Andrea Phillips's Blog, page 13

Children of Rouwen

Most of the news around here lately is about that book, but meanwhile Fireside Magazine published a new piece of short fiction from me on Monday: Children of Rouwen. I'd be delighted if you would read it and tell me what you think!

I'd like to talk a bit about where that story comes from -- and this is incredibly spoilery, so if you care about that sort of thing, please, read the story before you continue. Children of Rouwen is very directly inspired by and in conversation with Ursula Vernon's Elegant and Fine, a breathtaking work about Narnia, and about Susan, and the realistic emotional consequences of living a life in Narnia and then... coming home again, into a child's life and a child's body. It's a fine piece of writing, and Ursula Vernon is a genius.

This got me to thinking about the nature of portal fantasy as a whole, and about the ones who get left behind. If you think on it, the adults of Narnia, living through wartime and reconstruction, arguably need a little magic even more than the children do. The idea of being left behind, of being the one not chosen, of having missed your chance -- I think that speaks to a deep human fear. And there's another layer here, especially for parents: even once those children come back, the parents have still been left behind by the passage of time, haven't they? So Children of Rouwen is also, as many of my works are, about the inevitable sorrow of seeing your children grow up and away from you.

When my first daughter was a few days old and I was home alone with her for the first time, I was suddenly overcome with waterfalls of tears in the middle of a diaper change because it struck me all at once that one day, she would be a teenager and she would hate me; or at the very least, one day, she would be an adult, and she wouldn't really need me anymore. This was mostly a crazy rush of weird postpartum hormones. It's not really a rational train of thought, as such.

But parenting is, for me, full of something opposite to nostalgia; I think maybe the aesthetic called mono no aware in Japanese. It's the sadness of knowing that something beautiful is ephemeral; of missing something that brings you joy before it's even gone. 

Revision's First Week

Over at Chuck Wendig's place, last week I wrote a piece about how great it is to work with a small press. But there are two more benefits to my relationship with Fireside that didn't make it into that piece. They are: sales numbers more or less on request; and the freedom to share those numbers if I so choose. So let's you and me talk about Revision's first week in the wild.

Let's set the stage. Remember, I got a star in Publisher's Weekly. A great review in NPR Books. I've been on Rocket Talk, and several other reviewers and bloggers have said kind and thoughtful things. (A running list of reviews are linked from here.)  Now that the book is out, I have seven reviews averaging 4.7 stars on Amazon, and 19 ratings averaging 3.79 on Goodreads. (Wow, that... took a dive overnight, it was 4.16 yesterday. Easy come, easy go, I guess.) By and large, critical reception has been superb, far better than I could possibly have expected.

But what does all of that actually mean in cash money and books sold?

In total, we've sold 292 copies of Revision. Of that, 70 books were preorders on Amazon, and 3 were preorders on iTunes. Wait, let's make a nice visual for this:

Note Amazon's total domination of the market. Note how Kobo basically sucks, more's the pity. For my part, I'm amazed at how many people went all-in for the print version, since it costs so much more money. But the allure of paper is still strong, I guess. (And on Amazon, if you buy the print edition, you get the book for free through the Matchbook program, which is a nice draw.)

Remember back when I posted sales projections? I figured my baseline number of sales was... about 300, as that's about the combined number of people who will buy a copy because they are related to me, have a collegial professional relationship with me, are super good friends with me, or who really love my prior work. Actually, I suspect a majority of that 300 fall into more than one of those categories. It looks like that guess was spot on. I hadn't put a time frame on it, but I suppose it's "copies sold until the book more or less stops selling entirely," whether that takes a week, a month, a year.

The real question, is what happens from here?

So this is an overview of the print version of Revision's sales rank history over on Amazon. There are a few early spikes because the print edition was actually available for a week or so ahead of launch, and then on May 5, it hit a new high and sort of stayed there for a few days. And now it's starting to gradually drop.

The ebook edition's curve looks very similar, with more and bigger preorder spikes. The Kindle edition even hovered in the mid-5000s sales ranks for a while, which in my case works out to mean we were moving, mmm, 30 or so copies in a day.

I have a little more publicity lined up, so that high plateau may well continue for another week or two. But if the book were going to debut big and get onto an Amazon Top-100 or even Top-1000 list, that would've happened last week. I won't lie, I'm a little disappointed the book didn't go so high and get the sales boost that comes with that. From past experience, daily sales from here will continue to slide until they settle into either a modest few books sold in a typical week, or bupkis. The book will probably continue to see some modest sales spikes around signings, talks, and panels. Our chance to game the system for added visibility, however, is pretty much over.

Unless, unless. This is the point where we've done basically everything we can do for the book. It's in the hands of the readers now. And maybe some good word of mouth will kick in, who can say. Hugh Howey released Wool in July of 2011, and didn't break 1000 sales in a month until October. Not to say the Hugh Howey trajectory is where I'm headed, but it does mean it's at least possible that sales will remain stable or maybe even climb over an extended period... if the book is good enough, if it strikes enough people in the right way in the right moment, if people tell their friends, if people leave reviews.  

We've had a good, solid start. I'd hazard a guess that there are books even from major houses that have had worse first weeks than this; Kameron Hurley has been painfully honest about God's War selling 300 UK copies over several months. I figure lack of brick and mortar distribution on my end and UK-only numbers on hers make it a decent comparison, if you squint a little.

But will Revision have a tail from here? I don't know. I can't know. I think it's a good book and a lot of people seem to like it, so maybe it'll have legs. Maybe I will sell my benchmark of 1500 copies in the coming weeks or months. Maybe I'll even go full Hugh Howey, hey, you never know. But it's equally possible that this book is just about tapped and we're already on the last hill of the roller coaster.

Guess we'll find out, huh?

And We Have Liftoff

So remember that thing that was going to happen? IT IS HAPPENING. OMG.

REVISION: On sale right now. Did I say OMG yet?

If you find my ideas intriguing and you would like to buy my book, let me tell you how to do this thing! There is a paperback available for $14.99, or you can buy the ebook for $6.99 at these fine ebook retailers: Kindle! Nook! iTunes! Kobo! AW YISS.

I have also done a growing number of interviews and I have REVIEWS and such that you can read if a) you need more information before making a purchasing or not-purchasing decision, or b) you just want to know all the things about the book because you like me so much. There's a complete list over there at Fireside Fiction. 

One last thing: a number of people have asked me what they can do to help support the book. Is there a best format or location to buy from? Eh, not really. It's a balance between higher revenue vs. more visibility, and in the end there's no clear best way. So just do what is most convenient for you.

But there is one thing you can do. Leave a review of the book? Either where you bought it or on GoodReads, I'm not particular. It helps tremendously, believe it or not. The mysterious algorithms that Amazon et al use to decide when to recommend a book include reviews information, so even a short review -- even a BAD review -- can help lift me out of obscurity. Good times! 

And that's all for now. You are all wonderful. Thanks for coming this far with me.

30 Days and Counting

...Technically it's 29 days until REVISION COMES OUT YOU GUYS. That means the next several weeks are going to be full of links to podcasts and guest posts and me flailing my hands in the air and freaking out.

This in particular is a milestone day for me and this book, because today brought me a starred review in Publishers Weekly! "Terrific SF debut," they say! "Her fresh voice will be very welcome in the SF world," they say! 

But you don't have to take their word for it. You can read the first three chapters at Fireside Magazine today! I am full of all kinds of emotions right now. Full. There is no room in me for anything else.

And yet it's hard to say what this will mean in terms of actual sales. Publishers Weekly is primarily a resource for bookstores and librarians, and the fact that our print version is POD will probably soften or maybe even (alas) eliminate any bump we might have had. I was never getting distribution at Barnes & Noble to begin with, right? But I feel like this is a marker of credibility; more people are likely to take a chance on me with that floating around out there. And so that 1,500 books sold benchmark seems more attainable now, though 30,000 still seems laughably remote. Hey, you never know?

That said... the needle hasn't moved on my Amazon sales rank since this morning, so there hasn't been an immediate sales boost. So let me sweeten the pot: You trust a PW reviewer to know what they're talking about? Like what you see in those first three chapters? Think it's a book for you? Preorder for Kindle or Kobo (aw yeah affiliate links!) and then send me an email with the order confirmation, and I'll send you a signed postcard as a thank-you.

Four weeks, give or take, and then we'll see how much fuel this rocket's got in the tank. Four weeks. If ever there were a time to take up nail-biting...

Striving Toward Perfection

There's some substantial discussion going on right now about... you know, I can't even explain it. But there are important questions being raised about activism, about trying to do better, about whether trying is enough, whether being a good person is enough, even when you set a foot wrong.

I have expressed terrible opinions in my life, because I did not know better.

These opinions have been grossly homophobic (because the newspapers told me about the pervy gay people and AIDS.) They've been about trans people (because also pervy, I guess? That one sort of folded in with gay people back then.) They've been about how fat people are lazy and greedy, about gender roles and how I was a superior girl because I was much more like a boy, about Christians and rigid, repressive fundamentalism. Don't even get me started about the racist "knowledge" I learned and repeated about Filipinos when I lived on a military base in the Philippines.

But I know better now, I think. I have aged and grown more compassionate, more experienced at life. I've come to understand that my life is just a small fraction of all the possible lives to be lived, and many are more difficult than mine. Or just different than mine. But other experiences than mine have merit and value. Other choices than mine have value. I'm not the center of the freaking universe, nor are people like me. I know that now.

None of that erases the fact that I started off so horribly, cruelly wrong, a product of my time and environment. All of those horrible thoughts and opinions have been in my head. They were mine. Over time, I try to find the bad patterns, the awful judgey opinions that hurt people, and wear them away with something newer and kinder, something that lets me see and hear more people. It's an ongoing process. And yet I feel it might be unfair, unjust, unkind, to judge me for not having already arrived at the ultimate destination.

In twenty years' time I expect to find with horror that I've been even more wrong about other groups. Because I cannot be perfect, and I will never be perfect.

All I have is trying. And if trying isn't enough, then what hope is there for any of us?

Revision Sales Projections

When I embark on any big, new undertaking, I like to do a little bit of expectation management. Some of that is outward -- it's important to describe to your audience what the thing is you're about to do, so the people who won't enjoy it know they can safely ignore it, and so the people who will enjoy it know the intended tone and boundaries of your experience and start out on the right foot.

But it's just as important to look inside yourself and establish what your expected and desired outcomes are. If you don't set a benchmark for success or failure, you'll move your goalposts around so much that it becomes difficult to tell what's working and what isn't. And I consider it a mitzvah to tell you, too. There's a lot of speculation going on regarding sales and money, but very little hard public data about specific, real books and authors. And it's better for all of us who write or want to write to have a clear-eyed and brutally honest view of what to expect. So I'm here to share what I expect in sales for Revision and why. 

I figure my baseline floor is about 300 copies; anything less than this would be a shocking and humiliating failure. This is based on my experience with the Lucy Smokeheart Kickstarter. Lucy had roughly 250 backers, and I've made a lot of new friends since then, some of whom are likely book buyers. So I squint my eyes and think 300 is what I'll get in vegetable sales: copies moved because people like me personally, because they want to support my work, or because they've liked past work enough to take a chance on this next one, not because they think they'll like this one.

My royalty rate should give me roughly $2.45 per ebook sold, so that means I'm expecting to walk away with no less than $735 in my pocket, unless something truly catastrophic happens. This is not money to sneeze at; that means a trip to a con, or groceries for a few weeks, or a few car payments. That's not bad, but it also works out to a lousy hourly, because I promise you I've spent more than 100 hours working on this book. Hell, I'll probably spend more time than that just promoting it.

So I'm hoping to do better than that. I'm hoping the book doesn't stay hidden, known only among the circle of people who already know and like me well enough; that it is recommended, that word is passed on, that people read it and actually like it. So the most-reasonable forecast for books sold if the book does well but still doesn't quite light the world on fire is, say, 1,000 to 2,000 copies. We'll call it 1,500 for our purposes, which would earn me $3,675. That's a family vacation to Disney world, several months of car payments, and -- perhaps dearest to my heart -- a number that qualifies for SFWA membership. Not bad! Nothing to live on, and the hourly is still extremely unfavorable, but... not bad.

And if it does catch on and sell like hotcakes, what then? Let's cast aside the illusion of Hugh Howey numbers, here, or JK Rowling figures. Let's not think about numbers in the millions; we're just trying to make a living, not a killing. In my dearest possible imaginings, the book sells, mmm, let's call it 30,000 copies. That would net me $73,500, a princely sum with which I could remodel my bathrooms, cruise the Mediterranean, buy an Apple Watch, and still have money left over to pay the mortgage. And wouldn't that be lovely?

It's not impossible I'd sell that much, but if it happens, it'll be the result of a lot of things I have little control over: luck in striking readers the right way at the right moment; word of mouth based on that good impression; and nothing more important coming along and devouring my potential audience and their pocket change in the few weeks the book will be top of mind.

But my work here is almost done. I've written the book. I'll spend the next few months telling people it's there to buy, if they're so inclined. And as for the rest of it... well, it's out of my hands now. So we'll see how my predictions pan out, and you can count on me to let you know how it goes.

And while I'm at it... if you want to preorder, the links are right there in the sidebar. Out May 5. Maybe you'll like it?

The McKinnon Account

I made a thing! And I'd like to share the thing with you!  It's called The McKinnon Account, and it's a story told over the course of a morning via several emails and a few text messages. The fabulous and warmhearted Ben Scofield wrote the platform, and one day I'd like to make it open-source.

You can sign up for this little story at Hunter, Brown & Shen. Once you've registered, it begins for you at 9am the next day. (For extra verisimilitude, sign up on a Sunday so it plays out while you're at work of a Monday morning.) Just to be clear, it's not a game, just a story, and you can't do anything but read it. Call it an ARG without the G? 

This is just a tiny prototype for a larger project I'm hoping to make later this year, assuming I find the time to write it. That one is called The Attachment Study, and it's an experiment with a few things I'd like to try: single-player replayable immersive narrative; the illusion of interaction, where no real branching or player agency is actually possible; and for the real thing later in the year, the emotional texture of a character in the story falling in love with an audience member. The McKinnon Account does two out of three, and along the way incorporates some of the narrative techniques I plan to use in The Attachment Study  -- attributing actions to the player, for example. 

One more thing! Services to send email and text messages aren't entirely free, so running this story is likely to cost us a (very small) amount of money. If you think The McKinnon Account is super cool and you enjoy your time working for Hunter, Brown & Shen, maybe buy us a cup of coffee? I've set up a Gumroad product where you can pay what you like, if you are so moved. (The downloadable is a photo I recently took in Vienna, just so's there's something there. It is not actually related to the story of The McKinnon Account.)

So! That's the thing! Since this is a prototype, it's important I find out how this actually works for you. Please, please tell me how the story plays out for you; what you liked, what didn't work for you, thoughts on how it could be improved or modified to be better. Comment here if you can, or on Facebook or on Twitter, or reach out to me privately by email through my contact form. Even if you don't like it, that's valuable information I can use before I spend some months working on a story that everyone will hate.

Thank you! And congratulations on your new job at Hunter, Brown & Shen. Good luck!

UPDATED: If your phone number isn't in the U.S., alas you'll only receive the texts as emails and not to your phone -- but you will still get them, no worries!

Revision Cover Reveal

My debut novel, Revision, now has a cover and preorder links and a release date! The date is May 5 of 2015, you can get preorder links from Fireside Fiction, and the cover is... well.... let me just show you.

HOW BEAUTIFUL IS THAT CAN YOU EVEN STAND IT. SO BEAUTIFUL. ROBERT S. DAVIS MADE IT.

Meanwhile, I've gone through a very complicated reaction to the cover design process, and I thought I'd share it with you. The original cover designs were very much like this final cover; basically we combined the visual treatment of one with the text treatment of another, and BAM. Magic.

This is a very serious cover, I think. This is the cover for a book that lays a hard claim to being a science fiction novel. And that's what I wanted -- in fact, my most heartfelt addition to the cover brief was "no girl cooties." Revision is indeed a book upon which you could put an engagement ring on the cover and it wouldn't be... entirely misleading. Except that it would mean I couldn't get the kind of attention for this book that in my secret heart I want to get, because hahaha chicklit amirite?

And yet, and yet, I had a bit of panic at the idea of having such a serious cover for this book. When I drilled deep down into my psyche, I found fear, as one always does, and this time the fear took this shape: "What if they find out this is a GIRL BOOK about GIRL THINGS and they get angry? Because this is not a serious book."

Let's unpack this a little.

"This is not a serious book" is something I tell myself so it won't hurt if people dismiss it, but under the snarky, funny candy shell, this is to its core a book about privilege, about human nature, about trying and failing and trying again. It's not a serious book in that it's not The Handmaid's Tale, but it's not NOT a serious book, either. So why am I afraid of presenting myself as a serious author?

It's because we've created a false dichotomy where a book about a woman, where the core relationship is a friendship between women, where the most important plot drivers are to do with relationships and trust -- everything else falls away, and suddenly that book can't be serious. I can't be serious. So that cover is misleading.

In the interests of feminism, I've decided to stomp the hell out of that voice telling me it's too serious, too misleading -- because Revision is no more nor less serious a book than, say, Wool is, and I don't blink at that equally serious cover for a second.

But I doubt, and I worry. The fear is always there. Because that's what it is to be a woman author; to always be threading the needle between "woman" and "author." Let's hope this time we got it right.

In Loco Parentis and Doing Solo Work

Last week, my story In Loco Parentis went up on Escape Pod. OH MY GOD, you guys. It's happening! For real!

I wrote this piece originally as a sub for Women Destroy Science Fiction (though obviously they declined it) so it's about a teen girl and a crush and mothers and daughters and relationships. And AI that lives in your head. But it's also about how we use new technologies to do the same human things we've always done... maybe more efficiently, but always for the same ends. Read it! And I hope you like it!

It's been fairly well-received so far, or at least nobody has said anything mean to me about it? This is a tremendous relief. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I think I was expecting something terrible to happen.

See, this counts as my first-ever professional science fiction publication, which is simultaneously hilarious and overwhelming. I've been writing science fiction and fantasy professionally for several years, of course, but always in the context of a team, or work-for-hire, or else one-off goofy experimental projects. Lucy Smokeheart is a lot of fun, but it's not putting my heart on the line. I'm not trying to say anything. But this is the year I'm showing the world what's inside of my heart, as opposed to what comes out of my brain when I'm given a particular writing problem to solve.

So the other night I took to Twitters to talk a bit about what it's like to write for games vs. books (and solo short stories!) and why the latter feels much more frightening to me. Annnnnnd here's the Storify. You know, in case you missed it.

Transmedia Rolodex 2015

Friends, colleagues, artists all: I'm in a great position right now. I have more work than I can shake a stick at, and it looks like things are going to stay that way well into the foreseeable future. But it's not that way for everyone, and I'd like to do a little something about that.

I present to you the Transmedia Rolodex 2015.

If you're someone who's worked in the transmedia space -- an experience designer, a web developer or coder, a writer, an artist, video producer, anything -- leave your name in the comments here, along with a portfolio link and a suggestion on the best way to contact you for work.

I'll use this rolodex myself when trying to think of someone to refer work to, and indeed should I find myself needing someone to fill a particular skill gap in my team. And it's my hope that other people will also use this as a reference for finding people familiar with the particular needs and peculiarities of working in our liminal art. 

So please, leave your info here -- and if you get hired as a result, hey, drop me a line? I'd love to hear about it!