Chris Abouzeid's Blog, page 39
June 26, 2013
Serious Sex! How to Prep Your Loved Ones
Guest Post by Kim Triedman
The countdown to launch has begun – your first novel! – and everyone around you, from your hair-stylist to your therapist to your Zumba instructor, is hopped up and ready. Your kids are actually telling you how proud they are of you(!), and people you haven’t seen since childhood are suddenly friend-ing you on Facebook. The principal from your old high school just called: he’d like you to come give next year’s commencement address.
And your parents! Oh, God, your parents are kvelling. The Amazon page is up. They’ve pre-ordered 30 copies and invited both the family Rabbi and Great Aunt Ida to the launch. Their daughter, the poet, has finally written something their friends will actually read! It’s everything an author could hope for: the buzz, the goodwill, the respect from friends and colleagues far and wide – that sense of having finally reached some long-elusive station in life…
And yet…
“So, there’s this little scene on page 45,” you stammer.
Your father says he knows the owner of a local TV station.
“You know, the book may not be for everyone.”
He smiles, hard and bright. “We’ve scheduled a small party for you at the club.”
“I mean, there’s some serious… sex in it.”
Still with the smile, but just a heartbeat too long.
So. There’s sex and then there’s sex. We all know this. There’s the quiet grazing of a moonlit breast and then there’s the—
Well, we don’t have to go there.
But the point is, many of us do go there, at least in our novels, and it’s often so counter to what our friends and loved ones may be expecting from us that dread can appropriately be added to the long list of pre-debut emotions. But isn’t that what story-telling is all about? – that freedom to imagine ourselves into anything, or anyone, or any situation. It affords us the opportunity to expand our own physical/emotional boundaries, combine one truth with another, take the measure of what we are and what we know and jumble it all up like so many Sunday casseroles. Take your sexual inhibitions, add a little of his passive-aggressiveness and her flat feet, throw in my tattoo. Toss them all together and what you come up with is someone authentically other, behaving – and canoodling – in ways that only this new individual can behave.
Admittedly, it’s hard for readers not to impose their own knowledge of a writer on the reading of his/her work. How many people are able to read Sylvia Plath without bringing her tragic life-story to the task? And the closer the relationship with the writer, the trickier it gets. When the writer happens to be you and the readers some of your nearest and dearest, the dynamic can be downright explosive. There will be those who automatically equate your narrator’s voice with your own and those who see themselves in what you’ve written. Still others may feel scandalized by your character’s behaviors or hurt by their words. Imagine, for example, that you’ve chosen to read a passage about a character’s nasty break-up with her husband and your newly (messily) divorced neighbor happens to be at your reading. Or your main character has an affair with his hot-looking sister-in-law and your hot-looking sister-in-law’s husband shows up?
I’m just sayin’. There’s plenty of room for simmering indignation. People will take umbrage at things you never even imagined could be offensive. Your agent will quietly bristle at the way you describe the inner workings of the publishing world. Your neighbor will take offense at the ugly living room furniture you describe, recognizing it – correctly or incorrectly – as her own. Your sister will assume that all the emotional dysfunction you’ve heaped on the fictional sister in your book is your way of getting back at her for being the free-loader in the family.
Your husband may want a divorce.
The thing is: fiction liberates us to be NOT who-we-are. Or to be who we might be if only our hair was red or our mother was an opera star or the chickens were dying of swollen head syndrome…if our guilt wasn’t crippling or our cancer had metastasized…if our father was Haitian or our house was condemned or our sinuses blocked. In other words, fiction invites us to step away from our earthbound selves and take flight – in the bedroom or on the soccer field or at the top of the Empire State Building. And while there’s no way to side-step all of the misunderstandings and misapprehensions that may arise, it’s helpful to remember that nobody but you – and sometimes not even you – will ever know for sure just whose bad breath has been paired with whose overbearing boss.
So go ahead – read that sex scene. Read it loud and clear. Read it ’til you blush and your audience starts to look at their shoes. But when the Q&A comes around, do yourself a favor. Ask yourself your own first question – How do I come up with my characters? – and then answer it!
Kim Triedman is both an award-winning poet and a novelist. Her debut novel, The Other Room, and two full-length poetry collections, Plum(b) and Hadestown, release in 2013. The Other Room was one of four finalists for the 2008 James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and Kim’s poetry has garnered many awards, including the 2008 Main Street Rag Chapbook Award and the 2010 Ibbetson Street Poetry Award.
June 25, 2013
BOOK FACTS AND STATS
Truly, it is easier to find out the average cost of a meal or nail polish (found them both in one try) than it is to find out most statistics on book sales (try Googling “average number of books sold per title” in any iteration and you’ll see what I mean).
I could find that the median writer/author salary was $55,420 per year in 2010, but let’s remember what ‘median’ means.
In a world where with the touch of few button we can find out the coffee drinking habits of the world, why did I spend hours looking for the few stats I could tease out about publishing? (Are there not enough computers for publishers? Do we need a kickstarter campaign to help get these numbers in one place?)
As a lover of the make-believe, this was not my favorite pursuit (oh, that I could have assigned this job to my fact-loving husband) but knowledge is power, so consider this part one of: Just The Stat Facts, Mam.
Caveat Emptor: What you have below is the work of a curious mind, but not an expert-in-the-field. Corrections welcome!
BOOK SALES IN 2013:
Which means (even to a non-math person like me) paper books have 80% of the market)
Publishers Weekly, with numbers gleaned from BookStats, the Association of American Publishers/Book Industry Study Group, reported: “Sales of hardcovers rose 1.3% in the year, to $5.06 billion, and trade paperback sales increased slightly, up 0.4%, to $4.96 billion. . . . Total e-book sales rose 44.2% in 2012, to $3.04 billion and accounted for 20% of trade revenue”
PW expected a drop in mass-market paperback sales, while “sales of downloadable audio rose 21.8% in 2012, to $240.7 million,” but there was no data on the performance of physical audio.
Self-publishing has tripled in five years: “The number of self-published books produced annually in the U.S. has nearly tripled, growing 287 percent since 2006, and now tallies more than 235,000 print and “e” titles, according to a new analysis of data from Bowker® Books In Print and Bowker® Identifier Services.”
Traditionally published books rose six percent: The number of traditionally published print books rose 6% in 2011, to 347,178, according to preliminary figures released by Bowker.
How many copies do most self-published books sell and what does it cost to self-publish?
According to the New York Times (last August–click link above for article) “most self-published books sell fewer than 100 or 150 copies, many authors and self-publishing company executives say. There are breakout successes, to be sure, and some writers can make money simply by selling their e-books at low prices. Some self-published books attract so much attention that a traditional publishing house eventually picks them up. (Perhaps you’ve heard of the novel “Fifty Shades of Grey,” which began its life as a self-published work?)
Still, a huge majority of self-published books “don’t sell a lot of copies,” said Mark Coker, the founder and chief executive of Smashwords, a no-frills operation that concentrates on self-published e-books. “We make it clear to our authors.”
Finding the number of books, by average, that books published by traditional houses sell seemed close to impossible (but I will keep looking for part 2). The closest stats I could find for average book sales was this: According to BookScan, which tracks most bookstore, online, and other retail sales of books, only 299 million books were sold in 2008 in the U.S. in all adult nonfiction categories combined. The average U.S. book is now selling less than 250 copies per year and less than 3,000 copies over its lifetime.
The above did not differentiate eBooks, so this average is truly unclear, but it is a beginning. Before this, I always heard the average title sales (which I take to include all versions) were usually 5,000. But, that is only word of mouth.
Books Published Per Year by Country (according to UNESCO)
Top 15 Countries:
United States (2010) 328,259 (new titles and editions)
United Kingdom (2005) 206,000
China (2010) 189,295 (328,387 total)
Russian Federation (2008) 123,336
Germany (2009) 93,124
Spain (2008) 86,300
India (2004) 82,537 (21,370 in Hindi and 18,752 in English)
Japan (2009) 78,555
Iran (2010) 65,000
France (2010) 63,690 (67,278 total)
South Korea (2011) 44,036
Taiwan (2010) 43,309
Turkey (2011) 43,100
Netherlands (1993) 34,067
Italy (2005) 33,641 (59,743 total)
Click on the hyperlink above for the whole wide world. Very interesting.
IN THE WORLD OF MAGAZINES:
“In the fall, celebrity title sales usually dip, while titles in the Food, Health and Automotive categories spike during the 4th quarter,” and November is the slowest month for magazine purchases on newsstands.
HOW MANY BOOKSTORES? WHERE ARE THEY?
According to Open Education Database in October 2012, and other sources highlighted below:
The Amazon online bookstore had about 22.6 percent of book sales.
The number of bookstores decreased from 2,400 to 1,900.
Book sales were strongest in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Boston, Washington DC, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, San Jose, and San Diego.
Cities with the most bookstores are Seattle, followed closely by San Francisco, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, and St. Louis.
There were about 10,200 bookstores in the United States in 2011. Since the numbers below do not add up to anywhere near that number, I can only assume that Open Education Database includes booksellers such as Target, Costco and other big box stores.
Independent books stores were operated in 1900 locations (by 1567 owners) in 2012, according to the American Booksellers Association.
The Barnes and Noble chain has 1363 stores (689 retail stores, and 674 college stores) and are planning to close 20 a year during the next decade.
Books a Million have 250 stores.
Hudson Booksellers has 59 retail outlets.
HOW DO YOU COMPARE TO A CELEBRITY WRITER’S SALES?
Writer’s Digest provides a wrap-up. The high number on the list comes from Tina Fey, at 921,856 copies. The low comes courtesy of Paris Hilton’s children’s book, at 2,855 copies.
WHICH MAINSTREAM PUBLISHER IS SEMI-BANNED FROM BARNES & NOBLE?
In the “Really-this-is-still-happening side?” of publishing stats, my publisher, Simon and Schuster, and Barnes & Noble are in month six of their corporate skirmish:
After being turned away, author William Krueger writes: Barnes & Noble Still Banning Simon & Schuster Authors Six Months into A Corporate War, while Jeffery Trachtenberg tried to unearth why this is happening. Meanwhile, most mid-list authors are MIA from the shelves.
June 24, 2013
Juggling Writing and Work, An Interview with Sabin Willett, author of ABIDE WITH ME
June 20, 2013
Friday Faves: Pants-Kicker Edition
June 19, 2013
“Secrets and Lies” Are Your Friends
Secrets and Lies Are Your Friends
The Outcast: A “Shunned” Manuscript Leads to Acceptance
June 17, 2013
You Know More About Your Work Than You Think You Do
June 16, 2013
Playing Paper Dolls: How Should Your Characters Look?
June 13, 2013
Friday Faves: Summer Reading Lists for Kids
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