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.

           

           

Delayed Gratification

            This past week I was reminded again of the virtue of patience, and of the fact that it takes people a while to get around to something they’re meaning to do.

            At my Rotary Club meeting on Wednesdays, people frequently get up and pay a “happy fine” to support the club’s community activities. Last week, for instance, I paid such a fine because I was happy that our son, Nick, had called for the first time since he began basic training at Fort Jackson, SC, and that we had actually been able to talk to him. One of the other happy fines that day caught me by surprise.

            One of our longtime members rose to pay a fine for having read and enjoyed my mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, and for having enjoyed my use of names drawn from the local community. I even offered to pay his fine, but he insisted.

Good Intentions Take Time

            Until that moment I had forgotten that my fellow Rotarian had mentioned last year that he’d bought the book , then never said any more about it. More than six months passed between his buying it and reading it, but please don’t think I’m complaining. I’m thrilled to death if anybody reads it anytime.

            What I have to remember is that while my book is one of the most important things in my life right now, for everybody else, it’s at best a to-do item. And it can take a long time for a to-do item to rise to the top of the list. If it ever does. When I’m thinking about it rationally, I figure that the best case is that half the people who mean to read the book actually crack it open to the first page and read it all the way through.

            There are authors whose first book meteorically soars to the top of the best-seller lists, but most of us, if we ever succeed, do it in the style of the old-school businessmen who started in the stockroom after getting out of high school and worked their way to the top over decades. In today’s business world, those folks would be passed over for an MBA who would probably make a hash of the job, but that’s another blog.

Authors Who Start in the Stockroom

            The equivalent for an author is slowly building an audience until you hit a tipping point where your books start getting noticed. Most authors begin with a first book that sells a few thousand copies. With luck their second book sells a few thousand more and the third a few thousand more than that. Maybe on the fourth or fifth book, they crack the best-seller list, triggering some more sales for the earlier books and leading to a bigger audience for the next one.

            In other words, what’s your hurry?

            When my book was first published, I moved a lot of copies as free promotional e-books. Then I started wondering why the people who were buying it weren’t reviewing it. In the past couple of months the reviews, generally positive, have been coming in, and people scanning the mystery section at Amazon can see that a dozen people have read and reviewed the book.

            That gives it some credibility with readers who haven’t heard of me (which is nearly all of them), but it doesn’t mean they’re suddenly going to buy the book. A lot of them will check it out several times over a period of months before deciding to plunk down their $2.99. Like everything else, it takes time.

What's In an Author's Name?

            When I put my mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, up on Amazon last summer, there were quite a few decisions I had to make about it. I now realize I messed up on one that should have been easy.

            That would be the decision about what name to use as the author of the book. My friends all know me as Mike Wallace, but since that name also belongs to the late longtime anchor of 60 Minutes and to an all-pro NFL wide receiver, I rejected it out of hand. I didn’t want to confuse anyone, or have anyone feel they’d bought my book based on false pretenses.

            So I went with my full first name, and put the book out under Michael Wallace. I’m pretty conversant with the mystery section of the bookstore and had never seen that name on anything, so figured it would be pretty safe. I now realize that I should have gone a step further and done an author search under that name on Amazon.

How Many Michaels Are There?

            Had I done so, I would have realized there were a number of Michael Wallaces with books on Amazon, writing in a number of different fields. I should not have added another Michael to the list, if only because it makes a search by author name a lot more work. And the more work you make the customer do, the less likely you are to get the sale.

            It would have been a relatively simple matter to use some other variation. I could have called myself M.E. Wallace, Michael E. Wallace, or used my middle name in some variation: Eugene Wallace, Eugene M. Wallace. As glaringly obvious as it seems to me now, I didn’t bother to do the check because I didn’t realize the ginormous number of authors on Amazon and how common a name Michael Wallace really is.

            Maybe that’s not entirely a bad thing. The flip side of being hard to find in that thicket of Michaels is that some people slogging through that thicket, in search of one of the other chaps, will find me and my book. I know that’s already happened at least once.

Best Thing He’s Written

            One of my eight reviews on Kindle is from a complete stranger who apparently bought my book on the assumption that it was written by one of the other Michael Wallaces. The stranger gave The McHenry Inheritance five stars, for which I am deeply appreciative, and wrote a short review along the lines of, “it’s not like his other books, but it’s one of the best things he’s written.”

            As an author, I am happy when anyone reads my book all the way through and likes it, and if someone finds the book by mistake but still likes it, so much the better. As we all know, it’s tough to sell a book these days.

            Still, I can’t help feeling I should have used a more distinctive author name, something that would stand out and be appropriate for the series of fly-fishing mysteries I hope to write. This week it came to me. Instead of my real first name, I should have used another that carries a resonance of the Old West; that is the name of one of my favorite trout streams; and that, when coupled with my last name, doesn’t show up on Amazon and would have been a unique author. The author name I should have gone with is Carson Wallace.

           

           

The Effect of Free Book Promotions

            In an attempt to figure out how things work on Amazon, more specifically Kindle, I tried a new approach to free promotions of my mystery, The McHenry Inheritance, during the month of March. I still don’t understand how things work on Amazon, but pulled together a few strands of information that I’ll share for whatever they’re worth.

            For starters I decided to run three promotions during the month, all on weekends. The first was Sunday March 3 and the second was Saturday March 16. I figured I’d see whether Saturday or Sunday generated more downloads, then run the third promotion the following weekend on whichever day yielded better results.

            It wasn’t even close. That first Sunday I moved 306 free books, the best day I’d ever had to that point. The McHenry Inheritance climbed to number 53 on the free mystery list. On Saturday the 16^th, the total was 72 books and my best showing was number 2660 on the overall list. So I scheduled my third promo (and last for the 90-day period) on Sunday March 24.

Making a Big Push on Twitter

            For that day, I tried something different — a big push on Twitter (handle: @Qgordonnovel). I always tweet that I’m offering a free promotion early in the morning of the day it’s happening, but this time I went overboard.

            The day before I went to Twitter and followed 150 new people, which generated a number of follow-backs while the book was out there. During the day of the free promotion, I also tweeted every couple of hours about how the book was doing. It’s hard to say how much, if at all, that helped. I wasn’t re-tweeted at all, and my overall follower base is still relatively small (under 2,000).

            Nonetheless, the book did great, with more than 470 downloads — far and away the best day ever. It was in the top 4 percent of free books downloaded on Amazon that day and climbed to number 33 on the mystery list. If I’m not proving anything else, I’m at least demonstrating that I can give it away.

            The big question, of course, is how many of those people who got it free are going to read it at any time in the next year, never mind sooner. I can’t even imagine how you could get a reliable answer to that question.

But Does It Pay?

            Also unclear is whether the run on free copies of the books translated (or will translate) into paid sales of any significant nature. The week after that big Sunday, my book sold a little better than it had earlier in the month, but the numbers involved are so small that the difference is probably statistically insignificant.

            I’ve visited a few online conversations about the value of free promotions, and the consensus seems to be that there’s no immediate impact. No one, however, seems to be looking at it as a long-term proposition. If ten percent of the people who download the book free end up reading it in the next year and telling a friend who buys it (or better yet, liking it on Facebook), that’s a good return on the promotion, even if it takes a while.

            “Even if it takes a while” might actually be the operative phrase in evaluating self-publishing results. For every Fifty Shades of Grey that gets crazy-good sales results, there are probably hundreds of good books that build an audience slowly through word-of-mouse and through subsequent books the author writes. I can only keep moving forward and hope that The McHenry Inheritance will be one of those.

           

Watching the Numbers All Day Long

            A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about giving away copies of my mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, as a Kindle promotion to build readership. That blog got an uncommonly high number of page views, leading me to follow up here with additional thoughts and details on the practice.

            Wednesday was my birthday, and believing that I shouldn’t be the only one getting presents, I scheduled a free giveaway on Kindle that day. On giveaway days, I check every few hours (no point being obsessive about it) to see where I stand on Amazon’s free book sales list.

            The morning of the 27^th dawned bright and clear in coastal California, and at 6:15 a.m., Linda picked up her iPad and did the first check. She yelled out the number, and I forgot to write it down, but it was 21 thousand and something. It gives you a scary idea of how many books and authors are out there that on a weekday, there would be at least 21 thousand books being given away on Kindle.

Cresting, Like Obama

            At that time of day, of course, the West Coast is just getting up, the East Coast is going to or arriving at work, and Europe is still at work in the afternoon. The people buying books at those hours are probably in India, Australia and New Zealand.

            By 8:48 a.m., I had climbed 11,000 places on the list, to number 11,092. At 10:33 a.m., I had soared to 6,648^th place, a climb of 14,000 places since the day began. I tweeted about it. At 1:45 p.m., I was up to 5,010^th place.

            Clearly, like Barack Obama in a presidential election, I do better as the results start coming in from the west. The book continued to creep up the charts for the rest of the day, and when I checked at 10:07 p.m., before turning in, it was number 3,460 on the Amazon free book hit parade.

            How does that translate into actual sales? Amazon tells me that 64 people “bought” the book that day. What an author hopes for in this situation is that at least a few of them will read it, like it, and tell their friends in some way. Maybe they’ll even post a review on Kindle.

Weekdays Versus  Weekends

            One thing this tells me (and it reinforces earlier data, so I should have thought of it sooner) is that weekdays generally don’t seem to be too good for giveaways. Earlier in the month I gave the book away on Saturday the 16^th, the first day of a three-day weekend in America, and it moved more than 150 copies, or twice as many as on the weekday. Stands to reason, since that’s when more people are likely to be looking for something to read.

            Nobody knows how Amazon’s algorithm works in terms of generating referrals for a book, but anecdotally, it seems mine has gotten some mention after a good giveaway day, so I want to be trying to maximize that.

            Accordingly, my next big idea is to use my three remaining free promotion days on weekends in March, clustering more giveaways closer together than I’ve done up to this point. The questions should be, first, are more people snapping up the book when there’s a free offer, and second, are the ones I’m giving away generating any increase in paid sales of the book. Trial and error, but I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Giving Away What You Can Sell

            In the bad old days of self-publishing — less than ten years ago, actually — an author looked at a pile of his or her books and saw dollar signs. Not so much the dollars the books would bring in the unlikely event they ever sold, but rather the dollars in outlay they already represented.

            Having gone to a so-called vanity press and shelled out a significant sum of money for a couple thousand books, the author was beginning deep in the hole, financially speaking. The mere act of giving away a book to crazy Aunt Kate was painful because it represented a loss of money already spent and diminished the limited supply of inventory that could potentially be sold to recover some of the investment.

            Giving away a bunch of books as free promotions to attract readers? Unthinkable. Might as well start a fire in the fireplace and start throwing U.S. currency into it. Only a wealthy author with an outsized ego (do authors have any other kind of ego?) could even consider it.

Giving Away Pixels

            The e-book revolution and Amazon have changed all that and made free book giveaways a part of the new author’s marketing strategy. With no ink, paper and shipping costs to cover, it’s no problem to give your book away, and probably a good idea from a marketing standpoint. It took me a while to realize that, but now I’ve embraced it with a vengeance.

            When I published the e-book version of my mystery novel The McHenry Inheritance on Amazon last summer, the outsized-ego part of me was expecting it to be greeted with a parade and a White House reception, even as the rational part of me knew that was ridiculous. To the great American public, I’m just one of thousands, if not millions, of unknown authors.

            I had, however, signed up for Amazon’s Kindle Select program, which allows authors to offer the book free five days out of every three months. A couple of self-published authors I contacted through Twitter recommended doing that. Figuring it would be worth a try, I put my book up as a free promotion the second day it was on Amazon, and before I began notifying my friends, who I figure would be willing to pay the $2.99 it cost otherwise.

            On that first free promotion day, 250 people bought the book, which was a very respectable showing, and I’ve run several free promotions since.

Establishing What It’s Worth

            At this point, of course, a cynic could argue that all I’ve done is establish what my book is worth, namely nothing. But I don’t see it that way. As an unknown author, my first challenge is to find readers and start generating some word of mouth among those who like the book. If a free promotion gets me a few readers I otherwise wouldn’t have had, I consider myself ahead. Financially, I’m certainly not behind.

            My thinking has turned from the original idea of making a little money on the first book to the notion that the first book is the loss-leader that will set up sales for the second one. Hence, the more freebies that get snapped up, the better. Last weekend I did a free promotion day and moved 156 copies.

            Who knows how many of the people getting my book that way are actually reading it? I suspect that fewer than half will ever so much as start it. But a few who do, and who like it and tell their friends, can do me a lot of good. My fingers are crossed.

Behind Every Great Picture

            In connection with my day job, I had the opportunity the other day to be present at a professional photo shoot. For years, when I was at the newspaper, I worked alongside professional news photographers and in my work as a writer and publications consultant I still work with freelance professionals. Not as many as I used to, and there’s a worrying trend happening here.

            The proliferation of iPhones and point and shoot cameras has taken some of the mystery out of photography. It’s no longer necessary to worry about such things as the choice of film, the F-stop and shutter speed, and anyone can now take an in-focus photo that’s decently exposed.

            That has led to a trap, however. Too many people are beginning to believe that because they can take a technically competent picture, they can also take a good one. Usually they can’t, and the result is a form of unconscious incompetence — what you get when someone doesn’t know what they’re doing and doesn’t know that he doesn’t know.

It’s Complicated

            The photo shoot referred to earlier was for a publication being done by a local educational organization. They wanted a picture of a group of kids engaged in learning on both the computer and traditional books. To get it, they lined up six kids whose parents signed releases for a photo shoot, and we all met at the library of one of the local schools late one morning.

            Greg Pio, who took the author photo for my book The McHenry Inheritance, was called in to get the picture. He arrived early, checked out the site, and set up some lighting to illuminate a corner where a table was set up in front of shelves of books.

            At 11:30 the kids came in, and Greg sat them down and talked to them, explaining what we were doing and stressing that it was a joint project where he really needed their cooperation. Addressing them as adults, in a matter-of-fact tone, he pulled them into the project right away. He then gave them some specific things to do while he took the photos. Watching from behind, it was clear to me that they were getting into it, and that the shoot was going well.

Creating the Opportunity

            He took a lot of photos, and if you’ve ever shot a family gathering, you’ll know why. Whenever you have more than two people in a picture, the odds that one of them will have closed eyes, be drooling, be making a face, or otherwise inadvertently wrecking the picture are pretty formidable. Because the kids were relaxed and acting out a scene, that was less of an issue here. Greg has told me before that when he sets up a picture like this, he’s creating an opportunity to make the magic happen, then shooting enough pictures to be sure he’s capturing it.

            Sure enough, the results were terrific. There were enough good photos that it was tough to choose among them, but that’s the kind of problem you want. The client picked one and everybody was happy. (I can’t show the photo here because it belongs to the client, not me, so you’ll have to take my word for it.)

            It would have been easy for the client to cheap out and have someone on the staff take a picture, rather than calling in a professional. And odds are, it would have been wrong in a lot of subtle ways that add up to a boring photo. There’s a lot more to getting a great picture than telling everybody to get behind the table and say “Cheese.”

Going Fishing at Long Last

            The last time I held a fly rod in my hand, it didn’t really count. It was June, and we were filming a video trailer for my mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance. I say it didn’t count because the photographer was trying to get some casting footage, and I was casting an empty line, with no fly attached to it. No matter how willing a fish in that stream might have been, I couldn’t have caught him.

            My book’s protagonist is a man on a fly-fishing vacation who gets caught up in the local drama, which happens to include a trial over a contested will and a murder, among other things. Unlike my protagonist, I haven’t been able to get away on a fishing trip this summer. That’s about to change. Tomorrow my son, Nick, and I leave for a three-day fishing trip to the mountains east of Redding. And as the United Airlines commercial used to say, “I need a vacation.”

The Heart of Red-State California

            Going trout fishing in California these days involves a trip into another world. California as a whole is one of the bluest of states, but once you get north of Sacramento and east of Interstate 5, you might as well be in Wyoming, politically speaking.

            My guess is that once we take the Highway 505 cutoff  at Vacaville, it will be three days before we see a political sign for Barack Obama again. It will be all Romney, and perhaps a Ron Paul or two. Sprinkled in with the election signs will be a few general advocacy signs with statements like, “Produce the birth certificate.” I first noticed this tendency in the fall of 2000 when I took my then-new car for a four-day trip up the eastern slope of California to Southern Oregon and back. By day four I’d almost forgotten there was a fellow named Al Gore running for president — there certainly was no evidence of it where I was.

            But I’m not going there to talk politics and don’t expect to. Early October is a great time of year to be in the mountains, magical, really. It’s too soon for the peak of fall color, but there will be some. If it’s sunny, the days can be mild and pleasant, but as soon as the sun goes down, it gets cold in a hurry, and there typically will be frost on the ground at dawn.

The Wide-Open Spaces

            Like my character, Quill Gordon, and his sidekick, my son and I will be staying in a cabin at a ranch. It’s 13 miles from the nearest town, which boasts a population of only 3,500 people. Driving 13 miles where I live in coastal California is a high-intensity expedition nearly any time of day. Where we’ll be staying, it’s a wide-open, laid-back experience. Just point the car, turn up the radio, relax, and reach your destination in 12 minutes.

            There’s considerable nostalgia in America for living where there’s a lot of land and not too many people. I wouldn’t want to do it for any length of time, but I totally understand the feeling, and admit to a sense of renewal from spending a few days in a place like that. It’s a different pace and it induces a different frame of mind, and from time to time, I really enjoy the switch. There may or may not be some cooperative fish while we’re up there, but regardless of what the fish do, we’ll have a good time. The clock may seem to move more slowly, but it will be over all too soon.

           

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.            

Author Meets Public for First Time

            What if I threw a party and no one came? That’s probably the fear of every writer approaching his or her first book-signing or reading. You put the word out every way you can, but there are no RSVPs, and when you show up for the event, all you can do is hold your breath and hope.

            Saturday afternoon was the first book-signing for my mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance. It was held from 1 to 3 p.m. at Crossroads Books, a locally owned store of about 2,000 square feet in a shopping center on Main Street in Watsonville. Kelly, the friendly and supportive owner, had told me that if six people show up to buy the book, that’s a good showing. Doing the math, I figured six people in two hours is one every 20 minutes. If I could keep each one talking for five minutes, that would be enough action to keep things interesting.

            Leading up to the event, I got stories printed in three local papers, announced it on Facebook and Twitter, made an announcement (and paid a fine) at my Rotary Club, and sent e-mails to more than 100 people who live in the area. After that, I figured it was out of my hands.

The Curtain Rises

            We got there a bit early on the appointed day and helped with the set-up, which consisted of putting a table by the front door, with a chair for me to sit in and a copy of my book propped up in plain sight. Kelly said she wanted me to sign the books, then have people take them to the register to pay.

            The first customer showed up at five minutes to one, a woman I didn’t know, but who had read about the book and was interested in it. Shortly afterward, Elias and Heidi Alonzo came in. Elias and I had worked on a couple of projects in the past, but it had been a few years since I’d seen him. He got a copy for himself and one for a friend who had requested one. He gave the friend’s name, so I could write a personal inscription.

            All in all it was a mixed bag of people: A couple of Rotary friends, two of Linda’s old childhood friends, a man who had an office just across the hall from me a few years ago, and a couple of people I knew from around town, and a couple of people I didn’t know at all. Perhaps the most pleasant surprise visitor was Margaret, who worked in the classified ad section of the newspaper when I was city editor and managing editor, and who I hadn’t seen in years.

Setting a Bookstore Record

            It was really busy the first hour, then stopped altogether for about 35 minutes, then picked up again for the last 30 minutes. When the dust had settled, the event had generated 13 sales, and a few people also came in who had bought a book earlier in the week and wanted it signed. Kelly said it was the best sales event since she had become owner of the store. Afterward, we went out for coffee with one of Linda’s old friends and her fiancé.

            All in all, it was a successful event and provided some much-needed positive reinforcement. There will no doubt be other bookstore appearances as I continue to flog the book, and some may be more lucrative in terms of sales. But none will be as fondly remembered as this first one.

           

           

Trees Will Continue to Die

            When I first decided to put my mystery novel, TheMcHenry Inheritance, on Amazon, I toyed with the idea of making it an e-book only. A couple of friends were highly supportive, saying it was the wave of the future, and that print books were dinosaurs of the digital age.

            But the more people I talked to, the more dubious the idea became. Over and over I heard people say they preferred the print version of a book to the Kindle, Nook or iPad version.

            Moreover, the people who were saying this were not older folks who never made their peace with computers. (And to avoid stereotyping, I should mention that I know of at least one woman in her late 80s, no relation to me, who is reading my book on a Kindle.) They included a professor at Montana State University, a technical writer, and a couple of nonprofit agency directors — in short, people who use computers regularly and can in no way be considered technophobes. They just prefer the printed word.

Change Happens at Its Own Pace

            A lot of people tend to assume that when a new technology comes along, it will quickly drive out the old. Sometimes it does. Digital cameras wiped out film within a decade and the automobile did the same for the horse and buggy. But the arc of progress is by no means always clear and unimpeded.

            When television came along, a lot of people thought it would make radio and newspapers obsolete, but it didn’t. Electronic transfers and online banking have become hugely popular, yet plenty of checks are written each year. In fact, about 90 percent of them seem to be written by people ahead of me in line at the grocery store. Target and WalMart might wipe out the grocery store, but if there’s money to be made from it, they’ll still be taking checks.

            Print versions of books, and presumably the stores that sell them, look to be one of those things that will continue to survive and be profitable despite the newer technologies for reading. It will be a lesser market than it was before, and the players in it will have to be nimble and think strategically, but  old-school books fill a need and ought to do so for some time to come.

The Magic of Print

            Last month I went to Bookshop Santa Cruz, one of the leading independent bookstores in the country, for the unveiling of their new print-on-demand book machine. It was a big community event, with probably 200 or so people on hand. They even held a contest to name the machine, and the winner was Walt, in honor of the fact that poet Walt Whitman appears on many of the store’s logos.

            Friday night I was back at the store to get the proof copy of The McHenry Inheritance that had been run off a couple of hours earlier on the Walt. Something came over me when the book was handed across the counter — an emotional kick that I simply didn’t feel when I went to Amazon and saw my e-book in the Kindle store for the first time. Call it the magic of print.

            A print book is more work for a self-published author, and the final product costs the reader more money than the digital version. I’m willing to do the work, and people tell me they’re willing to pay the difference, so there must be value in there somewhere. In another ten days to two weeks, my book, already published online, will finally be, literally, “in print.”

           

           

When the Writer Has to Let Go

            Mark Twain had a problem with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and some scholars contend he set the book aside for several years because he couldn’t figure out how to end it. Hemingway even advised people to stop reading at a certain point.

            Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, a book almost no one gets through high school without reading, and never wrote another. Joseph Mitchell, an award-winning reporter for The New Yorker came to work every day the last 30 years of his life, sat at his desk and never wrote anything, a victim of acute writer’s block.

When the Writer Sees Only the Bad

            Now I’m not Twain, Lee or Mitchell, and neither is anyone reading this, but almost anyone who writes can identify with worrying over what’s wrong in a piece of writing to the point where you begin to doubt the whole enterprise.

            My first mystery novel, The McHenryInheritance, came out as a Kindle e-book today. For four decades, I’ve been a respected writer of reporting and comment, but this is my first published work of fiction. That it’s mystery, a genre where many people expect less of an author, didn’t make it any easier to do, and I have conflicted feelings about the final product.

            Sometimes I think it’s really good and should rocket to the top of the best-seller lists. Sometimes I think it’s a mess, and it will be a miracle if anyone buys it and doesn’t return it, dissatisfied. Most days I’m capable of holding both opinions within a ten-minute time span. Several times a day, in fact.

            Probably the truth is somewhere between the two extremes: The book is as good as half the books on the mystery shelf at the local bookstore. The problem is, I don’t know which half.

How the Newspaper Business Helped

            What has carried me through the rough spots and the pre-dawn wide-awake hours of doubt, more than anything else, has been my newspaper experience, particularly being the editor of a daily community paper.

            Facing a deadline every day develops a discipline tempered by perspective. A reporter, hunched over a computer, trying to polish and re-polish a story, has to deal with an editor screaming at him to turn the damn thing in. You learn that in journalism, as in politics, the perfect is the enemy of the good. If the facts are as accurate as you can get them, and the story makes sense, that may be the best you can do today. And there will be another newspaper coming out tomorrow.

            For three years, as editor of the paper, I had to write an editorial every day. Every one was capably written and passably argued, but some were better than others, and some I would like to have back. But something had to go in the space every day, and I learned to live with the idea that the good ones and bad ones alike would be lining bird cages or wrapping fish within three days.

            The only writers who never doubt the quality of their work are the unconsciously incompetent. The rest of us worry, and a few let the worry take over to the point where they never put their writing out. Better, I think, to do what Mark Twain did with Huck: Let it go at some point and allow the readers to decide. That’s scary, but holding on to a book, or any other piece of writing, in search of elusive perfection is at some level allowing your fear to triumph.