number-crunching

Just putting my December royalty figures into the spread sheet — the statement arrived just before Christmas but this is the first chance I’ve had to do more than glance at it. Time to throw out a few numbers that might be of interest.

My best-selling book is still Dolphin Dreams, which has now reached 2151 copies sold since it went on sale. Yes, very much small press numbers, but not bad going for a small press book. For the curious, around a thousand of those came from direct sales from the publisher’s website before it went made available through the distributors, and about 3/4 of the total number since release is from direct sales. For distributor sales, Fictionwise has around double the numbers going through All Romance eBooks.

Second best is the first Lord and Master book, which has sold 1829 copies. Again, around 3/4 through the publisher website, but this time three times as many from Fictionwise as from ARe.

That’s the general pattern on my books — major share is through Loose Id, with the largest chunk of distributor sales coming through Fictionwise, but a significant fraction of distributor sales through ARe, and a tiny trickle through others. (My ebook titles aren’t on Amazon, so I have nothing to report one way or the other there.) That’s one author, through one publisher; other authors report different experiences.

The second Lord and Master book has now sold 1020 copies, almost as many as the first book had after the same number of months on release. That’s pretty pleasing for a sequel, as it suggests that a lot of people liked the first one.

Promises To Keep is the oldest of my titles which are still in print at Loose Id, having been released for Halloween 2004. Yes, more than five years ago, not long after Loose Id opened. It still sells half a dozen copies a month — not a great deal of money, but rather gratifying nevertheless that people are still interested in buying an old backlist title.

A couple of points to note here: a) my books typically sell 500-1500 copies in the initial 2 year contract, b) that’s a two year contract taking only the rights the publisher has a reasonable chance of using, not a life-of-copyright contract grabbing all rights, c) I get a detailed monthly royalty statement, on time, that breaks down exactly which titles sold through which venues, and how much money I got for each venue and title. Now, obviously I’d like to be in mass market paperback and looking at numbers with another zero or two on the end — but even in the small press market, there are good and bad publishers. Anyone with a zero fewer on the end of their sales numbers should be asking themselves if there are better options. Ditto if your publisher claims that it’s too difficult to provide detailed royalty statements so that you know what they owe you. As for life-of-copyright, that’s not automatically bad, but they had better be offering something worthwhile in return.

But… even someone who can sell ebooks consistently at that level can have the occasional “sink without trace” title. I’ve got one that barely scraped past 200 after two years. I have an idea as to why, but no hard evidence. There are no guarantees in this game, just ways to improve the odds in your favour.

Back to work on the accounts. One of the joys of wandering from country to country is that one ends up having to file tax returns in more than one of them, and they have different rules. Blech…

{Note: all numbers in this assume me not cocking up entering the data into 1-2-3…)

More stuff in the Hugo voting packet

Yes, I’m slow posting this. It’s been a long week at work. Anyway, Scalzi posted a few days ago to say that more stuff has been added to the Hugo voting packet, so you now have even more incentive to buy a supporting membership for Worldcon should you not have already done so.

book log: Andre Norton — The Gifts of Asti

Short story originally published under the “Andrew North” pseudonym, now out of copyright. Nice little short about the last priestess of a god with both genuine power and an implied policy of non-interference. As invaders take the city below, the priestess and her non-human colleague take the back door out of the mountain temple, and find themselves on a strange path to a strange place of safety.

With this being a short story, the world-building isn’t to the same depth as in one of the novels, but Norton was adept at implying things with a few words. This has a number of Norton’s favourite themes presented in miniature, and is well worth a read if you’re a fan.

The text is available from Project Gutenberg and mirrors. The Gutenberg text is also available as a public domain audiobook at the LibriVox project, in both mp3 format and Ogg Vorbis format. The audiobook is about 41 minutes long and read by Mark Nelson. (You can find both the text and the Ogg Vorbis file mirrored at Wikisource.) I listened to the first ten minutes or so, and thought that it was an enjoyable performance.

International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day

I was too tired last night to edit and upload something, so nothing new this morning. I may get a chance tonight, but am not promising anything. In the meantime, there are already quite a few free pieces on my website, including my first profic novel series, and a couple of shorts from a current series.

http://julesjones.com/fiction/downloads.html

Hugo voting packet now available

More details at the Whatever:

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/04/20/the-2009-hugo-voters-packet-now-live/

cheap books — Hugo voting packet

John Scalzi is organising an ebook Hugo packet again, and this year’s collection is looking very good indeed. The deal here is that if you are a voting member of Worldcon (the annual world convention for science fiction and fantasy fandom), you can sign up to receive a free package of electronic versions of a lot of the books and short stories on the Hugo short list, the better that you may read them and then vote for them in the Hugos.

The bad news is that you have to be a voting member of Worldcon, and that costs money — at minimum you need to buy a supporting membership. The good news is that the packet would cost you rather more than the minimum $50 membership to go and buy commercially, so if these are books you’d like to read, this is a very good deal even if you’re not otherwise interested in Worldcon.

What do the authors and publishers get out of this, given that they’re donating the texts and get no direct financial return? Publicity. It’s a way to get their award shortlisted material in front of the people who can vote for that award. That’s good in a number of ways, not least the concept of “the first hit is free”.

More details at Scalzi’s blog:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/04/02/hugo-voter-packet-update/

Fictionwise release: A Kiss at Midnight

Loose Id have been busy releasing their backlist through their distributors. And with perfect timing, the New year’s Eve themed anthology A Kiss At Midnight has just gone up at Fictionwise. This is an anthology of three sf&f romance novellas, from myself, Emily Veinglory, and Ally Blue. Here’s the blurb for mine. As usual, there are excerpts on my website, and short blurbs and excerpts for all three novellas on Loose Id’s website.

First Footer

They say that how you spend New Year’s Day will set the pattern for the rest of your year. Matthew Ryder was hoping not to be single by the end of the New Year’s Eve party, but the blind date promised by his matchmaking friend never showed up. Still, there’s always hope in the form of the old custom of First Footing. To bring good luck to the household, the first person across the threshold after midnight should be a tall dark man holding a lump of coal and a bottle of whisky, and in some places they still like to provide this service for neighbours.

A tall dark stranger does indeed knock on the door at midnight, and he’s the man of Matthew’s dreams. Intelligent, good sense of humour. Handsome too, if you go for fur, tail, and a very seductive purr. For the First Footer is a First Contact team member, with a bit of a problem. There’s making a discreet landing in an uninhabited area, and then there’s landing your spacecraft in a peat bog.

It’s going to be an interesting year for Matthew…

Full Syndicate series now on the website

I’ve just uploaded the draft page of The Syndicate: Volume 2, which means the whole series is now available as free downloads on my site. I haven’t finished updating the rest of the site to match yet, so you may need to use the links below for the moment to find the pages:

Volume 1
Volume 2
Volume 3
Four Leaf Clover

Volumes 1 and 2 are actually parts 1 and 2 of a single novel constructed as a fix-up. Volume 3 is a sequel which follows on immediately from the end of Volume 2. Each volume is around 40,000 words. Four Leaf Clover is a novelette set some time after the end of Volume 3.

Here’s the blurb for the paperback edition of volumes 1&2:

When making life hell for the poor twitching users isn’t any fun for the sysadmin, what’s a geek to do? Run away to space, of course.

Allard’s current job is a nightmare. He’ll do anything to find another–including joining the slightly nutty crew of the Mary Sue, who have an even more malevolent attitude to traditional management structures than he does.

The crew and joint owners of the spaceship Mary Sue were looking for an IT expert who shared their political ideals. That’s not Allard, but that doesn’t bother him as long as he’s left out of it. He’s just looking for a working environment where he likes the people and the job. He’ll be pleased if they like him in return, although he’s not betting on it.

He gets all that and more. New friends, a non-organic quasi-son.

And then there’s Vaughan. Tall, gorgeous, inconveniently sexy, given to expansive gestures and talking far too much–which Allard plans to tell him as soon as he can get a word in edgeways.

Or at least as soon as he can get Vaughan’s tongue out of his mouth.

First thoughts on the Cybook Gen3

I bought a second-hand Cybook Gen3 ebook reader from my writing partner last month, and I’ve been using it long enough now to have some initial thoughts about it. This isn’t a proper review, as I haven’t been exploring all its features. What I *have* been doing with it is simply reading some of the books she’d loaded on it, mostly on the bus to and from work.

And the obvious question is — do I regret spending one hundred pounds on this thing? After all, I could buy quite a few paperbacks for that money. To which the answer is “no”, and for a specific reason I’ll get to at the end of this post. And it’s not one of the obvious reasons, like saving shelf space or being able to carry a hundred books with me at all times, although I can see the advantages there.

Would I buy one at full market price? (Currently 269 pounds if shipped to the UK.) Probably not, but mostly because the wee beastie is physically fragile, and I fully expect that I’ll manage to break it within a year or two given my current usage of it. I can see why other people would pay that for it, and why I might in other circumstances.