This page is not affiliated with authorearnings.com. Rails app to generate this can be found on GitHub. Some earlier charts are here.
Table columns are percentiles: 25% means that, if you line everyone up in order, 25% made that or less.

Self-Published Earnings, 2013

#	25%	50%	75%	90%	95%	100%
914	300	3000	24000	91000	200000	13000000

Traditionally-Published Earnings, 2013

#	25%	50%	75%	90%	95%	100%
265	800	7000	38000	100000	200000	1200000

Self-Published Earnings by # Books Self-Published

#	25%	50%	75%	90%	95%	100%
0-2	100	500	3200	15000	30000	130000
3-5	200	1600	14000	46000	70000	500000
6-10	1000	10000	45000	140000	200000	500000
11-25	3000	19000	78000	270000	380000	3500000
26-50	3000	24000	100000	400000	1000000	13000000
51-9999	5000	20000	80000	102500	1000000	1000000

Traditional Earnings by # Books Traditionally Published

#	25%	50%	75%	90%	95%	100%
0-2	200	1000	7876	50000	100000	190000
3-5	2000	17500	40000	150000	380000	500000
6-10	1500	10000	40000	100000	100000	200000
11-25	4214	30000	70000	250000	450000	550000
26-50	2500	10000	60000	153000	200000	1000000
51-9999	35000	65000	100000	1200000	1200000	1200000

Self-Published Earnings by Cover Art Type

#	25%	50%	75%	90%	95%	100%
My Own	150	1500	15000	50000	104000	3500000
Pre-Made	100	500	2000	11500	60000	100000
Hire a Pro	500	5000	35000	113232	250000	13000000

Self-Published Earnings by Editor Type

#	25%	50%	75%	90%	95%	100%
None	200	3500	20000	38000	165000	1000000
Friends & Family	150	1200	12000	70000	100000	567000
Critique Group	125	800	6000	50000	64000	1000000
Freelance Editor	600	6000	40000	140000	300000	13000000

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I’m going to go out on what seems to be a wildly unpopular limb here and say this: asking a developer to write an implementation of a sort algorithm is almost certainly a bad job interview question.
Why? Because you’re likely not hiring someone to write implementations of sort algorithms. Even if you were, they probably would not be writing optimized code in a job interview situation, so what’s it really testing?
Problem solving skills aren’t universal, nor does the ability/inability or inclination/disinclination to solve one kind of problem necessarily reflect one’s overall skills. Or lack thereof.
Remember that the person being interviewed is also interviewing you and deciding whether they want to work with you or not. If you ask a coding question that’s more directly relevant to the job at hand, then they will have a better sense of what it is you do every day—and whether that’s something they want to do, too. You’re engaging them in your problem space, not asking something they may or may not warm to even if they’d love the job you’re interviewing for.
For example, in an interview I went on once upon a time, the interviewer said, “We have this problem, and I’d like to see how you approach it.” So it was a supportive, shared, coding question. I had questions about some aspects of the requirements, which the interviewer then answered. That was a great interview approach.
I’ve come to dread the sort interview questions. Frankly, it’s not a part of programming I enjoy. I like the fact that other people think about sort implementations. Yay, diversity.
I remember once, I think it was 2005, having re-reviewed all the common sort algorithms, then flown to a job interview. The question: “How would you write a shuffle algorithm?”
I remember that instant of total frustration far more than anything else from the interview.
My answer was something like: create a hash of something like a random seed from the current time plus some aspect of the information you had about the song (since it was about shuffling songs) like the title, and then sort the hashes. I have no idea if that’s a good answer, but it’s what I came up with at the time.
Meanwhile, I’d much rather focus on whether we need this column or not, whether that schema is better suited for the project than this other one (and why), can we produce the desired page with less HTML/CSS markup? And how much can/should we shunt off to JavaScript? How much jQuery do we need? Does this page degrade gracefully without JavaScript? What pieces of this should go in the controller vs. the model or the view (and why)?
Using a different field, asking someone who’s applying for a general application programmer to write a sort implementation is like interviewing for a job as a Cosmo article writer and being asked to produce a sonnet in the job interview. (With the added bonus of live critique questioning your choices.)
Now that’s not to say that knowing how to write sonnets isn’t a cool skill. It is.
But let’s look at what an article writer needs skill at that a sonnet writer doesn’t:

• Ability to write whole sentences
• On time
• Correct length (sonnets have a lines/syllable count, but what an article writer needs is correct amount of space on the page, which is an entirely different form of length requirement)
• On correct subject
• Supports advertisers
• Current and relevant
• Literal language

What skills a sonnet writer needs that an article writer doesn’t:

• A feel for syllables
• Exhaustive vocabulary (because poetry readers will look up words but Cosmo readers almost certainly won’t)
• How to write something timeless
• The ability to fiddle until it’s “just so”
• Metaphorical language

99.9% of all people making their living as writers aren’t writing poetry. 99.9% of the rest write greeting cards for money. The other two are poetry professors. Random aside: did you know Cupertino has a poet laureate?
99.9% of all software engineers making a living as such aren’t writing implementations of sort algorithms or developing new sort algorithms as their job.
Ask more relevant questions.

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From our trip in 2011.

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Context: this post from Cassie Alexander.
Cassie, I’ve known you for a long time. We’ve spent nights writing in chat, on Twitter, at conventions, all kinds of things. I remember you bringing your (impressively large) box of rejection letters to BayCon one year before you had a pro sale.
I love you so much I even set foot in a Scientology building for you (because I said I’d be there for you for Writers of the Future) even though I hadn’t done that in many years.
I’m sorry that St. Martin’s has dropped your series, which I’ve loved. (And I feel guilty that I didn’t do as much as I’d have liked to help promote it, and I’m a shitty friend that way. Sorry.)
I’ve never known anyone as dedicated to their art as you are. You’ve written nine novels in the same time I’ve written four (and a half). I keep getting novel ideas, though, and series ideas.
The early days of self-publishing (via POD) were fraught with peril. I remember when I worked at Kepler’s that we wouldn’t order them because they were often so poorly produced (and I’m not just talking badly edited, I mean the covers would fall off, etc.) that they were just too problematic.
The world has changed, though. The production values on POD are now indistinguishable from traditional printing, and e-books have available samples, so there’s little risk. Now you can look and determine if it really is something you want to buy.
There’s a very, very real market and some good strategies for reaching it. And, I’m finding out, that the strategies that work for that are those that don’t work for the traditional market at all.

The Dip

One of the problems with The Dip is that you tend to look at your failures, but not your successes. Losing a book contract is a hardcore dip point.
What’s easy to overlook is that you’ve had amazing success as a writer. You were contracted to write a five-book series—and you did. Four of the volumes are in print and one will be out soonish.

Moving on to Indie Publishing

A few thoughts:

1. Out:think has some great resources. Read everything.
2. Reading all the email I got from Out:think led me to start reading Write. Publish. Repeat. I haven’t finished it yet, but so far it’s an amazing book.

Many of the successful indie authors have an seasonal/episodic approach to books. It’s a familiar paradigm in this culture of TV viewers. Instead of one longer novel, the books are novella length, and released as episodes. A season is often six episodes. Because they’re novella length, three makes a nice size paperback.
So the marketing goes like this:

1. Publish and sell episode 1.
2. Temporarily drop the price (perhaps free) of episode 1 when episode 2 comes out.
3. Temporarily drop the price (perhaps free) of episode 2 when episode 3 comes out.
4. Create an omnibus of episodes 1-3. Create a print book to go with.
5. Temporarily drop the price (perhaps free) of episodes 1-3 omnibus when episode 4 comes out.
6. Temporarily drop the price (perhaps free) of episode 4 when episode 5 comes out.
7. Temporarily drop the price (perhaps free) of episode 5 when episode 6 comes out.
8. Create an omnibus of episodes 4-6. Create a print book to go with.
9. Create an omnibus of episodes 1-6. Temporarily drop the price (perhaps free) of that when episode 7 (aka season 2, episode 1) comes out.

It’s rather brilliant, actually.
I was thinking about the whole idea of episodes, and, personally, I’m a fan of thirteen episodes to a season. Gives a great chance for reversals of fortune, too. Two six-episode arcs, a thirteen-episode arc, and a standalone in the middle.
The real point, though is to publish and market fairly consistently: have a predictable release schedule.

A Comment on “Real Writer”

But at the time, I thought, oh, no way, that’s too silly. I’m a Real Writer and I shouldn’t concern myself with smut…even though I happen to be perfectly good at writing it, heh!

Faruk Ateş raised the “real” issue on Twitter today, so I’m going to quote two of his tweets (the first not being aimed at you, obviously, it just gives context as he was wound up about someone’s writing):

“Real” as an attributive adjective has taken on the meaning of revealing that the author doesn’t know what they are talking about. link
“Real women” — meaningless; every woman is a real woman. “Real work” — no work is more “real” than any other. “Real game” — please shut up. link

It’s all real.
So do some cool stuff. I’ll be along for the ride.

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1. It’s easier to remove power lines by creating a path (using the pen tool) and stroking the path with the healing brush tool than the old way I used to do it. Yay. (I think this technique was added in CS5 or so.)
2. I’d forgotten you could create a transparent gradient of an image. (See below)
3. You can, if you want, combine two different images. One technique I used was to use a darker image over a lighter one and then use the lighten mask. Or vice-versa.
4. Or, you know, you could pick a sunset one and a thin beam one from here and stack it several layers deep in photoshop (using the above techniques), fuss with it until it looks just so, edit out the stars (for sad and arcane reasons), and then you have this:

And the gradient (bumped up to 100%, but only used at 30%):

Here are two of the originals I used in creating the composited image:

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But first, new blog theme on deirdre.net! I just changed it late last night, so I haven’t lived with everything quite long enough to figure out what I want to change. I need to do some work on the covers on the front page (to make them all the same size and work better within the theme).

Computers & Technology

• WordPress security best practices (video of a conference session)
• Model View Culture print subscriptions A literary mag about the “intersection of tech, culture and diversity.”
• Atari computer demonstration, 1979. Woman in the ad, too, very progressive for that era.
• Five programming tips from a seven year old. Yep.
• They’re breaking ground at the new Apple campus already. Woohoo!
• SelfieCity analyzes all the selfies out there.
• One of my favorite people in the Ruby community, Jim Weirich, passed away suddenly. His last commit. He made me feel welcome.

Writing & Publishing

• How Long Is the Average Book? Also includes relative frequency of POV (1st/3rd), broken by genre. No 2nd breakdown, though that number is probably vanishingly small.
• Considering self-publishing? Out:think group has some really interesting stuff, much of it free. Hearing Tim talk about why he thinks some people’s Facebook and Twitter strategies don’t work is a breath of fresh air. Basically: the real strategy is to have a mailing list.
• SFWA thing post from N. K. Jemisin. “But you don’t get to claim marginalization when you’re at the center of a thing.” If you’re tired of the SFWA train wreck, then just stick with that one pull quote.
• The semicolon’s breezy punctuality.
• Andrew O’Hagan on ghostwriting for Julian Assange. “It was exciting to think, in that very Jane Austen kind of house, that no novel had ever captured this new kind of history, where military lies on a global scale were revealed by a bunch of sleepy amateurs two foot from an Aga.” Note that this piece is 25,000 words, but it really does explain who Assange is. “I’ve never been with anybody who made me feel so like an adult. And I say that as the father of a ten-year-old.”

Arts

• How Olympic photographers get such stunning images
• XKCD, Slippery Slope
• The history of the Marber Grid, better known as the design ratios used in Penguin books of olde.
  (http://society6.com/zeruch/the-liason_Pillow#25=193&18=126) (SFW abstract).
• VHS vs. Communism Sometimes, we forget the power of art, especially when it’s not Art. This is why.
• Tatyana Fazlalizadeh wages an artistic war against street harassers.
• Photographer shoots one roll of film each week. This week features foggy San Francisco.

Science, Health, & Things Like That

• American Society of Breast Surgeons responds to Canada’s shocking recommendation against mammograms. I want to add that I’m really tired of the no-mammogram and no-PSA exam folks. Yes, there are some points to be made, but….

Miscellaneous Humor

• pnh: “[D]ingbats gonna ding.”
• When God closes a door, he opens a window. Our heating bill is outrageous & six raccoons got in last night. Please God, this has to stop.
• Dear people in the hotel room next door: I can hear you, and it sounds vaguely disappointing.

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Rick and I had our portraits done by the awesome Scottish photographer John Parris, who was truly a delight to work with. Glad we could get him down under (when we ourselves were in the South Pacific) and out of the gloomy Scottish winter.

There are three solo portraits of me (for author photos), one solo picture of Rick, and three of us together.

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…when you realize that places erupting into problem areas on the news are now more likely to be places you’ve been than places you’ve not.
Consider:

• Istanbul (we were there last year just before and just after the worst of what happened)
• Sochi
• Ukraine (though Rick’s been to Kiev and I have not). This map helps explain what parts of the Ukraine are protesting and why. Since we’ve been to the Baltic region of Ukraine, that would be the area that’s not protesting. Also: recommendation for a 30-minute video to watch to give context to the Ukraine crisis.
• Venezuela (though I haven’t been in quite a few years)

The first three? We were there last year.
We went to three Ukranian cities last year: Odessa, Yalta, and Sevastopol/Balaklava. Loved them.
I’m going to do three separate posts for the Ukraine, partly for @bobtiki.

Odessa

First, the Primorsky Stairs, better known as the Potemkin Stairs because of the film Battleship Potemkin, give the optical illusion of being longer than they are. The bottom of these steps is the port where our ship called. There were quite a few people with birds there, and they’d let you hold (and be photographed) with the bird for a few Hryvna (though they’d also accept Euros and Dollars).

The city coat of arms is everywhere.

There are lots of lovely neoclassical buildings, some with great chandeliers.

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Best related work: Fic by Anne Jamison, a history of fanfiction.
Best fan artist: Randall Munroe. Last cartoon of the year is 1311 and first of 2013 was 1155 (thank you @xkcdfeed). Three of note: 1158 (it’s all about physics), 1167 (Star Trek Into Darkness), 1177 (Time Robot). For those who feel he isn’t eligible, he was ruled eligible in 2011 and the rules have not changed. Further discussion here.
Best dramatic presentation, short form: Flying Tiare by Matthieu Courtois and Ludovic Allain. Made as a fan film for the airline’s 15th birthday, it’s a real look at the technology and work of commercial flying. The really cool part, though, is seeing someone go up into the jet engine and get to see the (running) engine from the inside.

I’d already posted a recommendation for: Short story: “The Slow Winter” by James Mickens, so just a reminder.

The Cambellian Anthology

The 2014 Cambellian Anthology is out! It features 860,000 words (eight-ish novels in size) from 111 different writers who are eligible for the Campbell award this year. Totally, completely free.
I want to offer my immense gratitude to Stupefying Stories for this. More than any other single award, I try to be well-read for the Campbell, and it used to be a real chore before Writertopia started keeping the eligibility list. Stupefying Stories took it to the next level with the clever idea to have an annual anthology.
Also, immense gratitude (and props) to the authors and publishers who’ve permitted their work to be included.
Special shout-out for Brooke Bolander, who is one of the eligible.

Addendum

Best dramatic presentation, long form: Sharknado. As billed. Loved it, and I’m not normally up for this kind of thing. Definitely smarter than it had to be.

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Based on seeing a friend’s pieces on Society6, I decided to start uploading photos there for sale in various forms. They have prints, iPhone cases, computer cases, pillows, tote bags, and stuff like that.
My first piece (my plan is to upload one per week) is called Iceplant.
I know, I know, it doesn’t look like iceplant, right? I prefer to think of it as iceplant in someone’s acid trip.
Actually, the photo is really of iceplant. Rick and I were walking around Pigeon Point Lighthouse one day. I had my finger on the shutter button, as you do, and misstepped, setting off the trigger. I got a lovely streaky blurry photo of a patch of iceplant.
Honestly, it really wasn’t very fetching, but there was something about it, so I played with it.

My friend Joe (zeruch) also has a shop on Society6, and I like this piece in particular. Note that some of his figurative work is NSFW, but I’ve linked to an abstract. I think it looks pretty awesome as a pillow or clock.

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Finally got around to reading this post, The Women We Don’t See.
Last year, my reading habits shifted as I was looking to publish in another genre. As that genre happened to be romance, I read a whole bunch of female authors (some of whom may be female in pen name only, granted). To my knowledge, none of the authors I read last year fit in a non-binary category, though some of the works I read did.
Books read: 243
Books by female authors: 220
Books by male authors: 28
91% female authors
(Sum is greater than total because of co-authors, e.g., Witt & Voinov.)

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Taken Nov 22, 2011. I drove as far south as one could go south from Pahoa, which is south of Hilo on the big island of Hawai’i. The road ends near Kalapana, then there’s a dirt road that other cars were going on, so I went too. (Never a great idea.)
The “dirt” road turns out to have been a paved road that lava flowed over. A few hundred feet back, there’s a bit of road again, leading out to a parking lot ending in a guard shack with a bunch of scary signs. I parked there and got out, went to the guard shack. He made sure I knew where the safe boundaries were and that I had water, sunscreen, and a hat.
Walking in the sun on a Hawai’ian day is brutal enough, but the black lava just soaks up heat. As if that weren’t enough, you’re not actually that far above the actual real hot lava flows that are probably radiating even more heat.
Despite my SPF 85 haole basting sauce, I managed to get a sunburn.

Oh, and I’d been very close, only a few hundred feet away, the year before. Here’s what the view looked like from offshore back on Nov 23, 2010:

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I’ve updated my Instagram icons for the Pinboard WordPress theme and added new IMDb icons.

Instagram

1x icon
2x icon

IMDb

1x icon
2x icon

See Them In Action!

See ’em in action on the header of this page.

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Caitlin Flanagan of Vanity Fair has taken the art of the first paragraph to a new level in her article The Dark Power of Fraternities. I’m not going to quote it here. Just: coffee & cats warning, okay?
There should be a trigger warning on the subject matter of the rest, though, which is about the warring dynamics of student safety, fraternity traditions and independence (not all of which is bad), and universities knowing where their fundraising dollars come from and not wanting to upset the balance.

[T]he majority of all fraternity insurance claims involve booze—I have read hundreds of fraternity incident reports, not one of which describes an event where massive amounts of alcohol weren’t part of the problem—and the need to manage or transfer risk presented by alcohol is perhaps the most important factor in protecting the system’s longevity.

And, after a truly horrifying set of crisis-management steps:

As you should by now be able to see very clearly, the interests of the national organization and the individual members cleave sharply as this crisis-management plan is followed.

Indeed.
I love the descriptions of two sides of the fraternity vs. injured-by-fraternity representatives.

Fierberg is a man of obvious and deep intelligence, comfortable—in the way of alpha-male litigators—with sharply correcting a fuzzy thought; with using obscenities; with speaking derisively, even contemptuously, of opponents. He is also the man I would run to as though my hair were on fire if I ever found myself in a legal battle with a fraternity, and so should you.

…and…

And then there is Peter Smithhisler, who is the senior fraternity man ne plus ultra: unfailingly, sometimes elaborately courteous; careful in his choice of words; unflappable; and as unlikely to interrupt or drop the f-bomb on a respectful female journalist as he would be to join the Communist Party.

Worth a read even if you don’t actually care about fraternities.

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Text here.
Excerpt:

I want to apologize to Mary for doing that. Mary, if you are reading this, I really am very sorry for my inconsiderate and insensitive response to the question, and my later posts. Our estrangement (admittedly by my own choice) has been painful to me, and I should not have done this to you, nor should I do such a thing to anyone. I don’t expect us to become friends again, but I hope for the sake of our earlier friendship, and what you did know of me, that you will believe the sincerity of my apology. In any event, I fully intend to leave you in peace, Mary, and I wish you continued success.

Update: Mary accepts. (My bad on the initial wording of this; I was chatting online at the time about the wording of Sean’s apology and made an unfortunate gaffe. I have not actually seen Mary’s post, but others have linked to it and hope it comes back online soon.)
Note: as of this update, the site with the linked-to posts is down. Screencaps on Pretty Terrible post here.

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