Exponential Growth.

Louis Shalako

Setting a rational sales goal, month to month, isn’t all that difficult. Making it happen isn’t all that difficult either, since it’s a rational goal. Here at Long Cool One Books, over the last three months, we’ve seen sales increases of ten percent or greater. It’s a kind of exponential growth, but like interest rates, whether you owe money, or you`re earning money on an investment, sales increases are compounded upon the previous month’s sales increase.

It is analogous and so the math works just fine.

Let’s assume you sold 100 books in December 2014. A ten percent increase would translate into 110 books as of January 31. That`s a straightforward, ten percent sales increase. By the end of February, you should be up to 121. It’s not ten more books a month, but ten percent more books per month. This results in sales of 132-point-something by March. There is a factor, and you can multiply Month One sales by that factor to project what sales might be in Month Twelve, if in fact you meet your sales goals, month-by-month, for an entire year.

The factor, using simple interest compounding techniques as a substitute for sales compounding, is 2.138428377. Simply put, if you can meet your ten percent sales-increase goal, month on month for twelve months, then you will be selling 213.8 books the next January for every 100 books you are selling this January. Ten percent increases are a form of exponential growth.

The math is pretty simple and here`s another link.

Beating Your Personal Best.

“Each week, her goal was to drop time in her races--not win, but beat her own personal best. Sometimes she only cut one-tenth of a second from her previous performance, but it was an improvement nonetheless and worth celebrating.”

This is exactly what we`re trying to do. This is why I go swimming, and try to see how far I can go. This is also why by the end of the season I can go farther than in the beginning of the season—I`m in training, and I`m keeping track accurately, and I`m trying to beat my personal best.

So our goal here for the month of September isn`t so much to attract a literary agent. Our goal here is not to make the New York Times Bestseller List. We know very well we`re not likely to release a novel and sell 100,000 copies. We`re unknown, but we`re also independent.

It is our greatest strength.

We don`t give a shit about any of that. What we want to do is to take last month`s (August, 2015), sales total and increase it by ten percent. That`s all, ladies and gentlemen. That`s all, ladies and gentlemen, month after month. We just have to keep going—that`s all.

In July, we sold 362 books. In August, 395 books. For September, we`re hoping for about 450 book sales across a bunch of platforms, all of which have strengths and weaknesses, and which must be treated on an individual basis. It is true, that a traditional publisher wouldn`t be interested in these kinds of numbers. They have a long tooth-to-tail ratio. For every book I sell, they would have to sell a thousand, maybe even ten thousand books just to break even.

They are no better at business than you or I.

The thing is, after twenty years on a disability pension, I really can`t succumb to that sense of entitlement and turn my nose up at a couple of hundred books a month. Especially since I`ve been seeing sales grow lately, when everyone else is blogging doom and gloom, everyone else is writing about the Top Ten Thousand Mistakes You Amateur Newbie Author`s Make, and WHY YOU`RE NEVER GOING TO BE VALIDATED BY SOMEONE IMPORTANT.

(There really shouldn`t be an apostrophe there in authors, Louis. – ed.)

(Point taken. P. S. Fuck off. Louis.)

So, you`re no doubt thinking, how do we achieve these ten percent increases in sales.

The simple answer is that we work ten percent harder, or for ten percent longer, or do our jobs ten percent better. WE WRITE TEN PERCENT MORE BOOKS. These are our own personal algorithms that we are gaming, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do.

Here at Long Cool One Books, we could write our product descriptions ten percent better. 

We could make our book covers ten percent better, okay, that sounds silly when all of art is so subjective. But merely working, pushing ahead at a constant rate, becoming better-skilled and more professional every day, probably helps.

Producing more products, each and every month, probably helps.

Becoming a better writer, and learning more about what people read, probably helps. Writing the sort of books that people want to read, might not actually help—that`s because those product categories are already extremely crowded by people following a trend. Finding a niche that is underserved, or badly-served, might help quite a bit.

Here at Long Cool One Books, reading the rules set down from on high for other people has been very illuminating for us. They`re the ones that told us to raise our prices to where we can make a living at it—which would price our books at about a hundred and eighty-five bucks each; and no one would ever buy one. They`re the ones that told us not to check our accounts, when that is a wonderful source of data and feedback. It will just depress you, or so they said.

They forgot to mention just how much it will empower you.

(They`re the ones that told us never to use a semi-colon. – ed.)

(Point taken. Now fuck off again. Louis.)

Here`s an interesting point. Let`s say you are lucky enough to land a traditional publishing contract, signing up, in your very first contract, with a small press. It looks like a lucky break. 

Someone else believes in you. They believe they can make money off of your work, the only question is why you don't. But how big is that advance. A couple of grand, five or ten grand tops. They`ll print up anywhere from 750 copies, (selling at forty bucks in an independent, brick-and-mortar store) to maybe, if you`re lucky, 2,000. You will never earn out your advance. You will likely never see a royalty cheque, and it takes years for the contract to revert. And you`ve sold somewhere between 750 and 2,000 books. The only street credibility you get is that you`ve been published.

This is the way to attract an agent. Or so they say. This is the way to make the bestseller lists—or so they say.

We`re going to continue to buck that trend, to reject all such advice, and just keep on doing what we`re already doing well. For one thing, we`ve distributed well over a hundred thousand books in five years. It`s taken that long to get where we are now. But you could submit books forever, without actually getting anywhere. That`s why so many people talk about luck in this business, when it`s really art and science that will get you to where you need to go.

Fuck them, anyways. I don`t have time for that shit.

To hell with the rest of the industry. But I will promise you this: guys like me are going to take a billion-dollar bite out of this industry in 2015. And next year, at least one-point-one billion. Maybe even one-point-one-one billion.

It`s called thinking outside the box, and they`ll lecture you on that too.

If you don`t believe it, just sit back and watch. Sit back and listen to them bitch, and whine, and piss and moan.

You will see, ladies and gentlemen.

End

Another article.

http://shalakopublishing.blogspot.ca/2013/09/production-goals.html

Life Takes Some Funny Turns.

Now it's all robots, of course.

Louis Shalako

Life takes some funny turns. Sometimes we’re just reacting to events. A lot of the time we're being pushed, and a lot of the time we’re just doing the best we can with what we got.

I have never liked being pushed, ladies and gentlemen.

When I was about eighteen, I got a job a Fibreglas Canada, bagging glass at their plant here in Chemical Valley. After two and a half months on the job, there was a layoff, and I didn’t have that much seniority. They laid off forty guys, maybe more. (It was a long time ago.) There was a two-week waiting period for unemployment insurance, and then the next week you get a cheque for the first week of your layoff. We were all union (or on probation at a union plant), and so Manpower as it was called back then, waived the job-search requirement. They knew what a layoff was.

So did my dad. He’d worked at Polysar for years. He was laid off one time for five or six weeks and he must have been scared shitless. I understand that much. Every time the contract came up for renewal, my old man would stop spending money. He’d be salting it away just in case there was a strike. We might have to survive on that for a while, right? Times were relatively good, the company usually came through, and strikes rarely happened. He had every right to be scared, of course, with a wife, three kids, a mortgage, two cars and all those mouths to feed.

I had another job within a few days—my old man told me there was no way he was putting up with bearded, drunken, pot-smoking bums laying on the couch all day while he was off sweating his bag off in the plant. He hated long hair, he hated rock music. He hated a lot of things.

I took a job at Holmes Insulation, which was easy enough to get as I had production experience in fibreglass and wool products. The pay was less, the working conditions were atrocious with wool hanging all over you. It hung in the air, it was draped over everything in the place, it crunched in your sandwiches and in your coffee. It was a hundred times worse than Fibrescratch, which was what everyone who worked there called it. The itch never left you, and in fact glass fibres came out of work clothes in the laundry. The stuff infiltrated into every other article of clothing that went through there. After a while it was in the blankets, sheets and pillowcases. And Holmes was worse.

I lasted four hours at Holmes. I walked out during first break, and got in my car and went home without looking back. The next day I was a bit surprised to find fibres, sticky wool hanging from the underside of my car roof…anyways, my old man must have been on his day off.

Rock wool, horrible stuff to work with. (Achim Hering, Wiki.)

And I had just quit my job for reasons which he clearly could not comprehend. I had worked for a year at K-Mart as a stockman. From there I got hired into Fibreglas. I would have gotten an unemployment cheque within a week or ten days, by this time.

I can’t recall exactly what was said. It wasn’t good and I had had enough. I ended up going downtown, after consulting the phone book, and talking to a recruiter for the Canadian Armed Forces. I told him all of this stuff. How my old man was all over me like a dirty shirt, and how I was laid off from Fibrescratch, how I had tried at Holmes, and how I just couldn’t stand it anymore. Get me out of here. Teach me to be fucking man, or whatever, you know the stupid shit people say to young guys all the time.

And he turned me down. He told me that I was upset, and that my attitude wasn’t all that good. Not what we’re looking for. I admitted that my teeth weren’t very good, which he could probably see. My old man would have been all over that—join the army, they’ll fix your teeth, put a roof over your head, they buy your clothes for you, your boots, and oh, yeah, they feed you too.

He was always like that, very practical I’m sure, and I might have told the recruiter some of that too. Anyway, he sent me home. He told me, come back next week, and if you haven’t changed your mind we’ll sign you up.

I went home, and my old man had gone out, probably to the union hall for his two glasses of draft beer.

By two-thirty in the afternoon the phone had rang. It was the plant—they were calling me back.

They must have gotten some new orders and everyone was going back to work.

I might have taken some small pleasure in telling my old man about the recruiter—even more pleasure in telling him I was going back to work.

But I learned something, or figured out something about my old man that day. He grew up in the Great Depression. There were eight kids, and mom and dad in a three-bedroom house. His older brothers and sisters couldn’t wait to get jobs, move into a ten-cent a night room at the YMCA and get the hell out of their parents' house.

For him the greatest sin of the age, was to lose your job. To quit a job, any job was unthinkable. My father understood some of this, as it had to come from somewhere—from his own family life. He told me something that’s not very funny. It ain’t funny at all, but he said it.

“If someone was cutting lawns for fifty cents a week, down at the rectory, and the priest fucked them up the ass, they didn’t dare go home and tell their parents. Their parents would have beaten the shit out of them…” That’s what the man said, ladies and gentlemen."They would have washed your mouth out with soap for telling such stories. They'd be telling you that you're going straight to hell for saying things like that about a priest..."

“Don’t you understand how important that fifty cents a week is to this family…???”

He told me all about it.

He understood their attitude well enough, for they had come from Quebec, looking for work and a better life. It was also one of the most priest-ridden societies in the world at the time, although things might be better now.

Anyways, that’s how I almost joined the army—and got turned down, and went on to work for over a year at Fibreglas before moving onto something else, the door business or something. I’ve had fifty or a hundred jobs in my lifetime, on at least a thousand different job-sites or in a thousand different workplaces.

Well, I got my pension now. Now I work for myself. I write books and stories and I will not apologize for that. Before he died, my old man finally read a couple of my books. That was special, it really was, although I have been told he blamed my mother for my having become a writer.

Old attitudes die hard, ladies and gentlemen. While my old man was a union man, and a socialist in his own way, he was also pretty conservative in some respects. You have to accept certain things about your folks, you have to forgive them for being who they are sometimes. 

Imagine what the poor man thought of me studying art, ladies and gentlemen.

But I will be damned if you are going to rule my life, sir.

In that sense, nothing has changed, sir.

END