Where is everybody?

I tried to do some Fermi estimations of the eBook market. Then looked up statistics instead. There's roughly a million books hitting the eBook market every year, of which 10% are fiction. There's about 40,000 working authors in the US. Today's high turn-over market causes genre writers to try to spend less than a year on a book, and first-year sales in self-publishing average 250 units (out of something like 200 million units worldwide.)

This is all orange-flavored applesauce. But anyhow.

KDP's algorithms start chopping the numbers after two weeks. So let's look at what is happening in a month. Roughly a thousand other fiction titles are hitting the system that month and that's why categories are important. Assuming you are in a popular and not too restrictive box, that's a hundred other titles gaming the algorithm to get display space. Means realistically you've got about a week when the rotation is reasonably likely to throw your book up on the "people who read this also liked..." listings.

Making some wild assumptions about the timing of the earn-out and the effect of the algorithm (and, yes, this is why having multiple titles out within a few months of each other really helps), half your yearly sales and 1/4 of the lifetime earning will be within that same week.

Carry the four, divide by cucumber, out of cheese error -- a couple hundred bucks, less if it is the first book of a series and you are trying to tempt readers.

Which is all by way of saying I'm not going to have a crisis of conscience if I only take six months on the next book.

+ + +

Oh, yeah. That riot scene? I just started writing and had no trouble deciding which riot to talk about and which to describe. With a certain amount of "You should have been here in February" stuff (even a guy on a podium who in February would have been Mikis Theodorakis but here in September is too far away for my characters to be sure.)

Oh, yeah. Mikis, who resisted the Junta, as did the students at the Politechnica, and yes they still march and otherwise remember the 1973 rebellions. Mikis composed the sirtaki, also known as the Zorbas, which is the name the Medicane of September 2018 took. Which is a dance my protagonist dances...with a university student.

I didn't plan any of this.

So I got that far, then stalled out again trying to figure out which way the cops were going (are they trying to clear Syntagma, or are they trying to keep the crowd from moving somewhere else?) Eventually I realized it was all fog of war anyhow...

...and then I hit ten hour days at work and had no more time to finish the scene.

+ + + REDO FROM START

Finally a (mostly) free weekend and took the portable keyboard to the cafe and finished the riot scene. Which is also the last Markos scene; I created him because I needed one more thing happening in the Museum sequence, he grew into a companion for several chapters and love interest, and the end of the riot scene is also their first big quarrel.

And that's basically it for contemporary Athens. There's an upcoming scene which is back in tourist land, clothes shopping, eating tourist food and going to the Acropolis museum. The scene might pick up just outside and skip over the other stuff, I don't know yet.

But the rest of the book is the adventure. Basically, the location shooting is done and the rest is on the sound stage.

And I'm looking forward to the return to the Atlantis Gallery. Because I realized I can make this a "Welcome to the Hellmouth" scene.

The kind of scene that happens at about the one-hour mark on the Stargate SG1 pilot; up until that moment they've thought of the Stargate as linking Earth and Abydos, and Ra being the singular Big Bad. Until Daniel shows them a room that is absolutely covered in seven-symbol groups -- every single one of them an extra-planetary address of what is then revealed to be a galactic Stargate network.

The gimmick to the Atlantis Gallery is it is weighted towards the intriguing. Less classic Polychrome ware, more Antikythera Mechanisms. Which means I can wave at Phaistos Discs and Crystal Skulls and Quimbaya "airplanes." 

Right, sorry, the "Hellmouth" example; after dusting her first vampire Buffy is confronted by Giles who drops a giant pile of books on the table, explaining Sunnyvale is over a thing called the "Hellmouth" and everything comes there...witches, demons, ghosts, werewolves....thus establishing the premise has all the plot hooks it needs for season after season.