Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

I fight the temptation to turn this into one of those writer blogs that’s about nothing but the numbers. But this is an interesting enough development that it bears recording.

So: on April 30th, I made Too Close to Miss available on Amazon for free. It had been moving fewer than a dozen copies per month over the last couple months (B&N, still killing it), so I wouldn’t be losing much money by giving up sales. The shift from $2.99 to $0.00 wouldn’t take effect for a few days^*, since I was taking advantage of Amazon’s price-match guarantee rather than their KDP Select program. So I lowered the price, checked in a few days later to see if it had taken effect (it hadn’t), and promptly forgot about it.

On May 7th, I saw that Too Close to Miss was finally at $0.00 on Amazon – the price-matching algorithms had caught up. I also saw that, through no work on my part, it had moved ten thousand free copies.

Fast forward a week. As of last night, Too Close to Miss has moved 60,000 free copies. It’s the #1 free ebook in the “Women Sleuths” category and, as of Sunday, was the #2 free ebook on Amazon overall.

When you get 60,000 of anything, you need to address it somehow. So let’s talk about the meaning of “free.”

I’ve been blogging for over ten years and I’ve never written something that 60,000 people have read. Even the occasional Overthinking It article of mine that found its way to the IMDb front page (and was fraught with errors) couldn’t match those numbers. And that’s free content too! So it takes more than just a $0.00 price tag – it takes a presence in front of an interested audience.

If I showed up in Times Square with 60,000 paperbacks, I couldn’t give them away in a week. And even if I did, almost all of them would end up in the garbage. The 60K copies of TCTM that have been downloaded in the last week all went to people who wanted something to read. A significant portion of them may have deleted it after the first page. But I guarantee I had a better success rate at connecting to readers with Amazon than I would have via any other means.

This is with practically no publicity effort on my part. I let my friends and the Overthinking It twitter feed know. But I do not have 60,000 friends, and OTI does not have 60,000 regular readers.

Then how did 60,000 people know this book was free all of a sudden? Amazon has created an audience expectation that plenty of Kindle books will be available for free at any one time. Sites and subcultures, like Kindle Nation Daily and Pixel of Ink, have sprung up around this notion: automatically and frequently updating subscribers on which ebooks are available for free that day. So there are people who will scoop every free ebook onto their Kindle like the lightning round of Supermarket Sweep. Given that, I’m not opening any champagne bottles yet.

And yet, presuming 1% of those 60,000 read the book and like it enough that they want to read more, that’s 600 new fans. All at a cost of the $20 to $30 that I lost in Amazon sales for May.

Final note: I would have been happy to end the experiment at 25K free copies. But, since this is a roundabout process (change the price at Smashwords, wait for it to get pushed to retailers, wait for the retailers to notice, wait for Amazon to notice the other retailers), it’s not fully under my control. Thankfully I’m not relying on this for significant income. And it’s not costing me or anyone else anything, so I’m left with this odd, inexplicable embarrassment as free copies keep pouring out the door.

Of course, the real test will be how many copies it moves once I start charging money for it again – or how many copies the next book in the series sells. Which should be any day now …

_________________
* Briefly: Amazon will not be undersold on an ebook if they can help it. If Amazon finds the same ebook at a lower price via another retailer, they will lower their price to match – all the way to zero if need be.

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

I will never again rag on a professional writer for putting out a bad book. Not after this week.

While the second book in the Mara Cunningham series undergoes its third round of edits, I decided to tackle another project. To challenge myself, I ran with an idea that had just come to me, rather than an idea I’d been brewing for a while. I was writing without an outline, sure, but I’d done a few novels that way and it hadn’t killed me yet. And I was aiming for 5000 words a day, just to keep it moving.

Seven days into the new project and I want to claw out my own brain.

What separates this project from my other (successful) ones? I have no idea where I’m going. In those other drafts, I had a strong sense of either character or plot, two of the essential ingredients for a novel. Here, I had a compelling vision for one character – and I was trying to write three. And I was making up the plot as I went. That led to my frontal lobes seizing up and grinding to a halt at about the 25K mark.

I’m pushing forward, anyway. I’ve decided to set aside the characters I can’t figure out (for now) and plunge on with the one person I can. This may result in a markedly shorter first draft. So be it! But it’s crucial that you finish the projects you start. A completed project can be remodeled, or salvaged, or at the very least harvested for parts. But an incomplete project will rust on your front lawn and scare the neighbors.

What valuable lesson have I taken from this ordeal? Will I reduce my daily page count to a more reasonable level? Will I go back to outlining projects before I launch myself at them, skull first? Will I study my characters with greater focus? Yeah, sure, probably. But most importantly, I’ve learned to forgive traditional authors their bad novels.

As a self-published author, I get to determine the arc that my work takes. The Mara Cunningham series could be two books long, or it could be twenty-two. It’s up to me. I don’t owe Random House their advance back if I can’t manage a fourth book in the series (TOO DRUNK TO SLEEP, coming September 2016).

Traditionally published authors don’t have that option.

I have enough faith in Lee Child as a craftsman to bet that he looked at the final draft of 61 Hours and thought, “This could have been better.” But he owed Delacorte a manuscript, so what choice did he have? He got that one out of his system, then turned it around with Worth Dying For and The Affair, his next two. So I forgive him 61 Hours.

And George R.R. Martin? Never again a complaint. I may not like A Dance with Dragons as much as the other books in the series. It genuinely isn’t as good. But you’ll never hear me rag on the man for taking so long to produce something sub-par.

Why not? Because through this creative battle, as I’ve let my daily deadlines wither by the roadside, as I’ve decided to shift focus away from the literary novel I’d hoped for to a more traditional thriller, as I stood in the shower this morning and thought, “Hell, maybe there’s a short story buried in there,” only one thought has kept me sane: it’s a good thing no one’s waiting for this one.

Enjoy the freedom to suck if you have it. And pour one out for those who don’t.

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

Talking a little about reviews today.

Too Close to Miss has 12 reviews on Amazon, out of 257 ebooks sold (it’s also available in paperback, but it’s sold maybe 10 copies there, and Amazon aggregates the reviews anyway). It has 9 reviews on Barnes & Noble, out of 929 ebooks sold – 7 of which are anonymous. The Goodreads page indicates TCTM has been added to 55 shelves (“read”, “to-read”, etc.), out of which 27 people have rated it and 10 people have written reviews.

Some observations:

• Goodreads has the highest reviewed/acquired ratio, which is especially impressive given that Goodreads isn’t a marketplace in itself. In fact, several people reviewed TCTM on Goodreads and Amazon. Is “hero” too strong a word for these people? Yes. But “champion” isn’t.
  

• Amazon has a higher reviewed/purchased ratio than B&N, despite B&N allowing anonymous reviews. So having to sign your name to something isn’t a barrier to participation. In fact, that may be part of the appeal.
  

• Not counting the Anons on B&N, Goodreads has the highest percentage of reviews by people I don’t know. This may speak more to the purpose of the site. Goodreads exists only to share information about what you’ve read with friends, whereas Amazon also serves that purpose, in addition to funneling goods to you at scandalously low prices. So a Goodreads user is, all things being equal, more likely to review a book that they added to Goodreads than an Amazon user is to review a book they acquired through Amazon. That’s the type of user the site attracts.
  

• 
  

A little more on that last bullet: I suspect people review books on Goodreads to share information with friends (real or Internet), while people review on Amazon to share information with strangers (potential future buyers). The former encourages people to write more reviews. Or maybe reviewing is just a rare behavior – how many products do you review, out of everything you buy? 10% of them? 1%? – and Goodreads aggregates a lot of reviewers into a convenient clump.

A user who reviews my book is of value to me, almost regardless of how well they review it. A review tells future buyers what to expect. One of the biggest obstacles to purchasing a book is uncertainty: is this going to entertain or enlighten me? Yeah, the marketing copy looks good, but does it live up to the hype? Even a 2-star review that goes into detail (too much sex and violence) could lure a reader off the fence.

My conclusion: Goodreads is a worthwhile place to focus on to build buzz; Amazon is important to attract buyers; and Barnes & Noble can just keep selling in massive quantities for whatever reason they choose.

If you read Too Close to Miss and thought something about it, whether good or bad, please let your friends know via a review on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Goodreads.

If you want to see why readers call Too Close to Miss a “compelling, incisively smart, and witty thriller”, then pick up your own copy!

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

Neal Stephenson, in his excellent essay In The Beginning Was The Command Line, introduced me to the term “metaphor shear,” which he defines as when “you realize that you’ve been living and thinking inside of a metaphor that is essentially bogus.”

GUIs use metaphors to make computing easier, but they are bad metaphors. Learning to use them is essentially a word game, a process of learning new definitions of words like “window” and “document” and “save” that are different from, and in many cases almost diametrically opposed to, the old. Somewhat improbably, this has worked very well, at least from a commercial standpoint, which is to say that Apple/Microsoft have made a lot of money off of it. All of the other modern operating systems have learned that in order to be accepted by users they must conceal their underlying gutwork beneath the same sort of spackle. This has some advantages: if you know how to use one GUI operating system, you can probably work out how to use any other in a few minutes. Everything works a little differently, like European plumbing–but with some fiddling around, you can type a memo or surf the web.

This stuck with me because Stephenson has a gift for giving convenient mental hooks to abstruse concepts. But it’s also lasted because the tangible sensation of metaphor shear has taken more years off my life than any other source of stress.

When confronting the sensation of knowing I should be able to do something, yet being absolutely unable to figure out how, my body produces a fight-or-flight response stronger than anything short of an actual fight. Every square inch of skin flushes. My breathing and heart rate triple. I have been known to throw whatever is in reach – a pen, a mouse, a water bottle – into whatever is out of reach – the opposite wall, the floor, an adjacent office. It’s a childish and unforgivable display, and my only excuse is that the world stopped working. Someone rewrote what words mean overnight and didn’t tell me.

Scrivener threw one of those at me this week.

I have loved Scrivener for a while. For its fullscreen and cursor centering features alone, it’s well worth the $45 for a desktop license. But I also love the “project” concept that Scrivener is built around. Everything you might use for a project – your research notes, some images you’ve looked up, your various drafts – exists in a single file. Scrivener arranges the different folders in one sidebar and displays what you’re currently working on in the center. Jump between stages of your project without losing anything. And Scrivener automatically saves, backs up and assists you with version control.

Then I tried to compile a project into a novel.

When I write a first draft, I don’t insert scene or chapter breaks. I write everything in one undifferentiated hash. Chapter breaks, for the modern thriller writer, are best used to sustain tension. I don’t know which cliffhangers need to end a chapter and which can end a scene. When writing in Word, this meant inserting page breaks, lots of carriage returns, and chapter titles manually. It also meant updating all of them if I moved the chapters around.

In Scrivener: … hmm.

First, I broke out my one large file into several text files. No dice. Then I gave each text file its own folder, naming the folders after what happened in them and trusting Scrivener to recognize them as chapters. It did, but it subtitled each chapter with the folder name, which would diminish the reading experience (“Chapter Ten: Mara Finds Dead Body”). After a little bit of poking, I disabled the function that subtitled each chapter, and compiled the Scrivener file into a PDF once more. But now the centered lines that I had used to break up scenes within each chapter were too long for the file’s margins. UGH.

Eventually, I realized that I didn’t need to insert dividing lines between scenes. If each text file were its own scene, Scrivener would do that for me when it compiled. And then the organizing principle clicked:

Novel = Project; Chapter = Folder; Text File = Scene

That’s it! That’s how you’re supposed to use Scrivener. It’s like figuring out the subjunctive tense in French: suddenly, a whole new corner of the language makes sense to you. I could write out my first draft in one headlong rush, like I usually do. Then I could split the file into separate text files during review. Then I could group those files into folders to make my chapters.

So I didn’t break anything. I didn’t throw a temper tantrum. I kept experimenting, checking and unchecking features, until I got the results I wanted. It’s a process – perhaps more of a process than it needs to be – but that’s what happens when you interact with the world through colorful menus.

If you want to read the last novel I wrote without Scrivener, check out Too Close to Miss, available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes. Readers call it “… a briskly-paced, thoroughly entertaining thriller that lives up to the heritage of the noir genre.”

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

Erin Petti, also a writer worth checking out, wrote this magical post last week that I’ve been too busy to link to sooner. It’s about the ability of writing to share experiences across miles or milieus or generations. It’s quick and it’s touching, so nip off and read it.

If the serious (!) writing I’ve done as an adult has any consistent theme, it’s “nobody knows anybody, not that well.” There is a perpetual gulf between Self and Other that we spend our whole lives dealing with. Some of us retreat to our side of the gulf and curl into a ball. Some of us risk balancing on the edge to extend our fingers across. But the howling gap is always there.

Writing – like all forms of art – is an attempt to bridge that gap. It’s our best effort at translating the personal into the universal. This is what it was like to be there, says Hemingway in For Whom The Bell Tolls, says Picasso in “Guernica,” says Landis in Animal House, says Beethoven in his Third Symphony. When the translation is pleasant, we call it “escapism”; when it’s somber, we call it “literary” or “serious,” but the effect is the same.

It’s easy to take the idea that “nobody knows anybody” and wallow in existentialist sobriety. It’s certainly easy for me; I do plenty of it. And yet the writing of mine that I’m happiest with also finds the happiness in that theme. If nobody truly knows anybody, then that means everybody has the potential to delight you. George Axelrod refers to it, in his arsenal of narrative devices, as “the duchess trucks”:

[T]he audience loves it when the sinister character turns out to be lovable: “The duchess breaks into a jazz dance.”

So it’s worth remembering that the purpose of writing is to reach across the gap – or, as Erin says by quoting King, to travel through time. And it’s worth making sure that that extended hand leads you somewhere worth going.

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

You don’t release a book when it’s perfect. You release a book when it’s as good as you can make it OR the deadline arrives, whichever comes first. Since I published Too Close to Miss myself, I went with the former.

Don’t get me wrong: “good enough” is plenty good, if the reviews are any indication. But I struggled in turning my protagonist, Mara Cunningham, into a real character. I chose a female protagonist, and women remain a mystery to me, so that didn’t help matters. But I knew I could add more depth to her. I just wasn’t sure how. She was complex! She had clear motivations and she acted on them! She had doubts but she didn’t let them defeat her! What was I missing?

It wasn’t until I started in on the next book in the series that I realized what else Mara needed. In Too Close to Miss, Mara’s investigating a deep mystery: who killed the wife and son of the married man whom she was sleeping with? She’s a complicated but determined troublemaker, dealing with her own complicated and troublesome past. With, um, determination.

In other words, Mara doesn’t want anything that the plot doesn’t also want.

As far as tight storytelling goes, this isn’t a bad thing. There’s no extraneous business and it keeps the reader flipping pages. But as far as realistic characterization goes, there’s something missing. I honed Mara down into a whip smart crimefighting attack dog and set her loose. It makes for a compelling read. But what would you and Mara talk about at the corner pub?

What does the reader want? To uncover the mystery (“what’s going to happen next?”). What does Mara Cunningham want? To uncover the mystery. These two goals shouldn’t be in conflict, but I’m not surprised some readers wanted to know more about Mara than I revealed.

Fortunately, it’s possible to create a compelling thriller with plenty of characterization. And, fortunately, the next book in the series (of which I’m editing the second draft as you read this) has loads. Fans of the first book will be delighted to learn that Mara has a romantic relationship! She has trouble at work! She has friends who support her, and whom she supports in turn! Normal human stuff.

Of course, she also plunges headlong into a mystery that pits her against ruthless killers, corruption at the highest levels, and her own complicated past. You’d be disappointed if she didn’t.

What I’ve learned about writing: no one wants to read about a shark. Characters need more than just a relentless drive to keep the plot moving. They need the human concerns that all of us recognize. Find a way to evoke these concerns through action, especially action that complements the main narrative, and you have a great story.

If you want to explore Mara Cunningham’s world from the beginning, check out Too Close to Miss, which readers call “fast paced, taut, and gripping,” available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iTunes.

If you thought Mara’s characterization was perfectly all right, then let your friends know via Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, or old-fashioned word of mouth.

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

Sometimes I have to remind myself how awesome Meghan O’Keefe is. If you haven’t met her, Meghan is breaking into the comedy scene in NYC, the modern equivalent to a fourth tour of ‘Nam. She did this by moving to New York, getting a day job, and then doing something like five open mics a week forever (I don’t have exact figures handy). Now she’s got gigs at Peoples’ Improv Theater and UCB, as well as regular columns for The Huffington Post, Hello Giggles, The Hairpin, etc. She is Living The Dream.

I was reminded of the awesomeness of Meghan’s path when rereading Jon Acuff’s Quitter (which deserves its own post). Acuff talks about Jerry Seinfeld’s famous hour-long interview on comedy, in which he talks about his own apprenticeship in the NYC comedy scene. His method: to do two shows a night, every night, without a single night off, for eighteen months. That’s over a thousand stand-up sets.

I thought of these inspiring people because I’ve been struggling with the balance between a dream job and a day job. All of us have creative passions that inspire us. All of us also recognize the need to earn a wage and pay for health insurance. How do you balance those? When do you take the leap to pursue your dream? And is the dream that you’re about to pursue worth that leap?

I don’t have the experience to answer the first question or the financial sense to answer the second. But based on my experience, and based on what my friends (and Jerry Seinfeld) have gone through, I think I can field the third.

If you’re wondering whether or not a particular dream of yours is your true calling in life, ask yourself: how long would I be willing to labor in fruitless obscurity just for the joy of pursuing this dream?

If the answer is “weeks” or “months,” forget it. If the answer is “years,” you’re on the right track. If it’s “decades,” you have a winner.

That’s not to say that you couldn’t find overnight success. And I don’t want to perpetuate the myth of the starving artist shivering in a garret apartment. A person’s got to eat! You don’t have to suffer. You just have to be willing to suffer.

(Or, more importantly, you don’t count obscurity as “suffering”)

It’s process, not feedback, that will make your dream succeed. You have to pursue your dream with the discipline of a 40hr/week day job, only with fewer than 40 hours a week to do it in. If you’re chasing after an immediate fix, you’ll get discouraged early on. Even worse, if you find early success and don’t immediately start work on your next project, you can get distracted from your dream before it fully takes off.

Too Close to Miss has succeeded to the point that it’s paid for itself (editing, cover design, Createspace account costs). It continues to sell at a slow clip. I’m incredibly lucky in that regard. But getting to this point took a decade of experimenting with fiction, and five years of writing novels. I tell people Too Close to Miss is my first novel, meaning the first one I’ve published. In terms of manuscripts I’ve completed, it’s probably my sixth or seventh. But none of those others will ever see the light of day. They’re not marketable. I needed to write them in order to learn the novel.

Ask yourself how long you’d be willing to pursue your dream without getting paid. Not for fame, not for money, just for the joy and curiosity of practicing the craft. If the answer isn’t “a sizable portion of your life,” then it’s not your true calling. Don’t worry: you do have one. Just keep searching.

If you want to see whether my years of toiling in obscurity paid off, check out Too Close to Miss, the crime thriller that readers “stayed up way too late finishing,” available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iTunes.

If you read it and liked it, please let your friends know via Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, or old-fashioned word of mouth.

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

This past Thursday I went to a corporate event at F1 Boston in Braintree. The sales team had been meeting there all day; Managed Services was joining them for dinner, drinks, and kart racing, not in that order. We drove on F1′s “City Course”: an uphill slope, two ninety degree turns, a downhill hairpin, and another two ninety degree turns with a straight shot to finish. Over thirty of us were racing, so we were divvied up into qualifying heats.

To drive an F1 kart, you have to forget half of what you know about driving. The karts lack power steering, so they respond only to vigorous turns of the wheel, but they respond quickly. It’s easy to oversteer, especially if you accelerate into a turn, slamming into walls or spinning out. Add to this the nine other racers on the course with you, each with their own agenda. You not only have to drive with skill; you need the killer instinct to pass as well.

There’s something thrilling about whipping down a straightaway at thirty miles an hour, mere inches off the ground. There’s also the joy of a job well done, applying brake and gas in just the right rhythm to squeal around a turn on the inside. But then you realize you haven’t seen another driver for the last two minutes. They’re in a knot at the opposite end of the track, jockeying for position, and you’re fighting your hardest just to keep the kart under control. Then the race ends and you stagger out of the kart, forearms shaking from exertion, and wrestle your too-small helmet off. The other racers are slapping each other on the back, exchanging friendly taunts, or recounting stories of near misses and sudden reversals. It’s as if they were in one race and you, another. And there’s still another qualifier to go, and then the final bracket. You consider shrugging out of your jumpsuit and going upstairs for a drink, but you know you have one more run in you.

I didn’t expect to win any trophies. But I got better with each race, and now I can say it’s something I’ve done.

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

I talked about The Hunger Games (the movie) with the rest of the Overthinkers on this week’s podcast; check it out. But the podcast is (or tries to be) more of an objective analysis, less of a subjective review. So, for my own thoughts:

Several friends of mine have complained recently about the injustice of Bully, a documentary about actual problems with actual teenagers, being rated R, while The Hunger Games, a fictional movie about teenagers murdering each other, is rated PG-13. The argument is that children need to see movies like Bully in order to put a face on a problem that they might otherwise ignore.

While I don’t want to take anything away from the importance of The Bully Project, it is just as important that every teenager in America sees The Hunger Games on the big screen. They need to see a world where people accept income inequality as the just outcome of wrongdoing two hundred years ago. They need to see a world where young adults are marched off to death with no objection. They need to see a world where the voices and faces of media are tools of social control. They need to see a world where it’s the villains who call ritual slaughter a “sacrifice” that needs to be “honored,” not the heroes.

But, of course, it’s fantasy. It’s a world where children are told that they need to conform to recognizable roles as early as they can or they’ll be picked off at the fringes of the herd. It’s a world where kissing the boy that society approves of gets you rewards. It’s a world from which there’s no escape – from which the idea of running away, living off the land and ignoring the arbitrary annual bloodletting, is laughed off. It’s bizarro science-fiction; look at the haircuts.

Yes, the setup is brutal, and depressing, and pointless. But what are you going to do when they start pulling names out of slips? Not send a tribute to the Capital?

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

Two important book announcements!

First, my friend Gina Damico’s macabre YA fantasy novel Croak is now available at Amazon or other fine retailers. If you don’t want your kids reading about emo vampires, give them this fun little page-turner. I’ve tried about three times to write a good description for it, and I can’t come up with one as good as the back cover copy, so:

Fed up with her wild behavior, sixteen-year-old Lex’s parents ship her off to upstate New York to live with her Uncle Mort for the summer, hoping that a few months of dirty farm work will whip her back into shape. But Uncle Mort’s true occupation is
much dirtier than shoveling manure.

He’s a Grim Reaper. And he’s going to teach Lex the family business.

It’s dark, it’s goofy and nobody falls in love with a hundred-year-old. Why haven’t you bought it already?

In more personal news: for those of you who haven’t caught up with my 80-year-old great aunts yet and bought a Kindle, you can now get Too Close to Miss on paperback through Amazon. Same great content as the well-received ebook, but now on stylish plant matter. Enjoy!

If you own an e-reader and want to pick up Too Close to Miss now, you can download it off of Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes and start reading it within seconds.

If you already enjoyed Too Close to Miss in electronic form, recommend the paperback version to a friend via Facebook, Twitter or old-fashioned word of mouth.

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

Hey! Look what came in the mail on Friday:

After designing an awesome cover for my ebook version, Ryan Sawyer took a stab at formatting the image for a paperback binding. This proved maddening for several reasons:

1) Createspace has an automated review process that checks out any PDF you send them for a cover design. Ryan’s kept failing because the block caps of the title were too close to the bleed (that is, the edge of the printable image). That’s what we wanted, of course: we wanted to preserve the claustrophobic effect. But when Createspace flags your cover as failing, there’s no “override and print this anyway” option. So Ryan squeezed the title a bit and we pressed on.

2) Print layout is a science as much as an art. When you read a paperback novel, you’re accustomed to a serifed font of about 10-pt, with between 50-60 characters per line of text. Bigger than that and it looks odd; smaller than that and the eye tires out. Getting it exactly right took several tries, each of which meant printing, ordering and shipping another galley proof.

3) And every time I changed the font, I changed the page count, which meant I had changed the width of the spine, which meant Ryan had to do another cover.

4) Add to this the fact that Createspace didn’t always recognize the fonts I used in Word for Mac, meaning I had to save the file as a PDF, see how it rendered, make any changes, re-save as a PDF and re-upload, etc.

Maybe I’m spoiled, starting out in the era of ebooks, but page layout is a pain in the ass. Deciding what font my book has to be in? Or how many words per line? Why can’t I let the reader decide that? They paid for the book; it’s theirs to play with. And on Kindle or Nook, those options are available to you. In print, I have to govern the experience page by page. What century is this?

Having done the print layout myself (with a bit of help from Sylvia), I can see the value of paying for a professional. Not that I think I’ll need to next time: I have a template now that I can re-use for the next book in the series. But maybe a huge industry grew up around this process for a reason!

If you own an e-reader and want to pick up Too Close to Miss now, you can download it off of Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes and start reading it within seconds.

If you have friends who don’t own e-readers, but would like this book once it’s available in paperback form, please tell them what you thought of Too Close to Miss via Facebook, Twitter or old-fashioned word of mouth.

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

Everyone else in the industry has seen this already, but here’s the WSJ last week with some bad news for legacy publishers:

The Justice Department has warned Apple Inc. and five of the biggest U.S. publishers that it plans to sue them for allegedly colluding to raise the price of electronic books, according to people familiar with the matter.

[...]

The five publishers facing a potential suit are CBS Corp.’s Simon & Schuster Inc.; Lagardere SCA’s Hachette Book Group; Pearson PLC’s Penguin Group (USA); Macmillan, a unit of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH; and HarperCollins Publishers Inc., a unit of News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal.

Hey, what’d I tell you?

When I first heard of this model, it sounded oddly familiar. Not because Apple had put it into practice already (for ebooks on iTunes). It sounded like minimum advertised pricing (MAP), a stunt that had cost music publishers hundreds of millions of dollars.

[...]

Telling retailers that you’d like them to advertise your products at a minimum price is not illegal in itself. However, the 43 states (and the FTC, in a parallel lawsuit) alleged that MAP was a tactic used to fix a de facto price floor.

I need to stress that I’m not loving this outcome. I had hoped that the Big 6 would recognize the danger they were in and back down from agency pricing without the threat of a lawsuit. The law is a blunt instrument, treating cancer with a claw hammer instead of a laser. Fortunately, per the WSJ article, it looks like the publishers and the Justice Department are agreeing on a settlement so that no one has to go to court.

What might the end of agency pricing mean for readers? Cheaper ebooks across all platforms. No more Kindle books at $14.99.

What might the end of agency pricing mean for authors? Mike Shatzkin speculated that this could be bad for indie authors, as keeping the $0.99 to $2.99 window free of legacy publishers gave indie authors room to stand out. I don’t know that I buy this. In the app market, for instance, both the small companies and the big ones compete in the $0.99 space. Angry Birds wasn’t locked out by the SimCity app. Consumer demand has a way of forcing cream to the top.

(I recognize that I may be committing the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, picking a successful indie game to prove that an indie game can succeed. But all we have is backward-looking data and experiments in the future)

What does this mean for the craft? For the moment, nothing. Keep writing, keep building a fan base, and keep your options open. The publishing industry has changed overnight in the past. We might have at least one more change coming.

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

I received a very sophisticated piece of phishing spam this weekend (see image). “Bank of America” claimed that they were “unable to verify my account information” during routine maintenance. I just needed to click on a link within the email to update my records. The email had excellent English and formatting, as well as a Bank of America logo. I have plenty of other emails from my bank that don’t look quite as nice.

This might have worked if I were a Bank of America customer. However, since you couldn’t pay me to do business with Bank of America^*, I was suspicious.

click for full size

The threat you’re expecting – a phisher asking you to email your password – may not be the threat you face in the next generation. I was thinking about this after reading a post on the Passive Voice blog about Barnes & Noble, erstwhile scourge of independent booksellers:

While Amazon is considered a disruptor company for many of the changes today – hated by independent book store owners and publishers, especially after they promoted their price-check app over the Christmas holidays, in the 80’s and 90’s Barnes and Noble was considered the “brutal capitalist” of booksellers. And its history is extremely interesting, considering what has been happening in the book world of late. Barnes and Noble was the first major bookseller to discount books, by selling The New York Times best-selling titles at 40% off the publishers’ list price. In the eighties they bought up chain book stores like B. Dalton, Doubleday Book Shops, and Bookstop. In 1998 they tried to purchase Ingram Book Group Inc., the largest book wholesaler in the United States but were unable to do so because of antitrust concerns. Supposedly one reason Waldenbooks and Borders opened so many stores was to keep up with Barnes and Noble’s superstores.

[...]

In 1998 Barnes & Noble got sued by the American Booksellers Association and 26 independent bookstores who claimed that Barnes & Noble and Borders had violated antitrust laws by using their buying power to demand from publishers “illegal and secret” discounts and then in 2003 Barnes and Noble was the first bookseller to publish its own line after acquiring Sterling Publishing Co., the nation’s largest publisher of how-to books, competing side by side with Modern Library and Penguin Classics.

In the 80s and 90s, publishers and booksellers feared “big box” bookstores grinding out the mom & pop store on the corner. Now, in the 10s, those same forces want B&N to save them from Amazon. They’re rallying behind the big box, hoping that B&N doesn’t go the way of Borders, to prevent Amazon from slashing their margins.

I can’t blame them. Amazon has made no qualms about gunning for the Big Six; obviously they’ll fire back. But IT professionals know that you don’t keep your desktop secure by protecting against last year’s threats. As soon as your adversary shows that they’ve adapted to your countermeasures, you need to respond proactively. If you don’t, you start hemorrhaging users at the fringes until your system’s hollow on the inside.

If you want to follow my attempts to stay on the nimble edge of publishing, check out my debut novel, Too Close to Miss and meet Mara Cunningham, whom readers call “flawed yet gustsy, smart [and] driven.” Download it off of Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes and start reading it within seconds.

If you want to send your friends a message that they’ll appreciate better than a password phishing email, please tell them what you thought of Too Close to Miss via Facebook, Twitter or old-fashioned word of mouth.

_________________
* A business model that might work better than the current one, where I have to pay them to do business with them.

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

I didn’t think I made 50 books in 2011, but Goodreads tells me I pulled it off. Goodreads also makes it immensely easy to export my ratings into a .csv file, and that greatly simplified the year-end roundup.

Best Nonfiction: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, Barbara Tuchman. The most detailed, accessible and enjoyable history of the 14th century – and of medieval Europe – one could ever hope to read. Dense with detail, but also full of Tuchman’s mild irony and a real sense of having been present.
Runner-Up: War, Sebastian Junger.

Best Inspirational Nonfiction: Quitter: Turning Your Job into a Dream and your Dream into a Job, Jonathan Acuff. Acuff doesn’t give you a book full of checklists, worksheets and exercises. What he gives instead is clear entertaining prose that makes clear he’s been in the same place you are. He recounts all the same fears that you’re having right now (I highlighted more passages in this book than I do in most others) and explains how to live with them. This isn’t a manual; it’s a philosophy.
Runner-Up: Read This Before our Next Meeting, Al Pittampili.

Best Literary Fiction: Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison. Not just an important novel, but also a genuinely good novel, too – a page-turner, an engrossing adventure, a deep look inside one lonely man’s struggle for identity. Full of wit, passion and arresting imagery. Highest recommendation.
Runner-Up: The Magician’s Assistant, Ann Patchett.

Best Thriller / Mystery / Suspense: The Keepsake, Tess Gerritsen. Gerritsen writes better thrillers than anyone on the market today. The pacing cracks right along. The tension keeps mounting – I was reading this on the subway and still felt chills as the killer’s plan unfolded.
Runner-Up: The Enemy, Lee Child.

Best Sci-Fi / Fantasy: The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch. The most entertaining fantasy novel I’ve read in nearly ten years. Not only does it have a compelling milieu, fun characters and high stakes, it’s a page-turner, too! I had a hard time putting it down! Considering the overwrought exposition dumps that we’ve come to expect from fantasy fiction, Lynch’s taut prose is like an oasis in the desert.
Runner-Up: The Blade Itself, Joe Abercrombie.

Biggest Surprise: The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins. Collins is a master at depicting a strange world – somewhat familiar, but still bizarre and dangerous – with a few throwaway lines. She makes her protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, seem real without being frustrating: torn by conflicting desires but not paralyzed by them. The story thrusts dire choices at her in a constant barrage. Watching her deal with these choices is fascinating.
Runner-Up: The Rookie, Scott Sigler.

Biggest Disappointment: Three Felonies a Day, Harvey Silverglate. I wanted a collection of stories about regulators, law enforcement officials and busybodies targeting common people. Instead, I got a few overwritten anecdotes about the Feds going after local politicians, corporations, and junk bond traders. Sure, if these people were innocent then it’s a shame, but this isn’t going to arouse anyone’s sympathy.
Runner-Down: The Company We Keep, Robert and Dayna Baer.

If you’re trying to read 50 books in 2012, Too Close to Miss is a quick read – a neo-noir crime thriller set in Boston that readers say “opens with a bang and never relents.” Download your copy on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

If you read the book and liked it, or even if you thought it needed work, use Goodreads to write your own review! Word of mouth has been my biggest sales driver so far, and I value every write-up I get.

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

Whenever a group of people do something terrible enough to make the news, whether it’s taunting a child into suicide, lying about the creditworthiness of mortgage-backed derivatives, or adopting the SS logo for their Marine Corps squad, I see a common reaction. As the news is being passed around, wall to wall and tweet to tweet, someone asks, “How can anybody act this way? How come nobody spoke up?”

My question: “why would you expect them to?”

At what point in the curriculum do we teach children to call bullshit on people in power? I know most course loads have a few sections devoted to critical thinking, but, as I recall, that’s mostly reading comprehension and word problems. The only lessons I got in resisting peer pressure came in the drugs and alcohol section of Health class. And compared to tormenting a kid until he hangs himself, weed is harmless.

In each of these newsworthy cases, here is what happened:

1. Someone with a bit of authority, earned or granted, suggests doing something questionable (e.g., “let’s get drunk and drag race!”, “let’s sell credit default swaps to pension fund managers!”, “let’s adopt the logo of a Wehrmacht unit for our squadron!”).
   

2. A bunch of people agree that it’s a good idea, either because they genuinely believe it to be – they followed the same chain of reasoning the originator did – or because they like power and want to be seen supporting it.
   

3. One or two brave souls realize that this might not be a good idea (e.g., “what if we crash?”, “what if a statistically unlikely number of mortgages default?“, “hey, didn’t the SS implement the Reich’s ‘final solution’?”).
   

4. Here we fork: these dissenters either keep their objections to themselves or voice their concerns. I couldn’t say what the breakdown is, but call it 50/50.
   

5. If they voice their concerns, the originator and his supporters either shout them down (“pussies!”) or, even worse, acknowledge the logic of the objections and then water down their suggestion slightly, in bad faith, in a way that doesn’t address the core harm (e.g., “let’s only sell the derivatives that Moody’s rates AAA”).
   

6. Everyone goes along with it.
   

7. They get caught.
   

8. A fraction of them feel no guilt for what they’ve done; a sizable portion are “sorry they were caught” and grapple with guilt for a while; the fraction who recognized the issues earlier and [did/didn't] speak up are mentally broken.
   

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

My work laptop crashed once every dozen days, so IT replaced it this week. Tim the IT guy dropped off a Thinkpad – slimmer than the last Thinkpad, already pretty svelte – and stuck around through the Outlook install and the mail import. “Just copy anything you need off your old computer onto the shared drive,” he said, “then copy it back to your new computer. You’ll have to reinstall any programs you use, but that’s it.” And even that wouldn’t mean a loss of data, as my music, notes and files all live in the cloud. Swapping computers took all of 30 minutes.

Kathryn Lilley of The Kill Zone wrote a post last week about a dog savaging her tasty leather Kindle case and losing the ereader in the carnage. I sympathize with her loss and with the frustration she feels at having to replace the Kindle. She lost her entire library!, we think. Only she really hasn’t, because as soon as she buys and activates a new one, Amazon can restore all her old books and notes to her.

We’re reaching the era where hardware only matters as a portal to content.

This scares a lot of people. Legacy publishers scramble for ways to push the lightning back into the sky, whether by censoring the Internet, suing content creators, or shaming people who buy used games. To their frustration, none of it’s working. Very few people seem to care about the competitive feature set that the latest forms of hardware provide. Volition spent millions developing Saints Row the Third and will likely recoup all of it. Angry Birds cost scant thousands to develop. Yet people seem just as engrossed by the chirping cels of the latter as by the rich graphics and hi-def sound of the former. More engrossed, perhaps, as my mother definitely would not enjoy Saints Row the Third.

Compelling content does not cost as much to create as the entertainment industry is paying to create it. The entertainment industry is being re-educated to this fact, though I use “re-education” in the same sense the North Vietnamese did. It’s a brutal process of creative destruction that is going to cost thousands of people their jobs. Obviously they’re going to fight it. They’ve invested a lot in certain institutions – publishing houses with printing presses, video game companies with design labs, record labels with recording studios – and they’ll die to defend it.

I don’t want to go all Thomas Friedman on you. This process, like all adolescent phases, will hurt as much as it helps. Going back to Kathryn Lilley’s example above: yes, she now has the power to take her entire library with her to the park for a read, but she also runs the risk of losing her entire library (or at least losing the keys to it) if a hungry Rhodesian Ridgeback gets the scent. On the historical scale, that’s not a bad problem to have. The kind of catastrophe you’d need to suffer to lose your whole library in 2002 would probably take down some of your house and/or family with it. But that’s little consolation when you’re staring at the wreckage of your favorite piece of electronics.

Still, it’s inevitable. The First World’s demand to be entertained is effectively unlimited. Get in front of that and produce interesting content with whatever means are at your disposal and you’ll do okay. Try to interrupt it and you’ll be shocked at the force of the response.

Check out my foray into this brave new world of raw content, Too Close to Miss, which Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings said “passes the key thriller test of ‘I stayed up later than intended to finish it.’” Download it off of Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes and start reading it within seconds.

If you’ve already read the book and are down with its bold digital content, please let your friends know via Facebook, Twitter or old-fashioned word of mouth.

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

Ferrett has an entertaining post on the supposed magical aspects of writing that I got a chuckle out of:

There is a lot of magic in the art of storytelling – the writer sits down, furrows his or her brow, and a world spills from their fingers. People emerge who’d never been there before, and begin to have adventures. It’s a mysterious, unfathomable Process that cannot be fully explained to mere mortals.

Or so writers would tell you.

Look, I’ve done a fair amount of writing in my time, and yes, sometimes you wake up and the faeries have sprinkled dust in your ears and lo, a story springs onto the page.

But most of the time I’m sitting down to the keys after eight hours of work, tired but ready, and today I’m going to fix the awkward dialogue in this scene, and rework the characterization so that Penelope The Heroine doesn’t come off like a complete idiot. Most days I write not because my head is buzzing like a beehive with Ideas, but because I’m 3,500 words in and one more scene means I can call it a day.

This is certainly true.

Every writing instructor and every experienced author stresses the discipline of writing. The scutwork. The drudgery. Getting up early every morning or setting time aside before you go to bed to get your pages in. You do this on the days when it feels great and you do this on the days you have a head cold. You keep at it. And eventually a novel emerges.

Ferrett is right to say that this isn’t magical.

And yet there’s a reason people call it magical, and it’s not just because that helps writers get laid. For one thing, talking about my writing, even when I was on the market, has never helped me get laid, except insofar as speaking passionately over drinks about interests another person can enjoy did it. But you can do that much with skiing.

My theory is that we call writing “magical” simply because we don’t know where it comes from.

By way of example: just two days ago, I started a scene in the current novel where the protagonist and her nemesis finally catch up. The nemesis begins laying out the history that brought them to the current crisis. He does so in a very personal and humanizing way that I hadn’t expected at the time. It was obvious to me, as I was writing the scene, that it had to unfold in this direction; it was opaque to me, before I started writing the scene, how it would go.

(I apologize for talking so abstractly, but it’s near the end and I don’t want to spoil anything)

I know exactly how I got there: by writing every day, I accreted details about these characters and their relationship until I had an organic world from which this scene grew. But I don’t know exactly how I got there. I have the oven and the ingredients, but I don’t have the recipe. I just know that I spent hours mixing things and suddenly there’s a bundt cake.

I mentioned this in one of my inaccessible political rants, so I’m not hurt if you skipped it, but: there’s a difference between unplanned and random. Evolution is the best example of that. All species are the product of natural and sexual selection, just like a puddle is the product of the shape of the hole it’s in. But those forces do not have a grand genius behind them.

Similarly, there’s a difference between a story emerging unplanned and a story emerging by magic. If you show up to your computer every day and you build a world, detail by detail, then scenes will emerge that you did not anticipate. The result is not magical, anymore than penicillin in a petri dish is magical. But nobody predicted it.

Ferrett’s right to say that writing isn’t magical, but let’s not throw away all the metaphors yet. Let’s say instead that writing is not alchemical but chemical. Writers do not tap into Atlantean wisdom and brew potions to turn lead into gold. Instead, writers show up in the lab every day. They study a hundred different samples and jot down figures in a wilting marble notebook. Then, if they’re patient and they’re diligent and they don’t hurry to publish, they may just discover a miracle.

If you want to find out what two hundred hours in the lab gets you, then buy a copy of Too Close to Miss, the Boston suspense novel that readers are calling “richly evocative,” available on Kindle, Nook or iTunes.

If you’ve already read the book and didn’t get an allergic reaction, please let your friends know via Facebook, Twitter or old-fashioned word of mouth.

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

When I laid out my formula of tension = uncertainty x stakes last week, I wrote at the end:

So we have uncertainty and we have stakes. Combine them and you get tension. But tension isn’t just a straight line through the narrative. It should be an arc, building toward the end and then exploding like a firework.

Laying tension out like an algebraic formula makes it clear how to build that arc. You multiply the tension by either raising the uncertainty or raising the stakes.

Let’s go back to the WW2 commando I mentioned in the last post. We can flesh out the rough beats of a story using the details I hinted at before.

1. Our hero gets his assignment: parachute with a commando unit into occupied France and secure the Nazi’s rocket plans.

   Uncertainty: Low. The briefing scene at HQ makes it seem like everything’s been accounted for.

   Stakes: Low. Yes, with this new rocket the Germans could incinerate London from the comfort of Berlin, but we know how the war turns out. Also, that’s a rather abstract danger. We as readers care more about one beloved character losing an arm than a city full of strangers dying.
   

2. The commando team is about to be dropped into France, but anti-aircraft guns shoot down their plane. Our hero and two other officers just barely make it out of the plane before it explodes.

   Uncertainty: Rising. Before, we had a full commando squad; now we have three guys with whatever equipment they have in their packs. Can they complete the mission?

   Stakes: same as before.
   

3. One of the other officers starts to lag behind. His teammates realize he was nicked by shrapnel in the explosion. They can slow the bleeding, but they need a surgeon to remove the metal and prevent an infection.

   Uncertainty: same.

   Stakes: Rising. There’s a chance we might lose a likeable supporting character, one of the protagonist’s buddies.
   

4. The commandos rendezvous with their French Resistance contact. But it’s not their contact – it’s a Nazi spy posing as him! They kill the Ratzi and find their original contact buried in the cellar, tortured to death.

   Uncertainty: Rising. How much did he reveal before dying? Is the plan compromised?

   Stakes: Rising. Now the team has to hustle before the Nazi spy’s failure to report is noticed.
   

5. Using the Nazi spy’s uniform, our protagonist poses as an officer to filch some first aid gear from a nearby camp. While there, he spots an old flame of his from his days at the University of Heidelburg, tending to injured soldiers. They lock eyes from across the tent.

   Uncertainty: Rising. Did she recognize him? If she did, will she break his cover?

   Stakes: Rising. The smart play would be to take off running. But now our hero has to know: what is she doing here? Is she an ardent Nazi or just going along with the cause? And does she still have feelings for him?
   </ul>
   I’ll break off the beat-by-beat here, partly because you can see where I’m going with this and partly because it’s getting exhausting. That’s four consecutive beats where we’ve cranked the tension up on our beleaguered commando unit. At this point in the story, I would cool things down for our heroes just a bit. Maybe the old flame tracks our heroes down and gives them cover IDs so they can get into a party her husband the Baron is throwing. This eases the pressure off on their getting caught, but ratchets up the romantic tension. “I can’t believe you married him!” “I can’t believe you abandoned me!” And so on.

   I hope the exercise, and the formula behind it, prove useful. Whether tension is the point of your story (as in thrillers and suspense novels) or simply part of the story, it’s not something you can ignore. Look at all the characters and events you have assembled. Examine how each of them contributes either to the uncertainty or the stakes. Then start cranking on the dials until the boiler screams.

   If you want to use this formula to check my math, then buy a copy of Too Close to Miss, the crime thriller that readers are calling “a new spin on a classic thriller,” available on Kindle, Nook or iTunes.

   If you’ve already read the book and liked what you found, please let your friends know via Facebook, Twitter or old-fashioned word of mouth.

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

I haven’t forgotten part 2 of my theories on building tension, but I had to hurry something along for Overthinking It this week: the next installment of OverWinging It, my review/analysis of Season 2 of The West Wing. This one covers “The Midterms,” “In This White House” and “And It’s Surely To Their Credit.” Ainsley Hayes! AIDS in Africa! H.M.S. Pinafore! And more.

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

Every story needs tension. Every story except the truly experimental needs to instill anticipation in the reader, to keep them turning the pages. Even those abstruse literary novels that are adapted from tales everyone knows (like The Story of Edgar Sawtelle) contain some tension, in the mystery of “how is he going to address this issue?” if nothing else.

My current genre, the thriller / crime novel, requires more tension than most. People turn to thrillers when they want compelling page-turners and the chance to escape into an exciting world. So I thought a lot about tension in writing Too Close to Miss, and I’m thinking about it even more with the next book in the series.

And I’ve hit on a formula that (I think) is original^* and (I hope) is useful:

TENSION = UNCERTAINTY x STAKES

Let’s break this down.

By uncertainty, I mean ignorance about what’s coming. Uncertainty is distinct from risk. Risk is a known quantity, like the odds of sevening out in craps. It means you can predict the outcome and make an informed decision. Uncertainty, on the other hand, is an unknown quantity. There’s a difference between not knowing how the dice will come up (risk) and not knowing what you don’t even know (uncertainty).

(Frank Knight breaks this down much more dryly in Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, so I’m not making this up)

To take a cliched action movie example: our hero is crouched behind a concrete pillar while a gunman at the other end of the street fires at him. If our hero chooses to duck across the alley, spraying bullets over his head for cover, that’s a risk. He’s taking a chance on getting shot in order to achieve the payoff of a better angle. If the gunman is actually a concealed sniper, however, then we’re dealing with uncertainty. Where is the gunman hidden? When is he going to fire next? How good of a bead does he have on our hero? And so on.

(You might say that uncertainty tends to slide into risk; as our hero gets answers to those questions above, he starts calculating the odds on when to act next)

Not seeing a lot of options here.

To use a popular example: risk is Luke and Leia swinging across the gap in the Death Star in Star Wars: A New Hope. Yes, there’s a chance they’ll fall in, but all the dangers seem pretty visible. Uncertainty is Luke stepping onto the board over the Sarlacc pit in Return of the Jedi. He seems to know how he’s getting out of this, but we don’t. He’s surrounded by guards! Leia’s already been captured! Giant flesh-eating pit monster! What’s with that jaunty grin on his face?

Uncertainty keeps the audience guessing. It actively engages the readers in the process of building the narrative. You read something weird and you can’t help but try to guess what will happen next. That makes for a much more satisfying reading experience.

By stakes, I mean what our hero is in danger of losing. In the thriller genre, this is typically a threat on the hero’s life. There’s a maniac with a knife obsessed over the pretty cop; there’s a brutal stranger who’s been torturing his victims. The use of good sensory details makes this danger more evocative.

Of course, you can put something besides the hero’s life at stake. Maybe their reputation is in danger: if word gets out, they’ll be too ashamed to ever leave the house. Or maybe it’s a relationship: they have a chance at true love, but it’s slipping away. Say what you will about their quality, but romance novels are good at playing with these sort of stakes. The millionaire heiress might lose her fortune and her reputation if anyone finds out about her relationship with that rough but tender cowboy, and so on.

The best sort of tension arises from when more than one factor is at stake. So the loner cop not only has to find the serial killer, he also has to keep his marriage from falling apart. The commando not only has to smuggle the German rocket plans back to Lisbon, he has to rescue the beautiful Baroness as well, without revealing to his comrades that she’s married to an SS commander. Force your hero to choose between what’s at stake. Or force him to compromise. This keeps the anticipation churning.

So we have uncertainty and we have stakes. Combine them and you get tension. But tension isn’t just a straight line through the narrative. It should be an arc, building toward the end and then exploding like a firework. I’ll write about how to do that next time around, as this post is getting a little long.

If you want to see my theories on building tension put to use, check out Too Close to Miss, the crime thriller that readers are calling “compelling, incisively smart, and witty,” available on Kindle, Nook or iTunes.

If you’ve already read the book and felt properly seat-edged, please let your friends know via Facebook, Twitter or old-fashioned word of mouth.
_________________
* Googling “tension = uncertainty x stakes” yields this review of Circus Vargas. I swear I hadn’t read it before writing this post. Since people who know me know that I’m the last person on Earth who would actively seek out circus reviews, I think I can lay claim to an original thought here, or at least parallel development.

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

Speaking of sales numbers, here’s an update on what I’ve moved for Too Close to Miss in January.

Amazon: 37^*
B&N: 148
iTunes: Unknown at this point

I expected sales to drop when I raised the price. My hypothesis (or rather my hope) was that raising the price 4X would result in less than a 4X drop in sales. In the case of B&N, I saw almost exactly a 4X drop; with Amazon, I saw more than that. So demand for ebooks by debut authors is predictably elastic! Useful data.

As to why sales dropped so much, I have a few theories:

(1) A natural drop-off from the initial surge. The day I posted the announcement, I saw an immense number of purchases. More than twenty friends of mine shared the post on Facebook. That sort of momentum couldn’t be sustained forever.

(2) I’ve also eased up on the self-promotion this month, not out of any consideration for your feelings but due to being busy. I also want to make sure I’m finding effective means of promotion, which has taken some research and planning.

(3) Pricing myself out of the market. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration: $3.99 is not too much to pay for an ebook (and at such quality!). But the data I referenced on Tuesday suggests that the plurality of ebooks on Amazon are priced between $2 and $0. That’s where all the action is. B&N books average higher, so I’m not costing myself as many sales there.

The plan for now is to keep the price at $3.99. I didn’t hit the 1000 copies total this month (I rather ambitiously called that shot two weeks ago; oops), but at this rate I’ll easy make that in February. The plan for now is to use social media to promote word of mouth and to focus on the next Mara Cunningham novel, which is roaring around the curve as you read this.

If you haven’t checked out Too Close to Miss, my neo-noir Boston crime thriller, you can find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes for only $3.99.

If you’ve already read it, please let people know what you thought – either with a review on your site of choice or by sharing the good tidings on Twitter or Facebook.

_______________
* Technically 38, less one refund. And Kindle credits the refund at $0.99, meaning this was before I jacked the price. So somebody bought my book, read enough of it to decide it wasn’t for them, and said, “I want my ninety-nine cents back.” I have flown too close to the sun.

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

With the surge in e-readers and tablets, as well as new programs like KDP Select, there’s been a huge churn of stories on ebook pricing. Here are a couple of recent links:

First, via The Kill Zone, a link to a Booklr survey of the top 100 Kindle Books vs. the top 100 Nook titles between January 12th-19th. 35% of the top Kindle titles were less than $2 or free; none of the Nook titles were. At the other end, 40% of Nook’s top 100 were $10 or more; only 27% of the Kindle’s were.

Second, via Forbes, an EbookFriendly report based on Amazon data shows that the average price for a self-published ebook in 2011 was $1.40. The average price for Amazon’s top 100 eBooks was $8.26.

(This was for all of 2011. The Booklr data above, for one week in 2012, gives an average price for the top Kindle 100 of $6.48. So already the KDP Select strategy has worked at lowering ebook prices)

Finally, my man Ben Snitkoff linked me to a blog post by David Kazzie on how KDP Select shot his debut novel, The Jackpot, to the #1 spot for Kindle legal thrillers. He has a few theories as to why the free promotion helped:

Also, I had so many free downloads, the book began to appear in other books’ “Customer Also Bought” pages. Amazon doesn’t seem to care if these books mix together on the Also-Bought lists, so many more people were seeing the book once it switched back to Paid status, even though all its prior traffic was due to free downloads.

I like this theory, partly because it jives with my own successes on the Nook platform. The more people download your book, the more your book gets paired up with other titles by recommendation algorithms. If it hits some lucky sector, sales can suddenly take off.

So what’s Amazon up to?

I love every chance I get to chat with my CEO for a few minutes, because he has amazing insight when it comes to online marketing and media^*. Many months ago, I was sitting with him at a company lunch while he was holding court to our Directors of Business Development and of Revenue about Google’s apparent product strategy. “Make a good enough product,” he said, “and give it away for free. Sure, Google Docs isn’t as feature-rich as MS Office, but it doesn’t need to be in order to exert price pressure.”

It appears that Amazon is following a similar strategy. They’re a big enough player that they can throw a lot of weight behind a particular price point. If their goal is to make life harder for legacy publishers, this makes sense as a tactic. Yes, Amazon would be collecting more margin if the average ebook price were still $8.26, not $6.48. But Amazon can afford to lose a little margin because they’re getting money elsewhere (people buying TVs or groceries or sweaters online). Random House isn’t.

This is purely speculation, of course. But it’s a story that makes sense to me.

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* And I’m not just saying that because he’s my boss. If you know me in real life, you’ll know that I never compliment someone’s intelligence unless I really mean it. This has less to do with my integrity and more to do with my overweening conceit.

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

Three years ago I took a writing class at Grub Street on “Building a Writing Career.” Ethan Gilsdorf kicked off the class by having us go ’round the room and introduce ourselves by saying, “Hi, my name is [$name_here], and I’m a writer.”

“This is an important part of growing as a writer – identifying as one,” he said. “So no matter what you think of your work, whether you’re published or sold or not, introduce yourself as a writer.”

It was a full room, just shy of twenty folks around a table. The introductions started at the far end and rotated away from me, so I was no earlier than #11. Yet I was the first person to introduce myself as a writer without qualifying it first. Not “I’m trying to be a writer” or “I want to be a writer” or “I’m a writer, I think,” followed by nervous giggles. Just saying it and owning it.

And this was in a room full of peers! All people in the same spot: uncertain about their craft, looking for guidance, ready to learn. And the instructor gave us permission to call ourselves writers, even if we didn’t feel that we were. Even if we thought it was aspirational, not indicative.

It’s hard to call yourself a writer. I still struggle with it, my burst of “courage” three years ago notwithstanding. And I’m far more qualified to call myself a writer today than I was then. If someone congratulates me on my success or asks how I’m doing, my first instinct is always to duck my head, give a shy smile and make that weird “ennhhh” sound that we associate with Jewish grandfathers. I’m getting better at nodding and saying, “Thank you” or giving a sincere answer, but it’s a conscious choice. It’s like improving your posture or watching what you eat: you commit yourself daily anew.

Why are we so scared to identify ourselves as writers? I’d guess for three reasons.

First, identifying yourself as anything creative often prompts odd responses from other people. “Oh, you did improv in college? Do something funny.” While no one will ask you to produce a poem on short notice, calling yourself a writer can lead to a variety of unpredictable questions. This isn’t a reason to stop identifying yourself, as such, but it can make you self-conscious.

Second, we have a hard time owning labels that other people don’t assign us. I have no problem identifying myself as a marketer, since someone’s paying me to fill that role. Fathers don’t have difficulty calling themselves parents. But there’s no license or exam or certification process to become a writer (MFAs don’t count).

Third, as much as we have to commit ourselves to calling ourselves writers, we have to commit ourselves even more frequently to actually writing. Writing takes constant work and there’s little immediate reward. It’s easy to fall off and miss a few days. And if you don’t feel like a writer, identifying as a writer can make you feel like a fraud.

But what about you? Do you have a hard time identifying yourself as a writer? Or as whichever art form you’re passionate about (a singer, a sculptor, etc)? If not, what have you done to get over that hurdle?

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

Writing a novel is hard work in itself. For some reason, I chose to make it harder by writing Too Close to Miss in first person from the viewpoint of a woman.

Okay, not for some arbitrary reason. I wanted to invert certain thriller genre tropes, so a female protagonist was necessary. And I default into first person unless I make a conscious effort not to. The easiest way to find a voice, for me, is to speak in it all the time.

But it certainly had its challenges.

When people read the first page of my novel, the most frequent feedback I got from male readers was that they didn’t think Mara was a woman until a few pages in. The most frequent feedback I got from female readers is, “why does she have her jeans hanging in the closet?” The detail just rang false. Jeans get folded and placed in a dresser. I don’t keep my jeans there, but that’s probably a guy thing: I have more closet space than I have dresser space. I fixed both those details for the final draft.

Just yesterday, a friend of mine tweeted (in a ha-ha-oops way, not a prurient way) that she’d left her house without a bra on. I didn’t think this was something women did. I know that, depending on physique and outfit, there are times a woman can do it and times that they can’t. But there’s a lot of lore and practice surrounding brassieres that, as a male, is just lost to me. Fitting, support, changing sizes due to fluctuations in weight, fashion considerations – all a darkened vale to me. My relationship with bras has fluctuated between bemusement and frustration for the last eleven years; that’s all the knowledge I can bring to bear.

I see this and I think 'Get a bigger clutch.'

My experience with femininity comes from two sources: the women I know and popular culture. Pop culture is a minefield when it comes to depictions of women (particularly independent women), so that’s better left unexplored. That leaves the women I know. While there are bits and pieces of several female friends in Mara Cunningham, I can only take that so far without being derivative. So I struggle to ask the probing but professional questions necessary to honestly depict a female hero.

The biggest shortcut I’ve taken, for the time being, has been to presume that women tend to want the same things men do: validation of their work, good sex, success for their friends, failure for their rivals and for their mothers to quit bugging them to settle down. Hasn’t steered me wrong yet.

But for those of you who’ve read Too Close to Miss, particularly female readers: does Mara Cunningham strike you as feminine? Not feminine enough? Too feminine (or perhaps too fake in her femininity)? Let me know, and be honest.

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* Nothing creeps me out more than older male writers who write young female characters as an excuse to leer. Rupert Holmes’s Where The Truth Lies is a particular offender, with the perky female protagonist taking every opportunity she can to examine her firm body. Thanks for making it clear who this novel’s for, Rupert.

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

A few weeks back, I polled the readers of Overthinking It to ask which season of The West Wing I should watch if I were only to watch one. They overwhelmingly voted for S2. Today I kicked off my analysis of the season on Overthinking it, tackling the two-parter “In The Shadow of Two Gunmen.”

You should check it out.

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

Before it can take over the world¹, indie publishing has to overcome the perception that self-published authors are crap. Self-published authors don’t do a lot to help this notion (I could link to some particular offenders, but that would be cruel). Then again, legacy published authors aren’t always the best shepherds of their image either; consider Q.R. Markham, the lauded new author whose debut Little, Brown & Co. novel, Assassin of Secrets, was found to be heavily plagiarized². But there’s a burden of proof on a self-published author that doesn’t exist for someone with a penguin on the cover.

Well, we take the world as we find it, not as we wish it. The perception exists. All I can do to counter it is keep producing well-reviewed neo-noir crime thrillers and calling out good indie work when I find it. This post is the latter.

I bought a copy of Fingers Murphy’s “Everything I Tell You is a Lie” when he released it for free (as part of his KDP Select promotion) on Amazon. It’s a slim little novella, but for its word count it doesn’t lack for impact. “Everything …” is a slick, evocative noir fable. Well, I say “noir,” but really it owes more to the existential fiction inspired by noir. Like Camus’s The Stranger, it follows a man recounting the choices and circumstances that led him to prison, where he’s about to be released after serving a sentence for homicide. It engrosses us in a small town story of the cycle of violence, neglect and pent-up rage that can ruin multiple lives.

Murphy writes with a mature, considered style, filling the story with true-to-life details that make it seem like a real narrative about real people in a real place. It’s a pleasure to read. There’s a slight tendency for the narrator to indulge in abstract introspection, but, since the frame story is about a man in therapy on the eve of his release from prison for murder, that’s almost to be expected.

My sincere wish is that Murphy turns this same stylistic laser on bigger and bolder subjects. Fortunately he’s got a few other titles to his name (if that is his name³) that promise to be meatier tales about desperate men in bad scenes. That’s the sort of story I go for, as anyone who’s read Too Close to Miss can tell you, so I’ll be checking his other stuff out.

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1. It won’t. If it took over the world, it wouldn’t be “indie,” now would it? Not that there’s a particular virtue to independence, but the niche exists because it works.

3. I’ve been assured it isn’t.

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

I’m happy my corner of the Internet has risen in unison to protest SOPA. I really am. I’m happy people seem to recognize, today, finally, that putting powerful weapons in the hands of the powerful only serves the interests of the powerful. I’m glad people are doing whatever they can, even if it’s within a rather narrow band (writing their Congresspersons, rewriting their .htaccess files), to check the effects of hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying money.

My only hope is that today makes an impact. Not on Congress, but on everyone else.

My sincere, I’m-not-being-sarcastic-this-time hope is that people investigate the process that led to SOPA being written in the first place and realize that it’s not an accident. Nothing this big is an accident. SOPA emerged from a deliberate confluence of factions conspiring to protect their power. Congress isn’t endorsing a bill that expands the already draconian provisions of the DMCA because no other option appears available to them to stop piracy. They’re not idiots. Congress is endorsing this bill because people with millions of dollars, such as the MPAA (and their chief lobbyist, former Senator Chris Dodd), want it to happen. And the MPAA wants it to happen because they want to turn third-party filesharing into a revenue stream through a constant barrage of torts.

Does your average member of Congress care about lobbyists and campaign contributions more than they care about their constituency? Obviously Perhaps not. But they know that you’re going to vote for them anyway. Most people are. Your Congressional representative knows that he has an eighty percent chance of keeping his job whatever he does, slightly less if he’s a Senator. You aren’t going to turn your back on him over one trivial bill. But the MPAA might. And when the MPAA takes a member of Congress off their list, that’s a thousand-dollar haircut. More if he has a valuable committee seat.

One of the ways that people get confused about evolution – even the people who defend evolution against creationists – is that they think it’s “accidental.” It’s not. There’s a difference between undesigned and accidental. Evolution produces speciation through the forces of natural and sexual selection, with a healthy dose of mutation thrown in at random intervals. While there is no divine intelligence behind it, that doesn’t mean the process is a complete roll of the dice. Humans (and other animals) fit so well on the planet Earth because an animal that didn’t fit well wouldn’t have survived here. Evolution is a product of forces. It’s no more accidental than a waterfall.

Similarly, the convergence of money and power in the form of destructive regulation is not accidental. It’s not like Lamar Smith woke up one morning, found a monstrous censoring blade on his desk and decided to start swinging it before reason overtook him. It’s not as if Eric Cantor hates Google and wants it destroyed. Rather, you have many unrelated actors – filesharing sites, search engines, content aggregators, members of Congress, the MPAA – and a vast institution that notionally connects them – the law. The law is not a bulwark against the powerful. It’s a giant, flashing beacon. It tells the powerful, “If you want your voice to be heard, make your checks out to this address and no other.”

I have to stress that SOPA and PIPA are a natural outcome of the regulatory process, not some accidental aberration. I have to stress it because every law is like that. All of them. Even the ones you like. Especially the ones you like. Every bill whose passage you’ve ever cheered has been the result of either a multi-million dollar lobbying effort or, rarely, a massive coordinated push by an obstreperous faction that decided results were more important than tact.

If you object to SOPA, you object to the system that created it. If you don’t object to the system that created it, you don’t really object to SOPA. And don’t tell me that you understand the potential for corruption, but you hope that by electing “more and better” Ruling Party members that you can get good results, etc, because you can’t. It doesn’t work. You want a super-intelligent shark that’s not going to eat Samuel L. Jackson. Well, I’m sorry, but the super-intelligent shark will always eat Samuel L. Jackson.

GIFSoup

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

I saw Mission Impossible 4: Spooky Operating Procedure with Sylvia over the holiday weekend. A slam-bang action flick, to use the Variety term, but a little breathless in the writing. And I use that in both the laudatory and pejorative senses: the action never lets up, but the speech gets a little nasally as a result.

Nonetheless it’s probably not my favorite M:I film. Every successive entry in the franchise makes me miss what I liked about the previous entry. I liked Brian de Palma’s velvety style; I liked John Woo’s balletic action; I liked J.J. Abrams’ efficient storytelling. Bird is more efficient at building tension without making it seem as ridiculous as Abrams does, and he can frame a fight scene without it becoming a clash of jumpy visual images. But he needed a better writer.

At first blush, writing a neo-noir crime thriller (like the sequel to Too Close to Miss) is nothing like writing a high-budget action flick. But the same principles of tension, danger and pacing apply, albeit on different scales. I was taking mental notes on things the writers might have done better; perhaps we can compare.

Three Things Ghost Protocol Got Wrong That It’s Not Hard to Get Right

1. Where’s Poochie?

Homer: One, Poochie needs to be louder, angrier, and have access to a time machine. Two, whenever Poochie’s not onscreen, all the other characters should be asking “Where’s Poochie”? Three…

Myers: Great, great. Just leave them right there on the floor on your way out.

- The Simpsons, “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show“

Tom Cruise’s character of Ethan Hunt has always been the star of the franchise. But somehow that’s never felt quite as staged as it did in this installment, where nobody can shut up about how awesome Hunt is and how tragic his circumstances are. Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) literally can’t shut up about how awesome it is to be working with Ethan Hunt. Agent Carter (Paula Patton) doesn’t have the same dialogue, but she favors Hunt with a lot of hurt stares, wondering at how he can deal with all that pain.

But it’s particularly galling with newcomer William Brandt (Jeremy Renner). Brandt is set up to be at least as interesting as Hunt: athletic, good sense of humor, driven, photographic memory. And it turns out (in a twist that the trailer reveals, so I don’t feel bad about spoiling it) that Brandt may secretly be a competent field agent as well. But after we discover the extent of Brandt’s talents, he spends the entire next scene … talking about Ethan Hunt.

How to Fix: Show, don’t tell. Ethan Hunt doesn’t do anything particularly impressive for the first twenty minutes of the movie, aside from one artfully choreographed fight scene. Demonstrate the man’s competence and make him admirable, rather than having characters stand around and admire him.

2. Make Your Villains Interesting

Who was the villain of MI4GP? A former Swiss something who was a Russian somebody who wanted to blow up the world. Why? His motives get revealed in a speech, which we watch on video, delivered to the most boring looking government body ever. He’s literally talking about nuking the planet and no one in his audience even blinks.

Compare that to MI2, where our introduction to the villain is through his wicked Tom Cruise impersonation (“that was the hardest part about having to portray you, grinning like an idiot every fifteen minutes”). Or to MI3; Philip Seymour Hoffman doesn’t look very engaged with the role, but at least he gets the best dialogue (“You can tell a lot about a person’s character by how they treat people they don’t have to treat well”). Compare that to Dr. No, or Die Hard, or Raiders of the Lost Ark, or The Dark Knight or any of the classic thrillers.

How to Fix: as I said, give your villain the best dialogue. Give him at least one scene to gloat, even if it’s a little unrealistic. Or give him some humanizing or admirable touch, even if it’s just thumbing his nose at social conventions (which we all want to do, deep down).

3. They’re Called Plot Twists, Not Plot Roundabouts

I’m going to spoil a bit of the Act 2 setpiece here, but hopefully most of you have seen the movie already. If not, you’ll still enjoy it even if you know the following.

In act 2, our heroes are stationed at the Burj Khalifa, Dubai, the tallest building in the world. They have to intercept a set of Russian nuclear launch codes before they pass from an assassin to one of the villain’s henchmen. Their plan is to send both the assassin and the henchman to the wrong rooms, with members of the team posing as each, to fake both the handoff and the payoff.

BUT, things get complicated when both the assassin and the henchman show up early. THEN, things get more complicated when Benji can’t hack the hotel’s servers, requiring Ethan to scale the outside of the hotel to break into the server room. AND THEN things get even more complicated when the mask-making machine breaks down, forcing the team to take the chance that the assassin and the henchman have never met each other. BUT THEN things get still more complicated when it turns out that the henchman is bringing a nuclear launch security expert with him, who can verify the codes onsite, preventing Hunt from handing off phony codes to the henchman. AND THEN …

All this in the space of ten minutes. Before the audience can even get a handle on what’s going on, the direction changes. The plot isn’t twisting at this point; it’s turning in a steady spiral. The result is dizziness, not breathlessness.

How to Fix: tension is a function of uncertainty and stakes. Uncertainty requires a baseline of certainty to spring off of: the audience has to think they know what’s likely before you can start changing likelihoods. Get them comfortable before you start tugging on the rug. The M:I series should be ripe for this. There’s lots of opportunity for teams to play with gadgets, monitor surveillance and form plans, developing a scenario to its natural conclusion. Then, just before the end, throw in a plot twist.

By calling out these three points, I don’t mean to imply that the writers of Mission Impossible 4: Haunted Three-Ring Binder are morons or that I’m some master auteur. I’m still learning. But part of the learning process means being an informed audience member and taking notes.

Anyone else seen MI4GP yet? What were your thoughts?

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

On Monday, I reported on my sales numbers for Too Close to Miss‘s first month: 755 copies in total. Of those 755, 583 came from Barnes & Noble.

It’s tough to find exact figures on how much bigger Amazon is than Barnes & Noble, especially in the burgeoning ebook space. The best estimates I’ve found peg Amazon’s market share at over sixty percent. That remaining forty percent is being fought over by Barnes & Noble, Sony, iTunes and other platforms as well, so it’s not as if there are close second placers. And yet in spite of that, I’ve sold three times the number of copies on B&N that I have on Amazon.

The best I can do is guess. But my guesses are as good as anyone else’s in this crazy business, so here goes:

1. The recent launching of Kindle Direct Publishing Select resulted in a flurry of volume among the top authors on Amazon. I would wager that a big chunk of Kindle title sales in December were actually loans of KDP Select titles, which count as sales for the purposes of ranking. So anyone who wasn’t in KDP might have lost some sales as a result.
   

2. B&N’s self-publishing platform, PubIt!, lets you classify a book in five categories, compared to KDP’s two. It’s possible that Too Close to Miss is ranking better in Women Sleuths than it is in Thrillers, or doing better in Mysteries > Hard-Boiled than in Suspense. I can’t tell (hey, PubIt! – good data for the next platform release!). But it makes sense that being visible in more places would result in better sales.
   

3. Related to the above, it’s possible my title reached some tipping point by being associated with some best-seller. Thriller readers and $0.99 readers tend to read compulsively, downloading and buzzing through titles at high speed. If a few people bought Too Close to Miss as well as some hot title, then my book might have started showing up on more “Readers Who Bought This Also Bought …” lists.
   

4. Sales were trucking along on B&N until the 20th, when they spiked to 89 in one day. Some popular blogger recommending it? Some private email list? It seems odd that the boost on that day would all accrue to B&N and nothing to Amazon. Then again, B&N’s PubIt! gives me sales by day if I want them; Amazon’s KDP does not (or if they do, I haven’t found out how). So I might be missing something. In any case, since that spike, B&N sales have been averaging between 20 and 30 a day.
   

Obviously, the same results might not be true for everybody. If your book is dragging its binding in the dust on B&N, you stand a chance to make more money in KDP Select. But make sure you look at the numbers before deciding. I did, and I got a very pleasant surprise.

Originally published at Periscope Depth. Please leave any comments there.

It’s been a hell of a first month, hasn’t it?¹

I don’t want this to turn into an indie writing blog focused solely on the numbers. I see a lot of those. While big sales are good, there are more important considerations, like growing the craft, developing a network of supportive readers and fellow authors, establishing benchmarks for quality, and so forth.

But: I’m new to the indie publishing process. I’m learning. And I invited all of you to learn with me. This means ripping open the numbers and letting strangers peck at them.

In the first month, I have 755 sales attributed to Too Close to Miss. This is across Amazon, Barnes & Noble and the various Smashwords platforms. It doesn’t include iTunes sales figures, which I only get to see quarterly, so for all I know I’ve sold more. But 755 is what I know I’ve done.

Some observations:

• To the best of my knowledge, 755 units is a phenomenal month for an independent, debut, no-name author. I’m very proud of it. I’d be more proud if it felt real; this is still some sort of crazy dream.
  

• Of those, 148 came in the first full week (Dec 2nd through 10th), 126 in the second week (Dec 11th through 17th), 333 in the third week (Dec 18th through 24th) (more on that odd surge tomorrow) and 169 in the final week (Dec 25th through 31st). So it seems like 100 / week is a good minimum to hope for.
  

• This was at a price of $0.99 across all platforms. Yesterday, as threatened, I raised the price to $3.99². My seat-of-the-pants guess is that multiplying the price by 4X will reduce sales volume by 4X. Of course, the royalty structure on Amazon and B&N means I’ll still be making more money, even if this is the case. And maybe demand is more inelastic than I suspect: maybe I’ll only lose half my sales. Or maybe they’ll shrink to 10 books a week. A spectrum of possibilities awaits!
  

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1. Life tip: the trick to making time last longer is to fill your days with new and exciting things. Since December had a book launch, a cycle of marketing and promotion, Christmas and New Year’s Eve in it, it feels like I’ve packed ten weeks into the last four. At this rate, I will live forever, or at least feel that way.

2. However, since iTunes takes longer to update its prices and since Amazon guarantees a price match on its ebooks, it’s still available (as of this writing) for $0.99 on both those platforms. Object lesson: plan your price changes carefully and stagger the execution.