Richard McGowan's Blog: Smashed-Rat-On-Press - Posts Tagged "tree"

All right, I'll admit to being stupidly curious about people who stumble over my stuff and then do something with it... Like read it, for one thing. (I'm waiting for the day when I find out someone likes the covers so much they're using my books for doorstops in lavatories.) Then there's the "World is getting creepier every day" angle and the "Here's where I run screaming from the Internet" angle and the "House of Non-Egging" angle that I've talked about before... (And also related posts from last year and early 2014).

Here's a bit of new creepiness... Some of my books have shown up over on Booklikes (a place that I don't go, and that's a pointer to the page). Oh, crapola. How does that happen?

The set of things there is rather curious because (a) most of those books have never sold even a single copy, so why the hell would anyone list them? and (b) why that random little collection but not, for example, the couple of books that people have actually bought and read? (Oh, and to add randomness to creepiness, both of the Shenanigan Cheesefield books have shown up there, too. Huh?)

Will I find some bizarre errors and end up having to go over there to stake a claim and help prevent another bibliographic train wreck? (Google books is a good example of a train wreck: they had both incorrect publisher and author attributions for the 1996 edition of A Harlot of Venus; and I had to whine at their support staff at least three times to get it corrected, but the incorrect crap still shows up in the snippet returned by a search of their site. And how the hell did it get into Google Books anyway; is there a stray copy in some university library?)

This reminds me again why I live under a rock.

So, the real reason for this rant of the day is that someone recently stumbled over something I had written and (gasp!) inquired about where to get a copy of it, apparently because someone else was reading it. That's always kind of creepy at first when it happens, but this one has a happy ending because it did result in a book sale (which is supposed to be a good thing, right?) and happily the person who made the inquiry does not bite.

And then last night, a rating/review appeared for the above-mentioned work, from someone else who was reading the book. (Where do they get these books?) But I must have been dreaming when I saw that because the review has now disappeared.

Like I said, the world gets creepier every day. And I've become unable to tell the difference between waking and reality. I mean dreaming and reality. Or whatever those things are... I've lost touch with the...

pod bay doors...

But I'm proud of myself for sitting on my hands and continuing to smile and not (again) removing the SROP catalog from the web. I'll ride out the crisis, somehow... Even if I have to price everything into the stratosphere to prevent accidental sales... LOL.

(P.S.: Nov 17: Eeek! The mysterious missing review is back!)

Ho hum. On the third day of Banned Books Week, Smashed-Rat-on-Press is giving away free e-copies of Squeezing Persephone's Pomegranates to anybody who can figure out how to ask for one in a dark alley... Just specify MOBI or EPUB format when meeting your shady connection.

Stay tuned tomorrow for more SROPly giveaways... There is unlikely to be one per day until next weekend because we're getting few takers. But who cares!? It's more fun to gleefully chortle beneath our cozy rock anyway. ;-)

Good evening everyone. It's that time of year again... When bustling things begin to wind down and we all meander toward a few days of utter repose in the last week of December. When we pause to take stock of what's been clogging up our presses. When we roll a big (now legal in Santa Banana) spliff and try to forget that Humanity is aboard a runaway train careening at high speed toward the yawning abyss of mass extinction...

It's time to look up and smile, and pause for a brief but happy examination of what happened this year at our homey little press, and to discover what befell our precious little rodents beneath their cozy rock.

First, 2016 was a rather terrible year for writing, which is a trifle sad. Smashed-Rat-on-Press only released three rather slim books, and one additional toss-off, all year. The writerly word-count was also depressingly lower than in the past couple of years, coming in below 73,000 words (not including blog postings).

These are the books that came out this year from SROP:

(Thankfully, the low annual output can be neatly blamed on the horrors of American politics, as 2016 is turning out officially to be the most depressing year since 2001, as well as the year from which we are least likely to recover. The bright part of the year's offerings is that we were able to work four times with our fabulous photographer/illustrator/friend, Jennifer Garst.)

Now that we've got the catalog issues out of the way, let's look at sales...

The SROP paperback sales for the year 2016 totalled [drumroll please]... eight books, for a net income of zero dollars and zero cents. The total for e-books sold is... two books, for a grand total income of $3.54. Yay! That's just enough for a boutique coffee beverage, so we're now chomping at the bit, ready to splurge at the sign of the mermaid.

But wait, there's even more good news! Because 2015 was one of the slowest sales years on record (a mere three books all year), 2016 sales were more than 300% higher; and not even much lower than 50% of the record 2014 sales year. So the rats are hopping with glee tonight and have a special beer already waiting.

Meanwhile, the infamous list of SROP titles that have never been read by anyone but the author and the cover designer has grown longer. So that is a feat of which we can be quite proud, hardly (perhaps never) duplicated in the last 500 years of publishing history.

Just in case nobody's looking, here is a formidable display of never-been-read SROP books:

And remember, there are only 10 more days until the burning of the books for Yuletide.

And now, adios muchachos as we say in California... Onward and upward to 2017 and beyond.