Compelling writing

I'm trying to figure out what keeps me reading a book. I pick up any number of thrillers and mysteries and find myself putting them down, picking them up after a couple of days, reading only because I want to finish the book -- in short, plodding through. The concept is good, the writing is at least OK, the characters are all right, but somehow it's falling flat. For instance, I recently started Karen Dionne's Boiling Point, which is set in Chile and is about global warming, volcanoes, and so -- an environmental thriller. I enjoyed reading her Freezing Point a few years ago. Karen runs the Backspace conference and has a big following in the publishing world.

I'm not getting into it. There are too many characters, and the two women protagonists seem an awful lot alike (one is African American, the other is American Indian). There's a lot of busy-ness as Dionne clearly is setting up a lot of strands to weave together. I may stick with it and finish it, but probably not.

I suspect some readers have similar problems with my book. You hear things like it's too slow at the beginning. The slow development doesn't suit some people who are perhaps less fascinated than I am by simply being in Constantinople and in 1910. They don't have the patience to stick with the early part even if the overall concept appeals to them.

Good writing can pull a reader along in spite of all this. My classic example of this is Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song. There is no way I was interested in Gary Gilmore, his crime or his execution, and yet I consumed the thousand-page book because the writing itself was so compelling.

My other non-starters these days have been Ian McEwan's Solar -- the protagonist is revolting -- and Amos Oz's Don't Call It Night -- where the two main characters are so self-absorbed it seems to reflect the author's own narcissistic tendencies.

Clearly, as my former agent Stuart Krichevsky told me, it's important for the reader to care about the characters. His example was Dennis Lehane's Mystic River, where the characters were each flawed in their own way but you cared fiercely about them nonetheless.

Casting about for something I would actually enjoy reading, I seized on David Kazzie's The Jackpot after reading his account of how Kindle Select promotions provided what may turn out to be a breakthrough for his thriller set in Richmond, Va. Now this is a book that's hard to put down. Yes, part of it is the violence, the turns it takes and the suddenness of unexpected death. Part of it is the quirkiness of the characters; Kazzie takes the time to explore each character and endow them with surprising qualities. The concept -- what happens to the winner of a super-jackpot lottery -- is a great one, with lots of natural suspense. The writing, if not exactly scintillating, is much better than just competent.

But it's true that one of the main attributes is that from the first page you care about the characters. There is Julius, who is watching the lottery drawing with good-for-nothing cousin and realizes he actually has the winning number. There is Samantha Khouri, the ambitious associate who has just been passed over for partner at her law firm when Julius turns to her for legal advice about his ticket. You're on their side. But even the heavies, like Samantha's stressed-out boss at the firm, or the eccentric bounty hunter sent to find the ticket, draw more sympathy than antipathy from the reader.

Caring about the characters is not enough by itself. My disappointment with Mark Young's Revenge stemmed from his getting lost in plot convolutions. His protagonist, Travis Mays, was someone you could care about, though Jessie, his love interest, was never fleshed out enough to really care about. What's important for me, too, is the sense of place, and both Kazzie and Young excel at that. But I ended up plodding through Revenge (who knows, the same may yet happen with The Jackpot, but I doubt it).

Do people care about Lord Leighton? I hope so. They seem to care about Elena. I suppose it has to start with the author caring about these characters. I'm writing a new book in the first person for the first time -- does that automatically make the reader care for the protagonist?

Kindle Select

Totally amazing. In the second two-day promotion of The Grand Mirage, thousands of free copies of the book have been downloaded, vaulting it to #2 on the free Kindle bestseller list for historical fiction and #19 among ALL free Kindle books.

I'm not sure what the actual sales of the paperback versions of my previous three books were, but this may be the most copies of any book I've written to get into readers' hands. Of course, the likelihood that many of those who downloaded the book for free will never read it is much higher than in the case of people who paid money for the other books.

The downloads this time around are a multiple of those in December. It is certainly due in part to the fact that there's now millions more Kindles out there after the Christmas bonanza in Kindle sales. Also, this time I had the helpful notice in Anthony Wessel's Digital Book Today. I had deliberately timed this promotion ahead of Valentine's Day in case anyone thought this would be an appropriate gift, but I have no idea if that played any role at all.

I'm not sure how this plays out in terms of paid sales, or name recognition, or sales of other books. I don't think anyone knows the answers to these questions. But I'm overwhelmed that so many people found the cover and the description and reviews of Mirage intriguing enough to click for a free download and my hope is that many will actually have a chance to read it and enjoy it.

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.