A Note on Networking at Malice

This is a tidbit on getting some publication momentum by scoring a review from a famous mystery writer. If I can do it, so can you!

I'm just back to earth from the Malice Domestic Conference in D.C. As an Agatha Award nominee for Best Short Story, I found myself for a brief moment in the company of Peter Lovesey, the Malice Domestic Lifetime Achievement Award recipient. This was planned on my part, devious gal that I am... We swapped email messages prior to Malice. Putting on my cheeky alter-ego persona, I had asked if he would care to read my short story. He was, as I suspected, a gentleman. Yes, came the answer. I sent him my story in a WORD attachment, post haste.

He replied with a comment that I'd like to tattoo on my chest - maybe my forearm for easier reading. At any rate, this is what he wrote:

"Delicious story, Nan. Sharp, witty dialogue, sparky characters and a neatly turned plot. In fairness I must see the others before casting my vote, but yours sets a high standard. Thanks for letting me have this preview. And good luck with it!
~ Peter"

Can you hear me dancing now? Tapping away! I am the proud owner of a credible endorsement of my ability to write. From his lips to an editor or agent's ears! Now to use it in my query letters. (Tee, hee, hee!)

My point? You can make connections for yourself. You don't have to be born under the right stars or happen to save some editor's cat from becoming road kill. Go to conferences. Do your homework and find a Significant Writer who will be at the conference - someone with whom you share some common ground. Have a short story or a few pages that you can offer to send via email, or establish a pitch that works in a crowded gathering. Just be polite. Accomplished writers can turn out to be very approachable. They remember the pain of finding a publisher and/or an agent. And, they can always say "Sorry" if they're not interested.

In the spirit of fair play, I said I would keep Peter's appraisal secret until after the Malice voting. I didn't want to turn the competition into a political-style campaign. Had no desire to sway any votes, except by the merits of my story. I hoped to hear if the story worked for him. And, boy were his comments ever welcomed!

Hope this helps you make some connections and leads to some quotable gold!

That Minotaur Wasn't So Scary

Image from Payton's Dungeon.

Actually, the Beast-in-chief wore a blazer and stylish spectacles. At the MWA NYC monthy chapter meeting this week, I got to converse with writers I know, sit with our own WoM Elaine, and learn some things about St. Martin's Minotaur, part of the Macmillan/St. Martin's mystery fiction behemoth. Their imprint alone puts out about 120 books per year. Andrew Martin (no relation to the saint, but horned god of Minotaur) was there to speak to us, as was executive editor Kelley Ragland, and some other folks who handle editing, administration, publicity (Jessica was sitting next to me), and library sales were scattered around the tables. I didn't hear all the full names often enough to remember with my sieve-like recall. So, forgive me, because I stink as a schmooze hound, and I wasn't avidly collecting cards and networking. I just felt like carousing and soaking up the info with the chicken gravy.

I can accurately report that the Minotaur folks seemed enthusiastic about their work and even more pleasantly, they seem to care a lot about the quality of the manuscripts, cited like a mantra as the sine qua non of getting published. Conveniently, and unlike Providence, it's one part of the process and industry the writer has control over. I also heard the (shocking) advice not to overstretch your marketing efforts online if they're getting in the way of your writing, and that they're willing to see authors build over several books. Immediate blockbusters are not required, though always welcome, of course. All nice to hear, and especially nice for the Minotaur authors present. Given that March 31st has come and gone without a congratulatory phone call, I think I probably did not win the First Crime Novel Contest that Minotaur and MWA co-sponsored this year. So, I'm not in that happy company yet.

Did you get the call? You can tell us. We could seriously rename ourselves the Women of Discretion and also of Mystery, but only after Discretion first. Spill.

The Minotaur guests also didn't much like the talk of "trends" and find it counterproductive to chase them. For what it's worth, if you're an espionage author or foreign author selling U.S. rights, perhaps you're in luck trend-wise. But those categories don't apply to me, so I'd best keep grinding out what I can. It was funny when a writer asked how Minotaur handles touring schedules etc. for their authors with other full-time jobs. The reply was that people have to work out individually what activities will be possible for them, but Minotaur would never decline a good manuscript because an author couldn't tour, and besides, almost all their authors still have day jobs. Welcome to the glamor of crime writing.

They're experimenting with various avenues of online marketing, like many publishers, but it's not clear which strategies are working and the double-investment in traditional approaches as well as the new creates in-house expense and confusion as well as potential. One such new initiative is Moments In Crime, a rotating blog from their huge roster of authors. Andrew Martin said that post-Kindle, e-books did double in sales last year, but that means from tiny number to twice a tiny number. However, audiobooks began like that, too, and have grown to a substantive piece of business today. On the acquisitions side, they deal almost exclusively with agented authors, and it's difficult for a self-published title, even with good sales numbers, to find its way to one of their editors.

If you're an MWA member, in a few days, you'll be able log in and hear the entire Past Meeting as a podcast, but I think those are the high points. If you have other questions about a particular topic of publishing interest I skipped, feel free to ask in the comments. I'll try to remember what was said or make up something that sounds plausible.

Speaking of day jobs: Today, I'm sewing table linens and planning menus and gardening and cleaning for houseguests. Call me Innkeeper. Meanwhile, Elaine is busy, busy with editing deadlines. Laura's manning her trade show booth this weekend. Nan has her own viper's nest of complications to wrestle before Malice Domestic, so I can only hope Terrie and Lois are beaming with pacific contentment somewhere. But I have my doubts. Now that spring is really starting to sproing, it's hauling tail like a lead-footed trucker on white crosses. Hope you're enjoying the breeze in your sails!

Update: In other publishing news, Harper Collins will publish you, but not for money exactly, and retailers can't return surplus. (WSJ article via Roger L. Simon's blog.) But perhaps you'll receive total consciousness on your deathbed, which would be nice.

Don't Care What. Who Do You Write For?

From the amazing Branded in the 80s blog, the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. I hope blogger Shawn will be my peep.


Elaine posted this week about the ever-shifting definitions within genres. As I see it, shelving arrangements are as much fashion as fact, and I know writers who have to check 2 or 3 sections to find themselves. But the purpose of knowing your market as a writer is to help you explain it to agents and editors and readers, to help you hit the bullseye of your story goal better. And I find keeping up with the slapdash scorecards of Hot and Not subgenres only make me confused and dispirited.

When I use the term story goal, I don't mean anything tremendously formal, just the way you'd like readers to feel at the end. Should they love/hate the protagonist, be pleasantly spent from the thrill ride or the laughs, feel like they've just left a bowling alley full of entertaining regulars, have a brooding sense of tragic reality or of difficult justice done? I think once you're far enough in a manuscript, you ought to know what overall effect you hope to achieve, so your editing passes can refine and amplify it. But who is it you're trying to affect?

The category I'm finding most persistently useful as a career-oriented fiction writer is target readership. Who are my people and who else do they read? If I capture that, the publishing types can encode it into whatever slot for the catalog, because by the time I start calling myself "fill-in-the-blank-lit" in a query, that label may be so February. Laura recently posted about finding unusual new ways to reach potential readers. Knowing who readers are means you can better locate them outside the bookstore and library, and better understand how certain agents or publishing approaches may help you reach them. Addressing the crucial question of readership, however, means addressing one of the most common and infuriating assumptions I hear again and again from other aspirants.

Aspiring Writer's Conceit #1: I am writing for all ages, both and mixed genders, all strata of society and anarchy, a tale that translated into every language on the planet can bring enjoyment and enrichment to any intelligent, sentient being of any species currently known or unknown.

Oh sure, we can't assemble five people to agree on the proper preparation and condiments for a hot dog, but I'll say Amen to your lofty claim if you'll do the same for me. Okay, now may we at least admit that establishing our inevitable, global readership requires a beachhead? First, the readers of Ed McBain's police procedurals, for example, then the world.

For my latest project, I've confessed my peeps (with visual evidence) in this post. When I'm standing near people in a line or on the subway, the clothes they're wearing and the media or products they're carrying or discussing tell me whether they're my potential readers. Some of these folks (sadly) enjoy less of the printed prose for leisure than other media. No matter, I still think they're awesome, so I have a comic book and will have a web comic as a portal to my created world. I hope it may lead some of the more prose-phobic to try out a novel of mine someday as well as adding facets and bonus content for those finding the book first. My target readers are probably 18-54, significantly male though I'm not (tricky), and geeks of some niche who like modern technology, games, mysterious histories, and having their brains tickled. They enjoy the absurd and fantastic as a way to play with real-world dilemmas and existential concepts. Robots versus ancient ghosts in an Apocalypse with banana peels.

So, are your peeps buying recyclables or scrapbooking, volunteering at animal shelters or attending concerts, watching Judge Judy or reading biographies in the bathtub? Are they of a certain age or gender? Do they read 2 hardcovers a month or 4 paperbacks a week? Who are their current favorite authors? I'm going on a limb as an unproven quantity here, and welcome any feedback from authors farther down their professional paths. I've spent a lot of time imagining my protagonists and plot, but I believe it's also important to spend time imagining what their consumers might be like. Who are they and what do they value in their reading experience? Then, it'll be more obvious to the many people a writer like me must convince between invention and publication how my final manuscript will delight that readership as well as myself.

A Cozy by Any Other Name . . .

I used to write cozies. No longer. It’s not that I’ve changed what I write. No, what I write has changed names.

That makes me feel better. Knowing this, that is. I thought for a while I had dementia. After all, I’ve been a member of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America on and off for almost 10 years now, have been reading mysteries since about second grade, and started trying to write them in fourth grade. I should know what the different types of mysteries are.

What I’ve always loved about mysteries is the way average people somehow get caught up in a murder in their hometown or workplace and use their specialized knowledge and ingenuity to solve the crime that the local cops are royally botching. I love the interplay between the characters. I love the puzzle. I love the bad guys being caught in the end and the world being once again set right. These books that I love to read and to write were always defined as cozies to me.

Recently, however, I began hearing that the only cozies that have been selling revolve around talking pets or knitting. I knit, but not well enough to write about it. And no matter how much I try to suspend belief, I just can’t seem to suspend it enough to take a talking cat seriously.

Then a week or two ago, I learned that the definition of cozies has become much narrower. Today, they’re almost always humorous. They generally have a female sleuth. They tend to have pets, and if they don’t, you don’t have a problem imagining shy pets hiding behind all the furniture. And they all have hooks, or gimmicks, whether it’s the sleuth’s profession, hobby, or something else that lends itself to great cover art and promotional items.

Originally, a cozy was a mystery of the type written by Agatha Christie. These are now called traditional mysteries. St. Martin’s Press, in its description of the manuscripts eligible for its Malice Domestic Competition, offers the best description:

1. Murder or another serious crime is at the heart of the story, and emphasis is on the solution rather than the details of the crime.
2. Whatever violence is necessarily involved should be neither excessive nor gratuitously detailed, nor is there to be explicit sex.
3. The crime is an extraordinary event in the lives of the characters.
4. The principal characters are people whom the reader might not like, but would be interested in knowing.
5. The suspects and the victims should know each other.
6. There are a limited number of suspects, each of whom has a credible motive and reasonable opportunity to have committed the crime.
7. The person who solves the crime is the central character.
8. The “detective” is an amateur, or, if a professional (private investigator, police officer) is not hardboiled and is as fully developed as the other characters.
9. The detective may find him or herself in serious peril, but he or she does not get beaten up to any serious extent.
10. All of the cast represent themselves as individuals, rather than large impersonal institutions like a national government, the Mafia, the CIA, etc.

Cozies, therefore, would seem to be a type of traditional mystery. Not all traditional mysteries are cozies, however.

In the end, though, I’m not going to stress over what subgenre my book falls into. Just like so many other things in our world, the list of mystery subgenres will continue to evolve and the definitions of many of the subgenres will continue to change. I’ll just write my book the way it needs to be written and pick the subgenre that best fits it when I’m ready to begin sending it out. And when it’s published, it’ll say “Mystery” on the spine and the back cover, the sales and publicity people will call it a mystery, the bookstores will shelve it in the mystery section, and the reviewers will deem it a “brilliant introduction to a new mystery series.” Only my talking cats and I will know it’s a traditional mystery. Or maybe a cozy again.

Get Your Murder Here!

Due to some Blogger issues, I can't put this in the sidebar at the moment. I hope once Blogger gets working again, I will be able to. But in honor of her Agatha nomination, Nan Higginson's story, Casino Gamble can be downloaded for free by clicking this link: Casino Gamble.pdf.

Simple, Easy, Effective, and Free

We’ve been talking a lot about promotion lately. We’ve touched on websites, giveaways, book tours, and social networking of all kinds. But all these things involve work, and most also take money. That’s no reason to skip doing them, of course, and I highly recommend doing all of them. But there’s also a form of promotion that’s simple in format, easy to set up, extremely effective, and 100-percent free. Even better, it’s available to everyone with an email address, and it allows you to reach everyone you ever send an email to. If you belong to any discussion lists, such as Yahoo groups, that can be a lot of people.

What am I talking about? Signature lines―the running footers on emails. Called sig lines for short, they can be set up to provide anything from just your name to a full résumé of your accomplishments. Some even present elaborate pieces of “artwork.” Who hasn’t gotten an email with a three-inch-tall slash-and-caret angel at the bottom?

I use a number of sig lines, a different one for each of my email addresses, each of which serves a different purpose. For my business email, I have a block signature consisting of five lines: my full name and the name of my business, what I do (in my case, “manuscript editing and production”), my business website address, my business email address (yes, it’s up in the header, but not everyone realizes that), and my business phone number. Does that sound like a business card? You got it! Whenever I send a business email, this “electronic business card” goes with it, much the way I drop paper business cards into envelopes before sending things by snail mail. If my email is saved, my contact information is always just a mouse click away.

While I’m more modest with my personal email, I also don’t let any opportunities slip by. I don’t clutter it up with a full business card of information, but I do present my business website address and the address to reach this blog. Since the sig line can be easily edited, I can reverse the order of those two lines or delete one or both, depending on who the recipient is.

For my writing-related email, I don’t use my name at all. Instead, I have a motto: “Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.” This quote from Jules de Gaultier just struck my fancy one day. But while I love that quote and use it in other places, too, I hope I’ll be changing my writing sig line in the very near future. I’m thinking of something along the lines of:

Elaine Will Sparber
www.womenofmystery.net
SPEAKING OF MURDER, Hotsy Totsy Press (coming to bookstores tomorrow)

Sounds good to me!

Short Stuff Sticker Shock

Allow me to hie to my fainting couch like Madame Recamier.

If hardcover prices don't already make you a little woozy in your weejuns, here's the latest wrinkle in softies, courtesy of my local drug store.

As I'm enviously prone to do, I was browsing the widely available, ergo widely read, book and magazine titles at a major chain. I spied a new (to me) title by a bestselling author of whom I am a sincere admirer, if less ardent in recent years. I noticed it wasn't very thick when I picked it up, but I don't always mind a quick read. I browsed the back cover. Still fine. I flipped inside for a peek at a random page in the thick of things (my preference over first or last pages). The text was HUGE, relatively speaking. It was at least 12 point font, but I'm betting more like 13 or 14. For weak-eyed readers, this will be welcome, but it wasn't stickered as one of those easy-to-read versions. Given the thickness of the book, I found myself curious, and started counting rows and words.

Keeping in mind that standard manuscript format is 250 words/page and that's how we typically estimate finished lengths in pages for agents and editors, etc, here's what I found in my admittedly non-comprehensive riffling and counting:

This title's pages were 25 lines long. Pretty standard, check.
The lengths of margin-to-margin lines ranged from 6 words to just one I counted with 11, and the majority come in at more like 7 words.
This got me to a generous average of 175 words/page on full pages.
There were 275 numbered pages.
This calculates to slightly over 48,000 words.

Now, that's an unrealistic maximum, because this book has LOTS of shorter pages due to pithy chunks of dialogue and the half-page chapter beginnings and partial-page chapter endings. As I recall it now (and forgot to note specifically, drat!), there were more than twenty chapters and some almost blank and numbered back pages. I think it's no grinchiness to say the book is, in fact, much closer to 40,000 words, about half of what I expect in a small paperback, and is still priced at the standard $6.99 mass market price.

I've since checked online, and the hardcover of this comes in at 176 pages, so the word/page count in that edition probably comes closer to the standard 250/page, but what do you think about buying a non-illustrated, series hardcover of that length for the $17.95 list?

I believe readers can and will judge whether they think it's worth it. I'm not calling anyone out, but let no one tell you the long-form short story or novella's a dead form. You just can't call it that openly, and you need a reader base so hungry for content that they won't squeal at half-servings.

Is this a trend? Do you know others besides the title I saw?

Thinking Inside The Box

In the comments section of a recent post, we began a discussion that bears bringing to the foreground, the question of what kinds of promotional items readers might find desirable (other than copies of your book, of course).

Terrie mentions giving away Yankees items because her short story in Murder New York Style has a large "Yankees" component. Clare mentions that many authors are auctioning off the ability to name characters, etc, in forthcoming books.

The picture here is of a new item I have in my store. (For detailed pictures of the parts of the set, see the product description.) I sell a lot of floral beads. I mean a LOT. And trying to find a fresh, new idea in floral beads is a challenge. But I love Kate Collins' frothy flowershop mysteries, and they seemed a natural match to my flower beads. Luckily, Kate agreed and signed six books for me to use in the project. But a book-bead combination seemed incomplete, so I added some matching silk ribbon along with "findings" for making a pendant, a bookmark, whatever. UPDATE: This sold within 24 hours to a woman who hangs out on the jewelry boards to which I belong. She's never bought anything from me before, nor has she read Kate's books, so with luck she'll like both our work!

Because regardless of what anyone in the publishing industry may think, I know that beaders are readers. And I'm looking to capitalize on the fact that they're looking for something new, both in beads and in books.

But I know my audience. I know I have to keep my price down a bit. Why? Because the people who buy this set will likely add their own talent, make some fabulous piece of jewelry, and then sell the jewelry with the book, and they have to be able to make a profit on that.

So, with luck, I hope several people will benefit from this venture: I hope to attract new customers and keep my customers who are looking for something new coming back for more, I hope to garner Kate a few new readers, I hope some jewelry artisans will be able to create unique items for their customers, and that, in the end, six people will end up with truly unique presents they buy for themselves or receive from others.

So I've been thinking about cross-promotion, and what unusual audiences a writer might find for her work. What's "inside the box" of your book? When you think about marketing, can you think of a group that might not normally be tapped who might be interested in your work? How can you get your novel into their hands, your name on their lips? (But keep this post from Heather Webber in mind: just because there's gardening in your book doesn't mean gardening clubs are your audience!)

"Niche" or "hobby" books, particularly cozies, have more obvious markets. But with work, I figure there has to be a way to find "different" markets for other kinds of books, too. So how about it, folks? Think inside your book...Where would you put your book that's not the standard bookstore aisle?

Anti-Social Networking

Network By Design
Most of you have probably gleaned from my various posts that I am not a big fan of "social networking" in the mode of MySpace or Facebook, especially not for authors who are trying to sell their books. I was, therefore, fascinated by this article in the Register, and this one on Creative Capital, both based on the same set of numbers, which indicate that the biggies in the social networking arena are growing slowly in the areas in which they are not actively shrinking. From Creative Capital:

Since December 2006, when MySpace engagement peaked at about 234 minutes spent per visitor, time spent on the site has dropped consistently throughout the year. In December, time spent per visitor saw its biggest month-to-month drop, of about 8.5%, to 179 minutes per visitor per month, down from 196 minutes in November. That equates to a 24% year-over-year drop.

Both MySpace and FaceBook are non-targeted networks. That is, people join them for general stuff. Members may self-select into groups based on hobbies, favorite activities, whatever, but the larger "network" is general.

Then there are the targeted networks. Daniel Hatadi created the targeted social network CrimeSpace on the general social networking site Ning. Crimespace is for those who like to read--and write--crime fiction. It has 1233 members, all of whom, presumably, are interested in the kinds of things we Women of Mystery like, too.

Targeted even more specifically are sites like Redroom, where in order to get your page "activated", you have to be a published author. Anyone can sign up for an account, though, so I suppose the "social network" aspect could be for readers as well, though I can't see how it would have a lot of appeal.

Network As Side-Benefit
For myself, I infinitely prefer sites where "social networking" takes place as a by-product. That is, the site is designed for some other purpose. For example, I belong to a number of forums for my day job like the Creative Wire Jewelry forum on Delphi. Long before the age of the "social networking site," there were bulletin board services, and these forums are holdovers from that style of communication. These are social networking at their most basic because they were really designed to be "social," not to help people "network."

You can't put your "author page" on a forum site the way you can on a social network site, but you don't need to. Why not? Because on a forum site, people know you by what you post. They learn who you are slowly. There's no Blatant Self-Promotion allowed, and although we all show our work and buy from each other, that's a side benefit of the forum, not its focus.

I also belong to LibraryThing. LibraryThing allows you to catalog your books online (and call your library from your cell phone in order to see whether you have already read that book you're pretty sure is a re-release....). You can rate books, review them, and--important to me--tag them. You can also subscribe to tag feeds. So whenever someone tags a book in their library as "cozy," my RSS reader lets me know, so I can see whether I've read it, might want to read it, whatever.

LibraryThing does have a section of forums, where people discuss all kinds of things. And you can search for people who have similar libraries to yours, make them your friends, etc. But mostly, it's about the books. The social network aspect is a sideline, so, no, it's not where you could put your author page. (Though if you are an author, you should become a "LibraryThing author" and tag your books so you know that geeks like me, who are getting the feeds, will be sure to know about your books! Since this takes all of two minutes--or five if you have a whole lot of books to pimp promote--you won't have put out a lot of effort for no measurable reward even if it doesn't sell a single book for you.)

And, of course, there's this blog. I didn't start blogging for promotion--I have nothing to promote--but it's certainly social, and we've created, I hope, a network. But a blog isn't a homepage, either. It's not enough for an author just to have a blog, s/he has to have a web page as well.

Home Salty Home
Why might you want to put your author page on a site like CrimeSpace, rather than just creating it out in the middle of the Web on its own? I'm probably the wrong person to ask. The idea is that if you put it up somewhere people are already going, they're more apt to see it. If they're already hanging out looking at author profiles, they'll be more receptive to yours.

Well, okay. That certainly worked for Wendy's, whose startup marketing strategy was to place a Wendy's near every McDonald's on the theory that if people wanted fast food, they wanted fast food.

Unfortunately, as every strip mall in existence illustrates, where there's a Wendy's and a McDonald's, there's also a Burger King, a Taco Bell.... The "noise" can become a bit overwhelming. How do you make yourself heard over the din, especially since most social networking sites strictly limit the alterations you can make on your page? The sites want a uniform look, like a housing development, in order to give visitors a sense of "place". Cruise around Redroom for a while. You may not know the author whose page you find yourself on, but you'll know you haven't left Redroom's site.

For many, many surfers, that sense of place is an important one. The question is, are your readers that kind of surfer? Are readers, in general, different from surfers of other types?

I think they probably are. I'm not at all sure how they differ, but I am pretty sure they do. Even genre-to-genre, I am willing to bet you'd find differences in the Internet habits of readers.

But as I struggle to figure out what to do for my own author page, I am more than willing to be educated--have you found success in formal social networking sites? What did it cost in terms of time, energy, upkeep? What do you like or dislike about your own site? I'd love to be proven wrong about social networking...there's an attractive aspect to the ease with which one can set up a page on those sites.

The Murky Demimonde

The title belongs to Slate. The image to Tairan Zhang.

Can't remember if I ever posted this, but it's an interesting article by Garth Risk Hallberg on Amazon's top reviewers, including the speed-reading and plot-summarizing icon Harriet Klausner.

Who Hates Sophomores?

Shuh! No fair! As if!

Gawker explains how a debut author's first book's can affect how and where B & N stocks the second.

Key concept: secret algorithms
<twiddles magic fingers>

Sample Hook?

At our January SinC, NY/TriState meeting's open mic session, Laura read her phenomenal hook for her work in progress. That night she posted it on our blog. It was a slam-dunk success. In our flurry of comments, Clare2e said she'd post hers if I posted mine.

Game on!

Only this comes with the news that my moment at the mic was not a slam dunk. More like the first two kicks by Lawrence Tynes at last night's football game - you might know the ones I'm talking about... Giants vs Packers, and all that.

Clare noted that it's easier to read with your eyes than with your ears. That says a lot about what can happen at a book signing when the opening gambit hasn't been pre-read by the attendees. Hmmm.

So, I'm offering up the beginning of my work-in-rewrite. Sure would like to hear comments on whether the writing's clear. It might not be your cuppa tea, but does it set a clear image? One that MIGHT eventually fall into the right agent's lap?

The working title: BUSTY BIGGS AND THE RUNAWAY DEATH (Apologies for the length. Stop reading whenever you feel like it.)

CHAPTER ONE: UNEXPECTED PACKAGE

Titillation is a good thing. Busty was certain of that. Living proof of that. All she needed was an innocent whiff of testosterone, a chance to flirt and she’d be good to go. All God’s children need a taste of the apple now and then. That pheromone boost sharpens wits and makes everything seem possible. So where was Charlie when she needed him?

The next best thing was a chocolate pill. Melt in your mouth, not in your hand. Busty fished one out of her dancer’s satchel. Her stash of M&M’s was running low. Not a good sign. She tried to ignore the problem at hand: the snarky kid sitting at the empty Ale House bar, chomping a mega-burger, avoiding all eye contact. Busty checked her watch again. The damn silent treatment wasn’t working on the kid. Miss Dixie should have used the burger as bait. Held the food until the kid opened up. Thirty minutes and counting before the locals arrived, looking for their after-work beer. And, dammit, the chocolate pill wasn’t working.

The kid looked to be maybe nineteen, a worn out nineteen. No visible sign of drugs or withdrawal, at least not at the moment. The stud in her tongue showed when she opened wide for another bite, but Busty saw no other piercings. No visible tattoos. The kid’s hooded sweatshirt and jeans hung limp on her bony frame. Her half-empty backpack was jammed between her worn-out sneakers and the brass foot rail. She was a tightly kept secret. How many secrets was she carrying?

The kid was on the run. No doubt. Needed help. Obvious. But how much protection did she need? Was she running solo, or was she part of the Native underground, escaping from an abuser who had insider connections – running from someone with power and money and an appetite for violence?

Did this kid need to be tucked deep in the secret chamber?

Busty drummed her red nails on the worn bar. Silent treatment. Crap.

The soulful voice of Mahalia Jackson drowned out conversation that didn’t exist. With blinds down and work lights on, the bar was beginning to show its age. Like Busty. It needed a face lift, but the local crowd loved it. Loved it like their lumpy old recliner. Maybe they’d feel that way about Busty when she got old and lumpy. If she lived that long. If this snarky kid didn’t cause a ruptured aneurism before then. Busty tried for calming thoughts. She looked to Miss Dixie for silent support.

Usually Miss Dixie sang along with Mahalia while prepping the bar, red wig bobbing with the gospel music. But not today. Today the old dancer stood silent behind the counter, her wig askew, studying the kid.

The waif shifted on her stool. She stared at Busty from behind her screen of splotchy bleached bangs. “You really named Busty? Busty Biggs? You ain’t all that big.” She twitched her thumb toward Busty’s chest. “I’ve seen bigger. That’s for sure.”

Busty was so startled that she laughed out loud. The girl had a set of balls after all. Biting the hand that fed her! The last thing Busty expected. Friggin’ amazing. “What’s it to you?”

Miss Dixie leaned across the bar as if sharing a secret with the kid. “That’s the trouble with nicknames like Busty’s. They’re as hard to shake as a stalker.” Her southern drawl pushed the word “stalker.”

The girl stopped chewing for a nanosecond. Busty noticed. Miss Dixie pressed on. “I bet you know something about stalkers.”

The waif stuffed more burger into her tight mouth. Dixie’s special sauce dribbled down her chin. She swiped at it with her napkin and kept chewing.

Do We Need to Move?

Looking for your audience? Wanna be closer to your readers? How about property shopping based upon book sales, etc.?

The annual rankings of the "most literate cities" are out from Central Connecticut State University, accounting for per capita booksellers; educational attainment; internet resources; library resources; newspaper circulation; and periodical publications.

These cities led the per capita bookstores list:
1 Seattle, WA
2 San Francisco, CA
3 Minneapolis, MN
3 Cincinnati, OH
5 St. Louis, MO
6 Portland, OR
7 Pittsburgh, PA
8 St. Paul, MN
9 Cleveland, OH
10 Washington,
10 Denver, CO

Tangled in the Web

We've taken many a fantasy trip into the future of publishing here lately. Assuming, however, that people continue to read books in some form or other, the question of how to make sure those readers know about--and invest in--our books is vitally important. When I first approached the other Women of Mystery about starting a blog, I did so because every editor and agent I'd spoken to said the same thing: authors, even unpublished authors, need to have web presences.

This is not news to me. For my "day job," I make and sell glass beads, and in retail, too, you need to have a web presence. With one, enormous exception.

No web page is better than a bad one.

"That's not what I wanted to hear."

I know, and I am sorry. And I have more bad news: just like you can't ask your friends to tell you what's wrong with your writing, you can't ask them to tell you what's wrong with your website. First of all, they may not know. For example, if your site is heavy on the graphics or Flash animations and your friends are all geeky types running high speed connections, they may not even realize that some people will leave your site without reading a word because the images take so long to load.

And then there's the question of text. You're a writer, so your site will probably have a lot of text on it. But studies have shown that people don't read text on a web page the same way they read it on paper.

In fact, with the exception of those passages of text you're using directly from your book, those teasers tempting readers to go out and buy the book, the writing on your website will probably bear no similarity to the deathless prose of your novel whatsoever.

People like to see lots of open space on web pages. Short paragraphs, bullet points, text that can be easily skimmed, that's what people want from a web page.

But wait...there's more. They want to be able to go to your web page by using your name. So if the domain associated with your name isn't taken, get it now. You don't have to use it right away, but you don't want someone else to take it while you're busy figuring out what you want to be when you grow up!

"I was going to use MySpace."

I'm not saying you can't, since it's easy enough to "point" one domain to another. [For example, if you go look at my temporary, under construction site at laurakramarsky.com, you're actually going to a subdirectory of my eCommerce website at http://torchsongsglassworks.com/laurakramarsky/ , but the pointer takes you directly there so you don't see. -edit: this site is down for a while while I decide what name I will be using for publication]

But before you go set up your MySpace page, consider whether that's what you want. Recently, a discussion thread on a list to which I belong debated the relative merits of gather.com and myspace.com. I have to say, nothing I read made me even slightly interested in joining either "community." A couple of people mentioned that their participation in those sites had resulted in book sales, but it sure sounded like a lot of work for relatively little reward. (I can't help it--because I run my own business, I'm always doing cost-benefit analyses, and it was really hard for me to stay out of that discussion.)

And then there's the question of professionalism. Do you really want your web "home" somewhere that the first thing people see at the top of the page or all along one side is a banner ad over which you have no control? What if the sponsor of the day turns out to be a company promoting something you stand wholeheartedly against? (Not to mention the question of having one's hosting site in the news weekly because of some pedophile or the likes of Lori Drew.)

"I can't afford a fancy web design."

And you don't need one. In fact, simpler without ads is far better than fancier with ads. I've said this before, when talking about the "numbers" trap--the desperate counting of website "hits" without considering the cost-benefit ratio of gaining those hits. Rather than thinking of your website as something to attract new readers, think of it as a way to keep in touch with readers you already have. Those readers are your best bets for finding a new audience--you need to keep them up to date so they know when to tell all their friends you're coming out with a new book!

They have to be able to say to a friend at a cocktail party "oh, you can find her website at..." and not forget the name of your site. They have to know their friends won't be freaked out by the kind of things you say on your site, which probably means you should steer clear of majorly controversial topics on your website unless they are things you tackle in your books (and is another good reason not to have ads you can't control on your site). And they have to know that their friends, who listen to books on tape (or on CD, or on their iPods) because their eyes aren't so great, will be able to read your site.

"Everyone says you're supposed to use your site to make connections."

I hate to sound like your mother, but if everyone said it was cool to jump off a bridge, would you do it? If you're not comfortable "making connections" online, joining a "myspace" group won't help.

You want to make your connections however best suits your personality and use your website to keep them. If you make new ones through the web, that's great, but if you set the goal at selling books and finding new readers, you're going to cause yourself a lot of angst. Because you're always, always going to be trying this thing and that, wasting your time attempting to determine whether various tactics are paying off.

Believe me when I tell you that you have the connections and you'll make more as you research and write your books. If you're feeling "unconnected," as if there's no audience for your book, you're much better off considering why that is rather than trying to correct it with an online shot of some kind.

"So I just stick up a web page and leave it there? That's it?"

Nope. How many books are you planning on cranking out this year? Did you try NaNoWriMo? Did you write a complete novel, edited and perfect in the month of November?

No? Me, either. So I won't be churning out twelve books a year, which means my readers might get a chance to forget I exist. I can't let that happen. So I have this blog, and eventually I'll get my author site up.

(But no spamming! Donna Andrews--whose website exemplifies simple, effective design--has a great post on why you don't send email to people who don't ask for it over on the Sisters in Crime blog.)

Look, you wrote a book. And you're planning on writing more. You can commit to writing a post once a week. Heck, give your readers tastes...commit to putting a paragraph up on your site every Monday. By the time your book gets into bookstores, your readers will be salivating over the full text.

Or don't. Do whatever makes you feel comfortable; if maintaining your web presence is a chore, it's going to show. Writing is hard work. Let the web stuff go slow and easy.

Delivering a Strike for Futurism

I got the image here. No idea of the original source.

I've got big to-dos yet to accomplish today, but squirmy thoughts have birthed in my fevered brain during the current WGA strike. I can't help drawing comparisons to the traders in tree-meat, aka the traditional book publishing industry. See what you think. [...snips and editorial asides mine]:

1) Marc Andreeson writes about Rebuilding Hollywood in Silicon Valley's Image.

...I think the TV and movie industry is at a turning point where things could go either way -- they could repeat the critical error of the music industry and permanently alienate their customer base; or they could get it together and create viable models for the future that make consumers happy and make money...

The classic Hollywood economic model is built around the existence of a few very large companies -- studios -- that dominate production, marketing, and distribution...Historically, marketing and distribution of entertainment properties [like the once-significant costs of printing books] has been extremely expensive...Because of that, those few very large companies -- studios [publishers]-- have been bottlenecks. If you are talent -- writers, actors, directors -- you have to deal with the studios because otherwise you can never bring anything to market...As a consequence, talent gets paid like hired guns, not owners. [Most book authors do have the promise of royalties, but ask them about the Byzantine, even Iron-Age accounting, and how much that glacier-speed harvesting yields for those other than bestsellers.]

2) From Andreeson's post Suicide by Strike.

...You're faced with a massive, once-in-a-lifetime shift in mainstream consumer behavior from traditional mass media, including film and television, to new activities that you do not control: the Internet, social networking, user-generated content, mobile services, video games. It's been snowballing since the mid 90's, for like 12 years -- 12 years of denial and obfuscation -- but it's really rolling fast now....

...And the consumers you rely upon for revenue are so frustrated with your company's inability to supply them with what they want, when they want it, that digital piracy of your content has become mainstream and socially acceptable behavior practically overnight...And your company's culture is not prepared to deal with the shift.

Your company was founded 50 or 80 or 100 or 150 years ago by different people in a different time, and the overwhelming majority of your people now -- smart and well-meaning managers and bureaucrats, but still managers and bureaucrats -- have to be retrained and reoriented toward entrepreneurial thinking in a viciously dynamic and startlingly fast-changing world not of your, or their, creation....

3) Rob Long, who I've referenced here before, has a post called Rebuild or Disrupt (which tipped me to Andreeson's, tx!) where he breaks down the expense of even participating in television enough to earn failure, a 98% probability. [a percentage as bad as earning out your advance. ]

These are a few among the many relevant analogs to today's book publishing as I understand it.

Traditional publishing has high overheads, low margins, and some self-destructive practices. Despite its collective experience and the seductively august legacy conveyed to most of us by the brands, it's not consistently able to identify what readers will enjoy enough to buy. Instead, it spends ever more time acquiring reprint rights to sales-tested content, sometimes from smaller, more focused and entrepreneurial houses. Having lost faith in its own judgment, steering decisions become activities in consensus, making it less likely to decide in favor of the innovative and what might become black swan megasellers. It is on the trailing (if not the kicking-and-screaming) edge of technology and actively resists new venues. It's poised for someone to eat its expensed lunch while it grouses about the illegitimacy of the upstarts. And now's when I plug in my crystal ball, because I'm optimistic about the opportunities inherent in such chaos.

I love books. LOVE 'EM! That said, I think it likely that the hardcover market as we know it will continue to diminish. However, exquisitely-crafted hardbacks will blossom as specialties, collaborations between authors and illustrators and bookbinding artists. Hardcovers will become ever more precious, limited-edition items with extensive extras (like DVDs offer), made for appreciators of the objects and memorabilia as much as the prose.

Cheap, robust, good-looking paperbacks with some form of rapid-delivery will continue to proliferate on the strength of their content and the easy durability of the form factor. Big publishing controls a lot of content, so it would have made sense that they'd develop some decently-designed electronic reader paving new avenues of profit to their backlists. Well, no. They haven't gotten in front of this challenge any better than the recording industry anticipated the pesky Napster, itself several years behind the popular rips and downloads on usenet boards. Someone-- my bet's on the tech-savvy, entrepreneurial sci-fi crowd or a marketing/self-help guru-- will develop the killer app to connect readers directly to their instant (or almost instant) content that's simple, intuitive, and fun to browse. One might argue that Amazon is this already, and I like the review feature, but it's still a product middleman. With new attacks on the affiliate relationships through taxation, like in blissfully confiscatory New York, it doesn't provide a much better shake for authors' profit-sharing.

With a friendly, solid, trustworthy direct interface, some other nimble entity will partner-up or hit up a venture capitalist to finally make the electronic reader/digital medium that works harmoniously and makes us all go, "Duh! No wonder they never took off before. Of course, that's the best way to design it! I must have one!" Bookstores will continue to exist, I believe and thank heavens for them, but will operate especially in rarities, niche specialties, and/or as friendly, non-bar gathering places and event venues. (One chain location I knew could've colored its P&L black just by charging carpet-rent for its 'after-school program.' See other examples here.)

Writers can become again the proprietors of their own cottage industries. Sure, it's scarier than just passing off your manuscript to someone who's supposed to know better than you and then cut you a check. However, tools and forums will develop as we help each other through it, and I do believe more fiction writers will be able to profit more amply from their work by selling directly to and expanding their unique readerships.

Now, my head hurts. Besides, it's your turn to point out where I'm full of bilgewater.

NaNo and the New Friday Feature?

I know I've mentioned this in the comments, but I'm pledged to NaNoWriMo this month for what I hope will be my own 50,000 words in November. This year, something like 90,000 folks signed up for the free, bragging-rights challenge. Today, our cumulative, self-reported word count is now up to 295 million!

Some people wonder about the quality of work generated by such an exercise. I understand, but quality's not the primary goal here, though flashes of brilliance always occur. The goal is to get involved, excited, and committed to this unique act of creation. If nothing else, the multitudes involved become more passionate readers, and that helps us all. And because I despise my first drafts, churning through them with a cheery scrum at my back is preferable to solitary misery. The MS my agent is trying to sell now is one whose first draft I finished during my first NaNo, and I hope to repeat the feat. NaNo demands that writers loosen up enough to be willing to generate garbage, but, outrunning your headlights and speeding across the chasms allows for unexpected wonders to happen, too. One feature this year is a weekly pep talk from a pro to our inbox. Here's the first:

When you sit down to begin that novel of yours, the first thing you might want to do is toss a handful of powdered napalm over both shoulders---so as to dispense with any and all of your old writing teachers, the ones whose ghosts surely will be hovering there, saying such things as, "Adverbs should never be...", or "A novel is supposed to convey...", et cetera. Enough! Ye literary bureaucrats, vamoose!

Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works. Ah, but how can you know if it's working? The truth is, you can't always know (I nearly burned my first novel a dozen times, and it's still in print after 35 years), you just have to sense it, feel it, trust it. It's intuitive, and that peculiar brand of intuition is a gift from the gods. Obviously, most people have received a different package altogether, but until you undo the ribbons you can never be sure.

As the great Nelson Algren once said, “Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much.” Most really good fiction is compelled into being. It comes from a kind of uncalculated innocence. You need not have your ending in mind before you commence. Indeed, you need not be certain of exactly what's going to transpire on page 2. If you know the whole story in advance, your novel is probably dead before you begin it. Give it some room to breathe, to change direction, to surprise you. Writing a novel is not so much a project as a journey, a voyage, an adventure.

A topic is necessary, of course; a theme, a general sense of the nexus of effects you'd like your narrative to ultimately produce. Beyond that, you simply pack your imagination, your sense of humor, a character or two, and your personal world view into a little canoe, push it out onto the vast dark river, and see where the currents take you. And should you ever think you hear the sound of dangerous rapids around the next bend, hey, hang on, tighten your focus, and keep paddling---because now you're really writing, baby! This is the best part.

It's a bit like being out of control and totally in charge, simultaneously. If that seems tricky, well, it's a tricky business. Try it. It'll drive you crazy. And you'll love it.

Tom Robbins

Shall we declare Fridays a day when we can all post updates about what we've been doing in the comments? That might include very-official things like actually writing works-in-progress or activities related to publishing. And Great! But, as far as I'm concerned, it might also be: mulling over an idea that's still percolating; reading or watching something inspiring (or envy-inducing); researching; keeping a personal journal or blogging; perhaps taking the necessary time and space to clear the cobwebs between efforts; even handling the peskiness of "real-life", so you can clear the decks for writing later. For so many of us, writing demands much but probably doesn't pay the mortgage (yet- stay hopeful). Feel free to stretch the definitions, and tell us what you've done for your writerly self this week.

Alaska! Bouchercon 2007

We just got back from Anchorage and a very successful Bouchercon 2007. It was fun. It was interesting. And it was full of contradictions. Here's the brief summary:

Under-attended -- boo

Very friendly folks -- yay

A little too rah-rah Alaska, rather than welcome world -- boo

The 1-day 26-glacier cruise was phenomenal -- yay

The book room failed to stock my book, LADYKILLER -- boo

I gave out dozens of bookmarks and many readers promised to order it -- yay

The hotel didn't have internet connection, even in the business center -- boo

We met nearly everyone there -- yay

Hotel bar small, understaffed and woefully inadequate -- boo

Drinks very cheap -- yay

Strange pink sauce on entrees at banquet -- boo

The band was great -- yay

Anyhow, it was Northern Exposure meets So You Think You Can Dance?

On balance, I'm glad I went, but am looking forward to Baltimore!

Author Site

This is a question more than an actual post.

I've been thinking lately about what would be necessary in an author site. In part, this is because I am designing one for my sister-in-law, whose non-fiction book on wedding etiquette comes out in February. (Just in time for those planning summer weddings.) Why is it so much easier to concentrate on other people's work than your own?

But still, even though non-fiction sites are very different from fiction ones, putting hers together has me thinking about my own. What's necessary in an author site? A couple of things she and I discussed (and this assumes it's your first book; if you have more books, you'll want the front page to reflect that):

About the book:
- media and reviews
- a buy it now link
- excerpts (should these be in the media section?)

About the author:
- bio
- contact information
- schedule/appearances

Blog, if you have one. (And it's easy enough to put a link to a group blog, if that's what you participate in. And if you only want your blog link to go to *your* posts, that's fairly easy, too.)

How about you guys? What do you think a site should have or should not have?

Black Swans and Rats: Mystery's Future is Now

No, it's not Nessie, but a creature once likewise thought to be imaginary. Image via Angie Outlaw.

Today is a solemn anniversary, the anniversary of a previously unimaginable event that, itself, has been therefore labeled a black swan. But I can't compete or even know what to express, so, having had my moments of hard-swallowing silence, I'd like to highlight another anniversary of sorts, not 6 years ago, but 20.

I think most of us might agree that Big-Imprint genre publishing is broken, or at least bent. Aside from worrying for our own careers, fledgling though they may be, we see authors we love to buy and read getting dropped by publishers while the most craptastic shinola is pimped like it's the next Sherlock. For myself, I believe this has created not only dire circumstances, but more importantly, opportunities for those editorially consistent and selective small presses who are pleased to make money on steadily performing midlist titles rather than always hunting the elusive blockbuster.

[Additional Background if you like: Regarding one-in-a-million blockbusters, those hard-to-predict occurrences of high impact also philosophically named black swans, I've enjoyed reading a free online book titled On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile. Author Michael Allen, who's also known as the Grumpy Old Bookman, has written a monograph of sorts to explain why conglomerate publishing has proven so hapless at manufacturing (or even recognizing) blockbusters and how their nevertheless unflagging obsession has hurt them.]

It was with those thoughts simmering that I read Jim Huang's recent post on the state of mystery publishing, written after his 20 years in the mystery bookselling business. I know some other, bigger blogs have batted this one around, but we haven't yet here, and I think it deserves the attention and consideration, especially from writers like us just now trying to plant our flags in this shifting soil. The essay brings up a few, immediate questions for me, and I'd love to know how your answers tally with Jim's findings and my own opinions (in italics).

1) Are series worth loving what you seek as a reader?
Often, but not exclusively. I do always seek out authors I've previously enjoyed.

2) Would you cultivate loyalty to an imprint and/or store that was conspicuously dedicated to meeting that need?
I have local booksellers I do trust for recommendations, though I'll miss Bonnie and Joe- sniff. I'd also love to be able to trust a publisher's name on the spine enough to feel good about experimenting with their new authors. I think Hard Case Crime and Soho Crime exemplify the kind of tight focus on certain flavors of books that allow readers to take those kinds of chances with confidence. I want to know when I do love a new series that I won't get dumped or delayed after a single book, and I want better marketing clarity in explaining the type of experience I'm buying, so I can competently choose what suits my mood. I think all that is as great for new talent as it is for readers.

3) Do you think the perpetuation of the bread-and-butter midlist and the "hit factories" are essential opposition?
Yep, even moreso as some of the big houses' specialized sub-imprints with tighter aesthetics got dismantled and reabsorbed into the motherships.

What's your vote and your prognosis?