I have to admit, I’ve never heard of an entire movie devoted to fart-sniffing before. I can’t confess to harboring any interest in it myself, but I’m sure there are some fetish freaks that should find this “biopic” to be fascinating, if not outright porn:
The actor Jason Segel will play David Foster Wallace in a forthcoming biopic of the author entitled The End of the Tour. Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, was one of the most talented writers of his generation. The film will be based on an article in Rolling Stone in which journalist David Lipsky (to be played by Jesse Eisenberg) followed Foster Wallace on his book tour round America promoting Infinite Jest, his 1,100-page novel from 1996.
Lipsky’s account was turned into a book in 2010 entitled Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: a Road Trip With David Foster Wallace. The film is scripted by Pulitzer-winning playwright Donald Margulies, and the director is James Ponsoldt.
Actually, David Foster Wallace wasn’t one of the most talented writers of my generation. He was one of the most promising writers of it. He was one of the most ballyhooed writers of it. He was one of the most talked-about writers of it. But he never actually realized any of that promise, and never managed to produce anything more than an inferior John Irving novel writ larger and less coherent.
I am absolutely convinced that the fart-sniffers of New York literary society bear more than a little responsibility for Wallace’s suicide. If they hadn’t put him on such a pedestal so early and undeservedly, he might not have felt like such a failure. Because he was a failure, a complete failure, despite writing a big novel that didn’t completely suck. But it also wasn’t the masterpiece it was expected to be, it wasn’t the masterpiece that some still pretend it to be, and Wallace knew that better than anyone.
By his traditional publishers, I mean to say. We already know beyond any shadow of a doubt that he was ripped off by the Bernie Madoff of science fiction. At Castalia House, a review of the traditional publishing model, based in part on records from the Heinlein estate, shows that an author with a traditional publisher has to sell at least 12.5 times more copies just to break even with the shared risk/reward independent publisher.
By the way, his advance from Putnam for Stranger in a Strange Land? $3,000. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. UPDATE: I think I figured out what happened. In March 1967, Putnam sold the exclusive paperback rights to Berkeley for $1. This permitted Putnam to reduce the royalties that came in from Berkeley with Heinlein. As it happened, Putnam had bought Berkeley two years before.
So, by selling Heinlein’s paperback rights to themselves for $1, they managed to cut his royalty from 12 percent to 6 percent. An examination of the Berkeley reports and a comparison of them with the pricing of their books over the years shows that from 1968 to 1978, Berkeley sold 2,281,668 paperbacks for $3,234,147.40 in retail revenue. Heinlein received $223,756.29 in royalties for a royalty rate of 6.9 percent. On a contract that called for him to receive 15 percent for sales over 10,000 units.
Traditional publishing for the win! Unless, of course, you’re the author.
Josh observed: “It looks to me like the prestige of being published by a traditional publisher is a commodity paid for by allowing them to rape you on the royalties.”
McRapey defended Tor: “I actually like my publishers, and they add value to my work and don’t rip me off in the process. Please don’t consider them evil (at least in their involvement with me), or try to cut them out of the pay loop. Thank you.”
Jerry Pournelle cited history: “As to conceding 30% to Amazon, I’m damned happy to do it, since publishers take 90%, and back in the bad old days hardbound publishers got 50% of the 5% we got from paperbacks as well. And tried to grab half the movie rights.”
I suggest a look at the facts are in order. Here are the specific terms from a Big Five publisher on a one-book contract offer with a $40,000 advance. Except for the retension of multimedia rights and the unusually high ebook royalties I negotiated, the terms are very similar to contracts with both larger and smaller advances from fellow Big Five publishers.
full term of copyright
Hardcover: 10 percent of catalog retail price on first 10,000 copies, 12.5 percent on the next 5,000 copies, and 15 percent on 15,000+ copies.
Trade Paperback: 6 percent of catalog retail price on the first 20,000 copies and 7.5 percent on 20,000+ copies.
Mass Market Paperback: 9 percent on first 150,000 copies and 10 percent on 150,000+.
Ebook: 50 percent of revenues received.(1)
Foreign language: 25 percent of proceeds from foreign publisher. Which, if similar to these terms, means 2.5 percent on hardcover and 6.25 percent on ebook.
All multimedia rights to games, films, and so forth were retained by the author.(2)
Now, keep in mind that this was considerably better than the boilerplate (see points 1 and 2 below). And there are certainly some authors who are able to command better terms than that, Hugh Howey being the prime example of an ideal model to follow. But before you dismiss me as someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about or blithely accepts bad contracts, how many authors do you know receive bigger advances than 8x the median SF first novel advance in 2005, (and I’ve heard they’re down to around $3,000 now, in which case 13.3x), while not giving up any film or game rights and receiving twice the standard ebook royalty?
Keep in mind that Jerry and I are not the horror stories. We’re simply pointing out how bad traditional publishing contracts have been even though we are both relative success stories! Bruce Bethke, on the other hand, wasn’t so fortunate. Consider the fate of Cyberpunk: “Initially written as a series of short stories in 1980, the novel was purchased by a publisher via an exclusive contract which forbade Bethke to sell the novel to any other publisher. The publisher decided not to release the novel, causing several years of legal battles over the rights to the book.”
So, while Tor may not be ripping off McRapey, who happily accepts making less money per unit in return for primary author status at the largest SF publisher, they are most certainly taking advantage of their lesser auhors. Compare who the names of the writers they published 10-15 years ago to the names being published now. What you will see, and what you will see if you look at any major publisher’s list of authors published over time is a regular new author churn, with low-cost authors providing 1-3 new books before being dropped and replaced when they fail to achieve sufficient sales velocity. It’s a constant churning process, and sometimes the publisher gets it wrong, such as when Pocket Books dropped Dan Brown prior to him writing The Da Vinci Code, which is a sequel to the Pocket-published Angels and Demons.
As one of the people involved in that decision once told me: “Nobody knows what they’re doing in this industry. We act like we do, but we really don’t.”
For the most part, publishers don’t really care who makes it and who doesn’t, because there are always new replacement writers to pour into the publishing mill. And there is nothing wrong with this process at face value, after all, publishers can’t afford to keep publishing authors who don’t sell in sufficient numbers. The problem is that the winners and losers are, to a large part, predetermined by the gatekeepers within the publishing house due to print runs and decisions to reprint books that have sold through their print runs or not. In my experience, these decisions are seldom based in ideology or malice, but are mostly rooted in happenstance and bureaucratic inertia.
Also, I should correct a previous statement. John Scalzi did not denigrate “self-publishers” when he went on his anti-Random House rampage in his swan song as SFWA president. He explicitly denigrated independent publishers operating on the no-advances model.
So why are so many eBook-only publishers attempting to run with the “no advances” business model? If I had to guess, I would say because many of these then-erstwhile publishers assumed that publishing electronically had a low financial threshold of entry (not true, if you’re serious about it) and they fancied being publishers, so they started their businesses undercapitalized, and are now currently in the process of passing the consequences of that undercapitalization unto the authors they would like to work with. Alternately, as appears to be the case with Random House, they’re looking for a way to pass as much of the initial cost of publishing onto the author as possible, and one of the best ways to bring down those initial costs is to avoid paying the author anything up front. Both of these are bad business models, although one is more maliciously so, and both are to be avoided. Just because someone has stupidly or maliciously planned their business, doesn’t mean you’re obliged to sign a contract with them.
There is nothing stupid or malicious about a shared risk/shared reward model. Only a rabbit who is afraid of risk could possibly suggest that there is. I leave it to the reader to compare the royalty terms of the traditional publishers shown above to the 25 to 65 percent royalties on revenues received offered by independent publishers utilizing the “no advances” shared-risk model, and to decide whose business model is disadvantageous to the author and which sort of contracts are therefore best avoided.
(1) With the Big Five these are now a standard 25 percent. (2) I have a copy of the contract with the boilerplate struck out. They actually tried to grab 100 percent of the net proceeds from British Commonwealth rights, foreign language translation rights, motion picture and television rights, and commercial merchandising rights.
I find it a little hard to summon any massive outrage on this basis:
The last time I blogged about the Author Solutions subsidiary iUniverse, I highlighted a typical marketing move. Just before Christmas last year, iUniverse mailed their existing customers with a very special “deal” where they offered to turn their print books into e-books and upload them to the various retailers for free. The catch was that customers would then have to fork over 50% of their royalties from every single sale to iUniverse. Needless to say, formatting and uploading is a trivial task. For those unable to do it themselves, that service can be purchased for a nominal up-front fee, leaving a writer’s royalties intact.
50 percent of their sales? Hmmm. Looking back at my original Simon and Schuster contract, it appears that they took 93 percent of my sales in mass market paperback. While I don’t use any Author Solutions services and never have, I fail to see how their overpriced services are any more abusive than the way conventional publishers have been treating the vast majority of their authors for decades.
Most of the publishing industry is set up specifically to exploit writers. That’s the stone cold reality. Castalia House isn’t, but then, as the shambling shoggoths will readily testify, we are extremists very far outside the pale of the mainstream publishing industry.
Mint Wilson, the lady responsible for the Indonesian translation of Mantra yang Rusak, which was published today in epub format since Amazon does not sell books published in Bahasa Indonesia, has been maintaining a blog about the translation process. It makes for interesting reading for anyone with an interest in languages:
As I translated A Magic Broken, I tried to translate VD’s word choices as close to Indonesian root words as possible. It’s not hard but it is sure often to find that I translated words into its Indonesian form only to realized Indonesian has borrowed it from English word. For example:
With the precision born of many hours of practice, the sleeve knife slid into his hand as he stepped behind the man rushing past him.
precision – presisi practice – praktik
It will be all right using these loan words to translate the English ones, but Bahasa Indonesia also has some of the same meaning words that are not any where close enough in form to their English counterparts. Though I suspect they are also loan words.
precision- presisi- ketepatan practice – praktik- latihan
Bahasa Indonesia has many loan words from other languages. The origin of Bahasa Indonesia is Malay Polynesian that has been used as lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries. Bahasa Indonesia underwent several developmental process before becoming a modern language; the most influential of these was it’s contact with other languages. Such language contact influence language system lexically, phonologically, and grammatically.
The languages that influence Bahasa Indonesia are :
Sanskrit, Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms that reigned in Indonesian archipelago brought by Indian results in many Sanskrit words in Bahasa Indonesia.
Arabic, Persian and Arabic traders introduced the religion and as Indonesia became the country with largest muslim population in the world, over the centuries results in an extensive Arabic loan words.
Dutch, Dutch colonization and administration, lasting from the 17th century to the 20th, had an extensive impact on the vocabulary.
Portuguese, The Portuguese were among the first westerners to sail eastwards to the “Spice Islands” in the 16th century as they traded and then colonized later.
Chinese, Chinese traders and significant number of immigrants made their contributions on Bahasa Indonesia vocabulary.
Some interesting fact: for ‘god’ Bahasa Indonesia Bible translate it with 4 loan words: ‘Tuhan’, ‘dewa’, ‘ilah ‘and ‘Allah’. I think ‘Tuhan’ and ‘dewa’ are from Sanskrit, ‘ilah’ and ‘Allah’ are from Arabic. For God Creator Bahasa Indonesia bible translate ‘God’ into TUHAN (when the origin mention Jehova or Yahwe) and Allah (when the original word might be ‘ADONAI’). ‘Dewa’ and ‘ilah’ are for lesser gods.
There is a scene in A Magic Broken, where the word ‘gods’ appear when Nicolas the main character trying to get pass the gate guard:
The friendly smile suddenly disappeared from the man’s face, and the guide was staring at him as if he’d suddenly turned into an orc. “You some sort’o wizard?” the guard demanded, even as he stepped back a pace and put a hand on his sword handle.
“Gods, no, I’m a soldier,”Nicolas lied easily. The guard wasn’t the problem. It was the red robe he had to worry about.
Here, I translated the word into ‘dewa’ as I don’t think ‘Allah’ will fit nor the original meaning permit ‘Allah’ in a plural form.
In addition to publishing Mint’s first translation, I’m pleased to be able to say that Castalia House has another 11 translations currently in progress. The Blue SF revolution continues.
“Sexual attraction may be innate, but it’s not universal. See asexual, people who identify as.”
Do you really think the occasional fluke has a whole lot to say about mass armies? If so, why?
How people act on sexual attraction is learned behaviour.
Only in minor details. The love, lust, favoritism, demoralization, and de facto prostitution are fairly universal within any armed force that sees integrated sexes or integrated sexually compatible people unless extraordinary structural provisions are made. Those structural provision include segregation. Here’s an interesting quote from very liberal, very politically correct Canada’s PPCLI battle school: “Male/female attraction will not go away because we tell it to; and soldiers will court considerable risk to pursue the obvious.”
What you really seem to be saying is we can control it. Forget it; we can’t.
What you should not forget is the ability of an army, any army, to make a terrible idea look good through sheer weight of effort and duplicity practiced on an heroic scale. Think Vietnam…or Project 100,000.
“can’t be controlled.” Tom, man. What’re you saying, dude? That people use sex to game the system? (Some people use anything to game systems.) And somehow that’s what, especially unfair? Or you’re saying, what, the act of sex is so inherently super-special it has in itself some peculiarly distorting effect on hierarchies? (Or maybe you’re saying something about sexual coercion, but I’m not going there.) I say to this: grow some imagination. I’m tired of hearing “the future can’t be different because [argument which boils down to “I don’t want to think about what would have to change”].” Like I said, these may not be stories you want to read or tell? But don’t pretend they can’t be told, or that other people may not find your futures as implausible – and even unpleasant – as you might theirs, on good grounds. From where I stand, your futures do live in Opposite World. And unless you bring a more SFnal imagination to our present interaction, my opinion of your wrongheadedness isn’t likely to change.
No, you are presupposing that things which cannot be changed can. Worse, you have no obvious basis for believing it except that you want to. Do you have any expertise in the matter of combat? I do. What you’re demanding isn’t SF; it’s fantasy. The mere fact that you can so lightly dismiss the effect of using sex to game the system, and as if that were all of it, indicates that anything that interferes with your particular fantasy has to be rejected.
Yes, the effect of sex has distorting effects in hierarchies. Perhaps it doesn’t matter at any given corporation, but combat units are not corporations. The next time Bill Gates has to worry about a near ambush or artillery strike on his way to the office will be the first.
In this particular, no, the future cannot be different unless you write away what men and women are, how they think and act, what they care about, and what they’ll take risks for.
Tom’s response is brilliant because it highlights the essential inhumanity of Pink SF. If great fiction speaks to the human condition, the great flaw of Pink SF is that it specifically and overtly rejects the human elements of the human condition. While I defer to Tom Kratman on what he insists is the legitimate possibility, given a considerable quantity of extreme and particular training, of women serving in an effective military unit, I remain extremely dubious that even the conventional notions of superstrength and mandatory reversible birth control could begin to permit women to become even mediocre soldiers. (4-3-6), in ASL terms, would be a best case scenario.
While I am not a military veteran, I am both a student of military history and a former martial arts fighter. As the former, I am aware that what settles battles is not who can kill the other side more effectively, but rather, who can cause the other side to run away or otherwise quit fighting first. As the latter, I have observed that women quit fighting as soon as they take a single damaging strike and not infrequently before then.
I have seen many men fight with broken bones; I myself once won a ringfight after having my nose broken in the initial exchange. I have never seen a woman get up off the ground after being flattened or bloodied and continue fighting except when she is in training with someone she trusts not to intentionally hurt her. In fact, when a woman isn’t hurt but simply gets frightened while sparring, she tends to turn her back on the opponent and literally cringe.
So, my conclusion is that women in combat will either surrender or run like rabbits as soon as they get sufficiently frightened or their unit takes a few casualties.
This comment, in particular, amused me:
Then again, on the other hand, we have John Scalzi, against whom I can levy no such complaint. Scalzi, unlike Ringo, Kratman, or Williamson, doesn’t have a military background of his own. Yet I find his future military more convincingly science-fictional than those of the aforementioned authors. Why is that?
I would think the answer is entirely obvious. Because you know nothing about war or the military and you prefer your weird non-science fantasies about old people’s orgies and men exchanging sexual favors to anything that can be reasonably extrapolated from the last 8,000 years of recorded military history.
The militaries in the science fiction world of QUANTUM MORTIS do not utilize female soldiers for the obvious reason that they are actually expected to engage in combat. The science fiction elements there involve physical augmentation, targeting-assisted weaponry, artificial intelligence, and interstellar mercenary corporations. They do not involve silly fantasies about strong, independent warrior women, which by rights should be classified as women’s erotic fiction rather than science fiction because it is quite literally anti-science.
Okay, I have to respond to this horseshit: “To get your friends into SF, show them a whole bunch of shit that no one gives a crap about, along with a few classics that aren’t really good for neophytes, and some hysteria-inducing leftism. And if that doesn’t work, go with a 2nd previous generation’s failed attempt at literary greatness.”
I’d like to destroy the prejudicial notion that the entire future is leftist, and that this is normal, desirable and believable. Near as I can tell, not a single “expert” they asked is within a standard deviation of center, and they’re all on the left. The only one with reasonably good recommendations was John Scalzi. When he’s your moderate, you may have a bit of a bias.
Heinlein’s YA? Neal Stephenson? Lois Bujold? Larry Niven? Sci fi with, you know, actual science? Drake for any veterans. Hell, Ben Bova has lots of very good near future SF. Mercedes Lackey is both liberal (since that obviously matters to them) and a good writer, with some decent present-day urban fantasy.
I’ve read close to 10K SF books and written a few, and I’ve never even heard of most of those choices. That by itself proves nothing, except that they’re not recommending anything anyone center, conservative or libertarian is going to be interested in, which is 75% of the population.
One thing you have to understand about the literate Left is that they are parasites who exist on nothing more than whatever they can leech from the productive populace in addition to each other’s farts. They are a breed unto themselves, homo fartsnifferus, for how else could one explain a movie – a freaking MOVIE – being made about a guy who killed himself because he was a mediocre novelist who everyone on the New York literary circuit erroneously believed was a literary genius.
(I speak, of course, of David Foster Wallace. A talented writer, yes, but a terrible novelist who couldn’t even rise to the level of Harold Robbins, let alone John Irving. I don’t condone suicide, but the only more explicable suicide in recent years was the Republican Senate staffer who was caught with kiddy porn.)
The whole point behind the Left’s endless babbling about social justice and gender equity and the entire catalog of pseudo-intellectual jabber is to conceal the fact that they have little talent and even less to say.
Okay, aspiring author types, you will see lots of things like this, and part of you may think you need to incorporate these helpful suggestions into your work. After all, this is on Tor.com so it must be legit. Just don’t. When you write with the goal of checking off boxes, it is usually crap. This article is great advice for writers who want to win awards but never actually be read by anyone.
Now do yourself a favor and read the comments… I’ll wait… Yeah… You know how when my Sad Puppies posts talk about the “typical WorldCon voter”? Those comments are a good snapshot of one subtype right there.
I also know from that Facebook thread that a lot of people tried to comment and disagree for various reasons, but their posts were deleted. (and some of them even swore that they were polite!). But like most modern lefty crusades, disagreement, in fact, anything less than cheerleading, is “intolerance” and won’t be tolerated. Meanwhile, my FB thread had lots of comments and an actual intelligent discussion of the pros and cons from both sides (and even transsexual communists who actually like to enjoy their fiction thought this Tor.com post was silly), so remember that the next time a snooty troll calls my fans a “right wing echo chamber.”
If you can’t stomach the comments long enough to hear what a typical WorldCon voter sounds like, let me paraphrase: “Fantastic! I’m so sick of people actually enjoying books that are fun! Let’s shove more message fiction down their throats! My cause comes before their enjoyment! Diversity! Gay polar bears are being murdered by greedy corporations! Only smart people who think correct thoughts like I do should read books and I won’t be happy until my genre dies a horrible death! Yay!” (and if there is beeping noise in the background, that’s because they’re backing up their mobility scooter).
So let’s break this pile of Gender Studies 101 mush down into its component bits and see just why some sci-fi writers won’t be happy until their genre dies completely.
I’ve pointed this out many times in the past, but this article on how writers earn less than you think should put it into perspective. I write solely as a hobby, I am persona non grata in most publishing circles, and even so my writing income puts me in the top 10 percent of traditionally published authors. That will go up in the coming year as I shift increasingly into Hybrid mode, but even so, I think I’d rather work a minimum wage job and spend all the money earned on lottery tickets than gamble on making $100,000 from writing for five consecutive years. Remember, unlike a salaried job, you are only as good as your last book, even if ebook sales extends the viability of your backlist.
This is not to discourage anyone from writing. To the contrary, I actively encourage anyone with an interest in writing to do so. Just don’t do it as a career. You don’t lift weights because you think you’re going to be a professional powerlifter, you don’t play softball because you think you’re going to make the major leagues, and you shouldn’t write because you think you’re going to be the next Stephen King or JK Rowling.
I don’t usually find myself agreeing with third world Marxists who natter on about “neo-imperialist fantasies of power and domination”, but I have to admit, the man isn’t entirely wrong when he points out how taking a fictional work out of its historical milieu often means sacrificing part of its heart and soul:
Shorn of their historical context, sequels and remakes today seem no more than rebranding exercises in an age of socioeconomic crisis, widespread uncertainty and creative stasis. Unlike most novelists, those refurbishing James Bond or Philip Marlowe can count on a ready-made store of readerly understanding and good will. As they do with the numerous renderings of the Ramayana and Mahabharata in India and Indonesia, audiences respond to familiarity spiced with the right measure of novelty and strangeness. Such tickling of the mass unconscious can be remunerative too: Unfocused nostalgia has a powerful lure in postindustrial cultures that seem to have a recurrent present but few clear traces of the past nor an avid anticipation of the future.
Naming the recent remakes of Bond in his witty book “The Man Who Saved Britain,” Simon Winder blurts out, “I’m sorry: I just can’t go on it’s all so terrible. They’re roughly the same, come out at irregular intervals and tend to have the word ‘Die’ in the title.” The increasingly pained-looking Bond played by Daniel Craig seems to concur.
Britain is geopolitically too insignificant, and non-Western markets — as well as political sensitivities — matter too much now for 007 to be able to fulfill neo-imperialist fantasies of power and domination. The artless seducer of women with names like Pussy Galore and Octopussy, a man who once charmingly hoped for sex to have “the sweet tang of rape,” also risks driving away a crucial demographic from the theaters. It is surely a sign of the times that in “Skyfall” a non-misogynist Bond retreats to his family estate in secession-minded Scotland, improbably preoccupied with a childhood trauma after what seems to have been a wholly unexamined life.
As will become clear in the near future, I’m not intrinsically opposed to remakes. The new Star Trek movies are better than the originals in many ways, in fact, some of their worst aspects are their determination to insert callbacks to their predecessors. No doubt Trekkies found it totally sweet when whoever it was shouted “KHAAAAAAN” just like the other guy did in the movie before him. I just rolled my eyes.
Speaking as one who has created a new detective, (to the extent that Graven Tower can properly be considered a detective as opposed to a law enforcer who applies Arnaud Amalric’s approach to the detective arts), it’s understandable that many writers prefer to simply borrow existing characters. It’s much easier to lean on an existing store of known and well-loved characteristics than to try to create new ones.
One could even make a logical case for encouraging those who are better with plot and style to mine the public domain rather than inflict their cardboard creations on us. The problem is that many of those who are already characterization-challenged can’t seem to resist putting their inept skills to use, thereby transforming the characters we know and love into cheap parodies of themselves.
Sure, it’s not uninteresting to imagine what Holmes might be like if he lived today. But instead, we’re presented with alternative concepts, and asked to imagine what a character might be like if he wasn’t that character at all, but merely happened to be prone to utilizing the same catchphrases. Thus we have Watson transformed into an Asian woman and Holmes depicted as a gay vampire and all the deplorable host of modern politically correct(1) cliches that render most modern fiction so bloody tedious and unreadable.
(1) “People forget that political correctness used to be called spastic gay talk.” – Frankie Boyle
At this time last year I wrote the following: “By the end of 2013, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to see the occasional month pushing somewhere between 800k and 900k Google pageviews. And if the Alpha Game traffic eventually surpasses Vox Popoli’s as I have always assumed it would, given the higher level of interest in intersexual relations than in economics, SF/F, and my personal ideosyncracies, the two blogs may well surpass 1.1 million/month next year without requiring any well-linked monster posts.”
As it turned out, the blogs surpassed 1.1 million pageviews per month by June. However, this wasn’t the result of Alpha Game surpassing Vox Popoli, as both blogs steadily gained readers even prior to the SFWA kerfluffle that led to more than 1.3 million pageviews in August. Traffic leveled off a bit once that situation was resolved, but remained strong as December marked the ninth straight month of more than one million combined Google pageviews.
In 2013, Vox Popoli had 9,340,663 pageviews and Alpha Game had 3,771,032 for a grand total of 13,111,695 Google pageviews. To the left is a chart showing the monthly traffic for both blogs for the last three years. It’s fascinating to look back and see that in five years, Vox Popoli has picked up an additional six million annual pageviews without Alpha Game. And with Alpha Game included, the annual total is nearly ten million higher. Alexa ranks also improved considerably in 2013: Vox Popoli from 29,426 (153,650) to 5,227 (41,452) and Alpha Game from 73,183 (215,234) to 11,851 (78,888). This tends to confirm my skepticism of the survey methodology and helps demonstrate why I prefer to track historical traffic in pageviews.
I would be remiss if I did not, for no particular reason at all, continue with a certain comparison that was repeatedly brought to my attention in previous years. This is, of course, the comparison with the hugely famous and massively popular Whatever blog. I find it both amusing, and all too typical, that while this comparison was originally cited as evidence of my inferiority, now that the comparison happens to have turned in my favor it is cited as evidence of my supposed insecurity and/or the number of evil people on the Internet. In any event, the following chart shows the comparative blog traffic over the last five years as measured in Google Pageviews.
Having done my part for charity and having successfully exposed the myth of Whatever’s claimed “50,000 daily readers”, I assume there won’t be as much occasion to reference Mr. Scalzi in 2014 as there was in 2013. I could certainly be wrong, of course, as who can possibly predict what surprises the Chief Rabbit of the Whatever Warren will have in store for us in the coming year. One way or another, I expect we will be provided with at least a modicum of continued entertainment on that front.
Whether you often agree with me or not, I appreciate that so many of you continue to take the time to stop by and peruse my idiosyncratic observations on various and sundry matters. I am also pleased that many of you take such an active part in the ongoing discourse here. We have lost some legends along the way, but the river of comments flows ever on. When I started this blog ten years and two months ago as a mailbag for my WND column, I had absolutely no idea that one day it would outlive the column. And yet, the column is gone and no one appears to have even blinked an eye, let alone missed it.
Considering my complete inability to foresee a 69 percent increase in traffic for the two blogs in 2013, I see little point in attempting to forecast anything. That being said, given the increased interest in economics in a slowing economy, in HBD in an unraveling society, and my continued expectation of AG eventually surpassing VP, it is not entirely unthinkable to imagine that next year could see a 2-million pageview month. But whether there are ten people or ten million people reading, this blog will continue to be here for your amusement and mine.
