Stopping to Smell the Flowers

            It was Mae West who once said, in a context other than literature, “I like a man what takes his time.” That used to be true in literature as well; readers appreciated authors who took their time to describe people, settings and situations in a way that made them come to life. Think of Dickens’ London.

            These days, not so much. Or so it seems.

            In the past month I’ve read two mystery-thriller novels by two different best-selling contemporary American authors, and what struck me about both of them was the utter lack of description. One book was set in New York and the other in San Francisco, but neither gave the least bit of feeling for the city in which the story took place. Either book could easily have been relocated to Cleveland simply by changing some place names.

            It was not always thus. Dashiell Hammett made you feel San Francisco; Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain caught the spirit of Los Angeles; and Ellery Queen captured the unmistakable aura of New York in the Twenties and Thirties.

Plot Coming; Outta The Way!

            All the aforementioned authors wrote pretty hard-boiled, fast-paced stuff, but they were still close to and felt bound by the older literary traditions that required a scene to be properly set and a character to be properly established. Those guys didn’t dawdle, but they colored in the picture well enough.

            I got to thinking about this on a more personal level lately when I went back and re-read the reviews on Kindle for my first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance. The book was generally well received by readers and is averaging a bit over four stars, but several reviewers, including some who rated the book highly, complained that there was too much description of fishing in the book.

            As a matter of objective fact, there were two detailed fishing scenes in the book, each about three pages long. One scene introduced the story’s antagonist and the other established the time of death in the murder.

            And, to be fair, a number of readers praised the descriptions in the book, so who do I listen to? At the moment, I have to feel the complainers are so used to books that don’t pause to convey detail — books that race from chase to chase and killing to killing — that they don’t know what to make of a story that stops to smell the flowers occasionally.

Authors What Takes Their Time

            And there certainly are successful mystery writers who do take the time to develop character and atmosphere. Benjamin Black and Louise Penny come to mind. But then, one is Irish and the other Canadian. The list of leisurely Americans is short indeed.

            I personally enjoy the writer who takes the time and effort to establish a setting, develop a character more fully, let me know what time of year it is and what the weather is like, and who even might interrupt the narrative flow of the book to tell, as an aside, a good story that may or may not have anything to do with the matter at hand but is interesting in its own right. Those are the details that make a book more real and memorable.

            That’s the way I try to write my mysteries, and if there’s a smaller audience for that sort of book than there is for the slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am thrillers, so be it. Authors and readers relate to each other as lovers, and I’m content to find the lovers — book lovers, that is — that like a man what takes his time.

The Locked-Room Mystery

            One of the pleasant surprises I’ve experienced since my second mystery novel, Wash Her Guilt Away, went live several weeks ago has been the response to the mystery itself. Several people have commented that they found the puzzle puzzling and the solution and explanation of it interesting and entertaining.

            Seventy five years ago, the puzzle or mystery was why people read mystery novels. Some authors (early Ellery Queen comes to mind) would even issue a challenge to the reader at the point where the detective was about to unmask the killer and explain the crime. The challenge was, essentially, you know everything the detective knows; all the clues have been laid before you fairly and openly; can you deduce who the killer was and how the crime was committed?

            There’s a certain pleasure to be had from this sort of matching wits with the detective/author, but the genre has largely gotten away from that sort of story. Instead, we tend to have police procedurals, where we follow the cops as they collect one piece of information after another until the picture comes into play, or we have books where the killer is known and the suspense is in catching him or her.

Doing It Backwards

            In my book, the puzzle is a locked-room mystery, an old chestnut that goes back nearly a century and a half. For all that, modern practitioners have still tried their hands at it. I’m thinking of Peter Lovesey in The Circle and Sjowall and Wahloo in The Locked Room. And why not? It’s a nifty gimmick.

            I originally conceived my book, years ago, as a social-tension mystery, where a group of people are cooped up in a remote place and things start getting a bit chippy. Somewhere along the way, it occurred to me that having the murder occur in a locked-room setting would be a nice touch, so I worked that into the outline and used it as a selling point in the book description I put up on Amazon.

            That sort of device is fun, but there are two things that have to be understood. The first is that there is no mystery involved for the author. He essentially does the story backwards, figuring out how to create the locked-room situation, then writing it in such a way as to misdirect the reader and sow confusion. The second is that the solution is always a bit disappointing, since it has to be more prosaic than the situation as presented.

Underestimating the Mystery

            Perhaps because I approached the locked-room mystery in the way described, I wasn’t all that impressed by my own creation. In fact, I went through moments of angst in which I was telling myself the solution was so obvious as to be cringe-worthy and subject to ridicule by readers.

            I was emboldened, however, by the fact that neither my wife nor my editor figured it out, which was an indication that I had pulled off the literary shell game with at least some degree of competence. And, after all, it was a good tease for the book, so I went ahead with it, and that’s looking as if it was the right decision.

            In the handful of reviews now up on Kindle, most comment on the quality of the puzzle as being something the reader liked in the book, and I’ve received several comments from people who said they were baffled until the mystery was explained by the detective at the end. I suppose it goes to show that the old pleasures never die; they’re simply reinvented over and over.

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.

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.

Selling Your Book Is Like Fishing

            The publication of my second mystery novel, Wash Her Guilt Away, has set me, once again, to thinking about the business of bookselling. I think I learned some things from the publication of the first book, The McHenry Inheritance; now let’s see if that turns out to be the case.

            One analogy that occurred to me in the first turn was that selling books is a lot like fishing, a simile that rings particularly true for the self-published author. With due respect to my readers, especially those who paid for the book, I’d like to pursue the comparison a bit farther.

            To begin with, one has to think of Amazon, the undisputed big boy in the self-publishing world, as a large, nutrient-rich lake teeming with readers, who are symbolized by fish. You know the fish are out there, and in enormous numbers, but for the most part you can’t see them, and figuring out where they are and what they’re biting on, i.e. buying, is an immense challenge.

Into the Boat and Onto the Water

            An author who puts a book up on Amazon is rather like an angler who takes a boat out on the lake, drops anchor and casts his bait into the lake. Assuming the book is good (in other words, that the bait isn’t rancid), the author can fish from one side of the boat, sit tight, and sooner or later catch a fish or two. But the reality is that nearly every other fish in the lake won’t even see the bait.

            In point of fact, not even every fish within catchable distance of the boat is going to see that bait. If the area fishable from the boat can be described as a circle surrounding the vessel, the author with one book is like an angler fishing with one rod and one hook from one side of the boat. That angler is putting the bait in front of only a quarter of the fish within shouting distance, at best.

            Furthermore, even if the bait is perfectly good, it might not be what the fish are in the mood for that day. You could be fishing with a plump, savory salmon egg, but if the fish are in the mood for cheese that day, they will swim right past your egg without so much as a second thought.

Two Rods and Two Hooks

            As a fisherman, I like to say that when you’re catching fish, you know you’re doing something right, but when you’re not catching fish, you often have no idea what the problem is. You could be using the wrong bait or the wrong technique, in which case the failure is on you. But it could also be that the fish ate their fill earlier in the day and simply aren’t interested, or that they have temporarily left the area you’re fishing, or that the weather is temporarily affecting the food supply and the environment. You just don’t know.

            Now let’s say our author/angler puts a second book up on Amazon. That changes the equation. Instead of fishing off one side of the boat, our intrepid angler now has a rod off two sides and is covering twice as much area and, theoretically, reaching twice as many fish with the bait. Also, each rod now has two hooks on it — one for each book. The fish can choose between cheese and salmon egg, and that increases the author’s chances. You have to figure you’ll do better overall.

            Those were the lines along which I was thinking when I put the second book up at the end of April. Next week I’ll discuss the early results.

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.

Good Training for Self-Publishing

            Back in the day, when I was editing a daily newspaper, I didn’t have a secretary. The company I worked for wasn’t terribly keen on spending money for anything, so they decided the general manager and I could do without. If I needed to photocopy a document, I had to walk out of my office in the newsroom, walk across the building to the Classified Advertising department, and make the copy myself.

            That was because the only photocopying machine in the building was in Classified. Also, I had to put my name down on a sheet of paper with a clipboard that sat atop the copier and record, with tally marks, how many copies I had made.

            As I said, the company didn’t like to spend money on anything. And don’t even ask what was involved in getting a replacement typewriter ribbon in the days before we switched over to computers. You don’t want to know.

If You Want It Done, Do It Yourself

            Spending 15-30 minutes a day doing my own photocopying was probably not the best use of my time, but I’d never known a different way of doing things, so I didn’t notice all that much. When I left the paper and went out on my own as a freelance consultant, I had to do everything myself as well.: Go to the post office every day to get the mail, go to Staples to get office supplies, write the checks to pay the bills, lick the envelopes and put the stamps on.

            In any given eight-hour day now, I figure an hour to an hour and a half of it is going to toward doing those kinds of things. When you’re self-employed, it comes with the territory.

            Much as I’d like to say that this sort of self-reliance builds character, I have my doubts. But there is one good thing that has come of it. It definitely has prepared me for my venture into self-publishing. The authors who have big contracts with the publishing houses can let those institutions take care of a lot of detail work while the author gets going on the next blockbuster. The self-publishing author doesn’t even begin the next book until all the detail work is done on the current one.

Having a Lot of Contacts Helps

            Two weeks ago my second mystery novel, Wash Her Guilt Away, went up on Amazon. For months beforehand, I was immersed in not only making the final revisions to the book, but also in working out all the details leading up to publication.

            I had to decide what the cover would look like and who should do it; I had to write a script for a video trailer and get someone to film and edit it; I had to get an author’s photo ready; I had to rework the website for my books; and, because I don’t have a publisher with in-house editors, I had to hire someone to give my book the final once-over before I thrust it upon an unsuspecting public.

            Owing to my years at the newspaper and doing PR work in the community, I at least have the advantage of knowing who’s good at doing those sorts of things, so I’ve been pleased with the results. And even working with people I know and trust, there’s a lot I have to do. I don’t know how someone less connected would go about it, but at least I can be grateful for all those years of working without a secretary. If I’d had one then, I’d be lost without one now.