Recently, we got some updated sales figures from our editor Lane. The Government Manual for New Superheroes has sold 10,269 copies (net) thus far. Lane is very pleased with the fact that we’ve sold that many copies in such a short time.
I,too, found myself thrilled by our sales numbers. But then I started thinking: when I wrote for Dennis Miller Live, hundreds of thousands of people would hear my writing every week–perhaps even a million. (I was always a little vague on what our actual viewership was.) Should I be more or less proud of 10,000 copies of a book that I co-authored than I should be of roughly a million viewers of a show for which I was a small part of a team?
This was an important question, and one that deserved to be answered scientifically.

To do so, I first had to create a concrete, objective measurement of artistic satisfaction. I therefore turned to the life of Charles Dickens, one of the rare authors to combine vast commercial success with unquestioned critical respect. His first book was The Pickwick Papers, which was issued in installments, the first of which sold a mere 500 copies. But it became more popular with every number, as word spread about this brilliant new writer, and the last volume in the series sold 40,000. Andince that final installment contained roughly 25,000 words, we have the following equation:
25,000 words x 40,000 copies = 1,000,000,000 word-copies.
Needless to say, 1 billion copies of your words must make for a heady degree of satisfaction. We’ll call this staggeringly large unit one dicken.
As his name suggests, Charles Dickens earned many of these units in his life. Most authors, however, will never reach his heights, and would consider themselves lucky to reach a single centidicken (10 million word copies) or even a millidicken (1 million word copies).
Now, let’s return to my own book. The Government Manual for New Superheroes is roughly 18,000 words. We therefore have the following equation:
50% authorship x 18,000 words x 10,269 copies = 92,421,000, or 92.41 millidickens of satisfaction.
At Dennis Miller Live, by contrast, there were about 10 writers (the exact number varied from season to season.) And Dennis’s strengths as a performer–his comic timing, his ability to improvise, his intelligence in selecting and editing material–was fully half the reason that the writing even worked. I therefore give myself one-tenth of one-half credit for the show, or 5%. I would estimate that, if you added up all the written material in a given week, it was about 3000 words. So:
5% authorship x 3000 words x 1 million viewers = 150,000,000, or 150 millidickens of artistic satisfaction.
So there you have an authoritative, scientific answer to an age-old question: is it more satisfying to write books or television? The answer is “television.” Dammit! And here I thought I was having fun.