Jason Boyett's Blog

Blogger and author Lisa DeLay was kind enough to feature me (along with my new book, Pocket Guide to 2012) in her Ninja Interview video series. She's breaking it into two parts, but in the first one I get to talk about the new book, the victims of failed doomsday predictions, and why I think our culture is so primed right now to freak out about apocalypse.

Also, you can see my bedroom behind me.

Thanks for the interview, Lisa!

As I continue to get the word out about my new book, I've got a piece in the Huffington Post today about the 2012 doomsday phenomenon. A sample:

Yes, there is such a thing as the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar, as mentioned in the movie. And yes, it does come to an end on the Winter Solstice of this year — Dec. 21, 2012. Just like your desk calendar came to an end on Dec. 31, 2011. And just like your car's odometer will "come to an end" should you drive it all the way to 99,999.9 miles.

Only you know as well as I do that calendars and odometers don't "end." They reset and start over. Your car doesn't implode when the odometer resets. Time didn't end when the ball dropped on New Year's Eve. Numbers change, totals reset to zero, and we keep counting.

Get Pocket Guide to 2012 on Kindle and Nook.

Yesterday was December 21, 2011 — a year away from the alleged 2012 doomsday date — so I began my last year on Earth explaining to the readers of "On Faith" at the Washington Post why I didn't think the coming 12 months would be our last:

———-

We've been here before. We humans, regardless of our religious persuasion, are obsessed with figuring out when we're going to die. From famed pastors and authors to obscure conspiracy theorists who are a few nuts short of a fruitcake, one of us is always predicting the end of the world.

These doomsayers have been wrong every time. Every. Single. Time.

———-

To help promote the book, I'll be trying to write a few more of these guest posts over the coming weeks. If you're interested in a guest post or interview at your blog, let me know. Email me at jb [at] jasonboyett.com or get in touch via Facebook or Twitter.

In years past, when people have asked me what I thought about self-publishing, my usual response was negative. It's too expensive, I would explain. You have to do all the sales, marketing and distribution yourself. You end up with a closet or trunk or garage full of books. And to most writers (including me), self-publishing was evidence that you didn't have a book good enough to be published the "real" way. Why else would you do it yourself?

Which is to say, I was a traditional-publishing snob.

I have changed my mind.

Last week I released my first self-published e-book. It's available for $3.99 as a PDF here. It's available for $3.99 on Amazon Kindle here. Within the week, it should be available for Barnes & Noble Nook and iBooks. I designed the cover. I wrote the descriptive copy. I formatted it for Kindle. I did everything but copy-edit the manuscript (a task I hired out to my friend and former Relevant editor Cara Davis). Now I'm selling it myself, as well as through big distributors like Amazon and B&N.

Why? Because self-publishing has changed dramatically over the last couple of years. Let me count the ways:

Timing: For the last few years, I've been trying to get publishers to let me update my first book, Pocket Guide to the Apocalypse, in order to add a chapter or two about the 2012 doomsday phenomenon. I met significant roadblocks. Though published in 2005 and impossible to find anywhere other than Amazon and Relevant, it's still technically in print. Also, there are still a lot of unsold copies sitting in a warehouse, and gaining back the rights would be way too expensive for a publisher (or me) to bet on. I started looking into a repackage in 2009, without success. Then it became 2010. Then it was 2011, at which point I scrapped the Apocalypse update idea and pitched the idea of a standalone Pocket Guide to 2012. There was some interest from Jossey-Bass, the publisher of my last three Pocket Guides, except for two major hesitations. First, sales of my other Pocket Guide books hadn't been as high as expected. Second, the shelf life for a 2012 book was…about a year long. I was pitching a book with an expiration date.

In September of this year, they declined the book. I was ready to go with Plan B: I decided to publish it anyway as an e-book. Because I could write it during September, October and November…and then publish it in December. I could have it on digital shelves within weeks of finishing the manuscript. It could be available for all of 2012 and then, once (SPOILER ALERT) nothing happened and we survived to enjoy 2013, I would not be saddled with unsold hard-copies of out-of-date books. Digital publishing is immediate. All it cost me was my time writing the book.

Ease: A major drawback of self-publishing is the work your publisher does once the manuscript is finished. It must be edited (I paid an editor for this). It needs a cover (I'm a professional graphic designer and designed my own). It needs marketing copy (I'm a professional copywriter and wrote my own). It must be formatted for Kindle, Nook, etc. (I figured it out). It needs to be distributed (Amazon and Barnes & Noble and my website do this for me). It needs to be marketed (the truth is that midlist writers like me are used to doing a lot of self-marketing anyway, even with our traditionally published books).

Kindle Direct Publishing and B&N's PubIt! platform make self-publishing much, much easier than it used to be. The hardest part about the whole process is…actually writing the book.

Money: Here's my dirty little secret: I don't make anywhere close to a living writing books. I have a full-time job in addition to my writing career. Most authors do. In fact, I probably will make more this year in my "real" job than I have made cumulatively from all of my books combined. (And while my single-income family is comfortable enough for Amarillo, Texas, I'm by no means making big bucks as a self-employed marketing professional.) With most of my book contracts, I'm making 12-18% on the "net receipts" of books sold. If one of my books sells for $9.99, I make a bit more than $1 a book. The rest of that money goes into editing costs, production costs, marketing costs, my agent at the time of the contract, and mostly to the publisher's overhead and bottom line.

In the Kindle store, my traditionally published Pocket Guides are listed right now at $8.09. That contract came about before much was happening on the e-book front, and my digital royalty rate is low, the same as my print royalty rate. I make around $1 on each of those sales. On the other hand, O Me of Little Faith is available on Kindle for $9.99. With that contract, I get a whopping 25% royalty from OMOLF e-book sales, so each time you download that book I'll earn around $2.50. That royalty rate is pretty standard these days.

But for Kindle books priced between $2.99 and $9.99, Amazon pays its self-published authors a 70% royalty. I've retained all the rights to Pocket Guide to 2012. I can price it whatever I want. I've set the price at $3.99. When you download it, I make in the vicinity of $2.70.

I will make more per download on my $3.99 book than I make on my $9.99 books. And which books are you more likely to download? My cheap one? Or my expensive ones?

That's why used-to-be traditionally published authors like J. A. Konrath advocate so hard on behalf of e-book self-publishing these days: because they're making more money doing it this way.

I don't have dreams of becoming rich on Pocket Guide to 2012. After all, it turns into a pumpkin in 12 months. But I've put a lot of hours into my writing career — a lot — and the opportunity to be better compensated for it is one I welcome.

Stigma: Amanda Hocking signed with a Big Six publisher after finding fantastic success as a self-pubbed e-book author. J.A. Konrath is more successful self-publishing than he was with a mainstream publisher. Barry Eisler is doing it. Seth Godin is doing it. Self-publishing a book no longer means your book wasn't good enough to be published for real. Those walls are disappearing, and it's not necessarily a bad thing.

Sure, there are still some bad books out there being self-published, just like there are some bad books out there being traditionally published. But the self-publishing stigma is diminishing quickly. In the future, I predict more and more midlist, traditionally published authors like me will begin to explore the self-published e-book approach, just like successful performers like Louis CK are exploring how to market their work directly to consumers rather than giving up all the rights to some corporate entity. It's better for authors. It's better for content creators. It's better for readers and consumers (cheaper books!). I think it will change publishing, in a good way.

Pocket Guide to 2012 is my self-publishing test run. I want to see what will happen, and I'm excited about it.

I hope you are, too. You can show it by buying a book. (See what I did there? I'm a marketing genius!)

In late November, my friend Winn Collier invited me to participate in an Instagram project, using the popular mobile photo-sharing service to "watch for light" during the Advent season (one of the two big seasons of the Christian year). I'm a big fan of Instagram and always looking for something that helps me to be more mindful of these seasons, so I was excited to participate. We're now more than halfway into it. It's been a blast.

Here are a few of my favorite personal photos so far. You can find a lot of these on Instagram or Twitter using the hashtag #adventpicaday.

"Light…not yet in focus." (The tree in front of my parent's house, from Dec. 12):

"Light through rippled glass" (Our outdoor lights seen through a window in our entryway, from Dec. 11):

"Light reflected" (A sunset pic of ANB Plaza Two, from Polk Street in downtown Amarillo, Dec. 8):

"Beauty from mistakes" (An unintentional photo taken along the Strip in Las Vegas, from Dec. 5):

Just as a Lenten fast helps Christians remain mindful in the days and weeks leading up to Easter, having to take a photo every day during Advent — and staying on the alert for good "light" opportunities — has been a very helpful way for me to remember the Great Light during Advent.

If you're an Instagram user, it's not too late to join us. Do a search for #adventpicaday and start watching.

[image error]If you've forgotten, today's the day Harold Camping said the world would end. In the wake of his failed rapture prediction from May of this year, the radio broadcaster stuck to his guns and continued to insist that the Last Days were still right on schedule, culminating in the end of the universe today, October 21, 2011.

Yesterday I wrote a piece for the Washington Post's "On Faith" section about how Camping's prediction will probably find its place within a long line of failed end-of-the-world predictions.

I take a bold, bold stand in saying "Call me crazy, but I predict it won't happen."

Still feeling good about it. Fingers crossed.

I've got a bookshelf with hundreds of books arranged by color (design nerd). My wife and I have dozens of books queued up on our Kindle. Our kids read something like a novel a week. We regularly leave the public library with our arms full. We are a family of readers.

[image error]I'm friends with a lot of readers, too. Two of them are marketing profs at my alma mater, West Texas A&M University. As part of a research project, they're administering a survey not of the types of books we read, or how we read them (paper, e-book), or where we read them, but WHY we read. What are the motives behind our reading? Do we do it purely for pleasure? For entertainment? For some kind of spiritual or intellectual enrichment? Or a combination of all those things?

I'm interested in the answers to those questions, too, so I've agreed to help them out by sending my friends to the survey. It is especially focused on how religious beliefs and/or personal spirituality influence your motives for reading. That's why the first page of questions is about your religious beliefs. The second is about your reading habits.

If you have a couple of spare minutes, would you mind responding to the survey? It takes less than five minutes, and everyone who completes it will be entered in a drawing to win a new Amazon Kindle Touch.

I appreciate it. My friends at WT appreciate it. And my fellow writers appreciate it. Because they more we know about WHY you read, the better we can produce stuff you'll like.

The Reading Motives Survey

On Saturday, along with my family, I participated for the first time in the local Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. I ran the competitive 5K in 23:53, a time I was pretty happy with. And a little later, the four of us jogged/walked the 5K fun run.

We participated as part of Team KAZ, in memory of Kelln Zimmer, a friend of a friend. She was diagnosed with breast cancer right after graduating from college, when she was 23. She died last year at the age of 29. Way too soon. Kelln was the honorary chairwoman of this year's race and we were proud to compete in her memory.

The Zimmer family owns the local porta-pottie business, so when my friends Emmet, Julie, and I arrived early for the competitive race, we decided to take a photo in front of the ridiculously pink Team KAZ-labeled potties. They matched our shirts, after all. That rarely happens.

A guy stepped out of one right as we took the photo. He was very, very startled. We all had a good laugh, because every man has a right to be startled by flash photography as he exits a pink porta-potty. No idea who this fellow was, but our apologies for the early-morning scare.

Race start. There were 5,000 total participants in the day's events, including (I think) more than 1,000 in the competitive 5K.

The race headed south on Polk Street, through downtown Amarillo.

Emmet and I stayed together the whole time, at about a 7:30/mile pace, which is pretty fast for me. Though I've run a lot of 5Ks at the end of triathlons, I've never run one as a stand-alone event. My triathlon 5K pace is usually around 8:30/mile. But that's after a bunch of other stuff. So I pushed it.

I was going so fast my head exploded when Emmet tried to take this photo:

He tried again, with less solar lighting.

We ran on old brick streets…

…and newer asphalt streets.

Look! It's Larry Hutton, event photographer! I've seen him before.

Emmet pulled ahead at the very end with a strong kick. I didn't.

Then it was time to find our family and friends for another 5K, the fun run/walk. We enjoyed it together, with short burst of intense running (kids aren't always good at jogging) and longer walking segments.

It was a great event, with tons of people, plenty of friends, and an excellent cause. Lots of teams, fun costumes, and clever pink t-shirts about breasts, 2nd base, etc. Good times. We'll do it again next year.

Earlier this week I was the guest speaker for Dr. Nick Gerlich's marketing classes at WTAMU. They're online classes, so my guest speakerdom was limited to the interview below, which the class then had to watch online. This wasn't quite as fun as the typical give-and-take interaction in a classroom, but makes it a whole lot easier to share with others.

We talked about a lot of things in 12 minutes, including my day job as a designer and copywriter, the importance of networking and self-marketing, how I use Twitter and Facebook, the practice of transparency in the age of digital oversharing, how I got started writing for Relevant, and the future of books.

If you're interested in any of that stuff — and you have 12 minutes to spare — you'll probably enjoy this video.

Nick's got a few more of these "Class Act" videos up on his YouTube channel. They make for a nice, quick little marketing education.

Not everyone knows it, but I supplement my writing income with a fair amount of graphic design work. I've been a graphic designer since the wee days of Adobe Illustrator and, ahem, PageMaker — and was the creative director for a local ad company around the time my first books started coming out.

And though I don't often post publicly about my design work, I thought I'd do so today.

Why? Because my friend Josh Wood gave me an interesting project last week. Inspired by this, Josh asked me to turn his regular old resume into an infographic. Josh has an impressive resumé to start with, but it becomes much more dynamic when you pull it out of the standard format. Not sure what interviewers or hiring committees think of these kinds of things, but they've got to be attention-getting, and in an increasingly visual culture I can see things moving this direction.

Anyway, here's where we ended up:

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Josh's whole post, about how to become more employable, is worth reading.

And if you're wondering — yep, I'd be happy to produce one of these for you (or anyone you know), if you're interested. Just get in touch and we'll talk.