Book Sales

Going through some paperwork last night I found a paragraph I had cut-n-pasted and printed about book sales. Unfortunately, I did not copy the source. The stats are from a company called Nielsen BookScan, which tracks all facets of book sales both nationally and internationally. I went to their website earlier and did some cursory searching, but could not obtain more current statistics in the few minutes I had set aside.

Anyway, it seems that 195,000 new book titles were published in 2004. That’s 25,000 more books than the previous year – apparently a very large jump. However, most of these books do not sell well. In fact, 93 percent – or some 180,000 new titles – only sell, at most, a thousand copies. These books account for only 13 percent of total book sales. So if you flip the numbers around, that means that 7 percent of the new books were responsible for 87 percent of total book sales.

I’m not sure what to take away from these numbers except a little better understanding of book sales. There’s a lot there that could get an aspiring author depressed. Or perhaps … motivated. Hey, 7 percent of the new books in 2004 were successful! So what if that’s only one out of every fourteen published. 7 percent translates to 15,000 books, and presumably, 15,000 authors! Would you sign up for an endeavor where there could be 14,999 other successful participants? You could be one of those 15,000. Hey, so could I!

Thoughts and Thinking

What influences our thoughts?

I can’t count how many times and in how many places I’ve read that we must “control our thoughts.” From conservative Catholic practical theology books and articles all the way down the spectrum to new-agey self-help writings. Control your thoughts. Well and good, I understand the point. What I don’t understand, though, is how to do it.

Sure, they’ll tell you it’s a hard thing to do. Perhaps the hardest thing we’re called to do on a daily, almost minute-by-minute basis during our sabbatical in this world. But if we are to get anything done while we’re here, and have a fair degree of peace of mind while we’re doing it, we need to control what the old noggin is focusing on. So I decided to practice what they preach and control my thinking for an hour, and concentrate on the opening question to this post.

I figure if we knew what exactly influences our thoughts we’d have a leg up on controlling them. Makes sense, right? And once we knew the influencers of thought, we could come up with some solutions, some things we can implement so that our negativity never rises above a certain point, and, if it does, it can quickly be brought down and replaced with better, nobler thinking.

There seems to be three main forces that influence what will cross our mind at any given instant in time.

The first is your physiology. This is the body part of the mind-body dualistic equation. In a nutshell, it’s the way you feel at this moment. Are you tired? Energetic? Happy? Sad? Mellow? Excited? Your physiology has a lot to do with that. It’s basically the result of four things: your diet, the frequency and quality of your exercising, the frequency and quality of your rest and relaxation, and your habitual posture. Yeah, you know about diet and exercise, as well as sleep, but now you know posture plays an important role. Don’t believe me? Next time you feel dragging, take a deep breath and stand as if an invisible cable were attached to your head and was pulling you up to the ceiling. You’ll instantly feel better. Why do they teach recruits in the armed forces to stand up straight with chest out?

The next part is external stimuli. This is the people, the environment, and the events that are immediately about you. This is kind of obvious. I mean, compare what would go through your mind sitting in an empty church as opposed to standing in the middle of Times Square on New Years Eve. This is also why being around habitually negative people is such a contagion for sensitive people like myself.

The last influencer, I believe, is your history of thinking. What you’ve thought in various situations over your lifetime, whether it was deliberately taught or unconsciously developed as, say, a defense mechanism. Think of a tree as symbolic of your thinking. Early on, it’s just a little stalk. But as time goes on, as water and nutrients are brought into the stalk, hard bark is formed, layer by layer, continually re-covering itself, until eventually a thick tree trunk results. Same with your thinking. There some external stimuli, your in a certain state of physiology, and you respond by thinking a certain thought. You get rewarded in some way, and the little stalk begins to grow. After a couple of years of such thinking, after a trunk of habitual thought results, don’t you see how difficult it would be to change?

Now, what’s the solution?

Simply, this:

1. Maintain excellent physiology
2. Associate with positive people who demonstrate the qualities you wish to have
3. Control your environment as favorably as possible to the best of your ability
4. Control events as favorably as possible to the best of your ability
5. Change your habitual thinking

Sounds easy, right? Now go out and do it! But wait – number 5, “Change your habitual thinking” … that’s still just a restatement of the phrase “Control your thoughts.” Hmmm. After some thought devoted to that thought, I decided there’s no pat answer to that one. Yes, improving your physiology will improve the quality of your thoughts. Yes, changing your environment and the people you surround yourself with will improve your thoughts. Yes, a little forward thinking about what may happen given this or that circumstances (“contingency planning”) will improve the quality of your thoughts. But how the heck do you deal with a lifetime of bad habitual useless and self-destructive thinking?

For me I had to go back to the drawing board and spend another hour brainstorming. I came up with a list of twenty-eight items. Some were concrete actions I had to take, some were replacement habits I should work on, some were techniques I could use to interrupt when habitual thinking kicked in. It looked like a lot of work, but if I could implement one thing every two weeks, and do it diligently, in a year I’d be a better person.

Right?

Well, I did these two brainstorming sessions a little over three years ago. I did devote considerable effort towards this problem (realizing it would spill over into all areas of my life, resulting in overall improvement and satisfaction). There were also months and months were I simply forgot everything I just wrote. All in all, I’d say, honestly, I’m about 35 to 40 percent of the way there. Recently I’ve been putting heavy focus on physiology – I had my heart issue taken care of, I’m on the raw foods transitional diet, drinking plenty of water, stretching daily, and a bunch of other things. Other aspects, such as environment, are in dire need of revision, and they will be revised, soon.

The only way to do it is to chip away at yourself, chiseling a bit here and there, resting and resuming, and eventually, over the course of a lifetime, you might actually be happy with the results.

Ten Really Neat Horror Novels

As a young boy I feasted on science fiction. It was my sustenance. I remember the SF section in my town’s library vividly, and going through just about every book over a couple of summers. Fondly do I recall those funky 70s sci-fi book covers, with their overexposed modern-art-ish themes. By high school, however, this changed, and I made a left-turn delving deep into the horror genre. I don’t know why; probably something to do with hormones and angst and the intersection of the two.

Anyway, I spent a good decade reading many, many works of horror. Every single Stephen King and every single Dean Koontz up until ’93 or ’94 or so. Then I made a right turn into Tom Clancy Land for two or three years (those books are long!) before rebounding back to science fiction, particularly focusing on the 50s classics as well as the warmly-remembered nostalgic voyages of my youth. I sprinkled some true classics here and there (I was well into Moby Dick – Melville’s chick magnet! – when I met my wife). Recently, a couple of horror novels crossed my path, through no rhyme or reason, and I decided this would be a an enjoyable topic to post.


Floating Dragon by Peter Straub – Earliest greatest horror novel! Don’t recall too much of the plot since I read it twenty-five years ago, but the eponymous critter is the cloud of noxious gas that escapes from a chemical plant and causes the populace of a nearby upscale town to go hallucinagetically and homicidally bonkers. Much more than that single-sentence summary; it holds some genuinely creepy-crawly images and situations. Begging to be re-read.

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell – Philosophical-slash-religious horror, with SF thrown in for good measure! The setup requires a bit of suspension of disbelief, but once you accept the Vatican launching a manned space mission to the homeworld of a newly-discovered alien race, things move along nicely. Foreshadowing and flashbacks are very important in this work, and you know very, very bad things are going to happen. You just don’t know when and to who.

A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay – WTF metaphysical-slash-mystical horror! I honestly had no idea what was going on through most of the book. Definitely some queasy moments, but emphasis more on atmospheric and eerie Lovecraftian-type horror. A man takes a dream-like trip to another world and meets all kinds of strange, wonderful, and dreadful characters, and learns something very terrible about himself at the end.

Weaveworld by Clive Barker – Fantasy horror! Another one I read a long time ago, maybe twenty years, but remains anchored in my mind. Barker created such an original, compelling, fantastical awe-inspiring yet dangerous world that coexists just a few steps away from our mundane day-to-day lives. The endgame of this book is one of the best I have ever read.

The Koontzian trio: The Bad Place, Phantoms, and Whispers by Dean R. Koontz. Soap-opera horror! Koontz is an idea-generator supreme, and his ideas keep you on your toes. That’s his genius. All his novels, at least the dozen or so early ones I read, start out with a mystery, a strong but hurting man meeting a strong but hurting woman, creepiness and occasional gore, and by the end of the book you’re amazed by what’s being revealed. These three are his best. The first two contain a bunch of SF themes and motifs, while the last is just downright crazy. Page-turners and well worth any investment.

The Spinner by Doris Piserchia – Monster horror, with SF thrown in for good measure! The best monster novel I’ve ever read. Why is the “monster novel” such a rarity? Every year Hollywood releases a dozen “monster movies,” so isn’t the market there? Anyway, I read this as a kid and re-read it a few years ago. Superb! A monster without reason, without explanation, without mercy. Cunning, always two-steps ahead of the authorities, and very, very ravenous. A heavy sense of despair falls over the unnamed city under siege as the inhabitants come to realize that there is no escaping the Spinner. Or – is there?

Tommyknockers by Stephen King – Flying saucer and all those gross paranoid themes from the 50s and 60s cinema horror! A writer and a drunk unearth an ancient flying saucer buried in the side of a mountain, which somehow causes the townsfolk to slowly mutate into super-intelligent but morally bankrupt creatures (uh-oh!). I found the anti-hero’s ultimate solution and his implementation of it to be quite touching.

It by Stephen King – The greatest (modern) horror story every written! Not to mention my favorite. The titular beast has no equal in the literature of monsters, waking every thirty years from its slumbers to feed on children. Oh, and the more frightened the child, the tastier the meal. So it morphs into whatever scares the little ones the most. Adults can’t see it, and It doesn’t bother with them unless it must. A ragtag group of kids manage to defeat it in 1957, or so they think, until as adults they realize bleakly they have to kill a stronger It three decades later before It gets them. Unforgettable characters, the type you wish really existed and were your friends. Over a thousand pages in length and I wanted it to keep going on and on. King’s magnum opus, par excellence.