Mojo Nixon’s back baby, bigger than life and twice as crazy.

In perhaps the best news of 2009, Amazon has made most of Mojo Nixon’s albums available as free .MP3 downloads.  If you enjoy crazy rockabilly music, then look no further. Mojo does not disappoint. Heck, he even gets a shout out in the song Punk Rock Girl by the Dead Milkmen.

Oh and you might also remember him as Toad in the Super Mario Bros. Movie.

Or maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, most of his albums are hard to find in stores or online (at least in my experience), so do take this opportunity to enrich your musical library with such classics as Elvis is Everywhere or Don Henley Must Die.  I had the sheer luck of finding a new copy of Whereabouts Unknown at Flat Black and Circular in East Lansing about a year ago, and quickly purchased it.

I read this is in support of Mojo’s new release, Whiskey Rebellion, which is a neat concept–but given that Mojo hasn’t been in the eye of the mainstream for…uh…awhile, I can see why this happened.

Or better yet, in the man’s own words:

“Can’t wait for Washington to fix the economy. We must take bold action now. If I make the new album free and my entire catalog free it will stimulate the economy. It might even over-stimulate the economy. History has shown than when people listen to my music, money tends to flow to bartenders, race tracks, late night greasy spoons, bail bondsman, go kart tracks, tractor pulls, football games, peep shows and several black market vices. My music causes itches that it usually takes some money to scratch.”

Mirrored from Daniel J. Hogan. If something doesn't look right or show up, view the original blog post. Feel free to comment here or on the original post

I got a message from someone today, who friended me on Facebook, saying that they found my website via Twitter and that they decided to buy a copy of The Magic of Eyri (through Amazon) after reading about it. Neat, huh? I can confirm that someone did buy a copy on Amazon today because my ranking dropped from 2 million something all the way down to 200 thousand something.

They went on to say that they like supporting "mid-western creative types" such as myself. Very cool.  This is part of the reason I started using Twitter in the first place: cross promotion and free adversiting.  You just never know and I figure it can't hurt any.

In other writing news, I mailed out one of my short stories once again.  I'm giving Slow and Steady, my steam punk retelling of the Tortise and the Hare, another chance.  i sent it to one of the bigger story magazines--let's hope they like this one.  They didn't accept the last story I sent them, but that was over 10,000 words and I think that didn't help any ( I have been told, the shorter the better).  This one is barely 3,800 words so it is not only considerably shorter but it'd be cheaper for them to buy (if they took it, I'd maybe get something around 5 or 6 cents a word).

I've also started doing research for the novel I want to write next month for National Novel Writing Month. I'm taking a break from the world of Eyri and doing something different.  Yeah, I still need to finish the second Magic of Eyri book but I'd like to have something different to send out to agents (something that I haven't self-published).  All I'll say about this next book is that it mixes detective stuff with monsters with a sort of urban fantasy/qusi-steam punk setting (along with my usual sense of humor).  Say that five times fast.

Anyway, I've been doing research on vampires, werewolves and other neato stuff. Did you know that there is an old myth that a dead werewolf would come back as a vampire? Crazy.

And to get an idea of what others have done with this genre, I checked out Kim Harrison's Dead Witch Walking from the library. I met Kim at ConClave last year when were on panels together, she's a very nice person.  I asked around at this year's ConClave about how people do research and I was told that reading what others have done is a good idea, not to copy it but to see what they do with things such as vampires, zombies, etc.  This is also why I ordered Hardboiled Cthulhu from Elder Signs Press (and why I'll reread all my Hellboy books again).

I'm still figuring things out though, for example today I made a list of what kind of technology I want my 'world' to have.  World building can be fun--but it can also be a big headache.  But it is mostly fun.  Mostly.

A reader contacted me today and asked about converting The Magic of Eyri to a better eBook format than the one offered on Lulu.com.
Lulu only offers book downloads as a .PDF. Now, when I was doing all of this publishing stuff, eBooks/downloadable versions were only an afterthought since I have never used them myself. Apparently they are becoming rather popular.

He told me that the problem with the PDF is that it doesn't show up that well on his eReader. He said a Rich Text Format file is the best way to go. I really have no idea as to how to go about to change this since I think Lulu only offers PDFs. I did look at Amazon's Kindle program today and am considering going that route. I just submitted The Magic of Eyri to Amazon's Search Inside program too. He said he has been discussing my book with people in eBook forums and that people are liking it - they just don't like the PDF format.

I want to do what I can to make my book more available for readers, so I'll look at this Kindle thing a bit more when I'm home (they wanted some info I wasn't happy giving out over a public wireless network). The other option is converting to something else myself - but then I'd have to have a way to sell it and offer it for download. The other advantage of the eBook is that it'll be way cheaper - it is less than $4 to download from Lulu - which I heard is actually pretty low. Again, this was an afterthought. The funny thing is I make more in royalties from someone downloading it on Lulu than someone buying the real book on Amazon.

But that' s the beauty of e-publishing: there are no material costs. This keeps the cost down and the profits high. I'm more concerned with keeping costs down than having higher profits.

This is something I defiantly want to get in on as we move further and further away from print. But what I don't know is that if I put Eyri up for sale on Amazon's Kindle if people without a Kindle can read it.

Maybe someone at ConFusion this weekend will have some insight on all of this.

Here is a flier for the book signing I'm doing in March along with jimhines , the flier was designed by Dean Stahl (aka wookiee71 ) - is going to be there as well. I had to shrink it down to fit in this blog - sorry Dean!



In other news, I got my December sales numbers from lulu.com the other day. I sold four copies during the month - woo hoo! That puts me at 94.
I got some interesting sales data last week courtesy of author/editor William Jones. He was able to look up my Nielson sales scan data for me - yes, the lameo system that TV uses to guess who is watching what is now being used for books. I'll try and sum up what I learned - first they don't count Amazon, so these are sales at places like Barnes & Noble.

Regions
17 copies sold in the East North Central region
3 copies in the Pacific region
2 copies sold in the South Atlantic region

Geographic Places
12 in Suburbs
8 in City
2 in Rural

Looks like I'm rockin' the suburbs. William also said that the number I need to shoot for is 1,000 copies sold, after that chain stores will take notice. I guess I have some more promotion to do!

EDIT: I forgot to mention that William said that chain stores triple their Nielson scan data, so he said my 22 copies actually count as 66. So, considering that - I only need to sell 333.333 copies to hopefully get noticed by the chains (yeah, only) - and these all have to be sales through a store that actually contributes to this data. Interesting stuff.

The year came to a close and so I had to finish off my Amazon Listmania! List of Books I Read in 2007. I hit 24 books - one less than my goal of 25. But I already have my first read of 2008 in the can, Casino Royale. I liked it, although I was kind of surprised as to how racy it actually was - but I guess I shouldn't be surprised considering how that is a big part of the films. I think I've just been reading too many Young Adult books lately and I'm not use to 'adult themes' or at least not in a book from the '50s.

My list from 2007 (first read to last read)

1.  Anatomy of a Murder Robert Traver
2. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal Christopher Moore
3. Here, There Be Dragons (The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica) James A. Owen
4.  The Hard Goodbye Frank Miller
5.  The Dante Club Matthew Pearl
6. The Light Fantastic Terry Pratchett
7. Bluebeard Kurt Vonnegut
8. The Hound of the Baskervilles Arthur Conan Doyle
9. Assassination Vacation Sarah Vowell
10. Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer James L. Swanson
11.  Better than Life Grant Naylor
12.  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows J.K. Rowling
13.  A Dame to Kill For Frank Miller
14.  The Big Fat Kill Frank Miller
15.  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay Michael Chabon
16.  Stardust Neil Gaiman
17. Me Talk Pretty One Day David Sedaris
18.  That Yellow Bastard Frank Miller
19.  The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories  H.P. Lovecraft
20.  Sourcery Terry Pratchett
21.  Bone Jeff Smith
22.  The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier Alan moore, Kevin O'Neil
    
23. Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form Scott McCloud
24. To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee

I try to jump from genre to genre as not to fall into a groove, but I enjoyed all of these - some more than others though. Another year, another batch of books to read - Slaughterhouse-Five is up next.

Goals in 2008:

Read at least 25 books (tried to do this last year, but fell a couple short)
Submit short stories to magazines
Do a weekly sketch and post it in this blog (can be anything, just have to post some kind of drawing once a week.)
Finish second Magic of Eyri novel
Get an agent
Get both Magic of Eyri novels published by someone other than myself
Redesign websites
Advertise websites on a more frequent/regular basis
Submit The Magic of Eyri to Amazon's Search Inside
Look into making The Magic of Eyri available for Amazon's Kindle eReader