Tromping on Your Backstory

            One of the problems with writing a series of books with the same running character or characters is keeping the stories straight. You might, for instance, have a character who appeared in Book 1 and is now coming back in Book 4, but you can’t remember if in the first book he was selling insurance or real estate.

            If you’re lucky, you’ll remember where you put that information in Book 1 and be able to look it up fairly quickly. Or, perhaps, you can slide around the question of the character’s occupation. If not, well, nobody ever said the writer’s lot is an easy one.

            There’s also a question of dealing with backstory. In the early books of a series, you can make up the backstory as you go along and, if you’re smart, which I wasn’t, make notes on it as you go along in case it comes up again. But another serious issue plagues the writer of serial books. At some point you get into a situation where you need to rely on some backstory that was in an earlier book.

Teasing Without Spoiling

            I’m encountering that situation now, in the fourth book of my Quill Gordon mystery series. I’m trying to create a situation where Gordon, my protagonist, is letting go of some issues created in the first book, The McHenry Inheritance, and writing those sequences is a case of threading an extremely fine needle.

            If everyone who reads the fourth book has already read the first three, there would be no problem. But that’s never the case. Some readers are scrupulous about reading a series of books in the order written. Others, like me, read whatever books in the series we can get at the time and come back to the others later.

            I try to write my books in such a way that each one will stand alone, but also in a way such that a reader who takes them in order will see some growth and development. But there’s one other consideration that looms large in writing these types of backstory scenes.

Oh, No! You Spoiled It!

            For readers who haven’t yet read the earlier books, you don’t want to spoil the surprises in them. So if you’re mentioning something in a past book, you need to do it in such a way that the reader who read the earlier book will understand, while the reader who hasn’t read the book can at least get the general picture without missing out on some of the surprises if and when he or she does get to the earlier book.

            How, exactly, does the author do this? I don’t know of any magic way. It basically becomes a situation where the author has to say, “I’ve read enough books and written enough words that I think I know more or less how to finesse this.”

            Then you do it the best you can. Then you show it to a couple of friends and get their feedback. Then, after all that, you click “Publish” and unloose the book on a waiting and sometimes cruel world. If you’re good, lucky, or both, the stratagem will work well enough and no one will complain. If you didn’t get it right, maybe the readers will let you know, and you’ll have another chance to do it better the next time.

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.

Getting Away to Work on the Book

            About this time last year, I posted a piece about getting away from it all to do book revisions. I had just returned from a week in Point Reyes, northwest of San Francisco, where I had been editing my second mystery novel, Wash Her Guilt Away. The concentrated effort, in an environment apart from the usual distractions, was highly beneficial, I wrote at the time.

            And I said then that I’d do it again for the next book, which I’ve just done. My third Quill Gordon mystery, Not Death, But Love, is about to go to my editor, Lauren Wilkins, for a final look, but I had to get the early-draft kinks out of it before she sees it. Ergo, another week in Point Reyes.

            For those unfamiliar with the area, Point Reyes Station is a town of about 350 people near the Point Reyes National Seashore. For my purposes, the town is just right for this sort of working getaway. What makes it so? Well, there are several factors.

What’s Your Environment?

            Probably I should begin by saying that’s a personal question. Different writers need different work spaces for this sort of thing. Some would be quite happy in a basement office in central Manhattan. Others would consider Point Reyes too cosmopolitan and distracting.

            Point Reyes Station is just right for me as a working base. It has a grocery store and hardware store where you can pick up just about anything you might have forgotten to bring from home. It has an Auto Club-approved garage (more on that later), three nice restaurants, a good coffee shop, and an excellent bakery. It also has a number of boutiques with lovely merchandise (good for gifts to take home) and a sweet little bookstore, where I bought three books.

            In short, just enough to provide a bit of a diversion when needed, but not so much as to be a distraction. That works for me. I need to be able to get away from the work a bit, and a short visit to town for a latte and a stroll-through in a couple of shops is just the ticket.

At the Edge of the Marsh

            Home for the week was a little cottage behind a house about a mile out of town. It had a small kitchen area, a living area with room to set up a folding table I brought along, and a nook to the side that housed a queen bed and a bathroom with a decent-sized shower. There was an enclosed outdoor patio, where I worked a couple of sunny afternoons, and the main window looked out on a yard full of sheep behind a fence.

            The property backs onto a marsh, which offers a great deal of solitude. Perhaps in the summer it’s an insect factory, but in early February, that wasn’t an issue. It was a good, quiet place to work, and I got a lot done.

            But I didn’t quite finish. The last morning, I was going to head into town for a pastry, but the car wouldn’t start. The garage sent out a truck to get me jumped, and I had to take the car to a Ford dealer in Petaluma, 35 miles away, to have it looked at. It turned out a battery cell was shot, and a replacement battery was installed under warranty. It took six and a half hours, and kept me from making the final changes on the last chapter. No harm, no foul. I finished the work when I got home, and the drive to Petaluma took me on a beautiful road I probably wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Sounds like a win-win situation to me.

So What's Your Angle?

            When I self-published my first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, nearly two years ago, I had to figure out a marketing plan. And I have to say that doing my own marketing for the book gave me a better understanding of why no agent wanted to touch it.

            Modern publishing, for better or worse, is mostly about the big score. Fifty years ago, a publishing house would be willing to nurture a writer whose first book sold five thousand copies; whose second book sold ten thousand; whose third book sold twenty thousand; and whose fourth had a breakout and sold forty to fifty thousand, plus drove readers to buy the earlier books.

            That sort of investment in an author is all but unheard-of these days. Agents and publishers are looking for a book that will sell in six-figure numbers straightaway. And in order to do that, there has to be an easily explained, highly exploitable angle for promoting it. Call it the book’s elevator speech, if you will.

A Good Story Is Not Enough

            Saying you have a good, compelling story is not enough. The marketing question is what makes the book stand out from its competitors; what makes it new and fresh and promotable.

            My angle was to promote the fly-fishing aspect of the book. Quill Gordon, my protagonist, is a man of independent means who can go fishing whenever he wants. The stories in the Quill Gordon Mystery series occur and will occur when he goes on a fishing trip and gets caught up in the local drama. So promoting the fly-fishing angle seemed logical — except that I’m starting to think it wasn’t.

            From the standpoint of selling books, there are two problems with that approach. The first is that there aren’t that many fly fishermen and women out there, so the appeal is being made to a small market niche to begin with. The second is that a lot of people who fly fish don’t read fiction. And I am rapidly coming to the belief that people who don’t read fiction are rarely going to change their ways because a certain work of fiction happens to be about their hobby or area of enthusiasm.

Free Advice and Worth Every Penny

            Well-meaning friends are always offering suggestions for selling the book by connecting with the fly fishing market, but I have grave doubts. Amazon already links my books with other fly-fishing-themed mysteries, and that probably serves to put it in front of most of the mystery readers who are looking for that kind of book.

            With the second Gordon novel, Wash Her Guilt Away, I’ve tried to take a broader approach to marketing the book — stressing the character tensions, the locked-room mystery, the witches’ coven and other aspects. I do believe I have a good story here, and I’m trying to promote it as such in a way that will attract readers who don’t necessarily care about fly fishing.

            The ones who do care about fly fishing will probably get more out of it, in the same way that people who love horses and horse racing get a bit more out of a Dick Francis novel than a horseless guy like me. But the point is, I like Dick Francis and I believe readers can like my books without caring about fishing.

            The ongoing marketing of my mystery series will undoubtedly be a matter of trial and error, trying a bunch of ideas and discarding the ones that don’t work. It will take time to reach an audience, if I ever do, but that’s all right. When you self-publish, you have a boss who can take the long view.

Fishing Memory: Alderson Lake

            This summer, as a sidelight to the Quill Gordon mystery series, I’ll be writing occasional blogs about memorable days of fishing. It’s a good way of getting those memories on the record and keeping myself in the right mood for writing the next book in the series.

            To begin, I’ll recall a day from the first year I took up fly fishing, 1982. That was also the year Linda and I bought a used 1977 VW camper and took one of our longest driving trips ever. Leaving Santa Cruz in late July, we drove north to Seattle, spent a few days with my sister there, then headed north to Canada through British Columbia to Jasper and Banff National Parks.

            From there, we went south, spending a few days at Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada and Glacier National Park in Montana before finally coming home. Total elapsed time: a little over three weeks. It’s hard now to imagine that we could ever get away for so long.

Right Equipment, No Clue

            That June I had bought an Orvis fly rod (my first of three), and it could be argued that a sales person with any ethics shouldn’t have sold it to such a greenhorn. Before the big trip, I’d taken the rod out on a couple of weekend trips where I hadn’t caught a thing. Much as I’d like to blame it on the fish or the weather, the fact was that I had no idea what I was doing.

            I fished at Banff and Jasper with similar results and by the time we got to Waterton was a bit down on my new hobby. Looking around for a day hike to take, we found on the map a trail leading from Waterton to Alderson Lake, about six and a half miles away. On a day with no rain in the forecast, we started out, with me carrying my fly rod by hand; waders and a box of flies were in my backpack.

            It was a stunningly beautiful hike, steep with switchbacks, through alpine terrain with breathtaking views. It took us about three hours to get to the lake, and we arrived a bit after 11 a.m. It was sunny, with passing clouds; the air was achingly clear, and the lake, more like a large, glacier-carved pond, had fish in it that were sporadically feeding on the surface.

Trout for Dinner

            The lake had a rocky bottom, but I was able to wade out waist-deep and cast a dry fly (an Adams or Humpy) over deeper water. The fish were cruising the lake and I and I caught three when they came near me — two cutthroats and a brook trout, 13, 11 and 10 inches long. It was legal to keep a few then, and it was before I converted to catch-and-release fishing, so we took them back to camp for dinner.

            In the three or four hours we were at the lake only a few other people came by, and they didn’t stay long. We pretty much had the place to ourselves. At some point we had a picnic lunch of sandwiches we had brought, and I had to take breaks from fishing on a regular basis because the lake was so cold it was numbing my feet, even through the boots and waders.

            Alderson Lake and the hike to it were so splendid, it would have been a special day if I hadn’t caught any fish. But because it was my first decent result with a fly rod, the day was even more special. You could say that was when I got hooked.

Every Day and in Every Way

            When I wrote my first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, I didn’t really have any goal other than to see if I could come up with a mystery good enough to show to other people. Because it was the first time around, I did it on a wing and a prayer, plodding forward with the idea in my head until it was done. I had no experience or basis to compare the effort to.

            The result was a book that has garnered decent reviews and decent traffic for a first work by an unknown author. But when I was finished with it, I knew I could have done better, and, knowing at least some of where I stumbled along the way, made some effort to change the way I wrote the next one.

            So the second time around I did more outlining — not just of the plot, but also putting down details of the setting and the characters before I sat down at the computer and began writing. I’d done a plot outline for the first book, but the second outline was considerably longer and more detailed.

Pick One Thing and Work It

            I also decided to try to focus on improving in one specific area, and chose character and dialogue. With that in mind, I looked at my grab-bag of story ideas and went for the one that was probably most dependent on character and atmosphere to carry the story forward. The result was the second Quill Gordon mystery, Wash Her Guilt Away, which should be up on Amazon in four to six weeks.

            As I’ve mentioned before, this is essentially an English country-house mystery, in which a group of people — some known to each other, some strangers — are brought together in an isolated setting. Tensions simmer, and eventually someone ends up dead. Because Americans don’t, by and large, do country-house weekends any more, I made the setting a remote fishing lodge, at which the guests are thrown together by a stretch of unremittingly bad weather.

            Starting afresh with the same protagonist, but otherwise a different setting and different cast of characters, I had the freedom to invent anew and be only slightly limited by what I had written in the first book. I even gave my lead character a different fishing sidekick and had some fun developing the new sidekick’s persona.

Diagramming the Plot

            There’s no telling what the readers will think, but I felt there was some improvement and plan to follow much of the same process for the third one.

            Which, by the way, is already started, with a goal of being in print (or at least in e-book) by the end of 2015. At the moment I’m only 90 percent sure about the title, so I won’t be giving that out yet, but I can tell you three things about it:

            1. It will take place in a different setting from the first two books and will have a new set of characters;

            2. The exception being that Gordon and one of the sidekicks from the first two books will reprise his role;

            3. The focus for improvement will be the complexity of the plot and the ingenuity involved in unraveling the mystery.

            This time I’m doing a formal story board and calendar for the action to ensure that everything falls into place as it should and diagramming the plot with even greater precision than before. Perhaps this is an exercise in literary Coue-ism, but if you’re not improving, you’re going backwards. I even know what I want to work on in the fourth novel, but let’s get this one done first.

           

           

Writing It Is the Easy Part

            There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who can’t imagine writing a book, and those who can’t imagine not writing a book. Most of my friends belong to the first group, and they sometimes ask me how hard it is to write a book.

            My standing answer is that any idiot can write a book, but that it takes a certain level of skill to write one that anyone will actually read. That doesn’t entirely answer the question, I know, but it’s the best I can do.

            As I approach the publication, in a few weeks, of my second Quill Gordon mystery novel, it occurs to me that there is a postscript to my standing answer. That would be that writing the book is the easy part; it’s all the stuff that comes afterward that’s the real work.

Mistakes on Top of Mistakes

            I happen to be thinking of this because yesterday afternoon I got an email from Lauren Wilkins, a former colleague at the newspaper, who is doing the final outside edit of book two, Wash Her Guilt Away. I decided to pay someone to do this after hearing from my friends about the mistakes they were finding in the first book, The McHenry Inheritance. (At least Amazon made it easy to go back and clean those up!)

            Already I’ve taken a week off to do nothing but edit and rewrite the second book, and after I was done with that, I gave it to my wife, Linda, for another read and made the corrections she indicated. Now Lauren is saying she’s making good progress and is surprised by how much stuff she’s catching.

            That both gratifies and mortifies me. I’m mortified because I don’t feel so much should still be wrong at this point, but gratified that my decision to hire an outside editor turned out to be justified. With any luck, my friends will have less to point out this time around.

            A key determinant of the ultimate publication date will be how much time it takes me to go through the manuscript and respond to what Lauren caught. I’m hoping the book will be out in late April, but realistically, it might not be on Amazon before May.

Who’s Hosting This, Anyway?

            Meanwhile, I met with my webmaster last week to redesign my website. Right now it’s doing a good job of promoting one book, but from here on out, it has to promote a series of books, which means completely restructuring it. That’s daunting enough as it is, but it turns out that neither the webmaster or I could initially figure out who’s hosting the site.

            Eventually that got figured out, but it was obscured because I have two accounts with the server business, owing to my propensity for forgetting log in ID’s and passwords. Fortunately that got sorted out in little over an hour; they were very helpful, and if I’d had to go somewhere else, that might have been a long slog.

            At the same time all this is going on, we’re waiting for rain so the final footage for the video trailer can be shot; a storm just moved in today, and the videographer is hoping to take care of business now. And of course I’m planning the promotional work for the book, which will really pick up once it’s actually published. With such a full plate, I’ll barely have time to follow March Madness this weekend. I’m rooting for Stanford and Tennessee, but only the Vols have much chance of going to the Final Four. You read it here first.

           

The Race to the Finish

            One of the things about reading a mystery novel is that the closer to the end you get, the faster it goes. It might take two hours to read the first hundred pages, but only one hour to read the last seventy-five.

            That has a lot to do with the inherent nature of storytelling. In the first hundred pages of the book, the reader is still getting the lay of the land. That involves processing a lot of stuff, from understanding the physical setting of the book to getting the characters sorted out. There have been some mysteries where even after two hundred pages, I was still scratching my head over whether Neville was the duke’s brother or prospective son-in-law.

            The closer the reader gets to the last page, the less of an issue that is. By then the reader knows who’s who and what’s what, and the story is galloping to a finish. If the reader has made it that far, almost every mystery is a page-turner at that point.

The Author Feels the Pain

            Much of what the reader goes through in reading the book, the author experiences as well in the writing of it. From my own experience, I would say that writing a novel is like running a marathon. There’s the rush of excitement at getting started, the long slog through a seemingly interminable middle, and the final burst of adrenalin at the race to the finish.

            When I wrote my first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, I felt those three phases acutely. When I began writing, I had a deadline for finishing the first draft in my mind, and after the first two chapters, I figured I’d beat that deadline with no worries.

            Not so fast. The middle of the book proved to be rough, even excruciating, sledding. I began to see previously unplanned things I had to do to both build on what I’d already written and to set up what I had in mind for the finale. Halfway through the first draft, I was bogged down and realized there was no way I’d hit the deadline.

            Then a funny thing happened. As I got back to the last three chapters, the confidence returned, the fingers began flying over the keyboard, and I made up lost time, finishing at around five o’clock Christmas Eve, a week ahead of schedule.

Round Up the Usual Suspects

            I’m currently wrapping up the first draft of my next Quill Gordon mystery, and the pattern has repeated itself somewhat. Learning from past experience, I plotted out the book and the characters better this time, with the result that writing the middle was less of a quagmire.

            At the same time I was writing the middle of the mystery, I was finishing work on a nonfiction book of local history, on which there was considerable time pressure to publish this year. That slowed down the writing of the mystery, but once the history book was off to the printers in early October, I was able to devote my attention to the mystery, with gratifying results. The penultimate chapter was completed last night, a week and a half ahead of schedule.

            With the holidays coming and my business workload easing, I’ll be writing fast and furious the rest of the year. Allowing for revisions, formatting, and all the other minutiae of finishing a book, I’m hoping to have it published in the spring of 2014. The race to the finish is on, and it’s every bit as much fun as it was the last time around.

           

Celebrating My Book's Anniversary

            This week marked the one-year anniversary of the digital publication of my first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance. I’ve had quite a year promoting the book, getting feedback on it, and working on the next Quill Gordon mystery, Wash Her Guilt Away, which I hope to release in early 2014.

            Anniversaries are always a good time to celebrate and take stock. The celebration takes the form of a free giveaway today (7/26) on Kindle. This essay will be the inventory, as it were, of what has happened and what I’ve come to understand about self-publishing in the digital age.

            The first big lesson I learned was about the power of free, as in free book. I decided to do a promotional giveaway within a couple of days of when the book went up, and on that first free day moved 250 copies. As I hadn’t yet notified most of my friends, those “sales” represented new readers who were willing to take a chance on the book if it cost them nothing. The strategy is that if they like it, they’ll be willing to pay a modest amount for the next one. I hope.

Building the Fan Base

            Based on the response to free-book giveaways, my understanding of how to market the book underwent a seismic change over the next few months. Before the book came out, I was thinking mostly about maximizing revenue from it, but I quickly came to realize that for an unknown writer, that’s a pipe dream. There are so many books out there that it’s a rare first novel indeed that will rack up an impressive number of paid sales.

            Instead, I came to think of it as a way of establishing some sort of base of followers for the books that I hope will follow. Simply put, I see it as the acorn, from which a solid oak tree may some day grow.

            More than 3,000 people have acquired the book, and about 90 percent of them got it as a free promotion. For a first book, that’s a decent acorn, and if a reasonable number of those folks review the book, tell a friend, or come back for the next one, I may be on to something. I don’t need John Grisham numbers to consider the Quill Gordon series a success. A half-dozen books, each generating a few hundred paid sales a month, could produce a steady stream of income over the years.

Finding an Audience Takes Time

            Realistically, building a fan base takes time. Most authors do it in increments, one book at a time, until they finally get a breakout book (if they do) that hits the bestseller lists. Keep writing; keep promoting; hope for a break; and maybe good things will happen.

            For instance, I was wondering for nine months why no reviews were forthcoming from people who’d picked the book up earlier. In the past three months, those reviews, mostly positive, have been showing up on Kindle, and I now have a respectable 15 reviews. That starts to make it look like a book that people are actually reading, which I hope they are.

            And it’s been a lot of fun along the way: Book signings, newspaper interviews, learning to use Facebook and Twitter for promotional purposes, talking to classes at schools, blogging. These days, writing the book is only part of the author’s job description, and I consider myself fortunate indeed that I enjoy the rest of the package as much as I do. Onward to book number two.

Talking to Rotary About Publishing

            Wednesday afternoon I gave a talk to the Rotary Club of Watsonville about “Self-Publishing in the Digital Age.” If you’re wondering how I got such a gig with my meager qualifications, I should mention that I serve on the club’s program committee and can call my own number at any time.

            With only a half hour, and wanting to leave time for questions, I could only skim the surface. I began by bringing up the memory of one our late club members, Sherrell Watson, who had self-published a book on steam locomotives in 1995, and tried to draw a contrast between that era and 17 years later, when I published my mystery, The McHenry Inheritance. The primary focus was the rise of Amazon and social media, which can give a hustling self-published author a modest shot at success.

            I do a lot of public speaking and (braggadocio alert!) like to believe I’m pretty good at it, which includes reading the audience reaction. This group was clearly interested, and when I finished the prepared talk and asked for questions, a half-dozen hands shot up instantaneously. That’s a sure sign they’re listening.

Interested in the Marketing

            As might have been expected from a business-oriented group, the questions were mostly geared to the business and marketing aspects of book publishing, as opposed to the work of writing a book. In fact, the closest thing to a writing question was whether I’m planning a sequel. The answer is yes, but not a continuation of the story, rather a new adventure featuring Quill Gordon (my main character) in a different setting with different characters and a fresh story.

            Beyond that, I tried to answer the questions in a complex and sophisticated fashion. A few examples:

            Q: Fifty Shades of Gray was self-published and became a huge best-seller. Do you think your book can do that?

            A: Probably not. I forgot to include any bondage or S&M scenes.

            Q: How do you make any money selling an e-book for $2.99?

            A: No problem. You just sell a million of ‘em.

            Q: How many people would you guess bought your book because they thought it was written by Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes?

            A: Not nearly enough.

            Yeah, we had some fun.

Surprised by the Response

            There were some good questions about tracking sales and about marketing the book as a straight mystery or emphasizing the fly-fishing angle. (Gordon is on a fishing trip in the High Sierra when he gets caught up in the murder and intrigue.) All in all, I was quite pleased with how it went.

            One pleasant surprise came out at the end. I had mentioned in my talk that I had probably maxed out on selling the book to my friends and had to be getting it into the hands of strangers now. I really believed that, figuring that if anyone who knows me hadn’t bought it after five months on the market, they weren’t going to buy it at all.

            Not so, as it turned out. In the course of the talk I mentioned that I had brought some books for sale (I’d recently ordered a dozen from Create Space, Amazon’s print-on-demand program) and that I would give $3 from each sale to the club’s community service fund. When the meeting adjourned, there was a crush around the head table, and when it finally dispersed, I had sold ten books to an audience of approximately 60 people. Nice work if you can get it, and not a bad day’s work at that.