[Note from Steve: A long newsletter today.  I thank you for your patience.  Maybe you’ll want to read only a few sections each day today and over the weekend, especially if you’re a Papa or you’re a family taking Papa out to some special event.]

#280: Free ebook…for all reading fathers and summer readers everywhere!  Angels Need Not Apply, where Detectives Chen and Castilblanco play dangerous games with al Qaeda terrorists, a Mexican cartel, and a neo-Nazi militia, will be available as a free download from Amazon, June 14 through 18—that is, starting today!  Don’t miss out on some free, exciting, and entertaining summer reading.  This is the second book in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series.”  If you liked The Midas Bomb and/or Teeter-Totter between Lust and Murder, you’ll enjoy this one.  And, if you haven’t read any of my books, what a nice opportunity to try one of them.

#281: Who are the avid readers?  I hold all readers in esteem because I believe that reading is a truly uplifting, intellectual, and entertaining pursuit.  Last week, though, I signaled out readers overseas.  If one believes the stats, readers across the pond are more evenly divided in gender than here in the States.  At the risk of sounding like a cheerleader for machismo, let me say: C’mon, guys.  Reading is better than TV or golf any day.

The bifurcation between genders among readers seems to occur in the U.S. somewhere between middle school and high school and has become so statistically significant that various genres are specifically targeted to female readers.  Another consequence is that genres often dominated by male readers are seeing many books with protagonists that are women.  Society has changed enough that men accept this and some men—myself included—really enjoy a well-written story where the lead character is a strong and intelligent woman.

Should we design our books to respond to these statistics?  No!  To me the story is everything.  Because I admire strong and intelligent women, I’m just as likely to have a female lead as a male lead, but I never, never start out writing with that in mind as the overall purpose.  To me the plot defines the choice of characters, which often means that the usual norms of society define how I populate my novels.  I can list many important female characters from my books—both protagonists and antagonists—and I try to make their roles as natural and multi-dimensionally complicated as the roles of the males.  That’s human society.

That said, I hope men, women, and yes, even older children, will find my books interesting.  I don’t write for any one sector of society—I write for them all.  That I’ve worked hard in capturing many sectors is more a reflection of my desire to make my fiction seem real.  I do not do simple and I don’t do stereotypes.  I do complex plots and complex characters.  That’s life.

#282: BooksNJ.  I wish I’d known about this earlier.  Oh well, maybe I’ll participate more fully next year.  It took place last Sunday, June 9, in Paramus, NJ.  The weather was great.  It’s more of a schmooze-fest book fair, where authors can meet and greet readers and readers can grill authors about their books and the writing business.  It’s a smaller version than some other conferences, but I was still lost in the crowds.  It doesn’t help to be an introverted author.

I still managed to jump in at the discussion session “Walking the Line between Thriller and Horror.”  Horror writers Nick Kisella, A. J. Colucci, and E. F. Watkins were featured.  Ms. Colucci writes sci-fi/thriller/horror, so some of her opinions mirrored mine (I walk the line between sci-fi and thriller).  I had a debate with the session leader about whether Phillip K. Dick was a sci-fi writer or a sci-fi thriller writer—probably a waste of time, but my point was that Hollywood discovered Dick and made many of his stories into thriller movies.  Or, sci-fi thrillers?  I’m not into the blood and guts of what passes for modern horror stories, though.  But none of these writers focused on that either.  A lot of cross-genre discussion ruled the day.

Avery Corman was the most interesting author I heard.  This old curmudgeon, who wrote Kramer vs. Kramer, reminisced and reflected on today’s publishing world in the discussion session “48 Years and Still Selling: Making it Work in the Changing World of Publishing.”  He spouted platitudes like it was easier back in the day (maybe), that self-publishing wasn’t worth it (maybe), and having a book turned into a movie changed his life (most certainly), but the title referred to the fact that his old books have been resurrected as ebooks and are selling well.  If that’s not a plug for writing ebooks, I don’t know what is.  And, if you self-publish your ebooks, they can live forever.

Interesting story: Mr. Corman found his agent essentially by accident.  We’d probably call it having the right connections today.  This seems to be a common denominator for many successfully published authors.  I don’t begrudge them this.  You use the cards you’re dealt and if one of these happens to point toward a hotshot agent, all the better.  Maybe that’s why he thought it was easier back in the day?  He was quite a character and I enjoyed his presentation, but his relevance for authors struggling in today’s publishing world is certainly questionable.  (Of course, almost any established author working with the Big Five is largely irrelevant to our problems.  They’re like Papa Bush wondering about the scanners in the supermarkets.)

I counted about 40 discussion sections—something for everyone, readers and writers alike, including a poetry slam.  The three keynote addresses had to compete with schedule hitches and malfunctioning microphones.  I only saw the first two and they were a waste of time (the last might have been better, but I was ready for the margaritas by then).  In general, there were too many authors reading excerpts from their books.  Boring, boring—and good warning for authors never to produce an audio book where they do their own reading!  Of course, authors are generally boring people and never as entertaining as their books—that’s a fact of nature.

It looked like everyone was having fun, though.  The great weather helped—a good day was sandwiched in between stretches of rain here in the tri-state area.  The conference was a mixed bag, though.  What’s your opinion on book fairs?

#283: How can you help indie authors?  You might not want to help, of course, and that’s your prerogative.  However, even if I weren’t an indie writer and just an avid reader, in recent years I would still have migrated to reading indie books because of the unfair prices the big publishers charge for books by their top authors.  I just won’t pay more than $10 for a book anymore—I don’t consider publishers a worthwhile charity.  Indie books, in general, are good bargains.

That migration brings up the question of what I or any other avid reader can do to help deserving indie authors.  I heard this question a lot at BooksNJ (see above).  My best advice: be a discriminating reader who speaks up.  Indie books are inexpensive (often free) but there are millions of them.  Someone has to sift the wheat from the chaff.

Before you choose a book, look at the reviews.  Even Amazon reviews give some indication about whether you will like the book and you can usually peek inside the book for excerpts.  Beware of bogus reviews, though.  There are many flippant, antagonistic, or irrelevant reviews on and off Amazon—you have to learn to detect the good reviews (good in the sense that the reviewer did a responsible job) and ignore the bad reviews (bad in the sense that the reviewer seems to have some sort of agenda).

After you’ve read the book, write a short review of it, even if it was a freebie.  That’s the number one thing you can do to help indie authors and other readers.  But don’t stop there.  Tell your family and friends that you read this indie book and it was…whatever.  You can maybe start a snowball effect that lifts that indie book above the average sea level of indie books out there, maybe even creating a tsunami.  Go to the author’s page (a link usually appears with his list of books on Amazon) and “like” the author (this is independent of Facebook “likes”).  The “like” takes seconds; the review of the book maybe a few minutes.  Visit the author’s fan page on Facebook and “like” that too.  If the indie author has a website, use his contact page to tell him you liked the book and why, or vice versa.  Authors love feedback.

All of this is feel-good stuff for the indie author and some of it can determine whether his or her book is successful.  Some recommended indie books?  Mine, of course, but that’s a given.  Check out my webpage “Steve’s Bookshelf” where the last section, “Stealth Reads,” lists some great indie books and indie authors (William Brown, Donna Carrick, Fett & Langford, Edgardo Holzman, P. D. LaFleur, and Carolyn J. Rose represent the cream of the crop, at least as far as books I’ve reviewed).  Some of the other books listed there are also by indie authors.  Take a gander at some of the websites that feature indie books—Author Marketing Club, Indies Unlimited, and New Book Journal, for example.  You can also try to wade through recommendations on Goodreads and Shelfari.

#284: Latin American reading.  Yesterday’s post where I translated a note by Vargas Llosa reminded me to tell all who read this newsletter that there are great authors all around the world.  Sure, you might miss some essence because of translators’ choices, but there are reasons Nobel prizes for literature are truly international—there’s a lot of good reading to be had from non-English authors.  We do a pretty good job with our fellow English speakers (although we can argue that Americans don’t do enough reading).  As part of my study of mystery writers, I really learned to appreciate Ian Rankin, for example, even though that Scottish vocab threw me at first (that’s part of the fun, of course).  Yet we tend to be more provincial with non-English authors.  Of course, nowadays we have plenty of books to read.  This is just a reminder that writing is an artistic endeavor, no matter what language the author writes in.

#285: Go out and socialize.  This is standard advice for indie writers and any writer without a heavy advertising package from a Big Six publisher (how much do those TV trailers and full-page NY Times ads cost anyway?).  Traditionally, this was done via book signings and book tours, where the author traveled around the country schmoozing with the reading crowds.  Avery Corman (see above) described this well.  Again, this cost money.  One big-name author, an ex-lawyer (can you guess who?), was rich enough to pay for his own book tour, and later became quite successful.  Others had theirs financed only after they became big names.

More and more, though, “go out and socialize” means social networking.  This is cheaper on the budget but it’s time-consuming—time spent here is time you lose for your writing.  I’m not convinced that any effort a writer spends social networking, via the internet or otherwise, increases book sales.  I value online friends I’ve met this way, even those who don’t share my generally progressive liberal agenda (my stand on the Snowden crisis will get me onto Fox News, according to some).  I value information and writing lessons learned lurking and occasionally commenting on other writers’ blog posts.

But there’s the rub.  I tend to socialize with other writers.  They say an active blog is an alternative—people who visit your blog and like your posts will buy your books.  I’m not convinced.  Certainly, now that Facebook is introducing hash tags (#) and becoming more commercial, I’m losing interest there.  But I’ll stick it out for my FB friends.  LinkedIn is another conundrum.  My number of connections is increasing every week, but I’m just a writer—I can offer these people nothing but my books!  And while many read my blog posts (thank you, thank you), few comment and not many blog readers are book readers—at least that’s one interpretation of my sales vs. blog statistics studies.

No, I think reaching readers is still done the old-fashioned way: you buy a book, like it, and tell a friend (or lend him the book).  We’re in a situation where the only thing that works is the snowball effect, however it’s launched.  Maybe, because of global warming, the snowball never takes off.  But don’t worry!  I’m not going to stop writing anytime soon.

In libris libertas….

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