I had a query about the subject late last night, so I thought I’d cross-blog the response here. (…”Cross-blog”. Is that a word? Well, it is now.)
As regards The Big Meow: I don’t have enough information yet to make a decision about writing the book, as I haven’t yet hit the “break-even” point in terms of responses to my initial posting about the project. So far I’ve only heard from a few hundred people, and even if every one of them bought a book at the stated price, I’d still be losing money on the deal. As the project stands at present, I would need to hear positively from at least a couple/few hundred more people before I could commit.
— And so that no one reading this misunderstands me: for costing purposes on this project — without getting into actual figures — I’m “paying myself” the lowest amount my agent would have allowed me to take for a work-for-hire/licensed-property book between three and five years ago, when I was still doing such things. This amount — again, without getting into actual figures — would be about one-fifth to one-sixth of what I normally get for a writing a novel these days. To do this very on-spec piece of work, I would be taking a considerable drop in pay while I spent a significant portion of my work year on the project — so you can see where my concern lies, as I have cats to feed, and they don’t understand explanations about wanting to write just for the joy of it: they want to know where their dinners are.
(An additional and slightly related issue: one of the ways I’ve been testing the water as regards self-publishing is with online sale of a book already written but never published elsewhere, though it was bought by mainline publishers twice — details here at the website for Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South. The sales so far of the book’s e-version have been only modest…and this for a novel already written. Looking at this situation, I have to ask myself whether The Big Meow is really likely to do any better, and whether I may be about to start wasting a lot of precious time on something that’s just “a nice idea”.)
…So if you know somebody who’s interested in seeing this book written, or (looking over the heads of whose who’ve already mailed me) if you’re yourself interested, now’s the time to drop me a note and let me know. The original post laying out the situation with this book is here. The blurb for the prospective novel (and the project’s homepage) are here. The address to mail support or inquiries to is
thebigmeow@youngwizards.com
If you haven’t done so already, please let me know what you think.
Or you could, if you liked, convince me more concretely by putting money-where-mouth-is and buying a copy of A Wind from the South. (There are sample chapters and links to reader comments at its website.)
But I also want to thank very much all those who’ve already written — so many of your comments have been really heartwarming — and those who’ve read AWFTS and have been having fun with it. You guys make the work worthwhile. 🙂
