Daniel J. Hogan's Blog

My order of 40 mini-pins through CafePress is seven days late. I need these bad boys to give out at Motor City Comic Con next weekend. Needless today, when I got home today and they still weren't here (should have arrived on the 2nd according to my email) I was not a happy camper. But, one quick phone call to CafePress later and they have re-sent out my order and upgraded it to One Day Shipping. I should get this new batch by Tuesday. Phew. However, I'm never using their Economy Shipping again.

They also said that if I do in fact get the original order to just keep it as a "thank for shopping with us." Bully. That would be kind of nice, to have an extra 40 buttons to give out after this little fiasco. The original order was sent out on the 23rd of April and whenever I went to check the UPS tracking info, it said none was available. Grrr. Thankfully it looks as if this situation has been taken care of and it should all work out in the end.

The only other thing I gotta worry about is if my promo cards (all 500 of 'em) I ordered through Lulu.com get to me in time. I did tell them that I needed 'em by Thursday after I emailed them back about making a few changes, so hopefully I don't hit any snags there. If it came right down to it, I'd rather have the cards than the pins. They are more useful. But then, if I don't get my cards I can always improvise something at the last minute before leaving for the con. It'd be like taking your cousin to the prom: it wouldn't be pretty, but at least you wouldn't show up empty handed. While I like getting those cards through Lulu.com, the process through which you get them is a tad clunky.

First you order them. They, usually the next day or so, they email you and ask you what you want on them. You send back the info and then, usually a day or so, they email you back what they came up with a soft proof .PDF to approve. If you don't like it, you email them back and say 'hey, change this.' Up until this time, they used the same layout for me each time and it was great. But it looks as if they redid their design because the front and backs are different. Plus they put the link to my book on lulu on the front and back cover . While that's nice,  "www.magicofeyri.com" looks a heck of a lot better than "http://www.lulu.com/content/572500" and I don't want people to go right to my lulu page. I want them to go to my site, look around and hopefully get very convinced to buy the book.

Sigh. The joys of self-publishing.

Only five days until Penguicon, and I'm equally excited and nervous. Yes, I know this is my third con in less than a year, so I shouldn't be that nervous but I still am. I'm going to be on a bunch o' panels this time around, six or seven I think--and I have a reading Sunday, which is the main reason for my nervousness. I know I'll have fun though, I always do and hopefully I'll sell a few books.

Finally got my taxes done and mailed off earlier in the week. Oy, that was a fiasco and a half. I'm very glad I bought Turbo Tax, that's for sure. Seeing exactly how much I spent on all this book stuff over the past year was kind of shocking when i had it all laid out in front of me. It was worth it to actually be a business for all of this, it helped me get a decent amount of money back because of business expenses (the bulk of which was going to cons to promote the book).

But yeah, I gotta change the way I do things a tad, have to be a little more conservative when it comes to spending money on this, especially when ordering copies of my own book. However to be fair, I ordered a lot of copies early on before I knew what I was doing (like taking 20 copies with me to the first con I went to in October) and I'm more experienced now, and a bit wiser. I'm taking less than ten copies this weekend--could be a risk because I'll be on a lot of panels so I'll be in the public eye more, but I have to watch my spending. I'd rather sell all eight copies and leave people asking for more than show up with twenty and only sell three (and let me tell you, lugging around seventeen copies of my book ain't fun).

I'll try and shoot video again and upload it, although I still haven't done that from the con in January--have the video shot and ready to edit, just need to do it.

Thanks to the signing on Saturday, I've broken the 100 copies sold mark for The Magic of Eyri. For a self-published, little advertised novel this is a decent bench mark. Granted, I won't really get noticed until I hit something like 1,000 but it is a start. I'm at 107 copies sold at the moment and i couldn't be happier. Things are going pretty great so far this Spring: I was mentioned in the Lansing State Journal last week, Friday I was interviewed on the radio, Saturday I had a great signing and I'll be a guest panelist at Penguicon next month.

Because I hit the 100 mark, this means I get to adopt another animal at Lansing's Potter Park Zoo as part of my Eyri Cares program. For those that don't know, every time I reach a certain sales goal I adopt an animal at the Zoo. You can learn more about it at magicofeyri.com/cares. So far I have already adopted three animals. According to my chart, next up is the Golden Lion Tamarin.

In writing news, the deadline for the CatsCurious Press fairy tale submission I'm working is quickly approaching and I'm not done yet. But, I work better under pressure and I'm almost finished. I have till the 31st, it'll happen--I haven't missed a deadline yet. I can't really blame my nasty cold last week that much, the real culprit is my total lack of time management skills "Sure, I'll watch three episodes of Battlestar Galactica in row, why not?"

I'm going to have to change the way I run things around here and get better at setting time aside to work on stuff. But I am the type of person who once I get in the zone, I cannot be stopped.

It is now officially tax season and this time around I have my small business taxes to file in addition to my regular kind. This is going to be interesting, I can already tell. Thankfully, I kept all my 'business' receipts organized - so it shouldn't be too hard, just tedious. The advice given to me by a friend who does independent stuff on the side like myself is that I don't really want to make a profit, just to break even at best and have my 'business' pay for all the stuff I do (like conventions, advertising, etc). It helps that Dad is self-employed, so he has been giving me a lot of help (told me to open separate accounts for business stuff, have separate credit cards, etc).

I can tell you right now there is no way I made a profit in 2007, I would of had to sell about 1,000 copies of The Magic of Eyri for that to happen. While there are things I like about being independent, financially it isn't the most fun. But this is the road I'm on at the moment, so I may as well stay the course see where it goes.

I bit the bullet and put up some Google Ads on danieljhogan.com and magicofeyri.com. I won't make a bunch of money off it but it'll help a bit. My preference is not to have ads, but getting some kind of income from the sites is nice. I can always take them down. I already had to block three ads from my sites (one was for a 'sexy singles' website), so I have to keep an eye on what is popping up.

I have a feeling any refund I get from my regular taxes is just going to go back and help pay off my bills from all of this book stuff. All things considered though, I'm not doing too bad. Yeah, I have some debt because of all of this but it isn't that much and I'm playing parts of it off each month and I'm watching my spending. Skipping conventions would be the best way to cut my costs, but I really can't do that - the exposure I get there is well worth the money and being able to sell books face to face to people is a priceless experience for me.

Oh well. At least people are buying the book, if they weren't and I was spending all of this money then I'd be in real trouble ;)

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.

I finally got around to putting up some shirt designs on my Zazzle.com store.

(has magicofeyri.com on the back by the neckline. I may redo this one later and try to put some kind of landscape picture with the two moons of Eyri on it, since that is what the quote is referring to. Uncle Shameless says it after he wakes up and sees Eyri's two moons - one of which is square  shaped.)


These are just my first stab at using the site - and what I liked most about it is that I did the text for these all on the site itself, which was great. It saved me so much time by not having to design each (and with a front and a back) in Photoshop and then uploading the graphic. I also like that anyone can put this design and any style shirt they want - thus saving me even more work. That was one thing I hated about Cafe Press: if I wanted different style shirts I had to go through the whole process for each. Very time consuming.

Zazzle made doing these a lot easier (and a lot more fun). You can even pick a cheaper shirt style if you want too, which is neat. I also like that I don't have to pay the website to have as many designs as I want - unlike Cafe Press. I think I'm gonna shut that shop down and just use Zazzle from now on.