HelenKay Dimon

In the Things We Never Needed To Know category… Bowker – the folks in charge of those ISBNs – have done a little analyzing for us. Since I know you’ve been wondering about the average cost of a romance novel and the average number of pages in a science fiction book, well, worry no more. Here are the stats:

Average Length:
Science Fiction – 329 pages
Romance – 324 pages
Mystery and Detective – 292 pages
Western – 261 pages

Average Suggested Retail Price:
Science Fiction – $7.35
Mystery and Detective – $6.94
Romance – $5.57

Most Popular Location (Cities):
New York
London
Los Angeles (including Hollywood)
Chicago
San Francisco

Most Popular Location (States):
California
Texas
Florida
Virginia
North Carolina

Publishers Marketplace has a handy feature for those with obsessive/compulsive issues. [Read: all authors.] You type in the ISBN of your book (of anyone’s book or books) and this handy system tells you your daily sales rank on Amazon and B&N. Sure, the numbers don’t really mean anything, but who the hell cares. This is a way to waste time and to worry about your book – which in my case means worrying about a book that doesn’t come out for more than two months. Very logical, I know.

For When Good Things Happen To Bad Boys, the chart for the last two weeks (yes, I have saved more weeks than that) looks like this:

01/15/06 Amazon # 54,327; BN # 30,371
01/16/06 Amazon # 99,926; BN # 29,626
01/17/06 Amazon # 63,592; BN # 24,260
01/20/06 Amazon # 45,978; BN # 22,063
01/21/06 Amazon # 30,379; BN # 22,378
01/23/06 Amazon # 27,607; BN # 22,242
01/25/06 Amazon # 105,132; BN # 17,465
01/26/06 Amazon # 22,134; BN # 18,347
01/27/06 Amazon # 26,544; BN # 18,347
01/28/06 Amazon # 49,924; BN # 18,209

Not too shabby. Thanks again to Lori and Erin and their faithful readers.

Some people hate chick lit. Some people, like this woman, take that dislike to a near pathological level:

Quite frankly their lurid pink presence on bookshop shelves irritates the hell out of me. This is a fairly irrational hatred but I will attempt to explain why I could cheerfully garrotte the publishers of such novels.

Garrotte? Don’t hear that very often. She does manage to spew some of the same old crap – you know, the favorite lines said by people who have read exactly two chick lit novels and then deem themselves experts on the genre. Speaking of cliche…

I do not dismiss these books on a snobbish intellectual level. Trashy novels are a pure, unadulterated escape from the scary world of essay crises: a temptation to which I succumb. The genre has – however – become a source of ridicule; creating clichés that tend to portray women in an unflattering or one-dimensional manner. I am pleased that women writers no longer struggle to be accepted in a previously male dominated profession, but why should a substantial portion of their success be due to novels which provoke such an exasperated reaction from readers both male and female.

Sounds a bit like a dismissal based on both snobbery and ignorance, but maybe I missed her point. At least she appreciates the craft…oh wait:

Their titles are pun filled, their heroines are the wrong side of a size 14 and have a loveable band of chums who can always be relied on but will inevitably be unceremoniously dumped when the heroine eventually gets their man. “The independent woman’s search for love”. The stereotype has become boring … even nauseating. Another chorus of “I Will Survive” anyone?

Many of these books are silly, tacky and just plain bad. One gets the sense that almost no thought has gone into their conception: the author has merely followed the rules of “Chick Lit” and not bothered to make the work their own.

I’m thinking she hasn’t signed up for my mailing list…

This week in the writing world has established one thing: lying is the new black. An hour in jail versus 87 abuse-filled days – come on, anyone can make that mistake. I bet it felt like 87 days. Maybe that’s what James Frey meant.

Then there’s the Oprah-doesn’t-like-bad-press issue…

While we all vilify Frey – and I’m all for that – my favorite writer mishap (mishap being code for Big Fat Liar) is the story of author Nasdijj. Nasdijj won award after award and significant praise for his poignant memoirs The Blood Runs Like A River Through My Dreams and The Boy And The Dog Are Sleeping . The novels followed his tragic life growing up on a Navajo reservation and the death of his adopted son. Problem is, Nasdijj seems to be a white guy named Timothy Patrick Barrus who, before he remade his image, wrote gay erotica (actually defined as “Sadomasochistic Literature”).

Let’s recap on Nasdijj – From Michigan. Grew up in the suburbs. Not Navajo. No dead son. Oops. Hey, it can happen to anyone. I often have trouble remembering whether I grew up on a Navajo reservation or in Amish country in Pennsylvania. Hard to keep those pesky little details straight.

Leave it to Harriet Klausner to highlight one of my fears…

I was looking at Bad Boys in Kilts by Donna Kauffman on the B&N website. Cute cover. I like Donna’s writing. Very excited about this book.

Klausner gave Bad Boys in Kilts 5 stars and a great review. But, the last line of the review said:

These three well-written contemporary interactive novellas star fun lead couples falling in love though in some ways the tales appear too similar with one another.

Not sure what to think about this. The novellas are connected, so I would expect some common scenes and characters. But this suggests that the plots are the same. Enter my fear. I have two Bad Boy single author anthologies coming out (only one is actually written). While writing the individual novellas for Viva Las Bad Boys, I worried about having the stories sound too similar. That the heroines might be too much alike. That the plots could blend. Blah, blah, blah… Just as I wrestle that demon to the ground, hand the thing in and wait patiently for copy edits to arrive, I see this. Great – now I can worry all over again.

Number 9 on the Barnes & Noble Contemporary romance Top Ten List is Singled Out by Trisha Ashley. I’ve never heard of the book or the author. What’s strange about the listing – yes, there’s something strange here – is that it has a publication date of January 2006, but it’s listed as a hardcover bargain book. The price is $3.99 or $3.59 if you have one of those nifty member cards. I’m guessing since the reviews are dated in 2004 that this came out overseas first and has been re-released here in hardcover. But why the bargain basement price for something that’s not a month old?

Here’s the cover. You’ll see why it caught my eye:

We all have those days. The ones where we remember exactly where we were when XXX happened. For me, the downing of flight Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland is one of those.

Ken Dornstein lost his brother David on the flight. David left behind notebooks and letters. As a tribute, Ken has written a book called The Boy Who Fell Out Of The Sky: A Memoir.

In this stunning, emotionally charged memoir, Ken Dornstein interweaves the moving story of his own coming-of-age with the promise of greatness his brother never lived to fulfill. The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky is a heartbreaking but profoundly hopeful book about finding beauty in the midst of tragedy and making sense of it.

David Dornstein was twenty-five years old, a handsome, charismatic young man on the verge of becoming an extraordinary writer, when he boarded Pan Am Flight 103 from London on the evening of December 21, 1988. Thirty-eight minutes after takeoff, he died, along with the 258 other passengers and crew, when a terrorist’s plastic explosive ripped the plane apart over Lockerbie, Scotland.

David’s brother, Ken, was nineteen, a college sophomore home on winter break, when the call came. All his life Ken had looked up to David, confided in him, followed where he led. David’s death left Ken with a void that both crushed and consumed him. What were his brother’s plans when he died? Was David really carrying home a draft of the great novel everyone knew was in him? Was he in love with the woman he was living with overseas? Ken Dornstein needed to learn the truth about his brother’s life and death. In this harrowing and affecting memoir, he records what he found out.

Finding actual book sales numbers is not an easy task. There are some general figures out there. With the help of Bookscan we can see some specifics. Here were the top 10 books of 2005 with number of units sold:

1. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling: 7,024,000
2. A Million Little Pieces, James Frey: 1,767,000
3. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini: 1,571,000
4. 1776, David McCullough: 1,234,000
5. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown: 1,087,000
6. The World Is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman: 1,066,000
7. The Purpose-Driven Life, Rick Warren: 983,000
8. Angels & Demons, Dan Brown: 924,000
9. You: The Owner’s Manual: Mehmet Oz, 918,000
10. Eldest, Christopher Paolini: 882,000

Let’s do some basic math using #10, Eldest. List price multiplied by author percentage multiplied by units sold less agent percentage: $21.00 x 10% (a guess) x 882,000 x 85% (percentage after deduction for agent’s take of 15% – another guess)= $1,574,370 to the author…who is about 20 years old.

On the question of where the romance novels fell on the list, I offer two options depending on whether or not you think Sparks qualifies as a romance writer:

22. True Believer, Nicholas Sparks
24. Black Rose, Nora Roberts

In a conversation over at PBR I registered my dislike for multiple POV in the sense of reading books that introduce the POV of the mailman, dog and potted plant. Having just finished pontificating on this issue, I picked up People and saw this description for The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis:

Tossed around like a frisbee, the book’s point of view zips from one character to another, as everyone – young and old, male and female, animal and human – gets a chance to tell us how today’s world looks to the inhabitants of the small community of Varennes, near the Canadian border. Nursing home residents, married couples, children and beloved pets reflect on the town’s scandals and secrets, tragedies and romances, as well as on a more metaphysical subjects…

Yes, beloved pet POV. Since this thing is getting great reviews, I’m willing to believe my bright-line rule on this issue may be too harsh. Have to say that it’s hard to imagine all this working. But, really, when is People wrong…

This book has the potential to be pretty funny – 50 Boyfriends Worse Than Yours by Justin Racz. Here’s a peek at the goodies inside:

There’s Thrifty, who thinks taking you out to Chuck E Cheese is charming; Goth Guy, who borrows your make-up; Large Pet Owner, who wears his Python around the house. Rounding out the list are The Flaw Corrector, The Comedian (who’s using you for material), One Position Peter (enough said), and Balding and Touchy About It.

It looks as if this guy has made a career out of finding the 50 worst things in several categories. Some of his other titles are: 50 Relatives Worse Than Yours and 50 Jobs Worse Than Yours. Good writing job if you can get it…or if you were smart enough to think of it first.