Tag Archives: Writing

How little is too much?

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I’ve been reading a lot of Lee Child lately. Not because I was so inspired by the movie, Jack Reacher, which was serviceable but not extraordinary in any way. Rather, I’ve been reading Child’s work because I want to try and tease out The Secret that he seems to have grasped with such alacrity. As I have mentioned elsewhere, Child has sold in excess of 50 million books, which means he’s sitting on a mountain of money somewhere in a stately mansion. If I could earn even one percent of that, I’d be thrilled.

So I’ve been reading, and reading with a purpose. This may mean that I enjoy the books a little less because I’m viewing them with such a critical eye for the details of craft, but I’m willing to sacrifice entertainment for knowledge. What I’ve learned I haven’t quite understood, but I have learned some things.

The most surprising thing I’ve gleaned from reading these Jack Reacher novels is that even though they have a reputation for being twisty, thrill-a-minute books, very little actually goes on in them. In fact, Child is a master at dragging things out well beyond the point where most people would give up. How he does this is a mystery me, but he does do it.

Take Die Trying, which I’m reading right now. I’m just a hair over a hundred pages into the book and only three things have happened: Jack Reacher is taken captive and driven around in the back of a panel van for hours, Jack Reacher spends the night in a barn and Jack Reacher gets put back into the panel van for more driving. Sure, there’s dialogue and whatnot during all of this, but from a plot standpoint the book is positively motionless. In fact, some scenes involving the FBI’s investigation into the initial abduction (there’s an FBI agent mixed up in all of this) involve supporting characters watching a video depicting things we already read, so not only is very little going on, but it’s going on repeatedly.

Despite all of this, Die Trying sold millions. How? I haven’t the foggiest notion.

Killing Floor was the same way. There was a lot of characters sort of meandering around inside the story, bumping up against narrative dead ends, until finally a rushed couple of scenes polished off the main bad guys (which we hardly knew) and concluded the book. End result? Millions sold.

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The never-ending story

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Over the past three weeks I’ve written the remaining three novellas that make up the Camaro Espinoza quartet of interlocking tales. They were a lot of fun to write, for reasons I’ve explicated before and won’t repeat here, but a person cannot subsist on a diet of little, snack-sized pieces that run 24,000 words. Eventually one must get back to the big meals, and that’s what I’m doing today.

I’m not starting cold, which has been the case in the past. This new novel, called One-Night Charter, is another Camaro tale, only this time told on a much larger canvas. If I’m able to write this thing properly (not always a given), it will function not only as a satisfactory continuation of the story told over those four novellas, but also as a standalone introduction to the character who’s been taking up so much of my time lately. While the novellas are all intended for the self-publishing end of things, my plan is to have my agent offer One-Night Charter to traditional publishers as the first in a series.

There is an ideal situation here, and I’ll lay it out for you. On the one hand I can pitch One-Night Charter as an exciting debut for an all-new character but on the other hand, and only if certain circumstances prevail, I can also sell it as a character with a proven track record. What are those certain circumstances? Good ebook sales.

I have been perfectly honest with you folks about how Juárez Dance has done over the last four months. Even with reviews in prominent and not-so-prominent outlets, I’ve barely been able to move the thing. You think giving it away for free would make a difference, but when I did that less than 200 people took advantage of the deal. Consider that for a minute. People didn’t even want it when it cost them nothing! And it’s not like there were bad reader reviews to scare them away, either.

In a way that’s a microcosm of the fate most of my Mexico novels have seen: apathy or outright rejection. For whatever reason, publishers and readers alike — in the US, I should say, and not in the UK or France and Germany — have no interest in stories about Mexico. Why? Who the heck knows? That’s the prime reason I have chosen to abandon Mexico as a setting. It would be a waste of my time to write further about that country, even as its disastrous drug war grinds on.

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And now the fun part.

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On Monday I talked about a couple of writers wrestling with different issues pertaining to the craft and publication. I’d like to get back to that for a minute before going on to discuss something different, but related.

This has more to do with the second of the two writers, the one who’s landed his white whale of a novel and is raring to see it in print. Right now he’s thinking he wants to go the traditional route, for which I laud him, but I cautioned him against wanting to see things move too quickly, because the submission and publication process can take years under the best of circumstances. Factor in the fact that he has no agent and it becomes an almost impossible task.

Bearing all that in mind, I mentioned to him that he might want to try self-publishing. If it’s a quick fix he’s looking for, and if he’s confident that his work has the merit to stand out in a (very) crowded marketplace, there’s no reason why not to do it save the expense required to prepare and release such a thing. But I know that money is as tight for him as it is for me, so that’s an issue. More to the point, promotion is an even bigger problem, and that brings me to today’s topic.

I’ve explained/complained before that traditional publishers don’t do promotion anymore and that’s more or less completely true. Sure, there might be some token effort to get things reviewed by circulating reader copies here and there, hoping that a newspaper or a magazine will take the time, but for the most part books are left to die on a figurative ice floe. Maybe someone will come along and save it from obscurity, but there are a lot of ice floes out there and a lot of stranded books and the boat can only hold so many.

Some books do get heavy pushes. These are the prestige releases from authors deemed worthy of such attention, and these are also the hoped-for big commercial successes. A decision is made early on in the process to get behind a particular release and all stops are pulled out. What little money publishers have set aside for promotion is funneled into these “sure thing” bets and occasionally they pay off. Certainly the odds are better for a book like that than they are for Joe Average’s release, which got a three-line reader review on Amazon (but four stars!).

Now these are traditional releases from publishers that have dedicated personnel whose only job is to promote that publisher’s books. Imagine now a situation where those publicity people don’t exist and there’s not one single person in the entire world who knows you have a book out. That’s how it is with the self-published author.

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How soon is now?

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I was writing one of the Camaro novellas last week — work on the final novella concludes today or tomorrow — when something came up: product placement. Now I suspect that some writers could possibly make money doing actual, honest-to-God product placement in their writing, taking cash from sponsors to mention their products by name, but for most of us that sort of thing is done for free. In fact, I remember reading more than once, way back in the ’80s when I first aspired to be a novelist, that writers should go out of their way not to mention products by name. The reasoning behind this was: 1) product names are trademarked, so you’re not technically allowed to use them, and 2) product names can pull a reader out of the consensual illusion of the story by being too real-world specific.

The first reason seems silly to me. The goal of all companies is to spread product awareness far and wide, so they’re thrilled whenever someone invokes their names. I’m sure they dislike seeing their trademarks misused — such as when someone uses the names Xerox and Kleenex or Band-Aid without capitalizing them, thus turning them into generic nouns — but for the most part they’re probably perfectly happy to have characters drinking Jack Daniels and driving Chevys. Normally I don’t think much about this topic at all, but it occurred to me when writing The Drum, the third Camaro novella, that I’d been deliberately avoiding naming the gun she uses.

If you’re at all curious, Camaro carries a Glock 38, a compact automatic chambered in .45 GAP. In Crossfire she also uses a Glock 39. These weren’t even questions, as I had the weapons fixed in my head from the very beginning without deviation, but I consistently referred to Camaro‘s weapon as “the .45,” and not as what it was. This got me thinking about why I’d studiously avoid using the Glock name, and it occurred to me that I was trying to avoid what Joe Kenney at Glorious Trash calls “gun porn,” where the names and stats of various weapons are laid out for the gun fetishists who happen to be reading. Gold Eagle, purveyors of all things Mack Bolan, are repeat offenders in this regard.

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