Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Turkey Day!

May your trousers support all the fowl, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, stuffing, mashed potatoes, ham, dinner rolls, corn on the cob, carrot cake, deviled eggs, baked macaroni and cheese, egg nog, apple cider, tossed salad, peach cobbler, candies yams, biscuits, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, turducken (whoa!), and if you have a turkey in a turkey (turturkeykey)--well that's just wrong.

Introducing the Book Royalties Calculator

Part of the process in learning about book deals is the madness of contract terms and book royalties. To be honest, I didn't know much about how it worked. Well, until I created this bad boy.

I whipped up this quickie application to learn more information about the book royalties process. I didn't want anything too complex. Just an application which showed me whether I would earn out or how many books I would need to earn out. I could have gone hardcore and developed an application to break down multiple royalties and sale types. (For example, a break down of hardcover with its percentage and amount, and then mass market with its percentage and amount of books sold.) But I somehow stuff the crazy urge back into the can and create a simple application to answer my questions.

In the application below you'll see I filled in the values to give you an idea of what you can put in there. You can also check Brenda Hiatt's Show Me the Money to get ideas on royalty rates and advance values you can enter in there.

Note: This is a tool for fun/estimate the values to earn out an advance. It does not factor in the fact that book costs can be discounted to bookstores or that the royalty rate may change base on the number of books sold.

I have other writer tools as well. Be sure to check them out.

What Would Your Heroine Do For a Klondike Bar

I'm writing today for Nanowrimo. Okay, I have the document open and I plan to use this blog post as a warm up.

My thought provoking question today: What would my heroine do for a Klondike bar?

In my book, my heroine, Natalya Stravinsky, is a werewolf with OCD. She is a normal person, to an extent of course since she's a werewolf, but she loves to eat delicious things like anyone else. But and there is a but. Based on her personality, she might love the taste, but she wouldn't be too happy with what happens to the Klondike bar as you eat it. Yep, if you've eaten one of those square ice cream treats you know those suckers break apart and melt pretty fast. My heroine would be horrified to the point of dumping the Klondike bar in a bowl and then eating it that way. (Hey, I'm sure you've had an ice cream cone that melted to the point where you had to put into bowl.)

I find it cool how a different perspective shapes how people approach things. Natalya would kick my butt for a Christmas ornament, while on the other hand I would love a bag of jelly beans right now. LOL It's those perceptions that shape our wants and needs and thus drives us to do certain things to fulfill those wants. Even if our needs border on the extreme.

Now for me, I would never do anything unscrupulous for such a wonderful, delicious, tasty, chocolate happiness like a Klondike bar. (Like pay extra money for it, avoid writing my manuscript to think about it...)

Can you tell I am easily distracted by the evil which is chocolate today? :)