It’s Nook for Deadbook this week

Just spent my Sunday morning (heathen that I am!) uploading Deadbook to Nook. Feels good to have it out on the two major ebook vendors at last. 

Mind you, I was one of those who vowed that when they came for my beloved books, they’d better be prepared to pry them out of my cold, lifeless fingers, and guess what? I still feel that way. All this talk of ebooks “taking over”, as though there were a war on between ebooks and the kind of books Grandma used to read, is a lot of hogwash. Kindle, Nook, their apps on iPad, are wonderful–addictive, really–for a certain kind of book. Namely, the kind of popular book, fiction or non-fiction, that appears on the bestseller lists. The kind of book you read at the beach, on the bus, in the doctor’s office, under the covers at night while your reading lamp burns brightly into the wee hours because you just have to see what happens in the next chapter.

But a how-to manual that you need to keep open, flipping back and forth through it while you work on something? Art books? Children’s picture books? Books containing graphs, diagrams, charts? Nah. Not to mention the joy of owning a book that is beautifully typeset, beautifully bound, beautiful to hold in one’s hands while breathing in that wordy, papery book-smell, so full of promise. But I tell you, the joy of waking up, restless and wide eyed at 2:00 am, with the knowledge that, hey: you can buy a book! Thousands to choose from, a whole e-bookstore just waiting to give you instant gratification! And you can take all of them, your entire booty, with you anywhere in your slim, handy dandy little plastic tablet! They’d have to pry it out of my cold, lifeless fingers.

Deadbook is finally out on Kindle. And we are finally moved into the new house. As Martin Scorsese said with such emphasis in that TV commercial a few years back, eyebrows a-quiver, “finally, finally”. What a week, with everything coming together at once. But isn’t that the way of the world? Weeks pass with nothing doing, and then WHAM, all hell breaks loose.

Now looms the befuddling task of (as they call it these days) “discoverability”. How is anyone to read Deadbook if no one knows it’s there? Sure, there’s the well-trodden recommended path of blogs, Tweets, Facebook posts and so forth, “Here I am, here’s my book, read it read it read it”.  But I’m thinking of something else. Other than the Net, where does nearly everyone get their information and entertainment these days, what medium reaches the greatest number of people as they lounge, open and receptive, in their recliners? Television!

Insane as it may sound, I’m thinking of producing a low-budget TV commercial. I don’t know, could be fun. Here’s one thing it will absolutely NOT feature: my face. No, I’m thinking more of getting a hot pair of young locals to play the parts of Rye and Amanda, interacting romantically with each other as the otherworldly aura emanating from the Blue Room creeps toward them. Got any creative input, anyone? Martin Scorsese I ain’t, but I’m all ears.

Coming Soon, to a Kindle Near You

Okay, so after major surgery last fall, the holiday season, a mountain of cattle work, and the all-consuming task of finishing up the extensive remodel on the (formerly bank-owned, trashed) house on 20 acres, I am back with a new direction. This direction is the one I should have taken last February upon returning from the San Francisco Writer’s Conference, but alas, I didn’t follow my gut instinct and –traditionalist that I am –  instead decided to try my hand at going the traditional route:  agent/publisher/”dead-tree book”, as a friend calls it. Which is not to say that this last year’s journey hasn’t been educational and entertaining. I’ve corresponded with some wonderful New York agents and publishers, learned a lot about the publishing business,  and in a handful of cases, received touchingly detailed, extensive personal comments, compliments, and critiques. When you detect a common thread in what these knowledgeable people are telling you, it starts to ring true. The reorganization and beefing up of Deadbook that resulted is in large part thanks to them, savvy agents who had no earthly cause to take their valuable time to help me, other than the fact that they loved the book and believed in it.

Well why then, you ask, if they loved it so much, didn’t they take it on? Therein lies the issue, the tumultuous state of confusion in which the publishing industry currently finds itself due to two things: the damaging left jab years ago from big box booksellers like Barnes and Noble who were powerful enough to call the shots, followed by the blasting right cross from the ebook revolution that put publishers and agents on the ropes, stars in their eyes and little birdies tweeting around their heads. But I don’t want to dwell on their plight, fascinating though it is. The bottom line is this: if you ain’t a best-selling author already, you ain’t getting published. And the penultimate bottom line is this: I’m doing what I should have done a year ago.

That’s right, in about three weeks, Deadbook will be out on Kindle and Nook. Dig it!

Coming Soon!

 

 

Editorial Errors in Best Sellers

I’ve tried to ignore this for some time now. I mean, I’m rabid, I know – some would say anal – about errors in books. Honestly, though, can I help it if I have an eye that just naturally gloms onto glaring gaffs? The amazing thing is that the errors appear even in books on the untouchable New York Times bestseller list, although it’s possible the errors only appear in the digital ebook version. I wouldn’t know,  since I can’t remember the last time I bought an actual book made out of paper, having long ago (albeit reluctantly, at first) become a Kindle convert. But the errors are alarming, so much so in fact that they keep me up at night long after the page turning or who-done-it aspect of the thing has worn thin. Last week I caught one in The Art of Fielding and was going to mention it, but forget it, that one pales in contrast to this latest, in a book called Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber, published by W.W. Norton Company, currently at sales rank number 1155 in the Kindle Store. (Trust me, out of 1,037,459 titles, that’s huge.)

Now, the main character is a baker. She runs a commercial bakery out of her home kitchen – something I am sure the health department would be interested in – but I’ll save that for another day. Maybe the regulations are different in Florida, what do I know. The real issue for today is this: for the entire first chapter, the main character has been baking a special type of labor-intensive, expensive, cookie for her teenage runaway daughter, whom she is meeting in a few hours after not having seen her for a very long time. The narrative goes on ad infinitum about the baking, the ingredients, her inner turmoil about the cookies, her husband’s inner turmoil about the cookies. Many lines of description about how she places them carefully in a tin, carries the tin, clutches the tin to her breast, and then is driven to the meeting place by her Cuban assistant – carrying the tin.”Today,” we are told, “She brings nothing but a wallet stuffed with crisp fifties and the tin of cookies.” Finally, finally, they arrive at the restaurant where the main character is to meet her wayward daughter. And lo and behold, she gets out of the car and “as she starts down Lincoln Road, she tries not to hold the bakery box too high.” HUH? Yet a couple of pages later in the restaurant, she “sits at a table, feeling flush, gripping the tin of precious cookies”.

Forgive me for picking nits, but I can’t help it. I really can’t.

Guess this is really the start of fall

Impending rain, blasting gusts of wind, mailbox stuffed full of catalogs with sweaters and boots and tweeds on the covers. Hmmm. Looks like fall has arrived, all right. Give me some candy corn and I’m set to go. One point here, though, you have to eat them the correct way: 1) bite off little yellow tip 2) turn over and bite off broad white base, being careful to fit your teeth just so between the white and orange so as not to scrape off any orange or leave any white 3) pop orange middle into mouth. Repeat ad nauseam.

Being it’s the start of a new season, and being that I’m running off to an appointment with my financial advisor in a little while, I thought I’d be all numberly for once and give a few Deadbook stats as of today: Total agents contacted: 20. Total rejections (all of them form rejections, not personal, of the brief “sorry, not quite the subject matter for me” type: 5. Total partial manuscripts requested: 1. Total full manuscripts requested: 4. Which leaves ten still out there awaiting some kind of answer, and five under consideration.

Okay, off to crunch some numbers. And pick up a bag of candy corn, so good for mindless munching.

Pulsating Pile of Slush in a Parallel Universe

It occurs to me that hopeful authors have their own slushpile and their own tales from Slushpile Hell. An inverse slushpile, if you will, out here on the prairies and coasts and deserts and towns on the other side of the mirror, far from New York, far from agency gatekeepers. The ever-spreading pile is one of pending, unanswered, and rejected queries. The “hell” of it is keeping some sense of order to the damn thing. Fortunately there’s a thing called “Query Tracker.com” that helps enormously with this chore, but you still have to lace up your fur-muffed snowboots and wade through it on a regular basis. It’s all such a different game from the last time I did this, a bygone epoch that I refuse to define by any particular year; let’s just reveal (and leave it at that) that in the gentler, kinder time of which I speak, one received thoughtful rejection notes in the mail, handwritten in good penmanship, even from the likes of editors at The Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker. In today’s brave new world of easy, instant submissions by email (and what, these days, isn’t instant and easy and open twenty-four hours) increasingly the rule is, “No response=no interest”.  After a few months of this, of course, the slush does tend to accumulate. Still, one hesitates to be too eager with the shovel . . .are these agents still interested, perhaps? Or just slow readers? Or maybe their computer opened, crevasse-like, and swallowed your query letter whole like one of those unfortunate climbers on Mt. Everest,  deleted in the depths. Yes, you can “nudge”, ie write again to ask what’s happening. But really, do you want to start out a potential lifelong relationship being a pain in the ass?

 

I’m Baaaaaaaaack

Well, it’s been a long hard summer – obviously, since I haven’t been in here for awhile. Somehow the cattle work and the remodeling work took over, and my poor book, after that hard push to complete it, just sat there. Oh, it made its presence known all right, making sure I spent many a wide-eyed night beating myself up for not championing it out there in the world instead of allowing it to moulder in the depths of my computer. As I write this I’m realizing that that’s how I picture my computer: a bottomless black pit that I lower a bucket into to pull things out when I need them. When you close a window, who knows where the information goes? Poof! Down the well. So there Deadbook was, calling to me pitifully from the inky bottom, like Gollum to Bilbo Baggins.

Apparently the effect of all that nagging was cumulative – or perhaps it was the changing of the seasons, the turning-leaf reminder of mortality and all that – because although I had no prior intention of doing so, I sat down one recent Sunday and devoted the entire day to researching agents in the most nit-picking way imaginable. And then sent out tailor made queries to my favorites. Apparently I’m doing something right, because within days I got one rejection and three very nice letters asking for the full manuscript. Still more out there I haven’t heard from, so we’ll see what happens.

I must catch you up on the rip-snorting tale of FOAF (Friend of a Friend, a very high-level agent who is the friend of one of my hubby’s friends and who represents, among other authors, a thriller writer whose books can be on the New York Times bestseller list at any given time) and TPNYA (Top Pick New York Agent, whom I met at the San Francisco Writer’s Conference last spring). Basically I consider these guys to be dead in the water. FOAF was interested, but only if I turned Deadbook into a YA novel — which, despite the “hot” genre, I cannot do. It never was or ever will be a YA story. On the other hand, I could go back and write the story as seen through the eyes of the character of the teenage daughter, which would be an entertaining writing exercise; but would it stand up as a book? As for TPNYA, word on the street is that as the author of many writing books and a popular draw at writer’s conferences, he is not involved so much in actual agenting these days. He’d requested my first 50 pages, which I sent him in early April, after some correspondence with him about the project. In June, after hearing nothing, I wrote to him asking whether he’d received my submission. He wrote back right away to say that no, he’d looked through his files and had never received it, could I re-send? Which I promptly did. And have never heard anything. I’m assuming it’s down there sloshing in the murk of his well somewhere, and who knows when he’ll lower the bucket. He’s almost never in town, ie: New York, especially lately during “conference season”, so I am sure he’s backlogged until roughly 2034.

Meanwhile, my friend who wrote the lovely, lyrical novel of India has finished three rounds of re-writes at the request of the agent she found at the conference, and is now on the threshold of publishing land, where the book will make the rounds. So now that you’re all caught up, I’m off, fortified with a strong cup of Peet’s, to work on my second book.