2,628 Words Per Dollar

Two thousand six hundred twenty-eight words per dollar. That's what you get for your buck when you buy my book, Lost in the Ivy, from Amazon.com. How do I know this? Because that's what Amazon tells me.

The list price on Amazon is $19.95 and the total number of words is 52,429. That, Amazon calculates, equates to 2,628 words per dollar.

This is one of the new Inside the Book features on Amazon. Just go to the Amazon sales page for Lost in the Ivy, scroll down to Inside the Book and there, among many other things, you'll find a section labeled Concordance and Text Stats. There, in addition to learning how many words per dollar you get when you buy my book, you can also find out the words per ounce, kind of like buying a piece of meat.

There are also stats telling you the book's readability level. On three readability scales, Lost in the Ivy rates between the fifth and seventh grade level. This I credit wholly to my master's degree studies in journalism because it was at that time, in my 18th year of formal education, I was taught to write as if my readers would be sixth graders. (Parental Warning: The fact that your kids could read my book doesn't mean that they should. Amazon neglects to include such an advisory, so I'm putting one here. There are adult language and themes in the book that I didn't learn about until my sophomore year in college and which most kids today probably don't learn about until, well, at least the eighth grade.) 

How does my book stack up? In comparison, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace is nothing short of a bargain, coming in at 50,357 words per dollar. But you'll end up paying the price, either in time lost that could have been spent doing other things or in the cost of that new stronger prescription you'll need for your eyeglasses.

My book, however, is a better buy than Pick-Up Lines that Work: Get the Girl Tonight! in which you only get 2,315 words for that same dollar. And, hey, you'll probably get just as many girls by buying my book.

Rebel Without the Caws

Clap, clap, clap your hands, clap your hands together.

Clap, clap, clap your hands, clap your hands together.

La la la la la la la, la la la la la la.

La la la la la la la, la la la la la.

So begins Clap, Clap, Clap, and so begins the Toddler’s Saturday morning music class, a mechanical wave of hands and annoying songs.

But where have all the Daddies gone? Slowly they’ve been disappearing. The Moms still dutifully show up with their little ones for the 9 AM class. But week by week, the Dad population has thinned. What has caused the decline?

The answer, I think, can be traced back in time to the Elementaryazoic Period in the development of the male species. It was during this stage of our lives that we spent a considerable amount of our time in classrooms. Most of that time was spent with our homeroom teacher but there were two breaks in that schedule, one of which was for gym class and the other of which was for music class.

For most boys, gym class, with the exception of recess, was the best time of the day. You got to run around like animals and throw balls at each other. What was there not to like about it? If you have an answer to that, odds are that you were not a boy.

Music class was everything that gym class wasn’t. A dreadful bore, it was. You felt like you were trapped in a birdcage for an hour. And the teacher forced you to do things that boys just didn’t do, at least in public, like dancing and singing and, worst of all, hand holding.

One would think that as the male species evolved and grew, it would have become more comfortable in its own skin. But the experience of toddler music class has demonstrated that not to be the case. If anything, Daddies are even less mature than their kids.

The Daddy drop-our rate in The Toddler’s music class is accelerating at an alarming rate, and it’s attributable to the class making them feel somewhat, well, less than manly. If real men don’t eat quiche, they certainly don’t dance around in a circle, holding hands and waving colorful scarves.

About three-quarters of the way through the class, the teacher plays a listening activity for the one and two year olds. In her whisper of a voice, she asks, “What sound is that?” When the one and two year olds yell “Crow!” it signals the lead-in for the song Billy McGee.

There were three crows sat on a tree, sing Billy McGee, McGaw.

There were three crows sat on a tree, sing Billy McGeee, McGaw.

There were three crows sat on a tree, and they are black as they could be,

And they all flapped their wings and cried, “Caw, caw, caw!”

With each “Caw, caw, caw!” the teacher places her hands in her armpits, flaps them like wings and adds the cawing sounds of the crow. Ritualistically, the toddlers and their parents follow her lead in cacophonous cawing, except for me, one of the few remaining Dads. I’ve taken to just watching from the safety of the crow’s nest, in the seats at the back of the room, the rebel without the caws.

Three Questions

There are two questions that confront an author more than any others. They follow a sequential order and both are, at times, equally difficult to answer. Because they're seemingly simply questions, those asking them always seem surprised when you don't have an answer for them.

The first question comes in variable forms but basically boils down to: When can I buy your book?

With some publishers that might be an easy answer, but it wasn't with mine. I didn't have a firm answer until the day I happened to find it being sold online.

The second question, I suppose, follows logically from the first. Not long after you've finally been able to give an answer to the first, you start getting a second question that you just can't answer, and that is: How many books have you sold?

Again, it's a six-word question, which, on its face, seems to be a simple one but is, in reality, fairly complex. Think, for a moment, about the ways that books are sold. It's not like they're all being sold in one place. Far from it. They're distributed throughout the world in brick-and-mortar bookstores and by online retailers. Even in this computer age, all of that information takes time to get back to the publisher and from the publisher to the author, and business cycles play a role in how long it takes to spread that information.

The one thing that the author has complete control over are the books he sells out of his own hands. In my 2005: Year in Review, I reported that I'd sold 104 copies by hand. I've since added three more to that total, bringing the number to 107. At the time I wrote the Year in Review, I mentioned that I'd soon be getting a report from my publisher that would give me a better idea of how many copies of Lost in the Ivy were sold in the first six months. That report arrived in the mail last week.

Now I can finally give an answer to that second question. In the first six months since its release, roughly 366 copies of Lost in the Ivy were sold. That includes the 107 copies I sold by hand.

Nobody will go "Wow!" when you tell them that you sold 366 copies of your book. But if you think about it, that's two copies that were sold each day of that six-month period. Certainly I didn't break any sales records, but I think I did fairly well.

If I could sustain those kind of sales over a two-year period, I'd be doing really well. Unfortunately, judging by the plummeting Amazon sales ranking, sales seem to have bottomed out.

Truth be told, I've even lost interest myself. You find some authors out there that just don't quit. They'll keep plugging that same book tirelessly day after day, year after year. I'm not one of those. I'm ready to move on. There are other things that I want to focus on.

As my first book, Lost in the Ivy will always hold a special place in my heart. It's opened new and exciting doors for me. Over the last year, however, it has, in many ways, consumed my life. I've answered many questions about it. There was just one more that I wanted to answer, and now I've done that.

There's a third question that follows in the sequential order. I already know what it will be: When will the next book be done?

That's a seven-word question, and it's even more difficult to answer than the first two. I'll answer it the same way I always answered the others: I wish I had an answer.

Behind the Scenes

If you've been paying attention, you've surely noticed that things have been pretty quiet on this blog lately. Does that mean that I haven't been busy? No, quite the opposite. Much goes on behind the scenes that you don't see. Lately I've been doing a lot of things behind that curtain of secrecy, and all of them with my clothes on. There's always the temptation, of course, to strip down and bare it all. But I'm much too modest for that kind of naked truth. 

So, what have I been doing in full dress rehearsal mode? Well, if I told you, it wouldn't be a secret any longer, now would it? You'll just have to be patient and wait for the curtain to open. Hopefully the wait will be worth it.

In the meantime, let me show you a few things that you probably haven't seen. Oh, come on, it's not like I'm going to drop my trousers. If I'm too modest to do so behind the curtain, I'm certainly not going to take it off with the eyes of the world upon me. These links take you to a few of the places that recently have linked to me: author T.A. Ridgell; R.J. Baker's Confessions of a Starving Mystery Writer blog; and Bethany Hiitola's Mommy Writer blog. And, finally, six months after I sent them a copy of my book, my local newspaper gives it a one-sentence blurb.

"Lost" in the Lights

Just learned that my book, Lost in the Ivy, has been singled for recognition by its publisher. The book is featured in the "Up in Lights" section of the publisher's home page.

Lost is being highlighted for being named winner of the "Fresh Voices" 2006 Book Award in the mystery/suspense/thriller category, which I wrote about here.

I must say that it's a nice warm feeling having the lights shine on me for awhile.