Hey, everyone. Warning you up front, this one may be a little long. Considering this was my vacation, I somehow ended up with a lot to talk with you about.

Speaking of which—aside from one week of intense heat that overwhelmed our air conditioner, having some time off has been fantastic. I’ve gotten some sleep (check it out, it’s amazing!), hung out with friends, caught up on reading, seen a movie or six. It’s been a while since my head’s felt this clear.

It’s wild how much weight this country—the US, not the rest of you with your healthcare and regular vacations—puts on work. I mean, I’m honestly not sure we worship the almighty dollar as fetishize the idea of work. Because all those multi-millionaire and billionaire folks, the one way you can always insult them is to imply they didn’t work for that money. Even when they plainly didn’t. Someone with $101 million will insist it’s not about the $100 million they inherited, but the shrewd investments they made since then (and yeah, the math always works out that way, doesn’t it?). We’ve all had it beaten into us that work is its own reward, that the work is honorable, that what you’re doing doesn’t count as real work.

And don’t get me wrong. I’m not against doing work. Hell, it’s arguable I did a lot of work during our vacation (we have a new garden path). But I do think there’s an issue when work is your whole life. When you can’t do anything except work, because you need to work to survive. Which leads us to the folks who think if you don’t work or even just can’t work... maybe you shouldn’t survive.

That is where I call bullpuckey, my friends. I know I’m in a very privileged position, to be able to just say “screw it, I need to take a few weeks off.” But you know what? I think we all should be in that position. You, me, her, them, even that guy over there. Yeah, he’s going to whine about it, but I still think he should get to take a few weeks off with no hassles or worries. Because common sense should tell us we’re all going to be a lot better at working when we can step away and come back to it rested and relaxed and with a clear head.

I know I’m going to.

How do we get there? I don’t know. Sorry. But I do know what’s going on right now sure as hell isn’t getting us anywhere near close to it.

Anyway... enough about that. Vacation Let’s talk about throwing a party.

We’re at the point in the year where I’m going to be talking more and more about books coming out. God’s Junk Drawer is coming out in paperback in less than two months (November 3rd!) and then The Off Season is in April of next year. Which means I’m going to be talking a lot about preorders in the months to come.

I’ve seen a lot of folks trying to explain preorders and why they’re good, but I had an idea the other day and I think it’s a simple way to explain it that everyone can understand.

Y’see, you and I are going to throw a party. We tell all our friends (let’s say twenty-five people, for our purposes here), hey, big party next Saturday. Next Saturday > you > here > party!

And then we think about getting supplies. Chips. A veggie platter. Maybe some cheese and crackers. Drinks. Mixers. All that sort of stuff. Now naturally, we’re not just going to assume everyone’s going to be there. Food and drinks for twenty-five people (plus us) is a big investment. It could mean spending a lot of money we didn’t need to. So what we’re probably going to do is ask people to let us know if they’re going to make it. Maybe give them a little nudge.

If only six or seven of those twenty-five people say they’re coming... well, maybe we’ll scale things back a bit. Only two bag of chips. Three six packs. Nobody wants to be stuck with a bunch of leftovers, right?

On the flipside, if everyone we tell says yeah, we’ll absolutely be there, we’re going to buy a lot of food. We’ll probably even buy extra food because you know some of these people will be bringing someone else with them.

And if a bunch of folks say nothing but them show up anyway... well, we may not have enough snacks. Almost definitely not enough drinks. Heck, the only thing worse would be if they text two hours before things are supposed to start and say “hey, I’m coming over and I’m bringing three friends.” Now we don’t have enough or time to get more and we’re just going to be stressing over it.

This all makes sense, right? We’ve all probably thrown a party where afterwards we thought “Wow, why did I even buy that vanilla vodka? And two tubs of spicy hummus? What was I thinking? Nobody even cracked the seal.”

Now, as you’ve probably guessed, we’re not actually talking about throwing a party.

Y’see, Timmy, every time a book comes out, a bookstore is acting like the party host. They’re trying to figure out how many folks are going to show up for this book and how many copies they should get. And, yeah, just like you and me, they don’t have an unlimited budget and don’t want to get stuck with a bunch of leftovers nobody was interested in. But they also don’t want to end up with a lot less than they need—again, not fun for anyone.

So just like our friends telling us if they’re coming or not, preorders help bookstores guess how many copies they’re going to need. Only one or two preorders, ehhh, probably no big deal. Six or seven preorders... maybe we should get nine or ten copies, just to be safe.

And all of this flows uphill. Y’see, the publisher is watching preorders, too. They may have only decided to print 8000 copies, but if it’s two months out and there’s already over a thousand preorders... maybe we should print an extra 2000. So the preorders help them have more books ready for when the bookstore decides they want more books. Because nobody wants to be in the situation where the store goes to order another dozen copies and finds out the distributor doesn’t have any.

Plus, one more fun fact. Those preorders may be spread out over weeks or months, but they all register as sales on the same day. Five here, six there, five from them, four from them, and suddenly there’s twenty sales on release day. Or a hundred. Or five hundred. And those first week sales are another thing telling the publisher if they want to print more copies. And, yes, total honestly, because of this preorders make it a lot easier for books to hit bestseller lists. Trying to get a thousand people to order a book on the same week is tough. Trying to get a thousand people to preorder a book over four or five months is a lot easier. And then, as mentioned above, all those sales register on the same day.

So... that’s why preorders matter.

Okay, one last thing. For real this time.

I know it seems like there need to be tons of preorders for any of this to make a difference. But it really doesn’t. Most independent stores will take note if three or four people preorder a book. Most publishers will notice a few hundred. When The Fold came out I asked my editor what would be great preorder numbers, and he told me it would be amazing if it broke 1000 preorders... but not to get my hopes up. It’s rare for a book—any book—to break that barrier.

Oh, hey, do you know how many people get this newsletter?

And by the way—have I mentioned that right now you could preorder God’s Junk Drawer in paperback? Or The Off Season in hardcover? Just saying...

Speaking of which... God’s Junk Drawer did not win a Dragon Award. Many, many thanks to those of you who took the time to vote. Wasn’t really expecting it, because there were a lot of very good books on that list, But that same week I found out that it had earned out in less than six months, which is just as cool in its own way.

What’s earning out? Oh, sorry...

Okay, so authors make a percentage of book sales. F’r example, if you pay $30 for a shiny new hardcover copy of The Off Season, I would get $1.50 of that (these are just fast, easy numbers so we can all follow along, and they’re different for every contract, every format, etc). The rest of that $30 sale goes to the bookstore, to pay assorted costs for the physical book itself, and to pay all the people who helped make the book at the publisher—editors, copyeditors, designers, cover artists, publicists, marketing folks, and so on. The book sells, everyone gets paid.

Now, you’ve probably heard about authors getting an advance. It’s pretty much the same thing as getting, say, an advance on your paycheck at your job. The boss gives you some money now before you’d normally be paid for it, and then you have to pay that money back before checks start coming normally again (depending on how big an advance it was). Book advances work the same way. The publisher says, hey, you’re going to make $1.50 per hardcover, but we believe in this book so much we’re going to give you $150 right now, before the book’s earned any money at all.

(before anyone feels the need to shoot me an email about the evils of big publishers, the advance for The Off Season was more than $150. Again—examples, keeping things simple so we can all follow along)

So now I’m in the position of I got $150—the advance—before the book earned anything, but I’ll need to pay it back, just like paying back an advance on a paycheck. So all those $1.50 royalties go to the publisher until the advance is paid off. And when the book’s sold enough copies to entirely pay back the advance, we say the book has earned out. Which means from here on the author starts getting royalty checks, because now those earnings aren’t being used to pay back the advance. Make sense?

Needless to say... this doesn’t happen often. The majority of books don’t earn out. Not for nefarious reasons, just because publishers tend to run a lot of numbers and go into a book deal with a pretty solid idea of how well a book’s going to sell. So when they offer an advance, they’re basing it off those predicted sales. Obviously, everyone’s thrilled when a book does much better than expected, but like I said... it doesn’t happen often.

And yes, there’s a bunch of different discussions we could have about that, but it’s not what I’m talking about right now. I’m just trying to explain what “earning out” means.

Anyway... that’s a lot of me prattling about work stuff for a month I didn’t do a lot of work.

What else can I tell you about? Well, I’ve had time to do quite a few fun things...

COOL STUFF I’VE BEEN WATCHING
Seen a bunch of movies. I saw Paprika, which has been on my anime-I-should-watch list for a while. My beloved and I watched Minions & Monsters which turned out to be to be a surprising little love letter to classic Hollywood. Borderlands was... well, as someone who’s never played the game it was a simple, fun action/ sci-fi movie. Spider-Man: Brand New Day was just magnificent and managed to surprise me in two or three different ways. Ted Lasso continues to provide a weekly serotonin boost. The new season of Strange New Worlds seems to be dividing a lot of folks, but I think it’s been fantastic.

COOL STUFF I’VE BEEN READING
Finally finished Year of the Mer by L.D. Lewis and goddamn it was amazing. Got to read an early copy of Autumn Christian’s I’m Your Cult Leader, Baby and it went to some wonderfully dark places. Also got to visit my friendly local comic shop and work my way through Starship Godzilla (fantastic) and Predator vs Planet of the Apes (which is waaaaaaay more fun than it has any right to be). I also continue to dabble heavily in Void Rivals, and will probably be doing so even more now that they’ve added Rom to the cast. Yes, that Rom. I’m a little jealous (no surprise to some of you, I’m sure) but so far... I’m liking this take on the character. I could talk about it at length, but I’ll spare you all...

COOL NEW TOYS
A bunch of stuff! I got an Eternal Champions Hellboy, which is basically animated Hellboy as if he was a Masters of the Universe figure... which works really well, it turns out. I picked up the Blokees Bruticus kit, which lets you assemble the Combaticons into their big ‘ol (six inch) combiner form. Marvel Legends had Warbow from the Crystar comics and Marrina from Alpha Flight. I picked up a Skeletron Cyberia which is just a fantastic figure that feels half Tron-inspired. But the hands down favorite for me was the Ambassador of R’lyeh, an Operation Monster Force character I preordered... jeeez, a year ago? The moment you could hit the preorder button. It’s just a wonderfully creepy, inhuman figure.

And, wow, that’s more than enough, isn’t it? Many, many thanks if you made it through this whole block of text. Talk with you again next month.

...crap, did I mention the preorders?