Planning for Retirement

Timesplash has been free on Amazon for the past week (and is still free on iBookstore for some reason) so I’ve been looking at the book charts (because whenever Timesplash is free, it goes racing to the top of the charts and, you know, I like to pretend I’m successful).

When you see a whole page of book covers on your screen, and they’re the top 20 free Sci-Fi and Fantasy books on iBookstore, and you notice that your own cover looks absolutely nothing like any of the others, you do a double-take and you start to notice things – like that 15 of the top 20 books have pictures of women on the covers. And not hot ninja chicks in latex catsuits clutching ray guns of such penile proportions they would make an erotic vampire novelist blush, or supernormal warrior maidens with ten times more flesh showing than armour and a rack that’s sure to lead to back problems in later years. No, these particular cover ornaments are long-limbed, long flaxen haired, long flowing (but tight-bodiced) dress wearing elf-maidens of the soppyest, girliest, droopiest kind. The kind of women who, in the Sixties, would have been swaying around at folk concerts with headbands and flowers painted on their cheeks.

You also notice the titles – like that four out of 20 contain the word “Moon” and three the word “Kiss”.

And that yours is the only sci-fi book on the whole screen.

So, with nothing to do but procrastinate today (I wish!) I did a quick survey of the frequency of words used in the Amazon top 100 Sci-fi and Fantasy book titles. It didn’t take all that long and there were no surprises (except perhaps that Amazon’s SF&F category contains a much higher proportion of SF than Apple’s one does). It did reveal that the most popular word by a long way was “Witch”. The next four runners up were, “War”, “Vampire”, “Chronicle” and “Saga”.

So, in case I ever go mad, or senile, or run out of good things to write, I call dibs on the title, “The Witch War Saga”. In fact, I may not go mad, senile or uninspired; I may just turn bitter and cynical. I reckon that “The Witch War Saga,” with a suitably droopy blonde on the cover, even if it contained nothing but railway timetables, would outsell any damned sci-fi novel I could ever write – probably ten times over. I think this book will be my retirement nest-egg.

(And, of course, in a not untypical case of Life imitating Art, when I checked to see if someone had already used the title, I found two instances of very similar book series names. One is “The Witch Wars Saga” by Ashley Girardi. The other is “The Witch War Cycle” by Alan Burt Akers. So I guess there are at least two writers who are going to cross me off their Christmas card lists now. Which is a shame, because they must both be very rich and famous – and, if they’re not, it’s because neither used an elongated blonde on the cover. Time for a new edition, guys? Hey, don’t be like that. I gave you both a plug didn’t I?)