Catching Up

by Stephanie Osborn
http://www.stephanie-osborn.com

Today is going to be fairly short. I'm writing this prior to DragonCon, because time crunch, and scheduling it to go up within 48 hrs of the end of Dragon. 

First off, I've had some inquiries as to where the print version of A Case of Spontaneous Combustion is. Well, it's not out yet. The ebook came out in May, and I anticipated the print book in June. But the publisher had a slight backlog and slipped it on out. Then we intended to try to get it into print prior to WorldCon in mid-August. But between that trip falling through for me, and some issues with the galley proofs, that slipped too. I've already been through several galley proofs, which is unusual with my publisher. I think the problem is partly mine; there is a good bit of non-English in this particular book, which required footnotes for translation, and the footnotes are not printing properly on the pages. So please be patient as we work out the proper layout and get it working right. I'd much rather delay and put out a good quality book than rush it to print and have people complain about its quality.

Second: If I have time -- and more importantly, energy -- to come back in here and edit this post for DragonCon updates, photos, etc., I will. Best not to expect it, lol. I put out a lot of energy during a regular con, and usually need a day when I get home to recuperate. (Part of it is due to the fact that I am not as much of an extrovert as most people think I am when they meet me.) And then there's DragonCon, which is nothing like a regular con. You gotta expect the biggest SF/F convention in the world to leave you worn out, especially if you're one of the people speaking at it. And since I have panels on Labor Day Monday, it will be late that night, possibly into the wee sma's Tuesday, before we arrive home. Tuesday to rest, and the blog goes live about 3:30am Central time on Wednesday, so yeah. Don't hold your breath! I'll post Dragon stuff when I can.

And last but hardly least, we will have just celebrated Labor Day. Of course I wasn't/won't be home to post anything, so I'd like to throw in a few inspirational quotes for those of you so inclined, and wish you all a happy start to Autumn 2014.

~~~

"Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work."

~~Mark Twain, aka Samuel Langhorne Clemens

"There is no substitute for hard work."

~~Thomas Edison

"I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it."

~~Thomas Jefferson

"Genius begins great works; labor alone finishes them."

~~Joseph Joubert

 “A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.”

~~Albert Einstein

“God sells us all things at the price of labor.” 

~~Leonardo da Vinci

“I know you’ve heard it a thousand times before. But it’s true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don’t love something, then don’t do it.” 

~~Ray Bradbury

“Each morning sees some task begin,Each evening sees it close;Something attempted, some done,Has earned a night’s repose.”

~~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

~~~

And on that note, dear friends, good night.

-Stephanie Osborn
http://www.stephanie-osborn.com

A New Sort of Publishing Model

by Stephanie Osborn
http://www.stephanie-osborn.com
with Dr. James K. Woosley

There's been a lot of discussion lately about the publishing industry as a whole and how it is or isn't growing, and whether writers are or are not competing. I've shared that discussion with friends and family, debating both sides of it. In general, I think that, especially with small presses and indie presses springing up, the growth is actually good and a positive thing. In theory we have a tremendous growth capability. In the short term, however, and in practical terms, I'm not so sure it isn't like saying we're going to fly to the Alpha Centauri system next year because some scientists have managed to develop a quantum-scale warp bubble in the lab. Theoretically it's possible, but practically, there's a few bugs yet to be worked out.

My friend Dr. James K. Woosley is a physicist and a Heinlein essayist; you'll meet him in more detail next week. But he's a hard-core, long-time science fiction/fantasy/specfic fan, and one of the friends with whom I've been discussing this issue. He's also skilled at modeling systems, down to the quantum level. Leave it to him to come up with a way to quantify this...

~~~

“It's partially an application of what I call a Sturgeon filter (because if 90% of everything is crap, then 10% of everything is worthwhile, and successive application can get to fairly decent estimates of demographics, as in 10% of people are readers, 10% of those are readers of SF/Fantasy literature, 10% are readers of more successively refined tastes, etc.

“Still, your potential reader base is X. Any individual author's actual reader base is a fraction f of that, or total number fX. Your base X has a total amount of disposable income C, and an average amount C/X, which is used to purchase reading material. The number of authors competing for that money is A, and the average number of works each author has for sale is n (where n is some conglomerate of new press and backlog, which complicates the analysis), such that the total competing number of works is N=nA. The average price of any work is P.

“Total individual items sold is thus C/P.

“Average sales per item is C/NP.

“Sales per item can be assumed (first order) to be Maxwell-distributed [an asymmetrical bell curve with one side steeper than the other --Steph] about that mean.

“The second constraint is time to read each book, moderated by the number of people who will buy attractive books that they want to read but lack the time to read, but also controlled by the fraction of people who re-read books. Assume an average reading speed (including breaks) of 15,000 words per minute or 6 hours for a typical novel, and assume further that the average reader will read one novel per week or roughly 50 novels per year, if they have the resources, but that an adult steady state reader will on average re-read 25 novels per year, so that new novels account for half of their reading.

“Assume that the book stockpiling factor is also 2. (Speaking for myself it's probably closer to 290, but...)

“The bottom line is that the non-cash-constrained market is about 50X novels per year, so that average sales computed that way is 50X/nA (where, again, n is some conglomerate of new press and backlog, which complicates the analysis). Or more simply, Sales(Avg)=50X/N.

“We'll assume cash parity initially, so that C = 50XP.

“I think a good working assumption is that X=1 million for SF/fantasy, so that about 50 million genre books are purchased each year. That is probably a maximum.

“At any time, A is about 500, with n=10 books (current plus backlog) in active publication.

“That yields a Maxwell-distributed average of 10,000 copies per book sold.

“At that level of the analysis the game is zero sum. The situation changes when either the fan base is increased, or disposable income increases so that people are more willing to stockpile books.

“And that's about it; danged if I know what if anything the analysis buys.”

~~~

Note that that's an initial analysis, and that the AVERAGE number of copies per book is 10,000. That isn't the best-seller numbers, and it isn't the bottom of the list numbers. This is how many books the mid-listers should be selling a year.

Food for thought.

~Stephanie Osborn

http://www.stephanie-osborn.com