The Long and Winding Road

Keith Raffel here for the first time in a while.

I live in Palo Alto, California and worked in high tech for a quarter century. That makes me a Silicon Valley guy.

What does that mean?

That means I’m almost always willing to try something new. If it pays off, fine. If not, well, that’s fine, too. I’ll just try something else.

Getting into novel-writing was something new. I was a little bored at my job so I signed up for a mystery-writing class at UC Berkeley Extension. When my work life heated up, I threw a half-finished manuscript into a drawer. A few years later I pulled it out and finished it. I found an agent who sold Dot Dead to Midnight Ink. Twenty months after signing the deal the book came out. Midnight Ink bought my next book, too. (I am skipping over the trials and tribulations of querying agents and publishers – another time.)

The reviews on my first two books were encouraging, and the second even showed up on a national bestseller list. Okay, good. Now it was time to see if I could support myself at this writing gig: what I was making with a traditional publisher wasn’t going to cut it. So I decided to try something new. I self-published my next two books, Drop By Drop and A Fine and Dangerous Season, and put them up on Amazon and BN.com. Somewhat to my surprise, I sold more copies and made more money than I had on my first two books. Another few steps down the road to making a living.

Amazon has its own publishing arm for crime fiction called Thomas and Mercer who were impressed enough with A Fine and Dangerous Season’s sales to offer to buy rights to it and bring it out under its own imprint. Sure, why not give it a try? It was a great ride. On one glorious day this past March, I saw my book ranked as the #5 seller on all of Amazon.com. But I still wasn’t making enough to support myself, let alone pay for another two kids’ worth of college tuition.

So I was ready to try something new to move the ball down the road. I decided to raise money via Kickstarter, the crowd-sourcing site, for my fifth novel, Temple Mount. Why? Two reasons. First, I wanted to get buy-in from my fans. There’s an old Silicon Valley saying that when you eat a bacon-and-egg breakfast, the chicken participates, the pig commits. I wanted commitment from my fans (but I did want to keep them alive, too). And I think I got it. They were co-publishing right along with me and had a stake in the venture. They’ve helped the spread the word and 50 of them even helped edit the book. (Paying for the privilege to edit? That made me feel like Tom Sawyer.) I’ve been blown away by their enthusiasm and generosity. Second, the money raised spurred me to try something new, or maybe old, to publicize Temple Mount. Starting next week we’re running an ad for it on Bay Area cable stations. (You can see the ad below.) I’m keeping my fingers crossed on how it does.

So here I am, getting closer to my goal of making a living as a writer, but still not quite there. When I started at this game, I went the only way I could: signing with a traditional publisher. Now an author can also self-publish, publish via a publisher with a new model like Thomas and Mercer or Polis or Brash, or even crowd-publish. Any one of them might be the right one for an aspiring author or even an old hack like me. It just depends what she or he wants.

I do feel lucky to be writing in a time where authors have choices.

Cheers,
Keith 

Before turning to writing full-time, Keith Raffel watched over the CIA, supported himself at the racetrack, founded a software company, taught writing to Harvard freshmen, ran for Congress, and sold DNA sequencing to medical researchers. He became a published author in 2006 with Dot Dead, which the New York Times said was “worthy of a Steve Jobs keynote presentation.” These days he can usually be found tapping his laptop’s keys and power-drinking green tea at a café around the corner from his home in California’s Silicon Valley. His latest novel Temple Mount ("a terrific battle of wit and wills" -Steve Berry) came out this month.

Twitter: Now I Think I Get It

by G.M. Malliet

I was reading a newspaper the other day. You know, a newspaper. It's this thing that gets printed on a printing press and gets delivered to your door, in my case by a guy in a pickup truck. A printing press? Well, a printing press--just, never mind.

Anyway, the article I was reading on this old-fashioned handheld device was about Charlie Sheen. I had, up to this point, actively avoided reading about Charlie Sheen. I had never seen his TV show and I have no plans to see it now. But somehow an article in the mainstream press made me think this was something I needed to be up on. It mentioned that Charlie has about a gazillion followers on Twitter. All of which is prompting a lot of online comment, which the Post (print edition) duly reported on.

I am not in the group of people bashing Charlie. I really, truly am not--it's clear this is a guy with troubles of his own, and if it were someone less blessed with money, talent, opportunity, looks, and the works, no one in the world would be interested in bashing him. But there was one comment repeated in the paper that made me choke on my coffee laughing--I really couldn't help myself. It was from Rob Thomas (http://twitter.com/ThisIsRobThomas) and it went like this:

"the more charlie sheen speaks, the more i think, "you know, lindsay lohan really seems to have her [stuff] together."

Now, I'm sorry, but that is funny. Bundling together two people who simply cannot see they have the world by the tail? Yes. Because we all have this blind spot to some degree? Yes--although most of us are operating on a much smaller budget. (Charlie's upcoming live shows are selling out, btw.) And so of course, I had to go online to see who Rob Thomas might be. It turns out he's a songwriter, and (as of the last time I looked) he has 219,150 followers on Twitter. I would bet he had a whole lot fewer followers before the Sheen tweet.

And surely some of these followers have gone on to look up Rob's Web site...

This is the power not of tweeting, but of tweeting in an original way, combined with some Zeitgeist-y thing that gets you mentioned in the mainstream press, driving people to go online to see who this funny or interesting person might be.

But without print, I'd most likely never have heard of online Rob.

The other day Paul Hochman, the Director of Social Media at St. Martin's Press, was interviewed at Jungle Red about how every author MUST be doing Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube--but only for 20 minutes a day (relief). I do all three (sometimes) although I am lamer when it comes to YouTube than I am with, say, roof repairs. But I did try with my first book, and I have an old trailer up there somewhere that at least ten people have viewed.

Would anyone shopping for a book start with YouTube? Probably not. But they might find a book through that Zeitgeist-y thing, so if you're an author, you need to be there.

Facebook I'm not crazy about lately. No reason, except it's become such a promotional tool it no longer seems friendly. My opinion? Authors are starting to overuse FB as a vehicle to sell their books and only to sell their books. A little of FB is starting to go a long way.

Twitter, as you can see, I'm coming around to. There are all kinds of people on there commenting on all kinds of things.

Cricket did a great blog here the other day about the many different sources for books these days, and that blog made a similar case. It's not an either/or proposition. Writers have to take advantage of all the choices out there. Online, in person, and what have you.

But, not all at once.

And only for 20 minutes a day.

Now, if someone could please just explain the point of FF on Twitter to me...

G.M. Malliet http://gmmalliet.com/
Follow me on Twitter and Facebook

Twitter image taken from aperture.org.