Jim C. Hines's Blog, page 182

E-book Experiment: Week One

Last week, I announced my little experiment, putting my mainstream novel Goldfish Dreams [B&N | Amazon] up for sale as a $2.99, DRM-free e-book.

[image error]Amazon was much quicker than B&N to get things uploaded and processed, but the book is now available on both sites.  (And to B&N's credit, they were able to recognize and link the e-book to the print edition, which Amazon failed to do.)

The sales results after release week?

Amazon: 10 copies sold

B&N: 2 copies sold

Both Amazon and B&N pay roughly $2 royalties per copy, which means I made about $24 that first week.  Really, that's not too bad — it's more than I was making when the book was on Fictionwise, where it was priced at about seven bucks.

6 of those sales were from the first day, when I blogged about the book being available on Kindle.  To see how blog hits translate into sales, that post was viewed 3198 times on LJ according to their stats site, with probably a few hundred additional hits from my site, RSS feeds, and Dreamwidth.  A few people also Tweeted about it.

Several folks commented that they'd love to read the book, but either didn't do e-books or else didn't like the formats available through Amazon and B&N. 

Over the past week, I spent about an hour updating product info on Amazon and B&N.  I also updated my LJ profile with a link to the book and started doing the same on my web site, but haven't finished that yet.  Nor have I had time to check into other stores/sales outlets for the book.  This underlined a problem I was anticipating: namely, I don't know that I have the time to effectively do the self-publishing thing.

I could have spent more time working to promote and sell Goldfish Dreams.  Instead, I finished the first draft of my goblin zombie story.  With limited writing time and two other anthology invites sitting on my desk, not to mention (hopefully) a forthcoming deal for the new series … I just don't have time to be my own sales force.

The question then becomes, what happens when I sit back and concentrate on the writing?  I will get the site updated, but once I do, will the book sell without my help?  Even a few copies a week could add up to several hundred bucks a year.  Or will it become one of the many forgotten books on Amazon with a sales rank in the three millions?

I have no idea.  I'll check back in about a month from now to see how things are going.

Winners and Lego

I'm a little late drawing winners for the Huff and Brennan giveaways.  Sorry about that!  It was the first thing I did this morning.  Okay, the second if you count heating up some leftover French toast.  Third if you include feeding the animals, but if I didn't do that the cats would still be yowling at me.  And technically, I also–

Oh, never mind.  Congratulations to ambyr, who won A Star Shall Fall, and bkwrrm_tx, who'll be getting The Enchantment Emporium.  (Winners picked by Random.org from everyone who entered on the various comment threads.)

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I really liked this build when I first saw it a week or so back.  Flickr user pirate_cat built the rescue of the Chilean miners out of LEGO.

Click the picture for the full set.

First Book Friday: Martha Wells

Welcome to First Book Friday. You know the drill…

Today we have Martha Wells (marthawells on LJ), who has the coolest writing routine ever.  From a 2009 interview, "I write full time now, so I pretty much just get up in the morning, surf a little bit, and then start writing."  All that's left is to combine the two activities … which would make an awesome author photo!

She's written both original work and Stargate tie-ins, but today she shares the story of her very first novel.  As a special bonus, Martha has posted that first book online for free at her web site.

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I wanted to be a writer as long as I can remember. Even back in grade school, while writing and illustrating stories about the Godzilla movies on Saturday afternoon TV and drawing elaborate maps of Monster Island, I wanted to do this thing, before I really understood what this thing was.

I started to write and submit short stories in college.  My parents never knew, but I chose Texas A&M University solely because it was listed in a directory of active SF/F fan groups in Starlog Magazine, and it had a student-run convention.  I took a writing workshop class taught by Steven Gould through the university's Free U, which offered classes in everything from conversational Japanese to bowling.  Over the next eight years, I went to more workshops, including Turkey City, where Bruce Sterling gave me some of the best advice on what worked and what didn't work that I've ever heard anybody give.  I got even more into fandom, I went to SF cons and helped run them, I wrote fanfiction for fun.  Eventually I was in a writers group with Steven Gould, Laura Mixon, and Rory Harper that met regularly.  I continued to write and submit short stories to magazines, and did not sell one single one.

Somewhere along the way, I'd had my imagination captured and held by Richard Lester's Three Musketeers movies and the dirty, gritty, vividly alive image of 17th century Paris.  I read Alexandre Dumas, watched the PBS/BBC series By the Sword Divided.  I started to write a fantasy novel, The Element of Fire [B&N |  Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon], and I based my world on 17th century France, but with magic and with fairy as a real every day threat.  Nobody in my writers group, possibly in the world, thought I'd finish it, but I'd been working up to this book for years.  It wrote it slowly, during breaks at my first full-time job in computer support.  In the evening and on weekends, I edited print-outs and hand wrote new material, because I didn't have a home computer.

[image error]About midway through the process, I got very lucky.  Steve Gould had been contacted by a relatively new agent actively seeking clients, and he gave the agent my number.  I talked to him on the phone, with very little idea of what I was supposed to ask or how things were going to work.  I sent him the first half of the book, and he agreed to represent it when it was finished.  It was kind of a shock.  (If that sounds easy, I made up for it sixteen years later when I left him and went looking for a new agent.  That's a long, fraught story for another time.)

Finally I finished the book, and my agent submitted it to a publisher who originally showed some interest, but then turned it down.  Then he submitted it to Tor, and incredibly, amazingly, they bought it for $3000, more money than I had made in my life at any one time.  It took two more years of contract wrangling and two revisions before the book was actually published in hardcover in 1993.

Since then I've had a lot of ups and downs, but I'm doing this thing I've always wanted to do, and it's the best thing ever.

Thoughts from a PC Parrot

I told myself I wasn't going to respond to the Apex blog post Plucking the PC Parrots in the Genre World.  Apparently I lied.

I'm not going to rehash a conversation I've already had with the author, but a few points kept bugging me and demanding blog time.

Bondoni opens with an anecdote about an American Fortune 50 executive who smugly described hiring an unqualified black woman to meet their quota.

The veracity of this story was challenged in the comments.  Personally, I don't care.  Anecdote =/= data.  But Bondoni uses this as a lead-in to what he calls ToC Fail, "the PC crowd's latest insanity," where people complained about "The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF" having only white male contributors.

I'm  missing the connection to his anecdote, since not one person in that 200+ comment thread suggested quotas.  Nobody in any of the responses I read was advocating for quotas.

My Recommendation: Read what people are actually asking for, and stop derailing discussion by complaining about imaginary quotas.

"Of course, maybe [the editor] was a chauvinist pig. Maybe he went through the stories and systematically removed all of those with a female byline, and anything by Tiptree as well. But … I believe the editor simply chose the best stories he could.  And this is exactly the way it should be. The best stories and ONLY the best stories should be included."

Underlying Assumption: If discrimination isn't conscious and deliberate, it doesn't count.

Bonus Assumption: This all-white-male ToC actually represents the best stories.

"It seems to me that we're still trying to fight a battle that was won years ago."  Bondoni states this more explicitly in the comments: "There is no misogyny in SF/F/H, and no racism, other than that nebulous 'implied' mysogyny and racism that we're all so angsty about."

Methinks that last sentence should read, "I've chosen not to see/acknowledge misogyny in SF/F/H, or racism…"  Off the top of my head, without even touching things like Moon v. Wiscon or Racefail:

Bloomsbury whitewashes the cover for Magic Under Glass.
Justine Larbalestier on the whitewashing of Liar.
Visual aid on the casting of The Last Airbender.
Various defenses of the use of "Sheet head" from the Asimov Forums.
Harlan Ellison gropes Connie Willis on-stage at the Hugo's, because he apparently thought it would be funny.
Comics are SF/F, right?  Check out Women in Refrigerators.
Or see this lovely licensed Marvel figurine of Mary Jane, from Spider Man.
Baen's cover art for their Young Flandry books.
Nnedi Okorafor discusses the difficulties in getting black characters properly represented on her covers.
A few first-hand examples of sexual harassment and assault at cons.
EA encourages congoers to "commit acts of lust" with their booth babes.
GenCon fails its save vs. misogyny.

Bonus Data Point:Bondoni refers to this article, which found that 85% of publishing employees (with 3 years experience or less) were female.  I clicked through to the posted data, which also looked at executive information/salaries.  In this "female-dominated" industry, 12 of the 14 publishing executives listed (that would be roughly 85%, right?) appear to be men.  But women own the bottom of the totem pole, so it's all good.

I'm not interested in arguing with Bondoni or in bashing him.  I've done the former, and I suspect the latter would only reinforce his belief that the "PC Zombies" are out to have dissenters "crucified, tarred, feathered and, if possible, impaled."

Bored now, and done.  This zombie parrot has a goblin story to finish…

Midlist Bestseller

Reminder - tomorrow is the last day to enter to win books by Tanya Huff and Marie Brennan !

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Joshua (my agent) e-mailed me after Monday's blog post to tell me I should really stop calling myself a midlist author.  Personally, I'd rather call myself Segway Ninja and Tribble Juggler Jim C. Hines.  But his e-mail got me thinking, and I realized I don't even know what "midlist" means.

[image error]Oh, I know the term originates from publishers' catalogs.  The Big Names are there at the front of the list.  Older and poorly-performing books get tucked away in back.  The rest get tossed somewhere in the middle of the list, ergo midlist.

Years ago, I remember Elizabeth Bear commenting that to be a midlist author, you have to have five books in print.  This isn't an official Law of Publishing or anything, but it stuck with me.  Getting my fifth book into print was a nice little milestone.

But am I a midlist author now?  I have six books in print, so maybe I'm upper midlist?  Lower frontlist?

Joshua said my sales continue to improve and my backlist is selling well, and these things propel me past midlist status.  Maybe I should start calling myself a Future Frontlist Author?

It was also pointed out that, at certain publishers which will remain anonymous, the fact that I've made the Locus bestseller list with my past four books would get me billed not as a midlister, but as National Bestselling Author Jim C. Hines.

Pardon me while I choke on my Diet Cherry Pepsi.

I know this much: I'm not about to start slapping "Bestselling Author" onto my business cards.  While technically true, it feels deceptive.  Like certain self-published authors who make it into the top 10 of some obscure Amazon subcategory and immediately dub themselves "Bestselling Author Spock T. Pizzatrousers" or whatever.

In some ways, this is pointless naval-gazing.  Who cares what I call myself, as long as I keep writing, selling, and enjoying it?  But the discussion brought something into focus: in certain respects,  midlist feels like a relative term, a comparison of your own success to that of other authors … and I have no clue where I fall on that continuum.

I know I'm not selling like Gaiman or Rowling or Harris, or any of those NYT Bestselling authors.  But that only tells me I'm not in the very top percentile.  Am I in the top ten percent?  Twenty?  At least in the upper half?

Again, in some respects, it doesn't matter.  I'm not trying to compete with my peers (except maybe that Anton Strout fellow), and as long as DAW keeps buying my books, I'm happy.  But I feel like I'm in the dark here.  If I'm future-lower-front-and-slightly-off-center list, should I be pushing for larger advances or better/bigger deals?  How confident should I be in my long-term career?

It reminds me of karate.  In Sanchin-Ryu, I've never been told what the requirements are for any given rank.  I had to teach myself not to worry about it, and to just concentrate on improving.  Let my sensei decide when I'm ready for the next rank.  But then, I'm not trying to make a career out of Sanchin-Ryu…

What do you think midlist really means?  Who do you think of as midlist authors?  And for the published authors, am I the only one who feels clueless about how successful (or not) I really am?

RIP Realms of Fantasy

According to owner Warren Lapine, Realms of Fantasy is going away again.  (Though he's offering to sell the magazine if anyone's interested.)

Realms of Fantasy was a big, shiny goalpost for me when I was trying to break in.  Finally selling "Deliverance" to Shawna McCarthy was almost as exciting as selling my first book.  I sold her a second story a year later — that was "Sister of the Hedge," a precursor to my princess books.  Then she bought "Ours to Fight For," another story I'm still incredibly proud of.

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Their sometimes questionable taste in cover art aside, it was a beautiful magazine, particularly the interior artwork.

I had issues with a few of Lapine's choices when he bought the magazine, but I appreciate him trying to resurrect it, and I'm sorry to see it go.  Again.

Experimenting with Kindling

Nifty First Book Friday news: Harry Connolly's piece has been picked up and reprinted at Black Gate.  Congrats, Harry!

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I've talked a bit about e-books and self-publishing.  There are folks like J. A. Konrath who claim to make it work.  When I posted about my electronic royalties, Konrath was one of the first to jump in and say flat-out that $6.99 was too much, and I would make more if the books were cheaper.

[image error]I decided to experiment.  I've taken my mainstream novel Goldfish Dreams and have released it in Amazon's Kindle store.  There's no DRM, and I priced it at $2.99 for worldwide distribution. I've also uploaded it to B&N.  (The B&N version is still being processed.)

I intend to be 100% transparent about this, sharing sales and royalties and the rest.  I'm as curious as anyone to see what happens.

Here are the advantages I believe I have, going into this:

I'm a midlist fantasy author, so readers will (hopefully) have some confidence that I can write a decent book.
I've got a moderate online following.  At best guess, about 2000 people see the blog each day.  I don't expect everyone to rush out and buy the book, but I suspect some will.
Goldfish Dreams is a rerelease of an out of print book from a small press, so it's already been through the gatekeepers once, and has benefited from some editorial feedback.

On the other hand, this is a mainstream book, so I'm not sure how much my stature as a fantasy author will help.  And as a reprint of an out-of-print book, I lose the initial friends & family sales, because many of them already have the printed book.

My investment so far:

Steven Saus did the e-book conversion, because it quickly became apparent I would need many hours to teach myself and prep the files.  Steven did a very nice job putting the book together in multiple formats and checking to make sure everything was clean and ready to go.
The cover art is recycled, with permission, from an unused concept from the original print release.  I added a blurb from Heinz Insu Fenkl.
Setting up accounts on Amazon and B&N and getting the books uploaded took an hour or so of my time.

I honestly don't know what to expect.  I imagine there will be some initial sales, but how many?  I couldn't say.  And what will happen in the long term?  Will sales grow over time or die off?  I keep reading arguments about how e-books can be so much more profitable for authors.  Will I actually see a significant profit?  Your guess is as good as mine.

I am not going to start going all-out on advertising and self-promotion.  For one thing, I don't have the time.  For another, that sort of thing gets annoying fast.  I'll post updates about the experiment, but I'm not going to become That Guy.

Let the experiment begin!

Where to purchase:

Amazon
B&N - Forthcoming
Other suggestions?

Description: Eileen Greenwood's first year at Southern Michigan University means freedom: freedom from the brother who molested her, freedom from the father who refused to believe her, and freedom from the sister who turned her back on it all. Eileen desperately wants to escape the past and live her life, but nightmares and flashbacks make it impossible to forget what she endured. Instead, she becomes obsessed with learning what transformed her brother into a predator.  In the effort to understand, she risks her health, her friendships, and her future. She will face both her own memories of the past, and a monster far worse than her brother … if she can find the strength to confront him.

First Book Friday: Seanan McGuire

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

Seanan McGuire, a.k.a. Mira Grant, is this year's winner of the Campbell Award for Best New Writer.  She's also a skilled musician.  Plus she draws awesome comics :-)  Basically, Seanan is who you'd get if SF/F were a superpower.

Read on to learn how she sold the first of her many books, and the whirlwind that began with that first sale…

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In digging through my (relatively epic) email archives, the earliest fragments I can find involving a character named Toby Daye are dated early 1998.  Twelve, going on thirteen, years ago.  I was twenty years old.  The rules of urban fantasy as we currently know it were still sort of sticky and half-baked, and no one really knew what they could or couldn't get away with.  I thought my decision to write in the first person was unique and would really stand out.  You know.  Crazy things like that.

After a few years of figuring out what the hell I was doing, I had a finished novel: Rosemary and Rue [B&N |  Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon], which, in its original form, didn't look very much like it did when it finally got published.  I wrote a sequel.  I learned a lot from writing the sequel.  I re-wrote the first book.  I wrote a third book.  I learned a lot from writing the third book.  I re-wrote the first book.  I wrote…you get the picture.  By 2007, I had what I considered to be an awesome book, and absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do with it.  I was like the underwear gnomes.  "Step one, write; step three, PROFIT."  Only I had no idea how to proceed.

I had started talking to the woman who would eventually become my agent, Diana Fox, in early 2007.  We'd been discussing the possibility of her representing me, and the fact that clearly, I still needed to do some work on Rosemary and Rue.  In December of that same year, I had one of those Legally Blonde "whoa" moments, and suddenly realized that I needed to completely re-write the book.  Diana asked to see the first sixty pages.  Then she asked for the whole book.  Then we spent about eight hours on the phone, ending with a formal offer of representation.  Whee!

I asked a friend of mine who was also an author if she would be willing to read Rosemary and Rue and give us a "shop quote" — something that we could use to pique the interest of editors.  She agreed, with that sort of cautious "um, maybe…" that is really the best defense of the published author being approached by their unpublished friend.  She wound up enjoying the book enough that she strongly recommended we try approaching DAW, as they would be the best fit for my work.  We approached DAW.  Thirteen days later (not that I was counting or anything), Diana called me at my day job and asked whether I had a minute.  I always have a minute for Diana.  I said sure.

She said "We got DAW."

…the screaming eventually stopped.  And the real work began.

Everything about actually publishing a book was strange and new to me.  I had to meet my editor, learn how she worked, learn how to work with her, and learn the names of everyone's cats (not entirely joking).  I had to come to terms, fast, with the fact that a) there were now a lot of things I didn't control, and b) everyone in the world assumed that I did control them, resulting in my spending a lot of time explaining publishing cycles to my friends.  And most of all, c) the whole world was about to have the chance to meet my imaginary friend, and not everyone was going to like her.

A year ago, I had no books in bookstores.  As I write this, I have four, with at least four more coming.  It's incredibly weird.  Sometimes, I still expect to wake up back in December of 2007.  But weird as it all is…wow, has it been worth it.

Bullying

A lot of good posts about bullying lately.  Seanan McGuire talks about her experiences.  Michelle Sagara talks about bullying as the parent of a child with Aspbergers.  Di Francis describes standing up to the bullies.

Bullying and suicide has been in the news a lot lately.  One Ohio high school lost four students to suicide in the past few years.  October 20 has been designated Spirit Day, to remember seven teenagers who killed themselves after being bullied about their sexuality/gender identity.

As I read through various articles, one of the first comments I saw said this was a sign of the times, and kids were tougher when he was a kid.  In those days, you either kicked the bully's ass or you were strong enough to take it.

Bullshit.

If you think kids didn't kill themselves over bullying in the old days, you're a damn fool.  I say this as someone who 20+ years sat in my parents' bathroom, having swiped one of my dad's syringes and filled it with insulin.  I remember breaking out in a sweat when the needle broke my skin.  I sat there for a long time, hands shaking, struggling with whether to push the plunger home and end it all.

Bullying gets more attention these days.  We talk about it online, and it pops up in the news more often, but it's nothing new.  For me, it started the first day of sixth grade.  I had gotten some "Hines Ketchup" comments in elementary school, but sixth grade is where things turned nasty.

I was a perfect target.  Small and skinny, with glasses and zero fashion sense.  (To this day, I despise the idea of fashion, and would happily live my life in blue jeans and T-shirts.)  I was one of the brightest kids in school, but my social skills lagged pretty badly.  Topping things off, I had been in speech therapy for years.

The bullying was mostly verbal, though I got my share of shoving, of books being knocked from my hands, and all the rest.  My next door neighbor ripped my book bag.  I was the kid who ended up in his own locker — ha ha, sitcom gold, right?  I usually managed to avoid actual fights, but that was it.

Teachers, bus drivers, and principals didn't give a damn, as far as I could see.  My parents … I didn't talk about it much, and I don't think they knew what to do.  They called other parents once or twice, took me shopping for better clothes, but none of it really helped.  The common wisdom back then was "Just ignore them," which was utter crap.

I was on the other side a few times, too.  In 7th or 8th grade, a friend and I picked on another former friend for most of the year.  There was a stint where I teased a kid about her weight.  Unforgivable, and I hate myself for doing it … but at the time, if my choice was to be bully or bullied, the former seemed the better choice.

For the most part though, it was 4-5 years of feeling alone and despised and hopeless.

I survived.  Things started to get better around 11th grade.  Today I look around at my children and their schools.  There's more awareness, but I'm still scared.  My daughter hasn't had much trouble yet.  She's socially gifted in all the ways I wasn't, and sometimes I envy her.  Well-liked without losing herself, gracefully exploring her identity.

My son reminds me of me.  He has Aspergers, and has been in speech therapy.  His social skills have improved some this year, but I still worry.

I don't know how to fix things.  But I know telling kids to toughen up only makes things worse.  It's victim-blaming.  "It's your fault because you're weak."

Bullshit.

Ignore them and they'll go away?  Never worked for me.

Conflict is part of life, but no child should feel sick with dread every morning before school.  Nobody should have to hide and watch for the bus, emerging only when it starts coming down the street, because that's the only way to avoid interacting with the other kids at the bus stop. Nobody should be pushed to the point where death looks like the only way to end the torment.

I wish there had been someone like Di at my school, both to stand up for me and to stop me when I was the one picking on others.  I wish I had known things would get better.  I wish people hadn't looked the other way, hiding behind "Boys will be boys" and other excuses.

It has to end.

Giveaway: Huff & Brennan

For the past week or so, most of my brain has been going into trying to write up proposals for a new series.  I've got the first synopsis written, and my agent says it looks like fun.  The second book … well, I scrapped that one and started over yesterday, and I think I'm on the right track.  But I find myself skimping a little on the blog as I try to get these finished and submitted.

So this seemed like a good time for a book giveaway.  I've ended up with extra copies of Marie Brennan's A Star Shall Fall [B&N | Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon] and Tanya Huff's The Enchantment Emporium [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy], and I'd love to find good homes for both of them.

 

To enter, you're going to have to help me out with this synopsis I'm writing – leave a comment suggesting the weirdest/silliest/most bizarre twist I should add to my new series.

Yes, I know I haven't told you what the series is about.  That's what makes it fun :-)  Be as creative as you'd like, and make sure you say which of the two books you'd like to win.  One entry per person, and this is open to everyone.

I'll pick two winners at random on 10/20/10.