e wrong box and go to a bookstore that didn't
order them and isn't invoiced for them and end up on a sale table
or in the trash. Some copies are returned as damaged. Some are
returned as unsold. Some come back to the store the next morning
accompanied by a whack of buyer's remorse. Some go to the place
where the spare sock in the dryer ends up.

The numbers on a royalty statement are actuarial, not actual.
They represent a kind of best-guess approximation of the copies
shipped, sold, returned and so forth. Actuarial accounting works
pretty well: well enough to run the juggernaut banking,
insurance, and gambling industries on. It's good enough for
divvying up the royalties paid by musical rights societies for
radio airplay and live performance. And it's good enough for
counting how many copies of a book are distributed online or off.

Counts of paper books are differently precise from counts of
electronic books, sure: but neither one is inherently countable.

And finally, of course, there's the matter of selling books.
However an author earns her living from her words, printed or
encoded, she has as her first and hardest task to find her
audience. There are more competitors for our attention than we
can possibly reconcile, prioritize or make sense of. Getting a
book under the right person's nose, with the right pitch, is the
hardest and most important task any writer faces.

#

I care about books, a lot. I started working in libraries and
bookstores at the age of 12 and kept at it for a decade, until I
was lured away by the siren song of the tech world. I knew I
wanted to be a writer at the age of 12, and now, 20 years later,
I have three novels, a short story collection and a nonfiction
book out, two more novels under contract, and another book in the
works. [BOOK COVERS] I've won a major award in my genre, science
fiction, [CAMPBELL AWARD] and I'm nominated for another one, the
2003 Nebula Award for best novelette. [NEBULA]

I own a *lot* of books. Easily more than 10,000 of them, in
storage on both coasts of the North American continent [LIBRARY
LADDER]. I have to own them, since they're the tools of my trade:
the reference works I refer to as a novelist and writer today.
Most of the literature I dig is very short-lived, it disappears
from the shelf after just a few months, usually for good. Science
fiction is inherently ephemeral. [ACE DOUBLES]

Now, as much as I love books, I love computers, too. Computers