Syrup Blog
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Ban This Book
Last March
I discovered that for some reason Canadian sales of
Syrup were somewhat weak. By this I mean that
in the last six months of 2003, I sold 6 copies. After I posted about
this on my site, several Canadians e-mailed me promising to snap up the book,
so I’ve been looking forward to
a big spike in my next royalty statement.
And here it is! My latest statement shows Canadian sales have increased an incredible 183%. So that’s 17 copies.
Now, I don’t want to seem ungrateful. J.K. Rowling would kill for sales growth like that. And, I suppose, cause the world to be completely deforested. But come on, 17! In other parts of the world, parts just on the other side of your border, Canada, it’s selling great. In fact, it’s in its fourth or fifth printing, and the fact that one of those times was because the publisher pulped a whole bunch of copies before realizing my career wasn’t dead yet doesn’t matter.
The way I see it, there are three possible parties to blame:
- Me
- My publisher
- Canada
I’m going with #3, because I have to work with #1 and #2. Pissing off Canada, on the other hand, means—what, they’ll stop buying their 23 copies a year?
Actually, this gives me an idea. Given I have so little to lose, what I need is to get Syrup banned there. Banned books attract publicity and protest groups, and when the ban is finally and inevitably lifted, they sell like gangbusters. Plus, being the author of a banned book would give me all kinds of literary cachet. I could get invited to top-class cocktail parties and tell Salman Rushdie about the time I used him as an example of a red-hot writerly stud muffin.
Surely it can’t be that hard to get banned; I just need to take a sentence or two out of context, tell some hyper-twitchy group that it’s aimed at them, and sit back and wait for Time to call. The Church of Scientology, for example. Surely there’s something I could find in Syrup that would offend them?
Snubbed by Canada
Today I received a Syrup royalty statement. This is usually
a depressing event, because it reveals either that vast numbers of people are not
buying Syrup, or, worse, that the book isn’t for sale any more. This statement, which is
the first since Viking brought Syrup back into print, is not quite so heinous.
People are buying it. This is a relief not because I get
75c from every copy—well, not just because of that—but because nothing
is quite as awful as watching your novel slowly sink into oblivion. Once
I got a royalty statement that had negative net sales. I didn’t even know that was
possible.
(It’s because bookstores can return unsold stock to the publisher for credit. Even on the royalty statement I’m looking at right now, one bookstore—just one!—returned one copy of the Syrup hardcover, almost five years after it was published. They make me pay back my 75c for that.)
It seems that people are split pretty evenly over whether they prefer Syrup or Jennifer Government, so I cling to the hope that one day the former will be read by as many people as the latter. It still seems possible.
Except in Canada. Now, Canada and Syrup have long had a strained relationship. It has always sold abysmally there, although I have no idea why. I like Canada. I used to work with a Canadian at Hewlett-Packard, Mike, and we got on fine; I don’t think he phoned home to say, “Quick, tell everyone not to buy Max’s novel.” But this latest royalty statement makes the situation truly bizarre. In the last six months of 2003, Canadian Syrup sales were: 6.
Now, serendipitous references to the character in the novel aside, what the hell is with that? Six!? I’ve bought more copies than that! If it was zero, I’d think maybe the book wasn’t available at all, but six—six! It’s enough to make me want to catch a plane to Vancouver and buy an armload full of copies, just to treble national sales. Or maybe I’ll track down Mike and kick his butt.
Return of the Syrup (part two)
Syrup is back in Australia and New Zealand! Apparently the publisher was checking down the back of a couch for a TV remote and instead found 2,000 copies. Or maybe it was a warehouse, not a couch. Whatever. This means that like in the US and Canada, while most bookstores won’t have Syrup on the shelves, they can now easily order it in for you.
Because there’s limited stock, if you’re keen to get your mitts on a copy in Australia or New Zealand, now’s the time to act. (By going to a bookstore and ordering a book. Was that clear already? Okay.)
Syrup 101
Today I achieved one of my life-long goals: I was used as a case study in a marketing textbook! This is cool because in Syrup, Scat lives in fear of becoming a “How Not To” case study. Now I am one! Only in a good way.
Just in case this is of interest to anyone other than myself, the textbook is Strategic Internet Marketing 2.0 by Susan & Stephen Dann, and it talks about how the NationStates game I wrote helped promote Jennifer Government.
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Syrup 101
Syrup returns
“It’s baaaaack.” Hmm, it really is hard to get the inflection right on that. But the point: Syrup is back in the US & Canada! It went briefly out of print in what was a terrible, dark time for, I think I can say, all of humanity. But especially me.
What this means: whether a bookstore has copies on its shelves or not, it can order some. So feel free, if your bookstore doesn’t have a Syrup, to demand they get some. Pound the counter, too. That makes you more persuasive.
Back in black & white
Great news: Viking is going back to the presses! Yes, copies of
Syrup, which have been increasingly hard to find in the US &
Canada lately, will soon be nestled on bookstore shelves again.
To all those people who wrote in for the SaveOurSyrups e-mail campaign: thank you so much! Your support really helped.
I don’t yet know when the new Syrups will be available. If you’d like to be notified when the book comes out, e-mail [email protected].