Peter M. Ball

I quietly dropped my 52 chapbook project earlier in the year. Partially this was a function of floods and work overwhelm, but the bigger problem was a massive change in the print-on-demand landscape and the major players within it right as I geared up for take-off.

Brain Jar Press (and my Eclectic Projects offshoot) is largely the child of print on demand technology. The whole business model only makes sense because I don’t have to store and warehouse books, and our predeliction for shorter books–chapbooks and novellas–is a function of the way print-on-demand is priced where page count, rather than formatting or paper, is one of the primary arbiters of final cost.

BJP & POD

My printer of choice has been Ingram Spark — a joint venture between one of hte largest distributors in the world (Ingram Distritubion) and a vederable print-on-demand house whose beens servicing small presses since I first started one back in 2005 (Lightning Source) and has since opened facilities around the globe. These two joined forces with Ingram Spark to court the indie market, offering the combination of print on demand with distribution, which basically means tht they store print-ready files and if a bookstore in Toledo wants to order a Brain Jar Press book, it gets printed and shipped from the closest printer instead of lugging a hardcopy all the way across the globe.

There’s trade-offs, of course. A print on demand book is more expensive to print than an off-set print run where a printer does thousands of copies at once, which means you’re earning less profit off the sale. It also means that you’re not warehousing thousands of copies and gambling on how many you can sell, which is a big advantage when you’re a small press with limited resources, so the trade-off makes sense to me.

That trade-off also frees you from the strict tyranny of traditional publishing’s profit-and-loss calcualtions, because there’s very little upfront expenditure on the print run. It frees you up to take chances and try things out, which is an overall net good because a) readers get access to works that otherwise wouldn’t have been viable, and b) off-beat works that take chances gradually filter through as influences on other works down the line.

Low cost doens’t mean no-cost, however. Ingram Spark charges a small fee for set-up before a book goes into distribution, and another when you revise files. These haven’t traditionally been a huge consideration because IS was in the phasew here they courted customers, offering “free set-up” codes to vairous conferences and professional organisations who might be inclined to use their services. I’m part of a lot of those conferences and organisations, and so I’ve spent approximately $25 on set-up for Brian Jar’s entire caatalogue.

A PROBLEM OF MISMATCHED EXPECTATIONS

But here’s the thing about Ingram Spark: I suspect that it’s two founding organisations weren’t quite prepared for the ways indies would use their services.

Keep in mind IS largely grew out of folks who are used to the trade side of things (Ingram) teaming with folks who were used to being the small-print-run printer of choice for small presses (Lightning Source). Their infrastructure has grown out of the assumptions attached to those two industries, and they built a system expecting indies to behave like smaller versions of the same (one of the reasons their user interface is so….well, lets call it “not user friendly”).

Indies have largely developed their strategies around the set-up for cheap-to-produce-and-update ebooks, and a large-scale sharing of informaiton. Many of these folks didn’t have a grounding in traditional publishing, and so their expectations have been shaped by their experiences with ebook retailers  (and, realistically, Amazon, who has an oversized footrprint in the space).

They’e also been sharing information and strategies with one another in informal ways, through groups and forums. This means promo codes spread far wider than IS expected when they originally offered them to folks, but it also means that there’s lots of tactical things indies do (rapid release, regular back-matter updates with every new release, constant updating of covers) that aren’t a great fit for the print side of the industry. Especially when each set-up cost Ingram Spark, and those costs weren’t then being covered by the subsequent sales  (or if the top end of the indie market they courted didn’t cover the loss leaders of the folks whose books weren’t covering costs in distribution sales)

Widely spread free codes meant that a lot of people were eating up IS resources doing some of the tactical stuff they do with ebooks, which led to a crackdown on Ingram Spark’s codes last year. What used to be a system where you got one code for a year became each organisation getting a unique code every month, and grave threats of being cut off if they were shared publically. There was also a new heirarchy to the codes ; some would only allow free set-up of new books, while others would also allow free revisions. Which you got largely depended on which organisation you joined.

Earlier this year–right about the point where I prepared for the 52 chapbook series–news of annother change rose to the surface: there was a hard limit on the number of codes you could use a year. Even if you were part of two orgnaisations who each offered 60 code uses every twelve months, IngramSpark would cut things off after 50.

A CHANGED POD LANDSCAPE

The responses from people running into that limit have been about as vocal as you’d expect, not least because they felt ripped off to have joined an organisation to get 60 set-up codes and suddenly learned they wouldn’t even get the full compliement. Personally, I expected something like this to happen, ableit not quite so soon. I’ve often got the feeling that the expectations of Ingram Spark wasn’t a great fit for the way indies worked, and they were taking a loss because of the codes.

More recently, they’ve been a lot more explicit about how they expected the platform to be used:

“IngramSpark was created for the independent author or small publisher to use to publish, print, and distribute their works, and generally would not publish more than 30 titles per year. This restriction on promo code usage helps to distinguish the works of our community from the millions of mass-produced and public domain books too often found in the self-publishing landscape. In this way, and many others we hope to reduce bias against self-published works.”

Source: https://help.ingramspark.com/…/5337716967949-Promotions…

My rule of thumb for indie publishing is this: don’t rail against the systems because they aren’t what I think they should be; work with the systems as they are.

When the system changes, your tactics need to change as well, and some things become less viable. Not impossible, just not the no brainer they once were.

MY CONFLICT

Here’s where the change caught me: I plan for every book to get both an initial upload (so I can do an ARC run) and a revision upload for the final print run.  Brian Jar Press, if I can ever get it running as smoothly as envisioned, Brain Jar will do about 25 to 26 books a year before I do anything with the Eclectic Projects sub-brand.

When the epxectations around using Ingram Spark changed, the 52 Chapbooks project fell by the wayside because putting another 52 books on top of just the books we’re doing this year massively altered our production estimates. And while I’m confident all the books would break even, I’d need to have the cashflow to cover the period before that happens.

Currently, that cashflow is unpredictable, as selling books during a period of high inflation is tricky (books are luxury items). Our ability to predict how many copies a book will sell is out-of-whack with reality, while our costs had already gone up because I now outsource certain jobs (primarily copyediting) I no longer have time to handle that part while working 9 hours a day at the day-job.

While I could have figured out how to do the writing and layout on 52 chapbooks  through floods, plague, and economic downturn, having to rethink the distribution and costing on the fly on top of everything else was a bit beyond me back in March and has largely stayed beyond me in the months since.

And that’s okay–I’ll loop around to that project again in a bit when I’ve had the space to re-think how it’ll work. There will be some research, some poking at new tools, and potentially a wait while I build up some other systems to support it, but I like the idea enough that I’ll do some iteration of it (even if it’s just leading with ebooks, and only doing print versions of collected sections). 

Yesterday, I started work on a new short story, working title The Furnace Season. It takes an idea I had back at the start of 2020, when the news was all terrifying bushfires instead of terrifying plague, but I threw out everything except the vague concept and started telling the story from scratch.

Normally, for a project like this, I’d be here counting words and tracking progress. Force of habit, because I’ve counted words like that for years. Counting words is what writers did on the internet for the first few years that blogs and social media were a thing. 

This time around, I’m eschewing wordcount for a simpler metric: did I work on the story today, or not? Did I finish a scene, or not?

This emerged from my morning journal a few weeks back, when I was frustrated with my progress on Median Survival Time and posed myself a question about the efficacy of the metrics I’m tracking: do I want to be writing words, or do I want to be writing stories?

There’s a tangled knot at the heart of this question, which comes back to what I want from my writing, and what I know about my habits. Specifically, I know one important thing about myself: I really dislike redrafting.

It’s verbotten to admit this in most writing circles, and many of the great writers I know are meticious redrafters. The kind of people whose process involves throwing a rough guide then spendig months sanding off the edges. My brain struggles with that kind of effort, as evidenced by the metric fuckton of ‘rough drafts’ on my hard drive and notebooks that have never advanced to the finished stage.

For me, writing works best when I’m living in a draft and fixing as I go, shoring up edges and clipping dead ends while it’s a work in progress. One of the things that energizes me is finding the right narrative voice and the right contrast to make a scene click, and writing a ‘vomit draft’ to be fixed later often means I’m pulling further and further from the thing that excites me about writing.

So the metric I’m tracking with The Furnace Season is not how many words did I do, but how close did I get the current scene to ‘finished’? I’m writing noticably fewer words this way — two days in, and i’ve finished a single scene that’s just 900 words long — but I’m moving onto the next scene confident I won’t have to go back and rewrite. 

More importantly, I woke up this morning to the sound of my partner throwing up on the couch, which meant the first hour of writing time was given over to cleaning and washing cushions and generally taking care of a poorly spouse. I expect the prospect of writing 750 words wouldn’t have gotten me to the keyboard after that, but I was energized by the thought of finishing the scene Is tarted yesterday.

I’m doing taxes this week, both the current year (aaarg) and outstanding taxes from the years 2012-2016 (AAAARG!) when I didn’t have the spoons for anything beyond dragging my carcass to work and back. 

It’s interesting to watch the steady decline of writing income across those years, which is partially attributable to picking up a regular job and the chronic sleep apnea, but I’m also pondering the impact of acquiring a copy of Scrivner and it’s fancy word count tracking features in early 2012. 

There’s plenty of days when chasing that word count was a useful way of pulling me forward, but occasionally I wonder if it slowly shifted my focus from the only metric that mattered – what’s actually finished and ready to go out into the world? Does it really matter if I can push myself to write 2,000 words a day if the resulting words are stories that never get finished, or finished drafts that never get turned into a story I’m willing to publish?

The Furnace Season isn’t a reliable test of this theory, although it genuflects in that direction. There’s a lot of variables the above doesn’t cover, and my satisfaction may well stem from doing something new after trying to resolve the issues with Median Survival Time for nigh on five years now (although I’m noting that I’ve also done work on MST, and Knock, Knock pt 3, while working on this one).

But I’m no the verge of doing a six-month test that will carry me through tot he end of the year. Six months where all I track is whether I worked, and what gets finished, without bothering to count words at all, just to see if it results in a meaningful difference in how much I get done. 

For the first time in a long while, I got a lot done on the weekend. Here’s the short list of writing-related achievements:

• Scheduled Saturday vignettes all the way out to the end of August
• Wrote Meat, a complete short story draft of approximately 4,000 words, which links back to the “what if Raymond Carver was being Raymond Carver during the zombie apocalypse” idea I had back at the start of the year.  
• Started Part Three of Knock, Knock (a lesson I picked up after the gap between part one and part two–start the next section the day after the votes are in).
• Did the final layouts for the next Writer Chaps for Brain Jar Press, Lee Murray’s Goal Setting (Literally), and put the print edition in for proof copies so we can launch pre-orders next Tuesday.
• Broke the spine of a scene/chapter that had stymied me in Median Survival Time.

Some snippets from works in progress:

MEAT

The Miracle Man’s chili order is up, so I hustle over to grab it. Bowie leaves the grill to put his two cents in, making noise about working hard on that food. Why’s this guy disrespecting him by letting it sit there, not even bothering to taste. I tell Bowie about the Miracle Man’s stomach, how he’s just here to get a whiff of things, and Bowie grumps and stomps back to the grill and rumbles about how it ain’t right. Then Vince intercepts me after I grab the order. Pulls me close and keeps his voice low, tells me to get the Miracle Man outta there. Fast as you can, he says. He’s making folks nervous around here. He’s not eating the food he ordered.

I think about telling Vince to go fuck himself, but what good does that do anyone. Do what I can, I tell him.

And I take the Miracle Man his chili.

Right away, I can tell he’s not in good shape. Sitting over a cut-up sandwich, the whole thing rendered down to bite-sized chunks nobody will ever eat. The Miracle Man is listing to his left, his face drawn tight like he’s in pain. Eyes tracking movement throughout the café with a predator’s focus. We all know that look, these days, only the Miracle Man’s not sweating. He’s not keeling over, about to die. His eyes aren’t changing colour. Still, it’s making folks right nervous. All that time we spend drilling safety protocols, all that talk about acting fast instead of waiting for folks to turn. All those adds reminding us we’re in this together, they do their job. I’m itching to draw my .45 and plug him between the eyes, but I don’t. He’s not a dead man. He’s a walking miracle. He’s the silver lining of all this shit, you know?

I put down the bowl of chili. Steam curls off it, the whole thing piping hot, bowl still warm from the oven. I swallow me fear and say, want me to clear some of these plates?

KNOCK KNOCK, PART THREE 

The shotgun trembled in Lucy’s grip. Tears beaded in the corner of the her eyes, and Finn figured the first signs of shock were setting in. They didn’t blame her; the looming presence of the intruder at Finn’s back hung there like a sword of Damocles, and they had no doubt all three would suffer if Lucy pulled the trigger.

“Luce, we’re outclassed here.” Finn kept their voice calm and measured, trying to pull her focus off the intruder. “Whatever our visitor is, it’s not immediately hostile, and it possesses technology that outstrips our own. You open fire, and this goes one way after that. I’m not sure—”

“DESIST!”

“Shut up,” Finn barked. “Luce, I know you’re scared here. Trust me, I’ve soiled my pants a dozen times since our guest arrived. But this isn’t the way.”

MEDIAN SURVIVAL TIME

Holst caught the hint of laughter on the edge of Zhu’s smile “Men like Patrick Tolland are an occupational hazard,” she said. “They’ve got the credit to get things done, and they’re motivated to spend. My office gets contacted by three or four of them a year. The leads they promise are rarely as promising as this one, and the rumours are always out there, but I’ve seen nothing to confirm the secret cabal hypothesis.”

“Maybe you just haven’t made the right find,” Holst said. “No reason to come after you.” 

Zhu turned in her crash couch. Holst could feel the doctor’s eyes on her, the questioning look of a woman who’d expected an ally and found herself contemplating an unexpected point. 

Holst stretched her legs the best she could in the confines of the couch and the suit. The nav data on the corner of her suit’s HUD said they were still thirty minutes out. When Zhu turned back to her work, comms silent and closed to pings from the rest of the team, Holst figured it was best to ride them in silence.