- Joined
- Aug 3, 2017
Well, you can't spell ELLIPSES without ELLIS!
TGWTG Nostalgia Chick / Lindsay Ellis / TheDudette - aka Hotdogs in face girl
- Thread starter Brandobaris
- Start date
Maybe the Boston Brands of this world can help here, but the phrasing "she came upon a realization" seems so awkward. 'Upon' is too formal for this usage, and I don't think 'to' can be substituted for 'upon', anyway; a realization is a sudden thing.
And her naming a character, 'Ampersand', is fucking embarrassing: doubly so if it connotes some kind of ironic character trait that they need/want/desire companionship like their namesake.
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2017
I see no reason she couldn't say: "She realized," except for the fact that exact phrase appears only a few sentences before.
Maybe something like "It dawned on her" or "It struck her." The current phrasing is just awkward.
- Joined
- Aug 31, 2020
So... very... drunk.
- Joined
- Jun 10, 2018
I agree. It's something an 11th grader would find clever dropping in his literature class's short story assignment.
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- Apr 3, 2021
As they say... The Review Must Go On
It reads like someone trying to replicate dialog between humans and other civilizations in an episode of Star Trek. Like if someone from Starfleet was talking to a Ferengi or something, but it doesn't come off right, Im not sure how to explain it.
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2021
Channel Awesome lives rent free in her head.
Random Internet Person
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 28, 2019
And in the heads of a few people at least.
- Joined
- Jul 16, 2020
The human side of the dialogue reads as more unnatural, stilted and awkward than the alien. It seems like Lindsay doesn't actually relate much to Cora as a protagonist but more to Ampersand and Kaveh. A lonely chicken alien and a world-weary but observant cynical optimist are more accessible to her mindset than a 20 something idpol label collector with trauma issues. Weird word choices all around.
RumblyTumbly
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2018
(reads last few pages)
Jeez, what a bitch.
Jeez, what a bitch.
Shotgun Badger
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 21, 2018
I love this, its like the most hackneyed Star Trek premise possible. 'You humans eat animal flesh? How incomprehensible, and barbaric'.
I always find this an annoying cliche anyway since an intelligent creature will probably have come from an evolutionary pathway with at least some predatory behaviour (hunting tends to correlate with higher intelligence compared to more passive ways of finding nutrition, and meat can be a very valuable quick infusion of calories for a creature with a energetically demanding brain), the concept of eating meat shouldn't be that foreign to them.
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2017
"More refined" aliens are utopian trash fantasies anyway. Give me an advanced culture based on the mating habits of anglerfish. "You mean you human males don't nibble on a vastly larger female until her acidic flesh dissolves your lips so that you fuse to her body, at which point you slowly shrivel away to naught but a pair of gonads jutting from her grotesque corpus? How revolting!"
Shotgun Badger
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 21, 2018
Considering Ellis seems to be indulging her fetish for bug-horse aliens that snag mates with a questionable approach to consent she might as well have just went all in and found the most depraved and horrendous mating strategies in nature and attached them to the aliens.
Its like in Futurama where Zoidberg's species gets hyper aggressive, grows a crest for mating dances and then dies immediately after laying and fertilizing their eggs. That's science fiction!
Edit; thinking about it, she really missed a golden opportunity from not having the aliens be Sequential hermaphrodites where Ampersand immediately changes sex to male after falling in love with the main character. She could have gotten massive woke points as a positive depiction of transgenderism from all the people who've deluded themselves into thinking that stuff like Clownfish changing sex is somehow comparable to mentally unstable humans getting their dick turned inside out or cobbling together a meat sausage stapled to your crotch made out of your peeled off arm skin.
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Arthur Morgan
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Sep 5, 2019
It's not something new. Since Blip didn't have visible views, people assumed TGWTG contributors were more popular than they really were. When they moved to YT, the truth came out.
PeriodicTrouble
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 28, 2020
Yeah pretty much. The only way we knew what views they had was if they told us themselves like Linkara and Mike Michaud talking about viewership of NC.
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- Sep 24, 2020
- Joined
- Apr 5, 2021
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- Jul 16, 2020
That Aaron Lewis song is pretty shit but it was low hanging fruit. Whining about the statues in the music video was a better choice than other directions he could have gone, like sperging about Rittenhouse. The video felt rushed and minimal effort IMO, I think I kind of laughed once? maybe? but I wasn't familiar with a lot of the songs. The nice thing with sponsorship is he isn't splitting the lists into two videos for more money. Makes me a bit sad though, because I recently rewatched his OHW on Coven's One Tin Soldier and damned if it wasn't funny and informative in a way he hasn't been in a while. Todd, Lindsay, etc really did ruin their humor with politics; there's little funny about a sanctimonious wokescold pontificating about pop culture. It's a shame really.
Random Internet Person
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 28, 2019
Won't debate if Todd deserves a thread or not because it seems OHW and TW are good enough that he's spared that fate (for now), but I WILL say that we know the avenue that could lead to him having one now.
And if you want apolitical, well, A Dose of Buckley recently released his Worst Songs of 2021 list.
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- Joined
- Jan 31, 2020
So... who wants me to give Ellis another reason to drink?
I have her sales numbers.
They're as bad as I thought.
34,039 copies of Axiom's End (HC) sold.
7,688 copies of Axoim's End (PB) sold.
9,338 copies of Truth of the Divine (HC) sold.
Now, those numbers don't mean much to the untrained eye admittedly. So let me toss in some highlights.
Sales wise, her books are like a virgin on prom night - blow their load immediately and then fall asleep. Both sold more than half of their total sales in the first week of sales, than immediately cratered - Truth, for example, sold 6,500 copies its first week, then has struggled to sell 200-300 copies weekly, which is about on pace for what a mid-tier title from a publisher should be getting close to a year after release, certainly not the first few weeks after release. The movie tie edition of Dune, which has been in print almost half a century, sells a couple thousand copies a week.
You can really see the vast difference a marketing campaign from the publisher makes - in this case dammed near 30,000 extra sales.
Even for a drop between book one and book two, the 66 percent drop between them is extraordinarily high.
Now, lets measure her against the competition, shall we?
-Brandon Sanderson's Cytonic has sold 27,000 copies, and it dropped less than a month ago. Last year's Rhythm of War has sold 200,000 in hardcover alone.
-Rebecca Roanhorse - SFWA's token Native American, and my go to example for how all the hype and marketing in the world can't make up for a lack of talent or readers - saw her first series perform slightly better than Lindsay, along with a similarly massive drop between her debut and the second book. Only reason she's not getting axed by her publisher is her Star Wars book was (briefly) a New York Times Bestseller, and she abandoned her poorly selling series for a new one. I don't see Ellis getting a Star Wars tie in novel to boost a flailing career, nor status as a diversity hire making the publisher keep you around.
-Christopher Paolini dropped a new scfi book last year around the same time as Lindsay, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars. Shockingly, Tor did relatively little advertising, hoping name recognition would carry him - and they weren't wrong. 130k sold in hardcover alone, and it took half a year to drop below 1,000 sales a week.
-Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir? 250k copies. It's actually outselling his last book, Artemis.
-The much maligned Ernest Cline and Ready Player Two? 400k copies.
-Arkady Martine, who had a debut very similar to Ellis - her first book, A Memory Called Empire, sold 13k hardcover... and then sold 24k paperback, because word of mouth was spectacular. Good authors don't drop off cliffs.
-Kim Stanley Robinson's latest 600 page doorstopper? The Ministry of the Future? 35k copies hardcover, 10k paperback, and the latter dropped two months ago.
-The Last Shadow, Orson Scott Card's latest and LAST Ender novel, just released a month ago, and just broke 10k hardcover sales... and the latest edition of Ender's Game dropped in May sold 13.5k in Trade Paperback and 9k in mass market. When I say his back catalog keeps Tor in the black, I wasn't joking... not bad for a guy the danger hairs have repeatedly tried to cancel.
-Jim Butcher's latest two Dreden Novels, Peace Talks and Battle Ground? 100k in hardcover... each.
-Larry Corriea's dropped 3-4 books since January 2020... none of them have sold fewer than 10k copies, admittedly barely in the case of the latest Forgotten Warrior Saga book, Destroyer of Worlds, which much to my shock, is his worst selling series.
-RF Kuang's Poppy War series? 60k for Poppy War, hardcover, another 30k for the paperback, and 15k for the hardcovers for book 2 and 3 and another 20k for the paperback of book 2... paperback for book 3, The Burning God, just dropped a month ago, and it looks ready to break 4k by Christmas.
-V.E. Schwab usually averages between 50k-30k sales per book, with two exceptions... the trade paperback of her first, A Darker Shade, 225k sold, and the hardcover of her latest, The Invisible Life of Addie Larue... which has sold 500k copies. That may actually be the first book by Tor this decade not written by an old white guy or Brandon Sanderson to break 100k copies. Good for her.
-Ever curious how much money Robert Jordan makes Tor? They've released three different versions of The Eye of the World since Jan 2020, and each has sold around 25k copies. So next time someone like Fonda Lee complains about "why dead white guy gets more shelf space than you do"... that's why.
-Oh, speaking of, let's look at Fonda Lee's sales, shall we? Only one of her books has EVER sold more than 5k copies, that being the trade paperback of Jade City at 17k copies... So Ms. Lee, you want to know why Robert Jordan gets more shelf space than you do? Because three different versions of his first book outsold everything you've ever written. COMBINED.
-I'm going to be selfish and pull up one of my favorite new authors, Christopher Ruocchio, because he's an educational example... his first book, Empire of Silence only sold 3.5k copies in hardcover. Looks bad, right? Wrong, for a simple reason: The original print run was only 3.5k copies TOTAL, and pulled off a damned rare feat for a debut author, not only earning out but SELLING out on their first book. Those hardcovers now go for almost $100 a pop, and his sales continue to increase.
-Lets do a depressing one now... Twilight's Stephanie Meyer. Her Twilight sequel last year, Midnight Sun, sold 1.5 million copies. God that's depressing. More optimistically, her non Twilight books do terribly... The Chemist sold maybe 80k copies combined across all editions, and The Host barely cracked 300k... I guess that doesn't matter when the Twilight books have 40 million books in print though.
-For all the knashing of teeth that she's a TERF, Harry Potter fans will not buy another book, or at least won't stop buying JK Rowling's. The Christmas Pig has sold 300k copies, The Ickabog 500k, hell, the screenplay to Crimes of Grindlewald sold 400k copies. Even her last "Robert Galbraith" detective novel sold 100k between paperback and hardcover.
-I know we've had some questions about how the Disney Star Wars novels have been doing... make a list and I can pull numbers, but it's a mixed bag. If you're a Timothy Zahn Thrawn novel? Pretty good, the one that came out last month, Thrawn Ascendancy: Lesser Evil, has sold 25k copies already, the prior two in this trilogy averaged 60k each in hardcover, and even the latest trade paperback reprints of the original Thrawn trilogy managed to sell over 20k copies each. If you're the High Republic novels... not so much. The YA novels, kids books and comics are doing especially poorly, the latter two barely moving over a thousand copies each. I don't know how much Disney is banking on the High Republic, but they're being outsold by Legends material and whatever Zahn's still cranking out by a comfortable margin.
-Ever wonder what a big difference popular tie ins can have on book sales? Look at the Witcher novels - sales have soared twice, once following The Witcher 3, and again after the Netflix show debuted. That's why they went from cult enough Orbit books bought the rights for a song and never bothered to put out hardcovers to selling hundreds of copies a week for years.
Long story short? It pretty much backs up what I said - Ellis is performing about as well as most debut novelists, that is to say, not well at all. Take away the massive marketing push she initially got from St. Martins Press, and as I suspected, her numbers cratered, and she's decidedly on the wrong end of sales numbers for a large print run book.
The good news for Ellis is I understand why the Hugo crowd hates her so much - they're almost all selling even fewer books than she is. Her sales numbers put her ahead of around half the Hugo field. Though I think that speaks to how poorly your average Hugo nominee sells rather than that Ellis herself is a big draw. No wonder she thinks she can make it as an author, she's comparing herself with this lot:
-NK Jemison's The City We Became? 66k copies in Hardcover, 33k in paperback. Amazing how rigging the Hugos to win three in a row gives you sales comparable to Brandon Sanderson or Larry Corriea's less popular books.
-Network Effect by Martha Wells, ie the novel that won the Hugo Award? 17k hardcover, 5k paperback.
-Piranesi by Susanna Clarke? 86.5k hardcover, 21k paperback
-The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowel? 5k total. Turns out, "Former SFWA President" sells about as many books as "YouTube film critic".
-Harrow the Ninth by Tamsin Muir? 32k hardcover, 7k paperback.
-Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse? 24k hardcover, 26k paperback. Her bestselling book that isn't a Star Wars tie in novel.
-The Last Emprox by John Scalzi? 9k hardcover, 3k paperback. So to answer that question about his million dollar contract - no, he most certainly is NOT earning that back for Tor.
-Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark? 12k hardcover.
-Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi? 7k hardcover
-The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo? 7k hardcover
-You Sexy Thing by Cat Rambo? 467 copies. Shit, forget Mary Three Names, for a former SFWA President, this is amazingly awful.
Brief aside, I don't know how Tor can keep affording to buy Hugo nominations with sales this lousy.
Long story short, take away the marketing push, and Lindsay Ellis sells about on par with Tor's latest batch of diversity hires, who are usually on the lower end of sales even for debut authors. This is why the NYT said Twitter followers don't sell books, because no doubt her publisher expected her to move way more units than the rainbow coalition bankrolled by Brandon Sanderson and Orson Scott Card's royalties.
Discounting her first book - and the MASSIVE marketing push it got from St. Martins - she outsells half the other Campbell nominees, albeit only barely. AK Larkwood and Jenn Lyons second books are both doing much better than Lindsay's which is what you want to see from an author... sales numbers growing, not dropping off a cliff. Especially since neither got the red carpet rolled out the way Ellis did.
We're also missing one key bit of data - circulation numbers, which no publisher in the right mind reports, and I think that may be what screws Ellis. Selling fewer than 10k copies of your new book isn't a death sentence if the publisher only printed 20k copies. If they gave you a massive advance and print run thinking you're going to sell tens of thousands of books consistently? You're fucked. Some publishers - DAW, Baen, Pyr - build themselves around smaller print runs/larger digital sales to ensure profitability on authors that with a large print run, could be deemed failures. Others, like Tor, flood the market, and count on their back catalog and parent company to make up for losses. St. Martins Press could have gone either way on Lindsay... one ensures she's a one hit wonder they now know can't move more than 5-10k books, the other means they rolled snake eyes and she's costing them money.
I also wonder what her advance was - that more than anything else will tell me just how much her sales, or lack thereof are bleeding the publisher. Who knows, maybe she was smart and turned down one - the only sin worse than awful sales numbers is not earning out the advance paid on the book.
I have her sales numbers.
They're as bad as I thought.
34,039 copies of Axiom's End (HC) sold.
7,688 copies of Axoim's End (PB) sold.
9,338 copies of Truth of the Divine (HC) sold.
Now, those numbers don't mean much to the untrained eye admittedly. So let me toss in some highlights.
Sales wise, her books are like a virgin on prom night - blow their load immediately and then fall asleep. Both sold more than half of their total sales in the first week of sales, than immediately cratered - Truth, for example, sold 6,500 copies its first week, then has struggled to sell 200-300 copies weekly, which is about on pace for what a mid-tier title from a publisher should be getting close to a year after release, certainly not the first few weeks after release. The movie tie edition of Dune, which has been in print almost half a century, sells a couple thousand copies a week.
You can really see the vast difference a marketing campaign from the publisher makes - in this case dammed near 30,000 extra sales.
Even for a drop between book one and book two, the 66 percent drop between them is extraordinarily high.
Now, lets measure her against the competition, shall we?
-Brandon Sanderson's Cytonic has sold 27,000 copies, and it dropped less than a month ago. Last year's Rhythm of War has sold 200,000 in hardcover alone.
-Rebecca Roanhorse - SFWA's token Native American, and my go to example for how all the hype and marketing in the world can't make up for a lack of talent or readers - saw her first series perform slightly better than Lindsay, along with a similarly massive drop between her debut and the second book. Only reason she's not getting axed by her publisher is her Star Wars book was (briefly) a New York Times Bestseller, and she abandoned her poorly selling series for a new one. I don't see Ellis getting a Star Wars tie in novel to boost a flailing career, nor status as a diversity hire making the publisher keep you around.
-Christopher Paolini dropped a new scfi book last year around the same time as Lindsay, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars. Shockingly, Tor did relatively little advertising, hoping name recognition would carry him - and they weren't wrong. 130k sold in hardcover alone, and it took half a year to drop below 1,000 sales a week.
-Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir? 250k copies. It's actually outselling his last book, Artemis.
-The much maligned Ernest Cline and Ready Player Two? 400k copies.
-Arkady Martine, who had a debut very similar to Ellis - her first book, A Memory Called Empire, sold 13k hardcover... and then sold 24k paperback, because word of mouth was spectacular. Good authors don't drop off cliffs.
-Kim Stanley Robinson's latest 600 page doorstopper? The Ministry of the Future? 35k copies hardcover, 10k paperback, and the latter dropped two months ago.
-The Last Shadow, Orson Scott Card's latest and LAST Ender novel, just released a month ago, and just broke 10k hardcover sales... and the latest edition of Ender's Game dropped in May sold 13.5k in Trade Paperback and 9k in mass market. When I say his back catalog keeps Tor in the black, I wasn't joking... not bad for a guy the danger hairs have repeatedly tried to cancel.
-Jim Butcher's latest two Dreden Novels, Peace Talks and Battle Ground? 100k in hardcover... each.
-Larry Corriea's dropped 3-4 books since January 2020... none of them have sold fewer than 10k copies, admittedly barely in the case of the latest Forgotten Warrior Saga book, Destroyer of Worlds, which much to my shock, is his worst selling series.
-RF Kuang's Poppy War series? 60k for Poppy War, hardcover, another 30k for the paperback, and 15k for the hardcovers for book 2 and 3 and another 20k for the paperback of book 2... paperback for book 3, The Burning God, just dropped a month ago, and it looks ready to break 4k by Christmas.
-V.E. Schwab usually averages between 50k-30k sales per book, with two exceptions... the trade paperback of her first, A Darker Shade, 225k sold, and the hardcover of her latest, The Invisible Life of Addie Larue... which has sold 500k copies. That may actually be the first book by Tor this decade not written by an old white guy or Brandon Sanderson to break 100k copies. Good for her.
-Ever curious how much money Robert Jordan makes Tor? They've released three different versions of The Eye of the World since Jan 2020, and each has sold around 25k copies. So next time someone like Fonda Lee complains about "why dead white guy gets more shelf space than you do"... that's why.
-Oh, speaking of, let's look at Fonda Lee's sales, shall we? Only one of her books has EVER sold more than 5k copies, that being the trade paperback of Jade City at 17k copies... So Ms. Lee, you want to know why Robert Jordan gets more shelf space than you do? Because three different versions of his first book outsold everything you've ever written. COMBINED.
-I'm going to be selfish and pull up one of my favorite new authors, Christopher Ruocchio, because he's an educational example... his first book, Empire of Silence only sold 3.5k copies in hardcover. Looks bad, right? Wrong, for a simple reason: The original print run was only 3.5k copies TOTAL, and pulled off a damned rare feat for a debut author, not only earning out but SELLING out on their first book. Those hardcovers now go for almost $100 a pop, and his sales continue to increase.
-Lets do a depressing one now... Twilight's Stephanie Meyer. Her Twilight sequel last year, Midnight Sun, sold 1.5 million copies. God that's depressing. More optimistically, her non Twilight books do terribly... The Chemist sold maybe 80k copies combined across all editions, and The Host barely cracked 300k... I guess that doesn't matter when the Twilight books have 40 million books in print though.
-For all the knashing of teeth that she's a TERF, Harry Potter fans will not buy another book, or at least won't stop buying JK Rowling's. The Christmas Pig has sold 300k copies, The Ickabog 500k, hell, the screenplay to Crimes of Grindlewald sold 400k copies. Even her last "Robert Galbraith" detective novel sold 100k between paperback and hardcover.
-I know we've had some questions about how the Disney Star Wars novels have been doing... make a list and I can pull numbers, but it's a mixed bag. If you're a Timothy Zahn Thrawn novel? Pretty good, the one that came out last month, Thrawn Ascendancy: Lesser Evil, has sold 25k copies already, the prior two in this trilogy averaged 60k each in hardcover, and even the latest trade paperback reprints of the original Thrawn trilogy managed to sell over 20k copies each. If you're the High Republic novels... not so much. The YA novels, kids books and comics are doing especially poorly, the latter two barely moving over a thousand copies each. I don't know how much Disney is banking on the High Republic, but they're being outsold by Legends material and whatever Zahn's still cranking out by a comfortable margin.
-Ever wonder what a big difference popular tie ins can have on book sales? Look at the Witcher novels - sales have soared twice, once following The Witcher 3, and again after the Netflix show debuted. That's why they went from cult enough Orbit books bought the rights for a song and never bothered to put out hardcovers to selling hundreds of copies a week for years.
Long story short? It pretty much backs up what I said - Ellis is performing about as well as most debut novelists, that is to say, not well at all. Take away the massive marketing push she initially got from St. Martins Press, and as I suspected, her numbers cratered, and she's decidedly on the wrong end of sales numbers for a large print run book.
The good news for Ellis is I understand why the Hugo crowd hates her so much - they're almost all selling even fewer books than she is. Her sales numbers put her ahead of around half the Hugo field. Though I think that speaks to how poorly your average Hugo nominee sells rather than that Ellis herself is a big draw. No wonder she thinks she can make it as an author, she's comparing herself with this lot:
-NK Jemison's The City We Became? 66k copies in Hardcover, 33k in paperback. Amazing how rigging the Hugos to win three in a row gives you sales comparable to Brandon Sanderson or Larry Corriea's less popular books.
-Network Effect by Martha Wells, ie the novel that won the Hugo Award? 17k hardcover, 5k paperback.
-Piranesi by Susanna Clarke? 86.5k hardcover, 21k paperback
-The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowel? 5k total. Turns out, "Former SFWA President" sells about as many books as "YouTube film critic".
-Harrow the Ninth by Tamsin Muir? 32k hardcover, 7k paperback.
-Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse? 24k hardcover, 26k paperback. Her bestselling book that isn't a Star Wars tie in novel.
-The Last Emprox by John Scalzi? 9k hardcover, 3k paperback. So to answer that question about his million dollar contract - no, he most certainly is NOT earning that back for Tor.
-Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark? 12k hardcover.
-Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi? 7k hardcover
-The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo? 7k hardcover
-You Sexy Thing by Cat Rambo? 467 copies. Shit, forget Mary Three Names, for a former SFWA President, this is amazingly awful.
Brief aside, I don't know how Tor can keep affording to buy Hugo nominations with sales this lousy.
Long story short, take away the marketing push, and Lindsay Ellis sells about on par with Tor's latest batch of diversity hires, who are usually on the lower end of sales even for debut authors. This is why the NYT said Twitter followers don't sell books, because no doubt her publisher expected her to move way more units than the rainbow coalition bankrolled by Brandon Sanderson and Orson Scott Card's royalties.
Discounting her first book - and the MASSIVE marketing push it got from St. Martins - she outsells half the other Campbell nominees, albeit only barely. AK Larkwood and Jenn Lyons second books are both doing much better than Lindsay's which is what you want to see from an author... sales numbers growing, not dropping off a cliff. Especially since neither got the red carpet rolled out the way Ellis did.
We're also missing one key bit of data - circulation numbers, which no publisher in the right mind reports, and I think that may be what screws Ellis. Selling fewer than 10k copies of your new book isn't a death sentence if the publisher only printed 20k copies. If they gave you a massive advance and print run thinking you're going to sell tens of thousands of books consistently? You're fucked. Some publishers - DAW, Baen, Pyr - build themselves around smaller print runs/larger digital sales to ensure profitability on authors that with a large print run, could be deemed failures. Others, like Tor, flood the market, and count on their back catalog and parent company to make up for losses. St. Martins Press could have gone either way on Lindsay... one ensures she's a one hit wonder they now know can't move more than 5-10k books, the other means they rolled snake eyes and she's costing them money.
I also wonder what her advance was - that more than anything else will tell me just how much her sales, or lack thereof are bleeding the publisher. Who knows, maybe she was smart and turned down one - the only sin worse than awful sales numbers is not earning out the advance paid on the book.