Tag: Top Ten

If you’re a self-published author, how do you stack up?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Yeah, we want folks to read our work, but we do dream of fame and riches, right?

Now, for a splash of cold reality.

  1. Even though a lot of authors are turning to self-publishing their own books, most don’t sell many copies. The typical self-published author sells about five copies, according to one report, while another has the average at 250. I’m guessing that some really hot sellers pull the average way up over the mean, kinda like winning the lottery.
  2. Another report has the average book now selling fewer than 200 copies a year and under a thousand copies over its lifetime. At the bottom, 90 percent of self-published books sell under a hundred copies. Not a lot to crow about, is it?
  3. On the other hand, self-published books account for a $1.25 billion annual market. At Amazon, that comes to $520 million in royalties. (As a self-published author, my royalties on an ebook rival what I get for a paper edition.)
  4. At Amazon, more than 1,000 self-published authors made $100,000 a year. Well, there goes a fifth of those royalties.
  5. For many authors, one secret to success is in having a lineup of titles rather than relying on just one. In that light, the average self-published author makes $1,000 a year in royalties, according to one account.
  6. But, back to the mean, a third of self-published authors make less than $500 a year and a fifth report making no income.
  7. New book sales don’t account for library patrons or the used book market. Used books? I don’t see ebooks showing up at yard sales. Consider that an advantage.
  8. The average American adult reads just 15 minutes a day, according to one survey that apparently doesn’t considering texting. On the other hand, just what are the others looking at on their phones?
  9. Still, if you’re an author, don’t quit your day job, OK?
  10. Only 1 percent of audiobooks on Audible are self-published.

Cranberries!

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Not everybody loves them, but they are a Thanksgiving tradition, jellied or stewed or otherwise.

Here’s some background.

  1. They’re one of the few fruits native to America.
  2. They don’t grow in water but the berries do float, which is how many of them are harvested, starting with a machine called an eggbeater.
  3. They also bounce.
  4. Only five percent are sold fresh. And eating one raw will be unpleasantly tart.
  5. Americans consume 400 million pounds of cranberries a year – roughly a pound and a half per person – a fifth of that during Thanksgiving week. How do you measure up?
  6. A gallon of juice requires 4,400 berries. Did we mention it’s a great antioxidant and high in Vitamin C?
  7. The “Sex in the City” TV series in the 1990s boosted the popularity of the Cosmopolitan cocktail, which features cranberry juice and vodka. Well, there’s a classic version with gin instead. Cosmos are typically served in martini glasses, after all.
  8. I’m quite fond of Craisins, the dried berry version that goes nicely in green salads and yoghurt, at the top of my list.
  9. Seven out of every ten cranberries sold in the world today come from Ocean Spray, a farmer-owned cooperative with more than 700 grower-families.
  10. Wisconsin is the leading producer in the U.S., followed by Massachusetts. A few are even grown here in Downeast Maine.

 

Just how many new books are being published, anyway?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

November is the month when a lot of amateur writers make a push to start and finish writing a novel. While I applaud the effort, I also question whether we need that many new manuscripts.

Again, definitive figures turn out to be elusive. Still, focusing on the United States, here’s what turns up:

  1. A conventional view places the output at 600,000 to 1 million new titles every year. That’s between 1,700 to 2,700 published every day – or more than 100 books an hour. Not all of it’s fiction, of course, not by a long shot. But if you’re writing, the competition is stiff.
  2. Another view puts the number at 4 million new books a year, three-quarters of them self-published. Under the radar, as it were.
  3. Hard cover and paperbacks account for just half of the books being sold in America. Ebooks get 36 percent, and audiobooks and “other” formats take up the rest. (When compared by the amount spent on each category, printed-on-paper editions skewer the picture.)
  4. A third of all ebooks are self-published.
  5. Two-thirds of the top-rated, self-published books are written by women, compared to just 39 percent of conventionally released books.
  6. The number of self-published books has increased by 264 percent in a five-year span.
  7. Of authors who released their first book in the last ten years, 1,200 traditionally published authors have earned $25,000 or more a year, compared to 1,600 self-published authors. That’s an eye-opener.
  8. The global publishing market is expected to grow at 1 percent a year, while the self-publishing market is expected to grow at 17 percent. I’m unclear if the figures are based on sales earnings or on the number of copies sold. Still, it’s a trend worth watching.
  9. Not every non-fiction book is read cover-to-cover.
  10. Fiction is for escape.

How many books do you read a year?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

These days, it seems that everyone I meet has written a book. As an author myself, I’d much rather for everyone to have read a book in the past week. Or, gee, even a newspaper.

Trying to get solid figures on how much is being published or read is trickier than you might suspect. But to get us started, let me offer some findings, albeit with a grain of salt. And, to further complicate matters, I’m not exactly sure how the researchers are defining “book.” I’m assuming textbooks, instruction manuals, catalogs, and the like are excluded. But cookbooks? They’re big in our household. That said, in the United States:

  1. Readership averages four books a year.
  2. A quarter to a half of adults admit to reading no books.
  3. A typical bookworm, on the other hand, devours 14 a year.
  4. Non-fiction dominates over fiction, three to two.
  5. History, biography, and memoir are major sellers.
  6. Two-thirds of book readers are women, but they comprise 80 percent of the fiction audience. Some surveys suggest that women age 18-24 are the most frequent fiction readers.
  7. On the other hand, half of American book readers are over age 55.
  8. Romance is the best-selling fiction genre, accounting for a third of the books sold. Mystery, fantasy, and sci fi are also boffo.
  9. Fiction titles still dominate bestseller lists.
  10. Books aren’t just for readers. They’re also for collectors. And gift giving.

 

Doodling around with the origins of ‘Yankee’

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The label does have a range of applications, from residents of the six-state New England region or Connecticut in particular to a Manhattan professional baseball team to anyone north of Dixie (often prefaced with “damn”) to anyone from the USA who lands in a foreign country.

Along with the shortened “Yank.” Or its many uses as an adjective.

The word’s origins, though, are contested.

  1. The earliest recorded use is credited to British General James Wolfe in 1758 when he complained about the Americans under his command. The British continued to use it in a derogatory fashion. The pompous fools.
  2. A largely dismissed theory had it arising in a French word for English-speaker that the Wyandot rendered into Y’an-gee.
  3. Another had it being adopted when New Englanders defeated a Native tribe who had identified themselves as Yankoos – meaning invincible. Problem there is the tribe must have been invisible all along.
  4. More likely is a derogatory Dutch-language origin in the early 1600s through New Amsterdam, beginning with the name Jan, for John, pronounced Yan. One theory has Jan being applied to any Dutch-speaking English colonist, a kind of winking acknowledgement that they could converse. How about having it originate among those Dutch-speaking Englishmen? I haven’t seen that suggestion before.
  5. Or it may have been imported from the Old World as Jan Kaas, “John Cheese,” a generic nickname the Flemish had for Dutch in the north.
  6. Or Jan might have been combined with another popular Dutch name, Kees, into Yankee, as English-speakers turned it against the New Netherlanders.
  7. And then those New Netherlanders soon slapped the word on English colonists in nearby Connecticut.
  8. By 1681 there may have even been a Dutch pirate, Captain Yanky or Yanke. The Dutch settlers, now subsumed into the English colony of New York, may have seen the Brits as pirates. Sounds awfully late in the timeline for me. I think it was definitely widespread slang before that.
  9. By the time of the Revolutionary War, the song “Yankee Doodle” was well established. Whatever its original intentions of mocking the Americans as simpletons, New Englanders took it as a badge of honor, macaroni and all.
  10. Somehow, after the Revolution, it became a synonym for Protestants descended from New England Puritans and their values. Take “Yankee ingenuity” as a prime example.

None of these quite convince me, but I feel Scottish, Swedish, and even Persian roots are even less likely.

Sometimes I’m accused of acting squirrely

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Back in New Hampshire, I was often engaged in a losing battle with squirrels. We had them for a while in the wall of the house and in the bay window, found they’d chewed into the attic through the flashing around the chimney, and were never able to eradicate them from the Red Barn, where they pretty much devoured a 20-foot strip of crown molding. They were always digging up bulbs or taking chunks out fruits and vegetables in our gardens.

At least we eventually got a birdfeeder that would send them falling off, an advance that left us endlessly amused, especially when we noticed the obsessed critter as a new kid on the block.

One good friend, an avid gardener, aptly dubbed them tree-climbing rats with big tails.

Here are a few related facts.

  1. They eat their own body weight every week, typically 1½ pounds.
  2. They can find food buried under a foot of snow or, for males, smell a female in heat a mile away.
  3. Their front teeth never stop growing, even when they eat right through wood.
  4. They can climb about anything. Yes, metal poles are no problem. Plus they can rotate their front feet 180 degrees.
  5. To elude predators, they run in sharp zigzags. They also have a way of moving to the side of a tree trunk opposite the side of a human, keeping themselves out of sight.
  6. They can leap ten times their body length. But not quite that much straight up, which I think is only five lengths.
  7. They can fall 30 meters without injury and run sprints at 20 miles an hour.
  8. They can travel as much as 100 miles in a day. So much for all those Havahart trap runs I took across the state line, just to add a river between us and the liberated rodent.
  9. By chewing electrical wiring in the walls and attic, they’re a major cause of house fires, perhaps 30,000 a year globally. They’re also responsible for an estimated 20 percent of electrical power outages, including knocking out entire transformers and leaving towns in the dark.
  10. Chipmunks are a kind of small squirrel with a prominent stripe rather than a big fluffy tail. They may be cute, but they may be the most destructive of all of their kin.

At least we don’t notice them around our current home on an island in Maine. Instead, we have deer.

Various lifestyles I’ve lived

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t have selfies through most of it. Most of those shots would have no doubt been embarrassing now.

So here’s how my life’s shaken out in terms of lifestyles.

  1. Straight ‘50s middle class: Growing up in the Midwest.
  2. Hippie: From college to Upstate New York and various moves thereafter, including my first marriage to an emerging visual artist. Well, this does fuel my novels Daffodil Uprising, Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, and Subway Visions.
  3. Monastic: The rogue yoga ashram in the Pocono mountains. See my novel Yoga Bootcamp.
  4. Ascetic: In many ways, this was still hippie as I lived in a loft in a small downtown in a place resembling what I’ve called Prairie Depot.
  5. And back-to-the earth: The next move was a return to my college, this time as a research associate position before leaping on to the interior Pacific Northwest, one with my personal life filled with growth as a published poet, a shift to Quaker spiritual practice, and immersion in backwoods and wilderness wonder. These inspire my novels Nearly Canaan and The Secret Side of Jaya.
  6. William Morris: Steel mill region in what one called the Near East, aka the Rust Belt. Included a divorce and rebound. Hometown News arises in that experience.
  7. Nearly Plain Quaker slash Muppie: The Mennonite Urban Professionals I was hanging out with in Baltimore were the less expensive version of Yuppies. Living in a federal-style brick rowhouse in the Bolton Hill neighborhood was the culmination of my big-city dreams. During the week, I was often on the road with a company car and expense account. This was a rich mix for me, a time of much personal growth, ending in a self-gifted sabbatical year hunkered down in a suburb in which I drafted early versions of much of my fiction.
  8. Yuppieville on the Hill: Relocating to New Hampshire, I wound up living in a complex where I rented a small townhouse. Back in the working ranks rather than management, I was freed from long unpaid overtime hours and the neckties and suits of my earlier professional situations. Contradancing, especially, steeped me in Boston, an hour to the south, while I immersed my personal writing in poetry circles. My love life had many ups and downs.
  9. City farmer: Remarriage prompted my move to the New Hampshire Seacoast, where we bought an old house within easy walking distance of downtown and the Quaker Meeting. That “farmer” label actually befits my spouse, the avid gardener. The property also had the small carriage house you know as my Red Barn. Retirement included serious choral singer and daily swimmer roles.
  10. Island author: We needed to downsize, which led to the remote fishing village with a lively arts scene you’ve been reading about here.

Pumpkins are no longer just a Halloween and Thanksgiving thing

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

At least in New England, pumpkins have become a ubiquitous autumn flavoring, from bread and doughnuts to muffins and classic cheesecakes and pies. I still balk at beer.

Here are some more facts to chew on:

  1. They’re actually fruits, though I’m glad they don’t grow on trees. And, yes, they’re technically also vegetables, something they share in common with watermelons.
  2. Each pumpkin contains about 500 seeds. For the record, many birds love those. Roasted, for humans, they’re low in calories and rich in iron.
  3. Some varieties can grow 50 pounds a day.
  4. Every part of a pumpkin is edible, including the blossoms – well, they share that with other squashes.
  5. As pie, pumpkin is America’s favorite Thanksgiving dessert.
  6. For the record, small sugar squashes are superior in taste to pumpkins for making those pies or also soups.
  7. The orange color comes from the same chemical that gives carrots and sweet potatoes their distinctive look. It’s good for Vitamin A, which in turn aids eye and skin health and supports your immune system.
  8. The first Jack o’ Lanterns weren’t carved from pumpkins but rather turnips. The practice arises in an Irish tradition regarding someone who tried to get the Devil to cover his bar tab and failed. Irish emigrants to America found the pumpkin superior to a turnip for those carvings.
  9. Illinois produces more than twice as many pumpkins as its nearest rival in the USA.
  10. The heaviest pumpkin grown in America was by Steve Geddes of New Hampshire in 2018 – a 2,528-pound monster.

 

Now for Machias

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

The governmental seat for sprawling Washington County is the town of Machias, or “bad little falls” in the river where it meets an arm of the Atlantic. Well, others have suggested the Passamaquoddy term would be more accurately rendered as “nasty” or something I suspect is much worse. From what I’ve seen, going over the cataract at the tidal line in a canoe or any other kind of boat would have been fatal. Not that I want to tempt anyone to prove me wrong, like those who have actually gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

That said, let’s look at some more facts about the town and its neighboring East Machias, Machiasport, and related neighborhoods.

Centre Street Congregational Church, erected in 1836.

~*~

  1. It’s pronounced “maaah-chEYE-us,” the central syllable running along the lines of a hardened SHY.
  2. Washington Academy in East Machias is not only among the oldest boarding schools in the country, but thanks to publicly-funded tuition students from neighboring towns, it’s also the largest high school in the county. It does attract an elite from abroad. Go Raiders.
  3. The state university branch campus is often ridiculed but definitely working toward an upgrade.
  4. An initial English attempt at settlement in 1633 was rebuffed by a French attack, creating a gap of more than 120 years.
  5. Machias is the birthplace of the U.S. Navy, and its inaugural victory was won, in part, with pitchforks. I’m not kidding. Look it up. I’ll even suggest it as a plot for a comic opera. Notably, Passamaquoddy Natives were instrumental on the colonists’ side.
  6. It briefly flourished as a lumber exporting center in the late 1800s.
  7. ATV riders will find a great entry to the Downeast Sunrise Trail here. The path follows an old railroad line.
  8. The flea market atop the causeway on U.S. 1 can be delightful, especially Earle’s fresh seafood truck toward weekends. I do have to wonder how the reconstruction of that crossing will affect tradition.
  9. Its emergency room and hospital are often favored over those in Calais. I won’t get into the details.
  10. We do love the general store and natural foods emporium. As for the tiny movie theater? Still on our to-do list. Best wishes.

 

The Pine Tree State was a shipbuilding mecca

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

You wouldn’t believe how many incredible seagoing vessels were built in the Pine Tree State. Maybe it’s because we have thousands of miles of coastline and tons of trees.

Just consider:

  1. The first ship built in Maine was at the failing Popham colony in the winter of 1607-1608. Where did they even get the sails? Yet the pinnace, the Virginia of Sagadhoc, was not only the first ocean-going ship built by English in the New World, but it returned to Jamestown the following year.
  2. In colonial days, the tallest, straightest trees were set aside as King’s Pines, reserved for the masts of the Royal Navy. Conflicts with the French kept many of them from being harvested before the American Revolution.
  3. From the 1830s to 1890s, Maine built more ships than any other state. More than 20,000 ships were launched from Maine shores, many from impromptu shipyards built along tidal rivers.
  4. Bath, with more than 22 shipyards at one time, was arguably the center of action. The town isn’t far from the former Popham colony, where the first ship had been built.
  5. During the Civil War, Confederate cruisers captured more than 100 Maine-built or Maine-owned vessels.  Coastal forts built during the war included Gorges at Portland, Popham at Phippsburg, and Knox near Bucksport.
  6. In 1862 the screw sloop-of-war U.S.S. Kearsarge built at Kittery sank the C.S.S. Alabama in a crucial naval battle.
  7. Maine accounted for 70 percent of the ships, barks, and barkentines built in the U.S. between 1870 and 1899. On the East Coast it also could claim to have built half of the three-mast schooners, 71 percent of the four-mast schooners, 95 percent of the five-mast schooners, and 90 percent of the six-mast schooners. I’m guessing a lot of those tall, straight pines could still be found.
  8. At one time, tiny Shackford Cove here in Eastport had four boatyards. And nearby Pembroke was also prolific.
  9. The shift to steel vessels largely decimated the yards building wooden ships, which capitalized on the state’s deep forests. Unlike most of the state, the shipyards at Bath, Kittery, South Portland, Woolwich, and East Boothbay successfully converted to metal at the end of the 1800s. 
  10. Today the state has an estimated 200 boatbuilding firms, most of the small and working with composites like fiberglass, laminated wood, and resin-based composites.