2013 January | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Jan

too close to miss: year one

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Note: every time I talk about sales figures for Too Close to Miss, I open the post with a very self-conscious apology for talking about sales figures. I still feel self-conscious about it! Focusing too much on sales numbers turns writing from a noble attempt to bridge the unfathomable gap between Self and Other into a P&L exercise. It feels mercenary and cheap, and while I am a mercenary I hate feeling tawdry. But, at the same time:

I believe it’s important to challenge the notion that self-publishing is not a viable means of releasing a book, and hard numbers are the only way to do that (“the plural of anecdote is data!”);
It’s so hard to get sales data for any books – self-published or traditionally published – that any data is useful data.

Of course, all self-reported sales data suffers from survivorship bias. All you read about are winners. No one whose book languishes in obscurity will ever blog about it; if they do, no one else will ever read it. Until more comprehensive data becomes available, though, self-reporting is the best we can do.

Enough throat clearing! The numbers:

From December 2011 through November 2012 – twelve calendar months of sales – Too Close to Miss sold 2728 copies. That’s across Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, various Smashwords platforms (primarily iTunes’ iBookstore), and hard copies on Amazon via Createspace. Total royalties, in my pocket, were $3984.

What does this mean?

I had to give away 100,000 copies free to sell those 2700. It’s impossible to say how many fewer copies I’d have sold without that bump in rankings, but, going off the trends of the months leading up to May and June (when I saw the biggest spike in Amazon), I’ll say at least 800 fewer units. I don’t know if this is a sustainable pattern of promotion; I suspect not.
Four grand ain’t enough to live on, at least not anywhere nicer than Cape Verde.
This is 2700 copies sold on primarily word of mouth. I bought no ads, did no interviews, and held no book release parties. I had several very nice reviews, but nothing in huge, traditional venues. I find this pretty reassuring.
If I had sold Too Close to Miss to a traditional publisher in November 2011 – meaning, if I’d lucked out and found a buyer the same month I put it on the market, which is akin to a winning Powerball ticket – I’d have most likely netted a $5,000 advance. There’s no database of average advances for first-time, non-celebrity authors, but anecdotes I’ve heard (blog posts, conference speakers) say that $5000, if not less, is a good benchmark. And I wouldn’t have even received it all at once. And Too Close to Miss wouldn’t even be in print right now (lead time between signing a contract and seeing the actual book in stores ranges from 12-18 months, if not more).
More to the point, Too Close to Miss would have been a terrible investment for a publishing house of any real size. 2700 copies in a year? Which publishers do print runs of fewer than five thousand?

What do I take from this?

Self-publishing Too Close to Miss was the right call. If a traditional publisher had bought Too Close to Miss, I would likely have made less money, made fewer sales, and wouldn’t even have the book in print yet. This way, it’s trucking along at its slow and steady pace, getting my name out there and generating interest in the Mara Cunningham series.

Too Close to Miss, the first Mara Cunningham novel, is still available just about anywhere you can buy books online – Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, and other stores. The second Mara Cunningham novel, Too Hard to Handle, is also available in select stores.

Jan

django unchained

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Struggling after the fact to put my conflicting feelings about Django Unchained and Quentin Tarantino into words, I came up with this: Tarantino never makes films in the genres he admires. Rather, he borrows the trappings of genre to talk about subjects he finds important. With Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino used the trappings of a war film to tell a story about the language of cinema as it relates to national identity^*. Django Unchained dresses up like a Western, but its meaning should, well, be obvious.

It’s not only possible to get a good education in America – best high schools and colleges – without knowing just how bad slavery was, it’s pretty damned likely. This isn’t to say that we never covered slavery in civics class, or that our teachers overlooked Black History Month. But the narrative that most folks would agree to is that slavery was this awful thing that happened long ago, but the Civil War fixed it, and then racism just kept happening for some reason, but then Martin Luther King fixed that, and that’s why we get the day off. We don’t really get how bad slavery was, not in the gut. Six hundred thousand people kidnapped from Africa. Four million slaves in America at the dawn of the Civil War. Iron shackles on bare calves, knotted whips on bare flesh, starving in wooden pens that reek of shit. An evil on par with the Holocaust, an industry that was so ingrained in the infrastructure of this country that the regions that profited the most off it – like Mississippi, the setting of most of the film – are miserable pits today.

Tarantino’s tendency toward excess, which I’ve always had a hard time with, serves him well here. We’ve all seen after-school specials and 19th-century woodcuts on the evils of slavery, but nothing makes you recoil like seeing Kerry Washington getting whipped by a sweating, ugly slaver while her husband not only pleads with the overseer to let her go, but pleads with her in the language of his oppressors: how master wouldn’t want a good house nigger marked up. After a few displays like that, including one pivotal scene I won’t spoil, you’ll cheer when Jamie Foxx, as Django, pulls his pistols. The shootout scenes are equally indulgent – they literally wallow in blood – but are well deserved.

Sylvia and I parted ways on Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance. I bought into the caricature he was going for: the plantation owner with the Satanic profile, right down to the devilish goatee and dinner jacket; the spoiled brat grown up, still looking like a boy as DiCaprio always will, living in a paradise called Candieland and talking about how well he knows black folks. But DiCaprio’s never been a subtle actor, and if you can’t take that you won’t quite like him. I don’t know that I’m qualified to comment on the whole spiderweb of controversy surrounding Samuel L. Jackson’s character, save that it felt legit to me. Sylvia also pointed out that Kerry Washington’s character didn’t have much to do beyond the “damsel in distress” role, which is sadly true.

Tarantino’s drive to load a film with every cool bit he can think of hurts the overall narrative, as it always does. While every distinct scene is entertaining or moving, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. There were scenes I laughed out loud at that I would still suggest cutting. At two hours and fifteen minutes, the movie could have been a masterpiece. As it is, the length doesn’t take away from the gripping power of the most visceral scenes, but it does take away from the overall composition. See it once on the big screen to see what it does to your gut; after that, you probably don’t need to see it again.

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* Also, as with Basterds, the ostensive subject of the film, as depicted in the trailer, is discarded in the first 30 minutes. Oh, the Brittle brothers, yup, that’s them over there. I wonder if trailer editors have a hard time turning Tarantino’s bloated films into enticing packages, or if Tarantino perhaps salts enough narrative in there to give the marketing team something to play with.

Jan

2012 best of blog

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

2012
meta

Until new content inspires me, I’ll run down some of (what I think were) my best posts from 2012:

On the SOPA Blackout: “If you object to SOPA, you object to the system that created it. If you don’t object to the system that created it, you don’t really object to SOPA. And don’t tell me that you understand the potential for corruption, but you hope that by electing “more and better” Ruling Party members that you can get good results, etc, because you can’t. It doesn’t work. You want a super-intelligent shark that’s not going to eat Samuel L. Jackson. Well, I’m sorry, but the super-intelligent shark will always eat Samuel L. Jackson.”

Writing as Chemistry: “Ferrett’s right to say that writing isn’t magical, but let’s not throw away all the metaphors yet. Let’s say instead that writing is not alchemical but chemical. Writers do not tap into Atlantean wisdom and brew potions to turn lead into gold. Instead, writers show up in the lab every day. They study a hundred different samples and jot down figures in a wilting marble notebook. Then, if they’re patient and they’re diligent and they don’t hurry to publish, they may just discover a miracle.”

The Death of Hardware: “The First World’s demand to be entertained is effectively unlimited. Get in front of that and produce interesting content with whatever means are at your disposal and you’ll do okay. Try to interrupt it and you’ll be shocked at the force of the response.”

Accountability: “You can’t teach a lack of respect for authority: even if power-worship weren’t wired into the human genome, skepticism and iconoclasm run counter to the principles of instruction. “Never take anyone’s word at face value, except mine, and only about this!” Perhaps the solution is to stop teaching, or to teach a different set of skills that will grow into independent thought, or to accept these occasional outbursts of group monstrosity as the price of a civil society.”

The Hunger Games: “While I don’t want to take anything away from the importance of The Bully Project, it is just as important that every teenager in America sees The Hunger Games on the big screen. They need to see a world where people accept income inequality as the just outcome of wrongdoing two hundred years ago. They need to see a world where young adults are marched off to death with no objection. They need to see a world where the voices and faces of media are tools of social control. They need to see a world where it’s the villains who call ritual slaughter a “sacrifice” that needs to be “honored,” not the heroes.”

Big Two-Hearted Racetrack: The symbolism will mean a little more to people who knew me personally in spring 2012, but I still think it works. Plus it’s a literal story that actually happened.

Living the Dream: “If you’re wondering whether or not a particular dream of yours is your true calling in life, ask yourself: how long would I be willing to labor in fruitless obscurity just for the joy of pursuing this dream?”

The Three Female Fates: “Maybe this was just the final straw. Maybe this was what burned me out after years of watching women shoved up against chain link fences, tied up in basements or covering their mouths as they look at pregnancy tests. I wasn’t offended at seeing rape on screen. I was just bored.”

On Guns and Mental Illness: “So maybe the truth about guns isn’t clear, nor will it be for some time. But we can say this with certainty: anyone who takes a weapon of any sort and wades into a crowd of civilians, slaying indiscriminately, has mental health issues. This is true for killers with ostensive political motives and for those without. This is a common denominator that unites all of them. So if we can’t make headway on the guns issue, maybe we can make some ground on mental health.”

On Contracts and Creators’ Rights: “Not only is Kurtz’s viewpoint wrong – the producer is just as much an actor as the artist is, and is therefore just as damned for drafting a shitty contract as the artist is for signing it – but it’s ugly. He’s hearing the grievances of men who’ve been discarded by the companies they trusted and he’s not saying, “That ain’t my problem.” He’s saying, “That’s precisely what you deserve.” He’s siding with the great against the powerless. That’s a tone from which nothing good ever emerges, save “the laugh in triumph over a defeated foe.” That there’s an audience for this sort of shit worries me.”