The Indy Book Store

Ted Krever: Writing and other forms of torture Posted on by

Ruth Jordan of Crimespree Magazine did an interview on Joe Konrath’s blog last week that’s worth passing on (I’m excerpting here but I think I’ve got the point):

‘Do you remember the rush when you stumbled across that perfect book? Do you recall a cover calling to you, the flap copy adding to the harmony, and possibly a blurb that sealed the deal? When you read that book it was yours. The book belonged to you and was yours to talk about, share, put into other folks hands. It was the discovery that made it special.

‘For most fiction readers that feeling I just described along with print reviews is the way they find these treasures, for now. The casual reader likes to walk into a store and find the book that’s going to get them through that chilly weekend or long plane ride.

‘Summer is coming and with it the beach & vacations. An outlet is gone for those who are part time readers to get their fix. The closing of Borders presents any number of problems to everyone with any conscious awareness of the Publishing Industry. Last year the box store accounted for 13% of all book sales.

‘There’s an opportunity here. Last year Indy stores accounted for only 2% of Sales. Let’s change that this year. Let’s Make it 8%.

‘That co-worker who asks you what to read? The friend who asks you what you think they might like? Surely all of us can find two people to walk into an independent bookstore of our choice who’ve never been to one before.

‘That’s it. That’s my plan. If all of us do this we can help the Indy dealers who lay the footprint for the best sellers of tomorrow. These smaller stores may not have as many end caps or focal points as a Borders but they are full of reading goodness and staff who knows how to put the right book into the customer’s hand.

‘There will be hard choices for writers, publishers, distributors and the consumer in the months ahead. But for the now, let’s gift our family, friends and acquaintances with a choice they never knew they had. The Indy Book Store.’

Amen. Pass the Word.

What Leads: Character or Story?

Ted Krever: Writing and other forms of torture Posted on by

I’m the kind of writer—and reader—who’s always favored character over story. If your character is interesting enough—and real enough—to me, I’ll follow him or her anywhere. Stories that lead with story over character have always seemed a bit thin, insubstantial—even though I sometimes have friends who are big advocates for them.

But I’ve just read a couple of books that made me think a little deeper about this distinction.

Coroner's LunchColin Cotterill’s ‘The Coroner’s Lunch’ has a terrific central character and situation. Siri is a 72-year-old doctor recently released from ‘re-education’ in Laos just after the Pathet Lao took over. As one of the few doctors who hasn’t fled the country with the change in regimes, he is sent to the capitol city to be the nation’s coroner. He has no interest in the job and even less in working with the party bureaucracy but has no choice but to fulfill his role in the worker’s paradise. And then the wife of a high party official shows up mysteriously dead and he follows the mystery to a winding conclusion.

The writing here is strong and the character interesting, both the man and his situation. Siri has a jaundiced eye that he turns on both the corrupt regime recently overthrown and its new Communist successor. There are a good number of subsidiary characters, many of whom—including Siri’s brother, a Vietnamese military coroner and a police detective—have to be rated as suspects or at least somewhat suspicious as the case proceeds.

Strong Enough to DieThe other book is something that, in the past, I might not have picked off the shelf on my own. Jon Land’s ‘Strong Enough to Die’ is the second in a series about the first female Texas Ranger and the writing and characters, at first blush, seem direct and clear but not particularly deep. There’s a story involving a Halliburton-like corporation—I like that idea—but the actual dangerous plot in the end seemed a little melodramatic. So you wouldn’t think this would be up my alley but I met Jon at a writer’s conference in February and he’s a really engaging funny gentleman, so I read the book—and got several great surprises.

I’m the guy who generally figures out the thriller plot on page 45 or fifteen minutes into the film. Maybe I don’t get every detail but I can give a good guess generally of who’s the villain and how the ending will play out.

‘Strong Enough to Die’ did something very unusual—it totally threw me twice early on and then maintained my interest all the way to the end, by creating a powerful tension within character. The problem with reviewing the book is that there’s very little I can tell about the story without giving away the surprises because they come early. I will just say that major characters do things you wouldn’t expect, the opposite of what you’ve been set up to expect—but when they make their moves, those moves seem not only understandable but almost inevitable and that’s a hell of a trick, especially early in a book.

And the result is that, ever after, you pay attention. This book gave me a new respect for strong story. I understood from that first big switch-up that there was no point speculating – it would only be blind guesswork or playing the odds, because the author had already defied those odds in a very satisfying fashion. And that kind of uncertainty is a huge strength in a thriller, because it mirrors what spooks us in real life.

Coming off that experience, I enjoyed ‘Coroner’s Lunch’ but not as much as I might have in the past. It ended up as what’s generally called a ‘cozy’ mystery, where the sleuth figures out the murderer with a minimum of violence and action. In truth, I’m not even sure who the murderer was or how Siri came to his conclusion. I enjoyed the book for the writing and characters, but after the experience of having been completely thrown by a well-written story, it came off as a tame exercise as opposed to a couple rounds in the ring.

Grace

Ted Krever: Writing and other forms of torture Posted on by

I just found out about this: Grace Paley: Collected Shorts, a film by Lilly Rivlin.

grace

Grace was not one of my teachers at Sarah Lawrence. But you could be Grace’s student without ever being in one of her classes. If you were in the writing program or involved in any of the protest movements at that time (early-mid 70’s), you got to know Grace. Tiny, willful, no-nonsense—and one of the great writers of our time.

She doesn’t need more tributes, certainly not from me. But the world needs more Grace. The website sells DVD’s. The trailer doesn’t look particularly wonderful. But I’m buying a copy and urge you to do the same.

One of the riveting things about Grace-in writing and planning protests-was her relentless focus on tangible detail. She blew through pretense and attitude as though it didn’t exist, wasn’t worth even noticing. I can’t say I learned to be a writer from Grace but I learned something about being a person, about being someone I could look in the mirror, just being around her. And if there’s a little of that in this film, that’s enough to recommend it highly.

And while you’re at it, go here or your local bookstore and buy at least one of Grace’s books. Neil Young always says he listens to the Basement Tapes before recording an album, to remind himself how to keep it real. Grace might be the written equivalent of that and that’s pretty high praise, even coming from an idiot like me.

 

Just Do It

Ted Krever: Writing and other forms of torture Posted on by

Jenny Milchman replied to my post yesterday with an account of her own trials with the publishing establishment:

Thanks for the post (and posts), Ted–I’ve just begun to scroll through your very relevant blog. Relevant to the times, and relevant to me.

I will try to nutshell it–3 agents, 14 editors who wanted one or more of my books, last one got everyone at the house on board except one top dog who vetoed, 12 blurbs from best-selling/award-winning authors–that’s my experience of the last 11 years.

jenny

I’m not sure what to do. I’m wondering if the world has changed sufficiently that
the goal I’ve been positioning myself (or position*ed*) for has become the wrong one. Your words about Harper’s success with their e version aside, what I fear is a major will charge an exorbitant price for digital versions ($12.99), turning off the e readers who expect their content for less. And other like mistakes as that big ship tries to turn itself around. Or doesn’t.

 

Anyway, thanks again for all the ideas, and best of luck with your own work. If it comes out in print, I will definitely check it out!

My rant of a reply:

Jenny’s blog has a continuing feature, writers talking about how they ‘made it’ in the publishing industry.

That’s the way I thought about my work for years. I wrote stories I would be interested in and then tried to get agents interested so they could interest a publisher and I could get readers.

What I’ve only recently come to understand is that what I’ve always wanted were the readers—and that publishers, in this day and age, are almost entirely getting in the way instead of helping me toward that goal.

Let me sketch out the two paths to publication and you tell me which sounds more compelling:

1) A huge corporation that publishes twenty-five books a month (I’m making the numbers up—they’re surely low in some cases). The company is interested in the big seller this month—until the week after publication, at which time its concern switches to the big seller for next month. If the book isn’t doing numbers the first week or two, the war’s over and Good Luck reaching anybody. You’re three-day-old fish in the marketplace but they’ll keep your e-book in print (at an uncompetitive $12.99, of which they pay you—what? 25%?) so you can’t take it over yourself.

Their business plan is dissolving under their feet as they walk (because it’s based on a 1970’s mass marketplace) and they’re panicking. Therefore, decisions get made on a cover your ass basis—’They can’t blame me for buying this; it’s just like what we sold last year.’ Books that don’t fit the cookie-cutter mold are rejected or forced to fit expectations (‘We need these changes to help your book become more commercially viable’).

'The focus group doesn't like it'

Because of panic, every book bought is either Big Prestige (Mr. Franzen, take a bow) or expected to be a blockbuster, appealing to everyone—and the focus on everyone is necessary if the publisher, bookbinder, publicist (who may or may not be spending any time on your book), proofreader (ditto), editorial assistant and the teams in Accounting and Royalties and Inventory Management are going to be able to pay their mortgages and the Zipcar at the Hamptons this summer . The writer is either saddled with low expectations (which means the publicist never heard of you) or has a huge advance to pay out, which you probably won’t (even big writers often don’t)—which makes it even harder when you want them to publish your next book. It’s like Wall Street, a totally artificial game—someone else sets the expectations , through a set of rules that seem almost entirely arbitrary, and then punishes you for not meeting them.

And all the time, everyone in this game knows that the big successes make their own genres, don’t fit the existing mold—and generally build slowly over time (the Harry Potter juggernaut hit around ‘Prisoner of Azkaban’, didn’t it? Which was Book Three). About half the time, nobody even sees the big hit coming.

So that’s one approach. On the other hand:

2) There’s me. I publish my six books. I’ve got one up now, probably put two more up in the next two weeks and the rest next month.

ted

Honest Abe

I know these books and love them. I believe in them to my soul. My focus will be entirely on them and I will sell them by going directly to readers—through Facebook, bulletin boards or bloggers who review books online. YouTube videos. Podcasts. Basically, word of mouth.

This costs me nothing but my time—however, since I set my own pub date and thereafter have the rest of my life to continue marketing them, time is actually on my side instead of working against me.

Since the books cost $0.99 to $2.99 (maybe $4.99 if I’ve got a built-in audience), they are an impulse purchase.

And I’m not looking for a blockbuster—I’m looking to build a group of steady readers for my books. If they don’t fit a genre, fine. They are what they are. They’re stories I love—I don’t want them sold as another ‘modern romance’ or ‘paranormal thriller’—I’m not looking for cookie cutter. I want their uniqueness, their difference from everyone else, to sell them, to find a smaller audience that will stick over time.

This works because I don’t need to appeal to everyone. I’m taking advantage of the modern niche-marketing Internet world. If I find 2,500 people this year who like one of my books—which shouldn’t be impossible if I work hard at it all year—and I make $2 from each sale, that’s $5,000, almost an average fiction book advance.

The difference is, since I’m the publisher, I will already have six books online at once—instead of having to wait 12-18 months for each book to come out, assuming anyone’s interested in publishing them all. Even more important, I’m making my $2 off a retail price of $2.99 (instead of an 12.99 ‘big publisher’ e-book, $16 trade paper or $25 hardcover, all of which pay roughly the same royalty)! So if, hopefully, 1,000 of those people decide to buy my other books—hell, they’re only $2.99—I make 6,000 more sales at $2 apiece, an additional $12,000. And hopefully those people have friends who read—and I have another book that will be out at the end of this year or early next year. These books keep building an audience indefinitely, since they don’t go out of print, period, until I do (if they’re still selling, my son can keep selling them, so maybe even beyond my expiration date).

But, you say, what about print readers? People who don’t want an e-book, who love the feel of a print book? Like me. (By the way, the Kindle is an awesome device—but I still love books…) There are print on demand deals and they’re only going to get better as this market explodes. You can charge less than a big publisher’s price and make a higher royalty. You just have to generate enough demand to pay off that initial printing.

None of this is new thinking–you only have to read Joe Konrath’s blog for a couple of days to hear all of this and better.

But the most important change here is the one in your own thinking, the writer’s frame of mind.

Suddenly, your focus is on the writing instead of making a deal, on pleasing yourself by doing good work instead of cutting your suit to fit the needs of an agent, marketing committee, focus group, blah blah.

I just figured out what was wrong with my next book—I’d done a whole lot of work on preliminary scenes that totally weighed down the beginning. So yesterday I chucked them and started the book in the middle. Much better. But it’s not a loss—I’ll put those chapters up as bonus content on this site or maybe sell them for $0.99.

I have a book that is a collection of short stories—I might put the book up at $2.99 and the short stories up individually for $0.99. If there’s a way for me to verify that someone bought one of the short stories ( I have to research this but I’ll bet there is), I can offer them a coupon to buy the whole book for $1.99. So everyone feels they get a good deal. Gotta take care of my readers.

Because they’re mine now—not a publisher’s, not some bookseller’s. Mine. That’s a very different attitude from the old model and much healthier. That unruly crazy back-and-forth that the Internet produces everywhere has to make me a better writer eventually—or I’ll deserve to go unnoticed.

Yes, marketing takes time and energy and it isn’t what I was looking forward to, but I’d have to put out that same energy if a publisher signed me. And now I’m captain of my own ship—instead of waiting another five years for someone to give me a chance (assuming there are big publishers or even bookstores then—I hope there are but…), I’m out there now and indefinitely so. If a publisher drops the ball publicizing my book (you hear these horror stories all the time), the book’s done. If I drop the ball myself, I can start again tomorrow, because I have no other focus. This is my business.

I worked at ABC News about fifteen years ago on a newsmagazine called ‘Day One with Forrest Sawyer.’ There were Executives in the News Division who would come down periodically to look at stories being edited and of course they always had their opinions and, since they were Executives, you had to take those opinions seriously. There was one—who still works in television News, though no longer at ABC—who seemed to specialize in finding the one soundbite that was absolutely crucial to the story, the emotional crux of the piece and deciding that bite made him uncomfortable or seemed suspect in some way. So it had to go and you were left after a week of editing trying to figure out how to salvage your story. For no discernable reason. We ended up leaving obviously bad bits in the stories so the execs could cut those out and get their satisfaction without doing massive damage.

I got turned down by an agent recently who was reading Mindbenders. He wrote me saying ‘I stopped feeling like I had to turn the pages at a certain point and in this type of book [thriller], that’s fatal.’ And he’s right, in a thriller, it is. So I wrote back, asking where he’d stopped so I could look the book over.

When I got the answer, I went back and found four pages between the place he’d stopped and the place where every person who’s read the book said ‘That’s when I was totally hooked.’ He’d gone 60 pages and faltered but didn’t give me four pages leeway! In the real world, if I’ve got a reader through page 61, even if they’re having doubts, they’ll get to 65. At very least, four pages should call for a rework, not a turn-down. But that’s the real world, not an agent’s world, not the publishing world today and that’s the point—and the problem. They’re looking for reasons to say ‘no’ and it’s gotten ridiculous.

With this new route I’m following, I’ll get my verdict direct from readers themselves. No politics, no panic, no covering-your-ass. The stories are out there, who wants to read them? Who wants to review them? Stand or fall. Get better or fail. After ten years of busting my hump against an unseen and incomprehensible industry that doesn’t seem to know how to get out of its own way, that seems like a walk in the park.

(Focus group photo courtesy photostock/FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

Avoiding the Digital Music Trap

Ted Krever: Writing and other forms of torture Posted on by

Bob Lefsetz has a controversial newsletter about the music industry but it’s good reading for anyone attempting to make a creative living in the digital world. He’s an advocate for content, which in his case is another way of saying good music (just using words like ‘content’ and ‘talent’ condescends to people who actually create and that condescension shows in the kind of work the big companies support).

His email dispatch this morning—it hasn’t show up yet on his blog—reports that Harper Publishing for the first time sold more copies of an e-book than its hardcover equivalent. ‘The Dressmaker of Khair Khana’ sold 6,500 digital to 5,700 hardcover in the first twelve days of sales. There are going to be lots of stories like this in the next few months.

The point he’s making is that ebooks may avoid the trap digital music got itself into because digital books are priced far lower—as they should be—than the hardcover. You have no cost of physical construction or distribution so of course—except the moguls of the music industry thought they could just rake in that difference as profit. So they’re suffering widespread piracy.

Hopefully, he’s right that books will avoid this issue. Time will tell and I know that books are moving well on Pirate’s Bay and other torrent sites.

When I published my first book on Smashwords and Amazon a few weeks ago, one of the choices I had to make was whether or not to enable DRM, Digital Rights Management, to prevent someone just making wholesale copies and distributing them all over the planet.

I did without. I’ve never seen any of those schemes that weren’t offensive and intrusive. I’m also Pollyanna by nature; I think if you trust people, they generally respond in kind and the others are scumbags who’ll find a way to steal from you anyhow (well, maybe post-modern Pollyanna…).

But, more than that, my feeling is that I should only be so lucky as to have copies of my work floating all over. There are some people who’ll read the thing for free and decide to buy the next book fair and square. And others who won’t read anything at all unless it’s free so okay, let them. I’m saying here, you petty cheapskates have my permission to read it yourself if you pirate it—but then you owe me to tell others if you like it, others who’ll buy a copy. A little theft is a nuisance and not worth worrying about in this massive digital world—but pay me back for my openness by finding me some more readers.

There is something different about this digital world that’s heartening. The record industry still has a lot of money and political clout—not that it did them any good. They started going after their own audience for sharing files and now the audience has shut them out. iTunes and other digital music purveyors are eating their lunch and dinner now and they haven’t any idea what to do. Because they didn’t act as good citizens—they were a big dog acting in a petty way—and their online audience isn’t passive. It punished them—and it’s going to put them out of business soon.

Hopefully, book publishers and booksellers are paying attention. As for writers, the New World is here already.

The Gospel on E-Books

Ted Krever: Writing and other forms of torture Posted on by

If you’re paying attention to this e-book revolution, I don’t have to tell you who Joe Konrath is.

Shaken Cover

Joe's latest e-book

But I will anyway, just in case.

Joe’s written (I think it’s) 24 books, been published by major publishers, been dropped by them and dropped them himself-Joe’s been to The Show, in baseball lingo.

Joe is now the John the Baptist of e-books. I met him in Chicago at Love Is Murder, where he sat alone on the biggest stage the conference had for an hour and mesmerized his audience with a disciplined rant about the state of publishing and the opportunities for e-publishing, particularly indie publishing. Joe knows whereof he speaks and he knows how to tell a story.

And since listening to him, I’ve been talking to and reading other traditionally-published authors and all I’m noticing are the horror stories: the publisher that bought their book and dumped it on the market, didn’t support their own efforts at publicity (if we’re doing our own publicity, what do we need them for?), decided to pulp the first two books in a series you’re still adding to (but their e-book version is still available at an inflated price so you can’t make it available yourself). Blah blah blah, on and on. Nobody wants to hear writer’s laments, except maybe other writers. But there’s a revolution here and it’s not brewing anymore, it’s boiling.

Count me as a recruit. I put up Howling at Wolves two weeks ago and my life changed the instant it appeared on Smashwords and Amazon. Suddenly, I was a business owner. This website has dominated my life since then because I needed a place to organize the job of putting my books up and getting readers. It’s my job now. I’m not interested in going begging to agents for handouts. I now have a ship; we’ll see how she sails.

The Writer’s Haircut

Ted Krever: Writing and other forms of torture Posted on by

I have to get my haircut today-which naturally gets me thinking about writing.

Oh-you don’t see the connection?

My philosophy, choosing a haircutter, is that it’s useless to tell the guy how I want my hair cut. He does what he does well. If you ask him to do what I think I have in mind, he’ll do a half-assed job and it’ll come out terrible. So I’m better off taking what he gives me-at very least, it’s the best he can do. If I really don’t like it, I should find someone else instead of trying to change him.

I think that same principle holds true for writing and most other occupations (also for marriage, but that’s a whole other essay/book/series/what have you). Every writer starts out emulating someone, the Writing God, whoever their writing God is. But there’s a moment when you reach a crossroads-either you write what comes natural or you continue to try to be the best version of what you started out loving.

I think if you look around at your own reading, you’ll see easily-recognized examples of both decisions. There are plenty of successful writers who are pale copies of other successful writers. There are successful writers who are vivid copies of other successful writers. I’m sure there are writers who are vivid copies of unsuccessful writers, but I’ll bet we don’t hear so much about them.

The point-and I’m sure you’ve beaten me there-is that you go down a different path when you do what comes natural. From my vantage point (at a distance), it seems to me that’s not what the book business favors these days.

I’ve written a thriller, ‘Mindbenders’. The people that have read it love it, including respected writers, total strangers and the friends whose judgment I trust-ie, the ones who told me in the past when I put them to sleep. An agent wrote that she thought the book was very good but she couldn’t take me on because she didn’t ‘do’ paranormal. To which my answer was, Perfect. You’re the one I want. Market it as ‘I don’t like paranormal but I like this.’ No vampires, no ghosts. A thriller about people who see a bigger world than the rest of us. But she couldn’t.

That’s not how the business works and the business is poorer for it. And because we want people to see our work, writers pursue the business-and are made poorer by its narrow-mindedness.

When you do what comes natural, you end up between genres, outside genres. You’re writing about people, about life, about what makes you squeal and what makes you squirm. You break ground. That’s where writing ought to go. That’s where readers look to us to take them.

E-books offer that opportunity, for the voices that d0n’t fit the straitjackets the business promotes. That’s why I’m here and why you’ll see most of the vitality in books coming from this direction in the future.

 

Words Have Power

Ted Krever: Writing and other forms of torture Posted on by

The Talmud says words have power, that words exist on the same level as guns and rockets and the disappointment in your lover’s glance that cuts your heart out.

Proof reading Talmud isn't enough

I was taught that as a kid (not the disappointment in the lover’s glance part, maybe, but certainly the rest). Now that I need it, of course, that quote has disappeared off the face of the Earth. Even the all-powerful Google can’t find it, though it offered instead a rabbi (in Texas, no less) who points out that the Hebrew word for words is d’varim while the word for bees is d’vorim. “Words,” he says, “can sting like bees as they rip into the very flesh of our souls.”

And this, my children, is an example of two things: one, why I don’t spend much time in shul anymore (reaching, guy, reaching…) and two, why Google is just like real life, because in both cases, you never get exactly what you expect but you do get a whole lot of comical distractions that keep your mind off whatever it was you originally wanted until you can’t remember what it was and realize it’s too late to keep looking for it anyway, give up in exhaustion and get a sandwich. Or a glass of wine. Or two.

To boil it down: Life=throwing idiotic distractions at you instead of whatever it is you really want (since we never get it, ‘what we want’ remains the most stubborn of fantasies).
Which brings me to my books.

I’ve written several comic romances, a couple darker stories and now I’m writing thrillers. But in my mind, all of them are satirical mysteries. I’m writing about my own time, specifically the late 90’s to present, an era spanning the dotcom bubble, the real estate bubble, 9/11, globalization, the Shock Doctrine, tsunamis, nuclear meltdowns, internet dating, Facebook, Twitter, the rise of religious fundamentalism at home and abroad, TMZ, ‘reality’ television, ignoring the beast of OIL while we argue over whether the government should mandate more-efficient lightbulbs…look at that list and tell me anybody could write about it straight. Not if they’re paying attention…so that’s the satire part.

The mystery is because I resist that tendency of stories to wrap things up. My stories all have endings but most of the endings are beginnings. Which makes me an optimist (another reason I can only approach this world satirically) and a skeptic. There are things in this world beyond facts, Horatio. The meaning and the payoff come in ways that can’t be quantified like gems on a scale. Meaning is elusive, gossamer, changing and transforming as we stupidly try to fix it in amber. Every moment worth living has a little mystery in it and that’s where fiction beats reality hands-down, because it has the freedom to dwell in that realm.

Blah blah. Anyway, a bad introduction is better than none because now, at least, it’s over and we can get down to cases. On to the next mystery. And buy my books—buy two copies of each, they’re cheap (If words really have power, I’ll be rich tomorrow).