The 6×9″ paperback version of The Extrapolated Man became available on Amazon late last night. What a rush!
I feel like I’m just one step ahead of everything in this whole process, so I’m sure there will be a new set of learning experiences associated with actually publishing a book. But “The journey of a thousand miles…” and all that! Off we go 🙂
The Extrapolated Man is live on Amazon as a Kindle ebook! It has been a long time coming, so this is really just an incredibly satisfying moment for me. And what better time to plant this seed than on a new moon. I hope it bears a bountiful harvest of readers. I think Hekate Binah would approve.
The print on demand (POD) paperback is in the review pipe, and will likely pop out late Monday night 3/11/2024. Amazon is a weird beast, and things take an unexpectedly long time to propagate through its subsystems. Hopefully my author bio will magically link up in due course, lol.
As I wormed my way deeper into the self-publishing apple, and learned the mysteries of ASINs and ISBNs and required metadata and all that cool publishing sh*t, I realized I was bumping up against the pithy core by naming my website after my first book – The Extrapolated Man. I mean… there are more books in the works, and short stories, and artifacts. Pretty obvious in retrospect, I know. Let’s just say I was in a hurry to get something online, and I ran with what I had in hand, which was the book title.
But now I have to go buy ISBNs – which are the unique numeric IDs that get books into bookstores and libraries and virtually any online platform except Amazon – and they are not particularly cheap. We’re talking $125 per ISBN in quantities 1-9, and then $295 for a 10-pack. Which is conveniently and extractively sized to make you buy the 10-pack because you need at least 2 ISBNs and more likely 4, since they are specific to a unique product (ebook, paperback, audio book, hardback). Which is a bit of an astonishing ripoff if you think about it, because we’re talking about $125 for a single record in a database, that you create yourself. As a former database guy, I’d guess their incremental cost is in the pennies zone. Such is life in a world jammed full of monopolies.
But I digress.
Where I was going with ISBNs is that they include IDs for your product and for its publisher. Which in turn linked to a website. Which made me step back and go, huh, I should have a cool publisher name, and a nifty logo on the spine of my book. A row of Mars & Torchship logos lined up on my bookshelf would look pretty sweet. That appeals to my compulsive over-organized visual brain. But what website should it link too? Oh. Yeah. This one, ideally.
And so before I got too far along, it seemed best to change the website’s name to something more inclusive. Now, the usual drill is for authors to name their websites after themselves, because they’re the product, right? Or at least the brand. Douglas Franklin! W00t! But something about that kind of bugs me. I mean google doesn’t care. If I manage to get this lumbering beast off the ground, then searches on me will link to here just as easily as to me.com. And while “you are your brand” fits this end-stage-capitalism moment, where we are expected to monetize every fucking thing, it fails to capture the messy reality of life. I’d rather my brand was the worlds I create.
So here we are. Welcome to Extrapolated Worlds, home of author and maker Doug Franklin!
When I told one of my friends that I had finally finished my science fiction novel THE EXTRAPOLATED MAN, they replied that at least the hard work was over. And then we both laughed, because writing a novel is a lot like hunting moose. You go out and spend a week or so in the hills, having a nice time doing just about exactly what you like doing. Getting up early to hike, sitting under a spruce tree listening to the wind blow and glassing the hills around you, calling from a tree stand at dusk with a friend who has brought a little something to take the chill off. And then the moment comes: you’ve found a legal moose, and he’s close enough to shoot and not too far to haul, and you finally pull the trigger. And that’s when the fun is done and the real work begins, because it takes a lot of effort to turn a moose in the field into meat in the freezer. Those things are huge. I can’t even carry a hindquarter anymore; that’s what kids are for. (Thanks Sam! Thanks Max!)
So that’s where I’m at in this process. It’s time to turn this beast of a book into something that sustains me and my family. It’s time to publish. And that requires making a decision: should I self-publish or go the traditional route? I’ve dreamed about seeing my books on store shelves since I was a kid. So traditional publishing has a lot of pull for me. And I was fortunate to get some attention early on, right up to getting a contract offer. (Thanks Stoney! Thanks Walt!) That was such a rush. I had my finger on the trigger! But times have changed since I was a kid. Only 2% of traditionally published authors make over $100K a year. The next 8% make between $60K and $100K. It falls off pretty rapidly from there. The bottom line is that the vast majority of published authors need side gigs and hustles and maybe even full time jobs, because otherwise they simply can’t make ends meet.
That sucks.
It is also a relatively new phenomenon. It used to be that “midlist” authors could actually make a living at their craft. But over the last few decades, there has been a tremendous consolidation of the publishing industry. Which is of course the same story as in many other industries. Because capitalism! So as all that power and money accrues to a tiny number of publishing houses, what happens? Well, basically the producers (that would be me!) get screwed.
Here’s an interesting number: 2000 hours. That’s how long it takes to write a typical novel. (Mine is a bit of a honker, so probably more like 3000 hours, or really 4000 if I’m being honest because I spent a lot of time in revisions.) 2000 hours is also the aspirational American work year (8 hrs/day x 5 days/wk = 40 hrs/wk, 40 hrs/wk x 50 wk/yr =2000 hrs). So if you hold down a full time job and write a novel in a year, you worked 16 hours a day. I’m old enough to have a realistic sense of what I’m capable of, and 16 work hours a day ain’t it. So let’s do the math. Say I can tolerate an honest 50 hour work week. That’s 40 for the Man and 10 for writing. So at that rate it’ll take about 4 years to write the next novel. By which time I’ll be 67. Damn. Also, are any readers I manage to attract going to remember me four years after they finish my epic science fiction novel THE EXTRAPOLATED MAN? Ha! I think not.
So what does this have to do with self-publishing versus traditional publishing? Thanks for asking! These days, if I self-publish a novel on Amazon or Apple Books, instead of getting single-digit royalties like I would for a printed book, I get about 70% of the retail price. I also get a world-wide market. And I don’t have to thread the needle of finding an agent who finds an editor who works for a publisher who is very interested in minimizing their risk and maximizing their profit. Which could take years.
What I don’t get with self-publishing is marketing. That’s all on me. But as it turns out, as a noob it’s mostly on me in traditional publishing as well. And advances are thing of the past. Things that make you say “Huh,” right? So the question becomes one of values: do I want to make a living out of writing, or do I want to be part of the club? Make no mistake, I have as much vanity and ego as anyone. Probably more. I’d fucking love to be part of the club of traditionally published authors. They are my heroes. But I need to make a living at this, or I need to do something else with my time.
So there you have it: wants versus needs. That’s not such a hard decision after all. And who knows, maybe after I self-publish my awesome epic science fiction novel THE EXTRAPOLATED MAN, I’ll get an invite to join the club. In the meantime, with a little help from friends and family, I’ll be hauling my own meat, Alaska-style.
In which my misadventures with prostate cancer lead to medical tourism in Germany…
A couple years after my initial diagnosis and adoption of a “watchful waiting” approach, my PSA test scores started to creep up, and I started looking for treatments that didn’t involve willful destruction of my basic plumbing. There were all sorts of semi-experimental procedures that attempted to do the job, like high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) and cryotherapy where they stick needles in and freeze the tumor, but at least at the time none were much better than a good old-fashioned prostatectomy. I was really hoping for the male equivalent of a lumpectomy.
Somewhere along the way I stumbled on hyperthermia, which involves jacking up the temperature of the rotty bits just enough to kill the cancer cells whilst leaving the healthy stuff intact. It seemed plausible, so next thing you know I was on a plane to Germany with my wife. Our destination was Klinik Marinus am Stein, there to submit myself to the tender ministrations of Dr. Axel Weber.
The big idea was – essentially – to microwave my prostate, which is an organ roughly the size of a walnut, without cooking anything else. So the way Dr. Weber did this was with a machine of his own invention. The process involved placing a balloon inside my bladder that anchored a microwave emitter a fixed distance downstream, as it were, hopefully in the middle of said walnut.
Now, there’s really only one way into a person’s bladder that doesn’t involve a sharp knife, which is through the urethra. Which in guys, exits the body through – you knew this was coming – the penis. So there I was, feet in the stirrups, with Dr. Weber leaning over me with a well-lubed microwave emitter roughly the size of a mechanical pencil, saying in a heavy German accent, “Look into my eyes!” while my wife looked on. It is a moment burned into my memory.
Yeah. Good times.
As a palate cleanser, I went off and trekked in the Himalaya for three weeks, which was a truly amazing experience. And also speaks to the degree to which the procedure was not destructive. But was it effective? Hard to say. My numbers went back down and stayed down for half-a-dozen years, so I thought it was a good spend at ~$8K all up (none covered by insurance, of course, because America).
But nothing lasts forever, and about the time the COVID-19 pandemic got rolling, my PSA scores reached the inflection point of the “hockey stick” curve and threatened to go vertical. Not a good sign.
More to come in part 3!