When Book Clubs Read Your Book

            In the past couple of months I’ve had the pleasure of being invited to two book club meetings that were discussing one of my mystery novels. It was a great experience, and one that gave me a bit of an insight into how the books are being read by typical readers.

            The first book club met on January 10 and was discussing my second novel, Wash Her Guilt Away. The meeting began with the playing of the video trailer for the book, and, since he had a cameo role in the trailer, the retired local police chief was also invited to the event.

            About a dozen people were on hand, and it turned out a couple of them were fly fishermen. As the book is set during a fly-fishing vacation, that gave something to talk about, and they showed pictures of fish they had caught. They were bigger fish than I usually catch, but let’s skip the sour grapes.

The Question I Didn’t Expect

            A certain amount of the discussion at this meeting (and at the other, as well) had to do with questions about how I write the books and where I get my ideas. My general answer to that question is that as a writer I’m always stockpiling material and ideas and that once I start to map out a story line, things begin to fuse together into a semi-coherent whole.

            Even so, there were questions I wasn’t expecting. One that threw me for a loop came from a man in the group who said he didn’t understand why a successful 55-year-old businessman would be attracted to a 27-year-old woman. (They were already married when the story began and were two of the key characters.)

            Of all the things in the book that I never expected to have to explain, that would top the list. As I sat there trying to formulate a tactful response, one of the women in the group came to my rescue.

            “Oh, come on,” she said, and made a hand gesture with an unmistakable meaning. I thanked her under my breath.

Just Among Rotarians

            Last week, I went to the second book club. It was formed by members of a nearby Rotary Club (not the one I belong to) and was discussing my first novel, The McHenry Inheritance.

            The club has ten members, but on that blustery, rainy winter night only four showed up. I knew them all, and it was a convivial experience. They had some good questions and comments.

            The lone man in the group analyzed the ending of the book, using the Rotary Four-Way Test: Is it the truth; is it fair to all concerned; will it build goodwill and better friendships; and is it beneficial to all concerned. It was a way of looking at the ending that hadn’t occurred to me, but at the same time showed that he had been considering the moral complexity of it.

            And there was a make my day moment, too. One of the women in the group said that when I published the book three and a half years earlier, and sent out emails to everyone I knew, she decided to buy it, even though she’d never bought an e-book before. It took her a while to get it on her iPad and be able to read it, but she persevered and said she loved the book.

            Now that’s what I call a loyal customer.

Driving up the Market for Art

            Every once in a while something happens that just seems meant to be. If you’re lucky, it could be something really big, like marrying the right person or getting the job that launches you on the career you should have. Even when it’s not  that important, it’s still a neat thing.

            A couple of weeks ago, I had one of those karma moments, or whatever you want to call them. A woman I know was having an exhibition of her paintings. She had received a fine arts degree years ago, but life happened before her painting took off: marriage, kids, a day job.

            A while back, she decided to take up painting again and found herself getting caught up in it.  The ouvre grew to the point where she had two shows in a week, at opposite ends of the county. I went to the first to see what she was up to and as a gesture of support.

The Woman in the Scarf

            The artist and I know enough of the same people that I recognized several familiar faces when I walked into the show and was quickly put at ease. I walked around the room several times, looking at the paintings. Some of them were more fully realized than others, but the underlying talent and competence were clearly in evidence.

            From my perspective, the best painting in the show was a profile of a woman wearing a scarf over her head. Everything clicked — from the jut of her jaw to the thrust of her nose to the pattern of the scarf to the perfect shade of green in the background. Apparently the artist agreed with me, because that was the painting she had put up for silent auction, with a comparatively high starting bid.

            I was intrigued. The silent auction closed at 5 p.m., and at 3, I was getting back to the house. If I made a bid before leaving, there would be two hours for someone else to come along and bid higher, so there didn’t seem to be a point.

            And then, I remembered what I had learned about silent auctions at Rotary.

You Gotta Know When to Hold ‘Em

            It’s the same principle, really, as in poker. You raise the stakes by a higher order of magnitude, chasing away the people who aren’t serious. It often results in a win without any further back-and-forth.

            Fortunately, I am in a position where if I want to spend a few hundred dollars on a work of art, I can arrange my finances to make it happen. I did a quick mental calculation about what I could do, settled on a number I could live with, and wrote it down on the auction sheet. My bid was four times higher than the increments bid up to that point. I reasoned that even if I didn’t get it (a strong possibility), I was helping drive the price up for the artist.

            At ten minutes past five, I got a call from the woman handling paintings at the show, notifying me I’d made the high bid for the woman in the scarf. It later turned out that someone else had been planning on coming in at the last minute and making the high bid, but had gotten distracted and missed the deadline. The gods were with me on this one. Last week, I took over possession.

            Now all I have to do is decide where to hang it.

Talking to Students About Fly Fishing

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            This week I sat down with Ron Kinninger, a retired school administrator, to talk about meeting with the Reading Buddies next month. Ron and I are both members and past presidents of the Rotary Club of Watsonville, which sends club members into E.A. Hall Middle School once a week to read with the kids who go there.

            It’s a great way to get them interested in reading and to expand their reading skills. Reading a book aloud with an adult who can ask questions and point things out can dramatically improve a student’s reading skills in a short period of time. It’s not uncommon to see kids who have read with a Rotary reading buddy for a year show a dramatic increase in standardized test scores.

            Ron had invited me to speak to the students and Rotary reading buddies on Dec. 5 about my mystery novel The McHenry Inheritance. He felt it would be a good idea to show the kids that real people write the books they’re reading and to have the kids hear something about how it’s done. And since I’ll stand up in front of an audience any time, I was an easy “get.”

Relating to 12-Year-Olds

            The students in the Reading Buddies program are sixth and seventh graders, so we’re talking about an average age of 12. That’s younger than my usual crowd, but I’m not going to be making any special preparations for the age group. Even when I speak to a roomful of college-educated people, I try to use simple, direct language. That ought to be good enough for the kids, as well, and in my experience, kids appreciate being talked to as if they’re adults and hate it when someone talks down to them.

            To begin the presentation, I thought we could show the video trailer for my book, which is two minutes long and starts with an explanation of where the idea for the story first began. Then I could talk a few minutes about writing the book and open it up to questions from the audience.

            Ron suggested something else that I hadn’t thought of. Since my book has a fly-fishing backdrop (the protagonist is on a fishing vacation in the High Sierra when he becomes embroiled in all the crime and drama), why not bring some fly-fishing paraphernalia to the presentation and talk about that as well?

Now We’re Talking Fishing

            Great idea, but all of a sudden I’ve become transformed from an English teacher talking about writing a book to a science instructor explaining how fish feed, the various stages of the insect development cycle, and the mechanics of casting a fly rod.  What the heck. In the new global economy, we’re all required to be multi-taskers.

            Still, it was an inspired idea of Ron’s to add this to the presentation. I could begin by asking how many of the kids have ever been fishing with their parents or an older sibling, then ask about fly fishing in particular. My guess is that most will have been fishing but none have been fly fishing, so it should all be new, yet related to something they’ve done and enjoyed. It’s a good way to get the audience involved.

            It even occurred to me that if the weather permits and the school authorities were agreeable, we could go outside for a fly-casting demonstration. Then I had second thoughts. It’s hard enough to make a good cast when you’re alone, no one is watching, and there’s no pressure. Doing it in front of an audience all but guarantees the yips. Besides, they can see me casting in the video.

Talking to the Rotary Club About Publishing

            This week the program chair of the Rotary Club asked me if I could give a talk on self-publishing in the digital age at one of the December meetings. I’d love to tell you I was asked because I’m an internationally recognized authority on the subject, but the reality is that I’m someone they know who has done it, and I’m generally willing to give a talk.

            Actually, one of the points I would make in such a talk is that I don’t believe there are any true experts in that field. There certainly are people who know a considerable amount about some aspect or another, but digital self-publishing is so new, and the options so many and bewildering that no one could really grasp it all. Nor have there been sufficient time and verifiable results for anyone to really know with any degree of certainty what’s most likely to work.

The Known Knowns

            There probably are two things that can be reasonably stipulated. The first is that digital self-publishing has given authors a more cost-effective and return-probable way of publishing their own work. The second is that the internet gives everyone a chance, albeit a longshot, at making a new book known to a wide audience and getting it purchased by enough people to make the effort worthwhile.

            In the old days (less than 10 years ago), self-publishing was a mug’s game. The author had to pay a printer thousands of dollars up front to run off a few thousand copies of a book, then drive to every bookstore for miles around, begging them to take a couple of copies on consignment, then try to keep track of all the books. Not one person in a hundred thousand came out ahead.

            Now there are outfits like Amazon that can process a word document into an e-book in minutes and sell that book around the world, or can format it as a print book and print copies only as ordered, saving the author a huge up-front cost. Game-changer is too mild a word for this development.

            Of course before anyone buys that book, they have to know about it and have a reason to seek it out. If it’s a book about a specific subject, say model railroads, with a number of core enthusiasts, internet searches can generate sales. For a general mystery novel like my book, The McHenry Inheritance, it’s not so easy.

The Unknown Unknowns

            It’s pretty much a given now that an author has to create a web site for his book, and do a video as well. The next question becomes how to drive people to the web site and video. I have been working with an excellent social-media guru on this subject and received some valuable pointers. Still, at the end of the day a lot of it comes down to persistence and experimentation.

            An author trying to promote his or her own book has such a smorgasbord of choices that it’s intimidating. I could easily be working 16 hours a day on book promotion (if I didn’t have a day job) and still not be doing everything I could. Nor would I really know whether the things I was doing were the things I should have been doing. A spectacularly big reaction tells you you’re doing something right, but no reaction simply means maybe. Maybe you tweeted a couple of hours too early. Maybe everybody was simply too busy to see what you put out today. You just don’t know. At this point, I figure all I can do is keep trying, keep analyzing, and pray for luck.            

Personal Experience and Prejudice

            At our Rotary meeting last week one of the club’s past presidents got up and volunteered to pay a “happy fine” to provide money for the club’s community service efforts. What he said (and I’m going from memory here) was:

            “My daughter, who lives in Brooklyn, started going out with a Coast Guard officer, and one thing led to another and they fell in love, and now they’re engaged. And I am so grateful that they are living in the state of New York, which recognizes gay marriage, and can get married.”

The Dog That Didn’t Bark

            The interesting thing about his announcement was the reaction to it, which was, well, nothing. He got a round of applause, paid his fine, and the meeting continued with no further notice of a declaration that I can’t imagine having been made before the club when I joined 23 years ago.

            Our club’s lone clergyman, a Presbyterian minister, wasn’t on hand to react, but I could make a pretty good guess as to what his reaction would have been. When we were chatting after a meeting a year ago, the Reverend told me how the scales had been lifted from his eyes on the question of homosexuality.

            He had been practicing his trade in another town, he said, and was invited to dinner by two male members of his congregation who were a gay couple. Spending an evening in their company, he realized they were as committed and happy as the heterosexual couples he ministered to — perhaps more so. The Reverend would probably have been one of the first to congratulate our past president after the meeting.

A Rotary Club’s AIDS Project

            More than two decades ago, the Los Altos Rotary Club, located in our district, which takes in most of Silicon Valley, launched an ambitious AIDS project. It was one of the first ever attempted in Rotary, and the story behind it was, again, a personal one.

            One of the longstanding and much-beloved members of the club, Dude Angius, had learned that his son, who lived in New York, had AIDS. Feeling powerless over such devastating news, he made an announcement at a meeting, and the club decided to get an AIDS project up and running. There was some opposition at first, but then it turned out that two members of the club — including the man who played Santa at Christmas parties — were HIV positive.

            That turned the tide, and the club developed an ambitious AIDS project that eventually became the subject of a highly praised documentary film, “The LosAltos Story,” and a model for similar projects undertaken by other clubs and organizations.

When the Political Becomes Personal

            What these stories have in common is a story line in which personal knowledge of someone in a situation changes previously held positions. I truly believe that prejudice and dogmatism can begin to dissolve when people become aware of the effect their beliefs might have on someone they know and love. Most, though not all, people are willing to let personal sentiment and loyalty override an ingrained belief, and that’s a good and very human response.

            I’m very happy for our past president and for his daughter. How wonderful that she now has the freedom to follow her heart, a freedom most of us take for granted. And how wonderful that her family and friends can share in her joy as she does so. It may run contrary to some concepts of religion, but to me, it’s a spiritual thing.