Releasing a book as "episodes" and "seasons"

I know I don't really have an audience, so I'll just apologize to myself for not being around in a while. In week seven I had my best week yet, largely because I was getting up very early (4:30 in the morning early) and actually getting things done. Then I decide to switch to writing after the kids were in bed, since I've always been a night owl at heart, but I ended up being so burnt out from work and getting up early for weeks that I'd just surf the Internet or waste time, often staying up until one or two in the morning and being a zombie the next day. Epic fail.

But that's all in the past, right?

I spent the day coming back to the idea of serialization, which I first talked about in March. There's been some debate on KBoards about how readers would respond to the different types of serialization. In the most traditional sense, a serial has a clear beginning, middle, and end, despite being a short piece. Meanwhile, a series is often thought of as several related, standard length books that can be read in any order. Apparently the term "saga" refers to what I usually consider to be a series, which are standard length books with a clear beginning, middle, and end that must be read in a specific order to understand the overarching plot.

The people posting on KBoards seem to be in one of two camps when it comes to splitting a traditional novel into several parts that have no clear beginning, middle, and end, and finish with a cliffhanger. The first believes that readers will consider it nothing more than a money grab, and that they will become annoyed and leave several one star reviews. The logic is that even if the serialization is designed for borrows through Kindle Unlimited, there will inevitably be a number of buyers who won't appreciate having to pay for one book several times. Of course, if one were to price each of the installments at $.99, over a four part serialization the author would only earn $1.20. If the same book was sold for $3.99, the author would earn $2.79. So clearly serialization is not a money grab, but readers may not realize this. I think the key is keeping the pricing of each individual installment approximately the same as the pricing of the box set.

The second camp believes that serialization is a good way to maximize the benefit from the 30 day hot new releases algorithm. Also, readers are less likely to buy a book from an author who only has one book published, and breaking a novel into several parts will increase the number of books available. Several authors have had great success with this approach. Key is having a very clear blurb that specifically says the book is an installment and that it ends on a cliffhanger. As readers of short works are a different target audience than readers of full novels, posters on KBoards also recommend saying that the books will be bundled when the last one is released, so that those who prefer a longer novel format can wait until it is available.

So my current plan is to completely write the book so that I can work in hints in the early stages, but to publish it as for "episodes" approximately 25,000 words long, roughly corresponding to Act 1, Act 2a, Act 2b, and Act 3. The Self-Publishing Podcast started applying the "episode" TV term to serialization as people are familiar with TV episodes that must be watched in order and end on a cliffhanger. The SPP guys release all episodes as a "season" in one fell swoop, Netflix style. I plan on stretching the releases a bit more than this to maximize the algorithm, but for the most part think the terms "episodes" and "seasons" are ideal.

My plan is to release the box set when people are getting their new kindles for Christmas. Each preceding release would occur a month before that date, with the exception that the first and second episodes will be published at the same time. The purpose of this is for the first episode to act as a free loss leader, and the second is immediately available to show that I am an author doing this for the long term. As a reader myself, I will seldom buy into a series if only one book is available because the author may just drop off the face of the earth.

September 2015: Release episode one as free. Have episode two available for $1.99, and episode three available through preorder for $1.99, with release in October 2015.

October 2015: Episode three is published. Episode four is available through preorder for $1.99.

November 2015: Episode four is published. Box set is available through preorder for $4.99.

December 2015: Box set is published.

Total cost to reader purchasing individual episodes: $5.97
Total royalties for selling all four individual episodes: $1.79

Total cost to reader buying boxed set: $4.99 (savings of 16%)
Total royalties for selling boxed set: $3.49

Given the above calculations, it may look like serialization is a bad idea, however exposure is key. By having two books available from the onset, I'll have the benefit of a loss leader with an immediate funnel to a purchase. Also, by releasing the next two episodes and the box set within the 30 day window, a title should be available on the hot new releases list for four months, instead of just one. If I've learned anything from reading KBoards it's that getting discovered is one of the most difficult hurdles to overcome in self-publishing, so I'm hoping this plan will work.

Weekly Progress

I'm a new writer who's still trying to work out how to be productive and write faster. I also love data, and track my output in a spreadsheet. Here I just wanted a place where I could post the weekly totals that I discuss in my Sunday updates, so I could see everything at a glance. I'll be updating this every week.

This form of progress tracking replaces the one I used previously, which didn't differentiate between editing and writing, and as a result the words per hour calculation wasn't accurate. I also realized that I was spending a lot of my time on the business aspect of self-publishing, such as reading about marketing and promotion on KBoards, but I wasn't tracking this at all. So when I would look back on the total amount of time I spent each week on developing this side career, it looked quite low. My old way was like tracking the production line, but paying no attention to the hours logged by the marketing division or the research and development team. This new way of tracking truly captures how much time I am spending on launching my writing career.

Key: W/E = Writing and Editing; B = Business (learning, production, marketing, management); O = Other (learning craft, outlining); WPH-W/E = Average words per Hour when writing/editing.

Wk	Week start	W/E	B	O	TOTAL	WPH-W	WPH-E	Net words
W-1	Jan 26, '15	6:15	n/a	n/a	6:15	273	-	1,707
W-2	Feb 2, '15	10:10	n/a	n/a	10:10	236	-	2,533
W-3	Feb 9, '15	8:05	n/a	n/a	8:05	364	-	2,365
W-4	Feb 16, '15	9:22	n/a	n/a	9:22	375	-	3,435
W-5	Feb 23, '15	10:25	n/a	n/a	10:25	295	-	2,768
W-6	Mar 2, '15	11:16	n/a	n/a	11:16	446	-	4,367
W-7	Mar 9, '15	10:19	n/a	n/a	10:19	450	-	4,955
W-8	Mar 16, '15	-	n/a	6:36	6:36	-	-	735
W-9	Mar 23, '15	2:31	n/a	1:20	3:51	413	-	n/a
W-10	Mar 30, '15	-	n/a	-	-	-	-	0
W-11	Apr 6, '15	-	n/a	-	-	-	-	0
W-12	Apr 13, '15	3:02	n/a	-	3:02	572	-	2,239
W-13	Apr 20, '15	9:42	n/a	-	9:42	475	2,099	476
W-14	Apr 27, '15	3:44	9:41	-	13:25	-	2,735	50
W-15	May 4, '15	5:33	5:17	15:17	26:07	530	4,004	1,584

Week of March 9, 2015: Best week yet, but writing takes so long... getting discouraged.

Week	Week start date	Days I wrote	Words written	Time used	WPH (avg)	WPH (writing)
W-7	Mar 9, 2015	6	4969	12:31	397	449

Re: Scheduling

So this is the end of my second week of early mornings, and it's working out fairly well. I fall asleep quite easily between 8:30 and 9:30, but still have a bit of trouble hauling myself out of bed. Also I've noticed that when I first started this I used to start writing right away, but now that I'm getting used to the schedule I spend time "waking up" with email checks just like I used to do in the evenings, so even though I get up 2 hours earlier, I only get about 1h20 of writing time in. And I hate when I'm on a roll and have to stop because I have to go to the real job.

This of course makes me flip flop back to 'why not just go back to nights?' If I'm going to 'waste' 40 minutes, I rather use that time to 'wake up' with a jog after the kids are in bed and then plow away with writing. That would also mean my social schedule gets less perturbed, and if I was on a roll I could run with it and push through work on less sleep, going to bed early to catch up. That inconsistent sleep schedule is bad for your overall health though. And my husband says I'm less cranky when I get up early, and less dead when I come home from work, heh. It's what I've been doing all my life though, so I feel myself gravitating to it.

Re: The long, long road...

This week was also the first major discrepancy between what I wrote and what I kept. So even though I wrote 4969, only 4550 remain. That stung.

I should be happy that I'm up to almost 5k a week. In the beginning that seemed like something I would never reach, but I still feel like it's not enough. Right now a lot of my weekly count is happening on the Tuesdays and Thursdays I have free. That's going to end, and then what? Back to the 1500-2000 words a week? Can't happen; I need to meet my goals. I'm impatient! The end of the road looks so far away, and then there's editing, and cover design, and marketing, and business stuff, and mailing lists, and figuring out how to stay anonymous.

I read somewhere that whenever you tackle a long task that you should visualize yourself a year from now, and looking back would you have wanted to start in on it earlier, even if it was just a little bit every day? And of course the answer would be yes. Even if I only have half a book the answer will be yes. But once I've got my mind into something I just want to dive right into it and burn through it until it's done. The fact that I can't because of my job is killing me.

I used to love my current job; I even proclaimed that it was the best job in the world, and I really did feel that way. Now every tiny little thing is getting to me, even if 90% of the time things are good, the 10% eats at my brain. And it comes down to the fact that I still work for someone else.

That's never really fit with me.

I started a dog walking business when I was 9. I did desktop publishing layouts in high school and early university but I felt more like a contractor. In my current part-time teaching job I feel like I'm in my own game, me and the students. I have a Department Head, but s/he doesn't tell me what to do; I just give him/her the grades. There's a freedom there. But in my bread-and-butter job I have a clear boss who I report to every week (and my new boss manages very differently than the old one. I used to feel like a team member whose ideas were appreciated; now I feel like a cog in the wheel who should just shut up and do the work.) While I enjoy the work and feel like I'm making a difference, the fact that it's employment won't change, and the environment is so very dependent on the personality of the person I report to. It's the fatal flaw that's gnawing at me, and making me quite unhappy with what most people would fall head over heels for.

I was reading on KBoards that there's no need to try to advance in two careers at the same time, and it hit me that that's really what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to get a promotion at work (largely so I only need to work one job to make ends meet instead of a full-time job plus a part-time job), and I'm trying to make this writing thing viable. I need to not give so much of myself to my day-job. I put in many hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime a year (I'm salaried, so it's expected), but I need to start delegating and protecting my time. Something has to give, and I can't expect my little boys to be the ones who have to go without their mommy. Sadly, that has been the case during peak periods at work, when they'd be heading to bed when I came home. That lasts 4-6 months. Brutal.

As an aside: I've never really blogged before I started this one, but man, writing all that stuff out is therapeutic. Reminds me of a study I read that showed that people who journal tend to have a better outlook, almost as much as those who go to therapy. I can see that.

To serialize or not to serialize

When I woke up a little past midnight tonight my brain was ruminating over whether or not to serialize my first book to take advantage of putting it in Kindle Unlimited and having 'many books' available right out of the gate.  My brain refused to turn off until an hour later, despite the fact that I have to wake up at 4:30...

Anyway, I was thinking of doing something along the lines of what Sean Platt, Johnny Truant, and David Wright of the Self Publishing Podcast do with their seasons and episodes. They've amassed quite a few of them now, so I was trying to figure out how long each one was. I've separated them into works with Sean and Johnny, and works with Sean and Dave, because when Johnny writes the first draft I find they tend to go longer and if edited could have been about 20% shorter. Kindle estimates on the high end of the standard 250 - 350 words per page and uses 350, so the word counts below are going by the page length of their complete seasons for season 1:

• Sean and Johnny
• Unicorn Western: Full Saga (Books 1-9) is 712 pages / 249k, so 27.5k per episode ($8.17)
• Robot Proletariat: Season One is 6 episodes and 388 pages / 136k, so 22.7k per episode ($6.27)
• The Beam: The Complete First Season is 6 episodes and 564 pages / 197k, so  33k per episode ($4.10)
• Sean and Dave
• Yesterday's Gone: Season One is 5 episodes and 503 pages / 176k, so 35k per episode ($4.96)
• Available Darkness: Season One (Episodes 1-6) is 339 pages / 119k, so 20k per episode ($4.96)
• WhiteSpace: Season One (Episodes 1-6 of the sci-fi horror serial) is 6 episodes and 367 pages / 128k, so 21k per episode ($4.96)

The episodes have chapters in them that run about 2-3k each.

Well, now I've used an hour of my writing time to satisfy my brain munchings and set up the above with Amazon affiliate links, so I should head back to actually writing the stuff I may or may not eventually serialize.

Week of March 1, 2015: I think this schedule is the best so far

Week	Week start date	Days I wrote	Words written	Time used	WPH
Week 6	Mar 2, 2015	6	4501	11:16	399

My husband was right; I just had to stick it out for more than a few days. During the weekdays there was only one day I didn't get up at 4:30am, and that was earlier in the week. When I tracked my alertness the first few days were "groggy", the next "ok" and near the end I said I was "in the zone", so I think I'm adapting. I've hit my weekly word count goal for the first time since I started, so yay! 
That said, there's still room for improvement. I realized that things will inevitably keep me from going to bed at 8:30 pm; most days it was more like 9 or 9:30 pm before I got in bed, so by the end of the week I had accumulated quite the sleep debt. I paid the price with a migraine Saturday evening, which screwed up Sunday. Can't afford screw ups like that.
So the new plan is to allow some "sleeping in" until 6:30 am on Saturday, to catch up, because I can't carry a sleep debt forever. That said, when I did that this week I felt on edge all day because I was used to starting my day writing. I put some time in later in the morning, but my WPH is higher first thing when I wake up (400-500, instead of ~300). 
Last week I projected the book would only be 80k, but now I'm thinking it will be 100k again. I'm at 18,352 and I still have 2 chapters before I break into Act 2a, which will bring me to about 25k per Act (Acts 1, 2a, 2b, and 3).

Week of Feb 23, 2015: New schedule... again.

Week of	Days I wrote	Words written	Time used	WPH
Feb 23, 2015	5	3070	10:25	295

My numbers this week aren't too bad considering I used a lot of time for mundane things. Managed to hire a new therapist for my son and got an eye exam (looks like I need my third pair of glasses in 9 months; hopefully things stabilize before I go blind or broke, oi!). I'm actually surprised that I got so much time in. I was off from my main job on Thursday but used the whole day preparing lectures and meeting with students for my second job, and I thought that would hit my word count hard. I did put in two insanely late nights, so that probably made up for it. I've noticed that the 10:30pm-12:30am window has the worst WPH, but the 12:30am-2:30am window is pretty good. Unfortunately the plan I implemented last week to stay up late a few days a week made me feel like a complete zombie.  My husband, bless his dear and patient soul, never laughs at me as I bounce my new scheduling plans off him each week (we have had this routine for many years; I have no idea how he keeps a straight face when I tell him that this week I'll figure out a schedule that catapults my productivity, heh). This time he had some advice: whatever plan I choose, stick to it for a whole month, not just a few days or a week. I figured that if I stay up late my brain is so dead that I have to put in more time to hit the same word count (yay data collection!), so mornings it is. So *drum roll* SJ's plan for the next MONTH is:
WEEKDAYS 4:30 am - 5:15 am: Wake up, shower, snack 5:15 am - 7:15 am: WRITE WRITE WRITE 7:15 am - 8:00 am: Breakfast with the kiddos, make lunches, get everyone out the door 8:00 am - 5:30 pm: MWF: Get to work, work, go home from work; TR: Write and/or do lecture prep 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm: Play with kids, have supper 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm: Kids bedtime routine 8:00 pm - 8:30 pm: Chores 8:30 pm: BED Estimated writing time: MWF: 2 hrs per day; TR: 3-4 hrs per day.  Total for weekdays: 12 - 14 hours per week.
WEEKENDS 4:30 am - 5:15 am: Wake up, shower, snack 5:15 am - 7:00 am: WRITE WRITE WRITE 7:00 am - 9:00 am: Hot breakfast with the kiddos, make lunches, get everyone out the door 9:00 am - 12:00 pm: WRITE while kids are at morning activities or with hubby (may or may not be possible depending on domestic chores) 12:00 pm - 7:00 pm: Family time, chores, exercise, etc. 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm: Kids bedtime routine 8:00 pm - 8:30 pm: Chores 8:30 pm: BED Estimated writing time: 4h45 per day. Total for weekends: 4.75 - 9.5 hrs per week. Total weekly time for writing: 16.75 -  23.5 hrs. At my dismal average of ~300 words/hr, I should get in ~5000 - 7000  words per week. That seems mind blowing to me. We'll see how it goes.
One notable impact is that this will essentially destroy my personal life, since staying up even until midnight will now through my schedule way off. But my social life is basically only seeing my friends once a month, so it should work. Also lacking is any exercise during weekdays. I really want to run for at least 30 minutes every day, but it never happens. If I could get by on 7 hours a night at get up at 3:30 I'd be set, ha! My husband says that I might be able to not feel like a zombie if I get a consistent amount each night (right now I'm on a binge sleep cycle, fluctuating between 4 hours and then several nights of 9 or more). We'll see. When I went without setting clocks I needed 8.5 consistently. Sigh.
One note for this week: I've got 5 chapters in to my book and my spreadsheet calculates that, based on my average chapter length and a plan for 24 chapters, my book will likely be 80,000 words instead of 100,000, so I've changed my ticker on the side to 80,000.

Week of Feb 16, 2015: Aiming for stamina + scheduling

Week of	Days I wrote	Words written	Time used	WPH
Feb 16, 2015	3	3514	9:22	375

Best week yet in terms of numbers, but still not where I want to be. I've been taking Tuesdays and Thursdays off to write and teach (I don't really get "weekends" with two young kids, I just do the mommy job really). Yet despite having all the day available I seem to only log 3.5 to 4 hours of writing. I have to increase my stamina to be more productive on those days, which should really be my powerhouse days. I'd also love to write every day.
I took some time to come up with yet another schedule to try to fit in my day job, part-time job, and writing, and of course family and exercise (although I have yet to get to that last one; I hope I don't die young). They say regular sleep is more important than the number of hours, but my normal cycle is to stay up until crazy-o'clock (as in 2am when I have to get up at 6:30am) and then go to bed early the next few nights to catch up. The potential new schedule looked more reasonable because it had a solid 8:15 of sleep each night, but I don't know how realistic it is. I think I'd do better with longer chunks of time less often, but if Tuesday and Thursday are any indication, maybe not.
I also got thrown a curve ball this week. My son's therapist is moving on to a higher level position so we have to find someone else within two weeks, which will be challenging if not impossible. Taxes are due and I have a very sizeable bill. And I've run out of lectures for my course and have to make more. Fun times.
I got most of the taxes squared away this weekend (earned myself a guilt trip from the kiddos who must think, "don't disturb mommy, she's working" is the natural state of things). I thought I'd just do a course prep marathon in the week coming up and take care of that and a bunch of other domestic stuff (hire a therapist for my son, get my eyes checked and new lenses, order a car seat replacement buckle, refute parking tickets, pay life insurance... the List of Boring goes on). At some point I have to replace my 10-year-old hot water boiler before it explodes, but knowing how life is it will probably get ignored until it explodes and we have even bigger problems. 
I'm thinking I should just give into my natural patterns and schedule marathon sessions. Stay up until 2am on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays, and take a nap in the middle of the day on Tuesdays and Thursdays (plus in bed early Saturday and Sunday). Hmmm. Gonna go work that out and see how it shapes up. =) Maybe at some point I'll figure out how to get more hours into the day.