Item: Don’t judge a book by its cover.  Have you seen the proposal for the cover to Harper Lee’s “new book”?  It’s terrible.  I reviewed Harlan Coben’s book The Stranger and noticed that his book’s cover is poor quality too.  Is traditional publishing cutting costs by not paying for a good cover?  My sample isn’t very large, of course.  As a reader and reviewer, I’ve never judged a book by its cover.  My judgement of a cover can only be the subjective opinion of someone who knows little about graphic art (readers of The Collector probably know that from the poem at the beginning).  After a lifetime of math and science tomes, my threshold is pretty low, in fact.  I’ve pushed to improve my covers, though, and have hired a very good graphic artist to make them, because some readers and reviewers do judge a book by its cover.  An attractive thumbnail image on Amazon can’t hurt, right?  But it’s what’s in the book that counts.

Item: FaceBook woes.  I think I’ve already announced this, but I no longer am active on FaceBook.  They’ve made it impossible to share these blog posts.  I’ll leave my author’s page up and keep the account open, but if you really want to discuss anything with me or learn about what I’m doing, this newsletter and this website’s contact page is the best place for you.  (I still share these posts via RSS on Amazon, Goodreads, and LinkedIn, and with Google+, so users of those sites will still have their memories tweaked from time to time.)

Item: Fantastic Encores!  As I announced earlier, this is a collection of short stories about what’s happened in the lives of some of my characters after the events of the novel; it will be released soon.  They’re entertaining stories, although they represent a blatant promotion of those same novels, in a sense.  They also provide you with an inexpensive introduction to the sci-fi part of my writing because they’ll be perpetually on sale at $0.99.  Pop Two Antacids and Have Some Java does the same for the C & C end (for those not in the know, that’s Chen and Castilblanco, my two NYPD homicide detectives).  I’ve already reduced that price to $0.99.

Item: Other price reductions.  ASAP, I’ll reduce all my prices to $2.99 for “standard novel length” ebooks and $3.99 for “epic sci-fi-length” ebooks, if they aren’t already there, and KDP Select doesn’t get in the way (I never remember what their 90-day rule actually requires).  I’m working on second editions for The Midas Bomb (C & C #1) and Survivors of the Chaos (#1 in the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy”); the first will be priced at $2.99 and the second at $3.99, following the above convention.

All future ebooks will follow this convention until further notice.  Think about it: you can buy four (4!) C & C novels (there are now four after The Midas Bomb) for about the price of one traditionally published James Patterson novel.  (Where does the money go when you buy a Patterson book?  You guessed it—the bloated bureaucracy of the Big Five!  I pass on my DIY production savings to you, my reader.  Buying Big Five ebooks just continues the life of the dinosaurs.)

Item:  Winning a small part of the lottery.  Why am I changing my prices?  Readers are lucky today…they have many good books to read.  Writers, not so much.  There are fewer readers to read their books, many genres are highly competitive, it’s harder to be discovered, and many extraneous agents conspire against the writer who wants to be “discovered” (my expose of Joe Konrath’s little plan to control library patrons is a case in point—see Monday’s blog post).  Indie and midlist writers’ fates are often determined by the internet gods—we can’t afford those swanky TV commercials and full-page ads the Big Five lavish on their old warhorses (Lord knows how really effective they are, of course—but that we can’t afford them is a fact).

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Item: Two new ebooks worth checking out.  Recently I reviewed Ellie O’Neill’s Reluctantly Charmed on Bookpleasures (my shortened review of the same ebook is on Amazon).  This is from Simon and Schuster’s Touchstone imprint; it’s a delightful mystery, fantasy, and romance that was released on St. Paddy’s day.  For all lovers of Irish folklore, to be sure.  Also, sometime ago I reviewed Jay Kinney’s The Masonic Myth from Harper Collins (yeah, I read non-fiction too).  I’ve recently had opportunity to put some of that knowledge about Free Masonry to use (I also have some personal experience with it) because I’m now reviewing Giacometti and Ravene’s Shadow Ritual, a translation from the French, for Le French Book.  It’s a thriller involving old Nazis and, you guessed it, Free Masons.  Look for that review on Bookpleasures—coming soon!

Item: Speaking of book reviews.  I’m always surprised that authors don’t do more reviewing.  While I’ve seen one- or two-line endorsements by big-time authors (they’re usually a negative for me, by the way—I’ve never read or reviewed a book because Lee Child or Douglas Preston endorses it), I have this perception that authors are reluctant to lower themselves to the level of readers and give something back to the community of readers and writers by reviewing other authors’ books.  There was a time Amazon frowned on this, and maybe still does—an absurd policy, to say the least.

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Don’t let any black cats cross your path today…adopt one from a shelter (unless you’re allergic, of course).  Watch for ladders too….

[Note: My apologies to my Facebook friends.  The geniuses running that social media site have made it impossible to share these posts.  I suggest you cancel your accounts and focus on Google+.  You can all follow me there, but your best bet is to RSS this blog.  I do so on Amazon, Goodreads, and LinkedIn…but you can always put this website in your “favorites list.”  Have a great weekend!  Spring is almost here….]

Item. Harper Lee’s “new book”.  It was only a matter of time.  Enough people have raised hell about whether Ms. Lee is competent enough to decide on the release of the sequel to Mockingbird that a court is stepping in to attend to a complaint to that effect.  Money, money, money; greed, greed, greed.  She seemed pretty spry and all there to me.  At her age I expect to be where she’s at too!  If she says she wants to release the book, more power to her.  We know the motivation of the publisher and the lawyer(s) who manage her estate.  What’s the motivation of the naysayers?  Dunno.  Maybe it’s just an expression of a sentiment I have: Mockingbird was almost a perfect book (sounds a wee bit old-fashioned now, but not as much as Jane Austen), so why add a sequel that Ms. Lee never pushed to publish…until now?  That said, it’s her book.  She can damn well do what she wants with it!

Item. Author Scott Dyson.  His recent post on labels in fiction is interesting.  Visit Scott’s website and blog.  Scott has published several short story collections and has one in the anthology Quantum Zoo (not to be confused with my Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape).  Check him out.

Item. My bookshelf.  Speaking of up and coming authors, have you checked out “Steve’s Bookshelf”?  I list some old hound dogs in both fiction and non-fiction (yeah, I read that too) and also some stealth reads, books by authors who haven’t received the attention they deserve (I might be in that category too—one reviewer said as much—but I already pound my chest enough on these website pages).  Note that the old hound dogs’ book might not be their most popular titles (I only list Deaver’s Garden of Beasts and Preston and Child’s The Relic, for example), but the books listed are their best in my opinion.

Item.  Women in my fiction.  Hot-off-the-press Silicon Slummin’…and Just Getting’ By is the second Mary Jo Melendez mystery; Muddlin’ Through is the first.  Starting with Caitlin Murphy, the FBI agent and protagonist in Soldiers of God, continuing with DHS agent Ashley Scott in The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan (she’s also a minor character in the novels in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series”), and now with ex-USN Master-at-Arms Mary Jo, I have a tradition of celebrating smart, intelligent women in my fiction (we shouldn’t forget Dao-Ming Chen and many others either)—women who strive to make their mark in a male-dominated world (thankfully it’s becoming less so).

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[I apologize to my friends on Facebook, where I usually share these posts.  Facebook has made it impossible to share.  You can follow me on Google+.  I recommend cancelling your Facebook accounts and creating Google+ accounts, if you haven’t already.]

Item.  Mary Jo is back!  In case you haven’t noticed, we (Carrick Publishing and I) just released Silicon Slummin’…and Just Gettin’ By, the sequel to Muddlin’ Through.  Ex-USN Master-at-Arms Mary Jo Melendez is a stay-at-home gal in this one, but her new stomping grounds become the Silicon Valley.  She takes a job as security director for a computer games firm.  She’s just settlin’ in when she discovers she has a stalker.  Russian and U.S. agents are also pursuing her.  She employs a PI to protect her, and becomes romantically involved with the handsome Italian.  She befriends an autistic boy who also helps in thwarting her pursuers.  As in Mary Jo #1, the adventure and action are non-stop.  Enjoy!

Item.  The two sign-offs.  Readers have probably noticed the two sign-offs I use at the end of my blog posts.  I’ll let you in on a secret: they’re not original!  Instead, they’re a bow to two special icons.  “And so it goes…” honors the iconic Kurt Vonnegut.  His curmudgeonly cynicism in A Man Without a Country has always been my inspiration for the writing style you see in my op-ed posts on current events and news events.  “In elibris libertas,” used for posts about the writing business, book reviews, and author interviews, is a nod to public libraries everywhere (the version without the “e” is on a public library building in LA, if I remember correctly); the “e” was added after I completed my transition to ebooks with the second edition of Soldiers of God.  You can now enjoy my prose in ebook format—quality entertainment at a reasonable price.  Even the Infinity ebooks are less expensive than those from traditional publishers.  Now you’re in the know.

Item.  Cameos.  I guess there’s not much interest for this, but I’ll put it out there once again.  The first five readers who email me that they want to participate will receive a cameo appearance in More Than Human: The Mensa Contagion and a free copy of the ebook when it’s released.  Unlike the Apple watch, there are no lines, no need to bring your tents to wait for the doors to open, and it doesn’t cost anything—well, a wee bit of your time, needed to send me an email (use my contact page).  For those who only want to be characters in certain genres, More than Human is hard, traditional sci-fi, but a wee bit sexy and humorous to add some spice.  Teaser: you could be in the first Mars colony!  (Note: I’ll have to put a closing date on this soon so I can kick this novel out the door to my wonderful ebook prep team.)

Item.  World Enough and Crime.  I’d like to feature this anthology again, not only because I have a story in it (I won’t even say what it is), but because my esteemed publisher, Carrick Publishing, has put together a really good collection for readers of crime stories.  If you like crime tales and love short stories, this is a book you shouldn’t miss (it’s available as an ebook and pbook).  These short stories represent quality writing.  M. H. Callway, author of the short story “The Ultimate Mystery,” has been short-listed for the Derringer Award, for example.  Author Lisa de Nikolits gave the collection a good review too.  Just in time maybe to lounge in that hammock and soak up some sun when spring comes?  (Mary Jo will provide some of the same medicine, of course!)

Item.  Amazon Worlds.  Speaking of worlds!  What is it?  Should authors participate?  Should readers care?  “Dunno” is my answer to all three right now.  My knee-jerk reaction is negative.  My reason is simple: nothing good is the usual product coming out of committees.  You know the story about the IQ of a committee: its IQ is the lowest IQ of its participating members divided by the number of members.  (Congressional committees are very visible examples, but I’ve experienced the phenomenon at all levels.)  I can’t even imagine working with a co-author (the one time I suggested it, he stole my idea and used it in one of his own novels—I won’t mention names because it was my stupid mistake to trust someone).  Amazon Worlds is a more sophisticated form of Flash Fiction or internet soap operas, all creations done by a committee—fun for the participants I guess, but there’s all too often a dearth of quality control.

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Item: Harry Bosch from a parallel universe?  As Michael Connelly observed, the new Amazon series has made a “fair amount of changes” to his famous LAPD detective.  Why would we expect otherwise?  Hollywood always has to tinker when turning a book into a movie!  In this case, we’re talking two books, Bosch #3, The Concrete Blonde, and Bosch #8, City of Bones, for the premier of the TV series on Amazon Prime.  Bosch in the books is an ex-Vietnam tunnel rat; TV makes him re-enlist after 9/11 to become an Afghan tunnel rat too.  Bosch is played by Titus Welliver, an unfamiliar actor for me (probably a good thing—I have my own mental image of what the Bosch in my universe looks like).  Readers should stick with the books, in spite of the fact that they’re so damn expensive (probably more than what you’d pay for the series).  No movie allows you to get inside the heads of protagonists and antagonists like a good book!  Sorry, Amazon—you should just sell Michael’s books and leave well enough alone.

Item: What are people thinking?  To elaborate on the above, movies made from successful novels are always suspect.  The 007, Bourne, and Harry Potter series are three OK examples where Hollywood couldn’t begin to match the intensity and depth of the novels.  Gone Girl started with a bad book and ended up a very bad movie.  It set the tone for the screen version of Fifty Shades, a terrible series of books (no, I didn’t read either Gone Girl or was interested in any of the S&M found in Fifty Shades—the blurbs and peek-insides were quite enough to convince me to leave well enough alone, and friends’ subsequent comments only reaffirmed the wisdom of my decision).  I think the lines at the box offices formed by voyeurs waiting to buy tickets are highly amusing.  Good luck with that movie, people!  The only positive thing I can say is that the cases of Gone Girl and Fifty Shades have confirmed my belief that achieving writing success, if measured by book sales and/or number of readers, is a complete lottery; a fickle reading public can make any author, no matter how bad, a winner!

Item: The Facebook-Nazis strike again!  Over the years I’ve used up a lot of adrenalin being in a rage about the arbitrary shenanigans FB programmers pull.  Beware geeks bearing gifts!  They’re continuously adding features I don’t give a damn about, and most of them just cause me acid reflux.  The egregious trick perpetrated recently on an unsuspecting public is a “security test” for people wanting to share articles and pictures to Facebook, either to their timelines and/or fan pages (my author page, in this case)—both applied to me.  I liked to share my blog posts to Facebook and Google+ (Goodreads and LinkedIn are smart—I can just RSS to those sites—but no, FB’s programmers, in their infinite stupidity, don’t allow that).

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[Aren’t you the lucky one?  This newsletter, after eighty editions, still isn’t cluttering up your email box.  It never will.  In particular, I’ll never use it to collect readers’ email addresses, so, if you feel guilty about reading my books, you’ll still be able to do so in anonymity.  It’s a feature most Friday’s right here at this blog, where I regularly talk about reading and writing…and books, others and my own.]

Item: Sequel? Prequel? So, they found Harper Lee’s lost MS, Go Set a Watchman, attached to an old copy of her famous novel, and now Harper Collins wants to make millions off it?  Beyond the dollars of profit involved, I can’t say whether publishing the book will be a valuable contribution to the reading world because I haven’t read the MS, but it might be pretty good if it comes anywhere close to To Kill a Mockingbird.  Word is out that maybe Ms. Lee never wanted this to be published because she didn’t think anything could hit the big time as well as Mockingbird.  With lawyers and traditional publishers involved and her health status, I’m suspicious that greed is the only driving factor here, and it doesn’t reside in Ms. Harper.

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Item: Who’s N. Scott Momaday?  Some of my readers might have noted his quote running across the top of this website and wondered.  More energetic ones might have googled him to find that he’s of Kiowa descent (my understanding: they roamed in the same general geographic area as the Lakota, or Sioux) and the winner of the 1969 Pulitzer of House Made of Dawn.  Very observant ones who also receive the Smithsonian magazine will remember him as the author of the article “The Year that the Stars Fell” (that superb January issue also contains the following interesting articles “The Lady Vanishes,” about Amelia Earhart; “PTSD: The Civil War’s Hidden Legacy”; “Darwin’s Forgotten World,” about where his theory took shape—hint: it’s not the Galapagos; and “Descent of Man,” a poem about evolution in NYC).

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Item: ny times attacking Amazon.  I’ve made a New Year’s resolution to start writing “ny times” without caps, because they’re continually showing their small-mindedness.  I’ve already stopped reading their Sunday Book Review—their bestseller lists are completely meaningless and should be ignored for multiple reasons.  When Hachette caved to Amazon, the newspaper lost a cause they’d been hammering, so now they’ve come out against Amazon by declaring that they aren’t needed by online buyers in a recent article.

All I can say is, “Huh?”  Online retailers are never “needed”—they’re simply a convenience for many shoppers.  I made many purchases from Amazon this Christmas because they offered the same products at lower prices.  When that doesn’t happen, I go to another website…or (horrors!) to a store.  There are certain items I don’t even like to buy online—computers, TVs, cars, appliances, and so forth, even shoes (I need to try them on).

While I don’t “need” Amazon in general for online buying, I often use it for that.  But, most of all, as an author—and this is true for ANY author—I can’t ignore Amazon.  No author should.  They’re still the best place to sell my books.  Smashwords and its associated retailers are a distant second—I have to focus on my ebooks that are available in both places.  Maybe that’s just me (I don’t sell many books in total, so my stats might be biased).

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[Note from Steve: This is my “official newsletter” that appears most Fridays.  It often contains acerbic comments about reading, writing, and the writing business, as well as some self-promotion—why not?  As always, read at your own risk…and comment when you feel like it.]

Item: Those clever devils!  In my last newsletter, I mentioned Michael Connelly’s book The Burning Room (a Harry Bosch novel).  I confirmed I paid $3.99 for it, although at the time of the newsletter it was up to $4.99.  It’s back to $3.99 (12/9/14).  Lee Child’s Personal (a Jack Reacher novel) is $9.99 (just squeezing under my $10 limit), but I bought it for $3.25 (also confirmed).  Either the Big Five are playing retail pricing games, or Amazon’s taking their well-deserved victory lap and jockeying prices up and down to drive the Big Five nuts—probably both.  My conclusion: my new limit is $5.  When I see a big name author’s ebook between $2.99 and $4.99, I’ll probably buy it.  That way I won’t feel swindled when I don’t like the book (Child’s) and will be pleased when I do (Connelly’s).

Item: Do the Brits really know English?  Lee Child is a Brit (born in Coventry), but sometimes he seems linguistically challenged (any writer is at times, of course).  In Personal (see above), he has Reacher make the self-appraisal that he speaks (and presumably writes) as a man of the world, an international crime fighter with no discernible accent, whereas his platonic partner, Casey Nice (Child channeling Ian Fleming with the antithesis of Pussy Galore?), is hobbled in London with her Midwestern American accent.  I found that whole charade hilarious—probably not Child’s intention.  Remember that Jack Reacher is the character who suffers from chronic diarrhea of conjunctions, or unfamiliarity with commas, depending on your point of view, because “and” is likely to appear so many times in his sentences.  So here’s my question: Is Child a typical Brit?  Do they really have trouble with the language?  Or, do they just stumble when trying to sound like Yanks?

Item.  French hypocrisy?  Speaking of language difficulties, ever been to Paris and try to speak French to Parisians?  I once asked a bus driver for the time, and he pointed angrily to a clock tower we were passing, not wanting to respond like a normal, civilized person (my French, at the time, was a whole lot better than Bush’s Spanish, enough to make a report in a police station to indifferent and lazy gendarmes who didn’t give a rat’s ass that I’d been mugged).  It’s better outside Paris, of course, but Parisians make New Yorkers seem like the most polite people on the planet.  With their famous l’Academie, they try to preserve the purity of the language too, even though “le weekend” and other Frenchified anglo-saxon words make that an impossible task.   I just wish they’d try to speak and write English correctly as much as they insist that we try to speak and write French correctly.

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Item: Hachette v. Amazon fallout?  Not much seen, actually.  I bought a copy of Michael Connelly’s The Burning Room, though.  This ebook cost me $3.99, I think, but it’s now listed at $4.99.  In either case, that’s in the “sweet spot” between $2.99 and $4.99, the latter price not bad for a new book of this length.  So…maybe the fallout will be subtle, with Hachette and other Big Five publishers realizing that they must sell ebooks at reasonable prices in order to compete—no one wants to pay almost the hardbound price for an ebook these days.  And, to benefit from Amazon’s domination of the ebook market, the Big Five have to change their business models in order to survive too.  Changes in author royalites also coming?

Item: Deaver’s experiments continue.  Prolific author Jeffery Deaver, like James Patterson, has more money than God, so he can afford to experiment with us mere mortals.  First, he writes a garbage-dominated rendering of a 007 adventure (literally and figuratively).  His next experiment was writing a book in reverse; I stopped after the first two (last two?) chapters, disgusted with the whole idea.  Now he’s come out with The Starling Project, a book that’s not a book, at least traditionally speaking, because it’s only available as an audio book (most audibles have a book version).  With voices from Alfred Molina and friends (and maybe sound effects?), is this the future?  If so, indies will be priced out of the competition.

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