Category Archives: Working In A Salt Mine…

A Bleg and a Business Proposal

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve long been kicking around the notion of a German translation of my books, especially the Adelsverein Trilogy – since that story has to do with German immigrants to the Texas frontier, and the Wild, Wild West as a concept is madly popular in Germany, and has been so for decades, if not centuries. Yeah, I know – weird concept, but it is true. I’ve fielded the occasional email from readers asking if there were such, as they have friends who don’t speak English but would just love-love-love to read the Trilogy in German. Early on, I had kind of hoped that I would get some interest from a German publishing house wanting to clean up from all those Karl May fans, but that hasn’t happened, not so far.
So, being advised by another newly-indy author, and a couple of friends, and my daughter (who had a great many caveats, seeing that she is not only my assistant but heir to the whole ongoing literary concern) I have decided to give up on any offers from German-language publishing concerns, and take command of the situation in a time- honored indy-author/free blogger way. Feh – like I had all that many offers for mainstream American publishers anyway …

Amazon has the ability to distribute their wares in Europe, and I am the junior partner in a boutique publishing firm with an LSI (Lightning Source International) with the ability to publish in any language that we specify – so publishing a German-language edition of my books would be a fairly simple matter: a separate ISBN, and another set of relatively small fees to upload.

That’s the easy part – the hard part is getting a German translator. I can’t afford to hire one directly. My checks for sales of my books, while adequate, are not yet into four figures. But sales for my books are a good and steady solid stream. I am mildly renowned locally and I do have a solid core of local fans, plus generally good reviews for my books. I figure that I am at the start of an arc of success, and that I can do on turning out another ripping good yarn every two years or so. Every book that I go on writing will bring in more fans; every reader who discovers a book of mine and instantly adores it will go to my back-list and buy all the rest. Such is my strategy, confirmed by the experience of a good few other indy authors … who have a nice augmentation to their regular day-job paycheck. Not enough that many of them can afford to quit their day jobs or start shopping for castles in the neighborhood of R.J. Rowling’s … but in this current economy, a regular income stream is a regular income stream, and to be valued accordingly. Given the focus of the Trilogy, the existing fan-base in Germany for Wild West adventures, I figure this venture would be a pretty solid … for anyone who wants to take a chance.

I am proposing to offer a significant percentage of ongoing sales of a German-language edition of the Adelsverein Trilogy to any qualified linguist prepared to take it on spec. Yeah, to do a lot of work in expectation of eventual royalties, which would sound a bit problematical – except that it’s what I have been doing with my books all this time since I published my first book, just like about every other author does, indy or mainstream pubbed. I gambled that my work on it would pay off eventually and over time. That gamble looks like it is beginning to pay off, so I am in a position to offer this to anyone with mad translating English-to-German skills.

I do have access through friends to means of judging abilities – and of setting up the legal matters … so, anyone out there who can translate from English to German, who wants to take a gamble on a steady income, and is prepared to do the same work I have done and take a long view … let me know.

(Cross-posted at Chicago Boyz)

Disposable

Posted on by
1

We live in a fairly OK suburban neighborhood on the north-east side of town – working class to middle-class, well-kept small house, with lots of military and retired military, being convenient to Randolph AFB, Fort Sam Houston and Brooke Army Medical Center; mostly owners and not many rental units. A solid, but not upscale neighborhood, which we know very well through having lived in and taken a lively interest in since I bought a house in 1995. We walk the dogs, and even before we had dogs, I used to jog a course taking me through most of the streets – it’s an OK neighborhood and we know it well. And San Antonio and Texas generally is doing all right, employment-wise, in comparison to many other places, but even so, I am developing my own way of following the current economic picture; the numbers of disposable pets.

Up until about a year and a half ago, when we found a loose dog in the neighborhood, the animal invariably turned out to be a strayed pet, and their owners were usually frantic to get them returned. Two of the largest dogs that we found and returned to their owners turned out to have strayed a good distance; several miles and from the other side of a busy four-lane avenue, but small dogs usually haven’t gone very far, not more than a couple of blocks from their starting point. We had it down to a science; if they were tagged and/or chipped, we would usually we’d have to wait until Monday to call the veterinary practice and get them to look at their rabies shot register and give us the owner’s phone number. Or the owner had put up posters all over the neighborhood, or even thought to put their phone number on the dog’s collar, or registered them with some kind of pet retrieval service. Sometimes, it would be a matter of just putting a stray on a leash and walking around, asking anyone if they recognized the dog. On one particularly memorable weekend, we found and returned four dogs to their owners – I was at a point where I was afraid to step out of the house, for fear that I would find yet another one. It usually wasn’t a bother to keep a stray for a day or so; they were almost always house-trained, friendly, and amiable towards our own dogs and cats, older animals showing evidence of having been groomed and cared for … but in the last year and a half, this has changed in a bad way.

The dogs that we have found in the streets lately have all been dumped here by their previous owners – no collars, no chips and no tags, no one advertising their loss, and certainly no one recognizes them. Most of these dogs were young, almost always dirty and rambunctious. It was easy to work out the story arc there: someone got a cute puppy, it grew up and grew large, became a handful. Someone solved their problem by driving into our neighborhood and making their problem someone else’s problem; a distressing circumstance, but kind of understandable. We dealt with two incidents of this in the last year; the first time by finding a new owner, the second time by reluctantly contacting the city animal shelter. The local city shelters will do their best to place healthy, uninjured and amiable animals, so we were not unutterably depressed in having to do this.

What is most depressing of all, is that the last few dogs that we or our neighbors have rescued from the street were not the very large, young, untrained and un-housebroken kind. They were all small, affectionate and well-behaved; one was a Chihuahua/min-pin mix, and the other two appeared to be Maltese-poodle mixes, not one of them more than fifteen pounds, and all three bearing the evidence of having been otherwise well-cared for. The first of these had also been neutered, tail docked, fairly well clipped and with beautiful manners – we thought for sure that he was a pet, and would be searched for by his owner … but no. He had been dumped as well: no one recognized him, there were no posters or notices up, as appear when a well-loved pet goes missing. The only way we can square this, is to think that perhaps his owner died or was incapacitated, and whoever was sorting out their household couldn’t be bothered to take him to the shelter. We’ve come to a bad place, when pets are being dumped like this. And if it’s like this here … how bad is it in the cities where the economic pinch is really being felt?

(We kept the one dog, by the way – his name is Connor, since we found him near O’Connor Road – and he is sleeing in his dog-bed, under my desk as I post this.)

The Indy Author Game

Posted on by
2

So, having been in the indy author game since . . . umm, when is it? Since 2004: my, how time does fly when you are having fun. I never had any ‘in’ with the monolith of the literary-industrial complex, no close friends or relations in the professional publishing game; never did a graduate level writing course of study, and I never did writer workshops. I did buy a couple of issues of Writer’s Digest, once upon a time, and made a good try at following their advice, pitching magazine articles and short stories . . . not entirely without result, just not results that made anyone sit up and pay attention. I have been paid often enough for my writing that I can, with a straight face, insist that I am a professional, but generally, the places that paid me were and are not exactly big league. So, when I took it in my head to write long-form fiction, I only took a year to go through the recommended motions of sending out query letters to agents, and submitting manuscripts or the portions thereof to the bare handful of publishers to even consider unagented submissions.

I was fortunate enough to have started off in blogging, which provided a body of readers, and me with practice in turning out a fetching phrase, and even more fortunate to have come around to wanting to do a long-form work in print when it became possible to publish a book in limited print runs through POD, or Print on Demand technology, and distribute/sell through online retailers like Amazon.com. The whole world of writing and publishing was pretty much rocked by those developments, and as much as the old-line publishing establishment will deny it, the cracks in the walls are visible and widening every day. The hows, whys and rationale of all this is enough for a whole ‘nother post, but what I wanted to do here is to distill some of the experience I have had over the since 2004, for the benefit of anyone thinking of doing a book (e- or print) as an indy writer. Holy cow, has it been nearly eight years? Guess it must have been. And I have done seven books in that time? Why, yes, I have.

1. Make your MS good, first off. Write it the best you can, invite other people to review and critique. Frame up the plot, polish the spelling and grammar; even put it away for a while and come back to it after a couple of months. Assure yourself that there is, indeed, a body of people who will want to pay money to read it. In one of Sharyn McCrumb’s books – Bimbos of the Death Sun, I think – one of her characters gave the greatest advice of all time for aspiring writers, to the effect that it’s a bit like taking up hooking: before you start charging money for it, best be sure that you’re pretty good.

2. Get an editor, preferably one strictly trained up in something like the Chicago Manual of Style, and hyper-vigilant, consistent – anal retentive, even – about punctuation and grammar. Hire one, do an exchange of work, call in favors; have someone else do this. It’s axiomatic that you cannot edit yourself. Of course, even with the most exacting editor, there will be some errors. It’s just going to happen, but you want to make the smallest number of them possible.

3. Graphic artist for the cover: again, hire, swap, beg, plead, whatever you have to do – a professional looking, and eye-ball attracting cover is absolutely essential. And it must also look good in thumbnail sized.

4. Formatting – that is, the design of the inside of the book. There a number of templates floating around, and some nice software programs that will give a good result if you do this yourself for a basic all-text interior. Remember, margins should be generous, top and bottom of the pages should likewise be generous also: I have seen some POD published books that were practically unreadable, as the formatter/publisher tried to save money in print costs by squeezing the margins until they were practically non-existent. Readers are accustomed to certain conventions in reading a book. Take account of the font size (10,11,12 pt is usual) and the leading – the space between the lines. Remember also running heads, and page numbers.

5. Setting the cost of your book: there are a couple of variables to consider, one of them being that the per-unit cost of a POD book will always be slightly more than the same format and size book printed by a traditional litho press. A traditional lithographic press print run will be in hundreds, thousands, or millions even, which will bring the individual per-copy costs down. The usual POD print run will be in the tens, or perhaps hundreds. So, for example, a single copy of a 6x 9 paperback POD book will cost . . . let’s say, $3.50 to print and ship to you. Now, in setting the end retail price, you could sell straight to the public for $5.00 and make $1.50 in profit per copy – but if you want to have your book available in a big box retail store like Barnes & Noble, you will also need to consider pricing to allow for a distributor’s discount of %55 off the end-retail price and your own profit. (And your publisher’s profit margin, if you have worked through one of the POD houses. Setting up as your own publisher is another whole blogpost.) Given a page count of 300-350 pages, a 6×9 paperback will retail in the neighborhood of $15.00. Of that, $8.25 will be discounted, then subtract the print costs per-unit, leaving $3.25 in profit. This is way simplified, of course – but you can see that writers like me really like selling directly to the public. On the other hand, the big-box places might make it profitable by dealing in volume, selling more efficiently. Lots of variables, and preferences to sort out.

6. Reviews: getting them is another consideration. Paying for them is probably not a good practice. Count on a long lead-time to submit reviews to various print and online organs who will have an interest in your book: that is, send out review copies six months ahead of your planned official release date. Realize that sending out review copies is at your expense and know that there is only a 25 percent return: that is, only one in four review copies sent out will result in a review. The old timers tell me this has always been the case. Review outlets are usually swamped with submissions, by the way. Target them carefully, as many of them will not consider POD/Indy published books anyway.

7. Have a plan, from the very beginning – of who the audience is for your book, where they might be found, and what you are going to do to get your book in front of them. This is a plain way to say ‘marketing.’ Like most things to do with publishing, it can be done cheaply or expensively. At a minimum, work up, or have worked up for you, things like flyers, business cards, post cards, and a website. When people ask you casually about what you do, tell them you are a writer, and if they seem interested, tell them a little about your book. Always have business cards with the name of your book and the ISBN, and your website to hand out to those who are really interested.

8. You will have to market the book, regardless if you are an indy or a traditional-published writer. It helps to be good at public speaking, or at least, be comfortable in front of a camera or behind a microphone. Anyplace there are people who want to know about your book, do whatever you can to get yourself in front of them.

9. Finally: save receipts, and keep records of your expenses – a lot of these can be considered business expenses, when it comes time to doing the income tax return.

Any Questions? There will be a quiz next week . . . and there are some interesting discussion threads on this topic here, and here.

Cross-posted at Chicago Boyz

A Taste of the Next Book

Posted on by
Reply

(For your enjoyment – a selected chapter from Deep in the Heart – the soon-to-be-released sequel to Daughter of Texas. Advance orders for autographed copies are being taken now, through my website catalog page, here. and for the print second edition of To Truckee’s Trail. Purchased copies will be mailed out by November 15th. My books now are being published through Watercress Press, rather than Booklocker, so I am working very hard to get them switched over, and to have mybacklist available in print editions once more. For now, it’s only the Complete Trilogy, and Daughter of Texas, so any purchases directly from me will help!)

Chapter 19 – The Last of the Lone Star

In the morning, Margaret rose at the usual hour, when the sky had just begun to pale in the east, and it was yet too early for the rooster to begin setting up a ruckus in the chicken pen. She had a house full of guests, even though most of them had not spent the night. One of the last things that Hetty had done before retiring for the night was to have Mose move the dining table back into the room where it normally resided, and return all the household chairs to their usual places. Margaret viewed the now-empty hall with a sigh, for the temporary glory that it had housed on the previous day – now, to see to breakfast for those guests who had remained. That breakfast should be every bit as good as the supper on Christmas night – for Margaret would not allow any diminution of her hospitality. She tied on her kitchen apron and walked into the kitchen, where she halted just inside the door, arrested by the expressions on the faces of the three within. Hetty bristled with unspoken irritation, even as she paused in rolling out the dough for the first batch of breakfast biscuits, Mose – who stood by the stove with an empty metal hot-water canister in each of his huge hands – had a nervous and apprehensive expression on his dark and usually uncommunicative face. Carl sat at the end of the kitchen table, interrupted in the act of wolfing down a plate of bacon, sausage and hash made from the leftovers of last night’s feast. He looked nearly as nervous as Mose, and his expression – especially as Margaret appeared in the doorway – appeared to be as guilty as a small child caught in the midst of some awful mischief, mischief for which he was certain to be punished.
Continue reading →

Military Geek Humor

Posted on by
Reply

Yes, never underestimate the capacity for extremely bored and intelligent military personnel in amusing themselves.
Yeeks – and this was even published in a presumably responsible military-oriented publication.
Kinda puts my whole being sarcastic about the movies scheduled for late Friday night at Zaragosa AB in the local TV Guide kinda pale … although I did have viewers now and again tell me that they stayed up deliberatly to watch them, just so see if they were as awful as I hinted that they were.

Enjoy. This is funnier than any of my movie promos were.

A Book the Size of a Brick

Posted on by
3

Oh, lord, I thought on Monday afternoon, when I ripped opened the industrially-strong sticky tape that held the cardboard mailer closed around a hardbound book the weight and dimension of two bricks – did I really write all that? The UPS guy had just brought it, and left it on the porch after ringing the doorbell, and departing as swift as the wind . . . or as swift as one can be, working a delivery job at the height of the summer inSouth Texas. I wouldn’t want to linger on a doorstep either, when it’s over 100 degrees in the shade and towards the end of a working day.

But the “OMG – did I write all that?” moment – It’s the same thing I thought, when I opened up my writer’s copy of Book Three of the Trilogy: all five hundred pages. Well, the story did kinda carry me away: the saga of the Germans in the Texas Hill Country. The research and writing of it I had nailed down within the space of two years, but I measured out the resulting books into three separate stories, all published through Booklocker, three years ago. Let’s just say that it has sold very well, as these things go when one’s nom du plume is not Philippa Gregory, Dan Brown or Larry McMurtry. The Trilogy continues to sell, in paperback and e-book categories . . . but one of my biggest fans and I decided to bring out a hard-bound with dust-jacket version of all three books in one. As I said, it is the size and weight of a couple of bricks, a solid 1040 pages (including historical notes) . . . and although a bit pricy, the retail price will be much less than the cost of all three volumes in paperback, and will probably last a titch longer, under the weight of constant re-reading. And did you see the dust-jacket cover? My little brother, the graphic artist, did that – and from a picture I took on the grounds of old Fort Martin Scott, just outside ofFredericksburg . . . where a lot of the action and drama took place.

Alas, have to tweak a couple of pages of content; namely the family trees. My own late dear Dad asked me to include family tree/trees, so that he could keep all of the main characters and their children straight. I did this with a mind fairly split: yes, it would be good to keep casual readers appraised of who was related to whom, especially as the story began to focus on the second and third generation, but I hated, hated, hated to give away plot developments: Readers could go to the family tree and plainly see who was going to marry whom, and who was going to eventually drop off their perch in the branches, and when, and given significant dates and events, probably from what cause . . . ugh. I hated to telegraph future developments, especially after taking such care in setting up plot and characters, and making people care and invest their interest in them, and all, and then hitting them with the surprise twist. It’s like – oh, she’s/he’s toast in Chapter Umpteen-whatever, don’t emotionally invest her/him at all. Or; he and she are going to marry anyway, so why bother with building up any suspense and wonderment about it all. So, I compromised and put the family tree in the last volume. One more thing to tweak . . . and anyway, here it is. The hardbound all-in-one publication of the Trilogy will be available on or about the first of September, through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and the usual on-line and big box store outlets. Enjoy . . . just as I have finished this one last tweak.

And I’ve been asked about pre-release orders: I’ve set up a page at my website to take pre-orders of the hardbound Complete Adelsverein Trilogy – to be autographed and mailed on 1 September, 2011 at a price slightly reduced from the official selling price (which Amazon will probably discount slightly anyway) but your copy will be autographed – personal message and all that. And I am extending the drawing for the Adelsverein tee-shirt to 1 September. Anyone ordering a copy of the Complete Adelsverein will have their name put into a drawing for one of two very nice customized tee shirts from ooshirts.com.

The hardbound version has all three volumes of the Trilogy, and the historic notes – and although it makes a … er … rather hefty volume (suitable for having a small child sit upon, at the Thanksgiving supper table in lieu of a telephone book) the retail price of it is about 2/3rds of what it would be to get all three separate volumes in paperback. And with luck, it will hold up to being read and re-read a little better than the paperback versions will. And you will be able to work on your hand and forearm strength in holding it up to read for hours at a time! Such a deal!

What We Have Here

Posted on by
1

. . . in the words of Strother Martin, from the old Paul Newman movie Cool Hand Luke, “is failure to communicate.” Although, in the case of one Private Nasser Jason Abdo, one really does wonder how much of that deliberate non-receptivity is on the part of the receiver; firstly – being eighteen years of age. Most eighteen year olds are idiots. I was one, and I remember thinking that yes, most of my peers were drooling morons. (Most of them did grow out of it, so there is hope.) Secondly – he willfully and with aforethought enlisted in the Army. Enable routine, inter-service slam here: oh, yeah, he enlisted in the Army. Any brains, you’d pick the Air Force or Navy, any balls, you’d go for the Marines. Disable routine, inter-service slam, and for the record I have known many brainy and ballsy Army troops, it’s just that . . . hey, opportunity presents and custom demands.

Anyway, our young hero decides to join the Army, go through Basic and probably tech school, and oh, wow – suddenly discovers that he has enlisted in a wartime military, where . . . umm . . . they kinda expect you to go out there and kill the enemy and blow up their stuff, routinely and regularly, in exchange for a paycheck, PX privileges and the burden of not having to decide to wear what to work each morning. This war thing, in Afghanistan – it’s a thing which has been going on since 2003. I know it doesn’t make the headlines every damn day, but really . . . if you were deciding to join the military in late 2009 or early 2010, it’s one of those things that I would have hoped that a bright young enlistee would have noticed, even if his recruiter failed to point that out. And if his recruiter had not made it relatively clear, I’d have thought Army basic training would have. So, anyway, upon receipt of notice that he is bound for deployment to Afghanistan, our your hero suddenly gets in touch with his inner Muslim and discovers that he is, in fact, a contentious objector, and the requirements of religion forbid him to kill other Muslims. Note; historically and in current events this particular stricture would come as rather a surprise to . . . say, participants in strife between Sunni and Shia, between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s . . . and in Afghanistan itself, where the local Muslims seem to kill each other, frequently, bloodily and with every evidence of keen enjoyment. And also – past times in the US military, declaring yourself to be a conscientious objector in the US military did not automatically relieve one from an obligation to serve in uniform. During WWII many conscientious objectors served as combat medics, and in fact, there were two Medals of Honor awarded for having performed heroically in that role.

So, on the basis of his suddenly-discovered pacifistic inclination, our young Private Abdo is made much the pet and prize of the anti-war movement, such as it exists in these strange days, but just as the Army is about to wash its hands of him metaphorically speaking, investigators find kiddy porn on his government computer . . . which is either very convenient for the investigators, or the abyss of stupidity on Private Abdos. I’m kind of torn on this one, but our young hero doesn’t exactly strike me as Mensa material – note above, regarding joining the Army in time of war and then being horrified to discover that participation in said war is obligatory.

And to crown the whole farrago of self-serving stupidity to go AWOL and be captured in Killeen, Texas . . . for trying to purchase guns and bomb-making materials, with the apparent intent of setting off explosions in an off-post eatery popular with the local troops. Okay, then . . . Private Abdos apparently does not grasp that whole conscientious objector concept, as we in the wonderful world of the military – and possibly even most of those on planet Earth – understand it , and in a fairly comprehensive way. This is an irony so dense that it threatens to drop through the earth’s crust, all the way through the molten core and come out the other side, and having a particularly dark and ironic sense of humor, I am getting at least a few chuckles out of this from watching the anti-war organizations dropping him as if he were made of plutonium, nearly as much as I did from the unmasking of Jesse McBeth.

(re-edited to permit comments)

Coming Up For Air

Posted on by
Reply

….er, what? It’s Friday? Already? (insert astonished face emoticon here) Oh, heck and no blog posts since Monday, which was the 4th of July, and Blondie dragged me off to Canyon Lake for the day (and a very hot one it was, too) and when I came back I had work to do. Like in work for money, and a client proposal to review… and somehere, somehow, someone bought 23 copies of To Truckee’s Trail last week, according to my Amazon Author Account Page – for no particular reason that I can discover.
And we have just gotten another one at Watercress Press, and prospects of still another, and a transcribing job for another client, plus the endless editing job … and oh, yes, two or three more chapters of the first draft of Deep in the Heart to finish.
It strikes me that as a basically unemployed person, I am really, really, really busy. Certainly no time for a fresh installment of bloggy ice cream.

Back next week, when I come up for air again, with a trenchant opinion on something or other. Practically anything but the Casey Anthony trial outcome, I promise.

Books and Stuff

Posted on by
Reply

So, today I had the signing – supposed to be more or less the launch signing for Daughter of Texas, at the Twig – and it was actually a bit of a bust, scheduled as it was to start in the afternoon at exactly the time the Farmers’ Market around in back had already closed down. Alas . . . it seems that the Pearl Brewery pretty much resembles a tomb, once whatever big event scheduled folds up and goes away. Part of this was my fault, for scheduling release to coincide with Fiesta, and not realizing that Easter this year coincided also with my range of dates, and that the Fiesta celebrations would actually put the Twig out of commission on a couple of relevant days, because of traffic and parking, and their immediate vicinity being the staging area for a parade . . . And it seems to Blondie (no mean detective when it comes to trends and atmosphere) that they are preferring to emphasize their place of business as sort of the FAO Schwartz of kid’s books, in San Antonio, and downplay the local, adult, independent, small-market author sort of thing . . . without entirely nuking their bridges to that community. But still – one does sense a certain chill in that respect. And it’s not just me, BTW – another indy author of a gripping book about the Texas war for independence had a signing event on a Saturday in April – and if it weren’t for me and three of his friends showing up, I don’t think he had much more in the way of interest and sales, even though his event was on a Saturday morning. Just about everyone who came through the door was a parent with a kidlet in tow.

Anyway, a two-hour stint of sitting behind a table in an almost-deserted bookstore, before Blondie and I packed it up at the hour-and-a-half mark. A bore, and a demoralizing one, at that, although I managed to get through one-third of a book about the Irish on the 19th century frontier; which I might have bought, if the author had written more about the Irish in Texas. We left then, as we had passed a parking-lot rummage sale that Blondie wanted to check out, before everyone packed up the goods or the good stuff was taken. Honestly, only two people even came up and talked to me during the whole hour and a half . . . and there were things that I could have been doing in that hour and a half, like working on chapter 12 of the sequel, posting and commenting to various websites, working the social media angle. The excellent thing is that Daughter of Texas has sold big, during April, especially in the Kindle format. Working through Watercress and by extension, Lightning Source has let me price it at a competitive level and at an acceptable discount for distribution to the chain stores – and it is selling, a nice little trickle of sales, through thick and thin. In the last month there was also a massive up-tick in interest for the Trilogy and for Truckee, through the halo effect. All of my books have very high level of presence in search engines on various relevant terms . . . so, honestly, I believe now I would better be served by working more on internet marketing, on doing book-talks, library talks, and book-club meetings – and the internet stuff. Doing a single author-table at a store just does not work without massive local media interest. I have managed to score a little of that, but not enough to make an appearance at a local bookstore a standing-room-only event. I have one more such on the schedule, at the Borders in Huebner Oaks, but after that I will probably pull the plug on any more single-author book-store appearances. They just do not seem to have any useful result; they are an energy and time sink – and I only have so much of either to allot to them. Joint appearances with other local authors; yes, indeedy, I’ll be there. Book-talks, book-club meetings, special events, special events like Christmas on the Square in Goliad, and Evening with the Authors in Lockhart, the West Texas Book and Music Festival in Abilene – and any other events that I am invited to . . . I’ll be there with bells on, and with my full table display and boxes of books. But the individual store events – It’s just not paying off, relative to the time and effort spent on them.

Oh, This is So Not Good

Posted on by
3

Just so we get this perfectly clear, the active, serving military will go on earning their pay over the period of the shut down of the federal government . . . they just won’t be getting any actual paychecks, or automatic deposit of it into their bank accounts. In a time where there are kinetic military events going on – what we used to call hostilities – in three different countries. No matter what you call ‘em, it means that the families of troops serving in an active war zone are not going to be happy. Especially the families of those junior troops who are already living close to the bone anyway; there were years when I finished out the last day or so before a payday with $1 in my bank account and a handful of change in my handbag. And I’ve lost track of how many times I floated a check for groceries at the Commissary, a day or two before payday.

Just to throw some gasoline on the fire, it seems that just that very week that the paychecks won’t be arriving, the First Lady and Mrs. Biden are launching a big push to support military families. Nice timing, ladies – because they certainly will be needing support by then. Seriously, though, I would reconsider rescheduling any events involving actual military members’ families during this period, as you’re liable to get an earful of how they really feel and I don’t think the protocol officers are gonna be able to cope.

Heck of a job, Barry. Heck of a job.

Relatively Phidless

Posted on by
5

Two weekends, I went to uphold the morale of another indy- and Texas-history-obsessed author at a local signing, at a bookstore which shall remain nameless because I am quite annoyed with them and don’t want to give them the traffic and it’s over a relatively piddling amount and I really ought to be big and forget about it but it’s the bloody principle of the thing and why the heck should I who subsist on freelance editing jobs and a military pension and an irregular stream of royalty checks be expected to subsidize a bookstore located in a very trendy and very likely expensive location and if they are on the financial rocks through miscalculation and their own business practices . . . well, again – why the heck should I be expected to bear some of the brunt of their various miscalculations? Oh, yeah – because I’m an indy writer, working for a teensy local subsidy press, and this enterprise is just about the only indy bookstore in town.

Getting back to my main point; frankly, doing an event at an indy bookstore or big-box outlet is usually ego-death-onna-stick anyway, unless by some miracle of persuasion, you have managed to BS local media outlets into going along with the pretense that you are a big-name-arthur. Which is what I told my new indy-author friend – who has actually had some luck with this . . . Anyway, one may as well have some friends come along, to while away the desperate hours with sitting behind the dreaded author-table and watching customers come in through the door, studiously avoiding your eye as they slither through the immediate area, heading for the Stephen Kings and the Philippa Gregorys and the latest Oprah pick.

Really – as I told my fellow obsessive – you might almost have better luck at a Christmas craft show, if it weren’t for the iron-clad tradition of authors appearing at bookstores. I know another local author who has a cute little cookbook, very well designed and edited, and she takes a table at regular gun shows. She cleans up, BTW. Guys, guns, hunting apparel and accessories. Wives and girlfriends, feeling obliged to come along, are not really much interested in the guns, apparel and accessories. Drawn to her cute little table display like insects to a bright porch light on a Texas summer evening, they are. Marketing, baby – sometimes it’s all about sorting out an unconventional venue where there are customers with money and where your product stands out.

Anyway, there were enough of my fellow Texas-history-obsessive friends showing up that we had a good time of it – alas that he didn’t have the good time that I had at the fund-raising luncheon the week before, where I nearly got writer’s-cramp scribbling messages and a stylized initial in the front of what seemed like an endless stream of my own books . . . hey, that’s a problem that is nice to have. I can get used to it. I promise onna-stacka-Bibles that I will never be a witch about this, I will be pleasant and obliging and always have time to talk at least briefly to a fan, even if it’s not a convenient time or a welcome interruption – I will make it seem like it is. I have skills that way. After the requisite time-behind-the-table was done, my author friend, three of his friends, and Blondie and I repaired to a table at Sams’ Burgers, to replenish the inner person and to talk about Texas history, a mad passion for which is shared by all of us at the table save perhaps Blondie, and then only because she is dragged into it by my interest. At the age of five, she got dragged into every significant museum and location of historical interest between the then-Iron Curtain and Gibraltar, so she ought to be used to it by now.

A matter of wry amusement to me is that I don’t have any sort of advanced degree for this. S’help me god, all I have is your basic state university English degree and only a BA at that. I did all the classes towards a Masters in public administration, way back before Blondie was born – but I swear it was only because I was bored silly and that was about the only higher ed program offered at Misawa AB . . . and the education counselor must have talked a good game or I had no sales resistance at all, because I wound up taking all the classes . . . even though I had no interest what-so-freaking-ever in public administration. Still, a lot of the classes were interesting, in and of themselves, so I suppose I took something away from that educational experience. Not that any of it applied in a way that I can see to my eventual career of scribbling respectably well-researched genre historical fiction . . . but it’s just as well there is no entry-qualification for that. Nope – no licensing procedure for those who wish to trot out our creative works of fiction before a (hopefully) appreciative audience . . . yet, anyway. There is no end to the writing of theses and papers and that sort of thing by those possessing PHDs, but very few of them have the ability to make them gripping reads, appealing to the general public.

But I was thinking, as I was scribbling this – I’ve been able to hold my own, when it comes to those matters that hold my interest – with all sorts of people, and some of them are . . . ummm, academically credentialed well above and far above my own level. I’ve always liked the thought of being an autodidact, a person who basically educated themselves, a person who read voraciously and thought about . . . things, outside the mainstream of currently acceptable intellectual thought-processes. And I’ve been thinking – that when it comes to writing agreeable, interesting and accessible genre fiction – it may be more doable to start with someone who can write vividly and with some degree of competence and discipline, and who might have learned or be taught mad historical research skills . . . than it would be to teach someone with all the skills to be a good story-teller and writer.

You know, I am also thinking – for dramatic story-telling potential, this could be a great rom-com; a serious and academically credentialed historian, married/involved with a historical novelist. Hilarity definitely guaranteed to ensue. Plot – oh, I could come up with something. I’m a novelist, after all.