14 Comments
Archive for April, 2011
33 items.
About a year-and-a-half ago, I found a discrepancy in the accounting on one of my book royalty statements which showed the publisher had not calculated my income correctly on a major book.
I reported the discrepancy, and it took the client over six months to forward the shortage, which was about $2,000. EDIT: Yes, it was an HONEST mistake. They agreed with me within ONE hour of my pointing it out. I don’t believe they were trying to rip me off. However…
Since then, royalty statements at the company have been revised. It is no longer possible to find the mistake I found with the new accounting system the company uses.
Just sayin’.
Author Kristine Kathryn Rusch has an excellent working writer blog, and there are two posts you must read about some major discrepancies she found in her ebook sales statements. This is very important information.
How many e-books did the traditional publisher say I sold? 30. That’s right. 30.
When the novellas, which had worse sales rankings from Amazon, sold 300 each.
That 30 number didn’t pass the sniff test for me. So I talked with other writers who have books in the same genre with the same company. The writers I talked with also had some e-book savvy.
These writers compared the sales of their self-published e-book titles to the sales of their traditionally published e-book titles, and found startling discrepancies. Even adjusting for price differences (Big Six e-books were priced higher than the self-published books), these writers discovered that their Big Six publishers reported e-book sales of one-tenth to one-one-hundredth of their indie-published titles.
FYI: Amazon doesn’t tell what your sales are. They only show your sales ranking in relation to how you sold on Amazon on that particular day.
You can get into the top 100,000 by just selling 2 or 3 books in a single day on Amazon, and you can be bumped down to the 1,000,000 mark by only selling one book on Amazon that week. You may be selling lots of books elsewhere, but on Amazon, that won’t show.
When I wrote an article about book piracy some months ago, a few folks rushed to Amazon to see the sales rankings on my books, stopped at A Distant Soil rankings, and looked no further. Why, who’d pirate her book! Her work doesn’t sell anyway! Look at her Amazon ranking!
I have about 2 dozen books on my backlist from which I derive royalty income. Looking at the Amazon sales ranking of only one of my books as some kind of objective measure of my entire backlist is dumb. Assuming only one of my books (this one) gets pirated is dumber. Since the majority of my sales via libraries and comic book shops wouldn’t show up on Amazon anyway, making much ado about my sales ranking on one of those books (a book which has sold $3,000,000 at retail, BTW) by noting the Amazon ranking as the sole measure, is amateur night analysis.
Yesterday’s Amazon rank for A Distant Soil Volume I was 335,000. The Amazon rank for Spider-man: Back in Black was 379,000. Therefore, A Distant Soil sells better than Spider-Man.
See how dumb that is?
More FYI: Bookscan is a service which tracks sales, but only covers about 50-75% of those sales. It covers NO digital sales, no mail order, no sales of books which don’t subscribe to the service. I track my Bookscan sales every single week. EDIT: FYI, these are book sales, not periodical sales. So, these are graphic novel numbers, not pamphlet comics.
It may surprise you to hear that one of my most solid backlist titles is Girl To Grrrl Manga. It certainly surprised me.
Here is an honest to gosharootie screen shot of eight weeks of my Bookscan backlist, with combined totals for my royalty-producing titles.
No, I will not give you any more specifics than this. I don’t think that would be fair to my clients.
As you can see from this graph, little me, the lowly creator of A Distant Soil who clearly doesn’t sell anything because I am such a loser for whining about illegal downloads, actually moves between 350 and 450 books EVERY SINGLE WEEK, via Bookscan alone. If you add in that extra lot that Bookscan doesn’t cover (25-50% more via other resources,) that’s a whole lotta books. EDIT: I haven’t had a new, original graphic novel out in years BTW. Very much looking forward to seeing what happens when my new GN’s are released, starting this fall.
Naturally, I do not get as big a cut from every sale as I do when I sell direct here on my website. Some of these books pay a pittance. Some of them have yet to earn out the advance. Others pay more than a pittance.
One creator who got a load of chirpy publicity from pirate – I mean, tech – websites, went on to rave about the big blip in his sales, which, it turned out, were only a couple dozen copies. If your baseline is zero, then any increase is a huge blip, I guess.
After literally millions of page views on articles about the “huge blip,” he went on to sell 150 copies on his website.
As you can see, 150 copies is, for me, a really bad week. More economy of scale reality check for you. Not to knock anyone else, or how they toot their horn, but what other people consider a step up is, in my universe, sinking into a black hole of suck. JK Rowling would probably weep buckets if her sales ever got to my level. Other people would think they died and went to heaven.
Online exposure does not necessarily translate to fame or sales. Just ask Huffpo bloggers.
As musician Rick Carnes once said, “People die of exposure.”
Here’s what works for me:
The combo of website sales, and big publisher support – the digital and traditional publishing combo, with authorized online publication of my work so people come directly to my site. That’s the ticket.
And it’s working better and better, thanks to the great readers who support the artist. YOU! Thanks to YOU, I grow flowers and make books, and make pictures! Whee!
A few years ago, the horizon looked bleak. Now, it’s shiny and sparkly. I think I see a unicorn!
Something else to think about: many of these self publishing services are de facto publishers. Don’t assume a major traditional publisher will rip you off on your sales accounting, and a Print on Demand service won’t.
Just sayin’.
Container Gardening for City Slickers: Beware the Homeowners Association
on April 19th, 2011Posted In: Blog, Colleen's Work
Once upon a time, Colleen lived in a city and hated it a whole lot. Cities are full of bland, overpriced housing, like this characterless unit I used to call home.
But on closer inspection, you’ll see I managed to turn my little plot of distant soil into a garden paradise.
A flock of happy ducks became part of my home.
Kristen and several other readers want to know if the nifty raised garden beds I rave about in the last post will be of use in their apartments. I tend to think they’ll be too large for you. And if you’re not on the bottom floor, with 500 lbs of dirt added, they will be too heavy for your porch.
Also, some homeowner’s associations can be very restrictive about what you can put where. After my garden grew, nosy neighbors became a pain.
Visitations from dangerous birds, like the ducks you see here, inspired the terrified villagers to pass a rule prohibiting bird feeding.
Here my beloved kitty Sawyer the Wonder Tom takes a stroll. He was very happy in my garden, and would sit outside all day, getting dive bombed by a bluejay.
The evil birds were so hated by my neighbors, that one of the few neighbors I had who wasn’t a psycho – a handsome, hero firefighter – got reported to his boss for felonious bird feeding, among other transgressions.
Yes, you read that right. They actually tried to get a hero firefighter, well, fired. For bird feeding.
My next door neighbors did the dastardly deed. When it came time to sell my condo, and an interested party stopped by to have a look, the lady next door (who wasn’t as much of a lady as she hoped to be thought of) asked, “Were they black?”
And I said, “I didn’t notice.”
The creeps next door were from Brooklyn, and seemed to have some sort of perverse allergy to nature. While being nice to my face, they reported me for felonious bird feeding, too.
Once, when I put my trash next to the door so a relative could pick it up and discard for me since I was too sick to walk it to the dumpster, they reported the crime. The fine for being unable to walk was $185.
When neighbor dude was sick with cancer, I baked the guy cookies. When I was so sick I had to come home from New York in a wheelchair, they made no inquiries – except to report errant trash bags next to my door.
In addition, my neighbors routinely stole the lovely flowers. I’d come out in the morning and find the treasures plundered.
Clueless landscapers would also grab lavender and other delights from the roots and toss them in the trash. “I don’t know nothing about these exotic plants!” grumbled one after I came running after him to retrieve my treasures.
I had no problem with the potted plants on or in my porch, but all plants surrounding my unit, the small plot which I had bought with the condo, were fair game for anyone with sticky fingers or eaten up with stupid.
Container gardening of this kind is probably best for the amateur urban gardener. It takes time to get used to how often which plant wants water, and in summer, some may require watering twice a day. You must read instructions, and keep a record of how your plants respond.
Also, terra cotta pots crack in cold weather, and must be brought indoors. Plastic pots, made to look like stone, are your best bet. You can leave your perennials outside all winter.
Important safety tip: anything you intend to bring indoors, keep on pot feet at all times. Bugs crawl in the drainage holes in your pots, and you bring them indoors with you. You get fewer bugs if your pots sit on feet.
I love hanging pots, and pots that hang off the railing. Grow tomatoes in a hanging pot.
My garden’s success was its doom, Harrison Bergeron in action. As you can see here, I had so many luscious plants, and my New Dawn rose was such a healthy resident, that the homeowner’s association passed new rules limiting the size and scope of the gardens we could have. I was ordered to get rid of the rose bush. My neighbors thought it was too big, and attracted birds.
I kid you not.
I really hated my neighbors, who all seemed to be from places with lots of pavement. They were pathologically suspicious of anything that wasn’t coated in plastic. After getting rid of the ducks (they even had some shot one night,) they installed plastic ducks on the lawn.
I could not wait to get away from these people.
Here’s my mom for a visit, enjoying the rose the neighbors hated.
My homeowner’s association presented me with a bill for $50 per day the rose remained in place. I appealed, and was given an extension to remove it when the plant went dormant. One frosty January, we hacked it back and dug it up, and transported it to my parent’s house, where it grew over 13 feet and flourished for years. When they sold the house, the new owner cut it down.
I wish city people would stay in cities and leave nature alone.
Please keep your Wal Mart, and your pavement, and your astroturf to yourselves.
The lesson here is the biggest problem you may have with your apartment garden is psychotic apartment residents. Find out what the homeowner’s association rules are before you plant anything. If your garden goes too well, you may find the rules changed on you.
Thus, I was driven back the the country where I belong.
And my former neighbors remain in their characterless condo. They choke daily on carbon monoxide, hear the honking of horns, and spy on their fellows, eyes peeled for transgressions like errant rose bushes, and dastardly bunches of lavender.
Thank God I’m a country girl.
