Followup on the grammar poll

Yesterday's question about a point of grammar was inspired by a post on the subject over at Britwriters. Some of the British erotic romance writers have noticed that many of the American editors they work with insist on removing all "was" usages as being passive tense and wrong, which tends to freak one a bit if one speaks a dialect of English where the different sentences have distinctly different meanings. I haven't run into this personally, but I work with one publisher and hence one editor, who happens to be good at editing in both dialects.

I was telling watervole about the post, and she suggested that it might be simply an artefact of people blindly applying rules they've been taught without understanding the basis of the rules (which to some extent was my own reaction), or alternatively that language varies widely in the US and it might be a regional thing. So we thought it might be interesting to run a poll to see who did and didn't see a difference, and what their unprompted comments might be.

I tried to set up the question so that it wasn't too leading, and split out US and Canadian because if there was a difference it would be interesting to see which way Canadians went -- American or Commonwealth. Right now there are 64 answers, 63 of which say there is a difference. The one that doesn't is from someone who says they're British.

Now, it's a biased poll. Apart from anything else, if you read this blog, there's a high probability that you like reading and that you read both American and British English writers, and thus have been exposed to different usages. But looking at the comment thread, it seems to me that there is a subtle usage difference between American English and British/Commonwealth English, but Americans are perfectly capable of understanding the distinction that British English makes. Which is a good thing, considering how much we use it. Consider, for example, the opening lines of this post and the previous one, which were purely unconscious and not chosen to make a point.

I also note with interest that far more of you will click a radio button in a poll than will comment in text format. Is this one of the attractions of running the things? Will I succumb to the desire for shiny toys and the desire for feedback, provided in one convenient package by a simple (hah!) piece of code? Tune in next week to find out...

Notes from the accounts

The October royalty statement from Loose Id arrived yesterday. Dolphin Dreams has just crept over the 1700 "copies someone paid hard cash for" mark. The bulk of those sales are through the publisher's own website, with around 12.5% coming from Fictionwise and a much smaller chunk from All Romance eBooks. No, I am not awake enough to sit here and calculate how much money total I've had off the book.

The book that's now been in print longest, Promises To Keep, is still selling a slow but steady double handful of copies each month after four years on sale, which is good because we've only just switched it over to the current contract which auto-renews unless explicitly cancelled by at least one party. It was the last of my books still on the old contract, which had to be explicitly renewed by both parties. Amongst other things, this involves posting of hard copies of contracts back and forth across the Atlantic, and checking of same to see if there have been any interesting changes since last time. At least it's a good cure for insomnia.

L&M2 has dropped very slightly against similar period figures for the first book, but after three months on sale has sold almost as many copies as L&M1 did in its first three months. That's interesting, as my prior experience with series is that sequels have significantly lower sales numbers. I don't know whether this is because I'm picking up more readers who want to read what-happened-next, or because the yaoi cover art is attracting readers who are willing to pick up book 2 without having first read book 1. I'll be interested to see how the figures compare at six months on sale.