Kati of Terra Book Three, now on kobo

Kati of Terra Book Three: Showdown on the Planet of the Slavers is now available on Kobo, for the very reasonable price of 3.99 $U.S..  It is a great read :).

  http://store.kobobooks.com/en-CA/ebook/kati-of-terra-book-three-showdown-on-the-planet-of-the-slavers

"Kati of Terra Book Three: Showdown on the Planet of the Slavers" is now available for sale on Amazon

Amazon now has "Kati of Terra Book Three: Showdown on the Planet of the Slavers" available for sale at the very reasonable price of $3.99 U.S.. Naturally, the number will be a bit different from that in other national currencies.  We  will also have it on Kobo soon (by this weekend).

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KHBN8FG

 

 

 

Here’s the description of the book:

Kati of Terra and Star Federation Agent Mikal R’ma Trodden join forces with the beautiful female reptilian, Xoraya, and the young Tarangayan mathematics and engineering genius, Lank, to chase down the Slaver Gorsh and bring him to justice.   The evil Waywardian Gorsh was responsible for Kati’s abduction from Earth, along with numerous other victims from many other worlds; among these were many small children from Earth and other planets.

Their quest begins on an obscure Fringe Space Station which houses a reputable used space ship yard, the services of which they need if they are to journey along the Space Trade Lanes.  Odd and dangerous events start to shadow them while they are on the Space Station, Qupar, and never really cease during the course of their mission.  It begins to look like there is much more at stake than merely bringing to justice a slaver, and rescuing the people he has enslaved and sold - an unnatural and unspeakable evil of cosmic proportions may well be at the center of events.

The group gains new members, even while it loses Mikal and Xoraya into Gorsh’s hands - Kati and Mikal are once again separated, and have to struggle to perform their tasks apart from one another.  However, neither of them is a quitter; they are resourceful and in love, so no force in the universe can keep them separated for long.  The manner in which they and their allies overcome the obstacles that they face makes for an exciting, amusing, and romantic tale.

This is the thrilling conclusion to the dramatic story which began in Escape from the Drowned Planet, and continued in On Assignment to the Planet of the Exalted.  Kati and Mikal can now take a breather from adventure - or can they?  Time will tell.

This is a full-length novel of about 260,000 words (equivalent to a paperback of about 550 pages).  Please note that the Kati of Terra novels are written so that they can be read as stand-alone books, so Kati of Terra Book 3 can be enjoyed by readers who have not yet read Kati of Terra Book 1 or Book 2.  Naturally, we encourage people to read the entire trilogy to experience all the adventure and romance of the Kati of Terra series.

Some more art, by the artist who imagined Kati of Terra

Here's a landscape by Leona Olausen, the artist who brought Kati of Terra to life (and the Kordean psychic Dian).  In this one she is demonstrating a river valley landscape done on site in a couple of hours, then refined back at the studio.

 

 

Here's the cover of Kati, Book 1.  Such skill.



Amazon Top 100 Kindle Books – Analysis of Average Ages of Writers in the Top 100

Since this blog is fairly data-rich, I will repeat the summary remarks here at the beginning, for those of you who are in a hurry.  But it the subject of what age is the "best age" for writers interests you, you should read the whole blog.

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Summing up, when it comes to the average age of writers in the Amazon Top 100, we can say:

· Their average age was 52.3 years, though there was a wide spread of ages in the data, from a low of 33 to a high of 86. So, writing success is possible at any age, though it appears to be an activity where success builds over time.

· Female writers were significantly younger than male writers, on average, about 51 years of ages versus 56 years of age.

· There was no strong tendency as to writers being older or younger by sales rank decile or quartile - average ages were about the same throughout the top 100 when broken out in these groupings.

· Indies were significantly younger than Trads, at about 45 years old versus 55 years old.

· Younger writers tended to sell at lower prince points than older writers.

· The Romance category had the youngest writers (46), on average. The Thriller category had the oldest writers (62), on average. The other genres were somewhere in the middle.

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Now, to the blog in its entirety:

In a series of recent blogs, I have performed some analyses on Amazon’s Top 100 Kindle eBooks of 2013.  These blogs have looked at that data in various ways – specifically, the demographic and publishing characteristics of writers in the top 100, as well as their average Amazon ratings and imputed numbers of book sales and dollar revenues.  Among the factors examined were:

1.       Gender (sex) of writer

2.       Relative position within the top 100 (by decile and quartile)

3.       Publisher

4.       Indie vs Trad status

5.       Price Range

6.       Genre

Many people, especially writers and publishers, are bound to be curious about just what is the age at which writers’ have their greatest success.  So to this very interesting list, we will now add age of writer (as of 2013, calculated as 2013 minus Birth Year).

First, a quick note on data sources and reliability.  About 62% of the writers in the Top 100 had Wiki entries that included explicit birth year information, about 4% had newspaper articles or other sources that indicated age reliably, and the remaining 34% had to be estimated from author bio information that didn’t mention age – basically that meant estimating from photographs or vague cultural references (e.g. read Sweet Valley High books as a teen).  Though the photos for this latter group seemed fairly up-to-date, one can never be sure, so it will be noted which groups had to have many of their ages estimated when we look at the data.  That will give the reader a chance to judge for himself or herself, whether that fact seems likely to have influenced the conclusions significantly.  Now to the data.

Overall Age Distribution

First off, the table below shows the overall age distribution of writers in the Amazon Top 100 for the year 2013.  I should note that if a particular writer had more than one book in the top 100, he or she will be counted more than once in the data below.  That seems fair to me, since it effectively gives more successful writers more weight in the data, and it makes the math easy (the counts also happen to be percentages of the total, since there are 100 titles in the dataset).
 

	Writer Age Range
	34 or Less	35-44	45-54	55 - 64	65 Plus	Total
Writer Count	3	21	36	18	22	100

As we can see, the majority of writers were in the 45-54 age range, followed by the 65 plus range.  Few writers were under 35.  This yielded an average age of 52.3, with a standard deviation of 11.3 years.  The latter figure gives a numeric value for the “spread” of the data.  Roughly speaking, you can think of this as meaning that two thirds of the writers were within 11 years of the average age of  52 (or two-thirds of the writers were between 41 and 63).

It is important to note that there was a substantial difference between the writers whose age was given on Wiki (56) versus those for whom I had to impute age (46).  So the writers whose age had to be imputed from photos were significantly younger than the others – it turns out that these were mostly female romance writers.  Given the possible implications of age stereotypes on romance writers, they may well have been a bit reluctant to be pinned down on the subject.  Nonetheless, I think the estimate is fairly accurate.

The graph above shows this effect clearly.  If we look only at the solid blue bars (the writers for whom we had wiki data on ages), there is a definite step pattern to the data – as the age range goes up, the number of books in the Top 100 goes up.  But when we add in the red speckled bars (the writers for whom we had to impute ages from photos on the web), the pattern changes dramatically, revealing a (more or less) normally distributed shape, with the peak near the middle age range of 45-54, then falling off on either side.  This is the pattern that we usually see in datasets of this type – that’s part of the reason that it’s called the “normal distribution” J.  So, that lends some confidence to the notion that our age estimates from the photos are probably reasonably accurate.

We will make a few more comments on the possible implications of this graph later in the blog, after detailing more of the key results of the analysis.

Age Distribution by gender

Females tended to be considerably younger than males, with the most common age for female writers being 45-55, while the most common age for males was 65 plus.  The average age for females was 50.8, whereas for males it was 55.9, a not inconsiderable difference of about 5 years. 

Writer Count	Writer Age Range
Gender	34 or Less	35-44	45-54	55 - 64	65 Plus	Total
Female	3	16	28	10	13	70
Male		5	8	8	9	30
Grand Total	3	21	36	18	22	100

In the case of both males and females, the average age of writers whose age had to be imputed was younger (about 45) than those for whom age was easily available on wiki (about 56).  However only about 3% of males required age imputation, while 53% of females did, so there was quite a strong gender effect in that respect.

Age Distribution by Sales Decile and Quartile

First, a refresher on what these terms mean.  A decile is one tenth of the dataset, while a quartile is one quarter of the dataset.  So, Decile 1 is the group whose sales ranked first to tenth, Decile 2 is the group in 11^th to 20^th, and so on.  Similarly, Quartile 1 is the group whose sales ranked first to twenty-fifth, and so on.  Note that because there are 100 books in the dataset, the math is easy.

All that being said, there was very little difference in writer ages by quartile of sales rank (Q1=52.5, Q2=52.4, Q3=52.3, Q4=52.0).  The same was true for deciles – almost all had average writer ages between 50 and 55.

It should be noted that writers whose age had to be imputed were somewhat more likely to be found in the second and third sales quartiles than the first and fourth.   As for deciles, the most interesting finding was that no writers in the first sales decile had to have their age imputed.

Age Distribution by Publisher

The table below shows the average age of writers, by publisher.  There appears to be no particularly strong trend, other than the observation that Indies are younger than the others, on average.  More on that in the next section.

Publisher2	Avg Age
Doubleday	58.0
Hachette	54.7
Harlequin	61.5
Harper Collins	46.8
Indie	45.2
MacMillan	64.0
Penguin	57.2
Random House	56.5
Simon & Schuster	49.0
William Morrow	49.0

 

Age Distribution by Indie vs Trad Status

A quick definition is in order.  Indie books are those that were self-published or published by very small publishers, while Trad books were published by one of the (usually larger) publishing corporations, such as Penguin or Random House (see above for a list).

This comparison is always interesting.  As we see in the table below, Indies tend to be substantially younger than Trads.  Indeed, the majority of Indies are under 55 (20 were under 55 versus only 4 that were older than that), while there are almost as many Trads 55 and over (36), as under 55 (40).  This gives an average age for Indies of 45.2 versus an average age for Trads of 54.6, a difference of just shy of ten years, quite a pronounced contrast.

Writer Count	Writer Age Range
Indie vs Trad	34 or Less	35-44	45-54	55 - 64	65 Plus	Total
Indie		10	10	2	2	24
Trad	3	11	26	16	20	76
Grand Total	3	21	36	18	22	100

 It is interesting to note that there was little difference between Indies and Trads in terms of the average age of those writers whose age had to be imputed from photos – 46.8 for Indies versus 44.3 for Trads.  So, if these writers seem to be somewhat reluctant to be entirely transparent about age, it is not because Indies are less  open than Trads.  Instead, it seems to be related to genre (Romance), with Indies and Trads probably both behaving in a way normative for that genre.  It is possible that Romance writers are particularly circumspect about revealing their ages,  for fear that readers might consider certain age ranges inappropriate - either too young to really understand the more complicated features of relationships, or too old to still appreciate being in the throes of passion.

Age Distribution by Price Range

Again, a definition is needed to put this data into context.   Low priced books are defined as being under $4.00, moderately priced books are between $4.00 and $7.99 and high priced books are $8.00 and up.

When we look at the data, we see that there is a clear distinction between books written by younger writers as opposed to those written by older writers.  The former tended to dominate the lower price range, while the latter dominated the higher price ranges.  In fact, the average age for writers of lower priced books was 48.3, while for higher priced books it was 60.8.  The average age for writers of moderately priced books was intermediate, at 51.7 years.

Writer Count	Writer Age Range
Price2	34 or Less	35-44	45-54	55 - 64	65 Plus	Total
1-Low	1	10	10	4	5	30
2-Mod	2	10	21	8	11	52
3-High		1	5	6	6	18
Grand Total	3	21	36	18	22	100

Once more we should note the trend with writers whose age had to be imputed from photos versus those whose age was given on Wiki.  The former had all of their books in the low and moderate categories;  the latter had books in all price ranges, but they were primarily in the moderate and high price ranges.

Age Distribution by Genre

The genre categories are fairly standard breakdowns.  The most obvious tendency in the data is that Romance writers tended to skew younger (mostly in the 35-44 and 45-54 ranges), though older writers also wrote their share of books in that genre.  Conversely, writers in the Thriller/Suspense/Crime genre tended to skew older (with half in the 65 Plus age range), though a few younger writers also wrote in that genre.  The remaining genres didn’t seem to show any clear age related trends.

 In terms of average age, in ascending order, the figures were: Romance (46.0), Science Fiction and Fantasy  (52.1), Literary Fiction (53.0), Other (54.4) and Thriller/Suspense/Crime (62.1).

Writer Count	Writer Age Range
Genre2	34 or Less	35-44	45-54	55 - 64	65 Plus	Total
LitFic			8.0	1.0	2.0	11.0
Other		2.0		5.0		7.0
Romance	3.0	16.0	20.0	3.0	5.0	47.0
SFF		2.0	2.0	2.0	1.0	7.0
Thriller/Suspense/Crime		1.0	6.0	7.0	14.0	28.0
Grand Total	3.0	21.0	36.0	18.0	22.0	100.0

Again, it is worthwhile to note that the group of writers whose age had to be imputed from photos were mostly in the Romance genre.

Summary

Summing up, when it comes to the average age of writers in the Amazon Top 100, we can say:

·         Their average age was 52.3 years, though there was a wide spread of ages in the data, from a low of 33 to a high of 86.  So, writing success is possible at any age, though it appears to be an activity where success builds over time.

·         Female writers were significantly younger than male writers, on average, about 51 years of ages versus 56 years of age.

·         There was no strong tendency as to writers being older or younger by sales rank decile or quartile - average ages were about the same throughout the top 100 when broken out in these groupings.

·         Indies were significantly younger than Trads, at about 45 years old versus 55 years old.

·         Younger writers tended to sell at lower prince points than older writers.

·         The Romance category had the youngest writers (46), on average.  The Thriller category had the oldest writers (62), on average.  The other genres were somewhere in the middle.

Going back to the graph with the solid blue and speckled red bars, it is interesting to speculate about the observation that most of the people that made up the red speckled bars were young female Romance writers (the actual breakdown is shown below).  About half of those were Indies.  Were these Indie writers being blocked from publishing by “gatekeepers”?  Were the Trad writers in this group being mostly ignored in sales rank lists, previous to the Amazon ebook revolution, due to the assumed less serious nature of their work?  If gatekeepers were excluding/ignoring a major portion of the writing population, we might expect the artificial looking step function that we observed with the blue bars to be replaced by the more natural looking normally distributed  function, once the “missing” writers were added back in.  After all, the latter function is generally what we seen in most natural situations, so it would make sense if it re-asserted itself once gatekeeper effects  were diminished.

Other = 2 females, average age 56

Romance = 34 females, average age 45

SFF = 1 male, age 45

Thriller = 1 female, age 47

Later blogs will look at reader satisfaction by age, sales (as estimated from number of reviews) by age, and revenue (as estimated by sales and book price) by age.  We will also look at how much the writers themselves earned in royalties by age.  At the end of the process, we hope to be able to see what the sweet spots for financial success are - i.e. age, gender, genre.