John August

Projects

Welcome, NY Times readers

Follow Up, Projects, The Variant

The NY Times has an article today about [The Variant](http://johnaugust.com/variant), the Kindle, and my [Twitter followers](http://twitter.com/johnaugust).

> Mr. August, who wrote it for possible inclusion in an anthology of work by well-known screenwriters, tested the story with about two dozen of the 6,000 or so people who follow him on Twitter. They persuaded him to change the first sentence, trim some paragraphs and shorten the title from “The Egyptian Variant.”

You can read the whole article [here](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/business/media/01august.html).

One correction: In the interview, I said that I’d earned enough to buy “about four Kindles.” But I misremembered how much they cost: $359.

As of Friday, I’d made enough to buy 2.73 Kindles.

A week of The Variant

Follow Up, Projects, The Variant

My short story [The Variant](http://johnaugust.com/variant) has been on the market for a week. As promised, here’s an update on how the 99-cent experiment has gone.

variant sales table

Short version: I sold more copies than I expected, with fewer technical issues. I had picked the Friday of Memorial Day weekend precisely because I hoped it would be slower-paced, allowing me to fix whatever disasters struck without a crush of weekday traffic. But I could have been more ambitious, and a mid-week launch would have made more sense.

I get 35 cents on each Kindle sale, versus 89 cents on each download.

I’d be less grumbly about Amazon’s 65 percent cut if their reporting were better. Their DTP publisher tells you almost nothing about your sales. It only shows how many total units, with no breakdowns at all — not by day, not by state, nothing. Fortunately, I had embedded my Amazon tracking number in links from my site, so I do know that 458 of my Kindle sales came from people who clicked through from the launch page. That’s only a third of the Kindle sales, so many people were getting it in one of three alternate ways:

* Following a direct link from an outside site, such as [Daring Fireball](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/05/22/the-variant).
* Buying it through Kindle itself, either the device or the iPhone app. ((I have a hunch that a lot of readers tried out the iPhone app for the first time buying the book.))
* Finding the book on the Kindle bestseller list. ((I’ll have more to say about the bestseller list in another post.))

Downloads provide a lot more data. I’ve already written about the [international readers](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/mapping-the-variant), but the numbers also help show the falloff over time. It sold ten times more on the first day than the seventh.

variant downloads chart

(Note: I grabbed data at different times, so this total is 12 units shy of the table above.)

Today’s [NY Times article about The Variant](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/business/media/01august.html?ref=business) may provide a bump, but an esteemed colleague (Ze) cautions that he’s never seen a real spike from stories in traditional media.

At this point, I don’t have any big sense of What It All Means.

It’s a fine number of sales for a short story that would have likely been buried in some specialty magazine. But I’m not sure I can offer any meaningful analysis of the publishing model, partly because I started with a higher profile than many fiction writers might.

Could an established novelist duplicate (or exceed) these results? Probably. Could a talented but unknown upstart? Not as likely.

This kind of self-publishing certainly reduces the barriers, but literary brand recognition is still a huge asset. It is reading, after all. People would rather do almost anything than risk reading something bad. Free previews and a 99-cent price tag help, but the reputation of the author is likely a major factor in deciding to buy.

Mapping The Variant

Geek Alert, Hive Mind, Projects, The Variant

I’ll release sales info for [The Variant](http://johnaugust.com/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](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0029ZAPRW?ie=UTF8&tag=johnaugustcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0029ZAPRW) are pretty opaque; I only know totals. But the [downloadable versions](http://johnaugust.com/variant) (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](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/variant_geo.xls) and [.csv](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/variant_geo.csv) formats. The file shows only transaction date/time, initials, city, state, postal code and country. ((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.))

If you do something interesting with the data, leave a link.

Take away the questions

Adaptation, Projects, Story and Plot

Discover Magazine has a list of eleven [Rules for Time Travelers](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/05/14/rules-for-time-travelers/), which seems pertinent given the double whammy of Lost and the new Star Trek.

I’m largely on board with most of their recommendations, particularly the idea that there are no paradoxes. I’m not talking scientifically here — I honestly have no idea how to crunch the numbers to prove this point. But in terms of fiction, and screenwriting in particular, I’d argue you need to actively crush any talk of paradoxes or impossible conundrums. They will grind your story to a halt.

I did a little work on Minority Report, a Scott Frank adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story which is enjoyable for its combined Frank-Dickness. Minority Report doesn’t deal with time travel, but rather its pushy cousin called precognition — knowledge of the future. In the story, police use precognition to stop murders before they happen.

But! But! How do you know the murders were going to happen? You changed things. So for every crime, you would need to prove that the soon-to-be-killers were absolutely, unquestionably going to do it. Which seems impossible.

I argued that you couldn’t just answer those questions when they came up. You had to take away that whole class of questions, early and forcefully.

Here’s the scene I wrote:

WITWER

But it’s not the future if you stop it. Isn’t that a fundamental paradox?

Jad sets the sphere down on the table, needing both hands to explain this.

JAD

You’re really talking about predetermination, which happens all the time.

Unseen by Jad, the sphere is starting to roll towards the edge of the table, building up speed.

JAD (CONT’D)

In fact, it’s easy to demonstrate...

At the last moment, Witwer catches it. Everyone smiles.

KNOTT

Why did you catch that?

WITWER

Because it was going to fall.

FLETCHER

You’re certain?

WITWER

Yes.

JAD

But it didn’t fall. You caught it.

Witwer smiles a little, starting to catch on.

JAD (CONT’D)

The fact that you prevented it from happening doesn’t change the fact that it was going to happen.

WITWER

It’s the same with the murders.

FLETCHER

The precogs are showing us what’s going to happen unless we stop it.

(In the final movie, it’s Tom Cruise’s character (Anderton) rather than Jad who provides the explanation. And that’s an understandable change: you want your hero to feel in command of the facts.)

In any script, look for scenes in which characters answer questions, and try to find ways to take the questions away. Often, that means backing up five or ten pages, well before the audience has started to formulate their concerns, and finding a way to visualize (or better yet, physicalize) the problem.

The first Jurassic Park does this well, with the animated science lesson setting the ground rules and chopping down poles upon which red flags might fly. Likewise, the first acts of most horror movies are largely devoted to creating situations in which the characters can’t simply escape or call for help. The more artfully it’s done, the less you notice the setup.

Nor can comedies waste time addressing audience concerns. Groundhog Day churns through a number of possible solutions to Bill Murray’s dilemma in a montage that makes you feel certain that he’s tried everything, whether you’ve thought of it or not.

Don’t answer questions. Get rid of them before they’re asked.

**UPDATE:** The weird thing about running this blog for 5+ years is that I sometimes forget which questions I’ve answered, and which anecdotes I’ve given. I wrote this post an hour ago, but it covers a lot of the same ground as last year’s longer and better essay on [How to Explain Quantum Mechanics](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2008/how-to-explain-quantum-mechanics). Credit for consistency, I guess.