What Happens In a Criminal Case

A fellow writer asked me for an overview of what happens during a criminal prosecution. Those questions pop up from time to time, so I thought I'd include the overview here. I won't be taking follow-up questions due to my own time constraints, but this might be enough for you to come across sounding knowledgeable in your own writing. As always, this is not legal advice. You get legal advice by hiring and paying a lawyer. This is simply informational and is meant only as an overview of what generally happens in American criminal courts. So here we go:


Criminal Procedure

Two classes of crimes based on severity: felony and misdemeanor. A felony is any crime punishable by incarceration for over a year. Served in state prison. Misdemeanors are any crime punishable by up to one year in jail, usually local county jail.

How prosecution begins
Prosecution of a citizen begins with either a criminal complaint being filed, usually signed by a police officer; or with an indictment issued by a grand jury. If by complaint, then a preliminary hearing must be held in order for the judge to determine whether there’s probable cause to hold the defendant for trial or not. If by indictment, no need for preliminary hearing as probable cause is already established by the issuance of the indictment by the grand jury. Grand jury proceedings are secret and no defense lawyer is allowed inside. 

Pre-trial court appearances
After indictment or criminal complaint the defendant is arrested and brought before the judge in what’s called the initial appearance. At this time the judge does or doesn’t set bail. In most states bail is always allowed except where the defendant is a danger to others and “the proof is evident and the presumption (of guilt) is great.” If defendant can’t pay bail, he goes to jail. If he can pay bail he’s released but usually can’t leave the state. Following initial appearance there’s next an arraignment, in which the defendant attends and is apprised by the court of the charges against him and a plea is taken guilty/or not guilty. A defendant has a constitutional right to have a lawyer present during the IA and the Arraignment. If he can’t afford one, the public defender is appointed.

Trial is set. The right to a speedy trial is also guaranteed by the constitution. 

Trial beginsJury selection happens. Each side is given what are called peremptory challenges, usually around six each. These allow me to kick you off the jury for any reason. There are also unlimited challenges for cause. "Cause" means a potential juror is biased and should be excused. Cause can also be physical frailties (hearing deficits, kids at home etc).

Next, opening statements are made, the state going first and the defense going second. Opening statements are limited in scope to what each party expects the evidence to prove. Argument is not allowed at this time.

    Introduction of Evidence:
The state goes first. The state has the burden of proving the charges in the complaint or indictment beyond a reasonable doubt. Then the defense puts on its case. The defendant is not required to testify because he has a Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. This is usually the case; the defendant does not testify. The jury takes notes. The jury is the decider of the facts, e.g., was the light green or red? Who's telling the truth and who's lying. Guilty or not guilty? (There is no such finding of "innocent." Only not guilty). 

At the close of all the evidence, closing arguments are made. Now is the time for argument. The state goes first. 

Then the court reads instructions on the law to the jury. The jury then takes the instructions and exhibits into the jury room to deliberate. Guilt must be unanimous. 

If found guilty, the defendant has a constitutional right to appeal. 

Additional insights 

In criminal law there are two kinds of law. Procedural law and substantive law. Procedural law is such things as rules of evidence and rules of procedure. Substantive law is the law that spells out the elements of a crime. When a lawyer objects in court to testimony, the objection is based on rules of evidence and is procedural, but it may cover areas of the law that are substantive, e.g., where the prosecution is offering proof of something that isn’t one of the elements of the crime charged the defendant would object based on relevance and/or materiality.

Writing, Feelings, and Vision

Women interpreted the world through feelings. The men interpreted the world with logic. I learned how to discuss my feeling state, my feelings. I learned how to say, when thus and so happens I feel this or that. Now my fictional characters do that. If you want to capture readers and have them seeking more of your work, give your characters full inner lives. This doesn’t mean omniscient viewpoint. It means reflecting a feeling or emotional reaction to an event. Not a logical reaction, not the thoughts, but the feelings. Two totally different things.

Do’s and don’t's

avoid cognitive dissonance

do full inner life, provide full cognitive consonance

Important for new writers:

1. remember that vision and voice are the same thing, and that one is how you see the world and one is how you express what you see — but in way they’re the same thing because in both cases it’s the brain interpreting your reality as seen through your filter. Biocentrists claim that vision creates reality. Some quantum physicists say the same thing. As humans we’re nosy about our neighbors: when I see red and you see red are we seeing the same thing? When I witness the accident on 24th street and you witness the same thing, did we see the same thing? Read an accident report for the answer to this. Two people located in the exact same position will give the police officer two totally different stories and yet both will be adamant that he or she is right. Amazing. So this is vision. Voice is how I tell you about the accident. Not what I tell you—what I tell you is vision. Voice is how I tell you. 
2. For that first year, ignore profit and seek out eyes

How to sell books

If I were starting today I would publish my first book and advertise in order to get reviews so I could aim for a Bookbub. At the same time I would be writing my second book. I wouldn’t let my first book drop off the 90 day cliff before I had my second book out. For a beginning writer I would also use preorders because a preorder can get me on the hot new releases list in my genre if I’m moving the book with my FB ads. Then I get the full benefit of HNR prepublication followed by thirty days on HNR after publication. In other words, I want my name out there.

In my first 18 months BB featured me 12 times. I always opted for the freebie feature and avoided the paid features because I wanted eyes, not a few bucks. 

Advertising: ignore ROI. Expect to lose dollars on advertising at first, but always remember you’re after exposure for your books. And as your backlist grows you will be selling those books based on the advertising cost of the first book alone.

Which brings me to the most important thing a new writer —or an old writer—can do: Write books that people want to read.

There are two steps to this

1 Write to market

2 Write compelling stories - you must have in each scene a goal and a move toward that goal. At the end of the scene you will leave a comment indicating whether the goal was reached or leave a comment indicating more problems to come. A good technique is not only to thwart that goal but also increase the problem the MC is facing because he or she tried to succeed.

-Never be afraid to put your MC in more danger or more of a struggle. This conflict is the key to getting readers to turn pages. 

-Every character who we’re going to see a second time in the book must be conflicted, however small. Interest level.

Also, MC must react to conflict with inner life reveals. We need to know his or her inner life or it becomes cardboard. So us what he or she is thinking, feeling, plotting, hoping, fearing—all of it. Except never foretell strategy. Let the reader see MC meet with another character to strategize but never let the reader know what it was they planned. Only that they planned something. Keep leading them along.

How I Sell So Many Books

Let's get real. We're entertainers, we authors. We're part of the entertainment industry. I don't consider myself an artist. I consider myself a standup storyteller who has taken to the page instead of the microphone. It is extremely important that I keep this in mind if I want to sell books.

How does it play out, that I'm an entertainer who wants to sell books/entertainment to you? For one, I need to think of juggling--the constant movement and craft of keeping your eyes on what I'm doing. I do this with plot. Next, I need to engage your eyes in my craft: I do this with characterizations, drawing up real characters that you care about. Whether it's the fourteen year old victim of white slavery or the lawyer or cop who's in something way over their prior experience level, I need to give  you a viewpoint or a playoff character that you want to follow. You must want to know what happens to him or her or my story won't move you.

Next, I must clothe myself in the garb you want someone to wear onstage. I do this by dressing up my descriptions and narrative in language that captures your eye. This is done by giving you the view of the world that through my eye or my character's eye gives a unique view and an enchanting view. Even hard-boiled detectives can enchant with their world view when viewing a decomposing body. ("The twisted smile suggested he actually enjoyed his death. Or maybe it was just muscle contracture brought on by rigor mortis. I couldn't tell, and such is the ambiguity of death without a witness nearby.") (Yes, I just made this up as an example and you may use it in your own story with my blessing, should it fit.)

Finally I, a thriller-writer, need to scare the hell out of you if I want you--and I do--to keep turning pages. So there must be something or someone important to you at risk. This is about craft and it's akin to making you like someone, getting you invested in someone and then setting their bed on fire.

Having done all this, I'm going to entertain you. If I do it well enough you might tell someone else about the experience. Which is how the big sellers get sold.

Word of mouth.

There is no substitute.

Novel Length

Whatever you term the length of my more recents books--whether novel or novella--I am finding more and more that my readers appreciate less description of rooms, countryside, cities, clothing, entrees and drinks, and such standbys that many of us believe(d) we need for verisimilitude or filler or because we were good at details or all three. I've heard it in my thousands of reviews repeatedly that "the story moved along at a fast pace without all the descriptions [that readers typically encounter and skip over.]" I'm thinking that today's reader is greatly accustomed to the quick TV/movie pan of the city/building/interior that just a quick word or two in my writing accomplishes the same thing that twenty years ago might have required a paragraph. The upshot is that my stories are getting shorter and thus "seem" more action-driven without all the other stuff.

It's not uncommon for me to go for several chapters without ever describing what anyone is wearing, eating, drinking etc. My readers just seem to be happier without all that stuff. My work easily shrinks from 80K 70K accordingly. It's a win-win for me and my readers, the way I see it.

And as far as pricing, none of my readers complain about prices (typically 3.99 or 4.99) whether the book is 65K or 80K. It's a non-issue.

Unless a sentence is moving the story forward its utility is always questionable.

Panes of Clarity In Your Writing

Two things: narrative and dialogue. If it's narrative, all my people, including first and third, sound alike. Who cares? It's me telling the story even in the first person. I'm not cool enough to develop a language and style of delivery for a character. Just hints of it. Dropping g's on ing's, that kind of thing, but not even that so much anymore. Message to self: readers read you because they like your vision of the world. Everyone is looking to an appropriate vision of the world for themselves. If they like yours you gonna sell lots and lots of books. If your view is mundane, uninventive, apoetic, they're going to dismiss you as...boring. Writing is boring because it doesn't shock the reader with panes of clarity. Keep them turning pages with panes of clarity, a way of seeing the world that is all yours. FOR ME, that's the entire insight I need.

Dialogue-- I don't overdo differentiation so much. I used to, when I was J.D. Salinger. I used to, when I was Ernest Hemingway. I used to, when I was John Irving. But when I stopped being everyone else and just became myself, I have my little simple speech tricks (e.g., less educated people speak in shorter phrases. It's an observable fact. They don't expand on ideas because they don't talk about ideas. They talk about things and they do it in about 3-4 iambs a phrase. More educated people speak (not narrate, dialogue), as Anni so eloquently put it, through the filter of their personalities, yes, but also through the filters of their formal education. Lawyers sound like lawyers; nurses sound like nurses; librarians sound like librarians, and everyone's world view--as a character, not as the storyteller--better be through the lens the reader expects. Truckers better sound like truckers. Etc. But the main narrative, the storyteller's voice, is a whole other animal. That's where I get to be me. This is the definition of literary fiction: the ability to create characters with worldviews that light up the page. And these will be incredible world views and lenses for seeing that play against the narrator's equally incredible world view and lenses. That's what literary fiction does so well. An entire book is spent on pretense in literary fiction: the story of a burned-out college professor over one crazy weekend where he romances the chancellor of his college, gets her pregnant and at the same time saves a defeated student from annihilation. Michael Chabon's treatment in The Wonder Boys. The key is that when writers write literarily they're not really writing just the story, they're also imparting their world view because others have found/will find it interesting and shocking at times with its clarity. 

Free Preview of My Best-Selling Book

The Law Partners: A Kindle Free Preview of my best-selling Book...

 book:

How to Make Money on the Money You've Already Made Selling Books

Whew, the topic title is a mouthful. Luckily, what I'm suggesting is much easier. A guy I know has figured out how to make 125% on the money I've made from my book sales. Interested? Read on.

In fact, he's been known to even make 150% on his money. For every $100 he invests he gets 150% percent back. In just two months. "I'll take one thousand at one-hundred-and-fifty percent, please."
Sold.

Not only that, everytime I do it he promises--guarantees--to improve my book's rank on Amazon's search engine. Wow!

So let me get this straight. I pay $100 and I get $150 back, AND you increase my book's ranking?

Such is the power of Facebook advertising. I'm doing it and I'm getting those returns. On the other hand, many other writers like me have tried Facebook advertising and had not-so-good results. They even say they're lost money. Spent $100 and only got back $80 in sales. A negative ROI.

But is it negative, really negative? If each of those people who bought into my multi-level marketing scheme (my 10 book series) bought the next nine books in the series, I would make another $2.70 on each one of those books. Now I'm getting my original money back. Plus...each of those readers might tell two or three other readers about my great stuff and they might buy too. At an acquisition cost to me of zero dollars.

One must take great care in how one assigns ROI on advertising efforts.

Psst. Wanna make 150% on your money?

Have I got a deal for you!

Bullet Chemical Analysis: A Look at The Law Partners Novel

Forensics on Trial
Chemical matching of bullets comes under fire

Alexandra Goho

In 1997, a jury convicted Michael Behm of murdering a man in South River, N.J. The only physical evidence linking Behm to the murder was bullet fragments from the crime scene. An FBI examiner testified in court that the fragments chemically matched bullets from a box of ammunition Behm had at his home. "We were devastated by this," says Jacquie Behm, whose brother is now serving a life sentence for murder. "At the time, we didn't know anything about bullet-lead analysis." Nor could her brother's lawyer during the trial find anyone qualified to question the validity of the chemical evidence or the examiner's interpretation of it.

As it turns out, there should have been plenty to question. Since that trial, a growing body of research has revealed that the practice of chemically matching bullets is seriously flawed. This February, a report released by the National Academies in Washington D.C. called on the FBI to revise its rules on interpreting data from chemical analyses of bullets and to limit how its examiners testify about such data in the courtroom.

Behm's present lawyer, Paul Casteleiro, has since filed a motion asking the courts to consider the National Academies' report in deciding whether to grant his client another trial. Other lawyers and their clients are likely to follow suit.

Indeed, the implications are considerable. The FBI has used chemical analysis of bullets in some 2,500 investigations since the early 1980s. Among those, there were 500 cases in which the prosecution introduced such analyses as evidence during trials. But the story of bullet chemical analysis has even broader implications; it emphasizes the need to keep science honest, especially in the courtroom.

Matchmaking

For several years, statisticians, metallurgists, and others outside the FBI have questioned the courtroom use of bullet chemical analyses. Now, the National Academies' report, Forensic Analysis: Weighing Bullet Lead Evidence, has brought the practice into the spotlight. That report, combined with past studies detailing the forensic tool's shortcomings, could call into question many past convictions in which results of the chemical analysis of bullets was introduced as evidence.

First developed in the 1960s, bullet chemical analysis has been used by prosecutors when a suspect's weapon is not available or when the bullet found at a crime scene is too fragmented to permit visual inspection of the characteristic markings that firearms leave on intact bullets.

The chemical analysis consists of measuring seven trace elements—arsenic, antimony, tin, copper, bismuth, silver, and cadmium—that typically are present in a bullet's lead alloy. Each element makes up less than 1 percent of the total lead alloy.

Using a technique called inductively coupled plasma–optical–mission spectroscopy, a forensic chemist determines the proportion of each element in the lead alloy. In that analysis, the chemist dissolves a sample of the bullet and feeds the resulting solution into the instrument's plasma chamber, where each element in the sample emits specific wavelengths of light. The pattern of emissions serves as a fingerprint for that element, so the intensity of the light of each pattern indicates how much of the element is present.

Characterizing a bullet's chemical composition is relatively straightforward. What it all means, however, is a matter of interpretation. The traditional reasoning has been that if two bullets are chemically indistinguishable, they probably came from the same pot of molten lead at the smelter or were manufactured on the same day by the same company. In court testimonies, FBI examiners have gone so far as to say that two chemically indistinguishable bullets probably came from the same box of ammunition.

Several years ago, while still working at the FBI, metallurgist William Tobin began questioning this practice. After all, he notes, much was and still is unknown about bullet manufacturing. It is disingenuous to say that the matching of two bullets is a significant find without knowing how much chemical diversity there is in the general population of bullets, Tobin says. "There isn't an individual on the face of the earth qualified to interpret the forensic significance of bullet-lead analysis," he argues.

After retiring from the FBI in 2000, Tobin partnered with Erik Randich, a forensics consultant and metallurgist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The duo set out to examine whether there was any statistical basis to bullet-lead matching. The metallurgists contacted two lead smelters that supply ammunition manufacturers in the United States and pored over the smelters' production data.

These lead suppliers are called secondary smelters because the majority of their lead comes from spent automotive batteries rather than from ore. Most of the recycled lead goes back into making new batteries, so the refiners adjust trace elements in the lead to meet the specifications of the battery industry. Smelters keep detailed records on the elemental composition of the molten lead in each pot.

When Tobin and Randich looked at the composition records for different pots of molten lead, they saw reason for concern. The composition of castings from a single pot sometimes varied, while the composition of lead in different pots sometimes matched. That meant that bullets made from two different batches of lead could wrongly appear to have come from the same pot.

"We then knew that both of the assumptions that the FBI makes—that a lead source is homogeneous and unique—are not true," says Randich.

It's circumstantial

With the publication of Tobin and Randich's research in July 2002, as well as other studies including the FBI's own analyses, pressure mounted on the FBI to reevaluate its methods and court testimonies. In the fall of that year, the bureau asked the National Academies to put together a committee to formally review the FBI's use of bullet-lead analysis and recommend changes.

The uncertainty of lead's provenance doesn't end with the smelting process, says Kenneth MacFadden, an independent consultant with training as an analytical chemist, who chaired the National Academies' committee. "Bullets from one [lead source] can get mixed with bullets from another at various points in the manufacturing process," he explains.

Once a bullet manufacturer receives slabs of lead from a refiner, the lead is cut into smaller blocks called billets. The billets are extruded into wires, which are cut into slugs that are then pressed into bullets. Because manufacturers receive lead from different smelter pots, lead from different sources can be intermingled at many stages in the manufacturing process. Therefore, a box of ammunition is likely to contain bullets from multiple volumes of lead, the committee reported.

"In fact, the FBI's own research has found instances where a single box of ammunition contained as many as 14 distinct compositional groups," MacFadden says.

The committee concluded that it's impossible to determine that a bullet from a crime scene came from a particular box of bullets or that two bullets were manufactured on the same day at the same factory.

This finding greatly weakens the evidentiary value of bullet-lead analysis. The committee recommended setting narrow limits on what FBI examiners can say in court. For instance, should two bullets have matching compositions, instead of suggesting they came from the same box of ammunition, an FBI expert can merely testify to an increased probability that the two bullets came from what the committee has called the same "compositionally indistinguishable volume of lead"

Acknowledging that smelting pots come in different sizes and that the chemical makeup of lead can vary within a pot, the committee asked that FBI examiners avoid making reference to "melt" or "production run." MacFadden adds that experts should explain to jurors that a CIVL can be of different sizes and produce anywhere from 12,000 to 35 million .22-caliber bullets. Annually, 9 billion bullets are made in the United States.

Committee member Paul Giannelli of Case Western Reserve University's Law School in Cleveland, likens attempts to match the lead from different bullets to finding a Nike size-10 shoeprint that matches that of a suspect's size-10 Nikes. "It's only circumstantial evidence," says Giannelli. "It would be admissible in court, although there would be a large number of people with that type of shoe." Similarly, if forensic analysis showed that the composition of a bullet from a crime scene matched that of a bullet confiscated from a defendant, there still would be many other people in possession of matching bullets.

Some say the shoe analogy isn't appropriate because the public is familiar with the distribution of footwear sizes. "Jurors are perfectly equipped to assess the probative value of a Nike size-10 shoeprint," says Tobin. But it's impossible for them to do that with bullet-lead analysis, he says, because they know too little about the origin, processing, and distribution of bullets.

Because of these uncertainties, trying to determine the odds that two bullets will match by sheer coincidence rather than shared origin is difficult. Several years ago, statistician Alicia Carriquiry of Iowa State University in Ames came up with a mathematical model to calculate this false-positive rate.

Funded by the FBI through the Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory, she and her colleagues took bullet-composition data from the FBI's database and plugged the numbers into the model. The model came up with a false-positive rate as high as 27 percent. In contrast, the false-positive rate for DNA fingerprinting is one in a quadrillion.

However, Carriquiry says that the 27 percent false-positive rate is not informative. The absence of several types of data muddied her team's efforts to pinpoint the true odds of two bullets matching merely by chance. For example, they needed to know the chemical diversity in the overall population of bullets and whether bullets from one batch of lead get shipped to a single town or dispersed across the country.

"Our conclusion was that you could calculate false positives this way, but we didn't have enough information to do it," says Carriquiry. In other words, there is currently no solid way of quantifying the evidentiary strength of a chemical match between two bullets, she says.

My bullet, your bullet

To start filling in the knowledge gap, Tobin has begun preliminary studies of the retail distribution of bullets. Because bullet manufacturers will not reveal who their clients are and how many boxes they ship to particular stores, Tobin decided to pay a visit to his local Wal-Mart, which is in Fredericksburg, Va. The company is one of the top two retailers of .22-caliber bullets in the United States; Kmart is the other.

Once boxes of ammunition leave the manufacturer's warehouse, they tend to travel on pallets. All boxes on a pallet have the same packing code. When Tobin did a preliminary analysis of the ammunition boxes at the Fredericksburg Wal-Mart, he deduced that potentially hundreds of residents in the area over several months had purchased bullets with the same packing code, indicating similar time of manufacture—and thus similar chemistry, according to the FBI.

"The study that really blew me away was the one I conducted in Juneau, Alaska," says Tobin. Although Juneau has an outdoors-oriented citizenry, it has only three retail outlets for bullets. Tobin and his colleagues examined the packing codes of every box of bullets in each store. They tallied several brands.

The team then calculated the chance that in Juneau an "innocent" purchaser of a specific brand of bullet would buy bullets with the same packing code as a "suspect's" bullet. For each brand, the chances ranged anywhere from 87 percent to 100 percent. By bullet-lead analysis alone, therefore, most of the bullet buyers would be suspects.

Tobin says that the more data he gets his hands on, the less confidence he has that bullet-lead analysis has any value at all.

A group of forensic scientists at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles recently teamed up with Tobin to continue his distribution studies. The researchers are sending students out to stores to record the packing codes on bullet boxes.

Warning shots

Bullet-lead analysis isn't the only forensic technique to come under fire in recent memory. Courts and legal experts have begun questioning tool-mark analysis—say, the pry-bar markings on a doorframe; handwriting analysis; and even fingerprint analysis. David Faigman at the University of California, San Francisco's Hastings College of Law says the problem is that many forensic techniques have been used for decades without undergoing significant validity testing. Only recently have experts and legal authorities begun to realize this oversight, he says.

Faigman calls the National Academies' report on bullet-lead analysis an "exemplary handling of the subject." In fact, he would like to see all disputed forensics sciences, as well as psychological evaluations such as repressed memories and battered-woman's syndrome, get this kind of critical assessment.

The time might be right for such reviews. With the relatively recent introduction of DNA evidence—the gold standard among forensic tools—jurors, judges, and lawyers are becoming more adept at asking technical questions regarding false-positive rates or validation studies, says Carriquiry.

That was the case in 2002, when a federal judge in Philadelphia held that fingerprint experts couldn't testify that a partial fingerprint from a crime scene matched the defendant's print. The practice of matching partial fingerprints with those of a suspect has a long history, yet the judge found that its validity had never been tested in any meaningful way. Although the judge later reversed his ruling, the development highlighted the need to hold forensics sciences to the same, high standards required in other areas of science.

"There are a lot of techniques out there that could be reviewed," says Moses Schanfield, chair of the department of forensic sciences at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. But that would require collecting vast amounts of data. And that takes time. The FBI is currently going through the long, arduous process of collecting and analyzing handwriting samples, he says.

Thorough empirical studies of forensic techniques could also yield valuable new information about certain types of evidence. For instance, Faigman says, it's difficult for an examiner to discern the age of a fingerprint discovered at the scene of a crime. If researchers understood how fingerprints fade or deteriorate over time, he says, then a fingerprint might place a suspect at the crime scene on a specific day.

Every day, courts are forced to make tough decisions using scientific evidence that inevitably comes with a degree of uncertainty. "So, we ought to have the best data in order to make the best decisions," says Faigman. "It may be that we're wrong on some of these things, but we're certainly going to be wrong a lot more often if we don't base our decisions on the best data available."

How Publishing Really Works: From an Indie Writer's Point-of-View

Everyday I'm in my writing chair by seven a.m. and reading yesterday's output. I do my editing as I read, so that, by the time my book is written, it is in final draft form, not first draft. After the daily edits, I begin my writing (cup of coffee number two). I generally try to get down about 2,000 words for the day. Unlike all the "write 10,000 words an hour books," I violate one of their cardinal rules in that I also research as I write. Why? Because I have found that research so often flows into another plot twist or follow-through that I hadn't been thinking on my own.

So I Google this or that as I go, and I download eBooks that provide background I need as I go (I write legal thrillers, so there's always something new for me to be learning about forensic chemistry or DNA banking or cyberdata or some other cutting-edge manner of evidence acquisition). I can scan an ebook in about fifteen minutes to nail down the particular area I want to include in my book. Borrowing the book on my Kindle Unlimited account costs me nothing. By the time I'm ready to move from spectography to facial recognition software I have maybe thirty minutes invested and no dollars, which makes my reseach all but free. This was all impossible before Google and KU and these repositories make for much more fun and accurate writing.

My 2000 words take me all of about two to three hours and I'm done writing for the day. My books are targeted for 80,000 words so my calendar for finishing the final draft is forty days. This means that I can put out about nine novels a year. Yes, nine. Unlike tradpub's goal of a book a year for its top-drawer writers, I don't have to wait weeks and weeks for editing, re-editing, proofing, cover art, and the like. It takes me at most one week to accomplish all these things when my final draft is finished. By then I'm 20,000 words into my next book.

Editing takes my editor five days. I receive the book back in Word markup and it takes me about three hours to revise as advised. Then the book is proofed by software I'm subscribed to, and at the same time my cover artist is finalizing the cover. Covers are an incredibly important part of book sales, so I have searched around until I found the perfect artist for my novels. It takes him about four days (he works days at his FT "real" job) to get a finished product back to me. All told, moving my book from final draft to ready-to-publish inventory takes one week. My wife then reads the final item one last time and makes her suggestions, which I follow. She's a common-sense reader and gives me common-sense feedback. This is an important step. She does her read-through and makes her notes for me concomitant to the days when the cover is being done, so there's no delaying the process for my wife's read. I format the ebook for publication using Vellum; formatting takes less than the ten minutes, including the addition of front- and back-matter, which mostly is copied and pasted from earlier books. Then we're ready to put the book up for sale.

I put one copy of the book up on book funnel and send an email to my mailing list select group, which is a group of about 150 of the most active participants on my mailing list (8000 strong and counting) and I ask the 150 to please download the freebie from book funnel. If they want, they will review it on Amazon when I send them the second email in a day or two announcing publication. My participation from this group is about 70%. Which means that within a matter of a week or so from first publication my books will have anywhere from 50-100 reader reviews.

Publishing my book on KDP takes less than an hour. Publishing my book on Createspace takes even less. Now my electronic book and my paperback are both up for sale. Once they are, I announce the publication to my full mailing list. My book is not discounted during any of this. It usually will hit the Amazon Top Twenty for legal thrillers within about 24 hours and copies start moving out the door as the Amazon algos take over.

Compare this to what you know about how tradpub works. Compared to those "real" writers, we're living and writing and publishing in two different worlds. Two months after publication, Amazon pays me my first month's 70% of sales. Tradpub writers get something like 15% maybe a year after publication. Most of those brothers and sisters have day jobs. I don't--not since I started DIY on Amazon.

After I've finished up my 2-3 hours of writing every day, I spend maybe an hour a day doing marketing. This consists of checking my Facebook ads for cost-per-click values, and maybe applying for a Bookbub or buying a Bargain Booksy listing. I don't do much more marketing anymore. My name is pretty well known among my genre, my niche, and my books fly out the door accordingly.

Tradpub can't compete with me. If I don't like how a book is moving in the market, I'll rewrite the blurb or tweak the cover. Fifteen minutes tops on blurb re-dos. Cover change-ups are rare; my artist and I pretty much know what will move books and we put that into practice with each book. I don't mess much with keywords anymore; I used to; now that's refined down to what works best for me.

I have an assistant. She runs my author's Facebook pages. This consists of daily posts of this or that article about books or publishing, and consists of interacting with readers, which I also do through reader emails I get every day. Everyone's inquiry or complaint or compliment gets a response. She gets paid for two hours of effort a day and she's excellent. She also does occasional newsletters to the mailing list but I really don't paper those readers like every week or two weeks, like some writers do. I hate signing up for stuff and getting victimized by some over-the-top seller and I know my readers do too. But every now and then we'll give away a free book just to say thanks or talk about a day at the beach--something personal that I hope connects.

That's my process. The results are astonishing. At one time I was a pretty well known trial lawyer and handled some pretty impressive clients. I never, however, earned as much as I do now with my books. I sell about 10,000 books a month and gather in about 7 million page reads a month, and I'm only just starting my third year. This year I will earn in the mid-to-upper six figures.

Thank you, Amazon. Thank you, Bookbub. I got into this in January of 2014 as a way to supplement my Social Security. Even after forty years of law practice I hadn't managed to save very much for retirement. But there was also a time in there of a complete medical disability which required me to shut down my law practice for two years and basically start over in my sixties. Savings were depleted by this. So remaking myself into a thriller writer has been a godsend and I am very grateful. I try to pass this along by helping other writers with their questions about marketing, etc., keeping in mind that as JAK says this is not a zero-sum game. The fact that I sell a book doesn't mean that you won't. We will both sell if we have what readers want to read.

While my methods and run-times differ dramatically from tradpub, both those writers and I must reach the same goal: we must write books that readers want to read. There is no secret ingredient, nothing that can be learned or taught.

You either write books that readers want to read, or you don't.

What Writing Success Requires

I have a very strong presence in legal thrillers. The secret has been marketing. My two most recent books are around 8 and 10 in legal thrillers top 100. The books I can't move in order to get a better ranking are John Grisham (of course) and the rest are Thomas Mercer imprints where the author has one or more books by TM that then pull the others along and they all rank in the top five or six all of the time. So be it, there's nothing I can do about it except bank my mid-five-figures each month and look at the next shiny toy on Amazon's site.

But I was lucky and somewhat knowledgeable when I first published in January 2014. I had done SEO on Google's Adwords for ten years and was pretty up on the importance of graphics and keywords. The graphics paid off by Bookbub giving me like ten or twelve promos in my first fifteen months. This had everything to do with my cover art, I am convinced. No, the covers are not typical genre like many gurus preach, but they did all have the indicia of legal thrillers such as courthouse columns or scales of justice somewhere in the cover. But my cover artist is a genius and had done Internet branding for many years and knew what i needed/wanted. So that was a good fit--and how else did Bookbub select me so often except by my covers since I started out a total unknown writer? Now I rank about number 26 in kindle thriller writers two years later.

Branding is the name of the game for me. Which will at least get you to the Look Inside feature. After that you better have a compelling story, worldview, and voice or no matter how great your cover you won't sell books. Purchasers are very astute when it comes to authorial sophistication and I was lucky in that regard too because I had written novels for thirty years, never made a sale to tradpub, and was quite accomplished (not bragging, I hope) when it came time to producing sentences people would like. Since January 2014 I have published 14 books and sold in excess of 150,000, the majority of those in the past eight or nine months.

I believe that trying hard is admirable but it's not enough. Practice is required within the art form itself; lots of unrewarded practice. Thank goodness no one did publish my first novel, my second, or my eighth or ninth. Thank goodness the New Yorker and The Atlantic rejected the hundreds of short stories I submitted over the years. But today I would be proud for them to publish me. I think I have finally started to learn how to say what it is I envision and what it is I am trying to distill from that vision into words on the page.

It didn't come to me in full until I was 74 years old. You have to really want this more than anything.

Yes, Amazon has definitely saturated my genre and I am paying them back. I am saturating it too.

Why Amazon Doesn't Violate Antitrust Laws (for the hundredth time)

“The central problem is Amazon’s enormous dominance of the entire book publishing industry,”

I am the publisher; Amazon is the retail outlet. The “publishers,” consisting of thousands of small fry just like me, exist in the most democratizing store front in the history of the world, Amazon’s website. Legally, one could argue that Amazon is a consignment store. “Here is a place to sell your goods,” says Amazon. “Bring them into our store and we will collect the money from the sale and keep a percent for rent and other overhead.”

How Amazon is strikingly different from Standard OIl and AT&T is that Amazon has no ownership interest in even one item out of the millions it sells. It doesn’t own oil lands, leaseholds, drilling platforms, tanker ships, or oil, the commodity itself. Neither does it own communication products put into the stream of commerce for resale. It uses communication products just like it uses carbon fuels, but it doesn’t own those things and has no competitive footprint in the market of such items.

Neither does Amazon have a competitive footprint in the market of books in the sense of ownership interest in the books it sells or the tires it sells or the garden hose it sells or the bracelets it sells–it’s simply a provisioner of a marketplace. You would never accuse a mall of antitrust; you would never accuse a website of antitrust. Offering other people’s products for sale in your mall just doesn’t fit inside the unfair competitive advantage by price-fixing and monopolistic practices the antitrust laws contemplate.

Finally, Amazon’s business practices in no way restrain trade. Every whiner and bitcher out there can go over to Go Daddy, buy a URL for $2.99 and set up a website for $9.99 a month and compete with Amazon 100% restraint free. There is no monopolistic practice that prevents that.

Late on Posts - Busy With New Book

The new book is Michael Gresham. Michael is 55, Catholic and prays, divorced, spends hours cleaning up after a brother who refuses to take his meds, negotiates with ex-wife who needs money to buy hormones and get pregnant, and defends a client with diminished capacity who is accused of killing the wife of a federal judge. This is enough to get anyone rolling down the the thriller tracks.

The idea for the book--it will develop into a series--is the constituency of my readership. The great majority of my readers will relate to Michael's age and marital status because so many fall within the same general characteristics. Is this a ploy? You're damn right it is. I want to read about people I can relate to and I bet you do, too.

Michael Gresham is a legal thriller. There's enough going on between the covers to keep you up late, reading when you should be sleeping and getting ready for tomorrow's mini-drama down at the office, or store, or station, or wherever you earn your keep. The book is written in the first person--your author's notion of how Michael Gresham sounds when he speaks. His words, his dialect, his depth of appraisal of the world around him, his reaction to events: you will come away knowing who he is, I promise you.

Now the question is, do I let one of Amazon's imprints publish the book or do I self-publish? On the one hand, Amazon has access to all the readers any writer could ever want. On the other hand, I do love my freedom and independence and ability to turn on a dime if I decide to change this or that about my work or manipulate the book's price or cover or the jillion other little things authors like to fiddle with. There's always that. So I'm going to let my beta reader Maia decide what I do with the book. She won't know she's making this decision: but when I see her reaction I'll know exactly where to place it for adoption. Another wounded child on its way home.

And that, my friends, is how I view the publication of one of my books.