The World Is Sad And So Am I. So Have Some Pretty Pretty Fingernails.

You may note I haven’t blogged much this week, because the news is pretty overwhelming.  So many people dead, and what the hell can I do about it?
(Well, I can join Campaign Zero to see which lawmakers are passing laws that might help the shooting of innocent black men, and write to those lawmakers – and I’m doing that – and to donate money to those law reform campaigns – and I’m doing that – but that doesn’t really help the blue bloodbath in Dallas, either, so I just wind up feeling overwhelmed and inadequate.)
I’m retweeting an awful lot on my Twitter feed, but my personal thoughts are a whirlwind.  It feels like every new headline knocks the last blog idea out of my hands.  This is a chaotic time, more turbulent than even the 1960s, and I’m pretty sure we’ll get through it – we have until now – but what scars will be left behind?
So fuck it.  I also realized I hadn’t posted my last three fingernail shots, so let’s put some joy in this world.
(As usual, all manicures are done by my Mad Manicurist Ashley, who currently works down at Fantasy Nails in Ohio City. Ask for her by name!)

Here’s perhaps the most amazing scientific feat of the year – we flung a three-ton robot across millions of miles to put it into orbit around a distant planet, and hit our target so precisely we were less than ten miles off by the time we got there. So why not Jupiter nails?
(Alas, Ashley forgot to put the little probe on my finger, but hey, she was busy and I had writing to do.)

Before I went on my two-week trip to Greece, I asked Mom if she wanted to have her nails done with me. I got sailboats, because, well, we were on a cruise. My Mom, who already had done her nails in deep blue, got Ashley to paint anchors on them, which coincidentally made her nails look like the Greek flag. We both got a lot of compliments, although I doubt my mother ever expected to be in a “fabulous nails” competition with her son.

When Game of Thrones premiered, everyone went “Get Game of Thrones nails! You love Game of Thrones!” But I was in my seasonal depression, and the world seemed bloody enough as it was, so I went with the other show premiere – the one that promised love and redemption.
Steven Universe nails are pretty wonderful. And I got to sing the theme song a lot, which I will do at the drop of a hat.

How Many Copies Of FLEX Did I Sell? Well, How Many Copies Does The Average Book Sell?

When I sold my novel Flex to Angry Robot, I knew if I didn’t set a sales goal before the book was published, I would angst endlessly over whether the book had been a success.
So I set a secret “Fuck you, Ferrett” number, making a promise to myself: If you sell that many copies of your debut novel, you have succeeded.  You may not compare your sales numbers to any other author and despair.  If you beat that “Fuck You, Ferrett” number, you sold more copies than you thought you would; take a bow and shut up.
I’m quite cruel to myself, really.  But me and I, we get along.
That “Fuck you, Ferrett” number was taken from an author I trusted, who told me over drinks that most books only sell 3,000 copies over their lifetime.  As in, “They sell 3,000 copies total before they’re put out of print and forgotten.”  So I said, “If I sell 4,000 copies, I must have done well.”
Problem is, the more I talked to authors, the more I wondered whether that 3,000 was correct.
I had lunch with an author friend of mine.  “My publisher treats me nice,” he said.  “Of course, I’ve sold like 30,000 copies.”  Three months later, they offered him a six-figure deal to write the next books in the series.  So, okay, 30,000 copies is good enough to get publishers running back.
But then during one of the inevitable Twitter discussions of “Does social media get you sales?”, I revealed that ten years of blogging and daily Tweeting got me a sum total of 900 preorders for Flex.  Several author friends of mine replied that they hadn’t sold 900 copies of their book total, and man did I feel like a dick all day.
A publisher friend of mine told me that the 3,000 copies was actually a bad figure, at least for sci-fi; most books sold more than that.   But my agent told me that it really depended on the book, and the publisher, and any number of other factors.
When I said my goal was to sell 3,000 copies, was that good for a debut?  Bad?  I didn’t know.  I knew 30,000 copies was good.  I knew 10,000 copies was enough to get a publisher to as for the next book in the series.  So clearly somewhere in between is what I could expect…
But authors, by and large, don’t discuss copies sold.  They occasionally discuss earned income, which is useful, but when it comes to “copies moved” you only hear about raging successes.
So is 3,000 copies actually a respectable number?  4,000?  Or is that the sort of figure you’d expect to see if you get signed with a major publisher like Tor or Random Penguin, and most indie publishers can expect to see a lot lower?
I figure the only way to determine what “average” looks like is to compile data.
So I asked authors how many copies they’d sold, and combed through blog posts to find authors who’d revealed their copies sold, and made a spreadsheet.  I’ve tried to embed it at the end of this entry – but if I failed, you can find the Google Spreadsheet detailing copies sold here.
If you would like to add your data to this spreadsheet, please email me at theferrett@theferrett.com with the email header AUTHOR SALES FIGURES SURVEY (so it doesn’t get lost in spam).  I’ll add them when I can.
I will note that self-published authors earn a lot more off of fewer numbers.  I’ve seen authors earning thousands off of hundreds of copies sold, because some of the authors shared their income.  I suspect on average, authors sell more copies through a traditional publisher, but the amount of cash is about the same – a suspicion confirmed by Brooke Johnson’s twin self-published/traditional published numbers.
As for me?
First, some figures:

• Flex had an Amazon sales ranking consistently between 30,000 and 80,000 in the first year of release (though it’s dropped off lately, almost sixteen months after its debut).
• It has 167 reviews on Amazon, which is probably above-average for a book of its sales numbers because I have a lot of loyal fans.  (Thank you guys.  Seriously.)  It’s got seven reviews on Barnes and Noble.
• It has 1,000 reviews on Goodreads.
• I’ve “earned out” on the book, which means I’ve sold enough copies to cover my initial advance.

So knowing that, how many copies would you say I’ve sold?
Flex sold 7,125 copies in the first nine months of release – or 178% of my “Fuck You, Ferrett” goal of 4,000 copies sold.  This was enough for Angry Robot to request a third book in the series – which, I should remind you, you can preorder now.
The sequel, The Flux, sold 4,125 copies in its first three months of release – Angry Robot’s sales figures end on December 31st, 2015.  Which, honestly, is way more than I thought it would sell, but those may not account for post-Christmas returns, which I suspect will bring it down a bit.  Then again, Angry Robot did run some promotions to goose The Flux’s online sales in the spring, so that may have shot up quite a bit.
The finale to the ‘Mancer series, Fix, will sell approximately one more copy if you click this link and go over and buy it now.
And that’s it.  7,125 seems like a pretty good number to me for a debut, and that’s not even a year.  But it’s hard to say, or compare. I think total number of Goodreads reviews is probably the best predictor of overall sales – you don’t have to write a review to leave a rating, unlike Amazon, and you generally have to have read the book to leave a rating.  But who knows?  Amazon sales rankings are crazy, BookScan numbers are crazy.  (According to Bookscan, I’ve sold roughly 3,000 units.)
If that was Young Adult, though, where the sale come fast and furious, that’d probably be a disappointment.  And if it was a cookbook, well, I’m told 10,000 is your bottom-of-the-barrel number.
So it all does depend, I guess. I’ll quote this segment of this extremely thorough overview of book sales, which I’d recommend to any author, which asks “What Constitutes ‘Good’ Sales?”:

As with anything here, we need qualifications. What constitutes “good” sales is entirely dependent on what type of book you are publishing, what size your publisher is, and what your advance was. 5,000 copies of a short story collection on a small press is a huge hit. 5,000 copies of a novel from a big publisher that paid a $100,000 advance is a huge disaster.

You also need to factor in the format. Selling 10,000 hardcover is worth more than 10,000 paperbacks. For ebooks, prices can be all over the place, even from a major publisher.

Qualifications aside, if you are a new writer at a big publisher and you’ve sold more than 10,000 copies of a novel you are in very good shape — as long as you didn’t have a large advance. It should be easy for you to get another book contract. If you sold more than 5,000, you are doing pretty well. You’ll probably sell your next book somewhere. If you sold less than 5,000, then you could be in trouble with the next book. (Although it is, as always, dependent on the project. If a publisher loves your next book, they may not care about previous sales.)

The smaller the press, the more you can scale down. One publisher of an independent press told me that most indie press books sell — not BookScan — about 1,500 copies, with 3,000 being good sales. Even then, the publisher stressed, an author selling 3,000 is really just paying for themselves. To be contributing to the operations of the press, they’d need to sell over 5,000.

So that’s the numbers.  That’s what I got.  As for what that all means, well, I’ll direct you towards Kameron Hurley’s wise dissection of her own sales numbers and how authors like us have to fight for the midlist.
And I’ll remind you that, as an author, comparing yourself to other authors is a void you can harm yourself in.  There is always, always, someone doing better than you did, and there always will be.  This is my debut novel, but I can name three authors who had debut novels that sold 20,000 copies, or 40,000 copies, or, you know, won the Hugo on their first novel.  I do this because, as a former book buyer – if you bought a computer book at Waldenbooks between 1997 and 2000, that’s because I put it on the shelf – sales numbers interest me.
But remember, “success” is defined by your publisher.  And “number of copies sold” is not the same as “quality,” unless you wanna start arguing that Renowned Dan Brown is the literary goal you are aiming for.  The suck thing about publishing is that lots of really good books don’t move the numbers in the way people had hoped, and professional writers have to live with that understanding that the marketplace is not a perfect reflection of their talent.
To quote William Goldman on Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.”  So keep writing as well as you can, and keep writing until hopefully the dice fall your way.  That’s literally all any of us can do.
And again, if you wanna share your own numbers, either through email or through letting me know about a blog post/Tweet/Tumblr you made, email me at theferrett@theferrett.com.  The more data we can have on this, the more we can normalize what sales numbers look like.
In the meantime, well… I’m happy with what I sold.  I have to be!  I made my goal.
So fuck you, neurotic Ferrett!  YOU DID GOOD.
Have a spreadsheet.

The First Review Of FIX Is In!

As y’all know, the third and final book in my ‘Mancer series, FIX, is coming out in September.  The review copies went out on Friday (and are still available if you’re a book reviewer).
Today is my birthday, so it’s really nice to get the first good review through Twitter:

I finished reading through my eARC of @ferretthimself FIX this morning. It definitely sticks the landing, something I’d been afraid of.

— Cassandra Khaw (@casskhaw) July 3, 2016

And it is a harder book, in some ways, than the other two. There’s still a lot of action, still a lot of adventure, but FIX cuts into
— Cassandra Khaw (@casskhaw) July 3, 2016

something darker than dimension-eating monstrosities. It carves its way into questions of familial strife, poisoned love, distrust.

— Cassandra Khaw (@casskhaw) July 3, 2016

It tears down the idea of family, and points out all the ways we can fuck up our relationships with the ones we love. And it is /heavy/.
— Cassandra Khaw (@casskhaw) July 3, 2016

Because even though we’re talking about earth-shatteringly powerful mages, their problems are relatable, painful to read.

— Cassandra Khaw (@casskhaw) July 3, 2016

Full disclosure: Cassandra’s been a huge fan of the series since the beginning, so much so that I Tuckerized her in Fix. (In many ways, she has the most tragic death.)  But if you’re a fan of the ‘Mancer series, this is a superfan saying that I managed to cobble together a good ending for what was never intended to be a trilogy, but sorta turned out that way.
So if you want to buy it, you know, preorders make a publisher happy.
And also, after having spent literally a week trying to figure out how to start my next novel, I finally cracked the opening 583 words in the first half hour of my birthday.  This is after experimenting with twenty-five different attempts, four serious, all of which sucked on some level or another.  But now I feel nothing but a strange giddiness, because the other attempts weren’t bad, they just weren’t as good as the novel I wanted to write.
So that’s there.  I’ll be making a post for the Clarion Echo soon, detailing what I did and how I did it, and if you want to walk through the novel-writing process with me, remember, all you have to do is donate $10 to the Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop.  It’s a bargain!
And now I’m off to eat too much cake, drink too much bourbon, and operate power tools.  Just as I beat not one, but two videogames yesterday and ate too much cake.
IT ARE MAH BIRFDAI YAYYYYY

Almost Forgot: If You're A Book Reviewer, FIX Is Up On NetGalley!

The third book in The ‘Mancer series, FIX, is finally available on NetGalley if you’d like to read and review.  Alas, this only applies to book reviews approved by NetGalley; the rest of you will have to wait until September.  But you can order it now!  (And please do!  My birthday’s this weekend!  Pre-orders help authors out, every time!)
I have to admit, though… seeing NetGalley tout my book as “THE THIRD TITLE IN FERRETT STEINMETZ’S CRITICALLY-ACCLAIMED ‘MANCER SERIES” is a little weird.  Actually, a lot weird.  I was like, “It wasn’t critically… okay, it got a lot of nice reviews… maybe a lot of them… but okay, it’s a marketing thing, I can turn off my ego-dampener just this one.”
Anyway.  If you review books, go request it from NetGalley.  If you simply want to find out what happens to Paul and Aliyah next – and major, major changes happen to everyone in this book, as I raze the potential of future books to the ground – then purchase it in advance.  Call it a birthday present, from you to me to you again!

Was Finding Dory Localized To Each City It Was Shown In?

So I saw Finding Dory last night, which was an interesting experience if you live in Cleveland.  Because a major plot point is that the fish are going to be hauled away to an aquarium in Cleveland, and many zany rescue attempts are made.
I kept wondering whether that was actually Cleveland.
I mean, a truck had “Cleveland” prominently written on it, and that truck showed up several times.  Characters mentioned Cleveland, but I kept watching closely to see whether their mouths were moving when they said it, or whether their mouths were obscured.
Because, being in Cleveland, seeing a major reference to Cleveland, I wondered whether Pixar had localized the movie.  Could it be that the fish were only going to Cleveland because I lived in Cleveland, and if you lived in Boston the fish would be going to Boston, and if you lived in Thailand the fish were going to Thailand?
It’s been done before.  Captain America had a list of things he needed to catch up on after his return to modern society, and that was localized – every country showed a different list, tailored to historical and musical events that happened in their country.  That was one shot with one notepad, but…
They’re already changing ads shown in live baseball games.  It’s called Virtual Advertising, and that Taco Bell advertisement behind the batter might be a Mutual Insurance ad for someone in another city.  We’re already tailoring ads.
Why not tailor movies? Why not give the kids a thrill by thinking that Dory might be coming to your city?
If anyone could do it, Pixar could.  It would take some doing – a lot of recording and timing issues, and you wouldn’t want to re-render every frame entirely.  But with some tweaking, I’m sure you could reserve a box area on the side of the truck and swap out city names with only a bit of overhead.  Make sure the characters never faced the camera when they spoke {$CITY_NAME}, so you don’t have to animate their mouths.  Then make a list of major cities with aquariums, have Ellen Degeneres speak all their names, and map out a distribution network.
As it turned out, Cleveland was hard-coded into Finding Dory.  (I was a little relieved.)  But I got a glimpse into the future, because I’m sure someone in Hollywood is thinking about this, and maybe it didn’t happen this time, but as the costs of digital distribution and animation fall, it will.
Some day, animation costs may fall to the point where you see a global destruction movie, with asteroids falling across the world, and you’ll see your home town destroyed by a meteor.  And it will be your home town annihilated no matter where you see it, because it’ll be trivial to take a helicopter shot and overlay it with personalized mayhem.
Not today.
Probably not tomorrow.
But it’s coming.

Why "Anyone With Common Sense Would Know That!" Is Not Common Sense

Occasionally, I write about simple topics and commenters scorn: “This is obvious! Anyone with common sense knows that!”
First off, “common sense” is often “education” in disguise. I have a lot of common sense when it comes to money, but that’s because my parents were good with money and taught me a lot of quiet financial stuff when I was very young about saving cash and being careful about contracts and so forth.
I only realized it wasn’t really “common sense” when I started hanging around folks whose parents didn’t teach them these lessons, and it turns out that my “God, everyone knows that!” turned out to be something that I’d actually been told back when I was seven. I’d simply known it for so long that I’d forgotten someone once had to educate me.
Scorning people for not knowing things that someone didn’t actually tell them is a douche move.
Second, ya do realize that some people have had their common sense purposely broken by abusive families, right? There’s all sorts of folks who don’t have common sense when it comes to love simply because their family needed someone compliant, and so taught them that love looked like “shutting up and never expressing your own needs” or love looks like “tending to someone relentlessly no matter how terrible they are to you” or bullshit like that.
Scorning people for not knowing things that someone purposely misled them away from is a douche move.
And lastly, “common sense” is often “instinct” in disguise. And everyone has different instincts. If you’re the sort of person who’s naturally slow to trust, it’s “common sense” to not fling yourself headfirst into love – but that’s not actually common, it’s an emotion distinct to you.
You know what should be common sense? Understanding that your comfort zone is not a universal thing shared by every other human.
Scorning people for not being born with your inherent preferences is a douche move.
I take the XKCD 10,000 approach. I too try not to make fun of people for admitting they don’t know things. It’s a big world. Someone’s discovering something you thought was blazingly obvious every day – and in some cases, that admittedly-trite advice hits home to someone and helps them.
What people write sometimes may be obvious.
It should also be obvious that that essay was not written for you.

How We Operate

Gini and I, in bed: “Could you scratch my back?”
*Gini scratches.  I purr.*
“Mmm.  The Empire Scratches Back.”
“That’s a much gentler sequel.”
*I pause.*  “Does Darth Vader even have fingernails on his gloves?”
“No.”
“Then he couldn’t scratch anyone’s back.”
“No, no, he could use the Force.”
“I don’t think he has that kind of control.  He can choke you, but that’s blunt trauma.  Being able to rip off a piece of machinery isn’t the same as scratching a back; it’s like saying hitting someone with a baseball bat is the same as scratching your back.”
“Well, okay… no, wait.  The Emperor releases Luke’s handcuffs in Return of the Jedi.  So Vader could…”
“I don’t think that’s fine manipulation.  He’s hitting a button on the handcuffs, not picking the lock.”
“Handcuffs are springing loose!  Are you telling me that the Emperor put Luke in cuffs that he could free himself from by hitting a button?”
“Well… Darth did.”
“Okay, point.  But still.  Hitting a small button is fine manipulation.  The Emperor can scratch someone’s back with the Force, so Darth can.”
*I get up on one elbow.*  “The Emperor also has force lightning!  He’s way better at the Force than Vader.”
“You asked whether Darth Vader could scratch a back!  He’s got the Force!”
“That’s not the way the Force works!”  *We giggle from laughter at referencing the Force Awakens.* “But seriously, we’re debating whether Darth Vader could scratch someone’s back, using the powers he’s known to have.  He’s known to be way worse than the Emperor at the Force. Just because the Emperor can do it doesn’t mean that Vader could scratch someone’s back with the Force.”
“Jesus, you… all right, fine.  What about the prequels?”
“Do we have to go there?”
“There’s that scene in Attack of the Clones where Anakin lifts an apple off the table and carves it.”
“Does he carve it?  I remember him just picking it up.  If he’s tossing it around like a baseball, that doesn’t indicate he can scratch a back.”
“No, I’m pretty sure he carves it.  Hang on, lemme bring up YouTube.  And… oh, man, there’s a lot of videos here.”
“Oh, it’s a pear!  He eats a pear!”
“But all these videos are music videos, and none of them seem to have the scene where he cuts it in mid-air.  Just videos where Padme looks like a total doof as he steals her pear.”
“Okay, goddammit, let’s go downstairs and get Attack of the Clones out.”
*Fifteen minutes later, after we’ve turned on the television and scanned to the scene*
“Well, that settles it, Gini.  You were right.  Anakin slices up a pear in mid-air, so Darth Vader could definitely scratch a man’s back with the Force.”
“…you realize we were supposed to be having sex now, right?”
“Yuuuup.”