I just found a pile of unopened mail which must have got buried under a load of crap when my other half cleaned the kitchen while I was away cycling with my son...
...and in amongst it was a royalty statement, dated 30.6.09, which is only three weeks after the foreign edition of my book was published... and after a bit of head-scratching over what any of it meant (cos it's mostly in foreign, and they do weird things with their decimal points and their commas)... according to the statement, at that point 3,186 copies had been sold! Eh?
Of course then I remembered what happened with my first book, which apparently earnt out its advance in the first 6 months and I got paid £43... only to get a negative statement 6 months later, when the bookshops returned all those unsold copies. So it might just be that 3,186 copies of the book have been sent out to bookshops. Who might not have sold any at all. Certainly it's not doing well on Amazon.
But still. It's kind of good news. I think. 3,186 copies! My first book only had a print run of 3,000 and sold less than a third of that.
Sometimes you need to let go
1 day ago
9 comments:
If it does genuinely sell well in that foreign land, it might be worth having another go at trying to sell it to publishers here. The trouble is that if you self-publish here, you are unlikely o be able to sell it to a mainstream publisher later. Have you come across:
http://howpublishingreallyworks.blogspot.com
Don't worry Pierre, I know that only too well.
If I self-publish it will take me at least a year to sort it out, probably longer. By that time I'll have a good idea of how well it's done abroad and whether it's likely to get a UK deal.
It is problematic though, cos the business of trying to find a UK publisher would be v time consuming, and time is something I don't have a lot of.
But the sales figures so far, although good by my standards, aren't necessarily that impressive to someone in the industry. Also the recession is making it much harder than normal to get a publishing deal, and I suspect that's going to get significantly worse over the next year or two (I know some people say publishing is recession-proof, but I have good reasons for doubting that). So even if it does do well-ish abroad, that would probably not be enough to get it published here. It's a bit of a quandary really, but it's true that I should only really go down the self-publishing route if I'm sure I can't get a proper publishing deal. Such a pain, this industry.
Hmm, and I have one - maybe worth a fortune some day due to it's rarity?
And I see you've had your first Amazon review - auf Deutsch, naturlich. They've only given it 3 stars (actually 3.5 according to the text), but it's mostly good, positive stuff.
Really Mike? You know more than I do.
[runs off to look]
Hmmm, slight problem being that my German is rubbish.
[runs off to find online translation engine]
Yes, seems [i]quite[/i] positive...
Although as usual they can't get their head around what genre I live in. I'm hopeless at fitting into genre. I probably also need to be a bit nicer to my characters. I do have a bit of a warts-and-all obsession which leans more in the wart direction and forgets about the all.
On the grounds that you should always celebrate the positive, I'm raising a glass to those initial figures.
Thanks Debi. And you're right, of course.
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