Cover Reveal: The new, improved cover of THE GIRLS OF ATOMIC CITY!

The Girls of Atomic City—take two!

My wife’s publisher cooked up a new cover to her WWII book, which pubs in March.

It’s a long story, which I’ll save for a rainy day. In the meantime, the pre-order giveaway continues apace. If you buy the book and forward a receipt, you’ll be entered to win a Nook ereader. Details found here.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Birthday Weekend in Asheville

Today is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birthday. So please, for the love of God, read The Great Gatsby or one of his short stories. Or something.

This past weekend, I went to visit the Grove Park Inn, a historic lodge in the town where I live. Every year on Fitzgerald’s birthday, the inn opens the suite of rooms the writer rented often when he was in town.

Truth be told, the story of the Fitzgeralds and Asheville, North Carolina, is an overwhelmingly sad one. Fitzgerald was in town visiting his wife Zelda, who was committed to a sanitarium in town. On these birthday weekends, the lodge decorates the room with the accoutrements of drunkards—beer bottles and the like, and a local literature professor greets tourists and shares some of the Fitzgeralds’ story. (Denise took some footage of our talk with Prof. Brian Railsback, and I hope to post some clips one of the days.) Among one of things we learned was that when Fitzgerald elected to stay off gin, he switched to beer, drinking as many as 35 cans or bottles a day.

Zelda Fitzgerald suffered her first breakdown in 1930, and by the time the couple arrived in Asheville in summer 1935, Fitzgerald was trying desperately to support her medical stays by writing commercial short stories. By the second summer, 1936, Fitzgerald had pubished his now oft-anthologized essay The Crack-Up, his mother had died, and his inheritance was keeping them afloat.

Grove Park Inn legend has it that he flirted with countless women while here, checking them out as they entered the hotel from the window you see here. He had at least one embarrassing, documented affair.

Fitzgerald famously gave an embarrassing interview to a New York Post reporter while in these rooms. The interview, found here, reveals him to be a hopeless alcoholic.

Fitzgerald died of cardiac arrest at the age of 44. Zelda outlived him, returning to Asheville, checking herself in and out of the sanitarium on Zillicoa Street. Some local scholars say she finally found peace here in the mountains. (They infer this from her paintings.) If so, the peace was short-lived. One night in 1948, as Zelda was locked in her room awaiting electroshock therapy, a fire broke out. She and eight other women were killed. She was 47.

The hospital grounds are in my neighborhood. Tour buses roll past there all the time, filling tourists’ heads with the inevitable claim of ghost sightings.

If you walk there you can find a little stone to Zelda’s memory, and this quote: “I don’t need anything except hope, which I can’t find by looking backwards or forwards, so I suppose the thing is to shut my eyes.”

I finally crack Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine—thirty years later!

When I was a kid, I read AHMM and its sister publication, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (EQMM), on a regular basis until I just couldn’t keep up with the subscriptions anymore.

I would also, from time to time, submit stories to these magazines during my teens. Shockingly, they were all returned with little white slips—the first rejections I ever got in my life.

Decades later, I finally have some good news to report on that front. This year I committed to submitting my short fiction to magazines on a more regular basis instead of self-pubbing them right off the bat. Besides Even, which ran back in August on Shotgun Honey, two of my short pieces have been bought by Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (AHMM). I couldn’t be more thrilled—penetrating that market has (obviously) been a lifelong dream of mine.

One is a straight-up story of corruption I wrote years ago. The other is one I wrote this year. It’s set in Rome. I’ve been thinking of it as written in the voice of an Italian Jane Austen, if such a thing were even possible. Seriously, the voices of both pieces couldn’t be more different.

They’ll run sometime next year. I’ll post the info when I have it.

Pre-order The Girls of Atomic City now

My wife and her publisher are running a giveaway to drum up pre-orders for her book The Girls of Atomic City, which pubs in March. If you buy the book and forward a receipt, you’ll be entered in a giveaway to win a Nook ereader. Details found here.

Denise was told that more and more publishers are going with minimalistic language on the back cover copy for advance reading copies (ARCs). In fact, say the publishing geniuses, they want them to sound like movie trailers. Hence the copy here.

I'm a writer, and sometimes I want fewer books

One of my cousins once worked in book manufacturing. I remember him talking about the release of a picture book by Madonna. This was years ago; the book may have been her controversial Sex. “The workmanship in this book, you gotta see,” my cousin said. “Of course, inside it’s all fuckin’ pornography.”

I was thinking about this when a friend showed me the art books she made in a book-making class. They’re shown above.

These days a lot of people are talking about the loss of “real” books. By that I assume they mean books as paper objects, as opposed to digital ebooks. 

Yeah—I get it. Some books are beautifully made, but most aren’t these days. Even hardcovers are not made with stitching, the way my friend learned to make them in her art class. Most books—the kind I like to read—are cheaply made with poorly designed covers, newsprint paper, and glue. But that’s okay. I don’t want them for their intrinsic value but for the stories inside them. 

I do think we are headed toward the age of the physical-book-as-a-collectible. You go to a reading by an author you like and you buy the book. Or you meet them at a con and you want a memento. These days, if I read an ebook that I like, I try to get a copy signed by the author.

But I predict I’ll eventually curtail even that instinct. The books I buy as collectibles end up sitting on my special shelf with other collectible books. Some are in plastic, most aren’t. I never touch them, I never engage with them, and I’ll certainly never read them. Most I ever do is take them down to show someone who shares an interest in a particular author: “Look—Ellroy touched this!”

In the last decade I’ve probably moved about 5 times, twice internationally. Each time, shipping books was my biggest expense. They were more numerous, costlier and heavier, pound for pound, than any other object I owned. 

You understand I’m saying? I’m a writer and I look forward to divesting myself of the “real” books in my life.

I read once that the only reason we hang onto books is that they are a way of broadcasting our identities. This is who I am. Look upon my books, and know me better, man!

It’s a way of announcing our egos. I don’t want to sound too spacey, but isn’t that an instinct we ought to try to get over? I think so.

My next book: The Great Gatsby

You’d have to have colossal stones to name your book after a famous one like The Catcher in the Rye,To Kill a Mockingbird, or The Great Gatsby. Technically, you could. While authors can copyright the content of their books, they can’t prevent someone from using their exact title, a title that is like theirs or close to theirs. Hence the rip-offs you’re seeing right now that are capitalizing on the success of 50 Shades of Grey.

How important is to an author to choose a book title that is highly original? I guess, these days, it’s becoming more and more important. The more distinctive the title, the more likely that an online search will turn up that book and that book alone. Recently my book Jersey Heat got its first review. I was excited to see that it was a four-star review:

Not the most descriptive review, but still nice. Only thing is, my book isn’t about the city streets. It’s about corruption and endangered wildlife in a small town in rural New Jersey. Judging from the previous reviews this reviewer has left, I’m pretty sure he or she meant to review this sexy-looking book, which is also entitled Jersey Heat. 

It’s easy to screw this up on Amazon, I guess. You type in the name of the book you just read, intending to give it a review. A bunch of candidate books pop up in your search. You click one without thinking carefully, and you—what?—scroll past the cover art that doesn’t match the product you bought, but then leave a review for that product anyway?

This sort of thing makes me want to resolve to come up with better, more distinctive titles. It’s a particularly sore point with me because I’ve always had trouble dreaming up good titles. When I had to come up with magazine headlines back in the day, I was terrible at it. And I think I’ve brought some of that awkwardness into my fiction writing. Jersey Heat is an okay title, but heat is an overused word in the crime genre, especially crime film dramas. Ideally, going forward, I’ll more carefully research whether a title has been used—and how—before I commit to it.

As much as I’d like to turn over a new leaf, I think I’m going to have to live with my decisions for a while. One of my indie titles is called The Mesmerist. It’s the story of a charismatic madman who’s killing people in an alt-1970s New York. Here’s the cover:

Yet I fully expect readers who like my book to leave reviews for these products instead:

Dr. Gordon Rugg interviewed in CNBC

My friend and colleague, the scientist Gordon Rugg, gets a plug in CNBC Magazine this month for his work on data analysis. The article highlights Rugg’s Search Visualizer software, which gives people a picture of whatever they’re searching for online.

Rugg is the “titular” scientist in my ebook, The Scientist & the Sociopath. That nonfiction book includes the story I wrote about his work, which appeared in Wired Magazine. That article was based on Rugg’s investigations into the Voynich Manuscript—a bizarre book that is written in an apparently unknown language or code. (See the video above.)

Rugg and I are coauthoring a book about his scientific methods, entitled BLIND SPOT, which HarperOne will release next year. I’ll post a cover here as soon as it’s released.

Going open kimono...

A couple of my writer friends have asked me recently how my ebook sales are doing. Rather than hem and haw, I thought I’d post the figures. For the sake of simplicity I’m going to just deal with the Kindle sales figures since sales on the other outlets are pretty insignificant at this point. 

In 2011, I earned about $70 on my ebook sales. Not monthly. Not weekly. That’s the whole thing. $70 from May 2011, when I uploaded my first book, to the end of Dec. 2011.

Thus far in 2012, with a total of three books for sale, I’ve earned about $122. I’m still a long way from paying off my costs—of covers, editing, copyrights—but I could care less. My monthly figures look like this…

To explain my shorthand here: SS is code for the title of my book The Scientist & the Sociopath, JH is Jersey Heat, and M is The Mesmerist.

I suppose you could say that there is some improvement here but honestly I don’t think I’m selling enough to make any sweeping statements like that. I thought I’d share some of the 6-week sales data as well, so you can get a sense of the sales frequency. (Click to embiggen.)

I’m not being coy about showing the dollar amounts. Both of these shots amount to about $54-$55.

By far my best-selling self-pubbed book is The Scientist & the Sociopath, probably because it’s really discoverable in the sparsely populated ghetto of nonfiction science collections, readers and anthologies.

My novels have fared less well. For three whole months I didn’t have a single sale of my novel Jersey Heat, then sales seemed to start up again in August. My other novel, The Mesmerist, is also doing better; no clue why.

I do know that Amazon was sending emails touting my most recent trad-pub book (Stuff Every American Should Know) beginning in June, so maybe that had something to do with the uptick in sales. I’ve also gotten smarter about using keywords. I have blogged more frequently on a more accessible platform. And I did a lot of publicity for Stuff in June/July.

For the sake of comparison, here’s how my Bookscan numbers look for the last year. Bear in mind that Bookscan only tracks traditionally published books, and only at certain retailers.

One of the things you can see from this graph is that my trad-pub sales tend to spike twice a year—around Christmas and around Fourth of July. That makes sense, since sales of everything on the planet go up when Americans start shopping for Christmas, and since one of my books is pegged to Fourth of July. Two of my others are also history titles with a patriotic U.S. slant, so I expect that sales of those books will continue to spike midyear. My history titles do exceptionally well at museum and historic site gift shops, but since Bookscan doesn’t track those bookstores, those sales are not reflected here. They are nothing to sneeze at.

So where does that leave us? Yes, the bulk of my royalty income is still coming from trad-pub sales. But just because my self-pubbed sales are truly unremarkable doesn’t mean I’m not excited about them. A book like The Scientist & the Sociopath represents years of writing for science magazines. Until the world of ebooks came along, those articles, once run, would never again see the light of day. Now they’re earning income.  Unless you’ve had an experience with newspaper and magazine journalism you cannot appreciate what a revolution that is.

I have no idea where my fiction will lead. Maybe it’ll lead nowhere. It’s been a long time since I’ve written fiction on a regular basis. I might very well suck. I only know that 20 or so years ago I made a decision to focus on journalism because I was just too timorous about my ability to write compelling fiction. That decision cost me time I’ll never get back. This is my chance to do the thing I believe I was meant to do: tell stories. I can’t give up this soon.

So I continue to be optimistic. I have a book of short stories coming later this year, and a third novel. I know I could be doing more to promote but I prefer to focus on writing and getting at least one series launched before doing much more promotion than I am doing. I am truly enjoying getting to know some of my fellow indie authors; they’ve offered advice, wisdom and camaraderie that I have found strangely lacking in the trad-pub world.