Selling Your Book Is Like Fishing, Part II

            In last week’s post I developed the theme that publishing (and trying to sell) your own book is kind of like fishing. If you don’t want to scroll down and read the whole thing, the gist of it was as follows:

            Amazon, the big player in self-publishing, can roughly be compared to a large lake teeming with fish, i.e., the customers for your book. Selling your book is kind of like taking a boat out into some point in the lake and casting out your line. If your bait (that is to say, your book) is any good, you’ll probably catch a few fish (make a few sales), but most of the fish in the lake will never know you’re there.

            Publishing a second book, I reasoned, should significantly improve your chances. It’s like having two lines and two rods working, plus with two books, you have two different pieces of bait to dangle from each line. All other things being equal, you should do better with two books out than with one.

An Experiment in Real Time

            On April 30, I published my second Quill Gordon mystery, Wash Her Guilt Away, as an e-book on Amazon. A month has now elapsed, and the early returns seem to be vindicating the theory.

            My hope was that the second book would do better at the start than the first one, and that turned out to be the case. Wash Her Guilt Away recorded paid sales in May that were 20 percent higher than the best month the first book, The McHenry Inheritance, has yet had. It also did well on two free-promotion days, cracking Amazon’s top 40 free books in crime fiction on both occasions. I don’t make any money from the books given away, but it’s a great way to get people who never heard of me (which would be 99.99999 percent of Amazon customers) to give me a try. If they like the book they got free, the theory goes, they’ll pay for the next one and the one after that.

            So far, so good. But probably the biggest surprise from that first month was the positive impact the release of the second book had on the sales of the first. I figured there would be a little bump, but it was much more than I expected.

Like a Candidate With Coattails

            Amazon doesn’t tell me who buys my books and why, so I have to make deductions. The first free promotion for Wash Her Guilt Away was on Saturday May 3, and several days later, I started seeing a distinct uptick in sales of The McHenry Inheritance. By the end of May, the first mystery had registered its fifth best month (out of 23) in paid sales and was selling almost even with the new one in the second half of the month. It sold ten times more copies in May than it did in April.

            Maybe I’m being a crazy optimist here, but the only explanation I can come up with is that some of the people who got the second book free read it, liked it, and came back to buy the first one. Or at least were intrigued enough to order it anyway.

            If true, that’s good news, and it certainly provides a powerful motivation for writing and publishing the third novel in the Quill Gordon mystery series, given that for sales, the more the merrier seems to be the rule. So here I go. I have the story and characters in place; all I need is a title and a year of work.

Did You Hear?

            One of the first indicators that told me the newspaper business was going irretrievably downhill came when I attended a ten-day seminar for editors and managing editors at the American Press Institute, located back then, in 1987, in Reston, VA. The aha! moment came during the session on lifestyle sections.

            The seminar leader, whose name I have mercifully forgotten, had sent us questionnaires to fill out beforehand. One of the questions was, “Does your newspaper run a gossip column?” I said we didn’t.

            Imagine, then, my surprise, when the session got under way and the chap produced samples from the papers present of what he called gossip columns. They were, without exception, the columns in which we printed the boring stuff people wanted us to print (“John Smith was named to the advisory board of the Heart Assn.”). It was what we printed to get people off our backs so we could cover the real news.

            Planet earth to instructor: If people WANT you to print something, it is, by definition, NOT gossip.

You Could Look It Up

            Webster’s, by the way, backs me up on this, its first definition referring to “personal or sensational facts.” Call me jaded, but Smith’s affiliation with the heart association does not seem personal or sensational in any way.

            Gossip is Walter Winchell asking who was the tycoon making woo-woo with a chorus girl at the Stork Club Thursday night. Gossip is Herb Caen reporting that the prominent political figure who just died unexpectedly was a case of mistress’s nightmare: a fatal heart attack during the height of passion. That’s what I’m talking about!

            Participating in gossip, either as a teller or a listener, is supposed to be a vice, even a sin, which it certainly wouldn’t be if the gossip consisted of Smith’s appointment to the heart association board. I have my doubts about the sin part. To me, gossip is simply human, and I would hope a just and merciful God would see it that way.

            Really, it’s just a sign of interest in people and a grasp of what they really are. Samuel Johnson once said that a man who is tired of London is tired of life. You could substitute “gossip” for “London” in that sentence and it would be just as true.

A Small-Town Pastime

            Gossip is frequently connected with small towns, and in those places no sentient human being can be under any illusions about the probity of his or her fellow citizens. That may be why Americans simultaneously romanticize small towns as being virtuous, while fleeing them in droves for the past 120 years.

            In my second Quill Gordon mystery novel, the characters are cooped up in a remote fishing lodge and housebound by rain. Gordon and his sidekick spend a fair amount of time gossiping about the other guests, and the other guests were no doubt doing the same about them. Gordon’s sidekick actually serves as sort of a Greek chorus, making comment on the action.

            The third book, now in the outline stage, will be taking a close look at the community structure of the town where the story takes place. Will there be gossip about the inhabitants? You bet your sweet bippy there will. It is, after all, a murder mystery, and most people get murdered for a reason. You would have to spend a lot of time reading newspapers to find a case where the reason for the crime was that the victim won the coveted spot on the Heart Assn. advisory board, and the killer was mad with jealousy.

           

           

           

What the Future Holds for Quill Gordon

            Like the first blossoms that herald the advent of spring, signs are appearing that my mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, is gradually beginning to develop a readership beyond my circle of friends and acquaintances.

            This past Saturday I offered the book free as a promotion on Kindle, and it moved 18 percent more e-copies than were downloaded in my March Saturday promotion. Paid sales have increased every month this year, and as I write this, it appears that April will continue that trend. In the past three weeks, three fresh reviews were posted on Kindle, bringing the total number to ten, all legit. Seven of the reviews gave the book 5 stars, two gave it 4 stars, and one gave it 3 stars. And on top of all that, I just got a free plug from the alumni magazine at my alma mater, UC-Santa Cruz.

            Friday night, I finished the first draft of the first chapter of the next book, working title, Wash Her Guilt Away, which I hope to have published by the end of this year. It’s all beginning to prompt some thoughts about the future of Quill Gordon, my lead character.

The Perpetual Vacation

            When I wrote this book, I did it with a running series in mind, and without giving too much away, I can say that by the end of The McHenry Inheritance, Gordon has decided he’s made enough money in the stock market that he doesn’t need to keep his day job any more. That means he can go fly-fishing whenever he wants, and each fishing trip is an adventure (or mystery) waiting to happen.

            Quite a few people have asked if I’m working on a sequel. If you’ve read the first book, you’ll understand the question; if you haven’t, you will when you do read it. But a sequel generally suggests the same characters in the same place or places, and that’s not happening in the second book.

            In the next book, the fishing trip is to a place a couple of hundred miles away from the setting of The McHenry Inheritance. It’s a different location, with a different feel, a different type of story, and different characters. Gordon is the only repeat personality; he even has a different, and more edgy, fishing buddy than in the first book, and my plan is to switch off the two sidekicks in future novels, depending on which one suits the tone of the particular book.

Fly-Fishing in San Francisco?

            From the very beginning, it was never my intent to have Gordon keep coming back to the same place, as Martha Grimes’ Superintendent Jury does to Long Piddleton, or Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache does to Three Pines. Aside from Gordon and his sidekicks, the places and characters will generally change from book to book.

            That doesn’t mean, of course, that Gordon couldn’t return to Summit County, scene of the action in The McHenry Inheritance, or that one or more characters from a previous book couldn’t make an appearance or play a part in a subsequent one. All I’m saying is I want Gordon’s vacations to be without too much baggage so that I have maximum freedom to create new and interesting situations for him.

            It’s even possible, since Gordon lives in San Francisco, that I might set a future book in The City, with fly-fishing scenes introduced through flashbacks. I don’t have a story to fit that concept yet, but what I’m saying is that readers should feel that anything could happen in a Quill Gordon mystery. Keep reading, or you might miss it.

Can't Tell the Players Without a Scorecard

            I am nearly done writing the first chapter of the second Quill Gordon mystery, tentatively titled Wash Her Guilt Away, and have found myself thinking about Ellery Queen. Early Ellery Queen, to be precise.

            What drove my mind there was the experience of trying to write a book that is a contemporary American take on the classic English country-house mystery. If you’ve read Agatha Christie, Georgette Heyer, or any of the other practitioners, you’ll know that’s a story where a diverse group of characters are invited to a country estate for the weekend and a murder ensues, with all the guests being suspects.

            Americans in the present day don’t do that sort of thing (I mean the country-house weekend; we certainly do murders) so in my book the characters assemble at a remote fishing lodge that has a bit of a history. The challenge facing the writer is bringing in all the characters, establishing their characters, and getting the reader interested in those characters without the benefit of the seven or eight corpses that usually appear in the first three pages of a modern mystery.

The Nephew or the Secretary?

            A caring and considerate author also wants readers to keep the characters mentally sorted without too much effort as the book progresses. When Jones reappears after an absence of 20 to 30 pages, you don’t want the reader scratching her head and saying, “Let’s see — was Jones the rich uncle’s nephew or was it his secretary?”

            Based solely on my own reading experience, this can be a serious problem. Quite a few mysteries (and serious novels, as well) have left me dizzy trying to remember what the relationship between the characters was. That’s what sent me to the bookshelf for a look at Queen’s The Greek Coffin Mystery, which I pulled down at random to see if my memory was correct.

            The Greek Coffin Mystery was published in 1932, which definitely makes it early Queen, and sure enough, right at the front, I found what I was looking for: A list of characters. Each was described in only a few words, but those few words established the relationships between the characters and generally what they did.

At any point in the book, a reader could flip back to that page to double-check on who someone was.

So Old School It’s Not Even Retro

            Looking through the character list of this particular book, the reader can quickly be reminded that George Khalkis is an eminent art dealer (and the victim); and that Alan Cheney is the son of Delphina Sloane, who is Khalkis’ sister, and who is married to Gilbert Sloane, the manager of the Khalkis galleries. Got that?

            That sort of scorecard to help the reader keep the players straight can be most helpful, but it went out of style in the 1940s. A writer who tried to use the technique today would probably be laughed off Amazon for being so out of date he wasn’t even retro. The contemporary author has to write his way through that problem without the help of a cheat sheet.

            My approach to separating the sheep from the goats, so to speak, is threefold. First, I’m keeping the character list short; Wash Her Guilt Away has 15 characters compared to 39 in The Greek Coffin Mystery. Second, they aren’t related, except for the married couples. Third, I try to introduce them one or two at a time so the reader can get to know them before moving on. Will that help the reader avoid confusion? I don’t know, but the more critical question is, will the reader care about them? We’ll see.