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.

A Fool Like Me

Keith Raffel here.

There’s an old Japanese saying that I’m very fond of. It goes something like this: “Every person should walk to the top of Mount Fuji, but only a fool would do it a second time.”

Color me foolish.

I spent three years working as a full-time novelist. I had just finished my fourth book, A Fine and Dangerous Season, when I went to a New Year’s Party. The host asked me what I was going to do next. I told her I didn’t have an idea for a new book. She asked if I would consider going back into the Silicon Valley fray and taking on a day job. I told her maybe, it depended on the job, and poof! – a few months later I was working at a DNA sequencing company. Fascinating work but that company was just purchased and so now I’m ready to give full-time writing another whirl no matter how ga-ga a Japanese sage might consider me.

I’ve tried publishing the traditional way and I’ve tried publishing e-books myself. Both ways worked fine, but I want to expand my readership. To quote another sage, Albert Einstein: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

So I am moving to full-time novel-writing for a second time, but am trying something different.

When Rob Thomas wanted to make a Veronica Mars movie, he raised $5 million from fans to get the project kick-started. Now I am not looking for that kind of money, but I do want to kick-start publication of my fifth novel, a thriller set in Jerusalem titled Temple Mount. I am terrifically excited at the prospect of building a groundswell of support for Temple Mount among readers of my novels, both past and future. I’m even ready to rely on supporters to crowd-source the editing of the manuscript.

I just hope others will join this possibly foolish, but probably sane author in getting Temple Mount published using a new crowd-publishing model. You can check out what I have in mind here. Don’t know if it’s going to work, but I’m going to give it a try. Please don’t be shy in offering advice and wish me luck!

It's Harder to Edit Real Life

By the time I turn in a manuscript for publication, I’ve done at least ten drafts. A few of them have been read by siblings, close friends, and my agent. I just polish and polish until I can’t take it anymore. My goal – to make the book as good as I can.

Last Sunday I appeared on Press:Here, a Silicon Valley Meet-the-Press that runs on the NBC affiliate here in the Bay Area and on cable in a bunch of other markets. Scott McGrew, the quick-witted and business-savvy host, reminded me just before the cameras started rolling that the show is taped in one run-through. And of course that was the problem. I couldn’t rephrase my answers or sit up straighter on the second take. Watching the video, I’m struck by a sense of esprit d’escalier – a French phrase for coming up with inspiration when it's too late to use it. The interview was real life where’s there’s no editing – where you’re stuck with what you’ve said, what you’ve done, and what you look like. Yuck. Not like writing fiction at all. When novel-writing I have control. Everything works just like I want it to. Not necessarily smoothly – where would the conflict be if it did? – but after ten drafts, the action, what the characters say, even the weather are all just what I want.

Anyway, here’s the eight minutes on Press:Here I spent talking about the ebook revolution, my novel Drop By Drop, and my checkered past – unedited.

Not A New Career

For over 20 years I worked in Silicon Valley for companies large (IBM, 400,000 employees at the time) and small (UpShot, where we started with three employees). A couple of years ago, I decided to change careers and become a full-time writer.

The joke was on me. I didn’t really change career paths as expected. Instead, I just veered a little. Let me explain.

When you’re coming up with product ideas in the high tech world, you look for a niche that will make your product distinctive and competitive. I did the same thing when I wrote my first two novels. I set them not in New York or even San Francisco but amidst the ambition, greed, and wealth of Silicon Valley where almost no crime fiction had been set before. Silicon Valley crime fiction has become my niche as a writer.

Next, and most important of all, when you’re seeking financing for a high tech company, you need a compelling story, you need to draw the listeners in and have them buy into your dream. You need to expand on that initial elevator pitch, too, with a business plan. Your objective is to get venture capitalists to invest their time, money, and resources into making your story come true. And when you are writing fiction? Your objective is to get a publisher to invest time, money, and resources into turning the story you tell in your manuscript into something tangible, a book.

In telling your story, both investors and publishers are searching for the next blockbuster, for the next Google or the next Da Vinci Code. I’ve had a VC tell me that I had a terrific, useful idea but it was only a $250 million idea, and he was looking for multi-billion ideas. Similarly, I’ve had a manuscript rejected with this comment: “Good as this is, I think it would quickly fall into midlist realm for us here.” Here’s the problem in both cases: No one knows what will make a blockbuster. What investor looked at Facebook when it was a roster for undergrads at Harvard and imagined it with 400 million users? And what about Stieg Larsson’s books? No one, no one had a clue that they would be an international publishing sensation including him. What you want in both cases is to bring a great idea to life. Those who just look around for blockbusters are going to spend too much on what they invest in and miss great stories that end up much bigger than they’d imagined.

I’ll just hit one more too-close-for-comfort-similarity. It’s not enough to build a great software product nor to write a great book. You have to spend your time and ingenuity promoting them. I don’t know what drug Emerson was on when he said, “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” Right. There are so many new products, so many new books that you need to stand out. You need to get word of mouth going. How? Who knows? But I do know it’s as hard standing up at a trade show as it is at a bookstore.

Entrepreneur? Novelist? Loved both careers (or one-and-a-half of them), but maybe I should have stuck with my original dream – playing center field on the Giants.

Jessica Seinfeld and Me

Keith Raffel here.

Norman Mailer, who died this week, aimed to write the Great American Novel. When I’m writing, nothing could be further from my mind. I want to write a book that can be enjoyed on a beach chair or airplane seat. A major thrill comes when people say they read my Dot Dead: A Silicon Valley Mystery at one sitting because they couldn’t put it down. One friend sent me an email whose subject line was “Damn You.” Apparently, she’d started reading the book just before bedtime and stayed up till three or four in the morning to finish it. The result was a bad day at work. Forgive me, but I loved it.

Of course, a second reason to put my ass in a chair and rap away at the keys is the cash. Despite the psychic satisfactions mentioned above, this author gig – well, it’s a business. As Dr. Johnson said, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

Have you read about the Jessica Seinfeld’s new cookbook, Deceptively Delicious? She explains how to slip vegetables into kids’ meals without them noticing. You know, some puréed cauliflower in the mac and cheese or sweet potatoes in the pancakes. Well, I try to sneak some good-for-you “vegetables” in what I write, too.

When Dot Dead starts, the hero is obsessed by making tens of millions from those stock options he's been granted by the start-up where he works. After all, who are the avatars of Silicon Valley if not the billionaire entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison? In the course of the narrative, I try to “slip in” the notion that pursuing justice, belonging to a community, and establishing a loving relationship just might also be goals worth striving for. Now, I explained all this to one bright friend and she said, “I loved the book, but I didn’t notice.” Perfect! She probably wouldn’t notice zucchini in her oatmeal either.

What subversive messages do you put in your books or do you notice other writers putting in theirs?