Cuppa Coffee and Pizza Pie

            Last week we got back from a 10-day trip to Washington and Oregon. We drove up Interstate 5 to Seattle in two days, spent a long weekend visiting my sister, who lives in the University district, then took the long way back. That involved cutting over to the ocean and taking U.S. 101 down the Oregon coastline and through California redwood country before getting home.

            The most interesting thing about the drive down 101 occurred when we left it for a bit and went inland. Isn’t that how it always happens — the detour becomes the highlight of the trip.

            And it all started with a really simple concept. We decided we didn’t want to stop at a Starbuck’s or other espresso joint for a latte and pre-fab pastry. Instead, we decided to seek out an old-school bakery or café that served fresh homemade pie and coffee — preferably the kind sitting in clear, institutional pots on warming burners.

You Could Always Ask

            Pie patrol began Tuesday afternoon, and for a while there, it didn’t look promising. We stopped at several places along the 101, but none had pie. Finally, though, a waitress at one recommended the Otis Café, at a small town just down the road and slightly off the highway.

            It was good, and we’d go back in a heartbeat, but it just whetted our appetite for more. So the next afternoon we were driving south of Coos Bay, looking for pie again. Figuring that going inland had worked once, I suggested we try the town of Coquille, 11 miles east of the main road.

            It was set in a rich and picturesque valley along the river of the same name, and I’m guessing most of its few thousand occupants earned a living related somehow to farming or logging. Just outside the town proper, we stopped at a fruit stand and bought a jar of locally made raspberry preserves and a larger jar of local blackberry honey.

            Then it was back to town in quest of pie. We drove around the streets while Linda searched to no avail on Yelp, and finally stopped in front of the Chamber of Commerce office, which was open. Linda went in and asked about a pie place, which is what we used to do all the time before the advent of smart phones.

Of Course There’s Pie

            After a bit of misunderstanding, we hit pay dirt. When Linda said she was looking for coffee and a piece of pie, the woman at the chamber heard pizza pie instead and referred her to a place with a name like Luigi’s.

Fortunately the error was self-evident and we end up being sent to Frazier’s Café and Bakery, which had a formidable array of pies in a clean, well-lit establishment with décor from around the 1950s. We each ordered a slice, with a cup of coffee, and each of us got the first piece cut from a fresh pie.

            Linda had a plain cherry pie, and I had the razzle-dazzle: a combination of blackberry, blueberry, cherry, strawberry and raspberry. It was without a doubt one of the finest pieces of pie I’ve ever eaten. The waitress, a young local woman, told me that the bakery has a customer in California who periodically orders a razzle-dazzle pie shipped to her overnight. I’m surprised there’s only one such customer.

            We ate slowly, savoring it all, and when we were done, the check arrived. It was $8 for two slices of pie and two cups of coffee — about what one slice of pie would cost where we live — if you could get it. The décor wasn’t the only thing old-school about Frazier’s.

Not Everybody Loves a Parade

            As I’m writing this on Fourth of July morning, one of the major holiday parades in our area is going on in Aptos Village, just a half-mile away. Thousands of people are lining the street to watch. I’m not one of them.

            There’s an old saying that everybody loves a parade, but it isn’t true. I must have somehow gotten shortchanged on the parade-appreciation gene because this is one activity I’ve never much cared for. I rarely go to one any more, and when I do, my reaction when it’s over is what I call the Peggy Lee response: Is that all there is?

            Between Fourth of July and Gay Pride, there have been a lot of parades around the country lately, and they’ve been well-attended, festive events. I suppose people are getting something out of them, but whatever it is, I don’t see it.

The Granddaddy of Them All

            I grew up in Southern California, in two towns very close to Pasadena, where the Rose Parade is held every New Year’s day. It’s nationally televised, but when I was very young, we didn’t have a TV, and I pestered my parents to take me.

            So when I was about 7 or 8, they bought tickets at a grandstand set up on Colorado Boulevard, near Vroman’s Bookstore, and we went to see the parade. After about 20 minutes, I was done.

            It was boring. The first couple of floats you saw were kind of interesting, but after that it was just one more moving floral display after another. They all looked alike, and nothing was happening on them — just people sitting on the flowers, waving like robots at the crowd. About the only interesting entry was some past-his-prime movie cowboy doing rope tricks as he rode down the street. Then it was flowers and more flowers. Bring on the football game, please!

Seen One, Seen ‘Em All

            And that was supposed to be one of the greatest parades in the world. I’ve seen other parades in other places since, and there’s not one I recall with any particular fondness. So these days, Fourth of July parade time is pretty much a good time to stay home and do the laundry and clean up my computer desktop.

            It’s funny, because people come from all over the county, and even outside it to see our Aptos Parade. It’s billed as the Shortest Parade in the World, which may have been arguably true when it first started half a century ago. But anyone who wants to can be in it, and that includes a growing number of businesses that are using it for self-promotion. So it has grown exponentially and no longer has even the virtue of brevity.

            Maybe if we ever have grandchildren, I’ll be able to go to this parade with them, see it through their eyes, and be able to appreciate it more. Maybe. But left to myself, I have more exciting things to do than go to a parade today. In fact, I think it’s time to move the clothes from the washer to the dryer.

Great Idea for a Book — So What?

            Coming up with a great idea for a book isn’t all that hard. Lots of people — maybe even most people — do it at some point in their lives. Great ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s the ability to execute that matters.

            The problem is that a great idea is like a good seed. Planted and properly cultivated it can grow to majestic proportions, but it can also die underground without putting up the most meager of sprouts.

            Viewed in that light, the great idea is properly understood as but the beginning of a long-term project. What goes into turning a great idea into a compelling book is something like what goes into turning a piece of cotton into a sweater, only harder. Much harder. Anybody can have a great idea, but very few can develop credible characters, write good dialogue, pace a story effectively for 300 pages, or create a sense of atmosphere with the written word. There’s a name for those who can. We call them authors.

It’s The Middle That Kills You

            As one who writes mystery novels, I’m here to tell you I have more good ideas than I know what to do with. Typically, the great idea begins with a concept, followed, in most cases, with a beginning and ending for a book using that idea. Most of the time, that’s where the matter ends.

            Some author, I don’t remember who, once said that anyone can come up with a good beginning and ending for a book, but it’s doing the middle of it that kills you. That’s where the grunt work of keeping a story going and working out its details is hardest but most essential. And my experience has been that the more prepared you are going into it, the easier it goes and the more likely it is to turn out well.

            I marvel at the people who are turning out a book every couple of months now, to feed the ever more voracious maw of Amazon. A book a year is the best I can do, and half that time is spent developing a detailed outline that arranges the details of the story. To me, that’s more demanding than actually writing it once I know where the story is going and how it’s going to get there.

Edison Had It Right

            The great inventor Thomas Edison once said that genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. Even for a non-genius like me, writing a book is exactly like that. Getting the details of plot, character and language right — in other words, the things that make a good book — is where the rubber meets the road.

            A good idea or concept can get a book noticed or published, but such a book can only go so far if the rest of it isn’t up to snuff. The graveyard of unpublished and non-starting self-published books is littered with skeletons. They are all that remains of good ideas that were insufficiently fleshed out.

Can't Tell the Characters Without a Scorecard

Slightly edited version of a post from spring 2013

            A couple of years ago, in the early stages of writing the second Quill Gordon mystery, Wash Her Guilt Away, I 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 before the first corpse makes its appearance.

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 30 to 40 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 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  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? Several reviews commented favorably on the book’s character development, so I guess so.

Trying Out Amazon Preorder

            Between the publication of my second mystery novel, Wash Her Guilt Away, last April and the publication of the third, Not Death, But Love, last month, Amazon introduced a new promotional tool for authors — the preorder. Although I’m not normally a cutting-edge sort of guy, I decided to give it a try.

            Preorder allows an author to put the book out there on Amazon as a coming attraction up to three months before actual publication. Interested readers can reserve a copy, which is downloaded to them on publication day. For the purpose of counting sales for book rankings on Amazon, the preorders are counted the day they’re recorded. For the purpose of paying the author, they’re counted on publication day.

            A book can be placed on preorder if it’s not quite done, but if the final copy isn’t submitted to Amazon a week and a half before publication, there are penalties. Like losing all the preorder sales. I knew I could make the deadline, so figured I had nothing to lose.

Not What I Expected

            My initial expectation was that the book up for preorder would sell about as well as the two books already up on Amazon, but that turned out not to be the case. The first month that Not Death, But Love was up on Amazon, the only buyers were myself, my wife, Linda, and two friends. I concluded that unless you’re a big-name author, you won’t sell many books in March to people who won’t be receiving them until the end of May.

            The next month picked up a bit, and when it got to be about two weeks before book publication date, the pace quickened. Ten days before publication, I sent a blast email to a large group of people I know and saw an immediate surge in sales.

            Not until the book went live did I get a breakdown of where the sales had come from. Most were from the U.S. (I’m guessing half to two thirds were people who knew me), but I also got preorders in the U.K. and Australia, where I don’t know anybody.

A Good Marketing Tool

            From the sales standpoint, I’d have to say the preorders were a bit disappointing, but they still helped somewhat. The unexpected bonus of trying this out was that it enabled me to do some test-marketing about how to present the book.

            When I first put the book up for preorder, the tag line on the book description was, “She was writing a family history, and her murder became the final chapter.” I tried tweeting that with an image of the book cover and a link, but I also tried out several other taglines. One of the alternatives came in head and shoulders above the others in terms of being re-tweeted and favorited.

            The winning tag line was “A Paean to Books, A Reflection on Love, and a Police Procedural With No Police.” That’s currently the leader to the book description on Amazon, and in spite of or because of it, the book is selling well compared to my previous efforts. In any event, I decided that the people had spoken and went with their decision. Well, the people who use Twitter, anyway.

The Hot Dog Stand That Fueled the Newspaper

            For the first few years I worked at the newspaper, I was the Saturday reporter. That’s right — the reporter. It was a small-town daily that published Monday through Saturday in the afternoon, and the Saturday paper was put out with the stuff left over from the day before and whatever the skeleton crew could pull together Saturday morning.

            Weekdays, we had a city editor, who handled the local news, and a wire editor, who handled the state, national and international news that came via United Press International. Saturdays, one editor — Bud O’Brien most weeks — did both jobs. But before coming in, he stopped at the Highway Patrol office during the 5:45 a.m. shift change to pick up vehicle accident reports from the night before.

            As the reporter, I started at a more civilized hour. I’d hit Santa Cruz at around 7:45 a.m., pick up news from that city’s police department and the county sheriff’s department, and get back to the office in Watsonville, 19 miles away, around 9 a.m. I’d write up the Santa Cruz news, call the fire stations, and take the obituaries called in by the funeral homes.

Rolling With the Punches

            You never knew what a Saturday was going to be like. If the villains were having a quiet Friday, the fire departments were polishing their engines, and the elders were holding off on the final check-out, it could be almost boring.

            But if there were a couple of juicy crimes, a couple of fires, and a slew of people going to their final rest, things could get pretty wild. Because of the uncertainty as to what the reporter would be doing, our structure called for the sports editor or one of the sports writers to go to the local police station once the sports pages were down at around 10 a.m.

            And there was a tradition associated with that. At the time there was a hot-dog stand named Taylor’s next to the police station (they’re now a couple of blocks apart), and the police reporter had to stop there to get hot dogs for the Saturday crew. He or she would take orders and collect money, then bring back the dogs. Not even having a triple murder to write up would interfere with stopping at Taylor’s. The news was important, but there were priorities, after all.

I Remember It Well

            It’s probably been 30 years since I had a Taylor’s hot dog, but I can conjure up the taste immediately. There were several possible combinations of condiments, and I always had mine with chili and onions — no mustard, no relish. As you might expect from a small place that did one thing and did it well, the hot dogs were to die for.

            By the time the police reporter returned around 11, we were in the final hour of putting out the paper, and things were often pretty busy. I remember many an occasion when I was sitting at my desk with the phone on my shoulder, a chili dog in my left hand, and a pencil in my right as I wrote down the names of surviving relatives for an obituary. I can’t recall ever making a mistake that could be attributed to the distraction of the hot dog.

            By noon, both the hot dogs and the work were pretty much finished. Once the front page was sent off to be plated for the press, I got to go home. Getting into my car, I could look forward to Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday off, with the aftertaste of the chili dogs still in my mouth. It didn’t get any better than that.

What a Difference a Dollar Makes

            Forty years ago, when I was a small-town newspaper reporter, people would call the paper all the time asking for information or trying to get us interested in their problems for a news story. There was one call that I remember to this day, because it made such an impression on me.

            It was from a man who lived out in the country, and whose neighbors (he said) were illegally using their property in a way that was causing spillover damage and loss of property value to his land. That’s one of those he-said-she-said things that we couldn’t readily get to the bottom of, so I suggested, because he stood to lose thousands of dollars from his neighbor’s actions, that he should report them to the county planning department, and if they found a major violation, we would do a story.

            His answer blew me away. “But the planning department is in Salinas,” he said. “That’s a toll call.”

What’s It Worth to You?

            So to recapitulate: We have someone who claims to be in danger of losing thousands of dollars due to a neighbor’s law-breaking, and he won’t spend a quarter on a toll call to the government department that could enforce the law in his favor. Go figure.

            The point that drove home — one that’s been repeated many times since — is that people are absolutely weird about what they think something’s worth, and it’s hard to figure for that irrationality. In the internet era, the problem is getting worse, particularly in the information/publication area, where people often resist paying for information or content because they’re used to getting it free.

            As a self-published author, this phenomenon is of more than usual interest to me. When I published my first mystery novel, TheMcHenry Inheritance, on Amazon, I priced it at $2.99 because that was the lowest price at which an author could qualify for the 70 percent royalty. Last year, when I put out the second mystery in my series, Wash Her Guilt Away, I kept the price at the same level.

The Caffe Latte Pricing Theory

            Talking to friends, I jokingly referred to it as the Caffe Latte Pricing Theory of book publishing: You had your book cost less than a latte on the theory that it could be an impulse purchase for someone who had never heard of you.

            That seemed to work fairly well. The books haven’t been bestsellers, but they have sold steadily over time and gotten largely positive reviews. They appear to be building a modest following with growth potential. So with the third book in the series, Not Death, But Love, coming out last month, I considered a price increase. Logically, there was no reason not to bump the price up by a dollar, but I kept thinking about that guy who wouldn’t make a toll call when he had thousands of dollars on the line.

            In the end, I decided to go for it and price the book at $3.99. It’s a reasonable amount of money for a book that provides five or six hours of pleasure, and with Amazon’s loan program cutting into author royalties, it made business sense. The book’s been out for a week, and its first-week sales have been double those of the last book. So far, so good, and all I did was go from the price of a small to a medium latte.