Why We Write

Ever wonder why people choose to write what they do? It’s very interesting to see how other writers work. It seems to me that the authors whose works stand the test of time write what they love regardless of the market. When I was a baby author, I was very conscious of what was selling, and always trying to jump on the bandwagon. It didn’t take me long to learn that it can’t be done. The bandwagon is always miles down the road before you can get your bags packed. In fact, I only began to have any success selling my fiction when I forgot about the market and began to write only what interests me personally. That’s why I write historical mysteries. I’m a lifelong lover of historical fiction.

If I wanted to broaden my popular appeal, I’d use a modern setting instead of a historical setting. But I love to go to a place and live there for a while. I love to travel, and that desire to explore the unfamiliar which intrigues me about exotic locales is the same one that fascinates me about exotic eras. To me, reading historical fiction is time travel without a time machine. It’s a cheap vacation to the past. William Faulkner said that the past isn’t dead The past isn't even past. Sometimes, in doing research for these books, I am amazed at how the same things keep happening over and over again. We never learn. This is a sad human fact, but great for a novelist. You can use the consequences of a historical event to make a point or comment about something that’s going on right now. You can do the same thing with science fiction - comment on the present by writing about the future.

If I were more concerned about appealing to the market, I would set my historicals in Tudor England. There are legions of people who would read a book about Tudor England whether they had ever heard of the author or not. Why choose Oklahoma, for God’s sake? Because I know and love the place and the people in my bones. I learned early in my life that most people don’t know much about OK, and what they do know is wrong. And all I can say about that is “Curse you, John Steinbeck.” Oklahoma was a place like no other in the world in the 1910s. It was incredibly rich - there was oil and cattle and land. It was poor and lawless at the same time, because people were coming from all over the world with nothing, trying to make their fortunes however they could. It was still the Wild West, and yet because of the money, it was the most cutting edge modern in the cities. It was an amazing racial mixture for that time. It had been the Indian Nations, after all. The Oklahoma Indians were not like the Indians in other parts of the country at that time. They had run their own country for seventy-five years. They were used to being in charge of themselves, and they didn’t much appreciate all these whites flooding in from other parts of the country with their unsavory ideas about the native people. From the beginning, OK Indians have been much more integrated with the general society and much more self-determining than anywhere else in the U.S. Right after statehood, OK was the most socialist state in the Union. The labor movement was very big there, and they didn’t cotton to the U.S. getting involved in the “rich man’s war” in 1917. It’s a historical novelist’s dream.

Okay, Donis, you may ask, if you’re so into history, why not write a straight historical novel. Why make it a mystery on top of everything?

I will tell you, Dear Reader. For me, a mystery is quite a satisfying form. A mystery novel is an archetypical story A mystery novel is a hero quest. Evil is done. Our hero goes on a quest to right the wrong. The hero confronts the villain and they do battle. Right triumphs over wrong and balance is restored. Justice is done in the end. It’s satisfying. But more importantly to me, the interesting thing about a mystery is not whodunnit, or even how they done it, but why they done it. Mysteries give the writer a very good forum for exploring human nature, why on earth people do the things they do. How is it that some people, when faced with a particular situation, rise to the occasion, sometimes in a truly heroic manner, but others sink to the depths of cowardice, heartlessness, weakness, thoughtlessness, or stupidity. Sometimes a good person is simply backed into a corner and can see no way out other than to commit and act he would never do under ordinary circumstances.

Have I narrowed my perspective audience as much as I possibly can? Maybe. But my stories have a lot of meaning for me, and I think my books are the better for it.

Joys of Summer: Random Thoughts

In truth, it seems like very little has happened since I wrote last Thursday, and it seems like the week has flown by.

Last week, I discussed my venture into online publishing, as I have posted all five Jack Austin PGA Tour novels on Smashwords, iBooks, and Amazon’s Kindle. I am watching the “sample download” and “sales” figures closely and reading numerous articles on the E-book industry.

Aside from building an Amazon author page, the week has been spent working on (or rather fighting with) a short story inspired by this fascinating article, creating a Power Point presentation for a pedagogy discussion I will give at a conference in October, and packing—we are moving (less than a mile) in August—and packing and packing. When I’m not packing, I’m driving my daughters to and from tennis, lacrosse, and now pottery camp (ever think you’d hear of such a thing?).

I want to recommend a wonderful novel I just finished, LAST CAR TO ELYSIAN FIELDS by James Lee Burke. Burke is a poet, an absolute master. He has won two Edgar Awards (no one has won more), and LAST CAR is vivid, dark, existential, and funny. Definitely worth a read.

Back to my story and my boxes!

More on Non-Print Books

What are ya gonna do? Keep telling those stories, I guess. I’m certainly still trying to figure it out.

The Wall Street Journal, June 3, reported on the front page that U.S. book sales fell 1.8% last year to $23.9 billion, but e-book sales tripled to $313 million. The journal goes on to inform us that e-book sales could grow to 20-25% of the total book market by 2012.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about the Google alert I’d received that informed me of the sale of 6286 copies of Pleasing the Dead. The link led to another, and another. One of them was Audible Books, and I called them. These people were friendly and helpful, and directed me to Blackstone Audio.

Anne Fonteneau, Director of Digital Sales at Blackstone, spoke to me at length. Blackstone Audio has twenty-five partners, among them Audible Books, iTunes, Borders, Barnes & Noble online. Each quarter, these partners report their sales to Blackstone. More and more, these sales are digital downloads. Note, too, that all the sales are audio books, not hard-copy, paper books. (Say, what do we call old-fashioned books these days?)

Every six months, Blackstone reports all digital and physical (CD’s, cassettes) sales to the book publishers, in my case, Poisoned Pen Press. This is generally done by a mailed statement with a royalty payment.

Anne gave me sales figures for Pleasing the Dead, which came out in February, 2009. Two hundred thirty seven copies were sold, and only 73 of these were physical sales, i.e. CD’s. Digital downloads totaled 164.

So—I’m a long way from 6286 downloads, but this was one company, and a very helpful one. Does anyone know some of the other companies that are downloading? Blackstone seems to have some big partners, but there must be a lot of others.

Poisoned Pen Press has mentioned the confusion of how to sort through the deluge of reports from different companies reporting on different schedules, plus sorting through which authors’ books are included in the statements. This sounds like a nightmare.

I want to close on an upbeat note here, so I will again mention how helpful Anne was. Blackstone is also willing to work with authors on publicity. I’m sure she won’t mind if I include some of her comments:

Here are some of the marketing/ promotion tools we use with our retailers and digital partners:

- Reviews

Have your titles been reviewed by newspapers and/or magazines? If so, please feel free to send them along. We will update our title description pages on all the different sites. The more positive reviews we post, the best impact in sales we see.

- Social media promotion (Facebook Fan Page/ Twitter/ author blogs)

These tools have proven to be very successful. For example, if you tweet that your title is available on Audible.com (currently the biggest digital audiobook retailer), Audible will pick up your tweet and forward it to all of their subscribers.

- Amazon.com Author Page

- Offering the 1^st chapter for free

Digital Book Signings

Okay, gang, this little funny, sent to me courtesy of Charles Benoit, late of Type M, sort of says it all.

Is this where we're headed? Please tell me it ain't so!



-=-=-=-
This funny brought to you by the fact that I'm swamped with work at the moment and just can't get my Type M brain in gear. Sorry 'bout that.

Bloody Words

Vicki here today to show you a movie. Spencer Barclay (son on Linwood) filmed this year's Bloody Words conference and has put together a great four minute film of the highlights and an introduction by the founder of the conference, Caro Soles. You'll spot some well-known writers. Have a look, perhaps it will entice you into coming next year to Victoria, B.C.

I incidently, am changing into my Constable Molly Smith persona at 44 seconds; giving the Boney Pete Award for best short story at the 1.33 minute mark, and attempting to spar with a policewoman, and not looking too sure about it, at the 3.23mintue mark.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZveBVAf1Lk

The photograph above is by Iden Ford, husband of Maureen Jennings. Too see more of the great photos Iden took at BW: click here

Writing a Book That People Want to Read

Last week I mentioned that on June 28 I’m going to be doing a talk for the Scottsdale Society of Women Writers about “the one thing I wish someone had told me about being a writer”. You know how you never notice Hyundais on the road until you buy one, and then you see Hyundais EVERYWHERE? Or you think you’re being so original when you name your kid Olduvai, and then when he gets to kindergarden, there are six other Olduvais in his class?

I’ve been finding illustrations of the points I make in my talk in everything I read these days. In my presentation, I go on for a bit about how to write a book that people want to read. I postulate that the best way to do it is to create characters that the reader really cares about.

Last night I was reading an older Barbara Kingsolver book, High Tide In Tucson. a collection of essays. In one of the essays, “Jaberwocky”, Kingsolver notes that “a novel works its magic by putting a reader inside another person’s life ... The power of fiction is to create empathy.” As an example, she says that a newspaper will give you the facts of a situation, say a plane crash, but a novel will show you just how it felt to be one of those hundreds of people who were killed in the crash.

One of my basic beliefs about fiction is that you as the author have to figure out how to make your reader care about the people in your book. It seems to me that truly empathetic characters can even cover sins in the plotting and construction of your book. Think of how many bad plots or unbelievable situations you’ve read in really popular books, and yet, even as you were aware of the novel’s weakness, you still enjoyed it. How does an author manage that?

Jean Auel’s books are a great example. Her “Earth’s Children” series is spectacularly fascinating. Talk about being able to create a world! She manages to make a character in Ayla that millions of readers wanted to follow all across Ice Age Europe though five encyclopedia-sized tomes. And yet in Auel’s world, one woman is responsible for every technological innovation known to Stone Age man. Do we care?

Here’s an egregious example: ever see the movie Troy? I love The Iliad. When I was an English teacher, I taught The Iliad. I know it well. And yet - in the movie, the Trojan War lasted three days instead of ten years. Paris and Helen lived happily ever after. Menelaus got killed. Agamemnon met his fate somewhere other than his bathtub. However, when Brad Pitt stripped down and sluiced himself off after a battle, did I care?

It all depends on how successfully the author (or filmmaker) is able to pull you into her world and how willing you are to go along with her. In his book on writing, This Year You Write Your Novel, Walter Mosely said, “a novel is a collusion between the author and the reader.” The reader wants to walk in your character’s shoes, to believe in the world you’ve created, and you don’t want to let him down.

One more unrelated but fabulous thing for anyone interested in the past: My brother-in-law sent me this link to a You Tube video of the first 35mm film ever made. It was taken by camera mounted on the front of a cable car in San Francisco, filmed only four days before the Great California Earthquake of April 18th, 1906, and shipped by train to NY for processing. It is hypnotic. I’ve watched it several times. This is from the intro:

A fascinating movie taken by a camera on the front of a street car 104 years ago. Look at the hats the ladies were wearing and the long dresses. Some of the cars had the steering wheels on the right side. I wonder when they standardized on the left? Still a lot of horse drawn vehicles in use. Mass transit looked like the way to get around. Looks like everybody had the right of way.

The number of automobiles is staggering for 1906. Absolutely amazing! The clock tower at the end of Market Street at the Embarcadero wharf is still there. How many "street cleaning" people were employed to pick up after the horses? Talk about going green!

Click here to see the film. Enjoy!

p.s. Jean Auel fans, I just checked her website in order to make sure I remembered all her titles, and saw that after a nine year gap, her sixth “EC” book, Land of the Painted Caves, is set to be published in March of 2011.

Two (thousand) is a Crowd

Anyone heard of crowdfunding? I hadn't until I read an article in The Guardian the other day.

Seems it is a way of raising funds from many small contributors, mostly on the internet, to finance projects - anything from charity work, to recording a new album, to making a movie.

Here's how Wikipedia defines it:

Crowdfunding (sometimes called crowd financing or crowd sourced capital) describes the collective cooperation, attention and trust by people who network and pool their money together, usually via the Internet, in order to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Crowdfunding occurs for any variety of purposes, from disaster relief to citizen journalism to artists seeking support from fans, to political campaigns.

And there's an interesting article in Time Magazine on how a website called CatwalkGenius.com helps bankroll new fashion designers; how Brit filmmaker Franny Armstrong raised more than $800,000 to make a movie that went on to premier at the Sundance Film Festival; how another site called SellaBand.com brings together music lovers with unsigned musicians wanting to record albums.

But the thing that caught my interest in The Guardian article was how a French publisher called Editions du Public, employing the slogan "I invest in what I want to read", is harnessing the power of crowdfunding to help readers publish authors. Selected books are promoted on the publisher's website, and readers can discuss it with the author via the website's forum, ultimately deciding whether or not to invest in it's publication.

That investment amounts to €11 ($14), and each book requires 2000 investors, or what are known as co-publishers, to finance its publication. When the requisite number of investors has been found, the publisher will discuss text and layout with the author and sell the book both online and through bookstores. They claim that the co-publishers could make up to eight times the amount of their investment, depending upon sales of course, as well as getting a free copy of the book.

Think of all those mid-list authors dumped on the scrapheap by publishers who didn't give a damn about the thousands of readers out there who still wanted more. Wouldn't any one of those readers be happy to pay $14 for a copy of a book by their favourite author - a cover price which would also buy them into a share of the book's profits?

What an opportunity for some enterprising small publisher to put a host of established authors back in print, financed entirely by their readers. Now that's what I call reader power!

An interesting idea. What do you think?

You can read The Guardian article by clicking on this link.