Prince of Thorns has been on the shelves for eleven years!
The UK paperback has reached at least 28 printings.
I'll take the chance to say thanks - thank you to my readers (and my publishers) for letting me spend the past 11 years writing stories, and more than that - living in them. It's been an unexpected privilege.
In other news, I now have a Patreon. Check it out!
I now have 16 books on the shelves!
The most recent addition was The Girl And The Moon, in April.
Being a numbers guy as well as a words guy I like to keep track of things and record them for when I'm doddery and old, looking back at my 'glory' days.
At this point I need to inject a comment concerning Goodreads. The Goodreads site has been an open joke for many years. It's one of the worst coded things on the internet. If you imagine a decent site as having an internal combustion engine, Goodreads is more a series of blackened saucepans propped up over trash fires, with a spaghetti mess of leaking twisted pipes siphoning off the steam in the hopes of driving a Victorian era piston.
It used to be that authors were forever questioning the admins about missing ratings, and the answer was always: "the buffers need flushing" and after a while a splurge of 200 ratings would appear.
Then, several years ago, my books and many others suddenly got a boost of thousands of ratings, which were attributed to some Goodreads engineer finally unblocking the pipes and dealing with the 'buffers' issue once and for all.
...this year though, my books started to lose hundreds of ratings a day, and ultimately several thousand from the most rated ones, like Prince of Thorns. I queried this several times. At first it was "an issue that the Goodreads team are aware of" and then finally it was "concluded". It was never fixed though. Those ratings just vanished. They weren't 'good' ones necessarily. The Red Sister average rating shot up...
What happened, I have no real idea. I'm not sure Goodreads do either. Certainly, they're not talking about it. My working theory (on no evidence) is that the big surge a few years ago was an error that has now been corrected. But it's just as likely that Goodreads randomly pissed away 10,000 ratings from my books.
Anyway - if any of you watch these stats closely enough to notice (and I would bet money that none of you do) then that's the story!
I have been slightly more active on the blog of late, it hasn't impacted the plateauing traffic, but still ~30,000 hits a month isn't too shabby and this year it so nearly reached 4 million hits in total.
And my quest to conquer Twitter crawls on...
It's also worth noting that this year saw the release of not one but two 10th anniversary special editions of Prince of Thorns (offering less eye-watering postage options). One in the UK from Broken Binding, and a super deluxe leatherbound one in the US from Grim Oak Press. Both publishers plan to follow up with 10th anniversary editions of King of Thorns.
Where things stand with my special editions:
Grim Oak Press
The Broken Empire omnibus - SOLD OUT
The Red Queen's War omnibus - 50 of 1,000 remaining.
10th anniversary Prince of Thorns - 60 of 750 remaining.
Broken Binding
10th anniversary Prince of Thorns - SOLD OUT
If you want to see how they appreciate, try buying a copy of the sold out editions on ebay.
Well, that's my annual stock-take. Over & out, until next year.
I agree the Goodreads needs a lot of work, I've looked for a replacement but I'm hesitant to jump. Your feed on there has actually been the source of multiple books that are now on my TBR pile.
ReplyDeleteThere are multiple other authors and booktubers that I follow on there as well and I feel that if there were a possible Mass Exodus to a new platform I would definitely join along.