Wednesday, July 06, 2005

Publishing News

I received my first-ever royalty statement from my agent. It looks like the book I coauthored, "Mormonism for Dummies," sold about 4,100 copies during its first two months (through April 30, 2005). We've earned back almost $4,000 of our advance--only $11,000 more to go before we start receiving royalty checks, which will probably amount to about $100 a year.

I don't know if 4,100 is good for a Dummies title or not. I'm also not sure if sales will have grown or diminished since April 30; I imagine they will have dimished, because book stores probably still have plenty of stock and haven't reordered yet. But who knows?

Several Utah papers have given the book some good coverage, the latest being a large article on July 1 in the Ogden Standard-Examiner:
http://www2.standard.net/standard/54884/

In other publishing news, I signed a contract to edit a book called "Conversations with Mormon Authors," to be published by a small press out of New York called Mormon Arts & Letters. This is mostly a collection of interviews with authors I did while editing Irreantum, but it will include a handful of new interviews. I've re-edited four of the interviews so far, and I think it's a really interesting, worthwhile project to pull together comments and observations by such a wide variety of authors under one cover.

The new editors of Irreantum recently accepted portions of my memoir about growing up Mormon, a fairly lengthy excerpt that I think will come out in the next issue. I'm a little queasy about it, because it includes some details about my personal involvement with sex and drugs as a teen, but I suppose self-disclosure is what I signed up for when I decided to be a writer, and part of me does enjoy being frank and intimate.

Other than that, I'm striving to put in two hours a day on my novel, which is very significant and emotional for me. I've been trying to find a publisher for a "Best of the Sugar Beet" collection, and one LDS publisher has been sitting on the proposal for about six months now.

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