Analyzing the Royalties

One of the many things my agent does for me is to take my royalties information from DAW and track it all in a nice, convenient spreadsheet.  This allows me to better indulge my data fetish, examining trends and playing with numbers until my wife reminds me I’m supposed to be going grocery shopping instead of spending all afternoon on the computer.

Last week I received the spreadsheet for my royalties statement through June 30, 2010 — right before Red Hood’s Revenge came out.

This is my fifth royalties check from DAW.  (They come out every six months.)  As of June 30, I had five books in print, four of which had earned out their advances.  I’m still waiting for the reserve against returns to go away on Mermaid, at which point I expect that one to start paying out as well.

To me, this royalty statement — particularly the graph I put together below — illustrates the importance of a backlist.  You can see how the royalty checks have grown pretty steadily over the past three years as I’ve continued to write and publish books.  This latest check will be about ten times what I got back in June of 2008 (point 1 on the graph below).

Some authors who get that bajillion-dollar advance for their first book.  I’m not one of them.  The slower but steady approach seems to be working for me though, at least so far.

Those books will eventually go out of print.  But DAW is pretty good about keeping things in print for a while, so I’m hopeful this trend will continue.

Another interesting data point came when I compared print sales to electronic.  I believe e-books are growing, and electronic sales are likely to take up a larger portion of overall sales.  For the moment though … well, take a look at the breakdown of total sales per book:

I’ve had the best electronic sales with Stepsister Scheme (don’t ask me why).  For that book, e-books make up about 4.3% of the total sales.  I don’t really have enough data to say how much or how quickly those e-book sales seem to be growing.  For now, while I definitely appreciate the extra royalties, they’re not yet a significant factor for me.

Another interesting point from that second graph: total sales of Stepsister are a little lower than sales of Goblin Quest.  Likewise for Mermaid.  This threw me for a second.  After all, the weekly sales numbers for the princess books are great, so why are the goblin books selling better?

The answer is, the goblin books have been selling longer.  Goblin Quest came out in November of 2006.  Stepsister came out in January, 2009.  Meaning in a year and a half, Stepsister Scheme has sold almost as many copies as Goblin Quest did in just under four.

And now it’s time to save this post and go get groceries.  Questions and comments are welcome, as always.

Anniversary

Seven years ago today, I married an incredible, smart, kind-hearted, patient woman, someone I love, who also happened to be my best friend.

The picture below is not from that day.  The actual wedding was in May the next year, but we were legally married in October.  As it turns out, it takes a little of the stress out of the whole wedding thing if you’ve already been married half a year.  However, this is one of my favorite pictures from the whole marriage/wedding thing, and I believe it best captures that sense of becoming a family.

Marriage is not what I expected.  It’s not what the movies led me to expect. It’s not always easy, and it’s not perfect.  (Though we’re getting closer … I got her hooked on Buffy, and I think I’ve successfully gotten her into Doctor Who as well.)  But looking back, asking her to marry me was the best decision I’ve ever made.  Hectic as these past seven years have sometimes been, I wouldn’t trade ’em for anything.

Happy anniversary, Amy!  I love you!

(A pic from the October marriage day is behind the cut.  I posted this one partly because it’s a nice picture, and partly because people occasionally ask what I looked like with long hair…)

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First Book Friday: John Levitt

Welcome to First Book Friday, an ongoing series exploring how various authors sold their first books.

Today we have John Levitt, whose lifestyle incorporates both the high-flying luxury of the author and the nonstop partying of the rocker, for approximately 400% more awesomeness.  (Check out his band’s page on MySpace.)  In a world full of cat-loving authors and readers, John dares to write urban fantasy with a dog on the cover.  Because that’s just the kind of guy he is.  He’s also on LiveJournal as johnlevitt.

Um… okay, so both kids have been sick this week, and my intro-writing skills are a bit overtired.  Anyway, here’s John!

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I’m one of the few people who has not one, but two first book stories. Not really, of course — there can only be one first book, but for all practical purposes I have two.

My first novel was published back in 1989. I’d spent some years previous to that as a police officer, and I used to tell my friends various “war stories,” which seemed to entertain them. So I decided I’d write a book about my police experiences.

Back in those ancient days, it was a lot easier for a first time writer to get published. Most publishers still took unagented submissions, and getting an agent wasn’t the holy grail it’s become today. Besides, I knew someone who knew someone, and a casual word was all it took for an agent to take a look at the ms.

He liked it, and tried to sell it for me on a handshake agreement. No contract, no forms, just a simple verbal agreement – fraught with danger now, but back then was a simpler time.

He couldn’t sell the book – everyone liked it, but didn’t think it would sell, because it was about police work in Salt Lake City, not L.A. or Miami. But the editor at Doubleday passed reluctantly, and mentioned that if I ever wrote a novel, he’d love to see it.

How hard can that be, I thought? Ah, the arrogance of the clueless. But I wrote one, a thriller titled Carnivores, and it sold to St. Martin’s Press. I was happy, but not overwhelmed. I assumed getting a novel published was honestly no big thing. A year later, I sold a sequel. As I said, a simpler time.

Then, for various reasons, I quit writing. Fast forward to 15 years later. I’d always been a reader of fantasy  and had in mind a desire to write a modern fantasy, a book combining magic and mayhem, P.I. noir with odd creatures and black magicians. I started it on a whim, not knowing if there was any market for it, and then discovered that not only was there a market, but a complete sub genre called urban fantasy.

So I finished it up, and went about finding an agent. I had no doubt about finding one; I assumed it would be easy. I was a published author, I’d gotten a rave review from Publisher’s Weekly and an enthusiastic blurb from Steven King himself for Carnivores. I researched agents, found the one I thought best suited for me, and dashed off a query letter.

I got back a very nice rejection note, saying though my credentials were impressive, the idea just didn’t grab her. I was actually shocked; that’s how naïve I was about how the business had changed. So I reworked the query, and sent it off to my second choice, and got an enthusiastic request for a partial. This was more like it. Except, this agent passed as well – just didn’t grab him. About this time I realized things  might be a bit more difficult than they used to be.

It took me about 8 months and numerous rejections before I landed my agent – but as it turned out, she was the perfect agent for me in every way. She helped me polish Dog Days [B&N |  Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon], an urban fantasy, (pointing out where she thought I’d gone astray), and submitted to five houses – three rejects and two offers. And this time, I was properly thrilled. I went with Ace, who offered a two book deal, then another two. And I’ve been writing ever since.

Thursday Links

1. A Michigan school is refusing to allow a transgender student to be homecoming king.  Even though this student received the most votes, he is listed in the school’s records as female, and therefore the school administration says he is ineligible.  Personally, I hope the school gets idiot-slapped for this.  But I keep thinking to myself, those kids elected an openly transgender student as their homecoming king.  I can’t imagine that happening when I was in high school 20 years ago.  Change is a slow thing, but this gives me hope … for the kids, if not for the adults.

2. The Sorting Hat: Which Kind of Activist Are You?  Yonmei‘s piece explores the different approaches to confrontation and activism, and touches a bit on what I talked about in Anger vs. Reason.  Only Yonmei uses Harry Potter references, and came up with a much more entertaining post.

3. Getting Published is Not a Crap Shoot.  I’ve said this before, on many occasions.  Writer Beware says the same thing.  I take this as official proof that I’m right, so from now on, anyone who refers to publishing as a lottery, crap shoot, or any other gambling metaphor shall immediately be booted in the head.

4. Empire Strikes Back Chess Set, by icgetaway.  Because it is awesome.  This is a sequel to his Star Wars chess set, which I linked to a while back.  Click the pic or link for the full photo set on Flickr.

Diabetes Details 9: The Diagnosis

Previous diabetes posts are available by clicking the diabetes tag.

I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes on October 31, 1998.  That’s right, the day I learned my pancreas was a lazy quitter and I’d have to monitor my carb intake for the rest of my life, I got to make my way through a hospital packed full of Halloween candy for the other patients.

My father was diagnosed with the same thing when he was 24 and a half, midway through grad school, so I was familiar with the disease.  In October of ’98, I was exactly 24 and a half years old, and was just starting my second year of grad school.  (My son is not allowed to go to grad school until he’s 25.)

The symptoms had started a few months earlier.  I started feeling a lot thirstier, and drinking much more.  Milk, water, orange juice … I even tried a few wine coolers.  (This brief period is the only time in my life I drank anything with alcohol.)

The trouble, though I didn’t know it, was diabetic ketoacidosis.  As my pancreas cut down to part time work and prepared for retirement, my blood sugar rose steadily higher, throwing my body’s pH out of whack and causing any number of nasty side effects.  My body kept trying to flush the crap out of my system, and to do that, it needed fluids.

Of course, the fluids I was drinking had a lot of carbs … which means my blood sugar just kept on climbing.  And all that fluid had to go somewhere, meaning I was constantly running to the bathroom, day and night.

In addition to the drink-n-pee cycle, my mood went downhill.  I was teaching freshman English at Eastern Michigan, and I remember ripping into one of my students I thought was disrespecting me.  When my roommate left his dirty dishes in the sink, I did them … swearing and slamming things around hard enough I’m surprised I didn’t break ’em all.

Mom talks about my father going through the same thing.  She says she was relieved when he was diagnosed, because if he had continued acting that way, she wasn’t sure how much longer she would have put up with him.

I also lost weight.  A lot of weight.  No matter how much I ate, my pancreas wasn’t producing enough insulin to use that food.  I dropped from over 150 pounds down to about 130.  (For comparison, I was about 160 pounds in this picture.  130 on me is not healthy.)

When I finally figured out something wasn’t right, I headed home.  I went out to dinner with my family, then used my father’s glucose meter to check my blood.  Normal blood sugar is about 80-120.  The meter’s range went up to 600.  Mine was too high to read.

Dad said he had already figured out I was diabetic from the amount I drank that night, and how often I went to the bathroom.

The nice thing is that after I went to the hospital, I felt better within a day or two.  Insulin is amazing stuff.  I had no idea just how bad I had been feeling until I was better.

I’ve kept the disease under pretty good control for 12 years now, in no small part because I remember how miserable I was back then, and I have no desire to go through that again.

I’m very comfortable talking about the disease, so questions and comments are more than welcome.  (With the understanding that I’m not a doctor, and I can only talk about my personal experiences.)

For those who are interested, the American Diabetes Association has a list of diabetes warning signs.

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Insulin/syringe photo by starrynight.

Droid vs. iPhone

Home with a sick girl today.

So a quick question for those of you more on top of the tech wave than I am:

iPhone 4 vs. Droid X

Which would you recommend, and why?

It goes without saying that if either one has an app that turns the phone into a working phaser or lightsaber, that’s the winner.  Unless one has a phaser and the other a lightsaber.  Hm.  Not sure how I’d call that one…

First Book Friday: Laura Resnick

Welcome to First Book Friday, an ongoing series exploring how various authors sold their first books.

Laura Resnick is the only author I’ve met whose series spans two two different publishers.  Her Esther Diamond series started with Disappearing Nightly at Luna, but she switched over to DAW with Doppelgangster, Unsympathetic Magic, and the upcoming Vamparazzi.  She’s written both fantasy and romance, hit several Year’s Best lists, and picked up a Campbell award to boot.

Her bio states that, growing up, she swore the one thing she would never pursue was the “godawful lifestyle” of the writer.  You can see how well that worked out…

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In 1987, I was 24 years old and living in Sicily without a telephone or television; my early exposure to email was still about five years away, and it would be nearly a decade before I saw a web page for the first time. That year, I read a book called How To Write A Romance And Get It Published by Kathryn Falk, the publisher of Romantic Times Magazine; and I decided to try it.

I wrote my fiction by hand in notebooks, then I typed the final version on a manual typewriter. I could only bang out about ten pages at a time on that thing before my fingers hurt too much to continue. So as far as I was concerned, once something was typed, it was set in stone. Consequently, I did all my rewriting, revising, honing, polishing, and proofreading by hand; and then I typed v-e-r-y carefully.

Having grown up in a writer’s house (my dad is science fiction writer Mike Resnick), I knew that the single most common difference between professional writers and never-published aspirants is certainly not luck, and it’s not even talent; it’s perseverance. So I decided that I would complete six novels before I considered quitting, and I hoped that I’d get enough constructive feedback in the rejections on my first three books to help me make my next three novels more marketable.

After I completed two books, the next phase of my plan in that pre-internet era required me to go to Rome, more than 600 miles away. The nearest copy of Writers Market was at an English-language library there. After photocopying the pages I needed from that book, I went back to Palermo (well, okay, after some sight-seeing and revelry in the Eternal City), where I started sending queries to agents and proposals to publishers via trans-Atlantic mail.

The dozen literary agents whom I queried all rejected me. However, a newly-hired editorial assistant at Silhouette Books (a division of Harlequin Enterprises, the biggest romance publisher in the world) wanted to get promoted up to assistant editor. And the best way to do that was to find something in the slushpile of 6,000 unsolicited submissions that year which Silhouette could buy and publish. She found my proposal for a book called One Sultry Summer, thought it was just the ticket, and requested the full MS from me. I sent it (which cost a fortune from Sicily), and she started the long process of passing it up through the hierarchy of people whose approval is needed before a house acquires a new author.

During the 11 months that this was going on, I completed my third MS and started work on my fourth. I also moved back to the US, where I got a phone—but not an answering machine. One day, to my surprise, I received a Federal Express letter from Silhouette Books. They’d been trying to reach me by phone without success. They hoped this letter would find me—and if it did, I should call them immediately, because they wanted to make an offer on One Sultry Summer [B&N |  Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon] , and they wanted to see any other MSs I had that might be suitable for Silhouette.

The editorial assistant who had discovered me did indeed get promoted. However, Silhouette didn’t want to assign a first-time writer to a first-time editor, so I was assigned to someone more experienced. (And within six months, I would already be on my third editor there… but that’s a story about staying in the business, rather than breaking into it.)

I learned a lot about my craft while writing books for Silhouette; and I sold a few romances to other houses, too. But I eventually left romance and switched to writing fantasy—where my then-agent and then-editor insisted on referring to me as a “new” and “first-time” author, though I had previously sold fourteen (romance) novels. So I guess switching genres is one way to keep the bloom forever fresh on your damask cheek.

SFNovelists Post & Anton’s Taile

1. I have a guest post up at SF Novelists today, where I jump into the conversation about finding/making time to write.

2. CatsCurious Press is opening to submissions on October 1 for the Faery Taile Project 2.  Some of you probably remember the first project, where Christopher Kastensmidt and I did a two-sided retelling of Red Riding Hood.  This time around, were-writer Anton Strout will be writing the counterstory.  The pay is 6 cents a word, for stories between 7500 and 12,500 words.  Details are posted here.

And if neither of those appeal to you, tune back in an hour for First Book Friday with Laura Resnick.

Reason and Anger

As a typically egotistical author, I’ve got Google alerts to let me know when people are talking about me or my books.  This week, I saw a number of links to my letter to Elizabeth Moon, including a few people who said they appreciated the letter, but were turned off by the comments praising how “reasonable” I was being.

That stuck with me.  Isn’t reasonableness a good thing? I was brain-fried by that point, and had to tuck it away in my head because I couldn’t quite parse it … until another commenter popped up to say he was talking to me because of my reasoned take on things, “unlike 85% of the poo-hurling monkeys.”

That comment helped me crystallize how the “reasonable” thing could become a problem.

For one thing, as was pointed out by another commenter, I’m not Muslim.  I’m not directly, personally hurt by prejudice against Muslims, meaning it’s easier for me to be step back and be “reasonable.” Taking that further, if you restrict your conversations to only those you deem reasonable, it seems like you could ignore a disproportionate number of those most directly affected … those whose experiences are most worth listening to.  (I’m still sorting this one out, so feel free to poke my logic here.)

There’s also the dynamic of telling victims of prejudice they must be this reasonable before we’ll listen.  Putting the onus not on those who committed the offense, but on the victims, and simultaneously creating a movable bar which can be used as an excuse to stop listening.

And we shouldn’t skip the irony of protesting that “those people” are too angry and insulting, while simultaneously telling those “poo-hurling monkeys” and “PC Nazis” to “stuff it where the sun don’t shine.”

Finally, the question of “How can they expect reasoned discourse if they’re so angry/belligerent/etc.?” misses the point that maybe “they” aren’t interested in discussing things with you right now.

Let’s say someone writes an editorial in Springield, Missouri to complain about the books in his schools, asking “How can Christian men and women expose children to such immorality?”  Maybe he picks a novel about rape and recovery, which he characterizes as a filthy, demeaning book, labeling it soft pornography.

I could write a calm, reasoned response explaining that rape =/= sex, and discussing the importance of students having access to stories and information about rape.

But maybe I’ve done so many of those posts about rape issues that I’m just plain tired.  Maybe this week I don’t have the sporks for it.   After spending years as a counselor and rape educator, talking to people who didn’t realize how prevalent rape was, or who had no reference to understand what had been done to them because people are so eager to silence any discussion of or reference to rape, maybe I’m too pissed to want any sort of dialogue with a guy like this or his supporters right now.  Maybe I just need to be angry, to say that if he had his head any further up his ass, he’d collapse into a singularity.

I usually try for the calm, “reasonable” approach. I appreciate comments and disagreement, and I love the discussions people have here.  That’s my choice.  I do it knowing people will disagree.  I know I’ll get more comments calling me a PC Nazi, or telling me to die in a fire.  It happens.  Freedom of speech =/= Freedom from criticism or disagreement.

To be clear, I’m not criticizing those who said they appreciated the tone of my letter.  I spent a lot of time on that post, and I was very glad for the reassurance that I accomplished what I tried to do.  But I think I also understand a little better how, when taken further, the “reasonable” thing can become problematic.

Like I said, I’m still sorting all of this out in my head.  So discussion and thoughts are very much welcome.  Even if they’re “unreasonable.”

Writing Update

Today, barring anything short of the zombie velociraptor apocalypse, I shall finish this draft of The Snow Queen’s Shadow!

That is all.

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