Books and Bytes
Mar. 18th, 2026 10:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeMori: nobody jumps out of bed going, “Good morning world, today I do my TAXES!” with a big smile on their face, but man alive, is it neat to see what sold and what didn’t, when and where.
The Homeless Year, for instance, was never popular as an ebook, probably because it looks like dogshit. (This isn’t an insult; Rogan made it mostly while homeless and miserable with whatever materials he had on hand, and that roughness shows. On paper, that can give you some zinester cachet, but digital art has six billion colors for free and the expectations therein.) However, it’s always sold reliably on paper—never any big booms of interest, never anyone’s favorite far as we know, but quiet and dependable. “It does its job,” as Rogan puts it, and I think we’re on our third print run of it. The only comparable seller with a spine is AllFam, and thanks to Olivia Li’s Kickstarter, we were able to print a WAY bigger run of it.
Meanwhile, Multi Orgasmic sells fine on paper, nothing special, but it sells like GANGBUSTERS as an ebook. It sells reliably and constantly, damn near every month. It’s the #2 ebook bestseller of all time, after AllFam, and AllFam had a Vulture journalist and academics talking about it. Multi Orgasmic, meanwhile, sells entirely through secret word of mouth, far as we can tell; people rarely talk about it in places we find out about, for presumably the obvious reasons. (That it’s apparently less risky to discuss a book about heinous child rape than happy headmate sex ed is a talk for another day... though that was easier to claim BEFORE AllFam got banned from itch.io.)
Then you got stuff like Henchwench for Hire, which has been successfully selling as a paper zine for years now, has been on the Dreamwidth voting pile for just as long, and never come close to winning. I guess we should make an ebook of it sometime? But demand hasn’t exactly been high. (Meanwhile, someone at the cons had multiple times come and asked us hopefully if there was a sequel. We ended up emailing them the scraps of other stuff we wrote for it. Who could say no to that face?)
It’s all about context. Different stuff sells in different places. Different events have different people. We’ve been spectacularly unsuccessful selling at any bookstore, asides from the Million Year Picnic in Harvard square, but our self-help one-pagers get periodic bulk orders from libraries, health centers, stuff like that. We are slowly ending up in library collections.
It’s satisfying to me, learning that stuff. And while numbers are one thing, commentary is another. We’ll probably write more Henchwench, just because of that one hopeful person!vaguelyautonomous put Reverend Alpert on Rogan’s “oh hey, I should finish that” radar, just from putting a lot of cool comments on the decade-old stories! When people show they’re into something, we notice! Even and especially the old stuff; it helps break Rogan’s residual tumblr-bile-mines indoctrination that says his art is too bigoted and problematique to be seen. When folks get excited anyway, we get excited! It’s the whole performer virtuous cycle of shared joy. And we have a low threshold, guys, one big enough fan can often get us excited to do more... IF we know about it. The monthly votes are handy because it helps break the silence and we get to know what folks want to see.
It’s almost too bad we’re mostly known for mental health nonfiction now, because we do truly like writing fiction too. Doing both keeps us balanced.
Okay, back to tax prep!
The Homeless Year, for instance, was never popular as an ebook, probably because it looks like dogshit. (This isn’t an insult; Rogan made it mostly while homeless and miserable with whatever materials he had on hand, and that roughness shows. On paper, that can give you some zinester cachet, but digital art has six billion colors for free and the expectations therein.) However, it’s always sold reliably on paper—never any big booms of interest, never anyone’s favorite far as we know, but quiet and dependable. “It does its job,” as Rogan puts it, and I think we’re on our third print run of it. The only comparable seller with a spine is AllFam, and thanks to Olivia Li’s Kickstarter, we were able to print a WAY bigger run of it.
Meanwhile, Multi Orgasmic sells fine on paper, nothing special, but it sells like GANGBUSTERS as an ebook. It sells reliably and constantly, damn near every month. It’s the #2 ebook bestseller of all time, after AllFam, and AllFam had a Vulture journalist and academics talking about it. Multi Orgasmic, meanwhile, sells entirely through secret word of mouth, far as we can tell; people rarely talk about it in places we find out about, for presumably the obvious reasons. (That it’s apparently less risky to discuss a book about heinous child rape than happy headmate sex ed is a talk for another day... though that was easier to claim BEFORE AllFam got banned from itch.io.)
Then you got stuff like Henchwench for Hire, which has been successfully selling as a paper zine for years now, has been on the Dreamwidth voting pile for just as long, and never come close to winning. I guess we should make an ebook of it sometime? But demand hasn’t exactly been high. (Meanwhile, someone at the cons had multiple times come and asked us hopefully if there was a sequel. We ended up emailing them the scraps of other stuff we wrote for it. Who could say no to that face?)
It’s all about context. Different stuff sells in different places. Different events have different people. We’ve been spectacularly unsuccessful selling at any bookstore, asides from the Million Year Picnic in Harvard square, but our self-help one-pagers get periodic bulk orders from libraries, health centers, stuff like that. We are slowly ending up in library collections.
It’s satisfying to me, learning that stuff. And while numbers are one thing, commentary is another. We’ll probably write more Henchwench, just because of that one hopeful person!
vaguelyautonomous put Reverend Alpert on Rogan’s “oh hey, I should finish that” radar, just from putting a lot of cool comments on the decade-old stories! When people show they’re into something, we notice! Even and especially the old stuff; it helps break Rogan’s residual tumblr-bile-mines indoctrination that says his art is too bigoted and problematique to be seen. When folks get excited anyway, we get excited! It’s the whole performer virtuous cycle of shared joy. And we have a low threshold, guys, one big enough fan can often get us excited to do more... IF we know about it. The monthly votes are handy because it helps break the silence and we get to know what folks want to see.It’s almost too bad we’re mostly known for mental health nonfiction now, because we do truly like writing fiction too. Doing both keeps us balanced.
Okay, back to tax prep!
