The TV guide in our NY Times has little capsule reviews for featured films.  They’re often humorous.  I saw this one a few days ago.  It’s a common sentiment but definitely not a tautology (something always true).  For example, The Martian (movie) is much better than the book, because the director and principal actor make it so (see tomorrow’s mini-review).  Gone Girl (movie) and Gone Girl (book) are equally bad.  Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (movie) was good, but the book IS better.

It’s useful to analyze which media can tell a story better.  Because I review both books and movies, I have a clear idea on the pros and cons of each one.  That doesn’t mean I can predict whether the book is better or not, but I can often hazard an educated guess, so maybe it’s worthwhile to list some of those pros and cons for readers/moviegoers.

Movies are visual and aural.  We often choose glitz, special effects, and action over cerebral introspection and quiet settings.  We like our professional soundtracks too.  In books, the first has to be described in words and the second is, of course, absent, unless you’re “reading” an audiobook.  On the other hand, books can be introspective—we can get into a character’s head easily in a book, but not so easily in a movie.  Great actors can use body language to project some inner thoughts, but that is limited in its possibilities in comparison to a book.

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This was part of a two-part question in a discussion thread on Linked In—the two questions were this one and whether Author Guild serves self-published authors.  There are good discussions on this social media site about the book business, but I’m usually a lurker because the monitors often have obvious agendas I find annoying (many aren’t writers, of course, but PR reps and marketers, cruising for clients).  I came out of the shadows for this thread and answered the person’s two questions with no and no.

From op-eds in this blog, readers know why I say no to the Author Guild question.  They are first and foremost an org promoting traditional publishing and traditionally published authors—in other words, they feel threatened by indie writers and attack them and their favorite media, ebooks, whenever they can.  They supported the Big Five and Apple in the agency-model price-fixing lawsuit launched by the Justice Department.  They have launched repeated attacks against Amazon, recently in support of Hachette.  They’ve let old has-beens like Patterson and Preston lead the charge against ebooks and indie writers.  So enough for that question.

The other question can’t be answered because there’s a dearth of reliable stats (nothing about the Guild is reliable, of course, including the stats they pull out their you-know-whats).  The genesis of my no can be found in the fact that almost every prize you can sign up for on your own is an award in a contest that’s merely a money-making scheme for the organizers of the contest, from the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Awards to the Writer’s Digest contests.  I get invitations to submit all the time.  They immediately go into the email trash bin on my computer or physical trash bin if they come via snail-mail.

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Stereotypes can be misleading.  They’re often originally based in some truth.  NYC used to have a lot of Irish cops, for example—maybe not so much anymore.  Maybe blonds do have more fun, but with both sexes dying their hair all the colors of the rainbow, who can say that this is still true?  Oxymorons can mislead too.  Intelligent politician, ethical businessperson, fair media, and so forth can be a lot of fun, but whether they’re true isn’t often so obvious.

I guess a stereotypical oxymoron is doubly questionable.  Honest lawyer, for example, might bring to mind ambulance chasers, defenders of MLB drug users, and sleazy legal departments at polluting corporations, but undoubtedly malign many lawyers out there who strive to make people’s encounters with the law as painless as possible, often taking cases pro bono because either the persons can’t pay up front or they’re overwhelmed by life’s tragedies.

An author has to be careful with both.  Both can be used, especially in dialog.  People often use stereotypes in ordinary speech; they often use oxymorons without realizing it too.  One can spice up speech that way by using them.  One can have one character correct their use by another character.  But an author has to be careful.  If s/he wants to show a character’s a bigot, have him use a bigoted stereotype, but a misuse can spell disaster.

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Design your campaign to your book.  Determine the audience for your book.  Use social media.  Give away freebies.  Start a book blog.  Accumulate hundreds of reviews.  Turn your website into a sales engine.  These are platitudes book PR reps and marketers throw at authors everyday.  And not just at indie authors.  Traditionally published authors who aren’t the prize stallions in traditional publishing’s stables—in other words, authors without the brand names (and formulaic output) of Baldacci, Child, Deaver, Grafton, Higgins-Clark, King, Koontz, and so forth—often have to create their own PR and marketing campaigns, while traditional publishing spams readers with full-page ads and TV promos for the afore-mentioned cash cows (yeah, I know, stallions and cash cows make for an amusing mixed metaphor—I just need the cowboys to have a Chisholm Trail).

Book PR reps and marketers give a lot of sophistic advice that’s often worthless, although they make promises like “Do it my way, and your book will make you rich.”  DIY and how-to books, ditto.  So-called marketing gurus running discussions on LinkedIn and elsewhere, ditto.  Always the SOS, and to be nice, let’s say that means “Same Old Sophisms” (I know—I’ve reviewed a few of these books and read the gurus “sage advice” on LinkedIn and elsewhere, and I’ve concluded that Sturgeon’s Law applies well here).  Most of these people don’t care what they say as long as what the platitudes they spew sound good enough to attract unsuspecting authors into forking over lots of money.  The X-files advice rings true here: trust no one!

Not all PR reps and marketers are jerks, but Sturgeon’s Law does apply to most and their advice.  You can gamble big and you can gamble small (they prefer big, of course), but beware the guru who says, “X is a bestselling author and s/he did Y; if you use Y, you’ll do well too.”  Sophism or platitude is a polite name for that.  X wrote a book that unpredictable readers loved.  Ask those readers if they read X’s book because of Y, and you’ll be surprised at the answers.  As a corollary to Sturgeon’s law, I’d be surprised if 90+% didn’t buy the book because someone told them about it—friends, family, or on social media (but not ads).  Readers see most self-promotion via ads and so forth as spam; authors see it as spamming.

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What’s the optimum price for an ebook?  Depends on whether you’re a reader or a writer, of course.  For readers, the optimum isn’t $0!  You might think it is, but it isn’t.  Writers are going to stop writing if you expect them to give away their ebooks.  Sure, you might find an ebook in promo for $0, and, given the number of ebooks available at that price, you might read for a lifetime without paying for any ebooks.  But there are authors you might be missing (I’m one of them) if you’re waiting for their ebook to be $0.  And no author is going to give ALL his ebooks away for nothing.  Even indies have costs they have to cover.

Promos ($0 or reduced prices) are often only for first books in a series too, no matter the price, so, if you finish that $0 ebook and want to read the next one in the series, you’ll be paying more than $0.  Moreover, the meaning of series is changing.  I don’t condone this, but authors are writing series now that are really one big story arc—individual ebooks in such a series don’t stand alone; they’re not complete stories, and to complete them the reader has to fork up money to continue.  (Yesterday, I reviewed such a book.)  If I’m in that situation as a reader, no matter the cost of the first installment, I won’t continue, but many readers will want to do so, and they’ll pay for it.

In a stable economic system (ebook publishing might not qualify as stable, of course), there’s a tug-of-war between producers (authors, in this case) and consumers (readers, in this case).  This settles down to some stability point where the consumer is willing to pay what is needed for the producer to keep producing.  Unless that stability point is found, one side or the other is going to remain dissatisfied.

The traditional publishers’ agency model isn’t stable in that sense.  Many avid readers (my definition of avid reader is one that reads at least one book every two weeks, on the average) won’t pay traditional publishing’s ebook prices, especially when they see hardbounds and trade paperbacks at $14.99 and the corresponding ebook at $12.99, for example.  Everyone knows it costs less to produce an ebook—the price should reflect that.  Moreover, because most indie ebooks are $2.99 to $4.99, the reader will often prefer foregoing the traditionally published ebook and buy three or four indies.  In addition, those traditionally published authors are often formulaic old stallions who should be sent to the glue factory—the smart reader knows he can find new and exciting entertainment at a better price.

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You’ve probably heard me speak of it.  Like that famous intruder into the three bears’ lives, this principle describes “getting it just right.”  In writing, it means looking for balance in your prose.  Zen is looking for a metaphysical balance, but many things in our lives need balance.  In particular, even if readers don’t actually look for it, they’ll sense that something’s amiss if it’s not there.

Of course, that perception of unbalance in a novel is subjective for both reader and writer.  One reader, upon finishing my very first book, Full Medical (now in its second edition as an ebook), told me I handle dialogue very well.  That might have spurred me on to write more dialogue than anything else, but I believe in the Goldilocks Principle—a balanced approach to writing fiction is very important to me.

There are many things going on in a novel—plot, characterization, action, romance, dialogue, and narrative (description of settings, flashbacks and back story, and world-building) are some of the important elements.  Although mysteries and thrillers are closely related, the balance needed between these elements is different for each one.  Mysteries need more attention to plot and characterization.  Thrillers tend to have less characterization and more plot and action.  Sci-fi might require a lot of world-building.  Some authors get so caught up in one element that they lose sight of others.  If the plot or story gets lost, for example, it’s a disaster.

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Occasionally the NY Times finds interesting news it deems fit to print.  Any time Stephen King writes something about the writing business, I read it.  I don’t like the guy’s stuff much, but I think his book On Writing should be read by every writer, new or established—it’s his most important opus.  The Times article by King, “Can a Novelist be too Prolific?” appearing in the Sunday Review section (8/30/15), is an important addendum.  Note the Times didn’t put it into their Book Review section or Business section, places that would make more sense.  But who said the Times editors know what they’re doing.

I quote from two paragraphs toward the end of the article: “As a young man, my head was like a crowded movie theater where someone has just yelled ‘Fire!’ and everyone is scrambling for the exits at once.  I had a thousand ideas but only 10 fingers and one typewriter.  There were days—I’m not kidding about this, or exaggerating—when I thought all the clamoring voices in my mind would drive me insane.”  “My thesis here is a modest one: that prolificacy is sometimes inevitable, and that it has its place.  The accepted definition of the word—‘producing much fruit, or foliage, or many offspring’—has an optimistic ring, at least to my ear.’

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From yesterday’s reviews and previous ones, readers of this blog might have noticed that I’ve binged on a few historical mysteries and thrillers lately.  There are also a few on “Steve’s Bookshelf” too (Deaver’s Garden of Beasts, Follett’s Eye of the Needle, Boston Teran’s Gardens of Grief, and Edgardo Holzman’s Malena), a list of books I consider truly exceptional.  The later reads could be considered companions of the bio of Churchill I’m slogging through, 1000+ pages describing the PM’s war years and those that followed.  Like my character Castilblanco, I’m a history aficionado.

When I finished Schreiber’s Secret, I wondered two things.  First, I wondered if I could write something like that.  My muses (remember, they’re really banshees with tasers) were all over that.  They had challenged me to write a YA novel, so I studied examples and read all sorts of advice on how to do that and, after about two years, wrote The Secret Lab, a sci-fi mystery for young adults and adults who are young at heart.  Those muses then got on my case about writing a mystery—The Secret Lab didn’t count, so I wrote Teeter-Totter between Lust and Murder.  Now they’re after me to write historical fiction.

Second, I wondered, is it safer to write about the past than the future?  Stories set in the immediate future are a wee bit tricky.  I started The Midas Bomb just before the huge financial crash in 2008, so it seemed safe to pick 2014 as the story’s time.  That collapse occurred, of course, and we’re still feeling the aftermath, so now I’ll just have to say that the entire “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” takes place on an alternate timeline.  That’s OK because there’s a fictional, temporal continuum from The Midas Bomb all the way to Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! and beyond.

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[This series started last week.  If you haven’t already done so, you might want to read Part One.]

Have I convinced you book reading America is in trouble?  There’s another chapter in this story.  No, it doesn’t have anything to do with traditional publishers and their writers trying to kill indies.  For the most part, readers can ignore that problem (unless they’re also authors).  Moreover, I’ve dealt with that enough in this blog as have many other people (Joe Konrath, in particular).

No, in this second part, I claim what few avid readers are left are spoiled.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Authors and publishers should spoil their readers (something traditional publishing fails miserably at).  Authors produce the raw product—think of bananas—and readers eat it up.  We’d have no market for the raw product if they didn’t do that.  (Traditional publishing adds a new wrinkle.  Like a certain banana company responsible for even the overthrow of governments, traditional publishing represents the middle people who exploit their workers, the writers, and exploit their consumers, the reading public.)

I want to spoil my readers with entertaining, meaningful stories, though.  Genre fiction writers are like the bards of old, providing entertaining stories at reasonable cost (indie writers, at least).  Maybe all writers fit into that role.  We should value every reader we have.  A satisfied reader will come back to buy my bananas.  A satisfied reader will tell other readers I sell good bananas.  Such a reader won’t like everything in my books (I don’t even like everything in my books, but I need to release my bananas or they’ll spoil).  Such a reader should complain to me about what s/he doesn’t like—I listen.  I might change my way of growing bananas.  But maybe not.

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I made some comments over on Scott Dyson’s blog.  (Scott’s post is the genesis for these ideas.)  I’d like to amplify on them here and next week.  To summarize bluntly: reading in America is in trouble.  Maybe in the rest of the world too, but it’s clear that we’re in trouble here.  Let’s consider some numbers.

I’ve upped my presence on Goodreads lately.  Forget Facebook; Goodreads is where the readers are.  Authors too, but they’re second-class citizens for the GR team, and justifiably so.  My goal is to entertain readers.  To the extent that authors are also readers, I can entertain them too, but my goal is to reach out to readers.  (Warning to authors: All those writing groups you belong to won’t help you find readers.)

I can’t help but notice the numbers on Goodreads.  Three of the groups I belong too are huge!  Goodreads Authors/Readers has 21,534 members last I checked (why isn’t it Readers/Authors?); the Mystery, Crime, and Thriller Group has 12, 682; and the Sci-fi and Fantasy Book Club has 14,187.  Given that there’s probably some overlap (me, for example), those numbers represent a PR and marketing teams’ dream.  (Warning to them: PR and marketing efforts are frowned upon in GR and are generally relegated to only certain sections of a group’s list of discussions…and justifiably so.)

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