Actress Promo Report

Zestful Blog Post #150

Thought you might be interested in some facts and figures today. Over last weekend and into this week I put The Actress up for free on Amazon Kindle, for the full 5-day period allowed, from Friday through Tuesday. Initially I thought I’d just make it free through Sunday (Oscar) night, but decided to leave it up the whole time, because it was doing so well.

First, context. My fiction is all in the Amazon ‘Select’ program, meaning the books are only available in e-book form on Amazon Kindle. The benefits, so far, are worth it to me. The vast majority of e-books are sold on Amazon, and if your books are in the Select program, you get more exposure and more money. This isn’t necessarily meant to be a ringing endorsement of the program, it’s just to explain why I, an author who values simplicity, am sticking with it for now. Your ‘Select’ books can be read for ‘free’ by readers who have signed up for Kindle Unlimited or KU (they pay $9.95 per month for unlimited access), and for actual free by readers who own a Kindle device (via the Kindle Owners Lending Library, or KOLL).

Free is good. You reach readers this way who wouldn’t necessarily find and buy your books on their own. The immediate benefit is that you, the author, get paid per page of free material read. It’s a fraction of a cent per page, but it adds up (example below). The extended benefit, of course, is that some readers who like your work will read and buy more and become fans.

Last week’s promo was the first time The Actress was free to anyone who wanted it. On Friday when my newschat and blog about it went out, readers downloaded it 2,629 times. Saturday: 1,408. Sunday: 731. Kind of a geometric progression. To my surprise, the book quickly reached #1 in the Amazon free store in the legal thriller category, and it ranged between 8^th and 11^th in the female sleuth category. It also broke into the top 100 free books overall, reaching #63 at its best.

Meanwhile, not much happened with my other titles, which, I’ve found, is typical when a free promo is running. My sales and free pages read were suffering from the winter blues, and I hoped this promo would help. The bump, if you’re going to get one, generally comes after the free promo is over.

As of Sunday night the book was still the #1 free legal thriller, so I decided to let the promo go the maximum time, through Tuesday, just to see if the ranking would hold, even though free downloads were slowing way down.

On Monday 400 more readers downloaded the book, and on Tuesday 427 did. A few spilled into Wednesday given international time zones: 17. So total: 5,612. That’s a lot of potential readers. Now, authors have learned that not everybody who downloads your freebie reads it, but a bunch will get to it, sooner or later. The book’s rank dropped to #2 and then #4 in free legal thrillers as of Tuesday afternoon, then I stopped keeping track.

Sales of my other books have bumped up a little in the last couple of days, but it’s too early to tell how well that will go or how long it will last. Mainly it’s the KU and KOLL pages read that have soared. As soon as the promo started, they jumped from dismally below 1,000 per day to way over that. Yesterday KU and KOLL readers made it through 3,776 of my pages. As I’m writing this midday today, about a thousand pages have been read.

[There was a bit of a bump for the quickie free promo of Easy Street I ran earlier in February, but the big spike is the result of The Actress promo.]

Let’s say you average 3,000 free pages a day. At .0058 cents per page, which is the last I figured it, that equals $522 in a 30-day month. Not a king’s ransom, but nothing to sneeze at.

I’m ramping up my promo work for my books, primarily by writing and planning more releases. I’ve been talking a little bit about Crimes in a Second Language; stay tuned for more on that this month.

What do you think? To post, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

Audible Deal and More

Zestful Blog Post #149

Dearest Zestful A-lister,

As promised yesterday, here’s my newschat that went out this morning. Forgive and delete if you’re already on that list.

Newschat for Brighter Skies

Dearest Correspondent,

We know there are only four seasons, but scientists have recently determined that winter actually has five subseasons: 1) holiday buildup, 2) holidays, 3) holiday downslope, 4) gray skies, and 5) despair. Even in Florida people complain about winter. The locals get out their coats and fur boots when temperatures plummet into the low seventies, while seasonal people get upset if it’s too windy to golf. Be that as it may. Here now the news, with bright-sky wishes for you and yours.

1) The audio book company Audible made an offer on all five of my Lillian Byrd crime novels, and we signed the contract last week. This was in the works for quite a while. Am thrilled that Lillian will have a voice! Was able to approve the narrator; more about her next time. Mega thanks to the team at the Donald Maass Literary Agency for making it happen: Rights Director Katie Shea Boutillier and Agent Cameron McClure.

Not sure when the audio books will be available, though the rumor is several months out from contract signing. Funny thing: I realized I need to reread those books closely and make pronunciation notes for the narrator, so I’m doing that in betwixt and between other stuff. Detroiters have developed idiosyncratic pronunciations for countless streets and places. Ask a Detroiter how to get to Gratiot or Livernois or Ecorse.

2) In honor of this weekend’s Oscars (which I don’t usually watch, but hey, it’s a good excuse to do a promo), The Actress – Rita Farmer mystery #1 is free on Amazon Kindle.

If you haven’t snagged it yet, please do. I hope you enjoy it! Maybe it will whet your appetite for the next two in the series, The Extra and On Location. (I might note that you don’t need a Kindle device to download the book; you can get the free app for just about any device you can use to get connectivity.) And yes, I know I’ve been promising the fourth in the series forever, but bear with me. I swear I’ll get it out there.

3) Meanwhile, I’m nearly finished with final edits on a mainstream standalone that I’ll be self-pubbing through my imprint Spruce Park Press. Crimes in a Second Language was inspired by my Aunt Tracy, who befriended her cleaning woman after discovering that she was not only illiterate, but had barely attended school at all in her native Mexico. My story takes two similar women on a twisty road through education, insight, deception, and (naturally enough) dangerous malfeasance. More soon.

4) It’s a little late to report this, but Lillian Byrd #5, Left Field, did in fact win a Goldie award at last year’s GCLS conference. Very happy about that. And no, I can’t make it to the GCLS con this year—too much other travel going on. Hope to have news of other appearances soon.

5) With enormous help from Marcia, my website got a makeover last fall, and I couldn’t be happier with it.

6) My blog keeps going, as well as articles for Writer’s Digest magazine. Most recent is “Power Tools” in the January issue. Currently I’m writing one for them on “The Little Things” that are easy for writers to overlook but can make a huge difference in the quality of your work.

7) My work will also appear in the forthcoming Crafting Dynamic Dialogue: The Complete Guide to Speaking, Conversing, Arguing, and Thinking in Fiction (Writer’s Digest Books, June 2016). I was honored to be asked to write an original chapter on internal dialogue for it. Also, they’ll be using some material from my book You’ve Got a Book in You.

Thanks for your company! Wishing you happy (ice-free) trails and blue skies. Love,

Elizabeth

What do you think? To post, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

Pulitzers and Oscars and Harper Lee's Lawyer

Zestful Blog Post #148

When writing or speaking about the craft of writing, I often give examples from famous books. As it happens, a great many famous books have been made into movies. This is not by accident, I tell my audiences. Stories that resonate deeply in the human heart find their way around.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee was one of the first novels I ever read. I remember being so young I didn’t know what rape was, and I didn’t understand that Mr. Ewell did NOT fall on his knife. Growing up, I read the story dozens of times, and still reread it every few years, in spite of having been told by a college professor that it was a contemptible book. This professor, in the middle of teaching Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, somehow found a way to bring up To Kill a Mockingbird and sneer at it, because in the end, the little white children are safe “and everything’s all nicey-nice.” I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t recap the plot of Mr. Sammler’s Planet if my life depended on it.

Harper Lee’s smash hit book was made into a terrific movie, which is as beloved as the book. I’m writing about this because it’s Oscar time. The film version of Mockingbird won a few Oscars. I’m getting to my point.

Which has to do with Harper Lee’s other book, Go Set a Watchman, which got published last year. Just to get this straight, Mockingbird brought tons of attention to Lee, who hated the attention, who retreated from public life, who said she’d never publish another book, but oh, my gosh! Her lawyer “finds” this ol’ manuscript—just now!—and gets an idea! And at the age of 88, after having a stroke and being in an assisted-living facility, Harper’s like, cool, I’d thought that stack of paper was lost for good! Let’s dust this puppy off and publish it! Heck, yes. I can’t wait! And what’s more, I really don’t need to do any edits, or even talk to the publisher myself; my lawyer will handle everything. She has my best interests at heart.

Right.

So the book, which I haven’t read because I’m boycotting it, reportedly portrays Atticus Finch as a racist, and puts an ugly coda onto the one brilliant gift Harper Lee gave the world. Do we think Watchman is going to win the Pulitzer? They’re talking about making a movie of it. No doubt they will. Suppose that’ll win some Oscars? A Pulitzer and some Oscars?

Right.

And that’s my point.

Here’s a tiny gift for you, dear reader who has stuck with me all the way to the bottom: Advance notice of our latest giveaway: Starting at midnight Pacific time tomorrow, Friday, The Actress (Rita Farmer mystery #1) will be free on Kindle through the weekend. In honor of the Oscars, naturally! This is the first time it's been free. Also, stay tuned for a newschat coming tomorrow with more announcements. I’ll post it here on the blog as well as send it to my newschat list.

What do you think? To post, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

Breaking the Rules of POV

Zestful Blog Post #133

Recently I got three inquiries in a row from aspiring writers wanting advice on point of view in fiction, specifically shifting POV from one character to another, and even more specifically, mixing first-person POV with other styles—third person limited and omniscient: can we do it? should we do it? how do we do it? (Thank you to D, J, and E for giving me the idea for this post.)

The novels of my first series (Lillian Byrd crime) are all in first person, which has its joys. The reader gets to know the main character intimately—if you’ve done your job well—and the limitations of the form can help shape your plot. One character can’t know everything, which automatically introduces an element of suspense. I chose first person for my first books because I was told by some magazine article (probably & ironically in Writer’s Digest magazine) that all first novelists should use it, because at least then you can’t screw up POV.

LOL.

Alternatively, writing gurus often tell new authors to stick with one style of POV: pick either first, third-limited, or omniscient, and stay there. Yet messing around with POV is interesting, and it can be just the thing for your story. Yet it’s fraught.

In many novels old and new, an omniscient narrator tells the story, shifting frequently from one character’s viewpoint to the next. If done well, we get not only a literal unfolding of the story, but also the characters’ inner worldview—their thoughts and judgments as to what’s going on. But the narrator becomes a bit of a character as well, which can be helpful or annoying, depending on the skill of the author.

For The Actress (Rita Farmer mysteries) I wanted more flexibility than simple first person, because my story was more ambitious, wider ranging, with more characters. Yet I liked the intimacy of first person. So I looked around to see if any novels mixed first with third limited and/or omniscient and found a few that worked (don’t ask me; I forget), so I figured I could do it too.

Yet I hated reading novels where the POV sticks with one character for almost the whole book, but shifts quickly and inexplicably to another character’s POV as a way out of plot jams, which is cheap. Suddenly—gosh!—we learn what the bad guy’s thinking, just at the exact moment we need an explanation of what the hell his motivation is. Then we’re back to the hero for the duration. In such cases, shifting POV is a way to avoid telling the story with discipline and fluidity. And it’s pure plain jangling to readers. It’s especially bad when readers constantly have to re-orient themselves to rapidly shifting limited POVs. Note I say limited: This is worse than just choosing omniscient, which imposes its own demands of reason and plausibility.

So I structured The Actress to begin from the perspective of Rita, my protagonist, and to shift POV only at major breaks. Sometimes it’s a chapter break, other times it’s a mid-chapter shift from one scene and set of characters to another. I carried the same pattern into the other two Rita books. By On Location I was pretty comfortable with it.

Currently I’m writing a final draft of a novel told in a mix of third limited and omniscient; no first person. It happens in Los Angeles, it involves a retired schoolteacher, her illiterate (and undocumented) cleaning woman, and a gang of corporate saboteurs. It digs into why people help one another, why they betray one another, and how far into the abyss they will go for money—and sometimes love. The title is Crimes in a Second Language.

Bottom line answer to the questions on mixing POVs: Yes, we can do it. We should do it IF the story demands, or at least prompts it. Keep your artistic integrity handy and never shift POV to get yourself out of a tight place you’ve gotten yourself into. When mixing first with third limited / omniscient, do it sparingly.

Moreover, don’t be cowed by the process. Relax, jump in, and give it a try.

What do you think? To post, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

Touring Against the Odds

Zestful Blog Post #92

Last night I had a blast on Andy and Rev’s Cocktail Hour, my first truly live, unscripted online appearance. I've been on radio and television a number of times, doing panels and interviews, and have done speeches and workshops that were recorded. My webinars for Writer’s Digest were all streamed live, but those were scripted down to the minute. So this was actually a first. And now it’s on YouTube. With an opening screenshot that makes me look like I just crawled across the Sahara with the flu. I'm putting the link in even though I've only watched a few minutes of the recording, so throw me a gold star for bravery, please. The Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnsoU9l9kZw

Andy and Rev are fabulous, book-loving humans, so if you like this recording or the others they’ve put up, consider letting them know by a comment or a share. Their web site: www.cocktailhour.us. They've got tons of other author chats and reviews, especially for the LGBT audience.

One more item of business: We’re doing a Kindle Countdown deal on Left Field right now. You can get it for 99 cents through most of Friday (yes, lucky 13), then it’ll go up by a buck a day until hitting its current regular price of $4.99. If you've already acquired it at full price, thank you. I believe you can actually do a return, then re-buy it, if your budget is tight. No authors ever say that publicly, but I believe it’s true.

I might add that as I write this, the book has regained the #1 spot on Amazon’s LGBT Mystery/Detective list, and three of the other four books in the series are in the top hundred on that list. So, hey, promos do help!

OK, back to my series on my publishing history (which actually you’re seeing unfold before your eyes; someday I’ll catch up, I promise). We’ll call this one:

#11: Touring Against the Odds

OK, in 2009 The Actress paperback is canceled, and The Extra is out in hardcover and e-book. My publicist at St. Martin’s Minotaur agreed to book a bunch of appearances at bookstores for me for a two-week summer tour. As I mentioned last week, this was all on my dime except for some co-op promo with the stores, signage, and goodwill from Minotaur.

My partner Marcia and I traveled by car from our then home in Washington state down to Los Angeles and back, doing drop-ins at more than thirty bookstores and doing about a dozen scheduled events, some with other authors. I promoted the appearances as best I could and let Providence take care of the rest, as Huck Finn would say.

What’s a drop-in, you might ask? That’s when you stop by a store, meet the staff and sign any stock on hand, give out bookmarks, and maybe meet a few customers as well. It’s best if you phone ahead to try to time your visit for when the appropriate buyer is on duty; I would ask, “Please tell me the name of your mystery buyer, I’d like to bring in a copy for him/her. Will he/she be working tomorrow afternoon?” But I’ve also just dropped in cold with pretty good results.

For chain stores, a cold drop-in is easiest. You just ask for the top mystery-lover on staff at the moment, give that person your free book and chat them up, sign stock and leave bookmarks, and be on your way.

[I love to surrender to the yellow lines...]

We traveled as cheaply as possible; Marcia worked Priceline to great advantage. Our biggest coup was a night at Dolce Hayes Mansion, this incredibly luxurious boutique hotel in San Jose that was going for close to $300 a night. When I told the desk clerk we’d gotten our room for $70, she didn’t believe me.

The trip yielded many good things. Apart from gaining exposure for my books, I made some lasting friends among booksellers, authors, and readers, and I learned countless little things to make drop-ins and appearances go smoothly and memorably.

However, independent bookstores were closing left and right, the chains were starting to have major difficulties, and online book sales were surging, thanks to Amazon. So the relevance of book tours was starting to wane, and has continued to wane ever since.

Although The Extra got a bump from my efforts (and The Actress, too, for that matter, in stores that carried lots of hardcovers), I learned, months later, that sales just didn't justify a paperback for that title either. I had already turned in the third in the series, On Location.

My agent, Cameron, and I had a parley. The results of that next week.

What do you think? To post, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

Dude, You're Screwed

Zestful Blog Post #91

Before I get into today's real blog, I want to let you know about a live online appearance: Next Wednesday, Feb. 11 at 8 p.m. (EST) I’ll be doing a Google Hangout with Andy and Rev on their Cocktail Hour. If you add them to your Google+ circle you can watch and listen live. (Handy link here: https://plus.google.com/+CocktailhourUs1/posts)

How it works is the url is available as soon as the thing goes live, so if Cocktail Hour is already in your circle, you can just go there at 8 next Wednesday evening and take it in. I'm sure I'll be brilliant. And aided, no doubt, by a Tanqueray martini, very dry, up, olives.

I'll be talking a bit about Left Field, but if you have any questions/issues you’d like me to discuss about anything, let me know either by commenting on this blog or sending me an email. (esims at elizabeth sims dot com, no spaces and use the punctuation marks you would normally; this is to defeat web spiders that search for email addys in blogs and then sell them to online porn stores, Nigerian royalty, etc.)

Now for the next installment in EPH (Elizabeth’s Publishing History):

10) Dude, You’re Screwed

Last week I wrote about the vagaries of the marketplace and cover design re: my debut mainstream novel, The Actress. I failed to mention that, just before the hardcover came out, I was informed by the Macmillan/St. Martin’s Minotaur marketing team that henceforth, Twitter would be the way we would all build community and do reader outreach. I found this dismaying, as I had detested Twitter as soon as it started to emerge, and had vowed never to establish a Twitter account. The insubstantialness of it, the quick shallowness of it, repelled me to the core. I had had my own web site for years, and had acquiesced to Facebook. (And I stuck with FB, even though they totally betrayed me; I had signed up early and written entertaining entries in the ‘background’ section of my profile, only to have FB delete all that when they changed their business model. Bastards. Bastards.)

But I dutifully established a Twitter account and made an effort to promote myself and my work without seeming to promote myself and my work. What a ton of fun. To this day social media is still a struggle for me, mostly because I’m like, Who in God’s name wants to hear my opinion on anything? The world is already full of blowhards. I’m supposed to be another one, only more entertaining?

However, I’m currently feeling a bit more dispassionate about it, like, OK, it’s business, try to find a sincere way to do this. I’m working on it and will write more about this subject in the near future.

Before returning to my narrative, I might add that when it came to promo for The Actress, I did all the normal stuff: announced the book on my web site, sent out newschats to my email list, printed up bookmarks to give out wherever I went, set up a signing at the Mystery Writers of America booth at Book Expo (and was invited to MWA’s late-night cocktail party at The Edison in Los Angeles, a great place to feel cool), went to and spoke and taught at other conferences and workshops, etc. But the Great Recession was a tough opponent.

As far as I knew, the paperback of The Actress was in production; it had been put up on Amazon for pre-order with the new cover I showed you last week. The release date was March 31, 2009. Two weeks before that date Cameron called. “I have bad news,” she said. “Minotaur pulled the plug on the paperback of The Actress.”

Since this was business and not a death in the family, I didn’t get emotional. But I knew exactly what had just happened. “So that’s it, then,” I said. “I mean, that’s the end of my career with Minotaur.” As a former bookseller, I knew how important it was for an author to be in paperback. The hardcover is your calling card, but the vast majority of your sales come from your paperbacks. Remember, at that time e-books were an unknown quantity in New York publishing.

Cameron said my editor told her that she’d fought and fought for the paperback at whatever meeting, but ultimately there weren’t enough advance orders from booksellers to justify an initial print run.

After I’d digested that news for a few days, I phoned my editor. I asked if there was any chance they’d reverse their decision if sales of the soon-to-be-released second in the series, The Extra, were above expected.

“Well, no,” she said. “There’s just not going to be a paperback of The Actress. We might run one next year for The Extra if the hardcover does well.”

[Here again we have a blonde facing away from us, but this one's definitely better than the original cover for The Actress.]

“OK,” I said. The gauntlet had been thrown down. I asked if Minotaur would help me set up a book tour for The Extra. I knew they wouldn’t pay my expenses, but I wanted their publicists to get my foot in the door at bookstores, and hopefully provide some co-op marketing and signage. The answer was yes.

More next week.

What do you think? To post, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

Champagne

Zestful Blog Post #88

When I left off last week, The Actress was on the verge of getting published. After I refused to make drastic changes to satisfy a certain editor, she opted not to make an offer.

We'll call this installment:

7) Champagne

But another editor was interested; in fact, she very much wanted to bid on The Actress, but couldn’t get the marketing guys on board. (Cameron related this to me.) Their feeling was, nobody wants to read about people in Hollywood. Evidently they’d published a book along those lines that didn’t do well, so they nixed a deal for The Actress.

[A hazy day in the Hollywood Hills, photo by ES.]

But yet another of the ‘Big Six’ wanted the book, and made an offer. The way it works is: they make an oral offer on the phone to your agent; the agent calls you and discusses, then the agent calls them back to say yea or nay. Only the most basic things are discussed during the oral process: the amount of the advance, and just a few details about the back end. (An advance is front end. Royalties after you earn out, any advertising/marketing arrangements, etc. are back end.)

If more than one publisher is interested simultaneously, the book ‘goes to auction’. That simply means the interested publishers are told by your agent that there are multiple interested parties, and they’d better put out their best offer during a certain tight window of time, like three days. Auctions for hot, multimillion-dollar books sometimes take only hours or minutes.

(When this offer came in, I was vacationing in Hawaii with friends. Because of my phone call from New York, I delayed our morning a bit, enduring their impatience to get out and look at the damn volcano already. But I’d worked for years to get to this point and was like, ‘Dudettes, you must delusional if you think I’m gonna cut this call short.’)

We came close to an auction situation for The Actress, what with the first publisher (who wanted changes) being so hot for it, but in the end we got just the one solid offer, which was for a two-book hardcover deal, and went with that. The publisher was St. Martin’s Minotaur, a division of Macmillan.

The whole process, from when Cameron started shopping the book around to getting the offer from Minotaur, took only two weeks.

Once the deal is accepted orally, the publisher draws up a contract and sends it to your agent, who sends it to you. (This one was done via U.S. Mail, but eventually everybody has pretty much gone electronic.) Once you’ve read it, you discuss it with your agent, and the agent gets back to the publisher with the changes you both agree to ask for.

Having negotiated my own contracts for my Lillian Byrd series, I was familiar with the process, but the contract from Macmillan was much longer and more involved than any I’d seen before. Here is where Cameron earned her percentage, by advising me on what we should and shouldn’t press for. Basically, a higher advance is always a good idea, but once you’ve gotten them as high as they’ll go (and without an auction you don’t have much leverage), you start talking about the back end. A good strategy is to ask for lower ‘bumps’ in the royalty schedule.

Say the contract says you’ll get ten percent of sales for the first fifteen thousand copies, then twelve and a half percent for the next fifteen thousand, then fifteen percent for the rest of all copies for eternity. You agent can ask for the first bump to be at ten thousand or seventy-five hundred, and so on, so that you’re eligible to make more total money on the book, sooner. You can ask that your highest percentage be bumped to twenty percent, stuff like that, as well.

You won’t get everything you ask for, but like an annoying corporate vice president I once worked with used to say, “Don’t ask, don’t get.”

So now is the time to ask away. More next time. Thanks for looking in.

What do you think? To post, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

A Rock in the (Main)Stream

Zestful Blog Post #87

I hope the holidays treated you well. I'm pleased with how Left Field is doing, but I have much more promo work to do. This week we’re back to my journey through the publishing world. This post necessarily contains spoilers from Holy Hell and The Actress. But they’re worth it, baby.

Let’s call this installment:

6) A Rock in the (Main)Stream

It took me about a year to write The Actress, then I sent it to Cameron (McClure, at the Donald Maass agency, who had expressed interest in the idea; see post #84). She liked the book a lot and offered to represent me. At the time, she was fairly new at Don’s agency. Before agreeing, I asked her why she thought she was right for the job.

“You already know I think you’re a great writer,” she said. “I’m young and hungry, and Don’s reputation opens all the doors for us.”

I said that sounded good. She replied, “From now on, it’s my job to be a bitch on your behalf.”

Such lovely, lovely music.

Some agents are hands-off and never make editorial suggestions; others are quite involved with their clients’ projects. I found that Cameron was into making suggestions. She got back to me with a long memo on The Actress, known as ‘notes’. This is the same thing as in Hollywood, where the producer or director or whoever tells the scriptwriter “I have some notes for you.” This can be ominous, signaling a horrifying ordeal for the writer, or it can turn out to be a most helpful, cooperative kind of thing.

Fortunately, I felt Cameron’s notes were valuable. While I rejected some of her ideas (which she insisted upon knowing reasons for), I adopted many of them, and the book became stronger for it.

I might note that early in the process, even before I wrote the whole book, one of Cameron’s suggestions was to kill off a main character. “because once you do that,” she explained, “your readers will never feel safe.” So I made sure to kill off a main character in The Actress.

During this, I reflected that in Holy Hell, my first title with Alyson Books, I made an opposite move. When my editor there got down to work on the book, she called me and said, “You know, I really think you shouldn’t [spoiler alert] kill off Minerva LeBlanc. She’s such a great character. Think what you could do with her in future books!”

I said, “Well, that’s the way the story goes. I needed a dead body to be found in Lillian’s apartment so suspicion falls on her and she has to deal with it. Like, you know, I’ve put her up a tree and now I’m throwing rocks at her. I wrote Minerva solely so I’d have an appealing character to kill off for this purpose.”

“Well, couldn’t you put her into a coma or something instead? So at least you have the option of bringing her back in the future?”

I thought for a minute. “Yeah, I could do that. I could have Minerva be viciously attacked in Lillian’s apartment while she’s away, and it would be attempted murder instead of murder, and Lillian would still be the natural first suspect for a serious crime.”

“OK, that’d be great.” And that’s how it worked out.

When both Cameron and I felt The Actress was in top shape, we discussed strategy. She knew I wanted a contract with a big publisher, so she prepared a list of the top ten, as well as a pitch email and so forth. I did not ask to see her pitch materials, trusting her to get the job done.

I didn’t have long to wait.

A few days after she started telling publishers about my book, she phoned me. We’d gotten one no-thanks from one of the ‘big six’, but another was expressing serious interest. Great, right? Just one hitch.

[Rocks make it dangerous--but fun.]

An editor for this publisher’s main crime-fiction imprint had read The Actress. She told Cameron, “I read the first half and thought it’s fabulous! I jumped up and ran down the hall to our contract department and said, ‘We’ve got to put together a offer for this book! It’s terrific!’ Then I went back to my office and read the second half. When I got to [spoiler alert] Gary’s death, I went, ‘Oh, no! She can’t kill off Gary! Rita and Gary have to get married and then solve crimes in the courtroom together!’”

This editor asked Cameron to see if I’d be agreeable to changing the book and the trajectory of the series. “What do you think?” Cameron asked.

This was a tough situation, but I said, “Well, no. I mean, I could put Gary into a coma”—hey, with one hand tied behind my back, lots of experience with coma-inducing injuries here—“and have him recover in the next book, but this can’t be a lawyers-together courtroom series.” I had initially conceived of a series of linked stand-alones, with some characters recurring, and I wanted to go forward with that. I wanted the next in the series to feature a different protagonist from Rita Farmer.

Cameron said, “Every editor who sees this says it absolutely has to be a series starring Rita. Everybody wants to know what happens to her next.”

“Well, I guess I could keep Rita as the main character, but I don’t have the background to write a lawyer/courtroom series, nor do I want to. I want [spoiler alert] Rita and George [the private eye in the story] to be together at the end of this one, and I’d be comfortable writing them working together going forward. I’m going to put Rita into law school, because she’s so interested in law after this one, but she’s not going to have a career as a lawyer. Maybe she’ll flunk out or something, I don’t know yet. I can write her as an actress, but not as a lawyer.”

Cameron explained all this to the big-shot editor, who said sadly that she wouldn’t be making an offer on the book after all.

She was sad. Righto.

However, Cameron had already heard from another couple of editors who were very interested in the book.

And we’ll have more on that next time. This is getting pretty detailed, but I feel the full story is worth telling.

What do you think? To post, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

Moving Into the Mainstream

Zestful Blog Post # 84

The series about my publishing history continues today.

5) Moving Into the Mainstream

When an artist belongs to some sort of minority, that artist must decide what kind of art to make. Shall I make art that I think/guess/hope will be understood/appreciated/purchased by a mainstream audience, or shall I produce something that speaks more specifically to my own smaller group, whatever that is, and take the risk of obscurity? Shall I be myself, or pretend to be someone else?

Leaving aside the question of figuring out one’s identity (which can take a lifetime right there), this can be a challenge. Charlotte Brontë, for instance, knew that in the male-dominated public sphere of her time, female authors were “liable to be looked upon with prejudice” and thus wrote Jane Eyre under the male name Currer Bell. She was just one of many female, or black, or Jewish (etc.) authors who concealed their personas in order to come across as one of the mainstream.

A main stream, with tug. [photo by ES]

Some authors who were gay / lesbian / bisexual or otherwise not part of the bicameral sexual culture have written books strictly about straight people and their lives. And some have been criticized for it by the politically-correct contingent. A subject for another post, perhaps. Incidentally, I believe a lot of gay writers who didn’t want to come out turned to mystery writing, because you can write gripping stories that have little to do with characters’ inner lives.

Finding some success with my Lillian Byrd series, I hungered for a larger audience. That could be achieved if I got published by a major house. And the major houses wanted, almost exclusively, mainstream stuff.

While trying to get Holy Hell published, I wrote a mainstream novel about the bookselling scene, which sparked some interest among the agents I queried, but again no offers for representation. So when strategizing again about getting picked up by a major publisher, I left aside that book and decided to write another novel, a mainstream mystery. This was a business decision.

The story, called Crimes in a Second Language, involves a retired schoolteacher who befriends her Latina cleaning woman by offering to teach her English. Their developing friendship leads to trouble with the cleaner’s husband, who appears to be involved in some dark business. And so on.

I sent excerpts to agents, and finally heard from Cameron McClure at the Donald Maass agency. “I can tell you’re a great writer,” she said, “but I don’t think I can sell this book. Do you have other ideas?”

Yes, I did. I sent her a batch of three or four ideas for crime / mystery novels, including a series of linked stand-alones, and she got back to me with some enthusiasm. She loved the concept of The Actress, in which a struggling actress is approached by a high-end defense attorney to coach his client, an unsympathetic society mom who’s up for the murder of her own daughter. The actress is a divorced mother of a little boy, with a gay best friend and a nasty ex-husband lurking in the background. “If you can write this one,” Cameron said, “I think I can sell it.”

So I spent a year on the project, and sure enough she did sell it to a major publisher. There’s a story to that, which I’ll detail next time.

What do you think? To post, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

Pistorius Trial Imitating Art?

The other day I was intrigued by a news item about the South African athlete Oscar Pistorius, who is currently on trial for the shooting death of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. A South African journalist published the allegation that Pistorius had secretly received, before his trial began, acting lessons from a close friend. News (and gossip) sites are trying to confirm or bust the story. According to behaviorists who claim to know these things, Pistorius's natural personality would make him react with anger and hostility to stuff going on at the trial, so if he could get himself to appear sad and distraught instead, the judge might go easier on him. If you've looked in on any of the news about the trial, you know that Pistorius wept and retched a fair amount of the time.

I don't know enough about the story to have an opinion, but I'm keeping my eye on it, because my novel The Actress is based on exactly such a premise: Unsympathetic defendant gets secret acting lessons, in hopes of influencing the jury.

I remember when the idea came. I was sitting on the couch with my beloved partner Marcia, watching a true-crime program about a woman who had been on trial (in the U.S.) for the murder of her young son. I don't know whether she did it or not, but she was convicted. Several of the jurors were interviewed later, and they said things like: "I don't know, I just didn't like the way she was. She didn't seem sorry that her son was dead. She just didn't act how you'd expect." None of them said anything about the evidence; it was all about the affect of the accused.

Marcia and I were appalled. Holy crap, was that all it took to get convicted? We started to think about the opposite: Is that all it would take to get off?

Marcia said, "You should write a novel about a murder defendant who gets acting lessons during the trial."

I was like, "Yeah!"

This was years after O.J. Simpson's acquittal for the murder of his ex-wife and her boyfriend, which to some people seemed based on either O.J.'s star power or feelings of payback for the Rodney King case rather than the facts. (Here again, I don't know whether he did it or not.)

The point is, I started looking into the fickleness of juries. It's enough to turn your blood into ice tea. One of the theoretical advantages of jury trials is that it's supposed to be harder to bribe, fool, or intimidate 12 people instead of one judge. Maybe, maybe not.

I developed a mystery story based on the secret-acting-lessons idea and wrote the novel. It was good enough to get me representation and a two-book hardcover deal with a major publisher (St. Martin's Minotaur / Macmillan). But when my agent tried to get a British publisher interested in the UK rights, they said things like, "It's a wee bit too high-concept for us." Which is publisher-speak for outlandish, implausible. No, thanks, they said.

And here we are with today's headlines. Different? Outlandish? Implausible? You be the judge.

[Photo of reflection of Los Angeles by ES]

Tell us what you think! To post your ideas / comments, all of which I read and try to respond to, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

Your Ideas Are Your Capital

The other day I was listening to an aspiring writer tell me about the novel he's writing. He mentioned that he had ideas for further novels, but was unsure whether to spend the effort developing them before he saw whether agents / editors / readers would be interested in this first book. He asked what I thought.

I told him that in my own case, ideas have broken through for me before a finished work did. Although I sold my first four novels to a publisher myself, it wasn't a novel that got me representation. Hungry for a bigger audience, I set out to write a novel good enough to score me a hardcover contract with a big house. I wrote the novel and shopped it around to agents. One read it and called me up. "You're obviously a terrific writer," she said, "but I just don't think I can sell this book. What other ideas do you have?" I told her a few, and she asked me to develop them a little more on paper. I did so, and she got back to me saying, "I really like this one about the actress. If you can write that one, I think I can sell it." Which is what happened, and The Actress debuted in hardcover with Minotaur Books (MacMillan). I've been with Cameron McClure at the Donald Maass Agency ever since.

The same thing happened the first time I approached Writer's Digest magazine. I wrote up a detailed inquiry about an article I'd like to write for them, and decided at the last minute to throw in a few other ideas at the bottom, just in case. The editor got back to me and said in a nice way that my main idea sucked, but they'd like me to write an article based on one of the little ones in the last paragraph. So I did, and have written more than 30 feature articles for them to date.

Which, I realized, exactly parallels something I learned in Hollywood. A few years ago I flew to Los Angeles to meet with a television executive to discuss making my first mystery series, the Lillian Byrd books, into a cable TV series. Over a meal at a hip restaurant in West Hollywood (I felt existentially enviable) we talked about my books in detail, how the series might be structured, and even threw around casting ideas.

Then the executive asked if I'd be willing to be a writer for the show.

"Sure," I said, "but I thought you guys usually just bought the material and had other people write the scripts."

She said, "You don't understand. It's not so much that we want this material you've written. We want your talent; we want YOU."

"Oh," I said.

She explained, "You were thinking about how the movies work. The movies want a script. TV wants a writer."

As it turned out, the executive couldn't get the big shots on board with the project. But thinking about all that later, I realized that publishing is like television production: agents, editors, and readers don't want a book, they want an author. They want somebody who can write great, compelling book after great, compelling book. They want an idea machine.

So there you have it, aspiring authors. Write up all of your best ideas and have them in your back pocket. Get started on that next novel! Come the time to start putting your first baby out into the world, your newer stuff just might be instrumental in your breakthrough.

Special notes for this week:

Local friends, check out the Florida Writer's Association Bradenton Mini-Conference in January, just in time for that New Year's writing resolution: http://www.floridawriters.net/FWA_Upcoming_Events.html

I'll be there doing a workshop and a writing-prompts session. Check out the other faculty; some pretty accomplished people will be there, all with the goal of helping you. I guarantee you'll deepen your talent and have fun doing it.

And to follow up on last weeks' post: I've received my package of Dragon software and will set it up soon. The shoulder is improving with drugs and therapy.

[Photo note: Hollywood landscape with smog-induced soft focus by ES.]

Tell me what you think! To post your ideas / comments, all of which I read and try to respond to, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

Ava, Frank, O.J., and me

For me, inspiration is the juice that you get from an experience that leads you from where you were a minute ago to someplace bigger, deeper, more intense. It doesn't necessarily have to be a good or positive experience.

Inspiration, for sure, can be a cliché: the beach at sunset, reading a poem about roses, listening to 'Light My Fire' on your headphones.

I find tremendous inspiration in the city of Los Angeles, and that's why I set one of my mystery series there, starting with THE ACTRESS. Oh, God, the pace, the energy, the history of it all---glamour, crime, innovation, disaster, sex, rags to riches to rags.

I lived on the West Coast for 17 years, and have spent lots of time in L.A. It's an infuriating place---all those people trying to drive on the same road you are, the asbestos-like smog, the on-the-makeness, the crime (which is just a particularly lousy way to be on the make), the poison oak in Griffith Park.

But! How sublime is the epicenter of American culture! Arguable? I simply say: the movies, custom cars, surfing, Watts Towers, and the weather.

[I took the above photo at the Griffith Observatory. Love that Greek key detailing.]

When I was in university, I got into reading Joan Didion, whose writing about L.A. I admired so much: so incisive, so caustic, so elegiac. Yes, somehow L.A. died for Joan, and she moved to New York, the next best thing.

Well, L.A. sure isn't dead for everybody.

One of the most intense experiences I've had in Los Angeles was in the summer of 1995, when the O.J. Simpson murder trial was saturating the city like creosote on a wharf piling. I flew into LAX and boarded the rental car shuttle bus, en route to a business meeting. The driver, a broad-shouldered black guy, greeted each of us with a cold stare. Once seated, I realized that the bus radio was tuned to the live broadcast of the Simpson trial. Every single passenger on that bus was white. We were all these little white businesspeople with our briefcases, and he was this stone-silent black guy with his hands gripping the wheel, and we all listened to the trial together, without anyone uttering a word, for the ten-minute ride to the car lot.

More recently, I was invited to dinner to a house in the Hollywood hills. My friend, an actor, and his wife were house- and dog-sitting for a director they knew, and they wanted some company, and I was in town. So my companion and I drove up those narrow twisting streets, and found our friends in an aerie above the city with purple evening coming on. The house had this tremendous aura of swank, with warm maple wood floors and ten-foot-high chiffon drapes screening the narrow deck. I remarked on a framed photograph of Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra on a wall.

"Oh, yeah, Ava used to own this place," I was told. "The current owners keep that picture."

Immediately my glamour glands started to pump, and I smelled the lipstick and the spilled Scotch and the cigarette smoke, and the split-level house came almost alive. We drank wine in the billowing sensuous privacy of the deck. The wind picked up and night came down, and we talked and laughed about a thousand things.

I'm looking forward to being in Los Angeles this weekend (Writer's Digest conference) and the next (workshops sponsored by Kleis TV). Details at my web site. It would be great if you could join me.

Is there a particular place that gets your creative juices going?

Tell me what you think! To post your ideas / comments, all of which I read and try to respond to, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.