Holllld on.

Thing 1: The New York Times bestsellers lists have never heard of this book. Look for yourself. It shows up nowhere for the three months after the July 12th letter from Jack Daniels. Mashable points out that it got all the way to #40 - 40 - on their lists.

Thing 2: This isn't a "my book was discovered and I still made no money" story. This is a "I got a sweeping wave of flavor-of-the-hour and it made me $12k" story. Kind of like the Bed Intruder guy getting enough Youtube royalties to afford a downpayment on a house, this is found money. If the book was any good, those who pushed it to #40 would have told their friends. They didn't.

Thing 3: "Amazon bestseller" is stupendously easy, considering how many categories Amazon has. I have three friends that update their facebook regularly with how such-and-such book (that you've never heard of) is the #1 book in "screenwriting advice" for the 4th week in a row or that they have the 3, 5, 9 and 12 positions in "kindle Erotica." And, by the way, it makes you money. One of my friends does about $20k a month off kindle smut.

Thing 4: The money is in the advance. Didn't get an advance? That means nobody likes your book. At $10 per download, the publisher makes $7 of which the author, by his own admission, makes $3.50. That's why you self-publish: you get $7. Or, that's why you go traditional: you get an advance.

Thing 5: You can't trust someone who claims they're outselling Hunger Games out of one side of their mouth and claiming they sold 5,000 copies (at 3.50 per, that's $17.5k, which, minus fluff, is believable) out the other. Play with this graph. Set it to 365 days. Now play with this one. The numbers aren't even within an order of magnitude of each other.

Yeah, it's tough being an author. Doug Preston relayed to me how tough it was being an author when his family thought he was wasting his time, and how life-changing it was when his agent paged him while he was out camping at the Bosque del Apache with his wife and two young kids, penniless, to tell him that Relic had been optioned. Greg Bear writes a NYT bestseller every year, pretty much, and that dude is a long ways away from "fuck you money." The average advance for a first-time novelist is $5k... which pretty much sucks for me, 'cuz I've been on this thing for 14 months. I've optioned screenplays for that much that took me 90 days to write.

But if we're going to talk about the numbers, let's talk about the numbers honestly.

It always amuses the fuck out of me to see writers bitching about the cloudy numbers of Nielsen Bookscan. Clearly, they've never worked with Hollywood. I had lunch with Bill Marsilii a couple years back. He co-wrote Deja Vu with Terry Rossio, which earned them the biggest spec sale in the history of Hollywood. The movie cost $80m to make and $40m in P&A and did $180m worldwide... yet as of 2011, Disney could show you balance sheets that put the movie $800m in the hole.