Posts Categorized: Writing

The City of Secret Rivers — Now In Paperback!

The City of Secret Rivers is now available in paperback!

At least, it’s available in the UK. In America, the book is called Hyacinth And The Secrets Beneath, and it won’t come out in paperback until April 24. Sorry, America. Guess that whole throwing-off-the-yoke-of-King-George thing doesn’t seem like such a good idea now, does it?

More Precious Than Rubies

Having found a mathematical formula that tells me how I feel about my book, I thought it only fair that I undertake a similar investigation into how America as a whole feels.
As mentioned in my previous post, our publisher has sold 10,269 copies of The Government Manual for New Superheroes. Since the cover price is $10.95(**), America has now spent a total of $112,445.55 on our book.
By the irrefutable laws of the free-market economy, this makes The Government Manual more valuable than a well-cut 3.01 karat diamond, which would sell for a mere $112,079–and then only if the color and clarity were up to snuff. Yes, America could have had the diamond, but it chose our book instead. That’s a great honor, and it’s one we’ll do our best to live up to.
Here are some other things America thinks our book is worth more than:
The right to send out pornographic spam
a 5-rai parcel of land in Thailand near Chiang Rai’s best little park and not far from Rajabat college. (5 rai is a little less than 2 acres, in case you’re wondering.)
• 5 1/2 of the most expensive Olympic pins ever created.
(**) Of course, many people presumably bought the book via Amazon or another source that sells the book at a discount, which means the figure of $112,445.55 overestimates the money spent. On the other hand, other people have presumably paid for used copies, which means that the figure underestimates our total sales. For now, I’m assuming that those two factors roughly cancel each other out. If I discover differently, I’ll let you know.

How Many Millidickens For This Post?

Recently, we got some updated sales figures from our editor Lane. The Government Manual for New Superheroes has sold 10,269 copies (net) thus far. Lane is very pleased with the fact that we’ve sold that many copies in such a short time.
I,too, found myself thrilled by our sales numbers. But then I started thinking: when I wrote for Dennis Miller Live, hundreds of thousands of people would hear my writing every week–perhaps even a million. (I was always a little vague on what our actual viewership was.) Should I be more or less proud of 10,000 copies of a book that I co-authored than I should be of roughly a million viewers of a show for which I was a small part of a team?
This was an important question, and one that deserved to be answered scientifically.