Mapping The Variant
I’ll release sales info for The Variant on Monday, but I wanted to offer up one bit this afternoon in case data-miners were inspired to do something with it over the weekend.
Sales of the Kindle version are pretty opaque; I only know totals. But the downloadable versions (pdf and ePub) give me names and shipping addresses. I was curious how many readers were international, particularly since Amazon’s Kindle is U.S.-only. (The answer: 37%.)
There may be other interesting things to explore and/or mash up, so I’ve stripped out identifying information and uploaded it in Excel and .csv formats. The file shows only transaction date/time, initials, city, state, postal code and country.1
If you do something interesting with the data, leave a link.
- Originally, I was going to include first name, which adds a nice degree of personality. But in a couple of cases, I worried that it was too individualizing, particularly with unusual names in smaller towns. ↩
Articles
May 29th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
The number of internationals is not entirely accurate, though, there are those of us with US credit cards. You can add Czech Republic to the list of countries that host your readers.
May 29th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
surprisingly, i’m the only visitor from croatia… thought there were at least few more followers!
May 29th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
So there were exactly 500 sales when you prepped the spreadsheets, or is that a representative sampling?
May 30th, 2009 at 2:45 am
You don’t need to worry about being too individualizing. Everybody’s name is Abdirman in the small town of Reusel (± 12.400) in The Netherlands ;-)
May 30th, 2009 at 5:12 am
Hopefully the “pre” tag will help with the formatting here…
Sample size: 500
Number of countries: 34
Percent from native English speaking countries: 80.8 (US, UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand)
Top ten by country:
country total
United States 256
United Kingdom (Great Britain) 57
Canada 47
Australia 34
Germany 22
Norway 8
France 7
Spain 7
Italy 6
Netherlands 6
Top ten by US state:
state total
CA 68
NY 18
MA 17
WA 15
IL 14
TX 11
OR 10
CO 9
FL 9
PA 9
Total and percentage-of-overseas transactions: (non-US/Canada, grouped by six-hour intervals)
transaction total overseas
2009.05.18T06:00:00.000 1 0
2009.05.18T18:00:00.000 3 0
2009.05.21T18:00:00.000 2 50
2009.05.22T00:00:00.000 1 100
2009.05.22T12:00:00.000 108 31.48148 2009.05.22T18:00:00.000 54 25.92593 2009.05.23T00:00:00.000 37 75.67568 2009.05.23T06:00:00.000 38 34.21053 2009.05.23T12:00:00.000 31 41.93548 2009.05.23T18:00:00.000 13 15.38462 2009.05.24T00:00:00.000 16 75
2009.05.24T06:00:00.000 13 15.38462 2009.05.24T12:00:00.000 18 50
2009.05.24T18:00:00.000 14 35.71429 2009.05.25T00:00:00.000 11 81.81818 2009.05.25T06:00:00.000 13 53.84615 2009.05.25T12:00:00.000 7 42.85714 2009.05.25T18:00:00.000 8 12.5
2009.05.26T00:00:00.000 7 100
2009.05.26T06:00:00.000 18 22.22222 2009.05.26T12:00:00.000 20 45
2009.05.26T18:00:00.000 11 18.18182 2009.05.27T00:00:00.000 13 84.61538 2009.05.27T06:00:00.000 8 37.5
2009.05.27T12:00:00.000 9 11.11111 2009.05.27T18:00:00.000 6 16.66667 2009.05.28T00:00:00.000 6 33.33333 2009.05.28T06:00:00.000 4 25
2009.05.28T12:00:00.000 3 0
2009.05.28T18:00:00.000 3 0
2009.05.29T00:00:00.000 3 66.66667
2009.05.29T06:00:00.000 1 0
You have a few sales listed before noon on the 22nd (the timestamp of original blog post), which I guess come from testing it out.
More stats available upon request.
May 30th, 2009 at 6:53 am
Oh, only three customers from Austria ;)
May 30th, 2009 at 8:15 am
@Chris(Quant):
Thanks for the nice breakdown. Yes, those early downloads were tests.
I’d noted to a friend that the pdfs seemed to be “mostly overseas,” which was true when I observed it, but not overall.
@Greg Bulmash:
It’s not a sample; there were exactly that number when I pulled the list.
May 30th, 2009 at 8:35 am
Without knowing your costs (I imagine those attached specifically to “The Variant” are few and minor), you have already made about what I made on my most lucrative short-story sale. (Your Kindle sales will push you well over my top.) Plus, now you have a revenue stream that belongs to you.
Publishing through magazines, at this point, is good only for association or visibility. You have visibility already.
Self-publishing is the thing. I love it. Submitting books and stories isn’t about quality of writing — or not just. It’s about audience. When you demonstrate you can build an audience, or come with one already built, publishers need a really good reason to convince themselves not to go with you; assuming you choose to go with a publisher down the line. (“You” not necessarily meaning you, John, obviously.) Just ask the likes of David Wellington, Leinad Zeraus, Wil Wheaton, and Scott Sigler.
That your audience is worldwide and your shipping costs are zero? Welcome to the future, I guess.
May 30th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
@Will:
Visibility is definitely true here. The numbers show that there was an initial spike in sales after the announcement, followed by lower but steady sales after a day or so. It seems that most buyers snapped it up as soon as they read about it through their feed readers.
@John:
One of the interesting things to note about media in general is the language barrier. Movies are often dubbed or given subtitles to play overseas. Your short story, however, is only available in English. I’m curious to see what would happen with a story like this published in another language. Would there be the initial buying frenzy? Would loyal readers be willing to make an “impulse purchase”?
May 31st, 2009 at 12:05 am
@Chris (Quant):
While the data points on foreign-language sales would be interesting, it brings up the new problem of getting a capable translation done, because the quality of translation could significantly influence sales.
Translation requires more than a technical ability, but an artistic sensibility and an ability to translate not just the words, but the nuances, preserving both the meaning and the voice of the story.
I was going to relate some personal experience from translating some English-language poetry into Spanish in college, but I think anyone who has used Babelfish or another automated translation service can see how much meaning, personality, and context can be lost in a bad or mediocre translation.
As a more humorous example of translation-gone-wrong, there’s the “Super Karate Monkey Death Car” episode of “News Radio”.
“Anyway, I wanted to read from chapter three… which is the story of my first rise to financial prominence… I had a small house of brokerage on Wall Street… many days no business come to my hut… my hut… but Jimmy has fear? A thousand times no. I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey strong bowels were girded with strength like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo… dung.”
May 31st, 2009 at 5:14 pm
John -
Thanks for the transparency on this; it’s fascinating. I look forward to the follow-up on Monday. As a professional novelist, I enjoy writing short stories in between larger projects, but markets–particularly for middle-grade and young adult stories–are few. I’ll also second what Will said as well–you’ve already earned more for The Variant than I was paid for either of the stories I’ve sold to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. The prospect of selling some of my stories myself online is intriguing, and I’m watching your experiment with interest. All I need now is your size audience…
Oh, and I enjoyed your story quite a lot too. :-)
Thanks again -