Dividends

Just when I was thinking there’d be nothing about Falling to share, having racked my brains for something scintillating to tell my loyal audience/scream into the void as the case may be, the most momentous news has arrive in my inbox.

No, Denis Villeneuve didn’t read it and get in touch telling me he wants to buy the rights, write and adapt it into a 10 part Netflix event series. Not that momentous.

But it’s certainly momentous in relation to everything else that’s happened to it.

The email was from Smashwords, a minor ebook sales platform compared to the iTunes and Amazon stores but a player nonetheless, and the subject line bought me up short;

‘Smashwords partner sales/downloads activity alert’

I tbought it might be spam. Somebody bought Falling? A genuine, actual, real-life sale? Seems so – as the email went on to read;

‘This is a brief note to let you know that one of our partners recently reported sales or downloads of one of your books. (One sale or download was reported.)’

I logged into my sales report dashboard and have the princely sum of $2.34 Canadian due. That’s $2.56 in my own currency.

Over the 31 years (so far) I’ve spent working on Falling, there have probably been about 12 solid months total on writing, rewriting, preparing for publication and running this website.

The average salary for an Australian male this year, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, is $90,329.20.

So at this breakneck rate, in order to be able to say Falling has earned me the equivalent of a year’s salary, I’ll only have to live to be 35,335 years old.

Wonder what version the iPad will be up to by then…