I don't get you, you leaf-obsessed monkeys!

This time of year gets me thinking about seasonal buying patterns. We live in a tourist town and I notice that tourists drop off in September and return in force in October. It’s as if the shock of the school year is just too much for mom and dad. They need to completely withdraw from public life for a month to deal with making lunch, getting kids up, and getting them hooked on extracurricular activities. But then, what? They get four weeks under their belts and they’re out in force at the drop of the first leaf?

How does that impact books sales? Damned if I know.

I use Novelrank to track my sales across the board, saving my Novelrank RSS to Google Reader. So now I know what Amazon is selling of mine almost to the hour, or whenever Novelrank updates. It’s sobering. I didn’t used to check my ebook sales everyday because they’ve been so piss-poor. Now I see their sales (or rather the lack of them) every time I log into Google Reader. I’m not sure it’s a good thing.

But it is interesting to see the fluctuations. Certain books sell well on weekends; others Tuesdays. I know that the secret hand of Amazon weighs heavily in this equation but it’s still fascinating to behold. My ebooks were up in September, my trad books down. The reverse is the case for October.

What the hell are you people doing?

Did you surf and buy ebooks during your September hibernation but you saved your dollars for impulse buys of “real” books in October? Are teachers suddenly figuring out that they need stuff for class in October as opposed to September? Is that why they bought my math and picture books in droves in October but not in September?

I don’t know.

One thing we discovered when we do book signings is how easy it is to trigger people to buy. Seriously, it’s easier to sell six books than it is to sell one. No one wants to buy when no one’s at your table. But if you’ve got three people hovering around the table, you are likely to get three more people come over. Once one person asks you to sign a book, five others want you to do the same.

Granted, I don’t think this is a universally human impulse, but I do think it’s universally American. Americans must be the most easily triggered buyers on the planet. They want whatever everyone else is buying. Amazon’s figured that out. I’ll bet a lot of business owners never do.

Also in October:

* I’ve been working on two ghostwriting books this month. Both have reached the copy-edited stage and we’ve seen covers from the publishers. The clients seem happy, if a little nervous. Everyone always gets nervous at this point in the process, when they realize that their words are going to be read by the world. There’s an instinct to retrench, to delete what might be construed as inflammatory.

* I’ve finished a second draft of The Marshal of the Borgo. Happy with it but still tinkering with the voice. I set it aside to deal with my work-work projects, work on a couple of short pieces, and fine-tune a collection I hope to publish before the end of the year. 

* Discovered I can read mags on my phone. Not optimal, but it beats reading them on my B/W Kindle.

* Denise got her galleys and her ARCs this month for The Girls of Atomic City. The galleys go to long-lead magazines, the nicer ARCs will be sent to booksellers and used for giveaways.

Dept. of Special Sales

Every year around this time our Quirk history titles find their way into a little mail-order catalog called Bas Bleu. It bills itself as a book catalog for discriminating women readers. We’d never heard of the catalog before our book started showing up in it; now we do run across a lot of (ahem, older) women friends and readers who tell us they first learned of our book in the pages of this catalog.

A few years ago, when Signing Their Lives Away first showed up in this catalog, I “subscribed” so I would always be up-to-date on when it came out. (The company mails about a million during the holiday season!) Recent editions have carried both of our Signer titles; the current one features both signer books and the new Stuff Every American Should Know, which came out this year. Here’s how the pages featuring our books look:

Here’s what I notice. Every time the catalog comes out, our titles get a slight bounce in sales at Amazon. Shockingly, a lot of catalog recipients don’t wait to buy from the catalog; they use it to showroom. Then they go buy whatever they like at Amazon. You can spot this effect clearly by inspecting the also-boughts for our Amazon books over the course of the Christmas season. Overnight they suddenly shift from the customary U.S. history fare to goofy trivia books unrelated to history, cat books, obscure historical romances, etc.

In the book biz accounts like Bas Bleu are called “special sales,” and encompass everything from catalog sales to gift shop sales, museum sales, etc. Basically, anything outside the realm of ordinary bookstores.

About three years ago, when I figured out that these types of stores could be important, I started researching ones that tied in with the signers of the Declaration of Independence. (Think: the gift shop at Monticello.) We must have printed and mailed about 200 to 300 letters to various historic sites and their gift shops, telling them about our book. I’d never done anything like that before, but I knew I had to do something. Our first signer book had done really well during its first month but returns were starting to pour in. Its moment in the sun was fading.

One or two people called me directly to order the book or ask about doing a book signing, but mostly, I never heard from the vast majority of people I’d sent the letters to. I had no idea if my plan had worked. Then one day we got a call from a business dude at Quirk, who asked: “What have you guys been doing to promote this book? We’re getting a lot of new accounts. Normally book sales drop off after the first year. Yours is growing.”

Cha-ching.

It used to be that whenever we passed by a bookstore, we’d run in to see if they carried our book. But we don’t do that anymore. I’d love to say that’s because we’ve over it, but mostly, it’s just depressing. You’ll have a huge B&N or BAM and they’ll have 1 copy of our book in the history section in a spot where, let’s just say, the book jacket is in little danger of ever being sun-damaged. Then we’ll visit a history site and they have stacks of our book and the booksellers there recognize us by name. That is weird, but for certain books cultivating such markets can really work.

Recently I learned that the Salvador Dali museum in Florida is carrying my children’s picture book on Fibonacci. Yes, the Fibonacci sequence is often embraced by artists. That got me thinking: art museums + Fibonacci = cha-ching?

I really think my time these days is better spent working on new books, but I am really tempted to start researching art museum gift shops. Let you know if I do.

My new short story up at Beat to a Pulp

I just found out that my short story "Back to the Boke" is published over at Beat to a Pulp. I hope you’ll go check it out. (Yes, Martha, it’s free.) The usual caveats about language and adult subject matter apply. My thanks to editor David Cranmer.

This is a story that was inspired by the time I spent living in Hoboken, New Jersey. Now, it’s true that I have little in common with my protagonist. But I do share one awful experience with him. A free pint (the next time I see you) to anyone who can peg what it is.

Talking to Sue Kushner about You Saved Me, Too

I majored in journalism in college and a lot of my friends from those days eventually left that profession for theoretically greener pastures. One went to work building websites for B&N. Another became the spokesman of his local power company. Still another became the principal of an elementary school. A while back, I came to realization that there were only a few of us in the old gang who still wrote for a living. That says more about journalism than my friends, I suspect. You go where you must to support yourself and your family.

Susan Kushner Resnick

was one of the people I knew back then who stayed in the traditional world of writing. We first met in a creative writing class in the mid-eighties, but would also see each other at the journalism school across the street. She, like me, seemed destined for both worlds—creative writing and journalism. Her mind and her work always impressed me, and it still does.

Today she’s a teacher and practitioner of narrative nonfiction. She uses the dramatic techniques of fiction to write about the real world. In 2010, she published

Goodbye Wifes and Daughters

, a book about a 1943 coal mining disaster in Montana that snuffed out the lives of more than seventy men. Kush’s voice is on every page, paying tribute to men she never knew and their families.

This month Globe Pequot Press released her third book,

You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish

. It’s a memoir of the friendship that sprung up between Sue, then a young Jewish mom who was struggling with depression, and a 76-year-old Auschwitz survivor, Aron Lieb, whom she met at a community center.

The two are drawn together by their Jewishness, their quick wit, their charming personalities. Though they are separated by four decades in age, they form a connection that will ultimately sustain and nurture both of them. Sue becomes determined to help Aron have a good life and death.

Her voice is key to this book. Here she is talking about the day she officially because Aron’s health care proxy.

After we signed next to the X’s, I dropped you back at your apartment. Later, I told a friend what I’d done.

"Now you have three aging parents to take care of," she said.

Put that way, the new arrangement sounded like a burden, but I wasn’t worried. I owed you whatever you needed because you had given me something no one else ever had: a character test. Or, rather, God has given me a test in the form of you. Here comes an old man walking toward you and your baby. Will you smile and walk away? Or will you stand and talk, bring him home, put him on your heart? Will you tell the story that his little sisters didn’t live to tell, and someday ask your children to keep his memories pulsing? Will you embrace the task or ignore it? This is your test.

I hope I will pass.

It’s a very moving book, but a funny one too. Actually, kind of hilarious. And it’s gotten starred reviews and rave reviews from authors and the

New York Journal of Books

. Sue agreed to answer some of the questions I had after I digested the book.

How did your relationship with Aron morph from him possibly being a subject for an article you were writing into a book. At what point did you make the shift?

It wasn’t an abrupt shift because we started as friends, then I realized he might be story-worthy, which I think may have been an excuse to keep hanging out with him. Once a book proposal about him and his girlfriend was rejected by many publishers, I packed up the little cassette tapes and the steno notebooks that contained his life story. Then we were back to being just friends and our relationship got deeper and more complicated because he needed help navigating the medical system. I wasn’t officially reporting on him during those years, but I always suspected I’d go back to writing about him someday, when I figured out the story, so I kept taking notes whenever he said something interesting or hilarious.

That makes sense. The book feels remarkably “reported” in the sense that you’re recalling things from the early days of your 14-year friendship.

That’s the beauty of memoir —you can chronicle life as you live it. And he’d ask me how the book was coming along every once in a while. I’d say, ‘I don’t know what to say about you.’ It wasn’t until his dying day that I figured out the story I needed to tell.

And what was that, the voice? Every review I’ve read talks about how the book is written in the second person. That’s not a narrative mode that’s used very often.

I realized as I was driving to his deathbed that I was talking to him in my head. I knew he was unconscious, but I was telling him to wait for me. I’d always promised him that I wouldn’t let him die alone. At that point, I wasn’t sure he was dying, but just in case, I wanted him to know that I was holding up my end of the bargain. And he had to hold up his: no dying until I arrived. Once I had that conversation started in my head, the rest fell into place. The biggest challenge was giving the reader information about the past while staying in the conversation. Fortunately, Aron was 91, so I could write “remember when” a lot.

At one point in the book you assert that you and Aron are soulmates—a word normally used to describe a romantic connection with someone. How can a happily married woman, a mom, claim to be a soulmate with a man who is forty-four years her senior and to whom she’s not related to by marriage or blood?

When we met, I was 32 and he was 76. I know most people think of soulmates as romantic partners, but I prefer the definition of soulmates as two halves of one person. That dynamic could be dangerous in a romantic relationship. 

Not a question, just a wow: I loved how you managed to convey history—American history, WWII history, etc.—without making us feel like we were reading history. Well played, ma’am, indeed.

Thank you so much! The story brewed for 15 years. I’m glad the end result goes down easy.

I voted today

This is my shirt, and I approved this message.

America!

Asheville's Stephen King Mystery

For a small city of 70,000, my adopted hometown of Asheville has a high number of bookstores. I counted up to 10 once. Strangely, they seem to be evenly split, too, between new and used bookstores. One of the used bookstores reported today that they’d found a sales receipt tucked inside a book apparently signed by author Stephen King. (I could be wrong, but I think the image below shows a carbon copy signature. Remember those?) The local blog Ashvegas has the story here.

By coincidence, Moby Lives has a nice piece about this 25-year-old bookstore…

See illustrations for my short story, 'Button Man'

Illustrator Tom Pokinko posted some images he created for my upcoming story in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (AHMM). I’d rather not reveal what the story’s about until it pubs in December, but you might be able to glean some clues from the pencil sketch and the final ink sketch on the blog of this Ottawa, Canada-based illustrator. Thanks, Tom!

Stuck in a room, writing

Anyone who writes cannot help grappling with a basic conflict. Locked away in your skull are all these incredible visions—elephants skateboarding on toast, dancing rabbi babies, lemon-ball-shitting vultures—which somehow have to be siphoned out of your brain and put down on paper in such a way that anyone who sees it will be compelled to drop everything to finish it. Artists work with paint, sculptors stone, musicians sound. Writers suck out their own brain matter and smear it on paper. The more you smear, the less you have, unless you replenish it somehow. But how to do it?

I just stole that from someone else, by the way. Years ago, when I was still working in New York and unknowingly struggling with this issue, a friend turned me on to an essay by Michael Ventura called The Talent of the Room. In a nutshell, Ventura said that all you need to succeed as a writer is the ability to sit in a room by yourself for hours a day, writing. And even if you could do this, you’d produce words but no guarantee of success.

I’ve read tons of books on writing, but none of them have ever come close to the wisdom in this short, punchy essay.

Ventura wrote the piece for LA Weekly. (The friend who sent it to me was living in California at the time and clipped it out of the paper.) Ventura later expanded his ideas into three columns on writing, but I’ve only seen the first and third. The first is best. For years, whenever I moved, I always made sure that I packed that column with me. Then they invented the Internet, and now you can read it at Ventura’s site.

Cover Reveal: Blind Spot!

I’m always explaining to people that I write my own books for personal satisfaction/gain/pleasure, but my day job is ghost-writing books for other people. Most of the time, the “authors” of these books ask me not to reveal that I’ve written them and this is enforced by our collaboration agreement. (The degree to which I write these books varies greatly; more on that process one of these days.) Here’s one of the books where I’ll actually be getting a “with” line.

HarperOne, a division of HarperCollins will release BLIND SPOT, a nonfiction science book co-authored by myself and UK senior lecturer Gordon Rugg in April 2013. The publisher has yet to release the product description, but basically: science. 

Rugg, by the way, is your basic code-breaker, computer scientist, and supergenius. Almost a decade ago, I profiled him for a WIRED magazine article about his then-new theories about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript—a bizarre medieval-seeming book that appears to have been written in an unbreakable secret code or unknown language. Check out high-res images of that freaky book here.

I later revised that article and presented the new version as the title piece in my nonfiction indie book, The Scientist and the Sociopath. (bottom)

The publishers have released this (top) version of the upcoming book, which is now up for preorder on Amazon and other sites. I used to proudly say ta-da! with each new cover, but I’ve since learned that covers can change on a dime. Could happen here, too.

My Handmade Standing Desk (with thanks to Emily St John Mandel)

After hearing so much about standing desks, I built one out of two wine crates and a set of quaint books I don’t use that much anymore: dictionaries.

I saw that the author Emily St. John Mandel built her own standing desk using cardboard boxes, and I couldn’t resist trying something similar.

I will probably need to raise the screen a little higher.