Pokemon Go: First Impressions Of A Game That's Changing Everything.

1) I’ve had a lot of friends sniffing how Pokemon Go isn’t as good as Ingress (which is the game it’s literally based on), and I don’t think these folks understand how deeply a game’s theme affects your appreciation of it.
Take Magic: the Gathering, for instance.  I can give you a card that’s an Equipment:
Equipment
Equipped creature gets +1/+0.
Whenever equipped creature blocks or is blocked by a member of Faction X, destroy that creature. It can’t be regenerated.
And if you’re big into Magic, you’ll understand what that card does, but it’s not a particularly memorable card.  If you don’t understand Magic, it’s a bunch of random words.
But that’s not the real Magic card.
The real Magic card takes place in Innistrad, the Gothic horror plane overrun by werewolves and zombies, and the actual card is:
Wooden Stake – Equipment
Equipped creature gets +1/+0.
Whenever equipped creature blocks or is blocked by a Vampire, destroy that creature. It can’t be regenerated.
Suddenly, all those random statistics coalesce into a story.  It fits into your brain a lot easier.  It becomes a pleasure to see this card, even if you don’t think it’s a good card (it isn’t), because the flavor of the card conveys and reinforces rules.
And I played Ingress for a bit, and I just didn’t care.  The flavor was dead: oh, you’re the blue color or the green color.  There was some vague text in the game about one being the rebellious color, but functionally both sides were perfectly identical, so I forgot which side was which because it was meaningless: there was “my side” and “the other side.”  And I went around checking in places for a while, but my rewards were pretty much “Hey, you’re more blue, go blue,” and I wound up not caring.
Pokemon Go is saturated with flavor.  First off, collecting little cute animals?  A major upgrade, even if nothing else happens.  But these animals are also iconic, giving you the choice of finding a Pikachu or a Charizard, so the collectibles you get in the game are more desirable.  And you can photograph them in the places you got to share them with your friends, so it’s automatically more entertaining than pressing a button when you’re within thirty feet of some restaurant and getting random numbers added to a meaningless score.
Flavor matters.
And maybe Ingress got better once you got to a super high level, but the fact is that at the early levels, the rewards were not particularly well defined.  They were an equipment, not a wooden stake.
Making Pokemon Go a wooden stake is a major upgrade even if you change nothing else, and if you’re a game designer you ignore that flavor component at your peril.
2)  Pokemon Go is a super-popular videogame, yes, but what strikes me about it is how it takes a solitary pasttime and makes it visible.  I mean, millions of people were playing Call of Duty and Dragon Age when those came out, but they were seated in their living rooms.  Pokemon Go makes you go out and be seen.
In a way, it’s the most brilliant marketing ever.
3)  I suspect it will also be a real sea change for how games intersect with real life from now on.  Already we have people who’ve had their houses tagged as gyms complaining about the way random folks showing up makes them look like a drug dealer, and they have no effective way to “un-gym” themselves.  We’ve had a Pokemon Go player stumble over a dead body. We’ve had robbers setting up camp by Pokemon Go stations.  We’ve had businesses putting up signs that “Pokemon are for paying customers only.”
We’ve seen black dudes and white dudes bonding over Pokemon Go at three in the morning, and concerns that Pokemon Go could get black men in trouble, wandering suspiciously in white neighborhoods.
What I like about the game is that it encourages real-world exploring.  I live in the suburbs, and I’m pretty much all rat and bird creatures.  My friend Dave went to the woods this weekend, and he found all sorts of water Pokemon I’m unlikely to find here, and I got a little jealous – which, if you know how much I hate the outdoors, is a strange strange feeling for me indeed.  I like the idea that Pokemon Go rewards people for going to new places, and you’d be surprised just how little incentive people need to change their behavior.
We’ve never really seen what augmented reality does before, and this is going to have so many surprises – both good ones and bad ones.  It’s going to get more insane, just you wait.
4)  It’s also going to cause a run on external power packs.  This game chews through batteries like there’s no tomorrow.
5)  This game is both good and bad for your social life.  On the one hand, I like the way it encourages small talk between strangers – I know if I see a guy with his phone in the “Pokemon hunting” hand position, I can say, “Hey, what’s in the neighborhood?” and talk shop with him.  Given that the game also encourages me to get out, that’s lovely.
But it’s terrible for talks with friends.  I went for a walk with Gini yesterday, and every three minutes the game buzzed and we collected a Pokemon.  We kept going, “…as we were saying” until we realized that it’s hard to discuss anything but Pokemon while you’re playing Pokemon, because it snatches your attention away.
6)  The game itself is… okay.  Like most MMORPG variants, it rewards “time” over “skill,” which is to say that a guy who grinds a lot will be rewarded a lot more than a very talented person who only has a half-hour or two to put into the game.  And it’s annoyingly undocumented, as there’s all sorts of things the game doesn’t bother to make clear, like what you’re supposed to do at a gym or what the little footstep-meters next to the Pokemon mean.
(Forbes Magazine, of all sources, has some hints for you.)
However, the “catch ’em all” formula has worked for years, and I do feel an urge to catch all the possible Pokemon in my neighborhood.  I found a crab wandering on my neighbor’s lawn today.  I don’t know why he was there, but hey, I caught him.
Will this game have lasting value, or be a fad?  A bit of both, I think.  We’re watching the high tide crest as Pokemon Go eclipses Twitter in “number of active users” (in under a week!), but eventually it’ll subside as everyone’s tried it and levels up enough to decide hey, I’ve seen enough.
But Nintendo hasn’t unleashed everything.  Once we can start trading Pokemon, that’ll be a major change in how we interact.  And the mass-captures, where everyone assembles in a city at a given time to capture, say, a Mewtwo, will be legendary – and they’re coming, it was in the game trailer.
And with each of those changes, societal ramifications will also ripple.  What happens when you can trade Pokemon, so some enterprising robber sets up shop at a gym to force people to trade him their strongest Pokemon at gunpoint?  And then he sells them on the black market to other Pokemon users? What happens when a kid gets sick and someone decides the best way to cheer him up is to get everyone to trade him the world’s best Pokemon, making him a tremendous owner of massively overpowered artificial monsters?
This is a fascinating world, my friends.  Pokemon Go is gonna change it a lot.
Let’s see what happens.
Until then, anyone wanna go into the woods to get a Magikarp?

Posted by on Jul 11, 2016 in Current Ramblings | 2 comments

The World Is Sad And So Am I. So Have Some Pretty Pretty Fingernails.

You may note I haven’t blogged much this week, because the news is pretty overwhelming.  So many people dead, and what the hell can I do about it?
(Well, I can join Campaign Zero to see which lawmakers are passing laws that might help the shooting of innocent black men, and write to those lawmakers – and I’m doing that – and to donate money to those law reform campaigns – and I’m doing that – but that doesn’t really help the blue bloodbath in Dallas, either, so I just wind up feeling overwhelmed and inadequate.)
I’m retweeting an awful lot on my Twitter feed, but my personal thoughts are a whirlwind.  It feels like every new headline knocks the last blog idea out of my hands.  This is a chaotic time, more turbulent than even the 1960s, and I’m pretty sure we’ll get through it – we have until now – but what scars will be left behind?
So fuck it.  I also realized I hadn’t posted my last three fingernail shots, so let’s put some joy in this world.
(As usual, all manicures are done by my Mad Manicurist Ashley, who currently works down at Fantasy Nails in Ohio City. Ask for her by name!)
Fingernails against sadness
Here’s perhaps the most amazing scientific feat of the year – we flung a three-ton robot across millions of miles to put it into orbit around a distant planet, and hit our target so precisely we were less than ten miles off by the time we got there. So why not Jupiter nails?
(Alas, Ashley forgot to put the little probe on my finger, but hey, she was busy and I had writing to do.)
Fingernails against sadness
Before I went on my two-week trip to Greece, I asked Mom if she wanted to have her nails done with me. I got sailboats, because, well, we were on a cruise. My Mom, who already had done her nails in deep blue, got Ashley to paint anchors on them, which coincidentally made her nails look like the Greek flag. We both got a lot of compliments, although I doubt my mother ever expected to be in a “fabulous nails” competition with her son.
Fingernails against sadness
When Game of Thrones premiered, everyone went “Get Game of Thrones nails! You love Game of Thrones!” But I was in my seasonal depression, and the world seemed bloody enough as it was, so I went with the other show premiere – the one that promised love and redemption.
Steven Universe nails are pretty wonderful. And I got to sing the theme song a lot, which I will do at the drop of a hat.

Posted by on Jul 8, 2016 in Current Ramblings | 0 comments

How Many Copies Of FLEX Did I Sell? Well, How Many Copies Does The Average Book Sell?

When I sold my novel Flex to Angry Robot, I knew if I didn’t set a sales goal before the book was published, I would angst endlessly over whether the book had been a success.
So I set a secret “Fuck you, Ferrett” number, making a promise to myself: If you sell that many copies of your debut novel, you have succeeded.  You may not compare your sales numbers to any other author and despair.  If you beat that “Fuck You, Ferrett” number, you sold more copies than you thought you would; take a bow and shut up.
I’m quite cruel to myself, really.  But me and I, we get along.
That “Fuck you, Ferrett” number was taken from an author I trusted, who told me over drinks that most books only sell 3,000 copies over their lifetime.  As in, “They sell 3,000 copies total before they’re put out of print and forgotten.”  So I said, “If I sell 4,000 copies, I must have done well.”
Problem is, the more I talked to authors, the more I wondered whether that 3,000 was correct.
I had lunch with an author friend of mine.  “My publisher treats me nice,” he said.  “Of course, I’ve sold like 30,000 copies.”  Three months later, they offered him a six-figure deal to write the next books in the series.  So, okay, 30,000 copies is good enough to get publishers running back.
But then during one of the inevitable Twitter discussions of “Does social media get you sales?”, I revealed that ten years of blogging and daily Tweeting got me a sum total of 900 preorders for Flex.  Several author friends of mine replied that they hadn’t sold 900 copies of their book total, and man did I feel like a dick all day.
A publisher friend of mine told me that the 3,000 copies was actually a bad figure, at least for sci-fi; most books sold more than that.   But my agent told me that it really depended on the book, and the publisher, and any number of other factors.
When I said my goal was to sell 3,000 copies, was that good for a debut?  Bad?  I didn’t know.  I knew 30,000 copies was good.  I knew 10,000 copies was enough to get a publisher to as for the next book in the series.  So clearly somewhere in between is what I could expect…
But authors, by and large, don’t discuss copies sold.  They occasionally discuss earned income, which is useful, but when it comes to “copies moved” you only hear about raging successes.
So is 3,000 copies actually a respectable number?  4,000?  Or is that the sort of figure you’d expect to see if you get signed with a major publisher like Tor or Random Penguin, and most indie publishers can expect to see a lot lower?
I figure the only way to determine what “average” looks like is to compile data.
So I asked authors how many copies they’d sold, and combed through blog posts to find authors who’d revealed their copies sold, and made a spreadsheet.  I’ve tried to embed it at the end of this entry – but if I failed, you can find the Google Spreadsheet detailing copies sold here.
If you would like to add your data to this spreadsheet, please email me at theferrett@theferrett.com with the email header AUTHOR SALES FIGURES SURVEY (so it doesn’t get lost in spam).  I’ll add them when I can.
I will note that self-published authors earn a lot more off of fewer numbers.  I’ve seen authors earning thousands off of hundreds of copies sold, because some of the authors shared their income.  I suspect on average, authors sell more copies through a traditional publisher, but the amount of cash is about the same – a suspicion confirmed by Brooke Johnson’s twin self-published/traditional published numbers.
As for me?
First, some figures:

  • Flex had an Amazon sales ranking consistently between 30,000 and 80,000 in the first year of release (though it’s dropped off lately, almost sixteen months after its debut).
  • It has 167 reviews on Amazon, which is probably above-average for a book of its sales numbers because I have a lot of loyal fans.  (Thank you guys.  Seriously.)  It’s got seven reviews on Barnes and Noble.
  • It has 1,000 reviews on Goodreads.
  • I’ve “earned out” on the book, which means I’ve sold enough copies to cover my initial advance.

So knowing that, how many copies would you say I’ve sold?
Flex sold 7,125 copies in the first nine months of release – or 178% of my “Fuck You, Ferrett” goal of 4,000 copies sold.  This was enough for Angry Robot to request a third book in the series – which, I should remind you, you can preorder now.
The sequel, The Flux, sold 4,125 copies in its first three months of release – Angry Robot’s sales figures end on December 31st, 2015.  Which, honestly, is way more than I thought it would sell, but those may not account for post-Christmas returns, which I suspect will bring it down a bit.  Then again, Angry Robot did run some promotions to goose The Flux’s online sales in the spring, so that may have shot up quite a bit.
The finale to the ‘Mancer series, Fix, will sell approximately one more copy if you click this link and go over and buy it now.
And that’s it.  7,125 seems like a pretty good number to me for a debut, and that’s not even a year.  But it’s hard to say, or compare. I think total number of Goodreads reviews is probably the best predictor of overall sales – you don’t have to write a review to leave a rating, unlike Amazon, and you generally have to have read the book to leave a rating.  But who knows?  Amazon sales rankings are crazy, BookScan numbers are crazy.  (According to Bookscan, I’ve sold roughly 3,000 units.)
If that was Young Adult, though, where the sale come fast and furious, that’d probably be a disappointment.  And if it was a cookbook, well, I’m told 10,000 is your bottom-of-the-barrel number.
So it all does depend, I guess. I’ll quote this segment of this extremely thorough overview of book sales, which I’d recommend to any author, which asks “What Constitutes ‘Good’ Sales?”:

As with anything here, we need qualifications. What constitutes “good” sales is entirely dependent on what type of book you are publishing, what size your publisher is, and what your advance was. 5,000 copies of a short story collection on a small press is a huge hit. 5,000 copies of a novel from a big publisher that paid a $100,000 advance is a huge disaster.

You also need to factor in the format. Selling 10,000 hardcover is worth more than 10,000 paperbacks. For ebooks, prices can be all over the place, even from a major publisher.

Qualifications aside, if you are a new writer at a big publisher and you’ve sold more than 10,000 copies of a novel you are in very good shape — as long as you didn’t have a large advance. It should be easy for you to get another book contract. If you sold more than 5,000, you are doing pretty well. You’ll probably sell your next book somewhere. If you sold less than 5,000, then you could be in trouble with the next book. (Although it is, as always, dependent on the project. If a publisher loves your next book, they may not care about previous sales.)

The smaller the press, the more you can scale down. One publisher of an independent press told me that most indie press books sell — not BookScan — about 1,500 copies, with 3,000 being good sales. Even then, the publisher stressed, an author selling 3,000 is really just paying for themselves. To be contributing to the operations of the press, they’d need to sell over 5,000.

So that’s the numbers.  That’s what I got.  As for what that all means, well, I’ll direct you towards Kameron Hurley’s wise dissection of her own sales numbers and how authors like us have to fight for the midlist.
And I’ll remind you that, as an author, comparing yourself to other authors is a void you can harm yourself in.  There is always, always, someone doing better than you did, and there always will be.  This is my debut novel, but I can name three authors who had debut novels that sold 20,000 copies, or 40,000 copies, or, you know, won the Hugo on their first novel.  I do this because, as a former book buyer – if you bought a computer book at Waldenbooks between 1997 and 2000, that’s because I put it on the shelf – sales numbers interest me.
But remember, “success” is defined by your publisher.  And “number of copies sold” is not the same as “quality,” unless you wanna start arguing that Renowned Dan Brown is the literary goal you are aiming for.  The suck thing about publishing is that lots of really good books don’t move the numbers in the way people had hoped, and professional writers have to live with that understanding that the marketplace is not a perfect reflection of their talent.
To quote William Goldman on Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.”  So keep writing as well as you can, and keep writing until hopefully the dice fall your way.  That’s literally all any of us can do.
And again, if you wanna share your own numbers, either through email or through letting me know about a blog post/Tweet/Tumblr you made, email me at theferrett@theferrett.com.  The more data we can have on this, the more we can normalize what sales numbers look like.
In the meantime, well… I’m happy with what I sold.  I have to be!  I made my goal.
So fuck you, neurotic Ferrett!  YOU DID GOOD.
Have a spreadsheet.

Posted by on Jul 5, 2016 in Current Ramblings | 1 comment

The First Review Of FIX Is In!

As y’all know, the third and final book in my ‘Mancer series, FIX, is coming out in September.  The review copies went out on Friday (and are still available if you’re a book reviewer).
Today is my birthday, so it’s really nice to get the first good review through Twitter:


Full disclosure: Cassandra’s been a huge fan of the series since the beginning, so much so that I Tuckerized her in Fix. (In many ways, she has the most tragic death.)  But if you’re a fan of the ‘Mancer series, this is a superfan saying that I managed to cobble together a good ending for what was never intended to be a trilogy, but sorta turned out that way.
So if you want to buy it, you know, preorders make a publisher happy.
And also, after having spent literally a week trying to figure out how to start my next novel, I finally cracked the opening 583 words in the first half hour of my birthday.  This is after experimenting with twenty-five different attempts, four serious, all of which sucked on some level or another.  But now I feel nothing but a strange giddiness, because the other attempts weren’t bad, they just weren’t as good as the novel I wanted to write.
So that’s there.  I’ll be making a post for the Clarion Echo soon, detailing what I did and how I did it, and if you want to walk through the novel-writing process with me, remember, all you have to do is donate $10 to the Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop.  It’s a bargain!
And now I’m off to eat too much cake, drink too much bourbon, and operate power tools.  Just as I beat not one, but two videogames yesterday and ate too much cake.
IT ARE MAH BIRFDAI YAYYYYY

Posted by on Jul 3, 2016 in Current Ramblings | 0 comments

Almost Forgot: If You're A Book Reviewer, FIX Is Up On NetGalley!

The third book in The ‘Mancer series, FIX, is finally available on NetGalley if you’d like to read and review.  Alas, this only applies to book reviews approved by NetGalley; the rest of you will have to wait until September.  But you can order it now!  (And please do!  My birthday’s this weekend!  Pre-orders help authors out, every time!)
I have to admit, though… seeing NetGalley tout my book as “THE THIRD TITLE IN FERRETT STEINMETZ’S CRITICALLY-ACCLAIMED ‘MANCER SERIES” is a little weird.  Actually, a lot weird.  I was like, “It wasn’t critically… okay, it got a lot of nice reviews… maybe a lot of them… but okay, it’s a marketing thing, I can turn off my ego-dampener just this one.”
Anyway.  If you review books, go request it from NetGalley.  If you simply want to find out what happens to Paul and Aliyah next – and major, major changes happen to everyone in this book, as I raze the potential of future books to the ground – then purchase it in advance.  Call it a birthday present, from you to me to you again!

Posted by on Jul 1, 2016 in Current Ramblings | 0 comments