Jeremy Rodden's Blog

I just realized I haven’t posted anything on my blog in a while so I figured I’d throw out a “halfway through 2019” update for anyone who cares!

I’ve begun being a little more open in some of the indie author circles on Facebook and other social media in regards to how much of a grind it is to be an indie artist (be it creative or performing). I figured now was as good a time as any to put some actual hard data out there on my blog.

This weekend was Tidewater Comicon in Virginia Beach (my area’s biggest local convention) and it was my second year attending in Artist Alley. I thoroughly enjoyed my time last year but was determined to make this year even better. I am proud to say I succeeded.

Here’s where I was, which did prove to be a very fortuitous location for foot traffic!

My first year at Tidewater Comicon I grossed about $150-160 in sales. Now, on the surface, I “made back table” for a booth that cost me $150 to procure. However, this does not account for the cost of the books I purchased to sell (my own Toonopolis books and copies of anthologies I am featured in) and some other ancillary expenses.

In order to calculate a true value of profit, I had to do a more complete breakdown of the cost of my books, cost of table, credit card fees for using Square, and some other things. Last year, I most definitely “lost” money on the endeavor. Overall in my author career (or “small business owner” career, as I prefer to consider it), I am still in the red (that would mean I have invested more money than I’ve earned).

That being said, here is a thorough breakdown of my experience this year at Tidewater Comicon, with a final profit margin of $67.47. Considering I was at my convention table for 14 hours (8 hours on Saturday, 6 hours on Sunday), this equates to an hourly rate of $4.82, or below minimum wage. When I tell people this gig is a grind, this is what I mean. Here is the chart of my performance this weekend:

By far my most successful sales week in sheer quantity of books sold (second in profit, as I had a recent library event that was a free table where I sold 10 books in 5 hours)

Now, it is important to note that this is only calculating direct sales during the convention. There is a chance of residual sales (either eBook purchases or later purchases from people who walked away with my bookmarks, informational cards, or just a memory of our conversations), but those are generally impossible to trace directly.

As I’m moving into a grey area in my indie author career where I’m actually starting to profit from events (albeit marginally), I felt it was important for me to track just how profitable I was being. As I’ve had a good response from other indie or aspiring authors by being open with sharing my data, I figured I’d continue the trend with some hard numbers for those interested.

Feel free to reach out with any questions or followups if you’ve read this post and would like more information.

Introduction

Title: What Goes Up
Author: Katie Kennedy
Genre: Science Fiction
Release Date: July 18, 2017
Synopsis (from Amazon):

Rosa and Eddie are among hundreds of teens applying to NASA’s mysterious Interworlds Agency. They’re not exactly sure what the top-secret program entails, but they know they want in. Rosa has her brilliant parents’ legacies to live up to, and Eddie has nowhere else to go–he’s certainly not going to stick around and wait for his violent father to get out of jail. Even if they are selected, they have no idea what lies in store. But first they have to make it through round after round of crazy-competitive testing.

And then something happens that even NASA’s scientists couldn’t predict . . .

Why I Think Boys May Enjoy This

What makes this book so pleasant of a science fiction is that it starts definitively as a realistic coming-of-age story. While later in the story, the science fiction elements become more important, What Goes Up focuses more on the science than the fiction. The alternating point-of-views between Rosa and Eddie give two very complete and complex characters a chance to share two very different worlds. Rosa comes from intelligence and success and is one of the best because she was raised and expected to be. Eddie is more of your Good Will Hunting poor genius archetype, albeit with some cool heritage of his own that comes about during the course of events. In the first half of the book (the competitive element between all the teens invited), they demonstrate how being the “best” doesn’t take only one type of approach.

Once the science fiction elements overtake the high school (albeit a very competitive and high level one full of super smart teens), the plot hits the ground like a fast-paced but teen version of a John Scalzi novel. The science is believable enough for those that buy into the theory of multiple universes, but Kennedy cares more about telling a fun and enjoyable story than the depth of the science itself. This is in no way an insult. I, for one, prefer light sci-fi that focuses enough on the science to get me into the world-building but not so much that every minute detail must be “real” or “believable” for it to matter. Just enjoy the ride.

The fast pace Earth-hopping story is a super fun read as you move along. The supporting cast of characters were a little stock at times, but Reg (their trainer and the only adult character who isn’t somewhat antagonistic or demeaning to the kids) really took the cake as a deep and fantastic mentor, who also had plenty of his own humor. All in all, this was a really fun read and I’m glad to have picked it up!

Content/Appropriateness

Even though the characters are in their late teens, there is pretty much no major content warnings. Any violence is PG13, language is minimal, and there is no sexual content to worry about. There is a scene of underage drinking, but it makes sense considering one of the character’s family history and low self-esteem. Therefore, this scene adds to the coming-of-age elements instead of serving as a “I want to make my teen get drunk for lulz” type of scene. This book is more than appropriate for the late middle grade/high school crowd of 12+.

Rating







Buy Links

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | iBooks | Google Play | Kobo

Yesterday I tried to talk an Uber driver into taking $200 to drive me from Washington, DC to Norfolk, VA because I had a family emergency. Along the way, I got a better understanding for the stress and sense of urgency displayed by the mom from Home Alone when she was in a similar situation. But let’s go back to the beginning first.

”
“And I don’t care if I have to get out on your runway and hitchhike! If it costs me everything I own, if I have to sell my soul to the devil himself, I am going to get home to my son!” (or wife, in my case)

Let me start off with two things. First: this is entirely factual. Second: my wife is doing well in the hospital and is looking like she is on the path to recovery. I felt that was important to note because this story is meant to be humorous (retrospectively, extremely stressful in the moment) and that can only be the case with an ending that is, at the very least, optimistic for future well-being of my loved ones.

That being said, this weekend was supposed to be an awesome (Get it? Well, you will.) experience for me. Having recently partnered up with my friend Tara Moeller, the head of the DreamPunk Press co-op (a small publishing group in my area), I was all set to bring my Toonopolis books to AwesomeCon in Washington, DC under the DreamPunk Press banner alongside the rest of the DreamPunk library. I’d never been to AwesomeCon, as an author or as a fan, so I was very excited to say the least.

Those little green tubes are only 5-9cm long in an average adult female. Didn’t think you were gonna learn anything in this blog post, huh?

A few weeks before the event, my wife had to schedule a surgery for a bile duct issue (the tubes connecting your organs like gallbladder, liver, pancreas, etc.). So yeah, guess when the surgery was? Thursday, the day before MarsCon. No big deal, my wife and I presume. It’s a simple outpatient procedure and she should be home and resting by the evening. The DreamPunk Press team would go up to DC Thursday evening to get set up, I’d take a train from Norfolk to DC Friday morning and be a little late to the start of the first day but otherwise be there to man the table, sell books, and try out a new cosplay (Greg Universe from Steven Universe!). Plan set. All parties on board.

Proceed to the day of the surgery. Everything goes fine, doctor is happy with the procedure, my wife goes into recovery and we are just waiting for anesthesia to wear off and her pain to be controlled. Only her pain never got controlled adequately so they opt to admit her to the hospital for observation, run a few scans, check some bloodwork, and she’d likely go home the next day. This leaves my wife and I with a dilemma: should I travel to DC the next morning? After evaluation and discussion, we decide that I would in fact go but keep in touch. Her parents were around for childcare backup, she was just waiting out her weird pain issues, and she’d probably go home Friday afternoon.

Apparently the white part in the circled area is not supposed to light up. Hers did. Fun times.

So I hop on my train from Norfolk at 9am Friday morning (after getting all three kids off to school so they were covered for the day), and thus begins the real adventure that would end up with me approximately thirteen of the subsequent thirty-three hours traveling between Norfolk and DC. At about 9:30am, I receive a phone call from my wife that the doctors may want to do more surgery but weren’t sure. Her gallbladder was apparently retaining the IV contrast used during the surgery. I don’t know what this means but she sent me a picture and told me “that white part isn’t supposed to be visible on X-Ray”.

So at this point, I have 4.5 hours left on my train ride to DC to worry about what this might mean for my wife, am already late to the beginning of the convention, and not even sure if I am going to have to turn right back around and go home (or jump off the train, hobo style somewhere in the middle of Virginia). We opted for me to go the Con and just stay in touch in case another surgery was necessary or something else went amiss.

After arriving in DC around 1:30pm, I get to the convention, get set up, throw on my Ash Ketchum costume, and find our table, which was awesome and the first time I got to use my new Toonopolis freestanding banner! Check it out:

The DreamPunk Press team has fantasy and sci-fi books ranging from middle grade to adult on this table. Cause that’s how we roll.

Introduction

Title: Ship Breaker
Author: Paolo Bacigalupi

Genre: Dystopia

Release Date: September 3, 2016

Synopsis (from Amazon):

This thrilling bestseller and National Book Award Finalist is a gritty, high-stakes adventure of a teenage boy faced with conflicting loyalties, set in a dark future America devastated by the forces of climate change.

In America’s flooded Gulf Coast region, oil is scarce, but loyalty is scarcer. Grounded oil tankers are being broken down for parts by crews of young people. Nailer, a teenage boy, works the light crew, scavenging for copper wiring just to make quota–and hopefully live to see another day. But when, by luck or by chance, he discovers an exquisite clipper ship beached during a recent hurricane, Nailer faces the most important decision of his life: Strip the ship for all it’s worth or rescue its lone survivor, a beautiful and wealthy girl who could lead him to a better life….

In this powerful novel, Hugo and Nebula Award winning author Paolo Bacigalupi delivers a fast-paced adventure set in the vivid and raw, uncertain future.

Why I Think Boys May Enjoy This

When my son first read this book for summer reading before seventh grade, he wouldn’t stop talking about how much he enjoyed it. It took me a year, but I finally got around to it and I’m sad that I took so long for me to get there. Bacigalupi created an amazing dystopian society focused on the rising sea levels predicted by climate change experts. It’s one thing to create a post-apocalyptic world, but amazing authors create fantastic depth, focusing on things like society structure, economy, and other facets of “what will life be like after impending catastrophe”.

As usual, what really makes dystopian stories great are the characters. Whether it’s zombies or nuclear fallout or rising water levels, how people respond is what matters. In this world, at least Nailer’s portion world, it’s cut-throat and you’re only as valuable as what you can provide. There is a certain Lord of the Flies element to the relative freedom the children have (with scenes of them drinking, being violent, and acting way more adult-like than a teenager would in our world), but it isn’t without reason. It’s a hard world and hard world create hard people.

Nailer’s character progression and his inherent drive to do the “right” thing to him (which isn’t exactly in line with the “right” thing by his peers’ standpoint) is what separates him from the rest of the characters. He represents a kind of impractical humanity/compassion that has been lost to this world in lieu of survivalism. As said above, any good dystopia is less about the events that led to the apocalyptic scenario and more about how people respond. This story is no different and it’s wonderful.

Content/Appropriateness

As mentioned above, there are scenes with teens cursing and drinking. There is also some somewhat descriptive violence (as well as a certain disregard for other humans) that, while they make complete sense in the world Bacigalupi created, is still a bit dark and cold. Again, this is a dark and cold world. My son was assigned this book in 7th grade so he was just turning 12 when he read it. I think this is a great age range, so long as the content is examined through a comparative filter that the way the teens act in this world is not appropriate for our society. If anything, this would be a more appropriate educational book to examine some of these elements than the tried and true Lord of the Flies, because at least Ship Breaker shows humanity in a cold world whereas Flies shows the inherent darkness in even “civilized” people.

Rating

Buy Links

Amazon[image error] | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | iBooks | Google Play | Kobo

Special note before the reveal from the Brave New Girls team below. I was thrilled to participate in the third installment of this series (Tales of Heroines who Hack), so even though I did not contribute a story to this collection, I am still happy to share information about it. I am a strong believer of the mission set out by Mary and Paige throughout this series (highlighting stories about teen girls in STEM fields) so I will continue to encourage readers to check out the whole series, regardless of whether or not I have a story included. That being said, on to the reveal of another beautiful Brave New Girls cover!

Introduction

Title: The Coilhunter Chronicles
Author: Dean F. Wilson
Genre: Western, Steampunk
Release Date: November 5, 2018
Synopsis (from Amazon):

For Coilhunter (Book 1)

Welcome to the Wild North, a desolate wasteland where criminals go to hide – if they can outlast the drought and the dangers of the desert. Or the dangers of something else.

Meet Nox, the Coilhunter. A mechanic and toymaker by trade, a bounty hunter by circumstance. He isn’t in it for the money. He’s in it for justice, and there’s a lot of justice that needs to be paid.

Between each kill, he’s looking for someone who has kept out of his cross hairs for quite a while – the person who murdered his wife and children. The trail has long gone cold, but there are changes happening, the kind of changes that uncover footprints and spent bullet casings.

Plagued by nightmares, he’s made himself into a living one, the kind the criminals and con men fear.

So, welcome, fair folk, to the Wild North. If the land doesn’t get you, the Coilhunter will.

Why I Think Boys May Enjoy This

What Dean F. Wilson has created with this series is something pretty awesome and somewhat unique. Western Steampunk is not a completely new concept (think the old Will Smith movie Wild Wild West or even the video for violinist Lindsey Stirling’s “Roundtable Rival”), it’s not heavily tapped into. That is awesome for those of us looking for a new combination of genres and Wilson doesn’t disappoint, handling both elements of his story and world fantastically.

If I had to push this story into one genre over the other, it’s more Western and a bit Steampunk-lite (especially Coilhunter, the first book in this omnibus). Outside of Nox’s “toys” (mechanical gadgets he uses to help him in his bounty hunter job) and his mode of transportation (a monowheel, which is just epic in and of itself), the steampunk elements are not key to the plot or characterization. The second book, Rustkiller, explores in much more depth the steampunk aspects, with a more thorough involvement of the autonomous clockwork constructs.

That all being said, this series is otherwise a fantastic old school Wild West (or Wild North, as it is in this world) story with some updated tidbits. Nox is intriguing from the start, with his gruff exterior (and smoke-pluming mask) and his seemingly impervious moral compass (more Wyatt Earp than Billy the Kid). Wilson took the key components of our favorite lawmen of the Old West and gave us a bit of the coldness & heartbrokenness of the Saint of Killers (from Garth Ennis’s Preacher comics).

At the end of the day, Nox is a powerful and complicated main character and drives these stories. There are some nice minor characters in each story, some with recurring roles, and a plethora of scoundrels and villains (with very Dick Tracey-esque nicknames), but the Coilhunter stories brilliance begins and ends with the title character. Everything else is just gravy.

Content/Appropriateness

As with most Westerns, there is definitely violence and gunplay. Language concerns are virtually non-existent. Sexuality is touched upon in the existence and mention of prostitution, but there is no explicit sexual content in any of the stories. These books are clearly written with an adult audience in mind but I wouldn’t consider them inappropriate for a high schooler. I’d put the content rating on par with a PG13 rating.

Special Note For Audio Edition

As I listened to this on audio, I wanted to add a special note about the superb performance by R.C. Bray for narration. I think part of the reason I fell in love with Nox so much was the way Bray hit his gravelly drawl so dead on. His diversification of voice made it feel like it was a full cast performance sometimes. In Rustkiller, specifically, his ability to go back and forth from hard-as-nails Nox and ultra flamboyant Porridge, was just out of this world good.

Rating







Buy Links

Amazon

Last week I started my phone detox and decided to track the data publicly as a form of accountability. Here’s last week’s post: http://www.toonopolis.com/2019/02/25/phone-detox-a-public-experiment-day-1-results/.

As it’s been one week since I started, I figured I’d share how it’s going for anyone following (but mostly for myself).

As a reminder, this was my data using the iOS Screentime calculations from the 6 days prior to my focus on phone detoxing:

As I said last week, if you subtract the data from Sunday and just do the previous 6 days, I had my screen open about 7.6 HOURS PER DAY. Which is insane.

I did much better that first day, but let’s look and see how I did for the duration of the week:

Well then, I shaved off my screentime by about four hours PER DAY in my first full week of fully paying attention to this problem with data tracking. The biggest key here is the amount of wasted time with Facebook. I went from nearly 9 hours (1.5 hours per day) on Facebook (remember, only dividing by 6 for that data) to just 1.5 hours for the entire week! (or just 13 minutes per day). As I said after Day 1, the best part is that I didn’t really feel like I missed out on anything.

You’ll notice a huge spike in Pokemon Go playtime on Monday. Well, you can blame really bad RNG trying to get a Smeargle to spawn with the new photo feature (seriously, I spend like 3 hours while watching Umbrella Academy with my wife just taking pictures and not getting one to spawn). You’ll also see I have not really cut down much on Pokemon Go time, but that’s okay. It’s pretty much the only game I play anymore so I’m not worried about that.

The other thing I did later in the week was cut down on notifications from Messenger. I directed friends to move to regular text messages and only put on “badge” notifications for messenger (a lot of it was idle chat, fellow authors discussing projects, local Pokemon Go related chatter, etc. – ultimately, nothing really time-sensitive that needed immediate notification).

I notice I still pick up my phone a lot (80 times per day) but it was clearly for either Pokemon playing or direct communication (mostly text messages). Facebook fell drastically. All in all, I think my results are positive and I look forward to continuing to work on it. If you look at my Goodreads page (https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...), you’ll also see a huge uptick in books completed last week. This is not a coincidence!

Over the weekend, I read an amazing New York Times article by Kevin Roose (Do Not Disturb: How I Ditched My Phone And Unbroke My Brain) that really opened my eyes to my behaviors when it comes to my smartphone. I won’t reiterate most of his points here, because the article is worth reading! Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Like many people in my generation (born in 1982, I identify as an early/first-wave millennial), smartphones have become so ubiquitous that we don’t even realize there is a problem. Or, even if we do, we don’t realize the severity. The difference in Roose’s article versus many I have seen addressing this topic is that his approach and experience is not one where you just throw your phone in a lake and run off naked into the woods like Thoreau (okay, that reference was stolen from his article but it was perfect). Nor does it suggest that ALL smartphone usage needs to end or inherently stop. That level of extreme is just not one I’m interested in and I don’t think wholly necessary for a balanced life.

However, I do acknowledge that I pick up my phone way too much. I kill small spaces of time (and not just in the bathroom) with checking Facebook or Twitter or even just scrolling absent-mindlessly through my Pokemon in Pokemon Go. My wife and I have been discussing my issues for close to a year and how to improve them. I got an Apple watch to get notifications for text/phone calls without having to pick up my phone (justification: as the stay-at-home parent and first-line of communication for any problems with our children [one of whom is special needs], I couldn’t just completely disconnect). This helped a little.

I disabled push notifications on my phone and actually *all* notifications for any app other than Phone, Messages, Messenger, and Facebook (just couldn’t quite let go of that last one until this weekend). This also helped some, but not a lot. The behavior of just reaching for and picking up my phone was still ingrained in me.

When Apple rolled out its Screen Time with iOS 12, I looked at it and said, “Wow, I’m on my screen a lot” but once again justified it (eh, most of that is Pokemon Go, and most of the time it’s just open even if I’m not playing it). Of course, bear in mind I have had a Pokeball Plus (a device that lets me play a good bit of the game without even opening the app on my phone) since it released, so that was a bit of nonsense too.

After reading Roose’s article, I decided to give some of the methods a shot yesterday (2/24/19). It was a Sunday. My whole family was home. It was a good time to see about. I had spousal encouragement to back me up and the motivation to self-improve.

First, I screenshotted my data from the previous 7 days (well, 6 days minus the current day):

Taking into account that I took these screenshots on Sunday morning (10:47AM to be precise), it’s actually worse than it looks (which is already bad). Subtracting Sunday’s minimal data, and my screen time usage was actually 7.6 hours per day, not 6.5. I picked up my phone on average 105 times per day. And, as you can see, even with many notifications turned off, I got about 151 notifications a day. While most of these were still Messages/Messenger/Gmail, it was still a lot (this also didn’t count the fact that I still had on “banner” notifications for Facebook, even if “push” notifications were turned off, so any time I did open the phone, that little red number would encourage me to check and see what it was all about).

All in all, the numbers don’t lie and my phone is in front of my face WAAAAAY too much. Cue the exercise yesterday to see how it could go with a conscious effort (plus removing ALL push notifications that weren’t direct communication [email/messages/messenger/phone]). Plus, these were all notifications I could easily check on my watch to determine if they are important before picking up my phone. Here are the results from Day 1 of the experiment:

In a single day of conscious effort, I was able to cut my screen time down about FOUR AND A HALF HOURS from my average just the previous six days. And only 33 minutes of that time was on social media (brief checks of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for anything relevant but no major scrolling/engagement). Nearly 2 hours was still Pokemon Go, but it was more active playtime (a couple of raids with some friends, a little playing while running an errand or two, and 30 minutes of opening a Mystery Box for Meltans [where I let my 3yo catch most of them anyway as he was on my lap!]). The point is that I can identify exactly what I was doing in that entire 3h10m (for the most part). It wasn’t just idle time-wasting.

I still picked up my phone a lot, but 40 times fewer than my average. There’s a certain muscle memory reflex that will take time to alleviate I think. Luckily, though, the lack of notifications coming through led me to often not even open it when I picked it up. I think this part will take time to unlearn the habit. Notifications were down as well, but far more relevant to direct conversations with people or deleting emails (next goal: purify the inbox to cut down on notifications of junk/subscription stuff). Most importantly, I don’t really feel like I *missed* anything by only checking Facebook for 12 minutes on Sunday. I really don’t.

All in all, I’m very pleased with the results of this more concerted effort to get the smartphone use under control. If anyone is interested, I intend to come back with weekly updates here on my blog and see if I can keep it up. Public accountability would be delightful! I’ve already found myself more involved with the family, more engaged in the books I’ve been reading, and even less tired at the end of the night. Here’s hoping it sticks!

tl;dr: Guess the pop culture references for my Pokemon from Pokemon Go below! Enter to win a $5 Amazon Giftcard! Entry options below!

Long Version: I’m a big geek and I wanted to play a game using my Pokemon. When I write Toonopolis stories, I make a lot of pop culture references (those of us ‘in the business’ as well as your high school English teacher call these allusions). I often name my Pokemon with similar references.

After you play the game (or honestly, you can just skip it by answering the first question below) you can gain additional entries for the gift card by visiting me on social media or checking out my books on Amazon!