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.

Only 17 years late

Have you seen Hazlitt? It’s Random House Canada’s new online pop culture/literary magazine. It’s slick as hell. I read it as RH’s attempt to do what they should have started doing in 1995, when Amazon first launched—create an inviting, online presence so readers know they exist and what books they “curate.” I haven’t researched this so I don’t know if or when there will be a similar RH USA offering. It may be that they’re keeping everything under wraps until 2029, when they’ll unveil their mind-blowing, cutting-edge device: the ereader.

Using Mean, Mode and Median to Evaluate Also-Boughts

Self-pubbed authors are always debating ebook pricing strategies. Former math editor that I am, it occurred to me that you could look at data gleaned from your book’s also-boughts to see what they tell you about the customers who have bought your books.

The also-boughts (or “alsobots”) are typically located under your book’s product description on Amazon. They look like this. (Click to enlarge.)

In this case the author (not me) has about 17 pages of books that were bought along with his. If you go through each of the titles and write down the book prices, you get a nice collection of data on purchasing patterns.

A refresher is probably necessary here.

The price (or prices) that appears most frequently is/are known as the mode. 

The average of all the prices—add them all up and divide by the number of individual prices—is the mean.

The number that appears in the middle of all these prices when you rank them from lowest to highest is the median.

One of my books—a nonfiction collection of my science articles—has only 5 pages of also-boughts. When I worked my way through the calculations, here’s what I found:

* I had 20 data points in all.

* The mean (average) price was $5.0035, or $5.00.

* The median (right-in-the-middle) price was $2.99.

* The mode (most frequent) price was $.99.

(You don’t have do these calculations by hand, by the way. You can use calculators like this one, this one or this one.)

This gives us some food for thought. You can use the results to ask yourself some questions:

* Am I pricing too low? (If both the mean and median are higher than your book’s price, you might consider adjusting.)

* Am I pricing too high? (Both mean and median are lower than your book’s price.)

* Am I living in cheapskate city? (Your mean and median are consistently lower than those of ebooks by comparable authors. The mode and even the median for all your titles is always $.99.)

Traditionally published books by name authors tend to display also-boughts that are solidly in the mainstream price range: $9.99 to $12.99.

Are the customers who’ve bought these books ignorant of the ocean of better-priced self-published books out there? Are they consciously avoiding them? Is there too much competition to be listed as an also-bought for a book by a Patterson, a Lee Child or even a Malcolm Gladwell that the algorithm favors higher-priced books over lower-priced ones? Does the evidence support the suggestion that there’s a self-pubbed pricing ghetto?

Or are there other reasons?

Uncertainties

This kind of data is interesting but problematic, for the following reasons.

* Book prices are dynamic. The price you’re seeing in also-boughts when you do your calculations may not be what customers originally paid.

* Inclusion as an also-bought is highly selective. You’ve sold a thousand of a certain title. Great. But you don’t see 1,000 also-boughts or even 500. You’re getting skewed data to begin with.

* Those who’ve designed software similar to the kind used by Amazon say systems can be inaccurate when reflecting customer buys or making recommendations. Think how often Netflix, Twitter, or Tumblr recommend films or follows you’d never spring for in a million years.)

Conclusion

Math is fun, but maddening when you don’t have all the facts. Mean, mode and median can be an interesting guide, but not the only one. My gut tells me to price my books somewhere in the range between $2.99 and $4.99, and this analysis seems to support my gut. (My median was $2.99 and my mean is $5.00.)

But this is what drives me nuts. Part of me can’t help wondering if I’m not caught in a self-fulfilling loop. Six of my also-bought data points are for ebooks priced $8.99 or higher. If customers were willing to spring for those books, why wouldn’t they spring for mine at that price? Sane me answers, “Because your name isn’t Oliver Sacks, Malcolm Gladwell, or Mary Roach, dumbass.”

So: If you’re picking prices with your gut, you might welcome the chance to put some calculations behind your decision. Just understand that the analysis may not be any more accurate than your gut. And if you’re like me, your brain will still give you doubts.

Outlining a book

I always outline when I’m writing nonfiction. It just seems to make sense. The editor tells you what the publication is looking for. They spell it out in your “letter of agreement.” You do the reporting, then sit down and organize the facts exactly the way everyone has told you they want it. In this respect, writing nonfiction is a little like elementary school. They hit you with facts, you spit them right back. 

Journalist Jon Franklin wrote an amazing book called "Writing For Story" that describes a powerful method for outlining short articles and nonfiction stories for maximum dramatic effect. He says that writers who try to write a complex story without outlining will inevitably reach a point where they begin "spaghettiing" — churning out copy that doesn’t have a strong focus.

I agree. Nailing down an outline before you write a nonfiction article usually results in writing only one or two drafts.

But all this goes out the window when I’m writing fiction. When I do fiction, I just start writing scenes I feel compelled to write now. And I keep numerous files with scraps, ideas, etc., of other scenes I know I’ll need in the future.

I once saw P.D. James talk about a similar method in a BBC interview. If she felt like writing a “bit of action” today, she bloody well would. That was a revelation to me. I had never known that you could do a book that way. I had assumed I should start at the beginning, write all of the way through in sequence, and start over with revisions. That’s what I’d done with everything I’d ever written.

Lawrence Block says outlining is nice, but don’t ever fool yourself that you have your entire book figured out. That’s an illusion. Better ideas will come along as you write and you need to be open to incorporating them. (By the way, I suspect that those who honed their craft prior to the age of computers learned to compose much more finished drafts than we do today.)

Today, I write as quickly and as far as I can in my piecemeal mode until I start to get irritated. That’s my spaghetti point. That’s when I know it’s time to see if everything I’ve written can be plotted on an outline, and if I can discern a coherent structure in it all. By then, I know a lot about the characters, their world, the story, and where I want to go. I start moving the scenes around in Scrivener, and it actually becomes fun, thinking of all the different ways I could build tension if I move this here or there.

Write first, then outline seems to be my current modus operandi. Wash the clothes, then hang them out to dry. An analogue to this might well be David Lynch’s index-card approach to making a film, only not nearly as crazy or as brilliant.

What do you do?

My story "Even" appears today on Shotgun Honey

My story “Even” is running today at Shotgun Honey. Thanks to Sabrina Ogden, Ron Earl Phillips and their team for choosing it and putting it all together. I picture the story taking place in a kitchen somewhere in New Jersey, but admittedly it could be anywhere. Those of you who know me through my children’s writing ought to be prepared before you read this. It’s definitely not for kids. And please, whatever you do, don’t tell my mom you caught me writing dirty words.

Ghosting while ghosting

I’m waiting on edits on two books I’m ghosting for other people, so I’m using the lull to get a good first draft together of my new novel, “The Marshal of the Borgo.”

The book’s set in an unnamed nation that’s suspiciously very much like Italy. “Borgo” is Italian for burg, as in Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Clevesburg. The anglicized version of the word is borough. Americans also use that term. I grew up in a town in New Jersey that used the abbreviation boro on their official stationery and town seal.

Until this week, I was having trouble describing the book’s genre. Then I ran across this post by mystery writer Elizabeth Zelvin, who talks about the stigma of introducing elements of magic into otherwise straight mysteries. She describes a recent short she did of this type as a “paranormal whodunit.” I’ve never heard the term before, but Google tells me that it certainly is out there.

I don’t know if I’m writing one these books yet. I’ll see how it turns out. I do know that I’m playing straight with the murder investigation in the book. It’s just that the detective has some unresolved issues in his past that can only be dealt with via the paranormal route. You might well ask, “Why can’t you just drop that magic crap and give us a straight mystery?”

Two answers to that: One is, the book doesn’t want to be a straight mystery. The second is, straight mysteries just don’t interest me much anymore. 

More later as I sort this out.

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News:

* My short short story, “Even,” should be running Monday on Shotgun Honey, barring last-minute schedule changes. I’ll post a link when I have it. I hope you’ll check it out.

* The domain of this website is now officially daggyland.com. Your RSS feeds will continue to work, no problem, because it’s still a Tumblr blog under the skin. If you’re a stickler, you might want to save the new address to your reader: feed://daggyland.com/rss

Cover Reveal: The Girls of Atomic City!

This just in!

My wife and sometimes co-author Denise Kiernan just got the cover of her next book, The Girls of Atomic City, about the women who unknowingly worked to create the fuel for the first bomb.

It’s a true story—a narrative nonfiction title that will be published by Touchstone/Simon & Schuster in March 2013.

I’m proud of her. It’s a project she’s been working on, in various ways, for the last seven years or so.

To find out more, you can check out Denise’s website…

Sign up for the newsletter at the book site…

Check out her old-timey WWII-era images on her Tumblr blog.

You can pre-order via Amazon.

Or pre-order a signed copy via our indie bookstore, Malaprops.

I’ll post again about this when she gets a trailer together.