Second Time’s the Charm

It’s been almost a year since DIAMONDS FOR THE DEAD came out, and I’m ramping up for the release of KILLER ROUTINE in April.

Here are five things I’ve learned promoting that second book:

1) It gets easier. You’ve been through the process once, so you know the time requirements and the effort needed to accomplish all those “nebulous” marketing tasks. You’ve made a ton of mistakes the first time around that you’ve, ahem, learned from.

2) It doesn’t get any easier. Sure, you’ve learned from all the mistakes you made the first time, but there are plenty of opportunities to make more mistakes. Those contacts you made last year have moved on to different jobs and you’re stuck trying to grovel your way onto conference panels and bookstore shelves.

3) The “debut” blush has worn off. Instead of smelling like that prized rose, you just smell. The added interest that seems to surround debut authors has waned. People like to discover the next great thing, and after your first book didn’t hit the bestseller list, you’re simply another writer hawking his latest release.

4) You’ve said it all before. Or at least much of it. So you need to find different—fresh—ways to say it all over again. Who wants to sound like a broken record (for those of you who don’t know what a broken record is, try Wikipedia)?

5) Promotion can be a bottomless pit, a giant sucking black hole that will swallow every last bit of your time, energy, and money if you let it. Just sayin’

 

So, what other tips and tidbits do you have when it comes to promoting your second (or subsequent) books?

 

Alan

Inkspot News - February 26, 2011

Inkspot's Beth Groundwater will be spending time on-line in March to debut the March 8 release of Deadly Currents, the first book in her RM Outdoor Adventures mystery series. Her Goodreads Q&A discussion group will be open from February 28 - April 9, and she will answer reader questions there. Beth's Virtual Book Tour will take place March 1 - 27. To see where she'll be each day, check out the schedule. Comment on her blog posts to be entered into a contest for a free copy of Deadly Currents.

DUMPED ON

I live in New Jersey, and we’re always getting dumped on by one thing or another -- from toxic waste in our streams to dead bodies in our marshlands. For years everyone believed Jimmy Hoffa was buried in cement under the goal posts at Giants Stadium. Yes, the New York Giants (as well as the New York Jets and New York Nets) all play in New Jersey. We’re so dumped on that we don’t even get to claim our own sports teams. I guess they didn’t want to be the butt of jokes, so when they moved across the Hudson, they kept their old names. By the way, Liberty Island, home to the Statue of Liberty, is also in New Jersey. I suspect Lady Liberty didn’t like being known as a Jersey girl. The entire country dumps on us. Thanks in part to late night comics and Hollywood reality TV shows, we’re the nation’s dumping ground.

However, what usually doesn’t get dumped on us too frequently is that cold white stuff from above. Yes, we get snow in New Jersey. Our annual snowfalls total 18”-30” over an entire winter. The statewide average is 24”. Not this year, though. Since the day after Christmas, we’ve been hammered with one storm after another, so many that I’ve lost count, but I think it’s about a dozen at this point. And many of them dumped a year’s worth of snow on us in one storm, the granddaddy of all being a storm that dumped 32” on us.

32”!!! When did New Jersey move to the Midwest? I spoke with someone in Minnesota recently, and we’ve had more snow this summer than they’ve had! Just so you know I’m not exaggerating, check out the two and three story snowmen built by residents a few blocks over from me.

I’m writing this blog post a week ahead of time because my WIP is giving me problems, and it’s better to write something than nothing. I’d dump Anastasia in the middle of a snow storm (What I don’t do to that poor woman!), but this particular book is set in July, and I couldn’t figure out a realistic way to get her down to the southern hemisphere.

Anyway, it’s actually 64 degrees outside today. We’re having our annual January thaw at the end of February, and I’m finally seeing pavement and grass for the first time since December 26 ^th. It won’t last, though. This little tease brought to us by Mother Nature disappears tonight when the temps will once again plummet. Chances are we’ll have another snow storm dumped on us by the time you read this.

Lois Winston is the author of ASSAULT WITH A DEADLY GLUE GUN, the first book in her Anastasia Pollack crafting mystery series. Learn more about Anastasia at her blog and about Lois at her website.

High Tech to the Rescue of Independent Bookstores?

Keith here

Of the 200 Borders stores across the company that are closing, I’ve done signings in half a dozen. That makes the chain's bankruptcy just a little more personal. I recently spoke to the proprietor of a large independent bookstore near where I live in Palo Alto. I suggested that there was some consolation -- at least Borders’ problems would be good for his store. He disabused me of that notion, saying that after getting stiffed for tens of millions of dollars by Borders, publishers are tightening up on credit with his store and other independents. He doesn’t need another problem given the threat posed by e-books to his book-and-mortar store.

So is there any future at all for the independent bookstore? Today, the independents, along with Borders and Barnes & Noble, are becoming less booksellers and more book showrooms. People wander through these brick-and-mortar stores, look around, and then go home to buy print-and-ink copies of their choices from Amazon or, alternatively, they buy downloads from Amazon or another e-book retailer. This is no secret. Booksellers at brick-and-mortar stores tell me looky-loos in their store shamelessly admit they are looking to find a good book so they can go home and purchase it over the Web. But here’s the critical point: these looky-loos prefer seeing books on shelves and talking to booksellers who know their stuff as compared to trolling through websites to look for a book to read. The problem with their preference, of course, is that there will be no book-and-mortar stores to shop at if people just come to bookstore to look without buying.

Google is making a first effort at addressing this problem. Google eBooks permits independent bookstores to offer their e-books on their websites today. (See here for example.) The store then gets a cut of the sale. Of course, buyers can also download books directly from Google’s own site. The portent may be promising, but even here in Silicon Valley not too many people are bothering to go through the bookstore sites. Still, here’s what I suspect is coming and, if it’s not, it should be. People who are checking out the shelves in an independent store will just point their iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android phone, e-book reading device at the book they want and have it instantly downloaded. The device will interpret the new generation barcode with the squiggly lines that’s already being used on billboards and magazines to send potential customers to websites, maps, videos, and such. (It's just to the left of the bottom of the Mountain Dew bottle in the ad to the right.) The e-book will be downloaded right then and there.

And guess what? Most of those devices have GPS software built in. That means Google eBooks or other e-book suppliers will know exactly what bookstore the purchaser is standing in and can pay a commission to the store. This way the store is compensated for acting as a showroom staffed with bibliophiles. By the way, with this approach, a user of Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader can just point it at a book on the shelf at a B&N and have the book ready to read, too. The model doesn’t work for the leading e-reader, Amazon’s Kindle, because Amazon doesn’t want you buying a book or e-book from anybody but them. On the other hand, a model where readers can download an e-book instantly while holding the print-and-ink version in their hands will begin to give Amazon a run for its money.

So, here’s the future. You'll go to your independent bookstore and point and click. Poof. An e-book is on your reading device even before you leave the store. Instant gratification. Rumor has it that the American Booksellers Association is working to make this all a reality. I can’t wait.



Above that's my #3 trying to download Marcus Sakey's latest.

Where am I?

by G.M. Malliet

My new mystery series, debuting in late September 2011, is set in a mythical village I call Nether Monkslip, near the English Channel. As I wrote the book and my story and setting began to evolve, I did something I've done with all my previous books: I began scribbling a rough map to help me picture the village in my own mind. I found it helpful to indicate what went where, and which character lived where.

These are by no means accomplished sketches. They're pretty awful, in fact. When it comes to drawing, I'm operating at about the third-grade level. But when I submitted the manuscript to my editor, I included a PDF of my strange little map. I figured it would help orient her to the story. And I half hoped a good artist might be enlisted to turn it into something usable for the book. This had happened in the past: My second St. Just book contains a schematic of a Scottish castle, and my third, a drawing of the grounds of St. Michael's College, Cambridge.

I heard no more about the map for a long time. I finally asked about it, and learned it hadn't yet been green-lighted. These things are an added cost, and few publishers these days are looking to pile on the expense. Then a couple of weeks ago, the okay came through (yay!) and rough sketches of the village began arriving by email. And yesterday, something close to the final sketch arrived.

Let me tell you: The map is utterly and completely captivating. Just charming. The artist has done exactly what I hoped he'd do: Produced a drawing that makes you take one look and say, "I wish I lived there." That he could do this based on my sketch is a miracle. But the process did involve several email exchanges in between versions, exchanges that went something like this:

Me: We're going to need a hedgerow or a fence or something so the cows don't fall in the river.
Artist: Okay.
Me: Could you take the lid off the church?
Artist: Hmm?
Me: The lid. That little pointy cap thing. Those were usually later additions to Norman churches. The Victorians have a lot to answer for.
Artist: Okay. Anything else?
Me: The menhirs are too regular. They need to look like bad teeth with a few crooked or missing. And could we have some tombstones in that churchyard?
Artist: Sure.

This went on for quite awhile. His patience was remarkable. I had lived with this thing inside my head so long that I knew exactly what the village looked like, and any deviation from that vision really bothered me. That he captured it so perfectly even on the first run is, again, a miracle.

I mentioned this map on Facebook yesterday and several people dropped by to say how much they loved maps in books, and family trees, and diagrams, and all the rest of it. These are considered old-fashioned touches but to me they're not. We live in an almost entirely visual age. It's probably time to bring back the "old-fashioned" touches that pull the reader into the story--for village traditionals like mine, and for hard-boiled PI novels. What say you all?

G.M. Malliet http://gmmalliet.com/
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Photos of idyllic English villages (Cerne Abbas in Dorset; South Poole in Devon; Kingham in Oxfordshire) from telegraph.co.uk
 

Change Blindness and the Perfect Mystery

by Julia Buckley

Watch the full episode. See more NOVA scienceNOW.

In this interesting little video produced by NOVA, it is demonstrated that people with "change blindness" don't notice a major difference in something right in front of their eyes.

This reminded me of many mysteries I've read in which characters (and, consequently, the readers) miss the fact that one character is eventually represented by someone else, and no one is meant to notice the difference, because therein lies the secret to the mystery. Agatha Christie did it more than once; I also recall a wonderful Mary Stewart novel which used the same sleight of hand.

Further, I thought of some more modern writers who have used this technique, but I won't name them for fear that I will be spoiling their plotting.

But is "change blindness" a real phenomenon? Or did this little set-up create a too-unrealistic situation?

Would you, for example, fall for the same thing?

Try taking this test:

My favorite part of the sleight of hand technique (or "change blindness, if you like) is that it makes the eventual solution so inevitable that the reader says "How didn't I see that before?"

Exactly!!

Have you used this in your writing?

What's the last thing you didn't recognize that was right in front of your nose?

Yeah, Right

I am fortunate to be married to a very smart guy and this year we celebrate 25 years of marriage. Wahoo! Big party on the coast of Maine if you are in town.

OK, so what does this have to do with you writers and aspiring writers out there? Well, I had the good sense to marry not only a smart guy, but an attorney. And not just any attorney, but one who would go back to law school after many years of practice to get an LLM (legal mumbo jumbo for an advanced degree) in Intellectual Property Law. And this affects you -- yes, you! -- because I'm going to share something he just discovered for me. FOR FREE!

(First, let me say that it was pretty fun when the kids were small to say that Daddy was getting an IP degree. You can imagine the jokes we got to make! Hee hee.)

Anyway, back to "our" discovery. I wrote a book back in 2000 that has sold pretty well and that I revised and was released again in 2007. The other day we opened the royalty statement and lo and behold, my e-book sales had surpassed the print. My husband noted that I was being paid 15% for those books, but when he checked my contract with the publisher, it stipulated payments for books the company sold, and books the company sold to other distributors, and said any remaining or "digital rights" would be 50%. Hmmm! The other interesting thing: my contract stipulated that when this book is out of print, the rights to the book revert back to me. All rights. Obviously it was negotiated back in the day when "out of print" meant something, because there were no digital options.

In real estate we learn about the bundle of rights that can transfer with a property. There are water and air rights, rights-of-way, and other instruments that benefit a property, as well as easements, covenants, and other restrictions that can limit that bundle. In intellectual property, it's sort of the same thing. Rather than the rights to ownership of a townhouse or Queen Anne, these are the rights to property of the mind.

It's a tricky new world out there, because with each technological advance, all the boundaries shift. Keeping on top of it all is a challenge. Are you paying close attention to the bundle of creative rights you are giving away when you sign a contract? Do you really want to sign away film rights? Are you ready to give away digital rights in perpetuity? Do you have the right to reproduce parts of your story yourself?

Many of us are not legal eagles or even business types, but we need to know this stuff nonetheless. If you have questions about your rights to your published work, let me know, and I'll pass them along to my IP guy. He's very good and I happen to know where he lives.

Inkspot News - February 19, 2011

Inkspot's own Alan Orloff has been nominated for an Agatha Award for Best First Novel for his debut book, DIAMONDS FOR THE DEAD. Congratulations, Alan!

Japanese rights to G.M. Malliet's first two St. Just books, DEATH OF A COZY WRITER and DEATH AND THE LIT CHICK, have been sold to Tokyo Sogensha.