Been Out a Bit...

I apologize for having disappeared... After the launch of SHOOTING KABUL I took some down-time, hung out with family and took a breather. But having SK out has been awesome, fingers crossed the reviews have been great and some wonderful authors and Bloggers have been chatting about the book. Here are two posts that came out, one one Mitali Perkin's blog, Mitali's Fire Escape, and the other on Cynthia Leitich Smith's Blog, Cynstations

Book Birthday!

Shooting Kabul officially released today and can be found at your local independent bookseller, Borders, Barnes & Noble, and on-line. The path to publishing has taken two years of hard work, with many people involved - my agent, editor, cover artist, marketing & sales personnel and host of others. Needless to say, I'm beyond excited!

The Book that Killed a Tree

Rainforests once covered 14% of the earth's land surface; now they cover a mere 6% and experts estimate that the last remaining rainforests could be consumed in less than 40 years - www.rain-tree.com

According to a new study released by the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), a large percentage of children's books sold in the U.S. are made from paper that includes "fiber linked to the clearing and conversion of Indonesia's rainforests." 90 percent of the world's acacia pulp is produced in Indonesia, according to RAN, where dedicated plantations are fast replacing virgin rainforest and wreaking havoc on the local ecology. Even worse, laboratory testing apparently found such fibers in at least one children's book about the destruction of rain forests.

Sadly, the children's book publishing industry is no exception to the fierce economics of globalization. RAN reports that U.S. publishers, relentlessly seeking to lower production costs, have aggressively offshored printing responsibilities to China. From 2000-2008, "Chinese sales of children's picture books to the U.S. ballooned by more than 290 percent, averaging an increase of more than 35 percent a year." China in turn, sources 18 percent of its pulp imports to Indonesia, where a pair of companies with two of the worst environmental reputations in the world, Asia Pulp and Paper and Asia Pacific Resources International, dominate the industry.

Rankingly Obsessed

Amazon has sold more than 7.5 million unique titles at this point, and rankings indicate a title must sell at least one copy a year to remain above a rank of two million - Morris Rosenthal, Foner Books 

Getting your book published is a exciting, awesome journey, but once it hits the shelves, you might think that writers relax and wait for the royalty checks to arrive in the mail... alas, it's not true. I'd say the majority of the writers I know start obsessing (at least a little) about sales. The first place they look is at their Amazon sales rankings. Your Amazon sales rank is a number that says how many other titles sold more than your book. The smaller the number, the better the sales. The number is re-computed daily (for obsessors who need to know)

 For example, a major publisher tracked 25 titles over a six month period, correlating the weekly Amazon sales rank with actual reported sales from Amazon. Here is what they found correlating Amazon Sales Rank with real sales:

Amazon Actual
Sale Rank              Books Sold per week
---------------------     -------------------------------
75-100                  250-275/wk
100-200                225-249/wk
200-300                150-200/wk
450-750                75-100/wk
750-3,000             40-75/wk
3,000-9,000          15-20/wk
10,000+                1-5/wk

Source: Rampant Techpress

There are fluctuations in Amazon sales rank when the book is first released - When the initial backorder is filled, the sales rank plummets (sometimes below 1,000) for a brief period. Thee there may be a large drops in rank when there is a bulk order. Not all books are treated equally -- the top 1,000 are recalculated hourly, the next chunk (up to 100,000 (estimated)) weekly, while the rest, monthly. 

Also available to obsessed writers are helpful Internet sites which track you sales for you, like Novelrank.com. NovelRank uses Amazon sales data, and is a free website for authors to track their Amazon Sales Rank on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk (United Kingdom), Amazon.ca (Canada), Amazon.fr (France), Amazon.de (Germany), and Amazon.co.jp (Japan).

So, feel free to go forth and obsess, but not too much!

Glimmer of Hope for Indies

March retail sales at bookstores were up by 1.6 percent, compared with March 2009, according to preliminary figures recently released by the Bureau of the Census - American Booksellers Association
 

Oren Teicher, chief executive of the American Booksellers Association (ABA), which represents independent stores, reported some good news the other day - membership is up from last years 1,401 to 1,410! But sadly, that is still it low from nearly 3,000 at the height of Independent Book Store ownership.
 

Independent stores have been struggling with the onslaught of change in the industry:

1. The spread of superstore chains, like Barnes & Nobles and Borders.
2. The emergence of Amazon.com and other online retailers.
3. The rise of the e-book platform, with many versions entering - Kindle, Nook, iPad etc. e-books now account for nearly 8% of sales for some major publishers.

Teicher credits last year’s turnaround mostly to the smarts of the independent community and a willingness to experiment, such as the literary day camp at BookPeople in Austin, Texas, or the clothing store in the Northshire Bookstore in Vermont. ABA president Michael Tucker, co-owner of Books Inc. in San Francisco, says the economy may have helped some stores, making it less costly to find retail space in downtown locations.

As the industry continues to face upheaval, fingers crossed that the Indies keep marching on.

Revisionist Social Studies

Texas is the country's second-largest textbook buyer, behind California, which has more than 6.2 million public school students in grades K-12.

I love Texas, don't get me wrong -- especially the BBQ. But ever since I heard that the Texas Board of Education approved a revised social studies curriculum to include adding language saying the country's Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles and a new section on "the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s," I got a little frightened. The revisions also include positive references to the Moral Majority, the National Rifle Association and the Contract with America, the congressional GOP manifesto from the 1990s.

Critics say if the changes are incorporated into textbooks, they will be historically inaccurate and dismissive of the contributions of minorities. The Texas recommendations face a final vote by the Republican-dominated board on May 21. The amendments to the state's curriculum standards also minimize Thomas Jefferson's role in world and U.S. history because he advocated the separation of church and state, and require that students learn about "the unintended consequences" of affirmative action and Title IX, the landmark federal law that bans gender discrimination in education programs and activities. 

 California may soon take a stand against proposed changes to social studies textbook sas a way to prevent them from being incorporated in California texts. Legislation by Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, seeks to protect the nation's largest public school population. "While some Texas politicians may want to set their educational standards back 50 years, California should not be subject to their backward curriculum changes," Yee said (Amen)

Lots of Launches

The following fellow 2K10 authors have launched their debut novels! 

Janet Fox's debut novel, FAITHFUL, released from Puffin last week. FAITHFUL, the story of 16-year old Maggie Bennet, is a tale of romance and mystery set in 1904 in spectacular Yellowstone National Park. 

Jeri Smith-Ready also launched with SHADE - In Shade, Aura Salvatore is a 16 year-old girl on a quest to uncover why everyone her age and younger can see ghosts, while coping with her boyfriend's own death and ghosthood.   

Tom Leveen's debut novel, PARTY, released April 29th from Random House. In PARTY, dovetailing perspectives unite 11 wildly different students at a graduation party in Santa Barbara in ways they never expected. 

THREE RIVERS RISING, a young-adult verse novel that combines tragedy, romance, and hope in Jame Richard's debut. Imagine a city under water—not Atlantis—but somewhere in the middle of the very real continental U.S., more than a hundred years before Hurricane Katrina. That city was Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and the year was 1889.