s a new college student, fresh from 12 years growing up in a small town in Wisconsin, I found myself living with young men from big cities of the East: New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Newark. Well, big cities and middle-sized ones.
I soon began to learn a number of words and phrases previously unknown to me, the most memorable being: "What's a game without numbers?" By itself, of course, this sounded like something I could have heard in Wisconsin, but it was often used in conjunction with another phrase: "What's the number?" I never investigated this too closely, but I concluded that it had something to do with a common gambling exercise.
Every activity can be seen as a game of numbers. Your dentist tells you, for example, that you must floss more than once a month. Your children get taller—or is it that you grow smaller? And who doesn't watch the numbers on the bathroom scale?
Numbers make it possible to keep score. They go by cover names like rating points or shares or units sold or ticket grosses, but don't be fooled: These numbers tell stories of their own, of dreams fulfilled or shattered, expectations met or exceeded, money made or money lost.
Of course, the standard of success—the magic number—varies wildly, depending on the form under discussion.
SF's standards of success are relative
Look at publishing, for example, still the creative heart of sci-fi. A literary sci-fi novel can be judged to be successful if it sells 10,000 hardcover copies—especially if the publisher thought it might do half that. A paperback is doing well if it sells 100,000 copies.
The genre sci-fi magazines—Analog, Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Realms of Fantasy—sell anywhere from 25,000 to 40,000 copies a month. The number of readers is likely more, using the standard publishing multiplier I've conveniently forgotten.
Do the publishers of these magazines feel successful? Sure—until they look at an Internet magazine like our own Science Fiction Weekly, which has 276,000 registered readers in the same time.
I have a personal perspective on this issue: I recently added up all the sales on the nine Michael Cassutt books in print, and found that I had—barely—managed to break the 100,000 barrier. On all of them put together.
Now, in a numerical vacuum, I would feel pretty good about this, given that it's proof that I've managed to sell books far beyond my immediate circle of family and friends. (I know a lot of people, but not 100,000 of them.)
Then I think about my friend the award-winning SF novelist, who sells several times 100,000 copies of each book he publishes.
And he can look ahead at Dame J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, which through summer 2000 (when, apparently, everyone except her accountants stopped keeping track) had sold 30 million copies.
Your mileage—and expectations may vary
The Harry Potter numbers compare favorably to those from the television world, where the units are audience share or rating points, not newsstand and subscription sales, or Internet hits.
Looking at the most recent figures to hand, I see that, for example, the highest-rated show on the SCI FI Channel for the week of April 8-14 was the TV movie Tremors, with a 2.4 rating—or about 3 million viewers. Not bad. An episode of Farscape typically reaches about half that, or maybe even a few hundred thousand more.
But then you start looking at the networks, and find that Enterprise has over 5 million viewers, even in a slow week. Are the producers of Enterprise happy with their numbers? They should be; they're great for UPN.
But they can't help but glance sideways at The X-Files, the highest-rated sci-fi series of the modern era (that is, following the expansion of new networks, cable and syndicated outlets), and seeing that even in its old age, the Fox series pulls in almost 8 million viewers per episode.
And everyone in sci-fi television can feel bad by seeing Spider-Man grossing $114 million in its first weekend of release. If you assume an average ticket price of $8 per attendee, you see that at least 18 million people went to see it. Some of them may have gone twice, but that's a lot of eyeballs. More than any issue of a sci-fi magazine, more than an unusually successful sci-fi book, twice as many as the most successful sci-fi series.
Even Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (#4) sold only 372,000 hardcovers in its first day of release. (Well, that was just in England. But Harry Potter is a special case, don't you agree?) What do you suppose its publishers are expecting when, or if, #5 appears?
18 million?
Attempting to measure the immeasurable
Why all this talk of numbers? Because now, more than at any other time (save that cold January when the holiday credit-card bills arrive), 'tis the season. As you read this, the cool, calculating intelligences in charge of the major and minor networks will be well into the business of screening pilots for the Fall 2002 season. They will not only be watching with their hearts and minds (and they do: I know, since, at a low level, I used to be one of them), they will be looking at numbers. How much is Pilot A likely to cost per episode, how much interest does it create in the upfront market, can we make money on it, etc.?
Publishing isn't immune from this, either. If a particular brand of sci-fi book meets expectations or makes money (not always the same thing), there will be more like it.
But numbers don't tell the whole story. Babylon 5 made a lengthy run by drawing Farscape-scale numbers. It was a money-making operation, to be sure, but not like X-Files.
Nothing like X-Files.
Yet J. Michael Straczynski felt as proud of his work on Babylon 5 as I do about my books and their economy-sized audiences.
What we need is a way to make the intangible tangible. To find some way of scoring artistic satisfaction. We live in a digital world, after all. When do we start assigning useful digits to feelings? Can you picture a day when a studio president looks at a matrix of numbers that not only include profit and loss, but also a scale of value? "Yeah, the net on the Way Station movie is only 4 percent, but the V-scale went through the roof. We should do more like it—"
Sorry. I don't know what came over me. This is supposed to be about sci-fi, not pure fantasy.
Michael Cassutt's current numbers are 2, 24, 150 and 2. He is currently writing scripts for 20th Television as well as Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda.
