There is a logical fallacy among many writers (witness the blogs and their followers) that goes like this: You sell lots of books; if I study how you did it, I will sell lots of books, too. This thinking doesn't, of course, take into account the factor of fortunate coincidence: in the first writer's case, certain events occurred that probably won't happen again in your case. But the second factor, and what this little blog exercise really is about, is what I call the logical fallacy of success. Here it is: Your ability to do something doesn't automatically mean I have the same ability.
Let's face it. Some people are smarter than other people. That is why they happen to succeed, because they thought their way into it. Or maybe they're more talented, so they wrote books that more people wanted to read. Just because author Jones can write unputdownable books doesn't mean author Smith can do the same. For author Smith to spend $99.99 to take author Jones' course on How to Sell Books is a foolish expenditure, if viewed in this light.
Now I'm going to tell you the secret of selling lots of books as it's come to me: write books people want to read. Can everyone do that? No. Can you? If factor one (the fortunate coincidence of events) and factor two (the level of IQ or talent) are both present, the answer for you is "maybe." Why only maybe? Because you might throw up your hands and give up on book nine when book ten was the one that was really going to sell. Or maybe you're writing romance when it's really erotica that's your gift.
But here's the bottom line. Can you write and sell books and quit the day job? You won't know until you try. And try. And try.
That's what the rest of us did.
But save the $99.99. That's the price of admission for one day at Seaworld. (I know, Shamu is a victim of his own success. My wife is actively campaigning to set them all free, so got that covered. Which leaves me more time to write. But seriously, go to Seaworld rather than take someone's course for $99.99. If you don't yet understand how the oblique leads to the unique in your art, you might not be ready.)
Thursday, October 8, 2015
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
Appointment World
I write on two Macbook Pro's. One is on my treadmill desk and one sits with me in my writing chair. The last time I was in Mexico my writing chair Macbook blew up (not literally). So I took it to Geeksquad when I returned to the U.S. They sent it off to Apple, who reported back the motherboard and this or that were burned out. Fried, they said. Fair enough. So I authorized the repair bill, which was about half the cost of a new machine ($700 repair). Lo and behold, I get a notice today from Geeksquad telling me to go on their calendar and make an appointment to come pick up my machine.
Apppointment?
What rock have I been living under? In Mexico I had my eyes examined by Dr. Cornel in Rosarito (great eye doctor, by the way). But first I called for an appointment. "Just come in tomorrow," he said, answering his own phone. "Yes, but what time?" I asked him. Silence on the line. "Just come in when you're ready," he said. "I'll see you then," he finished. So I did. He got me right in the next day when I turned up in his office. No forms to fill out, go right into the examining room. Exam took all of thirty minutes, following which he fitted me with the best pair of glasses I've ever owned. They have all the bells and whistles you can buy in the States, of course, but the point I'm trying to make is that an appointment wasn't necessary even for the office visit. But back in the U.S.? Apppointment for my computer pickup?
All right, so I'm old fashioned and, to be honest, an appointment does sound better than waiting forever in the customer service line at Geeksquad. Maybe it's time I learned to get with it, American style.
Still, I think back to my Mexico days. Come in when you're ready.
It works for me.
Apppointment?
What rock have I been living under? In Mexico I had my eyes examined by Dr. Cornel in Rosarito (great eye doctor, by the way). But first I called for an appointment. "Just come in tomorrow," he said, answering his own phone. "Yes, but what time?" I asked him. Silence on the line. "Just come in when you're ready," he said. "I'll see you then," he finished. So I did. He got me right in the next day when I turned up in his office. No forms to fill out, go right into the examining room. Exam took all of thirty minutes, following which he fitted me with the best pair of glasses I've ever owned. They have all the bells and whistles you can buy in the States, of course, but the point I'm trying to make is that an appointment wasn't necessary even for the office visit. But back in the U.S.? Apppointment for my computer pickup?
All right, so I'm old fashioned and, to be honest, an appointment does sound better than waiting forever in the customer service line at Geeksquad. Maybe it's time I learned to get with it, American style.
Still, I think back to my Mexico days. Come in when you're ready.
It works for me.
Friday, September 18, 2015
National Book Awards: No Indies
It's happened again: another award another troubling result: the National Book Awards fiction longlist contains no Indie books:
Each April, the Foundation sends the official National Book Awards guidelines and entry forms to the publishers in its master database. Those publishers who do not receive the materials automatically can call or email the Foundation to request a copy. Authors cannot submit their books themselves; they must have their publishers contact us directly. However, the guidelines are always available for informational purposes here:www.nationalbook.org/nbaentry.html.
In order to be eligible for the Award, a book must be written by an American citizen and published by an American publisher between December 1 of the previous year and November 30 of the current year. Self-published books are only eligible if the author/publisher publishes the work of other authors in addition to his own. Books published through services such as iUniverse are not eligible for the Award."
Did any Indie writers make it onto the long longlist? Or even the long long longlist?
Are there other Indies out there who, with me, would like to form a publishing co-op with an eye toward entering the NBA next year?
Just saying.
Jesse Ball, “A Cure for Suicide”
Pantheon Books/Penguin Random House
Bill Clegg, “Did You Ever Have a Family”
Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Karen E. Bender, “Refund”
Soft Skull/Counterpoint Press
Angela Flournoy, “The Turner House”
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Lauren Groff, “Fates and Furies”
Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House
Adam Johnson, “Fortune Smiles”
Random House/Penguin Random House
T. Geronimo Johnson, “Welcome to Braggsville”
William Morrow/HarperCollins
Edith Pearlman, “Honeydew”
Little, Brown/Hachette Book Group
Hanya Yanagihara, “A Little Life”
Doubleday/Penguin Random House
Nell Zink, “Mislaid”
The Ecco Press/HarperCollins
Surely some Indie writer somewhere penned a tome that should have found its way onto the list. But wait, there's a catch: Indie publishers are eligible IF they have published the works of other authors. The full eligibility text is here:
"WHO CAN SUBMIT BOOKS?
Each April, the Foundation sends the official National Book Awards guidelines and entry forms to the publishers in its master database. Those publishers who do not receive the materials automatically can call or email the Foundation to request a copy. Authors cannot submit their books themselves; they must have their publishers contact us directly. However, the guidelines are always available for informational purposes here:www.nationalbook.org/nbaentry.html.
In order to be eligible for the Award, a book must be written by an American citizen and published by an American publisher between December 1 of the previous year and November 30 of the current year. Self-published books are only eligible if the author/publisher publishes the work of other authors in addition to his own. Books published through services such as iUniverse are not eligible for the Award."
Did any Indie writers make it onto the long longlist? Or even the long long longlist?
Are there other Indies out there who, with me, would like to form a publishing co-op with an eye toward entering the NBA next year?
Just saying.
Friday, August 21, 2015
New Thaddeus Murfee Book: The Lawyer's Lawyer
I love writing about court cases where the target is moving. Where things are not what they seem. Because, in truth, that is the human condition: that things are never what they seem. We think we know our spouses or our children or our best friends, but do we really? The same thing is true with what happens in court. A guy gets arrested for something. Lawyer A, who has been paid $100,000 to defend the guy, pulls out all the stops. There is scientific evidence, there is a human factors expert, there is an economist, a treating physician, DNA testing and etc. Lawyer B, who has been paid $10,000 to defend the guy, shows up for court in a new suit and a recent haircut. There are no experts, no paid witnesses, no DNA testing experts and evidence, and no stops are pulled out. Lawyer C, the public defender, is paid $0 and immediately starts looking to plead the guy guilty to something. No offense meant; this is a budgetary matter. PD's are damn good lawyers, many, many of them even better than private lawyers, but, alas, they have no money to work with.
What's this all mean to me? That a lawsuit in my novel can have many different faces, depending on the motivation and expertise of the attorneys involved. So my main guy, Thaddeus Murfee, has money to burn. Why? Because that's how most all of us lawyers would like to handle our cases: ones where resources are unlimited. What a different world that would be.
In my latest Thaddeus adventure, due to be released in about 5-6 weeks, Thaddeus is defending a man with multiple motives to murder his wife, opportunity, and means. But there are other possible suspects as well. They also have motive[s], opportunity, and means. Are things as the client says they are? That's the rub: they never are. Which is the great thing about fiction: you can have two legitimate narrators in one book and they can both report the exact same scene differently--even vastly differently. So my client tells me one thing in the office, the police say something entirely different in court, and then the judge comes along and decides out of all of it what parts the jury gets to hear and what parts they won't access.
This is courtroom fiction at its best, this latest Thaddeus book. Be sure and preorder on Amazon. A good one-half of the book is taken up with the trial, my most ambitious yet.
Entertainment.
What's this all mean to me? That a lawsuit in my novel can have many different faces, depending on the motivation and expertise of the attorneys involved. So my main guy, Thaddeus Murfee, has money to burn. Why? Because that's how most all of us lawyers would like to handle our cases: ones where resources are unlimited. What a different world that would be.
In my latest Thaddeus adventure, due to be released in about 5-6 weeks, Thaddeus is defending a man with multiple motives to murder his wife, opportunity, and means. But there are other possible suspects as well. They also have motive[s], opportunity, and means. Are things as the client says they are? That's the rub: they never are. Which is the great thing about fiction: you can have two legitimate narrators in one book and they can both report the exact same scene differently--even vastly differently. So my client tells me one thing in the office, the police say something entirely different in court, and then the judge comes along and decides out of all of it what parts the jury gets to hear and what parts they won't access.
This is courtroom fiction at its best, this latest Thaddeus book. Be sure and preorder on Amazon. A good one-half of the book is taken up with the trial, my most ambitious yet.
Entertainment.
Thursday, August 6, 2015
How I Wrote and Published 10 Books in 18 Months
Whew!
And I get asked about it lots. How the heck did you write so many books in a year and half, books with hundreds of reviews and high (low) rankings?
Truth be told, I wrote them over the past forty or fifty years. Not these published books specifically, but other books. Books that kept me writing nonstop over weekends with work weeks in between. Books that kept me up until three or four in the morning while my future readership was sleeping (or not yet conceived...), books that tortured me with misgivings because I couldn't make the damn book say what it was I was trying to say. And on and on. I wrote wrote wrote. And I submitted submitted submitted. All the major magazine's saw my short stories: Harper's, New Yorker, Atlantic--they all got a taste of my art.
And they all turned me down. "Not quite there," they might scrawl on their rejection slip, or "Please try us again--" -- very popular with the New Yorker way back when. Now I don't know what they write on their rejection slips by way of encouragement, if anything. I don't know because I no longer submit to them. Why would I, when, with the advent of self pub, I can put my voice out there for millions to hear simply by clicking through a few Amazon categories and sub-categories.
In January of 2014 when I published my first novel, it really wasn't. Wasn't really my first novel. I had written my Hemingway lookalike while in college. I had written my Updike lookalike a year after. I had written my Salinger shorts during that same era (all dialogue, all trying to sound East Coast cranky). I had written my Ken Follett novel, my LeCarre ambiguous spy thriller, my Thomas Harris minimalism and my John Grisham soundalike careless toss-away flashes of genius (the other John's: I'm not saying I've ever had any of my own.) So when I published in 2014 you were able to buy a writer who had sounded like everyone else out there and who now had found his own voice and you could hear that and decide whether it was your cup of tea or not.
I then washed, rinsed, repeated nine more times. Or is it ten more times? The count is beginning to escape me. And my writing speed is mine to click into because the structural-grammatical-dramatical pieces are long ago in place. Through practice practice practice.
Now you know. How I published 10 novels in 18 months, downloaded 450,000 of them, and earned well over $100,000. The next twelve months look to be 2.5 times better. Wow on me.
One other thing. I would be remiss not to mention this. Bookbub allowed me to grace its email ten times over the last twelve months (counting this coming Saturday's number 10). Sales upon sales upon sales.
There's a bit of luck involved with all this too.
And I get asked about it lots. How the heck did you write so many books in a year and half, books with hundreds of reviews and high (low) rankings?
Truth be told, I wrote them over the past forty or fifty years. Not these published books specifically, but other books. Books that kept me writing nonstop over weekends with work weeks in between. Books that kept me up until three or four in the morning while my future readership was sleeping (or not yet conceived...), books that tortured me with misgivings because I couldn't make the damn book say what it was I was trying to say. And on and on. I wrote wrote wrote. And I submitted submitted submitted. All the major magazine's saw my short stories: Harper's, New Yorker, Atlantic--they all got a taste of my art.
And they all turned me down. "Not quite there," they might scrawl on their rejection slip, or "Please try us again--" -- very popular with the New Yorker way back when. Now I don't know what they write on their rejection slips by way of encouragement, if anything. I don't know because I no longer submit to them. Why would I, when, with the advent of self pub, I can put my voice out there for millions to hear simply by clicking through a few Amazon categories and sub-categories.
In January of 2014 when I published my first novel, it really wasn't. Wasn't really my first novel. I had written my Hemingway lookalike while in college. I had written my Updike lookalike a year after. I had written my Salinger shorts during that same era (all dialogue, all trying to sound East Coast cranky). I had written my Ken Follett novel, my LeCarre ambiguous spy thriller, my Thomas Harris minimalism and my John Grisham soundalike careless toss-away flashes of genius (the other John's: I'm not saying I've ever had any of my own.) So when I published in 2014 you were able to buy a writer who had sounded like everyone else out there and who now had found his own voice and you could hear that and decide whether it was your cup of tea or not.
I then washed, rinsed, repeated nine more times. Or is it ten more times? The count is beginning to escape me. And my writing speed is mine to click into because the structural-grammatical-dramatical pieces are long ago in place. Through practice practice practice.
Now you know. How I published 10 novels in 18 months, downloaded 450,000 of them, and earned well over $100,000. The next twelve months look to be 2.5 times better. Wow on me.
One other thing. I would be remiss not to mention this. Bookbub allowed me to grace its email ten times over the last twelve months (counting this coming Saturday's number 10). Sales upon sales upon sales.
There's a bit of luck involved with all this too.
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
Novel Writing Course for Lawyers
I've had enough lawyer wannabe novelists write to me about writing, reading their work and giving feedback, and publishing and marketing, that I thought maybe I should ask: would you, an attorney, be interested in enrolling in such a legal thriller course if I developed it? There would be a certain price threshold because the preparation of such a course would take me away from my writing bread and butter, but it would be a reasonable value, of course.
The course could cover the generalities of the legal thriller novel, such as they are, choice of story, expansion of choice into a novel-length treatment, and all the rest of the craft considerations the noobie novelist will need to review. We could maybe even do some hands-on feedback reading and writing where I would take a look at your chapter and publish it online, along with my comments. This might help us all learn.
Comments please. Is this something you might like to do?
The course could cover the generalities of the legal thriller novel, such as they are, choice of story, expansion of choice into a novel-length treatment, and all the rest of the craft considerations the noobie novelist will need to review. We could maybe even do some hands-on feedback reading and writing where I would take a look at your chapter and publish it online, along with my comments. This might help us all learn.
Comments please. Is this something you might like to do?
Sunday, July 19, 2015
Amazon and AntiTrust - the Real Truth
All the anti-Amazon bashing that’s underway again vis a vis Authors United simply goes too far. As a lawyer, the latest AU letter is presumptuous and just a little insulting.
As a “law,” U.S. antitrust is really a conglomeration of federal and some state laws that seek to address cartels, lessened competition and prohibit either (1) the creation of a monopoly or (2) abuse of monopoly power. It’s the latter which the AU is holding up in its grievance.
The fact is, U.S. antitrust laws do not outlaw cartels, business competition, or monopolies. That’s right, a business that operates as a monopoly is not per se illegal. It is illegal only when it takes action that abuses monopoly power.
But what I’ve seen so far is akin to the guy who runs into the fire station and cries out, “Fire! Red! Hot! Falling roofs! People fleeing!” and the fire department asking, give us an address. Because that’s the crux of all the adjectives being flung about by AU: symptoms, maybe, but address, none. In other words, tell the DOJ the address of the abuse of monopoly power. The DOJ will want an abuser, a fact of abuse, a date, a place, etc., all the stuff that enables it to fight the fire. But "fire, red, hot, falling roofs, people fleeing”—those are not enough. Not if you are seeking warranted action.
Again, it’s just a little bit insulting that some would try to inflame action with adjectives. The DOJ lawyers are much better trained than that.
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