A bit early for my birthday, but last night after I got home from our trip out west and spent appropriate time petting the pets, I got around to checking the stats on my novel. And saw that while I was gone, we crossed 25,000 total downloads of the book.
As I noted two years ago when the downloads crossed the 10,000 mark, that’s kinda cool. And I am likewise pleased that the book seems to be maintaining its popularity.
So, thanks to one and all for helping to spread the word. With a little luck, I’ll have some more information soon about the actual publication date to share.
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, Feedback, Guns, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction
Time for a recap of April.
There were another 484 downloads of the ‘classic’ Communion of Dreams, and another 70 downloads of the 2010 revision. 134 people downloaded at least one of the MP3 files of the book, and 32 people downloaded at least one individual chapter. We’re quickly approaching at least 24,000 downloads of the book. Who woulda thunk it? I hope some % of those who have downloaded the book will also buy a hardcopy once it is published and out.
And over at Ballistics By The Inch, things continue apace. April was the third-highest month for total hits since we launched the site in November 2008, with a total of 178,170 hits. That puts us at 2,351,313 hits. I spent some time yesterday afternoon finally getting some links to BBTI on Wikipedia, and I’m sure that will help to keep hits climbing.
And so it goes.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI Blog.)
Sometimes, you just gotta admit that you’ve been defeated, and move on.
No, I’m not talking about my decision to have someone with a tractor come and till my garden this year, rather than doing it myself because of my recent muscle tear (which is actually healing quite well, thanks).
Instead, I’m talking about going on Facebook. Yeah, in spite of their privacy policies and the whole high-school-popularity-competition nonsense, I bit the bullet and signed up. A personal profile in my name, and when I can get a handle on the best way to do it I’ll also set up pages for my business, BBTI, and Communion of Dreams. If you have suggestions or pointers, feel free to drop me a note, leave a comment here, or (gods forbid, I can’t believe I’m saying this) post something to my ‘wall.’ And yes, you’re all invited to be my friend.
Gah.
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, Feedback, Guns, Publishing, Science, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
OK. It’s April 1. A day which I have come to hate, at least online.
Be that as it may, I’m not joking around about looking back at the past month, and I have some good numbers to report. As noted, I did get news that Communion of Dreams is going to be published, though I am still waiting to sort out all the details. As well as the psychological boost that gave me, it seemed to also have a boost in terms of downloads of the book. March saw a total of 891 downloads of the original “complete” manuscript, 224 downloads of the revised manuscript (which will be basically what is published), at least 61 downloads of the MP3 version of the book, and at least 17 downloads of all the individual chapters. That’s over 1100 downloads in one month, no matter how you slice it, and puts the total number of downloads over 23,000.
BBTI has continued to do very well, as well. Late in February we crossed 2 million hits to that site, and March saw another 155,165 hits – the fourth largest monthly total to date – to bring us to a total of 2,173,143 hits. We have been forced to delay doing the next round of testing, due to ammo shortages, but that hasn’t hurt the popularity of the site at all.
So, no foolin’ – March was a good month. And it is bright, and sunny, and wonderfully spring outside. April seems to be off to a decent start.
Jim Downey
Cross posted to the BBTI blog.
Feeling a bit down today – I think I am just getting a bit tired of all the ‘neighborhood’ stuff I have been doing lately. But did just get a nice note that I thought I would share:
Jim:
Just finished your book, and I must say I really enjoyed it. As I typically do I devoured it in less than 2 days and will now go back and read it at a more leisurely pace.
I found your link to the book in a comment you left at DailyKos. Though I don’t necessarily agree with alot of what is written there, I enjoy reading all intelligent points of view, and you never know where you will find a gem such as your book.
Do try to get it published, and please continue to write. I look forward to your next book, as certainly I hope there is another one to come.
Cheers,
John O.
I wrote him back, thanking him. Now if only it was feedback from Trapdoor . . .
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, Feedback, Government, Guns, Science
I mentioned the other day that the BBTI site was closing in on 2 million hits. And, with the site chugging along with 3,500 – 4,500 hits a day, I figured we’d get there before the end of this month. But then, over the last couple of days, hits about doubled, approaching 7,000 hits a day.
Now, this happens. Usually it is due to BBTI being “discovered” and posted on a new gun/shooting forum someplace – so a bunch of people who haven’t heard about the project yet run off to check it out, and send links to their friends. And it has also happened when I’ve posted some new information to the site (such as when we added in the additional testing results last spring) or announce something new in the works (as with the cylinder gap tests).
But that wasn’t the reason why we saw the bump up this time. Instead, it was because of an announcement from the FBI.
See, the FBI has announced that they are going to go to a .40 S&W AR-15 carbine. And in discussing that decision, people started citing our numbers on the .40 S&W cartridge performance in different barrel lengths. You can see what I mean at The Firearm Blog, at Calguns, and elsewhere. This is something I have mentioned before, how BBTI has come to be increasingly used as a resource for evaluating firearm performance, but this is the first time that I’ve seen it happen in response to some newsworthy item. And I think that is really pretty cool.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Feedback, General Musings, James Burke, Phil Plait, Publishing, Science, Science Fiction, Space
Happy Thanksgiving, to my American friends.
Perhaps thinking about giving thanks, and the question of my perspective from this vantage point in life, is what made this post from the Bad Astronomer pop out in my reading this morning. It’s about a scale model of the solar system hosted on the web. From the site:
This page shows a scale model of the solar system, shrunken down to the point where the Sun, normally more than eight hundred thousand miles across, is the size you see it here. The planets are shown in corresponding scale. Unlike most models, which are compressed for viewing convenience, the planets here are also shown at their true-to-scale average distances from the Sun. That makes this page rather large – on an ordinary 72 dpi monitor it’s just over half a mile wide, making it possibly one of the largest pages on the web.
Just for reference, the image of the Sun on my monitor is about 6″ diameter. Yeah, Pluto is a speck about 6,000x the diameter of the Sun away.
I love these sorts of things which convey the notion of deep distance (similar to the concept of deep time). One of these days I’d like to make it to Sweden to see the Sweden Solar System, which uses the Globe arena to represent the Sun, with Pluto a sphere about 5″ in diameter almost 200 miles away.
This question of scale – of the deep distance from one planet to another here in our solar system – is one which I tried to deal with honestly in writing Communion of Dreams. It’s why it takes over a week for the researchers sent out from Earth to reach Saturn (Well, Titan, actually) even using a constant thrust of about one-third gravity, and why there is a time-lag in radio communications of about 90 minutes (yeah, I researched not just the average distances between the planets, but where they would be in their respective orbits on the dates in the book – as well as what the intermediate time lag would be en route at various points). Which presented a problem in the writing – what to do with the characters in the book during this period? Which, in turn, is what I think made the readers at the publisher feel that the book moved too slowly in the first half.
Well, I still haven’t heard back from the publisher about the revisions I sent (and I didn’t expect to yet), so I don’t know whether I was able to address this concern adequately with the changes I made. And once I do hear, I expect that my perspective on the matter will change – as it always does, after the fact. Such is life. Such is the universe.*
Again, Happy Thanksgiving.
Jim Downey
What’s that? 10,000 *what* a month? Hits to the website? Downloads of the novel? What?
What it is is the number of words that I am going to try and whittle out of Communion of Dreams over the next two months.
Why should I mess with the absolute perfection of the finished text this way? Why should I slaughter a single word that has been carefully chosen and adopted through countless revisions?
Well, because there’s a publisher who likes the book. And in the comments I received from said publisher, who had four people read it in order to sort out what work needed to be done to get the book into shape for publication, they said this:
It is very well written, and the author is clearly capable of telling a great story. I am a firm believer that a book should be as long as needed, however, this manuscript is too long for the story. I have several notes in the beginning that there is too much explaining of the events and technology. The original hook in the book after an hour’s worth of reading is that a secret meeting has been called. Again, the last several chapters were great at building the pace – it is just that it takes too long to get there.
They said other things, too, but this is what the whole thing comes down to.
I sent the comments to several friends last week, and asked for their reaction. The consensus was that I should be able to tighten up the text to make the earlier part of the book move more quickly, without sacrificing too much information that the reader needs to have in order to understand the world I have created.
And I agree.
So, I have told the publisher that I will make some significant revisions, and shoot for trimming down the book by about 20,000 words (it is currently 132,500), primarily from the first part of the book. And that I think I should be able to accomplish this in the next couple of months, given my other obligations. Actually, I think I can probably do this a lot faster than that, but I do have a lot else on my plate right now so I want to leave myself plenty of room.
The question comes up: why haven’t I trimmed down the book before in this way, if I am ready to agree to the changes now?
Well, because some people like the extra material – they want the more complete information, they like the more literary pacing of the start of the book. Not everyone, of course – one of the more common comments I have gotten about the book is that the pacing is slow at first. Curiously, it seems that this divide breaks along age lines – younger readers just like a faster pace, seem happy to dive in and let the technological details sort themselves out with less explanation. Before I was willing to make these changes, I wanted to have a good reason to do so. And while the publisher won’t be able to make a final commitment until I provide a revised manuscript, this is a good enough reason.
So, I’m going to do it. And we’ll see what happens. But this is undoubtedly the most ‘movement’ I’ve had with the book in the two and a half years since I posted it online and started this blog.
It may mean less posting here from me – which I hope is a worthwhile trade-off, if it results in a published version of the novel.
Wish me luck.
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, Feedback, Guns, Health, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, RKBA, Science Fiction
Feeling better, though still not entirely over the gut-bug. But I thought I would share some numbers with you.
In the six or so weeks since the last update, another 1,500 people have downloaded Communion of Dreams, which puts the total number of downloads at 17,000. This makes me happy. And we have a small publisher who is interested in the book. Maybe.
In other number news, BBTI continues to get a lot of hits. July had over 100,000, and that puts the total so far at 1,126,943. This also makes me happy. Feedback generally on the whole project continues to be positive, though we’re always getting comments like this:
ANALYZING UR STATS for 9mm, KEL-TEC (which I own). Dont know when this study was done. looks like maybe mid ‘2008??? which is current enough to be relevant. However…> WRONG AMMO for analysis w/KEL-TEC. ANYTHING with a long barrel should ALWAYS use +P or +P+ to take advantage of – via specific brands at that. FEDERAL & SPEER ARENT right choice because they’re specifically designed for short-barrel. “Fps gain” would expectantly be marginal over short barrel. CORBON might be close to reality – but this is only marginal. Would LOVE to see something like BUFFALO BORE or DOUBLE TAP +P/+P+ 124gr & 147gr put thru these. This is what I shoot all the time with it, and can only base “visual” on what I think… would bet its substantial “fps gains” over pistol barrel, then.Any chance of u updating ur chart to include some +P super-stuff specifically? Would even volunteer to send u a box or 2 of the BUffalo Bore if I could get a “yes” commitment from u!!
*sigh* Proof that, no matter what you do, somebody, somewhere, will bitch about it. It’s just the way people are.
But you can’t let that drive you nuts.
Too much. 😉
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI Blog.)
Filed under: Feedback
Got this in my inbox this morning:
Jim:
I enjoyed your book…….It is in the finest tradition of sci-fi…….Hope you realize more than personal satisfaction from this work. ($)! Great finish!
Bob
I do get these sorts of comments fairly often, but it’s still cool to hear from people who liked the book.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 