My Mother's Awful Secret, Kept For Thirty-Eight Years

So the wise among you will remember this tattoo from December:


That, my friends, is a Star Wars tattoo, which my wife and I got because we met in a Star Wars chat room.
We met in a Star Wars chat room because I had seen Star Wars well over seventy times in the theater.  In fact, I saw Star Wars fifty-seven and a half times before I was thirteen.
And that was, you youngsters, in the days before your fancy-schmancy DVDs or VHS tapes or even reruns existed.  Back in the day, if you wanted to see a movie and you were a young kid, you had to bug a relative into taking you.
I bugged my relatives fifty-seven and a half times.
The half was, I am only semi-ashamed to say, when I got my grandparents to take me.  They’d misread the matinee as 12:30 instead of 1:30, so we showed up an hour early, so Little Ferrett somehow convinced them to go into the theater early, watch the Death Star Trench Run, and then watch the entire movie again.
It is safe to say that Teeny Ferrett was a relative-bugging machine.  Imagine the challenge of convincing a relative, who has almost certainly seen Star Wars with you at least once because, well, hardly anyone has that big a family, and then saying, “Uh, hey, I know we’ve done this twice before and you know I’ve seen this movie forty times, but…
“…could we do it again?”
So my Star Wars bugging game was on fleek.
But the title of this entry was about my Mom’s horrible secret, which I only discovered when she arrived this Thursday and she told me how much she’d enjoyed The Force Awakens, and…
She should probably see Star Wars.
MY MOTHER HAD NEVER SEEN STAR WARS.
Let me repeat that:

My mother

had never seen

Star Wars.

Which, if you think about it, showcases my mother’s sheer manipulative genius.  Can you imagine what it took to not only withstand the pleadings of an iron-willed kid who would not shut up about this movie, but quietly maneuver every other relative to see this damn movie without once having to go yourself?
Jesus Christ, Machiavelli probably would have broken down at some point and said, “All right, I’ll go.”
Yet my Mom danced among the requests for my entire childhood, only now thinking, “Maybe it’s time.”
So we showed her last night.  She was sleepy, and having an allergic attack, but we got to the Death Star escape and she said, “PAUSE THIS MOVIE, I GOTTA PEE.”
She didn’t wanna miss a minute.
So she liked it.  Which is good.  Because as my friend Angie said, it’s so hard to rehome mothers once they get to that age.

Authors! How Many Books Did You Sell? A Survey.

So when I get back from Greece, I’m going to talk frankly about how many units my books Flex and The Flux sold.
There’s just one problem:
I don’t know whether that number is actually an impressive number.
The problem with publishing is that a) nobody wants to share their failures, and b) the successes push the top of the scale so much that it skews your vision.  Okay, if you sell 100,000 copies of your novel, you’ve done pretty well.
Yet what do good midlist sales numbers look like?
…somewhere between 100,000 copies and zero.   I guess.  Hardly anyone discusses the mid-range numbers, making it difficult to say what an author can, or should, expect.
So here’s where I ask my fellow authors: how many copies of your book did you sell?  If you made a blog post, or know of a blog post that discusses units (and not total dollars made), point me to that blog post.  (I know about Kameron Hurley’s brave revelation of her own sales numbers, but everyone else I’m happy to listen to.)
If you’re willing to share your numbers personally, identifying yourself and your book sales in public, email me at theferrett@theferrett.com.  (Telling me when it was published, if you’re self-published, and the average prices you sold it for will be a part of the equation, if’n you could share.)
And even if you’re not willing to say on the record, email me what you’ve sold and I’ll put you as an anonymous data point.
(And yes, I know you can look up Nielsen BookScan ratings, but that’s not an accurate total because it leaves out all ebooks and many many bookstores.  Everyone’s numbers on there are off by at least a third these days, maybe more.  Currently, BookScan is planted firmly in the “better’n nothing” camp.)
As a former book buyer, numbers always fascinate me.  This is a lot like Tobias Buckell’s author advance survey in that it’s a starting point for authors to know what the business is actually like.  Ultimately, I’ll compile a Google Sheets of numbers so there’s some better idea of what unit sales look like…
With the caveat that, having talked to several industry professionals, what matters for traditional publishers is not raw units, but beating your projections.  Smaller publishers are profitable on smaller print-runs, and what’s a big hit at a mid-level press might be a disappointment at a major press.  If you sold 100,000 units but the publisher printed 500,000 copies, you’re in the doghouse.
In any case, we’ve had some good studies on author advances and writing income, but raw book unit sales haven’t  been something I’ve seen talked about – at least when we’re not talking JK Rowling numbers.
If you want to share, let’s see how much data we can compile.

So If I Was Going After Donald Trump….

Attacking Trump has a lot of problems, but one of the main one is that Donald’s wrong for the Presidency in so many ways that watching the media go after him is like watching a small kid chasing chickens – he runs after one, notices another getting away, runs after that.  He says too many outrageous things, and it destroys the news cycle because they’re just getting hooked on one when something else too delicious to leave on the ground comes up.
So if I was in charge of the Democratic “Take Down Donald” Campaign, I’d announce a schedule:
Every two weeks, from now until the election, we will be discussing a new and entirely different way that Donald Trump is unfit for the Presidency.
And I’d focus on that with a series of commercials, the same commercials, aired as many times as humanly possible, homing in on just one of Donald’s many flaws.  (I’d also call him Donald.)   That would be what Hillary discusses in her campaign speeches, what I’d instruct other Democrats to focus in on, our social media targets.
So for two weeks, all we’d talk about is Trump University and what a rip-off it was, bringing out all the knives to bear, and discussing the delicious paradox of whether Donald knew he was extorting people for a degree that he knew was worthless, or whether he was just happy to walk away from it when it wasn’t what he wanted, and if so, is that what he’ll do to America when he plasters the Trump brand over the Oval Office?
Two weeks of shots.  Get that in there as much as possible.  Like a little television arc.
Then switch.  Don’t map out the schedule in advance; be flexible.  But if you do it right, people will wonder what’s coming next.  It’ll be like spoilers for a movie – “I heard the next Donald Doofiness will be his lack of international knowledge.”  “No, I hear it’s the accusations of him abusing his wife!” “No, I hear it’s his shameful treatment of veterans!” “It’s that he’s not even really a billionaire!” – with forums lighting up and suggestions made and his opponents getting furious.
Donald’s really good at pivoting away whenever someone starts to gain ground.  So nail him down.  Play his own game.  Make it all about what he can’t do, and refuse to be lured away from that.
It’s what Democrats have been traditionally crappy at anyway, so might as well learn on a big target, amiright?

So I'm Going To Greece. Here's The Books I'm Taking. Suggest One More.

On Friday, I’m going on vacation to Greece and Turkey and Italy for ten days. This will be a lovely cruise, and if it’s anything like last time, I’m going to get a lot of reading done.
So thanks to my new Kindle, I’ve stockpiled lots of books!  In case you’re wondering what I’ve been hearing good things about, here’s the list of books I’m taking with me:

• Joe Hill’s THE FIREMAN, which I am currently 65% through and thoroughly enjoying, as I have all of Joe Hill’s books;
• Will McIntosh’s LOVE MINUS EIGHTY, because his DEFENDERS was one of the best books I read in 2015 and SOFT APOCALYPSE was sad  and moving (even if it didn’t really have much of an ending), and I’m told this is his best work;
• Seanan McGuire’s EVERY HEART A DOORWAY, as I love the idea of a grown-up Narnia and I love Seanan’s works;
• Ransom Riggs’ MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN, as Bart Calendar won’t shut up about it and people have kept comparing bits of it to my own book THE FLUX (which, no, the Peregrine Institute was pure coincidental naming);
• Cassie Alexander’s DARK INK TATTOO, because she writes good smut and she has promised me tattoo smut in this tome;
• Claudia Gray’s LOST STARS, as everyone tells me it’s the best new Star Wars book, and also my daughter won’t shut up about it;
• Delilah Dawson’s HIT, because I enjoy a female hitman paying off her credit cards as much as anyone else;
• Richard Hacker’s THE ULTIMATE CIGAR BOOK, since if I’m smoking them occasionally I feel I should know the history, and the only other book I read a) talked about the hurricanes of 1994 as though they were recent history, and b) taught me lies that the guys at the cigar store easily dismissed;
• Siddharta Mukherjee’s THE GENE: AN INTIMATE HISTORY, which Ken Liu recommended and the opening chapter detailing a man’s struggle with his entire family going insane hooked me.

Now.  Despite all that, there’s room for one more book here.  I read fast, and I’ll be trapped on a plane for hours, and cruise ship expeditions involve a lot of travel time as we drive endlessly to my destination.  (Not that I expect to read all of these books – though I read five on my Italy trip – but I want a wide variety in what I do read.)
So.  What I’m looking for is one final book recommendation.  Something published in the last two years, something that’s not the first book in a series, and something light.  (No dense books; time has proven I can’t read them on vacation.)
The books I’ve raved about to people lately have been Scott Hawkin’s LIBRARY AT MOUNT CHAR, Charlie Jane Anders’ ALL THE BIRDS IN THE SKY, Dan Wells’ JOHN CLEAVER series, and of course Rae Carson’s THE GIRL OF FIRE AND THORNS.
If you have a book that fits all those criteria, suggest away!  I may have read it.  But then we can geek out about it!