are some of the most-borrowed in the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library. Not only do they get paid for these borrows, but the borrows get applied to their sales rank, helping ensure they remain visible to other shoppers. This is a long-term strategy. If self-publishing is a dark and unknown sea, Select is their raft.

Granted, very few of us are Brown or Geary. But a whole lot of us are entering the indie frontier with nothing but a book and the hope it will be seen. And one of the very few ways to get it seen is to take advantage of the powerful tools of KDP Select.

Smith is regrettably dogmatic about promotion, too. In short, he considers it a waste of time until you have a significant backlist–25+ titles. Again, the concept makes sense–don’t waste time promoting when you should be spending that time writing new books–but following it to the letter will often do more harm than good. How long does it really take to set up a Select giveaway? Or to book an ad? Ten minutes? At the cost of a couple hundred lost words, you might walk away with hundreds of extra sales. Maybe enough to ensure you can spend next month writing, too.

As a guideline, his advice is good: “Hey, careful not to spend too much time flogging your books. Remember, the best advertising is a new release.”

As a rule, however, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Writing 25+ books will take most people 5-10 years. I don’t think you have to wait nearly that long to take an active role in selling your work. I have seen dozens of people write several books a year while promoting the books they’ve already written. Because of that, they’re selling copies and making fans today.

That feels like long-term thinking to me.

I’m an indie author. A self-publisher. I’m proud of it. I spend a lot of time at the Kboards Writer’s Cafe. There are many amazing people there who are incredibly generous and eager to share their advice, experience, and even personal financial information with their fellow authors, helping us all navigate the most brutal coastlines and unmapped interiors. I believe it’s the best self-publishing resource in the world.

But I don’t think self publishing is the first, best, or only way to El Dorado. And if AW is pro-trad–and even phrasing it in those terms exposes how ridiculous such positions are–then Kboards is pro-indie. Which often manifests as anti-traditional publishing.

Take the response to another Salon article about a guy who only made $12,000 from an “Amazon bestseller.” The facts were that he made as much per sale as he would have as a typical self-publisher. And that his publisher was directly (if luckily and unintentionally) responsible for the lightning strike of press that caused that flash of sales in the first place.

But about half the discussion on KB leaped to the conclusion that the reason he made so little money was that he was signed with a publisher. He had been screwed, and it was his own fault for signing away his rights. He would have made more self-publishing. I think most people on Kboards are pretty open, but there is a definite population that believes you should never, ever sign away your ebook rights. Not unless a big publisher walks up to you and hands you a check for a million dollars. There Be Dragons, in other words, and their lawyers are better than yours, too.

The thinking is that you will almost always make more money long-term if you hang onto your rights and publish for yourself instead of signing them over to a big publisher. That, unless they’re offering enough to match your projected earnings for the next 20+ years, it would be a poor business decision to sign over your rights.

This, I think, is a bit of wishful thinking. Ebooks may be forever, but sustained sales are not. All books peak and fall. Even Harry Potter. Even Fifty Shades. Even Wool. One of the wonderful things about the indie revolution is we’re much more protective of our book rights, especially on ebooks, but insisting you should never give them up except for silly-money is somewhat paranoid.

It’s also somewhat privileged. I know that many advances are small ($5000-20,000), and they’re often split into two or three or four payments. But very few indie authors are overnight successes. It can take a few years and several books to start earning any real money on your own. Not everyone is in position to wait for that money to start rolling in. While you’re waiting on favorable winds, you’ve still got to eat.

There are other financial reasons to accept traditional contracts, too. Maybe you write in a genre that isn’t yet indie-friendly. Or you want to diversify yourself and give someone else a vested interest in promoting your work for you. Or you feel you’ve plateaued as a self-publisher and want to roll the dice and see if someone at the Big Six can kick you up to the next level.

The fact of the matter is that, if you’re in a position to write full-time, it’s pretty easy to write a few new books every single year. If a trad contract will pay you money right now, and that money is enough to give you the breathing room to write more right now, how can you put a value on that?

How can you tell someone that it’s daft to sign away the rights to one book because they can (maybe, eventually) make more money on their own?

The goal is to make money writing. For a career. If a trad contract can help you begin that career tomorrow, it is worth deep and serious consideration. It’s all a gamble, a risk/reward assessment. You can guess which claim will cough up more gold, but no one can predict the future.

Even now, in 2013, there are people who think self-publishing is a pitfall that will only hamstring or destroy your career. Simultaneously, things have moved so far and so fast that others think any but the largest of traditional contracts is selling yourself short. That going indie is the only way. And if you do go indie, there are others who will tell you there are certain rules for how you must go about it, that there’s a single route through the world, and everything else is a waste of time, effort, and money.

In every instance, I understand the motivation for people laying down these rules for Doing It Right. It’s even noble: the desire to steer other writers away from hazards and toward the career they’ve always wanted.

And I understand why people look to prominent authors and institutions for advice. This job is terrifying! There is almost no security, everything’s in total anarchy, and the specific nature of that anarchy changes every god damn season. It is very comforting to have an authorial belief system, a set of laws to turn to for a clear path through the wilds.

But it should be pretty clear by now there are far more exceptions than there are rules. I’d go so far as to say there are no rules. Instead, there are some ideas. Some concepts. Some guidelines. Some of which may make sense for you, right now, in this exact place and moment in your career. The trains are rarely running in the right direction, let alone on schedule, but fling yourself aboard anything that looks like it’s headed where you want to go.

I opened with the anecdote about AbsoluteWrite because it’s funny, but also because it’s insane. There are respected institutions that are so locked in to a theology of publishing that they will banish a person because they suspect he is another person who they disagree with about the proper way to build a career as a writer. Who is this helping?

By all means, take directions. We could all use a few landmarks to guide us to our goal. But this is one crazy, tripped-out, Dr. Seuss landscape we’re all traveling through. It’s going to look different to everyone who walks through it.

Because it is.

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Using KDP Select to Crowdsource Your Novel’s Appeal, Part 1: The Basics

In my last post, I talked about how last year’s changes to Amazon’s algorithms were probably intended to put a stronger filter on free books. The idea was to use the wisdom of crowds to ensure that only the Select books with the most sales potential wound up in front of paying customers once the books’ free runs concluded.

This is why authors like Joe Konrath hardly notice a difference. Konrath writes entertaining stuff in popular genres with quality covers (and his name recognition, reviews, etc. probably don’t hurt, either). He’s able to do as well as ever. While it’s good that stories like that are being shared–I self-publish because of Konrath, so without posts like his, this post would never exist–I tend to focus on those of us who are still quite a ways from being Konraths ourselves.

For many of us, then, there is a big difference in Select. Specifically, it’s a lot worse. But even if your books don’t seem to be able to knock it out of the park like Konrath and others, Select can still be useful. Not just to sell books. But to learn how to make your books better.

I touched on this last time, but when you make a book free, you eliminate a reader’s biggest resistance to picking it up: price. When a reader sees a book that costs nothing, and they’re actively looking for new books, their only consideration is whether that book looks like it might be any good.

For an author, this can be a crazy-valuable tool.

You can use free to gauge how much appeal your book’s got. And if you think it should get better results than you’re seeing when it’s free, that’s an indication you may need to tweak its appearance to get shoppers to give it a chance.

I’m going to split this into two parts. In this post, I’m going to lay out the general concept. In the followup, I’m going to dive into specific numbers to look out for, as well as a discussion of how to analyze your results. In other words, this first part will be about eyeballing things and trusting your gut, and in the second part, we’re gonna drop some science on it.

Onward. So you’ve set your book free. The question you’re asking readers is: Does this book look any good? Their answer–the number of times they download it–will help you decide what if anything needs to be done to improve the book’s appeal. In very basic terms, this is how the answers break down.

A few hundred downloads or less: Your book may not be connecting with readers. Think hard about giving it a makeover.

A few thousand downloads: Sweet, your book’s got something going for it. You might consider some tweaks, but you’re on the right track.

Thousands upon thousands of downloads: Congratulations, your book looks like it rules.

Now there’s a huge caveat here. If your book didn’t get many downloads, that’s probably because few free book sites mentioned it. That may itself be a sign that your book needs work–freebie bloggers tend to have good eyes for books that will do well; if they’re not picking you up, readers might not, either–but it may just be a sign your free run ran into some bad luck. (Or that it isn’t ready yet–many sites require 5-20 reviews to run a book; the biggest sites tend to have higher requirements.) That’s why I would never make a decision about changing my book’s appearance based on a single free run.

But if you’ve made it free, say, 3-5 different times or more, and nothing much has happened, your gut may start wondering whether it’s time for change.

Your book was free, so you know its price isn’t the issue. Most free downloads don’t bother checking out the sample, so the writing probably isn’t the problem (though you can never rule it out). That leaves three things: cover, category, and blurb.

The cover is crucial. Simple thought-experiment: if the cover doesn’t look professional, why would a potential reader expect the writing and story inside it to be any better?

The categories are pretty big, too. They’re how readers find the kinds of books they want to read. Don’t get cute with them. Unless you’re Nicholas Sparks, if you put your book in Romance, it damn well better have an HEA. If you put your book in SF, but it’s essentially a romance with lasers, don’t be surprised that SF readers aren’t leaping to over themselves to snap it up

The blurb is less important than the other two, but it still makes a difference. Is it confusing? Does it express your core concept/hook? Blurbs suck and everyone hates writing them, but a good one is money

I’m hardly the first to stress the importance of these things, but when you’ve got the visibility of freebie sites, and you remove price from the equation, these are really the only factors left. That makes it easy to pinpoint what areas of your book need work. Is the blurb good? Is it in the right category? Then consider a new cover. Do you have a sweet cover, but you’re still only managing a few hundred downloads? First check your categories, then consider the blurb.

When it comes to covers, some people get attached to what they’ve got–I’ve done it, too–but if it’s not working, it’s not working. A cover should be gorgeous and immediately tell a potential reader what genre it is. Like, if you’re writing space opera, you don’t have to have a planet and/or a spaceship on your cover, but if not, something about your cover better say that it’s high tech, futuristic, adventuresome, and sense-of-wonder-ful. It’s true that there are a lot of successful books with terrible covers, but a lot of those people already have big fanbases. If you don’t, and you literally can’t give your books away, you have have a problem.

But it may not be with your book’s content. It may be with its appeal. Especially when you’re first getting started, there’s so much to learn about what works and what doesn’t. Don’t treat a poor free run as a failure. Treat it as the chance to learn very powerful lessons. It may be much harder to sell books through Select than it used to, but it still offers a priceless tool: direct and widescale reader feedback about what they respond to and what they don’t.

Use that tool correctly. By definition, a pattern is something that happens more than once; don’t overreact to one weak free run. But if it happens again, raise an eyebrow. If it happens a third time, raise the other one. Then think about switching it up. Try a new cover. Check your blurb and your categories. Try another couple runs and see if it makes a difference. It could just be that your story has a very narrow audience, but worst-case scenario, the crowd has told you you’re probably better off writing and promoting something else.

By the way–you can learn from your successes, too. If your book kicks ass every time it goes free, then you’ve done something very, very well. Probably lots of things. The crowd may have taught you to stick with that cover artist. That genre. That series. Because you’ve connected with your readers. If you can do it again, and again after that, you may be looking at a career.

I write this blog for fun, and to pay it forward for all the great advice I’ve learned from other writers, but (in what is surely a coincidence!) I’ve got a new book out today on Amazon, B&N, and Kobo. It is currently one dollar. Want to help me out? Give it a look.

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Failure Ahoy: If You Like Espresso, Buy a Damn Machine (You Can Pretend It’s a Helpful Robot)

As Americans, it’s our cultural heritage to spend more money than we make. Your income may be a hard, fast number, but it’s much more of a suggestion than a limit. What I’m getting at here is unless you put yourself in debt, the massive institutions of legal usury aren’t going to be able to buy their underground city with the stoplights where the only color is gold and the streets are paved with the credit cards of starved debtors. We need that city. If Apophis blows us all to hell, it’ll be the only place we have left.

But say you’re a selfish un-team player who (unlike the world’s forward-thinking big businessmen) cares nothing for the long-term survival of humanity. Say you’re following some stupid career that makes you little to no money (actually, given that qualification, “stupid” is probably redundant). And in the most unlikely assumption of them all, say you intend to spend less than you earn.

Among the chief components of executing this America-destroying plan is to identify repeated expenses and decide if they’re necessary. If they’re not, your solution’s simple. Quit spending money on them, Monopoly Man With Your Dopey Little Monocle.

If they are necessary–and I’m using the term loosely here; I, for instance, like to own so many socks my closet looks like the corner of a cotton mill–see if you can’t minimize the expense. Shit adds up. If you buy a $3 mocha every day on your way to work, you’re dropping $60-70 a month on coffee.

Buy a $60 espresso machine. Get a thermos. Learn to make your own mochas. Reduce monthly coffee expenditures to $5 of beans and $5 of milk. Yay! You’ve still got delicious coffee and you can cut a few hours from your regular job to focus on writing/underwater basketweaving/Chewbacca sculptures etc.

But wait, there’s more. Ladies like a dynamic guy. (Men may like a dynamic partner, too, if only because a girlfriend with hobbies of her own gives us more time to work on our own ridiculous hobbies.) I think, subconsciously, women evaluate every man they meet by his capability to survive a zombie apocalypse. Looking all big and strong is the no-duh part of this, but having skill sets is an even bigger part. Knowing tae kwon do: an obvious plus. Cooking, too–the apocalypse is filled with bad meals. If you’re aware of the eldritch secrets of heat and salt, you’ll be worth your weight in shotgun shells. Even something unglamorous like knowing how to sew or change a tire is attractive.

Allow me to put this in terms we can all understand. In D&D, most of your character’s power comes from his skills. If you want to be high-leveled in real life, you need to develop skills of your own. And what is the art of concocting espresso-based drinks if not a modern form of potion brewing?

Learn to do stuff for yourself instead of buying those services from others. It’ll cut back on your day job and make you sexier. Besides, you think any of those banker fucks know how to brew their own espresso? You’re going to be in pretty high demand in the underground city.

My Purpose in Minimalism

My car’s a piece of crap, but it starts up whenever I turn the key. Most times I don’t even need to yell at it. I’ve got an old TV, a DVD player, a Wii, and this laptop. I have a nice coat I bought a couple years ago and a small collection of signed books. Other than that, the most expensive thing I own is probably my fishtank and its assorted apparati–and it’s a freshwater ten gallon.

I think I can count on one hand the number of DVDs and CDs I’ve bought this year. I’ve got a lot of books and a small DVD library, but both these collections accumulate slowly.

I don’t not buy things for some moral or spiritual reason; if I look like a monk, it’s coincidence, not purity. I think monks go to church sometimes. They’re also not supposed to be this fond of vodka.

I’m lucky in that I seem to lack the consumer gene–it just doesn’t occur to me to buy things, although that may be a byproduct of never having money–but my amaterialism is also a product of valuing my writing career more highly than I value.. whatever it is people buy. New cars? Jeans so stiff you need pliers to get into them? TVs so huge they could double as a supporting wall? (Okay, now that one I do want.) Every hour I spend at work piling up fat stacks is one less hour I have to devote to honing my skillz. One hour further away from living as a professional in the field I want to work in.

That’s the real reason I don’t buy stuff. Stuff isn’t worth it, and neither’s what I have to do to make the money I’d need to buy it. Trust me, when I have money, I’ll buy a flatscreen TV so huge I’ll have to knock down a wall to make room for the team of elephants it’ll take to deliver it. But when I buy that TV, it’ll be with money I made doing what I’ve always wanted to do.

In the meantime, I don’t need it. When you know why you don’t need it, it’s no trouble to forego.

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The Failure Ahoy Manifesto

Many people who want unorthodox careers–writers, actors, cartoonists, artists of all kinds, underwater basketweavers and snipe hunters, kung fu fighters and professional fluffers–spend their early years in careers that have nothing to do with their dream. As lawyers. Computer programmers. Salesmen.

Fuck that. I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was 12. I’m not going to wait until I’m 30 or 40 or 60 to start living like one.

At this point in time and space, we all need money. Most of us have to work for it. If you don’t, please leave your address and when you’ll next be out of the house. If you do have to work, if you have to put time in what’s known as a “real” job to support your quest for your “fake” one, take a look at how much time you’re putting into the former and how much into the latter. If the first outweighs the second, quit.

I’m not kidding. You’re making too much money. Either find more time for your fake job or cut back your real one. Your fake job won’t become a real career until you start treating it like one.

Or for a long time after that. Which is why you should get serious about it right now.

The money of a traditional career might be a safety net, but it’s not a very good one. Your corpse won’t end up any more nutritious than mine. I don’t want you standing behind a counter helping people buy slacks with someone else’s name on them. I want you lying on your floor in your pajamas sculpting Chewbaccas out of pipecleaners because that’s what you want to do with your life god damn it. So quit making money and start making pipecleaner Chewbaccas. If you try that for ten years and you’re not one step closer to making a living at it, you know what, late-stage capitalism will still be out there. They’ll still need dentists and retailers and personal trainers.

But at least you tried, and failed, to do what you really want, and probably had a lot more fun even when you were failing than you would have tallying someone else’s cash flow or selling someone else’s product.

I want to be a writer. I’m living like one before I can make a living as one. It’s pretty fucking fun. Failure ahoy.

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