Unsolicited advice: Number crunching -- Jules

I've just finished putting this month's royalty statement numbers into my spreadsheet. As predicted after last month's figures, another book has gone over 1500 copies sold. I've received almost exactly $4000 in royalties on that title since it was released in April last year. The bulk of the sales came from the publisher's own website, but the book was also released through Fictionwise and All Romance Ebooks some months after its initial release, and both sites have shifted some units.

This is why I have a day job.

On the other hand, that's rather more than the price of a round of beers. It's a lot less money than I'd get if I'd been steadily selling books to Tor over the last four years, but it's a lot more money than I'd get at some publishers. Even if you're writing in a genre that New York won't touch, do your homework before submitting to a publisher. Money isn't the only factor, of course, or I'd be putting more effort into writing something that I could sensibly submit to Tor (who I'm using as an example because I *would* like to submit something to them). But it's a really good idea to submit first to a publisher that has a sane contract and has a reasonable chance of both staying in business and making you more than beer money. There are no guarantees in this business, but there are elementary precautions you can take to reduce your risk of getting burned.

On dealing with bad reviews -- Jules

I'd been meaning to do an "unsolicited advice" post on the subject of how to cope with bad reviews, but hadn't got to it in the aftermath of Eastercon. And then a week or so ago an enormous blogstorm erupted over one author taking bad reviews far too seriously, giving an example of authors behaving very badly indeed. It's a *very* touchy subject at the moment, so I'm simply going to pull up a comment that I posted at Dear Author back in January, in a completely different discussion.

On the topic of less-than-rave reviews, I don’t like getting them any more than the next author does. But one of the useful bits of advice I’ve had out of hanging around more experienced writers is this:

There is no book written that is going to appeal to everyone who reads it, because people have different tastes. So if your book reaches a wide audience, sooner or later it’s going to get a bad review, no matter how good a book it is. If it reaches a really wide audience, it’s going to get the sort of review that strips paint from walls. The thing to worry about is when you *don’t* get any bad reviews — because it means that not many people have read the book.

The duelling reviews on Dear Author and other sites occasionally demonstrate the truth of that. What one reviewer adores, another loathes, and sometimes for exactly the same reason. Bad reviews are part of the job description. You don’t have to learn to like them, but you do have to learn to live with them. And an honest review of the book isn’t an attack on the author, even if the reviewer didn’t like the book. A thumbs-down review may help sell the book to someone with different tastes, if the reviewer sets out clearly why the book didn’t work for her.

And I said something along the same lines a year ago in a comment on an EREC thread. I can't even remember now what outbreak of angst we were referring to, because authors regularly get in a public snit about less than glowing reviews.

Bad reviews hurt. But they're part of the job. And yes, I put my money, or at least my review copies, where my mouth is. I don't send out many review copies, because my publisher handles the routine review copies, including all the ones sent to the fluff review sites. But the few that *I* send out go to reviewers who are willing to say that they didn't like a book and why they didn't like it. Reviewers like Mrs Giggles, or Jan (the manga reviewer) at Dear Author. I know what sort of reviews I take seriously when I'm looking at reviews with my reader hat on, and that's the sort of review I want for one of my books, even if it means taking the risk that they'll shred it.

Welcome to the Panopticon, little author -- Jules

Or, "Post in haste, repent at leisure." One of the most useful pieces of advice I was ever given about the online world was back when I was a wee newbie; I was told not to post in anger. Write it if I must, but then leave it. For at least ten minutes, preferably overnight. Come back and look at it when calmed down, and ask myself, "Do I really want to send that?"

This was in the days before Google, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Alta Vista ruled the search engines. And when a search engine company called Deja News was causing consternation by archiving and indexing the casual conversation on a system called USENET, making it possible to retrieve and read posts that had been made years earlier in the expectation that what was said was ephemeral, the online equivalent of spoken words, gone once the conversation was over. There had always been small specialist archives, but Deja News made it possible for someone to call up the entirety of a person's posting history, see what they said on any subject, and to whom they said it. Casual, semi-private conversation was no longer either casual or semi-private.

Why does this matter? Because the net has a funny effect on people. It dehumanises the social transaction, makes it easy to forget that those are real people on the other end of the wire. Or it simply insulates people from the consequences of their actions. And thus it becomes easy to say things that you'd never say to someone's face, or that you'd never say in front of a camera recording your words for posterity. Things you might find embarrassing to have quoted back to you at a later date.

People have long memories, and it's neither nice nor wise to insult them unnecessarily. But machines have longer memories still, and back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, we were starting to understand what that meant. What goes on the net, stays on the net. You cannot take back your words once they've been said. They remain frozen in time, on some storage medium somewhere, and you can never, ever be quite sure that they won't return to haunt you. With datestamps and IP addresses to prove that yes, it was you who said them.

You can take down the webpage or blog post you wrote when you were drunk and angry, but Google cache will continue to show it to the world for a few hours or days or weeks. And archive.org may well have it in permanent archives. You can ask them to remove it, and they will, eventually. In the meantime, people will have been making screen shots. If you comment on someone else's blog, you're just going to have to hope that it's one that allows you to delete your own posts, and that it's not set to email copies of comments to the blog owner.

You can try to keep things private. Locked LiveJournal posts? Well, there was that episode when someone offered a useful service that just happened to ask people to login using their LJ password. And a couple of months later, the owners had enormous fun publicly posting the contents of locked posts they'd gained access to because a friend of the poster had subscribed to this service. Private bulletin boards get hacked. Oh, and that private mailing list may be exposed when some virus scoops up the contents of someone's hard drive, and starts emailing it to random addresses. I've been on the receiving end of such virus-forwarded emails, and it took a formal complaint to the infectee's ISP to get them to clean up their computer. Private tantrums are much, much better than public, but you can't assume that they'll stay private.

None of this means that you must be a saint at all times, never saying anything controversial or nasty, not even in passive-aggressive fashion or in a private forum. After all, I'm not known for my shy and retiring nature online. You'll go nuts, and you'll be boring. And people will forgive a lot, if you make an honest apology for something you regret in the cold light of morning. But own your words. Because they will surely own you, come the day you feel a need to deny them.

Welcome to the Panopticon, little author. Where there are a million cameras watching you, each and every one of them recording you for posterity. Try not to show your knickers in public too often.

[No, this isn't aimed at anyone in particular. I've been meaning to write something along these lines for months, wrote the first draft over a month ago, and have been sitting on it ever since, waiting for the opportunity to post it on a quiet day when nobody was going to take it personally. I think this roughly translates as "when hell freezes over", so it's going up today.]