Hey, There's A Dead Guy in the Living Room

Articulating the Big Message and a question about Social Media

BENJAMIN LEROY

So, at some point here, I’m going to write this big manifesto about publishing that will no doubt get whispered about on the internet for the next fifteen years, but for right now, I’m back with another Q&A session. Is it lazy? Sure. Maybe. But maybe there are questions here that you’ve been afraid to ask, so maybe you shouldn’t be too judgmental.

(1) Does an author need to be all up in the social media hive? Twitter, Facebook, etc. (@zbarnes)

  This is definitely a question that I’m going to be addressing in the Big Manifesto, but my short answer here is...no. I want to tell you more. I want to discuss this at great length, but for right now, I’m just going to say, no, an author does not need to be all up in the social media hive.

(2) What makes the Big Message so hard to articulate? (@seanchercover)

When an author—actually, let me expand this—when people have something that is buzzing around their insides that they want to share with the rest of the world, there’s an added stress to make sure you get it right. The mistake is in thinking that proper articulation (finding the right words) is the only necessary component.

It’s not.

There’s also body language, use of exclamation points, ability to be heard, and about a million other things at play. The words are important, yeah, but they are not everything.

I know that probably sounds like something I shouldn’t give voice to on account of me making a living by selling words, but the truth is the truth and I can’t dispute it here and try to peddle it somewhere else as gospel.

Anyway, back to the question about the Big Message. It turns out some people don’t believe in the Big Message. To them, life is a series of 30 minute episodes with no story arc. Things happen. People laugh. People cry. Special guests appear for an episode. Some stick around (Cousin Oliver being the prime example). Other times there are very special episodes and those usually involve a tragedy.

But there is no arc.

Therein lies one of the problems of articulating a Big Message—you have to convince, subtly, and without a hammer, those people who aren’t inclined to believe in Big Messages that there is, in fact, a Big Message without being written off as a pretentious, pseudo-intellectual, loud mouth who is madly in love with the sound of his own voice.

Then again, there are others who believe in the Big Message. Those two can be broken down into two categories.

(1) The Know-it-All. Not only does the Know-it-All believe in the Big Message, but he/she knows the Big Message and isn’t afraid to tell you about it and criticize you for not believing or call you stupid for believing something else.

(2) Then there’s the Socrates school (the wisest among us know nothing) of people who are searching for the Big Message. Really looking. Behind rocks. Under the carpet. In the stars. In the laughter of strangers. On the open stretch of highway connecting every goddamn town I’ve ever...they’ve ever driven down. Sometimes the Big Message feels like it’s in your hand, but you don’t dare open your hand because you’re afraid that as soon as you pry your fingers apart it will float away like so much campfire smoke. And sometimes, with that message in hand, you’d like to gather everybody around for show and tell, but you are deathly afraid of opening up that paw of yours and only seeing the lifelines delicately carved into your palm.

Ok, (this has gone on entirely too long, and for that I apologize, sincerely, but also, I persist) now that we’ve narrowed down the three general approaches to the Big Message, you can see why it’s hard to articulate. If you aren’t afraid of being called a pretentious asshole by one group you’re worried about being told you’re wrong by another. And adding to all of that, you aren’t even entirely sure what you’ve got, because you’re afraid to really give it the once over, and in most cases, doubt you can hold onto it long enough to even look.

And that, friend, is the answer to that.

Love,

b.

 

I ramble even more over on my website http://www.benjaminleroy.com

Progress - or just change?

Lynne Patrick

I think I must be getting old.

I was watching a sitcom on TV the other night, and a boy of about twelve unearthed some old 78 records in his grandmother’s attic. He asked, ‘What are these round things, gran? Place mats?’

It gets worse. She replied, ‘They’re what we played music on before CDs.’ And the kid replied, ‘What are CDs?’

Technology is out of date before you can carry the new gadget home from the shop. And everyone’s at it: banks are trying to phase out cheques; train companies use Twitter to update passengers about delays; publishers haven’t known what to do with paper manuscripts for years. The world is moving so fast that when I stand still I’ll feel it rushing past me like a 70 mph gust of wind.

In my own life, the local theatre seems to have been taken over by blinkered bureaucrats who don’t even live in the town. The local newspaper is moving out of the office it’s lived in since Adam was in short trousers, and into a building designed by someone with a mirror fetish. And the landscape around my house is set to change if ‘relaxed’ planning regulations have their way. Yes, folks, the developers are back, and this time they’ve brought in the big guns.

I don’t know whether to run away and hide from it all, or climb on the roof and yell at the top of my voice, ‘S-L-O-W down a little and just THINK about this before you change everything out of all recognition.’

Because they don’t, do they? At least, that’s how it looks to me. I ache to quote Native American wisdom to them: the bit about thinking through the consequences of their actions unto the seventh generation. In fact, the next generation would be good. Better than at the moment, anyway; they don’t seem to look beyond the next balance sheet.

It’s all about money. And worse, it’s all about money now. Take the theatre.

Last week the place was packed out; the show was a popular genre, and had a couple of well-known faces in it. But it was very... average. Tedious, in fact, as if the cast had learned it by rote and weren’t really interested. People left at the interval. Quite a lot of people. So the theatre’s coffers were full for a week, but its reputation for quality work plummets; those people won’t be back, and will tell their theatre-loving friends not to bother. It wouldn’t have happened when the woman in charge actually knew her audience, many of them by name because they did come back, every week.

Short-term thinking benefits no one further than the eye can see.

And don’t get me started on the criteria publishers use to select new titles... (Not all publishers, Ben. Some of you have the right priorities. I like to think I did; maybe that’s why I couldn’t make it pay.)

I’ll stop ranting now. I’m sorry this post has nothing to do with crime fiction – just the kind of day-to-day real-life low-level crimes against humanity that are perpetrated in the name of progress.

Progress? Yeah, right.

Waiting To Buy Tickets At Tower Records

Josh Getzler

When I was in high school, there was an enormous Tower Records store on 66th Street and Broadway, right in front of the subway station I used to get home from school. I spent a serious amount of time in Tower Records, learning about Jimi Hendrix and Depeche Mode, Prince and The Replacements, browsing the racks of LPs and reading liner notes, which were their own metaliturature.

No, I’m not going to spent the next 500 words mourning the death of the record store (though I could) or comparing the slow death of Tower Records to what appears to be a similar death spiral of retail Barnes and Nobles stores (again, I could). But I am going to discuss, somewhat wistfully I suppose, another aspect of the Tower Records experience that is gone and which I miss: The Ticketmaster line.

I was talking to one of the guys I share my office with the other day, and mentioned that tickets for a particular concert I wanted to see had sold out at the price I wanted to pay. And I said, in a kind of throwaway line, that pressing refresh on the Live Nation website was nowhere near as much fun as it had been to wait on line for tickets to, say, Jethro Tull or Rush or the Kinks in eighth or ninth grade.

Actually, it wasn’t that much fun to wait. You had to line up around the Tower Records store up Broadway to 67th Street, then around toward Amsterdam, and couldn’t get in until the store opened at 9 in the morning. It was cold and boring and the smell of stale weed gets old. I didn’t do it often. But there was still a shared sense of community with other teenagers to wait to get tickets to a show, and you’d talk about how you hoped they’d only play Old Stuff because the new album sucked and did you see them the LAST time they were in New York—no, not the Friday night show, I heard that was terrible, but the Saturday night one when Joey Ramone came onstage for the encore and, well, looked like he was going to fall over but he was SO COOL!

And then the door would open and you’d go in and wait some more (but warm, now) and you’d hold each other’s places to (finally) go to the bathroom and talk about how you hope that they would just open the stupid register already because last time they sold out the first show in 11 minutes, but you’d get it and pay the cash you collected from your friends and get your tickets and bounce out and start the countdown to the actual show (and maybe buy the new album and see if it really did suck).

Then the next week, you’d walk past Tower Records and see another line of teenagers, for another concert, maybe dressed more metal or punk or new wave and you’d ask some tired kid “who’s coming?” and either nod approvingly or shrug, and get on the subway.

Look, it’s way more efficient to buy tickets (or books or albums or…toothpaste) on line than it is to wait all night on Broadway or shlep to the grocery store. Tower Records is out of business (a whole other column), replaced by Raymour & Flanagan, and nobody is waiting up all night for a new sofa. Teenagers meet on YouTube and Instagram to talk about whose songs suck, and take videos on their smartphones when they’re actually at the concerts. There are great advantages to our virtual world. But somehow that conversation the other day brought me back to the excitement and enthusiasm of an adolescent community experience which has gone the way of Joey Ramone sightings and liner notes.

A Great and Terrible Story

Jeff Cohen

I cherish the time I spent, back in another lifetime, as a newspaper reporter. And I include my time at the Rutgers Daily Targum, which is a student newspaper, but a really good one that publishes--to this day--five times a week when school is in session. We weren't kidding there.

At the Passaic Herald-News, my very first job out of school, I met some amazing people, a few of whom are close friends still all these years later. And I discovered, to my considerable chagrin, that I was a pretty bad reporter.

People think I'm being falsely modest when I say that. I'm not. I was a bad reporter, and for all the reasons that I hold good reporters in extremely high estimation. I was not good at cultivating sources of information among cops, politicians or for that matter, anybody else. I put in my time, but not more than my time. I didn't know where to look for news. I could write it, and I could research assignments when given to me, but I was terrible at generating my own stories.

And it's a shame, because the best story of my life, a really interesting and (I think) important book is out there, I can see it, but there's no way I could ever write it.

My first hometown, Irvington, New Jersey.

In the 1960s, when I was growing up, Irvington was a bedroom community of Newark, the state's largest city. Our suburban streets were crowded with homes and people--in fact, Irvington was (and they were proud of this!) the most densely populated town in the country. Three square miles. 70,000 residents. I'm not making a word of this up.

But it had a certain hybrid small town/city charm in those days. We walked the streets as kids without worrying about our safety. We walked from my house on Campfield Street, between Union Avenue and Chancellor Avenue, to the Dairy Queen all the way on the other side of town, and nobody thought a thing about it. Watson Bagels--still the best I have ever had, bar none, and you can suck on that, New Yorkers--was two blocks from my house. Once the 1970s rolled around, my father's paint store (which had been on West Market Street in Newark) relocated to Chancellor Avenue, across from Watson Bagel. (Readers of CHANCE OF A GHOST might get a few hints at my affection for paint stores.)

But the Newark riots of 1967 had their devastating effect on that city, and on ours. By the time I got to college in 1975, it was only a matter of time before my family was to move out of Irvington. 

And that was the beginning. Today, the town (now a township, I think) is known around the state as a center of crime, and often violent crime. The population has decreased by almost 20,000. Drug dealers are rampant, the murder rate is eight times higher than the rest of New Jersey (ac-cording to the State Police) and most of us avoid the place altogether. When we are forced to drive through it, we keep the windows up and the doors locked. I have a friend who isn't scared of anything, and he won't even consider driving by the house he grew up in.

A year or two ago, the chapter of Mystery Writers of America that I belonged to sponsored a tour of the State Police weapons lab. And in one office over our heads hung a chart representing the level of violent crime in New Jersey. Listed were three municipalities: Newark, the state's largest city; Camden, the state's poorest city, and Irvington. Three square miles, and that much violence.

I'm sure the average resident of Irvington today is a law-abiding person. I used to occasionally drive by the house in which I spend my first 20 years (except when I was living at Rutgers); it looked like it was being well-maintained and the block still looked quiet and peaceful.

Now, I look at the address on Google Earth, because I wouldn't dare drive down that street again.

There's a book in this, and a good one. But I have no desire to cultivate sources in the town, to spend nights with gang members and drug dealers in an effort to see what the place is really like today. I wouldn't risk my evenings, let along my life, to set off the childhood memories of my hometown against the reality of Irvington in the 21st century.

I'm not a good reporter. I can write, but I'm not a good reporter. I don't have the instincts. If someone out there wants to research that book, I'll be an eager interview subject about the old days, and I'll be glad to write some of it. But don't ask me to go into the war zone. Because I know my limits, and that is past it.

It's a shame--I can see the story in front of me, but I can't report it. I hope somebody does. Because it needs to be told.

Real-world unsolved mysteries involving authors

Jessy Randall

This week I thought I'd get a little meta on y'all. Instead of talking about fictional mysteries, I'm going to talk about real-world unsolved mysteries involving authors and literature.

"Theophanes" has done a good job summarizing the three biggest mysteries in literary history: the death of Edgar Allan Poe, the disappearance and death of Ambrose Bierce, and the ten-day disappearance of Agatha Christie. Read all about those here.

In "The Unicorn and the Wasp," Doctor Who fans received a possible explanation for what happened to Christie. (It won't surprise you to hear that aliens and time travel are involved.) And, guess what, Edgar Allan Poe's death figures in two Doctor Who novels published in 2004: The Algebra of Ice and The Deadstone Memorial. That leaves Ambrose Bierce's story available, BBC writers -- you should get on that!

 

 

E-Books or T-Books?

Marilyn Thiele

An internet outage at my store this week and a conversation with my sister, a fifth-grade teacher, got me back to a topic I avoid thinking about, digital and on-line books. Apparently some text book publishers are considering eliminating printed books, offering only online versions to schools. This “progress” is not being greeted with glee by the teaching profession. As one who is always willing to expound on the limitations of electronic books, I decided to do a little research on this particular subset of digitized materials.

There is no doubt that on-line resources can greatly enhance learning. Interactive lessons can keep a student’s attention from straying. Additional information on a topic that piques interest can be supplied quickly. In subject areas where material requires constant revision and years-old printed books are obsolete, current data can be supplied quickly. Homework is not delayed because the book was “forgotten” (often because it was impossible to stuff one more thick tome into the bulging backpack). But the wholesale switch from a proven method for conveying information to a newer one, just because it is new, and without planning or anticipation of pitfalls, seems to be wreaking havoc in some school districts around the country.

The state of Florida has set a goal of having 50% of its textbooks in electronic format by 2015. One school district moved toward this objective last fall by replacing its Social Studies textbooks with online versions, purchasing a few printed copies for each classroom. Not enough research was done on the student body’s access to computers outside the classroom. Although some computers were available for students to borrow, there were not nearly enough. And (surprise!) families without computers in the home did not have internet access. Many homes had one computer shared by the family; three children, one computer, who gets to do his homework tonight? Even with computer access, there were difficulties in logging on or accessing the right material, and no help was available. Those who were unable to borrow computers were told to use the school or public library. Using the school library required missing extracurricular activities; public library hours had been shortened and some evenings eliminated due to budget constraints. Some money may have been saved on printed books, but learning suffered, and the disadvantaged students are now even more disadvantaged.

Fairfax County, Virginia, certainly not a disadvantaged area, having successfully integrated online learning in a few subjects with planning and training, did a wholesale elimination of math textbooks. Comments on this change included all of the problems found in Florida, plus many more found by frustrated parents. One mother whose child had a doctor’s appointment and wanted her child to do his homework while waiting found that the software would not allow them to print the material; cutting and pasting didn’t work; it could not be downloaded to a reader or an iPhone; bringing the desktop to the doctor’s office was a bit much. So the work didn’t get done. Other parents bought textbooks for their children on Amazon so they could carry their work to with them (no better place to get your homework done than at your brother’s swim meet!) Teachers found difficulties in accessing the software even at school, and wound up making up their own lesson plans and printing their own material. Some schools ran out of the monthly allotment of paper by the 10th of the month. A great savings.

For those who were able to access a computer easily, there were still problems. Text was compacted two pages to one screen, with no zoom capability, and thus illegible. Graphs were cut off. There was no search capability, and soon printed books, purchased by the family, were the preferred method for referring to other parts of the text for information. Having had my own horrible experiences with scanned electronic books, I understand the frustration. This was not a system designed for online learning, but a cheap scanned version of printed matter.

Arne Duncan, in a speech to the National Press Club last fall, called for making printed textbooks obsolete as a way of keeping up with other countries who are outperforming us with online learning. It seems to me that just scanning books and throwing away the printed copies is a little too simplistic. I hope this isn’t what he meant. With careful planning, online and digital books and other materials can enhance the curriculum. Interactive programs can ensure that each student grasps a concept before moving on to the next. Different sources can be accessed for different topics, instead of using one publisher’s product for an entire year. None of this can be done overnight, and it will be expensive to do well.

Duncan used South Korea has an example of a country that is outpacing the US in educational results and which is moving more quickly to digital learning. What seems to be overlooked is that South Korea is one of the most “wired” countries in the world. We are shamefully behind many countries in internet access, and cannot expect our students to compete without that access. How many families can afford a laptop or iPad or even smart phone for each child, never mind the data charges incurred to make these devices portable? Our schools are trying to save money in every way, including eliminating textbooks, but where is the investment in the supportive infrastructure, the bandwidth, the up-to-date networks, the “IT” staff to support the teaching professionals? Some teachers spend half a class period helping students log on to slow, aging computer systems, losing valuable learning time. Sometimes access is unavailable, and alternative lesson plans have to be ready. On paper.

I spent one day at my store without internet access this week, and explained to a few customers that I could not easily check book availability. Not a big deal. If publishers choose to eliminate printed textbooks, or school districts refuse to purchase them, what’s a teacher with a classroom full of students supposed to do when the computer system fails? There needs to be a lot more thinking, planning and preparing for digital education before the book burning begins.

P. S. After writing the above in Word, it was time to post. It took 20 minutes to logon to Typepad and get to the "Compose New Post" page. When I pasted in my post, all of my paragraph breaks were gone. You know, with computers, stuff just happens. Glad I didn't have a room full of students waiting.

Introduction to Online Advertising for Authors

by Erin Mitchell

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working with the good folks at Crimespree Magazine to spruce up their website. The new one will be live on March 1, but you can get a preview here. One of the things we’ve done is add banner advertising to the site. Which has me thinking about online advertising generally as a marketing vehicle for books, authors and publishers.

Now, before you get all up in arms and disgruntled and feel the need to express your abhorrence for online ads, please take a look at the site and finish reading this post. Thank you.

By way of disclosure, I should mention that approximately a million years ago, I worked for ad agency McCann-Erickson, in Dublin, Ireland and Chicago. It was a good experience—great colleagues, fantastic clients—and so I’m slightly biased in favor of advertising as a general rule. That said…

We all know that advertising has changed dramatically in the last decade. TV advertising is and will always be both incredibly powerful—and also beyond the means of most authors and publishing imprints, assuming we’re not talking about books penned by the likes of a Grishman, Patterson, or King. Radio has become an on-demand medium, except when it’s consumed in cars. Outdoor—billboards, bus wraps and shelters, taxi tops, signs in airports—can deliver value to authors, but this is a topic for another post.

Which brings us to online advertising. You know, those boxes or links that nobody will ever admit to clicking (keeping in mind that everyone lies—no offense). The bane of Facebook denizens. Yeah…that.

Just like any marketing tactic, for online advertising to be effective and worthwhile, you need to have clear and simple goals defined. By simple, I mean that you have three choices:

• Increase brand (book and/or author) awareness
• Sell books
• Grow your audience

If you’re not looking to accomplish one or more of those things, online advertising is not for you.

Next, you need to have a budget, which should be divided into a “campaign test” and “campaign execution.” Because advertising has so very many moving parts, it’s crucial that you test everything you’re doing before dumping your entire spend into, say, Google Adwords. In determining a budget, think about your customer acquisition cost—and the value of those customers. What portion of those who buy your latest book are likely to also buy your backlist titles? Or tell their friends about your books?

Now, consider where you want to advertise.

• Ad Networks—like the aforementioned Google Adwords, give you broad and potentially targeted reach, but they’re not easy to navigate. Their plethora of options can deliver real bang for your buck if you have some idea of what you’re doing. There are lots of ad networks out there, so even choosing one—never mind using it—can be a bear.
• Media Networks—Time Inc. is a good example; this is a group of publications that are all under the same corporate umbrella. As a general rule, you can get better advertising rates if you advertise in more than one “property” (website) and some of these networks even have mobile-specific programs available now.
• Social Network Advertising comes in two flavors, Facebook and Twitter. Yes, there are others, but they don’t really matter. If you’re looking to grow your audience in either of these venues (and you have the means in place to maintain a strong presence there), you need to consider social media advertising. Be warned, though, it’s really easy to waste money on both or either of these; you need to understand the options available and use them effectively.
• Specific Websites can reach your readers directly. This is the category Crimespree falls into (and the reason it makes sense for them to have curated ads on their site), as does Mystery Scene, Ellery Queen, Spinetingler, and others, not to mention blogs. Not all accept online ads and it’s impossible to make generalizations about these sites, so it’s important to learn about each to determine whether they’re right for you. Keep in mind that with these outlets, you’re not just buying eyeballs, but rather a qualified, self-identified reader audience, and as such you’ll pay more per click or impression than with a network…but you’ll also see a (much) higher conversion rate. 

Once you’ve determined what you want to accomplish with online advertising, how much you want to spend, and where you can best reach and interact with your audience, it’s time to figure out what kind of online advertising you need. You need to learn the definition of a lot of terms to do this… online advertising has an entire lexicon with which you need to be familiar (if you think I’m kidding, the Interactive Advertising Bureau has a helpful wiki that includes 569 of these terms).

By this point, you’ve likely decided that given its complexity, online advertising can’t possibly deliver a return equal to other marketing activities. Not so. Like all marketing, it’s not to be taken lightly. There’s a reason professionals specialize in this; it’s not easy. Just because you don’t like online ads (yeah, yeah…you never click…I remember) as you browse the interwebs doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use them. When done well—often with the help of a professional and as a part of a marketing campaign—it can actually be one of your most powerful tools.

Because Colds Happen

BENJAMIN LEROY

Hey Gang- I hope your Thursday is going well. Since the last time we spoke, I’ve gotten a bit older (from 36 to 37) and I want to publicly thank everybody for the birthday wishes. I appreciate the entire lot of you. I’m dealing with a bit of a cold today, leaving the better part of my brain unavailable for coherent and reasoned pieces. With that said (and trying to keep a little bit on topic) last year I wrote a piece about publishing using a construction metaphor. You can read it here.  

Earlier this week, Slate had a piece from a real life contractor. Unfortunately, he didn't use publishing as a metaphor for construction. You should read it anyway. Here. Compare. Contrast.

Previously on Wednesday's Dead Guy...

Lynne Patrick

In the absence of much else of moment in my life this week, I thought I’d expand on a theme I began to play with a few weeks ago, especially since Jeff’s post yesterday reignited the theme in my mind. His point about a series making promises and its author having a responsibility to keep to the original premise hits the nail squarely on the head. He also talks about growth and change, and that’s where I’m going to pick up the baton.

I’ve never attempted to write a series, not even of short stories, so what insights I may have to offer are solely from the point of view of the reader. And I don’t really have insights – just questions about how it’s done, and a lot of admiration for authors who do it well. I discovered early in my seven-year publishing career that booksellers, and therefore publishers, like series fiction, largely because it generates sales and keeps the backlist alive; it follows as night the day that the reason for this is that readers, aka book buyers, also like them.

So my first question is, what makes a reader latch on to a series and keep coming back for more?

For me one answer stands head-high above anything else: a protagonist I can warm to. It doesn’t matter where I pick up the series: first title, most recent or somewhere in the middle; if the lead character is someone I feel I’d like to know, to have a conversation with and look for common ground, maybe commiserate with when their personal life goes pear-shaped (Merrily Watkins, Alison Kerby, Bev Morriss), or trust to get me out of a sticky situation (Jack Reacher, Eve Dallas, Andy Dalziel and possibly Peter Pascoe), or is just the kind of person who exerts a strange fascination (Tony Hill, Temperance Brennan), I go in search of other books in the series, or look forward to the next one when I’ve caught up. The ones I’ve listed are only examples; I can think of upwards of a dozen other series on my current wishlist which fit the bill. It helps if there are other characters I care about too, but it’s always the leading player who reels me in.

Or doesn’t.

More than once I’ve been hooked by one series by an author, and less than entranced by a second or third. One of my favourite authors was persuaded to abandon a series which made me laugh and cry, and for me the replacement doesn’t have the same grab factor.

It’s sad, because it could work against the author: if a reader comes to the less attractive series first, the other one may never get a look in. Fortunately it doesn’t happen often, at least not to me.

My second question requires a little more thought: how does the author of a series ring the changes, make each book different without compromising those ongoing elements which keep pulling the reader back?

Different authors achieve it in different ways. Some keep ramping up the gore factor: not my favourite approach by any means; it strikes me as lazy. But then I probably wouldn’t be reading many of the series anyway. Others introduce new ongoing characters to the mix, and bring them centre stage now and again. Yet others find something new for the character to do each time – stating the obvious, maybe, but harder than it sounds, especially with police procedurals. (Check out Mark Billingham’s Tom Thorne series as a prime example of how to get it right.) Maverick heroes have it easier in that regard.

Occasionally an author realizes that a particular series is self-limiting, and stops before it loses all credibility. I had to admire Ann Cleeves when she called a halt on her Shetland quartet without being tempted to stretch it beyond the four she intended, despite its having won awards and plaudits, not to mention a TV series. A series of murder mysteries set in the kind of place where shoplifting is crime enough to make headlines can only be strung out so far, but at least there were several different islands she could make use of. When I heard there’s now a fifth title, I blinked a little; it will take an author of Ann’s calibre to make it work.

That’s the trouble with series, isn’t it? Credibility. Big-city police procedurals with a high body count I can swallow; and itinerant PIs or maverick heroes cover a lot of distance, so the bodies can be well spaced out. But for many years, the joke around Oxford was that, with four murders a week when the TV series was running, Inspector Morse made this civilized university city the most dangerous place in England. Now they’ve even retired Morse’s sidekick, so Oxford residents (of whom my daughter is one, so I have a vested interest) can lie easy in their beds.

And don’t get me started on the sleepy villages of Midsomer, where the local constabulary must work an eight-day week to solve all the suspicious (and ingenious) deaths. I’m sure the US has similar places where no self-respecting fictional character would want to set foot in case s/he becomes a victim of random slaughter. I do seem to come across a lot of serial killer novels set in Arizona...

I think the real answers to my two questions are that there are no definitive answers. I know what works – and what doesn’t – for me. Maybe for you it’s something different entirely.

A Stye

Josh Getzler

...is what I have in my eye. I am supposed to sit with a (not kidding) hot potato against it. But in the meantime, I look like I went a couple of gentle rounds with Roberto Duran. No mas. No mas. Back next week.

Star Trek, Star Wars, JJ Abrams, and Mystery Books

Jeff Cohen

First things first: Happy birthday, Mom!

Now: Not terribly long ago, it was announced that the Disney Company, which in addition to owning most of Florida and California had now bought the STAR WARS franchise from George Lucas (because apparently he didn't have enough money yet), had decided on a director for its first continuation of that series. And it was announced that said director was JJ Abrams.

My son Josh, who at 23 is angling to become the king of all sci-fi geeks, was appalled. Scandalized. Horrified. Apoplectic.

He wasn't happy, is what I'm saying.

Abrams, who seems like a nice enough guy when he's being interviewed, was the mastermind behind LOST, one of the most audience-frustrating television series in history. He directed an installment of the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE film series (in which Tom Cruise was apparently tall enough to be an action hero) and in 2009 gave us the latest--so far--film in the STAR TREK series.

And that's when he crossed the line for Josh.

A graduate of the Old School (and Drexel University, with a degree in film and video, if you're hiring), Josh was weaned on the first (and, for those of us who care, only) STAR TREK TV series, and saw a number of the films with Shatner and Company when he was growing up (Josh, not Shatner). So he was well aware of the "mythology" of the series, the interaction of the characters, and many of the better episodes. (I did not subject him to Frank Gorshin as the guy who's black on one side and white on the other.)

So when Mr. Abrams and his screenwriters (LOST alumni) decided that in order to "reboot the franchise"--that is, to make it appealing to people younger than, say, me, by using a time-loop storyline to essentially negate pretty much everything that had come before it, there were those of us among the long-time fans who were less than pleased (I will have to be persuaded very strongly to attend the upcoming STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS, and not just because that might be the worst title in history). But Josh, being a guy with a strong sense of story and a devotion to character, might have been more annoyed than I was.

The news that Abrams is now in charge of both STAR WARS and STAR TREK for the big screen did not go down well with him.

Those of you who are not invested in such things might be wondering at this point--assuming you've hung in there this long--what the heck this has to do with crime fiction publishing. Very good question.

Storytelling is storytelling no matter what the genre and no matter what the medium. And a series is something else again--it's a contract with the "consumers" (one pictures people eating books) that if they are pleased with the type of material they find in the first book, they will not be reading something entirely different by Book #3. Or book #33.

A series makes promises. If you don't care for the overall premise of one, you should not merely assume that it will change drastically as the series progresses. Yes, there should be growth and there can be change, but a massive overhaul of the core storyline or the continuing characters should not be on the menu. 

With the publication of CHANCE OF A GHOST a couple of weeks ago (you were wondering how long it would take me to plug the new book? 530 words), I reached uncharted territory in my publishing career. This is the first time I've had a series go longer than three books.

CHANCE is the fourth Haunted Guesthouse mystery--for you sticklers, by E.J. Copperman--and there will be, contractually, at least three more. I'm very pleased to give you that information. I'm also promising that I will not, whenever the final book is contracted, inform loyal readers that it was all a dream, that the main character is insane and it was a long hallucination, or that the ghosts were just a couple of pranksters who like to hang around the Jersey shore and thought they could get free lodging with a few cheap theatrical tricks. None of that will ever happen.

As an author, I have the advantage of characters who will not age beyond the number I assign to them. Special effects in books will not progress past the style I write today. I don't have to care if the books hit a younger demographic, because younger people can start reading them today and either like them or not. 

But I see the point Josh is making about STAR TREK. The last movie wasn't just a slight change for me--I could certainly handle seeing other actors play those roles, and in most cases play them very well. But the storyline took me to a place that made me feel the filmmakers were telling me I was no longer relevant. They wanted the younger person's money, and not mine.

Which is fair. I don't have to give them the price of a ticket if I don't want to go. It was the way they did it, with the idea that all those shows and films you loved? Remember them? They never happened. We decide what happens now, and it's going to be all different. They couldn't just tell the stories that came between the ones I knew; they had to erase the ones I knew. That broke the contract with me, and with Josh.

And now, he's worried about STAR WARS. I'm not. I stopped caring about that story when they blew up the Death Star AGAIN. 

Nancy Drew for $6500?!

Jessy Randall

I can't seem to get off this Nancy Drew topic. Talking to my aunt last week made me wonder what mint-condition vintage Nancy Drew books might be worth. A visit to abebooks.com yielded some surprises. Currently for sale: a first edition of The Password to Larkspur Lane (1933), in dust jacket, for sale for $6500. Now, there's no guarantee it will sell at that price. But that's what the dealer is asking. The copy is described as in "very good" condition, which any collector will tell you is quite different from "mint" or "as new" or "fine."

The next most expensive Nancy Drew for sale right now is a first edition of The Clue in the Diary (1932), also in "very good" condition, for $2500.

I wondered if I would find any Nancy Drews claiming to be signed by the author, since Carolyn Keene didn't actually exist. I didn't find any, but I did find a book signed by Mildred Wirt, one of several authors who used the Keene pseudonym. She published, under her own name, Ruth Darrow in the Fire Patrol (1930), and there's a signed copy available for $650 right now.

 

Getting the Word Out

Marilyn Thiele

A few days ago I found myself in a common situation. I was a potential customer looking for the right person to provide the service I needed, a repairman to fix an older refrigerator which I had already diagnosed as needing a new fan. A few years ago I had a bad experience with a large appliance repair company; the repairman had no idea what was wrong with a range whose oven would not heat, and was very attached to his attitude problem. The people in the office were also surly; it certainly was not their fault that the repairman had no clue, and so nothing could be done except to bill me for a service call where no service had been provided. I had heard good things about this company, but from friends who live in other towns. It seems that it is a franchise operation which is generally well thought of, but the local franchisee is the exception. I have since found both the repairman and the franchise holder named in reviews that were less than glowing.

At that time, I was able to find another repair service, a local one-man operation. Michael was fantastic. The range is in an apartment over my shop; it was installed a few years earlier when the apartment was renovated. After the renovation, the tenants were all single men. It was not until the mother of the current tenant came to visit that the problem manifested itself; the oven had never been used in five years, and the gas valve had not been turned on at the installation. Enough said. Since then, Michael has fixed a few appliances in the building, always polite, prompt, reasonable in his charges, and sensible. Alas, I found out this week that he is no longer in business, and calls to his office are referred to the large franchise operation.

The search for another repairman brought home to me how radically the way businesses reach potential customers has changed in a very short time. I spent most of my life as a consumer relying on the Yellow Pages when a referral by a trusted friend was unavailable. There was no guarantee of quality, but at least most, if not all, of the local options were presented in one place.  Now the listings are sparse. Phone books and yellow pages are hardly touched and seem to be no more than a solid waste management problem to most people. I have cut my ads there to one line, for the occasional relic who may actually use the book for more than a booster seat. Even that expense is about to be eliminated. This week I explored the alternatives as a consumer rather than as a vendor, and gained some thought-provoking insights.

Having become newly tech savvy (see last week’s post here), I decided to check out on-line reviews of those repair businesses that are still listed in the paper phone book. (Angie’s List does not have any local listings for anything I have ever needed, so is not an option.) I started with Google reviews, and didn’t find much, except  that the local franchise still has a repairman named “-----” and neither his skills nor his attitude have improved. But Google being Google, and perceiving that I was in need of a repairman, offered me several more possibilities.

The majority of the alternatives presented had links to Google+, Businessfinder.com, Yelp, Manta, and various other business listing services. When I followed them, I was asked to please claim this business if it was mine; in other words, there was no information beyond address and phone number (and a map, so I could take the refrigerator there.) But at least I had more names. Several of the sites list “similar businesses.” I recognized a name, and remembered hearing positive comments, so my search ended, at least until Tuesday when I will know if I have to start over.

As I pursued the elusive reliable repairman, I thought about how a customer looking for my business would proceed, and, as a business owner, how difficult it is today to “get the word out.” I am overwhelmed by the number of places available, many at no cost, to advertise my business on-line: Yelp, Manta, Google+, Facebook, and hundreds of other ways to put information in front of potential customers. From a business owner’s point of view, they are also all eaters of the scarcest resource, time. I wish I could afford a full time person to handle just this aspect of the business, and one person might not be adequate. It’s not enough to put a brilliant description of my charming shop out there. The listing needs to be updated and monitored for comments and questions. Responses may be required. Ignoring a customer’s interest or complaint is worse than never having had contact at all.

I question whether all this time and effort would be worthwhile. I think of my Facebook page and the realization that my posts there are seen by a small percentage of those who have “liked” it. I know that I don’t get every post from pages I am interested in, and have to go to the page to see what’s happening. If I am planning an event, and few see the post, it seems I have wasted time. I doubt that all who have “liked” my shop go to the page daily for updates. My best communication tool, an e-mail newsletter through Constant Contact, usually has an open rate of about 25%, which they tell me is above the industry average. 25% of the people who said they are interested in receiving the news, and signed up!

Not only are small businesses overwhelmed by the number of on-line marketing options available and the time it takes to use them, consumers are swamped by the number of sites they can visit, social media they can join, and e-mails they receive. Soon it all becomes a big jumble, and nothing stands out. A not unusual conversation in my shop:

Customer, seeing post-event display of an author’s book advertising signed copies: “Oh, I wish I had known that Author X was here; I would have enjoyed meeting her.”

Me: “Are you on our e-mail newsletter list?”

Customer: “Yes.”

Me: “Have you liked our page on Facebook?”

Customer: “Yes.”

Of course, there were also notices in the “Events” listing in the local newspaper and posters all over the shop and the town.

I don’t blame the customer for her lack of awareness. The deluge of marketing messages through multitudes of channels has made us all numb. As a consumer, I just want to “Find it Fast in the Yellow Pages.” As a business owner, I long for a single, simple, efficient way to communicate. We can all dream.

 

More Q&A - Valentine's Day edition

BENJAMIN LEROY

Hey Gang, since last week's Q&A was so much fun (for me, at least) I decided it'd be cool to do another one. Questions are being submitted through Twitter (@tyrusbooks) and Facebook. If you've got something you want to know, ask it at some point today and I'll do my best to answer. I'll be updating this entry multiple times during the day.

Also, this Saturday is my birthday and I've reflected a little about life over on my blog. You can read that here and wonder how the hell anybody takes me seriously. Seriously.

Now! Questions ahead!

(1) “Is romance dead in crime fiction? Does it ever work out or is this genre dedicated heart & soul to heartbroken protagonists?” (oddmonster)

It’d be easy for me to bust out the cynical Romance is Dead Everywhere answer. And with crime fiction being full of really cynical characters (and the authors who create them) it’d also be consistent messaging for a lot of the people with whom I associate.

But because I’m always searching for the truth, I want to explore this a little deeper.

What is romance? Using a very limited understanding of romance fiction, I think I’m supposed to imagine some broad shouldered cowboy showing up in a white hat to pluck some lady off the train tracks before disappearing into the sunset.

Yeah?

Well that’s not dead. But not because it’s alive and throbbing, but because it never existed. Ever. Not in real life. A bunch of heartbroken mopes with inked up quills played the literary what if game and then a bunch of readers were like, “Yeah, that would be Awesome! I hate my life, too! What have I done and how did I get here?”

We are all destined to be heartbroken protagonists of our own scripts.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

 

(2) “Conferences. I've never been to one. They look like fun, but I've wondered about just how beneficial they are. Thoughts?” (@caroylnleeadams)

Conferences can be hugely beneficial depending on your goals.

As far as I’m concerned, hanging out with friends (new and old) in an environment where you can talk about writing, books, shared experiences, etc. is the spice of life. Some of my closest friends are people I’ve met at conferences. I’m so glad to have met them. Though it’s not what I’m looking for when I go, I know a lot of people meet beta readers/critique partners at conferences, and that’s valuable.

Then, of course, are the speakers and the classes that the conference offers. This is—in my experience—a very hit or miss proposition. I don’t spend a lot of time in the workshops I’m not leading (too busy hanging out with others at the bar), but I’ve sat in on a few classes that left me wondering, who the hell is this person and why is he/she pretending to know what the hell he/she is talking about? Cringe inducing bad.

But when I was a young pup, I also attended a few conferences that helped me to understand how the industry works, gave names to writing techniques/devices that I loosely understood, and introduced me to agents and editors (who I was then interested in pitching, but now, in some cases, call friend).

Conferences vary widely. So do experiences.

Dig around before you sign up.  

 

(3) “What are your thoughts on self-publishing allegedly poisoning your marketability to actual publishers later?” (@SSVa_Raven)

That’s conventional wisdom and it has been for as long I’ve been publishing books. The addendum people would throw in would be something like, “But, if you can sell X copies of your book by yourself, a publisher might be interested in picking the book up from you.” X was sometimes understood to be 5,000 copies. Sometimes 10,000. Sometimes...eh, you get the point, people were making shit up like they always do.

The idea was, if you sold it to 1,000 people, you’d probably maxed out all of your friends and family connections and the book didn’t have a life past that. In most cases, knowing what I know now, that was probably true.

But somewhere along the line publishing flipped a little bit, and the dismissive attitude towards self-publishing is changing. Sure, most of it is still suspect, but as recent successes, both critical and commercial, have shown, there are some really worthwhile projects that could be moneyfied if they had the machinery of big publishing behind them.

For us, one of the challenges (and it’s one that may be changing) is that historically, if a book had already been published in any form, it wasn’t eligible to be reviewed by the important publishing industry trade magazines like Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Booklist, and Kirkus. Because reviews/coverage in those magazines are an essential building block for a book’s success for a company like ours, we couldn’t really even consider re-releasing self-published books.

But I think the rules on that kind of thing are changing. Basically, at some point, all the Publuminati will gather in some super swank Manhattan office and decide what is officially “ok” and “not ok.” They’ll disseminate that information down the ladder to me, and I’ll whistle the tune.

 

 

 

Begin at the beginning

Lynne Patrick

I started to review for a mystery fiction website a few months ago, and when I was checking out this month’s list of books on offer, something struck me. All but one of the books I’ve reviewed so far have been debuts – and I wouldn’t cite the one that wasn’t as the best of the bunch.

Twenty-some years ago I set up an editorial consultancy with the intention of helping unpublished writers move towards the point at which they might become debut authors. Ten years ago I set up a small publishing house with the express purpose of giving debut crime fiction authors a springboard. Now I’m extolling the virtues, because mostly that’s what they make me want to do, of debut authors on the web. It seems to be a habit I can’t kick!

Not that I’m complaining. It means I’ve read a lot of debut fiction over the years, and a surprisingly high proportion of it has been remarkable. I’ve just finished the fifth novel by a writer for who, wearing my editorial consultant hat, I predicted success several years before her first went to an auction involving four major publishing houses and made number one in the bestseller lists. Several of the authors I published are still going strong with larger publishers; one in particular is also on his fifth, and the fourth was shortlisted for a major award last year.

I claim no credit; I was just there when it all began for them.

These days, of course, the discerning reader has to take care. Amazon has ensured that there’s now a high chance debut could mean self-published, and though some self-published books attain the heights of quality, not all do; statistically there’s still a higher chance of that if a rigorous selection process has taken place. And no, I’m not going to apologize for that opinion, though in the interests of avoiding litigation I should make it clear that it’s mine, and only an opinion.

Actually, that opinion doesn’t really matter; since I don’t read eBooks, my chances of coming across self-published debuts are pretty small. They’re not hard to spot in print; the copyright info page usually says something like Published by Appletree Cottage Books, which doesn’t exist on Google. So I can avoid them if I choose to. Maybe I miss out occasionally, but I’ll take that risk.

Which brings us back to that rigorous selection process. In company with every unpublished novelist I’ve ever encountered, I used to harangue publishers (not to their faces; that’s a self-destruct button) for their lack of perception when they spent their resources on yet another a celebrity biog, instead of on my debut work of indescribable genius. (Another entirely subjective opinion, you understand.) Then I crossed to the other side; I became that publisher, and made a vital discovery: publishing is a business, and in order to stay in business, a business has to make money. At least enough to cover its operating costs, and preferably enough to pay for an occasional vacation and Sunday lunch somewhere nice in the country; job satisfaction is good, but sometimes a person needs a little more out of life. And the bigger the business, the bigger the infrastructure it has to support before anyone gets a vacation or lunch. And celebrity biogs sell better than debut crime fiction. Go figure.

And in case there’s anyone reading this who wasn’t around last time I quoted the following true but little-known (and even less believed) statistic: on average, publishers are likely to make no more than seven per cent profit on any book; most debuts are lucky to break even, and more often than not make a loss. Which brings us back to that rigorous selection process. The book trade has always been a jungle, with thousands of books vying for attention; these days that jungle is positively... amazonian. In order to succeed, a book has to stand head-high above the competition. A debut, without the author’s reputation and track record to hold it up, has to stand head and shoulders high. So it has to be really special.

Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re going to say: if publishers marketed the debut fiction... And I’m not disagreeing. The system’s not perfect; that’s why so many people are resorting to the Amazon eBook model. (Though don’t forget that Amazon is a business too, and a very big one.) But even that isn’t infallible; for every E L James there are thousands, which sink without a trace.

But for the moment, I’m more than happy to trust other people’s judgement, and read debuts which have been through a tough selection process which I’m now all too familiar with from the other side. Every novelist’s career has to begin with a single novel; with proper nurturing, who knows where it may lead?

The Modifier Zone Redux

Josh Getzler

I spent a couple of hours going through my unsolicited manuscripts on Monday with Danielle, my new assistant. It was fascinating going through this with a new person after a year and a half, when the material has become a bit more focused (much more historical fiction, much less fantasy and literary shoe-gazing). But we were struck by the fact that so many writers were still falling into the trap we call The Modifier Zone. Therefore, as a Public Service (as well as because it is evening and I've just returned from a conference run by the writing program at Columbia), I'm reprinting an old column (hey, after a year and a half this is the first time I'm doing this--not SO bad, no?) called (uh huh) The Modifier Zone. PS--The manuscript I discussed in this column turned out to be The Midwife's Tale by Sam Thomas, which was released last month by Minotaur and is selling like crazy (and which is THAT good).

 

“Josh stretched his tired arms and wearily dragged his calloused, tapered fingers through his curly, tangled hair as he struggled to rouse his overworked body out of his comfortable bed, the tinny chirps of the chrome iHome alarm clock mocking him…chirpily. He staggered blearily past the cluttered wood desk and opened the white door to the beige bathroom, where he splashed cold water on his scruffy cheeks and shook himself awake as the minty toothpaste shocked his sleepy tastebuds into awareness. He trudged heavily into the book-lined family room, past the herringbone sofa and the orange chairs, stopping at his dark brown Jack Spade messenger bag to take out his red Dell laptop. It is 5:15, and you have entered…The Modifier Zone.”

One of the more common flaws I’ve found in the queries I read is the Modifier Dump, when an author—whether in looking to be absolutely sure that the reader knows precisely what the room looks like or the character feels, goes adjective and adverb crazy. A tree is not a tree—it’s a green, leafy tree. A person doesn’t walk down the street—he walks down the wide, car-filled, green-leafy-tree-lined, newly-paved highway.  At times it’s an excuse to show off SAT words: “The perspicacious toddler lugubriously imbibed the apple juice, perspiration trickling over his blowzy digits.”

Regardless, it’s the sure way to make me stop reading. When I am looking at the beginning of a book, I want to be hooked. That’s not a revelation—everyone wants to be hooked at the start of a book. It either needs to have action that draws the reader in, or a description of a place or character that makes you want to continue because that character or place is going to do something or be the site of something interesting. And you don’t need a lot of words to make that happen. (And you sure don’t need to describe the weather. Weather, unless we’re talking about, say, the moors or the desert or the ski slopes or the Islands, is rarely relevant; and when it is, it’s often self-evident.)

Rather, in a short space, you (typically) need to place the reader in time and location, and indicate something about the person or people involved, and what they are doing.

I was talking to my (FORMER!) assistant, Maddie, yesterday (LAST YEAR!), about an exciting query which had come in through the weekend. It had many of the elements I salivate over—foreign, historical setting, crime, class issues, badass proto-feminist protagonist, and author with a great background and the background to pull off an ambitious novel of this ilk.

“How’s the writing?” Maddie asked.

“Marvelous,” I said, and read the first sentence to her. “On the night I delivered Mercy Harris of a bastard child, the King’s soldiers burned the city’s suburbs and fell back within its walls to await the rebel assault.”

There is so much good about this—in 29 words, the author managed to convey so many things—let’s see how many:

1)      The narrator delivers babies. So the protagonist is a doctor or a midwife. Not an amateur, or it would have been “The night I helped Mercy Harris deliver her baby.”

2)      More than that, the narrator delivers bastard babies, which means that the story takes place during a time where that is important.

3)      It’s set in a city.

4)      With a wall.

5)      It’s set during a time and place where there is

1. A king
2. A rebellion

So the reader immediately knows that there are big things going on—a civil war of some kind—and also local dramas of childbirth. We don’t know where it’s going, exactly, but we want to continue. And in these 29 words, there is one modifier—bastard—and it’s vital, and evocative. It would say something very different about the book if the adjective were “illegitimate,” right? And it wasn’t necessary to say that the night was dark or rainy or dangerous, because the details given are more than sufficient to pique our interest. I don’t know if the author will be able to sustain the prose or the story, but I do know that I want to read on, and I’m inclined to like it.

So the takeaway on this I suppose is that for me the best writing is careful writing, where the pyrotechnics can be subtle, the adjectives minimal and always germane, and the weather implied. Many agents and editors talk about wanting to be transported to a different or unfamiliar time and place, with unique characters and gripping plots. That’s an incredibly tall order, and one whose difficulty is only magnified when it is burdened with unnecessary modifiers.

 

"Humor?" Nooooooooooooo!

Jeff Cohen

Something funny happens to you when you write books that are meant to be something other than bleak and depressing.

Wait.

Perhaps I should have said, Something strange happens to you when you write books that are meant to be something other than bleak and depressing.

Yeah, that’s closer.

See, if, like me, you believe that a book doesn’t have to leave you wanting to lock up the household cutlery as a precautionary measure, you realize it’s possible to write an engaging story with interesting characters doing intriguing things and still have a few laughs along the way.

But be careful—if you go so far as to write such a story and, worse, see it published so that people might actually heaven forbid read it, you might be labeled as something beneath notice, something so inconsequential as to be ignored at all costs, a creature of less societal importance than the sound board engineer who synched up Beyonce’s performance of the national anthem.

That’s right. You could be labeled a “humor writer.”

Avoid that label at all costs. People think, for reasons that are both understandable and wrong, that writing humor is a breeze, something that those infinite number of chimps typing out Shakespeare could toss off on their banana break. They think that, because humor is meant to seem—and this is a word I sort of hate—“effortless,” that it really requires no effort at all.

Um, no. Think of this: Those who write funny—one of the few words I hate more than “effortless” is “humorous,” which is the comedy equivalent of “pleasant”—novels have to do all the things the “literary” novelists have to do. That would include coming up with an idea that you might care to spend months working on, which is the hardest part in the process. It would also include developing a story that is not predictable, characters who will work their way into the reader’s mind without being simple or exaggerated, plot twists meant to deflect without being unrealistic, dialogue that sounds like real conversation and not spoken plot points, chapter endings that encourage if not demand the reader keep those pages turning, and an ending that satisfies without telegraphing itself a hundred pages previous.

For the mystery writer, add in a decent number of possible suspects, motivations, a method of murder that seems unusual without being ridiculous, a few red herrings for spice, and preferably an explanation scene that doesn’t include the villain spouting out every possible type of confession unsolicited just for the sake of convenience.

Now. Do all that and be funny, too. Organically funny, meaning the humor comes not from contrived “wacky’ situations and “wacky” characters but from the suspenseful situation and the three-dimensional characters needed to sustain believability. Go ahead. Be a riot now.

Not so easy, is it?

And yet, those who work in comedy are considered “light entertainers” who just breeze through their work between trips to the bank to deposit their royalty checks.

Do I sound bitter? Because I’m really not.

This is a cautionary tale, not a complaint: Stay out of the comedy trenches, young aspiring authors! Don’t get caught in the quicksand of hilarity and get pulled under by the unthinking assumptions of those who haven’t tried it themselves. Write something with no laughs at all, with an ending guaranteed to inspire all-night drinking binges. Because you don’t want to be dubbed a “humor writer.”

On the other hand, if you get labeled a “humorist,” you’re golden. Mark Twain was a “humorist.”

Whatever that is.

 

P.S. Pitchers and catchers report... TODAY!

Thoughts from a Nancy Drew collector

Jessy Randall

Talking to kids about Nancy Drew led me to interview my aunt Peg about her collection of vintage Nancy Drew Books. Peg is a New Yorker by all but birth and very glamorous. She is now in her sixties but you wouldn't guess it. I didn’t know until recently that she collected old Nancy Drews. 

 

 

 

 

Do you still read the books, or just collect them?

I still read them. Even now, it’s almost embarrassing to admit, the books are page turners. When you get to the end of a chapter, you MUST keep reading to find out what happens. 

Are there things in the books you notice now that you didn’t notice as a kid?

Yes, definitely. From my perspective now, though I didn’t notice these things as a kid, I see 1) what a thoroughly modern woman Nancy was. She changed her own tires on her roadster, she dried out carburetors. She was not helpless. She tackled problems fearlessly. 2) how unfortunately racist many of the books were. In The Mystery at Lilac Inn, for example, a "dark-complexioned" woman is described as "impudent," "insolent," "swaggering," and having a "sly look." In The Mystery of the Ivory Charm, an Indian man is cruel to animals and children, and “his eyes bulged with superstitious fear.”  In The Clue in the Old Album, a grandmother explains that she has little control over her granddaughter, “Perhaps…because of the heritage on her father’s side.” (Her father was a gypsy.) Throughout this book, gypsies are portrayed in a negatively stereotypic way.

Even as a girl I was aware of the absurdity of Nancy falling into all those mysteries. I laughed even then at the boilerplate writing that appeared in all the books – her “famous criminal lawyer” father; his “sparkling blue eyes” and more. Also that Nancy never appeared to go to school.

Do you read any of the new versions that are out now?

I am a Nancy Drew purist, in that I don’t want to read the revised mysteries making the story details more current. I like the 30s and 40s time frame. In re-reading one of the books, I was confused as to why Nancy felt she had to rush home from her outing in her blue roadster when it looked like there was going to be a big storm. Nancy didn’t strike me as the type who would be afraid of driving in rain.  As I read on I realized that in those days the secondary roads were not paved so a big rain would turn the dirt roads to mud. And sure enough, Nancy ’s car got stuck and so she had to go to a farmhouse for help, leading of course to a new mystery.

If You Can't Beat 'em, Join 'em

Marilyn Thiele

As a lover of a very old technology for conveying information, the bound, printed book, and a believer in face-to-face or telephone conversations when anything of substance needs to be discussed, I realize that I am fast becoming an anachronism.  Add to that my technophobia (if I choose the wrong option, will I wipe out everything on my computer?) and I begin to wonder if it is time to retire.

What keeps me going is the determination to learn what those young whippersnappers seem to handle so easily. Some who know me would call this character trait “stubbornness,” but whatever it is, it seems to be keeping me only a little, rather than vastly, behind the curve. This week I had another triumph in my effort to be no more than a few years behind the rest of the world.  

The problem to be solved is caused by a combination of the location of my book shop and the current conditions in the publishing world. My shop, delightful as it is, is in a rather remote location. Although Flemington is located halfway between New York and Philadelphia, it is not close to the major through-routes nor easily reached by public transportation. I often wish I were in a more populated area, but then remember that I love the town, and have a loyal, intelligent and active group of mystery lovers right here. “Bloom where you’re planted” has always been my motto. Publishers, however, have little interest in promoting their wares to a small audience. Only the biggest names on the bestseller lists get any help with touring, and they head for the big stores in the big cities. Marketing money is spent on media which reach the largest audiences; it only makes sense. Yet I know many authors love to talk to their fans personally. Some authors do national tours at their own expense; others who live in New Jersey or close by are willing to do an event at my shop. The reality is, however, that time is as limiting as funding. A day traveling is a day away from writing and possibly other work, such as teaching, that helps pay the bills.

Authors in today’s environment reach their readers through the on-line media available: Facebook, Twitter, whatever else I have not caught up with yet. Most are glad to respond to e-mails and other messages, establishing a rapport with fans that engenders loyalty. These are useful methods of communicating, but have their limitations. Not every reader is a good writer, or a good typist. Meaning is sometimes lost or misinterpreted without accompanying facial expressions or verbal inflections. Even if both parties are on-line messaging at the same time (unlikely), there is a delay between question and answer and the next question generated by the answer. A question such as “What was your inspiration for this book?” may require paragraphs in response; a conversation would be less arduous and more revealing.  And most important, that sense of “I met and talked to Author X,” the feeling of a personal relationship, is not truly established. I have seen many times how a reader who has met an author will talk up his or her work; they stand in my shop and do my work for me.

After chatting with several authors at Bouchercon in October about how to overcome the time and distance problem, and learning that many would be willing to appear via Skype, I decided that it was time to overcome my resistance to another new technology and give it a try. I felt that asking an author to meet with our monthly mystery reading group would be a good way to start. We have met with a few authors via speakerphone, and it has been a good experience. Time for the next step.

I contacted Reed Farrel Coleman last fall to set up a Skype visit for this past week. I asked him because he has appeared at my store, and has many fans in Flemington, especially in our reading group. He had recently published a stand-alone novel, one those in the group who are new to his work could read rather than jumping into the middle of his Moe Prager series, which really should be read in sequence. And although he lives in the next state, it is a 3-hour drive one way in good weather; the 2 feet of snow he is currently buried in on eastern Long Island could as easily have arrived two nights ago. In person visits in February are a dice roll.

Reed was amenable to trying Skype, although he had as much experience with it as I had – none. We consoled ourselves that we had the speakerphone to fall back on, and enlisted the younger generation to get us going. The teenage son of one of our group members arrived 30 minutes before the meeting and had us hooked up 15 minutes early. Amazing! There was Reed at his desk, a fully loaded bookshelf (yes, real paper books) behind him, and there we were in semicircle, all able to see each other, feeling we were all in the same room.

We had a fantastic meeting, discussing Gun Church, the stand-alone book, and his series. The conversation flowed because of the face to face intimacy that written messages cannot imitate. Those who had not met Reed before feel they know him, and those who had met him renewed the acquaintance. When he suggested that we attend the launch party in New York for his new book, Onion Street, in May, there was a chorus of “Yes! Road Trip!” I may have mentioned in the past how this particular group has bonded and enjoys activities beyond the monthly meeting. We have already planned the big “road trip” to Albany for Bouchercon; everyone who can get away has registered. So I am sure there will be a contingent from Flemington’s small but charming mystery book shop at the much better known Mysterious Bookshop in May. This would not have happened without the personal contact Skype allowed us.

This experience has given me, at least temporarily, a more positive attitude toward the technology which seems to be changing my life. I am pondering how to expand the use of on-line visits from a small reading group to a larger event open to the community. Books could be signed and shipped. A larger screen could be obtained. What else is needed? Would people be interested in attending? If anyone has tried this, I would like to know how it worked. I still think personal appearances are the best way for writers to connect with readers, but if the technology which is hurting us in some ways can also provide a reasonable substitute, why not use it?

Q&A Day in the Living Room

BENJAMIN LEROY

Hey Gang-

This post is going to get updated about a million times today (2/7/2013). I'm answering questions from Twitter in realtime. If you have a question you'd like me to answer, even if it's "for a friend," send it to @tyrusbooks and I'll do my best.

Let's get started!

(1) “How much of a book submission do you read before you decide whether it's worth considering or destined for the garbage pile?” (@seanmay)

This is a multiple answer question. I’ll cover all of the possible avenues. Partly because you asked, partly because it might be of interest to others. Partly because I rarely pass on an opportunity to drone on pedantically on the internet.

Situation One – the query letter

The first thing I’m looking for when I open a query letter is whether or not I think the author has actually looked at our submission guidelines/is familiar with our line, or if they’re applying the “shotgun” method of query where they spray it out to every address they can find for anybody who has ever published a book.

As soon as I see evidence of the shotgun (querying for a “high stakes thriller!” or “an innovative chipmunk/sci-fi/steampunk genre bender”) I quit reading. It’s not for us and I know it. Doesn’t matter if the book is attached (it shouldn’t be), I won’t read the first sentence.

Sometimes the title of the book is in bold, 32 pt. font, and if that catches my eye first, I will develop an opinion before reading another word of the query. If I see something like EXTREME FINAL JUSTICE, I know, for sure, I will not be publishing. I’m more of an AMBIGUOUS TRAGEDY GRAY AREA EXPLORATION type dude. Have I unfairly dismissed a book that I might have loved in my ten years of publishing based on the title? I doubt it.

Situation Two – sample pages

After a query letter makes it into my “I should request some of this pile” I anxiously await getting the first thirty pages. Something in the query letter has intrigued me. Usually, you can tell just by the writing in the query letter whether or not the author has a voice right for our line (I assume this same, subjective process, is applied everywhere).

Pages show up, I set aside some time to read them, let’s go!

Oh.

Well, that was unfortunate. Turns out I’ve been duped. The thing I was so excited for wasn’t the thing I thought it was.

I can know this as soon as I’ve read the first sentence in some cases. Other times I might read the whole thirty pages, get to the end, and be all, “meh.” If I’m not super jazzed about those thirty pages, I have to write the, “Hey, it’s not you (but really it is), it’s me...” email.

Here’s a point I want to stress on behalf of all my agent and publisher brethren—there is no “yeah, but wait until chapter six! Then the book really takes off!” It either takes off right away or it doesn’t work. That doesn’t mean it has to start with a big ass car chase and explosions and some dude in a Lucha Libre mask robbing a bank. It simply means I have to care about the people on the page and what’s going on. That’s your job as a writer. At least where I’m from it is.

Situation Three – the whole manuscript

There are few things as frustrating as getting to the homestretch of a really great book only to see the author paint him/herself into a corner, ending the book with an unsatisfactory ending because the literary dexterity wasn’t present. Maybe it was too tricky of a spot to navigate, maybe it was laziness, maybe it was a poor artistic choice. Whatever the case may be, it hurts. It hurts because—all of my smartass posturing aside—I love good books. They kinda give my life meaning. I want to find things that are absolutely brilliant with the power to really move people.

So make sure your book wraps up the right way. That doesn’t mean all loose ends need to be connected. It doesn’t mean it needs to be drawn tight with a pretty bow. Life rarely is. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to do things and I need you to do the right thing.

 

(2) “Being an indy publisher, do you make 2 book deals? What goes into your thought process for that decision?” (@zbarnes)

I certainly have done multiple book deals. Without thinking too hard about it, I’d say that in all of those cases it was for ongoing work in a series. There are authors who do not work in a series that I would totally trust to turn in multiple non-related novels, knowing they’d be awesome. Here’s what goes into the thought process in some variation.

• Does the author have a demonstrable track record of good sales?
• If the series is new, do I have faith that the protagonist in book one will be able to carry multiple books?
• Am I sure I want to work with this person for years? There are times when I meet an author and I think—you are either awesome or you will be the death of me. If I’m unsure which camp a particular author falls into, I’d be less likely to sign a multiple book deal.
• How much cash is this going to cost me? Paying out advances (even in part) for books that aren’t going to come out until a year or two down the road raises some liquidity of capital issues that I can’t ignore. Is it worth it to know the books are locked up? 

 

(3) “Seems almost impossible to get past Zuul the gatekeeper. Besides tenacity and a lot brandy what else?” (@Mcvladie)

If you write a great book, act like a real human being (instead of a cutout from a “How to” book), query projects that fit the agent/publishers niche, and interact with others (gatekeepers included) in a respectful way, it goes a long way towards getting past the fence. That said, I’m not going to pretend that the system is flawless. I know for a fact that many great books and authors don’t get the attention they deserve. Sometimes that’s the result of bad behaviors from others that end up poisoning the well. I’d like to say following the guidelines above, mixed with tenacity, will get the job done. But I also know that’s at least a little bit bullshit, because we are flawed humans working a flawed industry. Mistakes and oversights happen.

 

(4) “Should a publisher have their own ebook store? Why? Why not?” (@komavary)

Good question. What I say today will probably be irrelevant tomorrow, but I’ll go on the record anyway.

Historically, publishers have not been in the business of selling books directly to consumers. It was one more challenge, and one that was not in the direct line of work that publishers were doing (creating books). So the responsibility of bookselling landed with distributors and bookstores. Along the way, publishers gave up somewhere in the ballpark of 50% off the cover price. Seems like a lot of money.

It seems like a no-brainer that publishers would set up ebook stores. Right?

Here are some of the challenges that go with it.

• readers shop by title and by author, but much more rarely by publisher. There are logos that should be indicative of quality (you’d recognize them when you saw them), but I’m willing to bet they are interchangeable in the mind of most consumers. Some independent publishers (and by that I mean independent publishing houses, not authors who are “indie publishing,” a phrase that had a totally different meaning until about three years ago) might enjoy more support by their brand name, but that is likely because the volume of books is more manageable and specific, plus, everybody likes to support the underdog. Counting on readers to track down the publisher’s website to buy books might not be a good bet...

 

• ...ok, fine, so most people wouldn’t shop at the publisher’s website, why not set up the store anyway? Some people will inevitably show up, won’t they? Maybe. But here’s another issue—online retailers that actually sell the majority of ebooks want special terms when working with the publisher. In many cases that means restricting competition for who can sell the books in exchange for better discount rates. If the predominant online retailers see the publishers as competition as opposed to partner in the bookselling business, the terms extended to publishers could rapidly deteriorate or cease to exist at all. (There are egos involved in these types of business decisions).

It’s not hard for me to imagine a landscape where the middleman is cut out of the equation, but I’ve got a vivid imagination. How fast consumer habits could shift and what happens in the evolutionary period are variables that people hoping to make billions of dollars aren’t willing to gamble on without being the house.

The standoff continues.

 

(5) “How does an advance work? Ie: what’s its purpose? When does it get paid off? If a book doesn’t make enough, do you pay it back? (@hcmarks)

An advance is a good faith payment towards a book’s expected earnings. It’s the publisher’s way of saying, “Hey, we believe in this project. We know you’ve worked hard on it, and we want to totally help you buy some groceries this week.”

To make for some SUPER SIMPLE MATH that is in NO WAY industry standard, here’s the process/math of it all.

If an author was getting a 10% royalty payment on the cover price of a $10 book, he/she would make $1 every time a copy of My Heart Bleeds Angst sells.

Before the book is published, the publisher has to fill out a profit and loss spreadsheet that accounts for all of the costs associated with the production of the book – page count, printing, design, editorial, etc. and then, using a mixture of witchcraft and hope, has to guess how many copies could expect to be sold in a limited time after release (we’ll say a year in this case). The advance will then be based on (pulling a percentage out of a hat) 50% of the sales.

If the publisher thinks the book will sell 2000 copies (netting the author $2000), the publisher might pay a $1000 advance, because shit happens and sometimes you don’t sell 2000 copies and it’s better not to have overpaid an advance that the author doesn’t earn out.

So, in the case above, if the author is given a $1000 advance, as soon as that book sells its 1000th copy, the advance is paid off. The author will make $1 for each copy sold after that. If the book only sells 800 copies, meaning the author has only netted $800 for his/her account, the advance will not have been earned out, but the author is not expected to pay back the $200 short. It’s part of the risk that a publisher takes.

However, when an author doesn’t earn out his/her advance on a book, it makes the likelihood of future books with that same publisher pretty unlikely. Sometimes that’s a less fair than other times.

 

(6) “How much say does an author have in how his book is marketed? Ie: cover design, back cover copy, etc?” (@hcmarks)

This varies from publisher to publisher. I’ve heard stories from authors who don’t know what their cover is going to look like until they’re holding a finished copy in their hands. So, I guess I’d say some people have none.

For me, I try to take a holistic and organic approach to those issues. Typically, I’ll have a conference call with an agent and author to discuss strategy for marketing the book, asking about willingness to travel, social media usage, relationships with bookstores, media connections, etc.

A separate conversation will be about how the author “sees” the book cover. Sometimes that’s a concrete image, sometimes it’s a series of keywords, sometimes it’s a vague concept. I listen to it all, and then incorporate some/most/all of it into my notes that I pass on to the production department.

It’s important to note that although many authors have already whipped up something in MS Paint that they’ve become attached to, most authors aren’t designers and the covers are...not so good. Design—good design—is a real skillset that super talented people spend years developing. You aren’t a designer because you own a bootlegged copy of Photoshop.

As far as back cover copy goes, most of the time we end up using a variation of the agent’s initial pitch materials. That was most likely honed by the author and agent much earlier in the process.

So that’s how much I let authors get involved. Like I said earlier, your mileage may vary elsewhere. At the end of the day, it’s important to me that everybody associated with the book feels happy and excited about the product heading to the marketplace.

(7) “Why does it take so long to go from ms to distributed book, sir?” (@lovingshiva)

Lead time, lead time, lead time. Everybody always needs more lead time.

Firstly, the book has to be edited. Even when a publisher likes something enough to acquire it, there are always modifications, fixes, tweaks, twists, etc. that need to be done. Once notes have been handed to author, author reads notes and has conversation with editor, then author makes changes and editor re-reads, then it gets handed over to the production department who lays it out, then it gets sent to the ARC/galley printer.

All of that needs to happen AT LEAST five months before the release of a book for us. The important trade reviewers like Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist request books 3-4 months in advance of a release date.

During that same window, the sales and marketing folks are hard at work trying to generate buzz with retailers, readers, librarians, etc., all of whom have to order books way in advance to make sure they get copies when the book is released.

You can, and people do, skip these processes or speed them up, but it’s been my experience that it hurts sales for us if that happens. We need every second before release.

 

(8) “How important is the cover letter when you are considering a submission? Do you prefer a synopsis or just a few sample chapters?” (@mszola)

For me, a cover letter isn’t all that important. I don’t want a very detailed synopsis or sample chapters to begin. I want to get a sense of YOU, the author. I can learn a lot from your cover/query letter writing and wish that you’d allow yourself to be yourself and that you’d tell me the slightest bit about your book.

That said, other people are going to have different requests for a synopsis or sample chapters, and you’d be doing yourself a favor to adhere to them. They might also have gone to a different school of cover letter expectations. You should not assume that all cover letters will be read the same way.

Important takeaway from this question—follow the guidelines for each person you send materials to and do not assume the generic, one-size-fits-all letter will do the trick.

It’s at this point—inevitably, all the time—that some dude in the back of the room stands up. Typically, he’s wearing black Chuck Taylor’s and a jean jacket with a patch on the back for some band you’ve never heard of and he says, “If you follow the rules, you’re a chump! I do it my own way, with my own style, and blah blah blah.”

Yes, Angsty Teenage Boy Wearing Adult Sizes, you’re totally right, Maverick. You did it your own way and your Rebel Force is strong and everybody bows down to your quasi-literary anarchist tendencies and all the chicks at the pizza parlor think you’re handsome...but nobody has gotten rejected for following the rules. Plenty of people have for not following the rules. Why make an already tough proposition tougher?

 

(9) Would you recommend selfpublishing or going with a publisher? (@elfhybrid)

It all depends on your goals and skillset.

If you think you want total control—cover, editorial, time it takes to get the book to market, etc. then you’re going to want to self-publish. Because you’ll get that control, and you’d absolutely drive a publisher batshit insane with your level of meddling.

You’re going to want to pay freelancers for editing, cover design, ebook formatting, etc. if you decide to self-publish. You should not make the mistake of thinking that because you have software that is capable of doing something, that you actually know how to do it. All of those skills take time to learn (even on the most perfunctory level) and if you want to be taken seriously in the marketplace, your book is going to need to keep up with industry standards. If it doesn’t, and nobody buys it, that’s on you. That’s your fault. Don’t point the finger and blame others as though we were conspiring against you. We weren’t. I promise. But understand that if you’re counting on people to buy your book because “it’s good enough” or “there are worse” you’re going to be hopelessly disappointed.

Lecture out of the way—if you can make a serious go of it with your self-produced ebooks (and maybe print), your share of the $$$ pie will be so much greater than if you went with a publisher. Rough math on a $5 ebook. Through a publisher, you’re going to make $.63 per sale (25% on net of what publisher receives from vendor, usually about a 50% discount), whereas, if you’re at the right place selling your ebook by yourself, you might be able to get 70% of list price--$3.50 per!

Now it becomes a question of—will the lower royalty rate be made up in more copies sold with a traditional publisher? If the answer is “no,” then you should really look at doing it yourself.

But remember, you have to pay all of those freelancers we talked about above, so you’ll need to make at least that much $$ before you start making the down payment on your BMW. Some folks have the extra scratch sitting around to finance those things and not miss a beat. For others, that’s gas and grocery money. You’ll want to make sure nobody is going to go hungry if things don’t work out the way you want them to.

So what can a publisher provide? Well, assuming it’s a reputable one with the right infrastructure—it will be taking care of editing, cover design, sales and marketing, warehousing, order fulfillment, and all of the publicity efforts that are 100 bajillion times more difficult for a self-published author. Existing publishers with track records can reach out to media, retail buyers, etc. and have their communications returned. They’re a known quantity. That’s a huge part of the equation, and all of those things listed above—especially the publicity and marketing—is how books end up getting sold to readers, how readers even know the books exist.

Cash flow on a per book sale basis will be much less than if you do it yourself, but that’s a limited perspective from which to judge.

As Black Sheep rapped back in ’91—The Choice is Yours.

 

(10) “How many different 'layers' of approval does an accepted project go thru?ie; slush, bumped up to someone, bumped to the next one” (@josiejo127)

This is another one of those questions that has a bunch of different answers depending on the publishing company. If it’s a one or two person operation, likely it can go from slush to published only passing through one person’s inky hands.

At its most layered, I’ve had something go from an intern, to an editor, to me, to a boss above me before I knew for sure something was going to get published. I’ve had some awesome interns over the years, but I’ve also had some that were better suited to selling Orange Julius, so I’m sure a whole gang of totally awesome books never made it to my desk because the initial reader didn’t see the brilliance. Flawed system, but it’s all that we had.

A typical experience at a larger house might involve an initial reader digging something, passing it onto an editor, the editor then takes it to a Pub Board where he/she presents it to a bunch of people, including a marketing department (who may or may not ever read the book) that will assess the book’s viability in the marketplace based on how much it mirrors Harry Potter or 50 Shades of Gray. At this point, things like “literary quality” and “emotional resonance” are quaint relics of a bygone era. If marketing isn’t on board, well, it was a nice try kid.

This makes Publishing Bear sad.

Basically, everybody who aspires to publisher/editor status wants to be able to wield a “This Will be Published” sword that he/she can swing whenever he/she wants. But very few people have pulled that sword from the stone and anyway, even if they did, the marketing people would probably criticize the technique.

 

(11) “Is there any way to efficiently distribute books to indie book stores without major distributors?” (@genesisoflegend)

If there is, I never found it. As a guy who started two independent publishing companies that garnered a little credibility in the publishing world, the biggest challenge was to get bookstores to know that you existed, believed you published a good book, and ordered accordingly. It was easy enough to target individual bookstores and approach them if the author or the story matter had a local connection. But trying to reach a wide section with the ultimate goal of a legitimate business relationship (consistent ordering)? That was a tough cookie to crack. We attended Book Expo America and regional tradeshows, met a few booksellers, developed a few relationships, but not enough to sustain a publishing company.

It was until we started Tyrus in 2009 that we saw the power of good distribution (we were partnered with Consortium) and what could happen if you had a bunch of sales reps who had existing relationships with buyers.

 

(12) "How does one find the right editor out of the myriads there are? How to avoid being scammed?" (@elfhybrid)

Get a client list/references. Because there is absolutely ZERO certification needed to call oneself an “editor,” a whole bunch of people wake up regularly and say, “Yeah, I’m an editor.”

And they’re not.

Not good ones at least.

Editing, like design, like playing shortstop, like playing drums, is a learned skillset. Just because somebody has read a bunch of books or took a creative writing class in college, it doesn’t mean shit as far as how good of an editor he/she will be.

Did the editor used to work for a legit publishing house (as opposed to some hobbyist’s garage publishing company)? Are the books edited by that editor available from real publishing companies? If you get a client list and every book on it has been self-published or came out from some small press that nobody has ever heard of, it’s probably a fair play to raise an eyebrow at the editor’s “credentials.”

 

(13) "How important is it to be previously published in some fashion prior to submitting a novel-length work?" (@mark_a_tucker)

To me, it isn’t very important at all.

It might have meant something thirty years ago when there were only like three or four literary journals and a couple of magazines that published fiction. But now, every website is a front for a ‘zine, and I’m pretty sure that even people who had no intention of being published have a half-dozen credits to their names.

What I’m trying to say is that what was once one way for figuring out how legit somebody was as a writer became meaningless with the proliferation of the web. I get all sorts of bios in query letters that list things like church newsletters, personal blogs, and fancy sounding web ‘zines like “Emerald Cottage Review” that make me say, “Wait, have I ever heard of that? Is that important?” And then it turns out I haven’t (and maybe nobody else has either), so I quit trying to keep up to date with all of that stuff and I deal with the material at hand. Obviously if I see something like “The New Yorker” in a query, I’ll pay a little bit more attention, but I’m definitely not trying to suss out the hierarchal structure of the online ‘zine world.

Also, not really related to anything above, but something else of note—at one point, just about every other submission we got, the author had been a “Pushcart Prize nominee.” That ceased meaning anything to me. Along with all of the made up awards “Bensonville Achievement Award for Written Excellence,” etc.

 

 

 

 

History? It's a mystery!

Lynne Patrick

Last night I went to see a play which first saw the light of... day? lighting rig?... back in the 1960s. Not that I saw it then, you understand. Of course not. I was too busy not being born/playing with dolls/studying for exams at high school (delete as you feel appropriate.)

Anyway, my point is, that play has now become a period piece; the set was littered with ‘60s icons like colourful beanbags, early Bond movie posters, a chirrupy phone and one of those uncomfortable leather couches with a button-back. And the equally iconic pre-curtain and scene-link music... suffice to say I almost became that woman who knows all the words and sings along.

The train of thought it set in motion was, in fiction terms, where does contemporary end and historical begin?

It depends who you ask. At a weekend workshop I attended several aeons ago, someone suggested history was anything earlier than midnight last night. I had a problem with that even then. According to the Ellis Peters Award, the UK’s leading historical mystery prize, it’s thirty-five years before that year’s closing date, which, if my arithmetic gene is working, comes out at the late 1970s at the moment. That makes more sense.

When I was publishing, I steered clear of anything post-1960s and pre-whatever year we were in. This was partly because I have a problem with calling my own lifetime history, but mainly for marketing reasons. Ask any bookseller where they shelve a book set in 1998.

In fact, when we were starting out and ran an X-Factor-style contest to find our launch titles (do you have X-Factor in the US?) one of the finalists was rejected purely on that basis: it was one of the best of the bunch: well-written, tightly plotted, with great characters and... you get the picture; but it was set in the 1990s, for reasons which made it impossible to rework into the 2000s.

But I’m now beginning to wonder if, as a marketing strategy, this is becoming outdated. The speed of progress seems to be increasing exponentially; my three-year-old laptop is practically an antique. And the publishing world has changed out of all recognition, even in the two years or so since I moved on. In my last year at the helm of a small indie, eBooks accounted for such a tiny proportion of the big companies’ sales that little guys like me could afford to ignore them. Today, the UK’s last remaining bookshop chain has reported an operating loss of many millions; add that to the way indie bookshops continue to tumble like dominoes and look for a cause, and the answer has to be... eBooks.

And the assault of technology on the book trade must have had an effect on the average age of readers. The reading demographic used to be something of a mantra. How did it go? Eighty per cent of books are bought by women between the ages of forty-five and seventy; and eighty per cent of library members are over sixty. I don’t know how accurate that was, but someone must have gone to the trouble of studying the marketplace, so surely there was some truth in it.

But now that so much reading is done not from a thick chunk of paper you keep in your backpack, but from a gadget you carry in your pocket, are those numbers changing? I know a lot of 60-plus people who have an aversion to gadgets, but I can’t think of a single acquaintance under 40 who doesn’t carry a mobile phone. To be fair, a lot of those over-60s do too, and some of them even own e-readers; but the level of resistance to technology does seem to rise in proportion with age.

I’m sure I’ll get lots of protests along the lines of ‘My 90-year-old mother is part of an online poker syndicate, and Skypes me every day from her iPad’; I’m equally sure that mother exists, and more power to her. All I’m saying is she’s not in the majority among her age group. My point is that the marriage of reading and technology has given reading a new spin, indeed a new buzz, which possibly makes it more appealing to younger generations.

Which, in turn, means that history can begin more recently than thirty-five years ago. To me, a play set in the 1960s doesn’t quite qualify as period drama. To someone born in the 1990s, 1980 is a whole different world.

Master Class

Josh Getzler

When my wife and I lived in deepest upstate New York, where entertainment  options were…limited (Sam’s Club was a hot date on a Saturday night), we spent more than a little time reading essays by Dave Barry to each other and attempting not to spit out our Stewart’s root beer. From discussions of the worst songs in the world (sorry Neil Diamond and MacArthur Park) to riding at the speed of sound with pilots and trying not to throw up, we went through his oeuvre repeatedly through the long North Country winters.

It stood to reason, therefore, that when our 13 year old son who has a liking for Weird Al and Tom Lehrer discovered our Dave Barry collections, he fell madly in love. He’d insist on reading us chapter after chapter out loud, until our 9 and 10 year olds were repeating the punchlines (“and then the cyst was gone”—HAHAHA!).

Last week, Barry released his latest novel, Insane City, and nothing short of a second Hurricane Sandy was going to keep our gang from going to B&N to watch. We don’t go to readings that often—at least all of us don’t, and not together—and Amanda and I were hoping that they weren’t going to be disappointed. We hoped that he’d be funny and charming, but steeled ourselves for jaded and phoning it in.

What we got, very simply, was a master class in book touring. Look, Dave Barry’s been doing this for years, and he’s comfortable and practiced. Rather than giving anything terribly introductory or biographical or philosophical, as most writers appropriately do, Barry started us off with 15 minutes of stand-up comedy. It was a greatest hits tour through his Miami Herald columns, and the audience (the average age of which my children reduced by around thirty years) was nodding and laughing and mouthing along and winking at each other knowingly.

Seamlessly, he then segued to a short description of the new book, adding new anecdotes and a riff on the foibles of Miami. Then he took questions, and deflected the rude and the weird with grace and humor. Finally he finished, exactly, it seemed, at the minute he’d intended to, and sat patiently as 100 or so people streamed past with books to sign, even standing and taking photos with those who wanted them. When we got to him, he signed one book to “My idol Joe” and then told him to stay sane, even when Joe told him that he knew the whole Book of Bad Songs by heart. It was utterly satisfying, and great fun.

I write about this not to be hokey or to give a Larger Message about author readings and signings. There are a great number of ways to read well in public, from providing literary pyrotechnics to appearing sweet or simply showing one’s talent, to getting up and reading and letting one’s writing take center stage. Rather, I write about last week because it is a good feeling to go to an event—whether a reading or a play or an opera or a ball game or a movie—and get exactly what you hoped to get, and leave happy.

It's Here!

Jeff Cohen

It's interesting: Albums drop. (Are there albums anymore?) Movies open. TV series premiere. Games begin. Races start. News stories break. Ships sail. Airplanes take off. Ideas germinate. Evening falls.

Books, on the other hand, launch.

Each form of art or entertainment has its own term for the beginning. And for a few weeks/months now, I've been mentioning the upcoming launch of the fourth Haunted Guesthouse mystery novel, CHANCE OF A GHOST by E.J. Copperman, which will in fact take place on Tuesday, February 5.

Well, what do you know? That's TODAY!

Yes, starting right now, Alison Kerby, the Jersey Shore guesthouse owner with the cranky dead people on the premises, will be searching for a murderer, so that she might be able to find her late father, one of the few ghosts she hasn't seen around the house lately. It's a long story. (About 87,000 words.)

The publishing process is a strange journey for an author: The idea that began (sorry, germinated) roughly 20 months ago, cooked for a while, came out on a computer screen, was (mercifully) edited and revised, was (even more justifiably) revised again, had a cover (nice, no?), cover copy, blurbs and acknowledgements added to it, was teased in an ebook novella and hyped within an inch of its life on this site is now about to find its way to bookstores, ereaders, libraries and hopefully more than a few homes to be read.

Meanwhile, the author has written another manuscript or two, is working on at least one more, and occasionally wonders which one this book was again. It's natural. If the author isn't thinking about the coming volume now, the next launch--or the one after that--might not happen on time, or at all.

Tomorrow is also notable in being the launch day for new titles from such pals as Avery Ames, Lucy Arlington, Lorraine Bartlett and Sheila Connolly. It's a difficult thing for an author to be watching the Amazon and Barnes & Noble rankings, feeling good (or bad) about them and, at the same time, wondering how everyone else is doing.

And believe me, authors are watching those numbers like a nest of hawks. This is a competitive business, as all businesses are. The other writers are usually excellent people, they are friends and colleagues and one never wishes them anything but the best. But if our numbers are not what we anticipated they might be, the question "Why me?" will inch its ugly way into the author's head. 

The author, by the way, is not proud of that.

Best of luck--sincerely--to all my pals whose books will not drop, open, premiere, begin, start, break, start, take off, germinate or fall today. Happy launch day, everybody; it's the nicest and strangest day of the year. It is to be savored.

And now, to indulge in a DEAD GUY Annual Tradition, the Launch Day List:

10 People To Whom CHANCE OF A GHOST Should Be Given as a Gift

1. Your beloved--Valentine's day is NEXT WEEK!
2. Your least-favorite in-law ("NO, I didn't forget to give you a holiday gift--I was waiting for this book to be published!")
3. Your boss--a delighted supervisor is more open to talk of a raise!
4. Your fifth-grade English teacher, the one who got you interested in reading.
5. Mel Brooks, if you know him.
6. Your favorite sibling. Let them know you're glad your parents sibled.
7. Your parents, if you can. Alison's searching for her dad, and her mom is helping. Think how you can bring your family closer together. It's practically an obligation. (Family guilt is the best guilt.)
8. Jon Stewart wouldn't be bad, either. Tell him I said hi.
9. Your doctor. They say laughter is the best medicine. This could open up all sorts of distribution possibilities for the book.
10. Yourself. After all that gift-giving, you deserve a good story.

 

Last CHANCE! The CHANCE OF A GHOST contest winner--who'll get a FREE Kindle or Nook with all the Haunted Guesthouse titles pre-loaded--will be drawn TOMORROW on Launch Day! So there's still time to enter--click here for details!

An eight-year-old weighs in on favorite mysteries

Jessy Randall

My daughter Celie is eight years old, just about to turn nine. Here are her answers to my questions about a mystery series she likes, Archie's Weird Mysteries, which are comic book versions of a television series of the same name. They are available as paperback books and as ebooks for the iPad and iPhone.

What do you like about these books?

I like the characters, because they are the same ones as in my favorite comic books. I also like the setting, Riverdale.

At what age did you first one of these?

8

Are they too scary for little kids? What age do you think they would be best for?

They would be good for all ages.

Do you need to read the books in order?

No.

What else would you say about these books?

You always want to read on.

 

THE (L)ON(E)LY EDITOR: A “REWRITER” AMONG WRITERS

Pamela Bond Contractor

(Guest Blogging for Marilyn Thiele)

It started eight months ago with a tap on my shoulder after an author talk at the library. At the end of the session, I raised my hand and boldly mentioned to the new author, a local fiction writer, that I was an “out of work editor.” She wasn’t particularly interested, but the man sitting behind me apparently was.

Something about the word “editor” resonated with the shoulder tapper, who explained that his creative writing group met every Friday afternoon at the library. Would I be interested in joining them? He didn’t really say why he'd invited me, but I suspected he thought an editor could somehow add a bit of gleam to the group’s output. Now that the world of academic editing didn’t seem to want my "rewriting" (I use the term very loosely) services anymore, an invitation to actually write caught my attention.

At first, I was only mildly interested in being the token editor in a group of adult non-professional (unpublished) creative writers. But, eager to meet new people, especially highly literate people, I showed up—and showed off (mostly to myself). Knowing as much as I did about helping authors use the English language to its fullest effect, I felt as if I stood apart from the group. Even though these were intelligent, educated, thoughtful adults, I kept wondering why I was there among them.

Something was wrong. And it wasn’t that they didn’t write well; most of them didn’t write at all. What had begun a year or so earlier as a fiction and memoir-writing group, the project of a creative writing student who had since moved on, was now an unfocused social gathering of nice folks. Now I kept wondering why they were there. Each of them seemed to have a private reason for getting together each week.

Since that time, a mini-(r)evolution has occurred. We elected a steering committee (of which I found myself chair) and split into subgroups by genre: long fiction, short fiction, and memoir/anything goes. Suddenly, these small groups—four or five members in each—were actually writing. So if getting everyone organized and focused required a catalyst, maybe that’s why I was there: to “edit” the group! Well, OK, maybe not. . . .

Wanting to seamlessly transform myself from academic editor to creative writer, I was eager to start creating fiction. But now something else was wrong. Finally finding myself among writers, here I was with my purple editing pen ready and my own writing suspended, withheld because I was fearful of the transition. Being the only editor in a group of writers was confusing, creating a dilemma born of the ability to see the potential in the work of others combined with the humility—and fear—of finding out what others might see in the work I myself would do.

Despite my identity crisis, I did begin to write and turned in a couple of chapters from my new historical mystery novel, still a tiny seed planted in unfertilized soil. The idea for the story came from a casual remark my husband had made while we were on a driving trip. My interest piqued, I started thinking about what life was like in an earlier era and the promise it held for an intriguing mystery set in the present. Actually, I came to love the idea, and my group seemed to like it a lot as well. But I still had to learn to execute it.

Unable to remove my tight-fitting editor’s hat, I stumbled over my efforts, getting in my own way as I wavered between fact-finding and free-flowing thought. Roughly mashing together hasty research and a story with no clear direction, I created a bit of a mess. But it was a mess with merit, and maybe even a little magic. So I knew I had to persevere in my mission to balance analytical thinking and creative writing.

As if teetering on the razor’s edge between editor and writer hasn’t been difficult enough, I am still learning the subtle differences between editing in a professional environment and critiquing in a non-professional peer setting. Beyond that, I need to understand how critiquing induces good writing. But as an editor-cum-critiquer, how could I stop being prescriptive? Even though I know creative writing has somewhat fluid rules, I can’t not see things that editors are taught to home in on. Yet I know this isn’t exactly what beginning authors are looking for from peer reviewers. They seek critiques more than tweaks, even if nobody quite knows what that means.

At our monthly meeting yesterday, I asked my writing colleagues how they thought critiquing creative writing differed from editing it. Someone said these were right- (critiquing) vs. left- (editing) brain activities. This begins to get at the differences, but distinctions remain somewhat difficult to articulate. The repertoire of editorial skills I'd acquired as an academic editor had left me ill equipped to answer my own question—or even to ask it in the first place. We had some further discussion, and my thinking became even cloudier.

After a few hours’ reflection, however, here’s what I now think I know: Critiquing is not synonymous with editing, by which I mean the hands-on reworking of text, one eye on the details, the other on the whole picture. Yet the two functions have significant overlap, not the least being their primary purpose—to help authors improve their writing. And the fastest way to learn what critiquing is is to submit your own work for peer review.

In a non-professional adult writing group, you need to leave your biases at the door and recognize that—unless you are a published author—the others in the room actually are your peers. You can’t stand apart as an editor, as a teacher, or as a competitor. You’re laying bare part of your soul and inviting virtual strangers and incipient friends to comment on it. Remembering what peer reviews were like in my technical writing classes in graduate school, I feel lucky to be among gifted amateurs who haven’t learned or been exposed to the vitriol of aggressive, cold judgments.

An editor in a professional situation stands apart from authors and their brainchildren, coolly observing how well the work has been rendered. Being removed makes this kind of work possible, even if one is passionate about the editorial process. (I am not exploring here the various editorial roles one finds in publishing houses, but generalizing based on common notions of hands-on editing.) Critiquing in a non-professional peer-to-peer setting is more personal, more interdependent. It is also, to some extent, more subjective than editing—critiquers are often blatantly contradictory. Critiquing is also more emotional, dare I say it, and somewhat less cerebral—but no less insightful—than editing. Those who critique have more responsibilities to authors’ dreams and fewer rules about how they are expressed than those who edit.

What do writers want from peer reviews? Accolades, of course, oohs and aahs, hearing that the reviewers couldn’t put the writing down—that it made them cry, or laugh, or relate, or change their lives—or, best of all—write better themselves. Short story, novel chapter, memoir . . . it doesn’t matter. Authors want to wow those who read them. Then real life happens. An author might read something aloud, only to be rewarded with complete silence. Or a writer might submit something in advance, only to be serenaded with earnest comments about what could have been better—and, damn, they’re right!

In a supportive environment, authors may feel a bit chagrined when their reviewers seem bemused rather than bedazzled, but they will go home and write better as a result of thoughtful, insightful reactions to their work. Good editing may achieve a similar result, but it feels very different to be instructed rather than inspired, revised rather than reinvigorated, edited rather than enlightened. Hands-on editing puts the final burnish on good writing. Heart-to-heart critiquing fuels the fire that creates it. Oversimplified? Yes, but I’m running out of space and time. . . .

My group members and I are not that different as writers, so we can nurture one another’s talent, expressed or latent, without class distinction. As students of writing, we are self-taught. Amateurs we may be, but in some cases gifted ones. Who knows? We may even incubate something publishable, although what that means in today’s changing world of publishing-house mergers and self-publishing technologies requires a lot of educated guessing and adventurous exploration.

Having reviewed the work my group has produced and experienced their critiques of my own, I am convinced not only of their expressed or evolving talent, but of their good intentions. Undoubtedly, whatever I continue to produce as I learn to translate the inner world of my imagination into shared experience through writing will be flawed in some way or another. But in my group, the review process is handled with kindness, humor, and a sense of mutuality. Gradually, this editor is becoming a writer who critiques and a reviewer who is critiqued.

At this stage of life, moving toward the creative side of the writing world is beginning to feel liberating. And doing it in an environment where people care as much about others' work as they do their own is fun—truly enjoyable. If my historical mystery ever makes its way from my head into others’ hands, that will be the ultimate critique.

Pamela Bond Contractor is the owner and principal at Ellipsis Enterprises, an editorial consulting agency; a member of Marilyn’s “Twice Told Tales/Moonstone Mystery” reading groups; and a member of the Hunterdon County (NJ) Library Writing Group.