Authors Guild

Oh my. The Authors Guild sent out a long email citing the New York Times story on Barnes & Noble as great journalism and buying into the misguided notion that B&N is the great hope for book publishing's future.

The email came from "staff" and replies probably go into a dead-letter box, but I replied anyway. The original email is way too long to reproduce, but suffice to say it reflects the Big Six attitude of viewing Amazon as the enemy. (The text is available on the Authors Guild blog.) I shouldn't be surprised, since the AG board consists of big-name franchise authors who have a vested interest in the current system, even though they pretend to defend the little-guy author and a system that has served neither readers nor authors well.

Here is my reply, beginning with one particularly naive quote from the email:

Established authors, for the most part, do fine selling through online bookstores. It’s new authors who lose out if browsing in bookstores becomes a thing of the past. Advances for unproven and non-bestselling authors have already plummeted, by all accounts. Literary diversity is at risk.

What planet are you living on? What new authors are you talking about -- the lucky few that scrape through a series of middlemen to finally get into print?

Wake up Authors Guild! If you continue to betray a bias as representatives of established authors who have a vested interest in a flawed and doomed system, you will go down with that system. There is a whole new class of authors -- independent authors -- who will also need the kind of neutral assistance the Authors Guild can provide.

I published three books with mainstream publishers -- Doubleday and Dutton. I couldn't find a publisher for my latest novel so I self-published in POD and ebook. I listed for distribution everywhere and Amazon was the only outlet that sold any ebooks. So it was a no-brainer to sign up for KDP Select when Amazon offered it.

Amazon is the future of book publishing, so stop treating it like the enemy. It is the enemy only of legacy publishers and their franchised bestselling authors -- who of course dominate the Authors Guild board. Don't pretend to be representing me when you cling to B&N. Amazon will find competition, but not from an inefficient dinosaur like B&N, which has done more than any institution to narrow the midlist market by centralizing purchasing and often not buying a single copy of newly published books for any one of its 700 stores.

I'm astonished at the insouciance and naivete of this email. The Authors Guild has done a lot of good work for writers, and I've been happy to be a member. But I will need to see some evidence that you have a clue about where book publishing is going before I renew my membership the next time my dues are up.

Title time

It's possible to write a book with just a working title, but I think the sooner you have the title, the better -- and the easier. I waited too long, I think, to settle on the title for The Grand Mirage and it was hard at that point to actually figure it out (and then retrofit the title into the book).

Working titles are easy. They are one word and it only has to speak to me. Mirage, for instance, was called Orient, which told me what I needed to know but couldn't be used in the title because most people now associate Orient with the Far East. I thought of Orientalist as the title, but that didn't really solve the problem and the biography of Kurban Said had just come out with that title.

So now I'm working on the sequel to Mirage -- or really the next in the series. My first idea was one set in Cairo (working title: Cairo) and involving oil, tentatively titled Black Sands. I liked that because, as with The Grand Mirage, it directly evoked the desert. I may get back to that but in the meantime I feel more inspired to have the next one set in the Levant (working title: Levant, you see how it goes). Unfortunately, as I've noted in a related blog, this concept doesn't seem to be commonly known in the U.S. So any title like Shadows on the Levant would not resonate the way I would like.

I'm beginning to understand why many of Alan Furst's titles are so vague (Night Soldiers, Kingdom of Shadows, Red Gold, The World at Night, Dark Voyage). They are evocative but evanescent and I'm sure I'm not the only one who can't remember which title goes with which plot. I can't even remember which ones I read. Some of the others (Spies of the Balkans, The Spies of Warsaw) are literally easier to place, but betray a certain lack of imagination. His forthcoming book apparently is titled Mission to Paris.

In fact, one of the titles I considered for Mirage along these lines was Caravan to Baghdad. So in the sequel I should forget Levant and think about the names of some cities involved, such as Damascus and Beirut (Smyrna and Alexandretta probably don't have sufficient name recognition). Combining this with some evocative concept like "shadows" or "winds" may do the trick, but something more concrete may be called for. We'll see.

The giveaway gambit

If this sounds like a mystery story, it is. What does it profit a man if he gives away his ebook? One of the "benefits" in Amazon's new KDP Select program is to give an author five promotion days in the 90-day sign-up period, to offer his book for free.

Now this is a generous offer from Amazon, which puts its vast customer base and sophisticated selling software at the disposal of an author and gets nothing in return for processing the sales on those days.

What does the author get from it? Exposure. The biggest challenge the self-published author faces is readers finding out the book exists. Offering it for free brings it to the attention of those trolling precisely for these free books and catapults your book to the top of the free Kindle bestselling lists.

It's common for new businesses to offer freebies to attract customers. Of course, they can then sell the same good or service to repeat customers. Since I don't have a second Kindle out there, I can't benefit from a repeat customer, at least not directly.

My hope is that whatever percentage of those potential readers who download my book actually read it, some of them will talk about it with their friends, recommend it, maybe even give it as a gift. Everyone says word of mouth is the path to success with indie books and it seems to getting your book into the hands of hundreds of readers is good way to prime that pump.

Ebook quandary for publishing

A newly formed literary agency, Hannigan Salky Getzler, had a very nice reception here in Washington to mark their launch. The three young agents -- Carrie Hannigan, Jesseca Salky and Joshua Getzler -- worked together at Russell & Volkening. They parted ways, amicably, with this old line agency because, as they put it, they want to find new ways to help authors in an industry experiencing a seismic shift.

It is probably very tough for agents these days, given how skittish and narrow the mainstream publishers have become. The role played by good agents -- identifying and grooming new authors, placing them with just the right editor, and following their career through successive books -- has become much more challenging in an industry dominated by bottom-line thinking and copycat bestsellers.

Having lunch today with authors who are recently published with mainstream publishers reminded me that they have a hard road to hoe, as well. One of them actually just had his book named as a New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year, but he still bemoans the fact that his books get no placement in the bookstores. Another is trying to navigate the treacherous shoals of negotiating a new book contract with very little leverage.

One quandary that emerged clearly from discussions at the reception and at lunch is the ebook. What should be the price of an ebook? Publishers want to set it at $15, a challenge in the era of the 99-cent indie Kindle. But the writer with the $15 retail price still only gets $2.25, about the same as I get with my $2.99 price. Amazon's 30% is much bigger and the publisher gets a big, big slice for doing...nothing. No printing and warehousing, no marketing or sales. Ebooks are simply a pricey ancillary to publishing a print version.

Except that now publishers are offering an ebook only option. This may come with a small advance, but they want to charge the full publisher retail price even when they are not spending money on a print version.

This is not fair and can't last but it is part of the turmoil that agents and authors who work with the legacy publishing houses must deal with. One alternative that is becoming more popular is for agencies to function as quasi-publishers and manage the independent ebook publication for their authors.

 Let's see what happens when a couple of million more Kindles are sold this holiday season.

The self-indulgent writer

Where does writing what you know or the art of the telling detail become self-indulgence? Sometimes, it's obvious. The whisky drinker who slips in a reference to his favorite single malt, the car aficionado who lovingly reels off the model and year of the hero's vehicle, the movie fan who references a film or (worse!) describes a character by comparing him to an actor.

I've been convinced for a while that an author whose main character smokes is himself a smoker or former smoker. For instance, I've just started reading Eleven Days by Donald Harstad, who is a former cop, and his first-person hero, a cop, describes himself as a "heavy smoker." This may be an important element of characterization or even plot, but it seems at first blush to be a self-indulgent expression of defiance ("you gotta problem with that, this is the way cops are").

Sometimes an author seems to be indulging in a personal fantasy. In The Essene Conspiracy, S. Eric  Wachtel is a bit too meticulous chronicling his hero's high-living lifestyle, reflecting either, one is tempted to think, his own fantasy or even his own fantasy-come-true. In The Sound of Blood, Lawrence DeMaria endows the female antagonist, Alana Loeb, with almost superhuman qualities of sexiness and cleverness, stretching the reader's suspension of disbelief.

It is not a coincidence, I think, that it's easier to find examples of self-indulgence in self-published books. Part of an editor's job is to ruthlessly cut and trim the author's self-indulgent flights of fancy. This was my experience with Gold, where Dick Marek callously cut out some of my slips, and in The Grand Mirage, where Jerry Gross marked whole passages for elimination (it was always my choice, but I generally followed his recommendations).

When it's not possible to get that kind of editing -- and that may be as true today for mainstream publishing as well as self-publishing -- it is up to the writer to exercise some self-discipline and rigorously ask himself whether certain details are necessary to plot or characterization. The line is not always clear, but the writer who crosses that line is detracting from his own effort to immerse the reader in this fictional world with these often jarring and irrelevant references.

Does size matter?

One of the questions about ebooks is how long should they be? Often the product description specifies that this ebook is a "full length" novel and gives the equivalent in page numbers. This leads one to believe that other ebooks may not be as long as your traditional printed book.

Is that important? Has length historically been determined by the constraints of printing and commercialization which don't really apply in ebooks?

There's no question that a printed work of 90 pages, traditionally called a novella, can be satisfying to read. But are we conditioned to believe that the development of plot and character that unfolds in 300 pages is the norm?

Authors had an incentive before to write long because it took nearly a year to get a book in print. But now authors can publish their own works in intervals of months, or even weeks. There are no physical or commercial constraints on length.

Why don't ebooks automatically give the print page equivalent? It would seem that is easy enough to program. Apparently you can't go by file size because formatting and compression will give wildly different numbers of kilobytes. For instance, Castle Cape, an ebook I'm currently reading, is supposed to have 370 pages in print, but the ebook file size is given as 495 KB. My book, The Grand Mirage, at 304 pages in print, has a file size of  834 KB.

As a freelance journalist, I'm accustomed to thinking of length in terms of words. Mirage is a little over 80,000 words, whereas my earlier thriller, Gold, weighed in at 72,000 after I had it scanned and converted to Word for re-issue. My friend Jim Bruno said he is aiming for 90,000 words in his new Cuba thriller.

There is a certain discipline to writing long. It forces the author to elaborate with descriptions, to step back and slow down the pace of the plot, adding details to characterization and richness to the overall narrative. It would be easy to slap a bare-bones novel into e-print, charge 99 cents for it, and caveat emptor, but a more finished product might be more satisfying for both author and reader.

In any case, I think in principle I will shoot for the 70,000 to 80,000-word range, longer if the spirit moves me, perhaps shorter if the book feels done.

Q&A on writing

Several of the questions in a recent interview I had with Norm Goldman at Bookpleasures touched on writing techniques. Here are some of the excerpts (see the full interview here):

Norm: What was your creative process like when creating your most recent novel, The Grand Mirage?

Darrell: I first came across the intriguing story of the Baghdad Railway in a history of Deutsche Bank, which I covered as journalist. It seemed to be a fabulous adventure in an exotic world. I found that I had assembled whole bookshelves of works about the history of the Middle East and wanted to recreate a world that has vanished in history but lurks in our subconscious. Then it became a challenge to scour contemporary journals and letters for all the telling details of this world, while the amazing resources of the Internet produced numerous images to help visualize it. ...

Norm: What do you believe is required for a character to be believable and how did you create Richard Leighton, 9th Baron Leighton in The Grand Mirage?

Darrell: Making up a British lord is a particular challenge because everyone of them has been painstakingly recorded and you find that many of the good names have been taken. I wanted the hero to be an aristocrat so that he would have the intellectual and financial resources to be a true gentleman adventurer and able to play his role as an unofficial spy for the government. After that, like all characters, he had to be someone the reader cares for. It's important to delve into his emotions, explore his backstory, show his thinking. At the same time, in an historical novel like this one, you want to avoid anachronism. So, for instance, Leighton does not condemn British imperialism -- he is part of it -- though his love of the Orient leads him to have some doubts.

Norm: Did you know the end of The Grand Mirage at the beginning?

Darrell: What I have found both with this book and my earlier thriller, Gold, is that you start out with a vague idea of the arc of the plot, put your characters to work and see just where they take you. So while I knew generally where things would end up, I didn't anticipate all the twists and turns until they actually developed in the writing. This is one of the wonderful things about creating a work of fiction. ...

Norm: Do you believe you have already found “your voice” or is that something one is always searching for?

Darrell: I'm not sure I'm looking for "a" voice. I'm happy with the voice in both my novels, but I don't think it is the same. There may be some common sensibilities, but the voice of a contemporary financial thriller -- the style, the language, the pace -- is different from that in an historical thriller like The Grand Mirage. At some point, I may want to write a police procedural that would have yet again another style and voice. ...

Norm: Do you have any suggestions to help our readers become a better writers? If so, what are they?

Darrell: I think it's important to pay attention to the role of language in writing. Plot, characterization, often research are all important, but the writer should revel in the language itself, play with it, use it as a vital part of the overall package. One of my favorite writers at the moment, Simon Mawer, says a writer should be like a sculptor working in the marble of language, shaping it to portray the reality we see.