Subaru Accuracy

            No author ever sets out to make a mistake, and no author ever writes a perfect book. That’s the case with fiction and nonfiction books, both of which I’ve written. A book is simply too big a project to be bug-free.

            In a work of nonfiction, many mistakes are indisputable. The author spells someone’s name wrong or gets a date wrong. The author’s interpretations of the facts can also be wrong, but these are subject to endless debate and need not concern us at the moment.

            The question of accuracy in fiction similarly involves considerable ambiguity and openness to interpretation. The author wants to get details right, obviously, but if she has a certain type of pistol ejecting its shell casings when that type of pistol in fact doesn’t, how important is the mistake? I’d argue (and some would argue otherwise) that as long as she’s not writing a forensic-investigation novel and plays fair with the reader about the clue of the shell casings, it’s a pretty minor error.

The Intentional ‘Mistake’

            Fiction being fiction, authors are free to imagine things that don’t exist. Suppose a mystery writer was setting a story in a clearly identified national park, using many of its real elements as part of the tale. Then suppose said author gave said park a fictitious old lodge that the real park doesn’t have, in order to provide a place for suspects, victims and more ambiguous characters to mingle. Would that be a mistake?

            Of course not. It’s fiction, and as long as the author acknowledges that it was done intentionally for the sake of the story, where’s the harm? The important thing in a piece of fiction is that the imaginary world is true to itself and in the larger sense reflective of the real world in some way.

            I got to thinking along these lines last week, as I was working on my fourth mystery novel. I’ve gotten into the habit of showing the new book to Linda piece by piece as I write it. She often catches typos and raises points about characters and facts. It’s very helpful, really.

The Mistake That Wasn’t

            Looking over a recent passage, she came to a scene where I had one of the characters driving a certain type of Subaru station wagon and promptly told me Subaru didn’t make such a wagon. Trying to get it right, I had looked that up on Wikipedia beforehand and found that they did make such a wagon in the early to mid 1990s, and that since the story was set in 1997, the character could indeed have quite plausibly been driving one.

            And then I got to thinking. Suppose I hadn’t looked it up, had been wrong about the model, and the mistake had made it into the book. If someone had pointed out the mistake to me, I would have been annoyed at having made it and made a note to myself to be more careful the next time.

            If, on the other hand, someone had made the criticism that the character in question didn’t seem to be the sort of person who would drive a Subaru, I’d have been gobsmacked because I would stand accused of not being true within my fictional world.

            I raised the point with Linda a couple of days later, and she got what I was saying. She also reassured me on the point I considered important, saying of the character in my book, “She’s definitely the sort of person who’d be driving a Subaru.”

            We’re good.

Why the Television Experiment Failed

            When you’re out fishing, you get your scorecard in real time. You know how many fish you’re catching — or at very least how many are taking your offering. When that happens, you know you’re doing something right.

            On the other hand, if you’re not catching fish, you often don’t know why. It could be that you’re doing something wrong — a clumsy approach, bad technique, poor choice of fly or bait, whatever. Or it could be that you’re fishing a good piece of water and the fish simply aren’t there or aren’t feeding at the moment. Hard to say.

            In other words, it’s like advertising in some respects. Which is why a common saying, attributed to F.W. Woolworth and others, is, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The problem is, I don’t know which half.”

The Author on Television

            I used that quote in a post two months ago, in which I said I was going to do a test on advertising my mystery novel, Not Death, But Love, on cable TV. At the time of the posting, I’d just signed an agreement to run a 30-second spot in a relatively small cable market (Monterey County, CA) to see what sort of bump it would provide for my book sales.

            It was clearly an experiment. Based on the number of people who would be seeing it, there was no way I could sell enough copies of the book to pay the whole cost of the ad. However, I reasoned that if I got a discernibly good response, that would tell me that this sort of advertising can be effective, and the next step would be to see how to use the video tool in a more cost-effective way.

            I worked with a cable consultant to come up with a package that would put the spot in front of a large number of women aged 35-64, a good target market for my type of mystery. It ran a couple hundred times on six different channels in the market, and the results are now in.

            It failed utterly.

What Went Wrong?

            Like the angler who thinks he’s doing things right, but getting no love from the fish, I was perplexed. I had expected I’d see at minimum a modest boost in sales from the ad, yet during the two weeks it was running, I sold fewer books than I had the prior two weeks. And the prior two weeks were slow, so sales in the ad period couldn’t even clear a very low bar. No way you can put lipstick on that pig.

            So the question is why did it fail? The reasons I can think of include: The ad wasn’t good; the book was wrong for the target market; the brief experiment didn’t connect with enough repeat viewers; requiring people to go to Amazon to buy the book may have been too much to ask; people screen out TV ads and nobody saw it; people needed to see it a couple more times before taking action.

            My gut sense is that it likely wasn’t the first two reasons, and that the problem had more to do with the fact of hitting an audience with a completely unknown product. In such a case, it would probably take more ad repetitions than I could afford to drive a fair number of people to log on to Amazon and buy the book. Well, that’s my best guess anyway.

Legs

            Three years ago, full of hope and inflated expectations, I put my first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, up for sale on Amazon. Good as it was, I thought it might sell 10,000 copies the first month.

            It sold 11 copies, and I personally knew 9 of the people who bought it.

            That was hardly an auspicious beginning, but the more I learn about self-publishing, the more I have come to realize it was par for the course. The old rule of thumb used to be that the average self-published book sells 150 copies. There’s a reason for that.

            Sociologists figure that between work, church, clubs, neighbors, and old friends, the typical American knows about 150 people reasonably well. If you write a book (and who doesn’t these days?) you can figure half your circle of people will buy it, and a similar number of outliers will stumble across it somewhere as well. And perhaps Amazon has pushed the number of outliers up a bit.

Reason to Keep Going

            Despite the slow start for my book, I started getting positive feedback from people who didn’t have to say anything, and the book gradually began getting positive reviews from strangers. Encouraged by the response, and experiencing a serious case of Writer’s Ego, I decided to write a second mystery in the series.

            Wash Her Guilt Away was published at the end of April 2014. At the time of its release, I expected it would boost sales of The McHenry Inheritance by a bit. After all, I reasoned, people who never saw the first book might read and like the second, then go back to the first. In a good month, I figured, The McHenry Inheritance might sell half as many copies as Wash Her Guilt Away.

            Wrong again. In September, the fourth month the second book was out, The McHenry Inheritance outsold it. And it continued to outsell Wash Her Guilt Away over eight of the next nine months. Furthermore, from the scant information Amazon provides its authors, it appeared that a fair number of people were buying the two books together.

What’s Happening Here?

            At the end of May of this year, I published the third mystery novel in the series, Not Death, But Love. June was the first full month it was available. And The McHenry Inheritance had more paid downloads (e-book sales and borrows) that month than the new book did.

            I must confess I’m at a loss to explain why the three-year old book is steadily outselling the newer releases. Is it because the cover is more of an attention-getter? Is it because it has more reviews on file than the other two books, having been out longer? Is it because it’s the first book in the series and people want to start at the beginning? Or is it some combination of those factors plus something else I haven’t thought of?

            Whatever it is, the book is showing legs that I never imagined it would have, and the wise author takes any sale he can get. Last week, on the third anniversary of its publication, The McHenry Inheritance got two new reviews from strangers (five and four stars) and sold its first copy in Spain. Spain! If this be magic of some sort, I’m going to get out of the way and let it happen. The wise author also has to suspect that the readers might be right.

It's Terrific! It's Terrible!

            At the moment I am hip-deep in the final revisions of my third mystery novel, Not Death, But Love. This is the period in producing any book, when it is not a happy time to be an author. From a creative standpoint, the book has been let go, and all that remains is the drudgery of making sure the commas are in place, the quotes are closed, the style is consistent, and the sentences are as tight as they can be.

            Nevertheless, when shying from the task or considering making short shrift of it, I am reminded of the one-star review I read for another self-published author’s work: “Next time, he should consider spending some money on an editor so he doesn’t put out another book so full of typos to an unsuspecting world.”

            I don’t want to get a review like that, and fear can be a powerful motivator.

When Perspective Vanishes

            Something else happens to an author at this stage of the game. By now, I have been living with this book for so long that it is hard to maintain any sort of perspective toward it. Reading the manuscript yet one more time, I find myself overreacting to almost everything in it.

            If I read a paragraph that strikes me as being good, I begin to have fantasies about the ghost of Tolstoy appearing before me and tipping his hat in tribute. If I read a paragraph that strikes me as being not quite right, it can be only a matter of seconds before I’ve gone to the conclusion that the whole book is garbage and the only thing to be done with it is to hit Command-All-Delete and start all over again.

            It is not at all uncommon to encounter two such paragraphs back-to-back within the span of a minute. The mood swings are scary, and I am grateful to have the self-discipline not to act on my worst impulses.

The Power of Stet

            I have, by the way, hired an editor for this book, and she was well worth the money. What I am doing now is reading the manuscript, chapter by chapter, noting her comments and corrections, and doing additional revisions on my own initiative. Even though I’m adding, as well as subtracting, I figure the final manuscript will be a thousand words shorter by the time I’m done.

            In doing this, I am coming face-to-face with my own mental tennis match. Several times now, I’ve marked a change on the manuscript, then when I set down to enter the revisions the next day, I looked at the change and decided to leave it the way it was in the first place. I came of age in the days of manual proofreading, and one of the proof terms of the time was “stet,” which means, “ignore the correction.” I am stetting a lot as I lurch toward the final version of the book.

            Even so, the version that goes live May 27 won’t be the final one. Everything changes, and, for all the attention my editor and I have paid to detail, there will be things to be corrected after publication. I believe in the book, so I will make those changes. I want it to present as well as possible to the readers.

If Only I Could Just Write …

            I’ve often wondered what it would be like to write a mystery novel if that was the only thing I had to do. Like most first-time authors, I wrote my first book, The McHenry Inheritance, when I could find the time outside my day job. It was a short book, about 200 pages, and the first draft took about six months. I started it in July and finished it Christmas Eve.

            That’s not to say that it was written at any sort of steady pace. I pay the bills by being a freelance public relations and publications consultant in a mid-size market. Essentially, I work when my clients have projects for me, and when they don’t have projects, I don’t work.

            For reasons I’ve never been able to figure out, the business oscillates wildly between feast and famine. It seems that I’m either working until nine o’clock every night or else doing nothing but making sales calls and drinking coffee. Maybe two months out of every year I have a normal workload: enough to keep me busy and profitable, but able to knock off at five o’clock every day.

Start and Stop

            The year I started that first book, I had an insanely busy spring and plenty of money in the bank at the end of June. I’d planned on starting the book in April, but suddenly clients, most of them new, were coming at me from all directions, and I had to do justice to the work for which they were hiring me.

            At the end of June there was a sudden drop-off in business, and I decided to concentrate on the book. July and August were relatively slow for the business, and I was able to make good progress. I probably had 40 percent of the first draft written by Labor Day. At that point the business gods smiled on me again, and things got busy again until mid-November. It wasn’t as crazy as April-June, but less work was getting done on the book.

            For me, at least, writing fiction isn’t something I can do in 15-minute bursts. I have to have a block of at least a couple of hours, where I can really get into it and start feeling the characters and the story. I was busy enough that those blocks of time weren’t reliably there, and I began to despair of my goal of finishing the first draft by year’s end.

           

The Holidays to the Rescue

            About a week before Thanksgiving, a couple of projects ended at the same time, and suddenly nothing was on the horizon, work-wise. In a project-driven business such as mine, the rule of thumb is that if a client doesn’t start a job before Thanksgiving, it will be postponed until after Martin Luther King Day.

            My days were open again, and I got back to the book with a fury. There were a couple of slowdowns along the way, where I had to work through a story or writing conundrum, but I was really ripping, with almost no distractions. At 4 p.m. that last day, I typed the final sentence into the computer, hit save, did a double fist-pump, and headed home where my wife, son, and mother were waiting for my arrival so they could start the Christmas Eve dinner.

            So what if I’d been able to start in July and had nothing else to do? I have a sinking feeling I know the answer. Parkinson’s Law (Work expands to fill the time available) would have kicked in, and I would have dawdled over it, daydreamed more, and drunk more coffee. The last sentence and the fist-pump still would have happened at 4 p.m. on Christmas Eve.

Who Are These People, Anyway?

            By my best calculation, the last friend to buy my mystery novel did so on January 9 of this year. That was when I gave a talk on self-publishing to my Rotary Club and sold about a dozen copies after the meeting.

            From that point on, I figure every book that’s sold has been to a stranger, someone who doesn’t know me at all. Well, maybe not every one. There are no doubt a couple of stragglers out there who know me and have been meaning to buy the book but haven’t. But the bottom line is that I’ve reached that tipping point that every first-time author has to face. What happens when your friends stop buying the book and your sales depend on people you don’t know?

            This is not an insignificant question. I read somewhere that the average self-published book sells 150 copies, and the number is no coincidence. Sociologists say that’s how many people the average person knows tolerably well, through family, school, work, church, and other organizations. How the first-time author gets past 150 sales is the sixty four thousand dollar question.

Numbers on a Computer Screen

            Since the beginning of the year, when I figure my friends stopped buying it, my book, The McHenry Inheritance, continues to move on Amazon. Almost every other day one of those strangers I wonder about shells out $2.99 to buy the e-book version. The print-on-demand version sells less well, but still gets a couple of bites each month. And when I offer it free as a one-day promotion, the numbers steadily improve. In January, I did two promotional days and “sold” 154 books. For two days in March the number is up to 378.

            (A cynic might argue that the volume of free books simply establishes what mine is worth, and perhaps that’s so. But there seem to be fifteen to twenty thousand free books available each day on Kindle, and a lot of them seem to be moving in single digits, so something about my book must be ringing a bell.)

            The sales figures for my book are mere numbers on a computer screen, and I wish I had some way of knowing more about who is buying the book and why. The people who actually paid for the book (albeit less than they’d pay for a latte) clearly had to make a decision, but what about the ones who take it when it’s free?

Literary Hoarders

            I wonder all sorts of things. How much time do they spend considering the book before adding it to the cart? What’s the tipping point that makes them buy? How many free books do they “buy” in one shopping spree? How many are seriously interested, as opposed to simply locking it in for nothing, just in case they feel like reading it later?

            There’s no way of knowing for sure, but I suspect that quite a few of the free sales are to people I would characterize as literary hoarders, people who can’t stand to pass up a free book because maybe some day they’ll want to read it. Many, if not most, will never open it, or if they do, won’t read beyond the first few pages.

            What I have to hope for is that a handful of those who impulsively snapped it up free will eventually read it. That probably won’t be for a while, because they didn’t really set out to buy it.  But if they like the book, and tell their friends about it, those friends might actually go to Kindle and pay for it because they want it. I can only hope.