Where I've Been

• Bookie Brunch at one of my favorite blogs, vvb32 Reads

• ImajinBooks announces release of the horror anthology What Fears Become (Piers Anthony, Lansdale, Graham Masterton, Ronald Malfi, Joe R. Lansdale, Ramsey Campbell, more)
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• Curiosity Quills interview by Lisa Guy
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• Post on "Modern Folk Myths" at Seeing Night Reviews
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• Finishing revision to Liquid Fear
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• drinking coffee
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• lazily loving bulleted lists

Meet thriller writer Robert McDermott, Deadly Straits

Q: How did Deadly Straits come about?

Robert: I was working a job in Singapore when the towers came down. Prior to that, terrorism was just a vague threat to me. It was there, but off the radar, remote somehow. 9/11 changed that, and I began to think about the potential for a tanker-based terrorist attack and how that was most likely to play out. The story just grew out of those musings.

Q: Why did you decide to self-publish?

Robert: I think the deciding factor was the realization that even if I managed to land a publishing contract (a very big ‘if’), I would still be looking at a two-year wait before the book hit the stores. I didn’t think it should take longer to publish a completed book than it takes to design and build a ship. That just seemed wrong somehow.

Q: What was your biggest challenge in writing Deadly Straits?

Robert: Keeping it real. As a reader, I’m lousy at the ‘suspension of disbelief,’ thing. As a writer, I wanted to ensure my characters and their actions were believable. I hate books or movies where the hero gets smacked between the eyes with a bat and then jumps up and beats the hell out of twelve bad guys. Or books where the hero is a nuclear physicist, brain surgeon, or whatever, who gets in a bind and just happens to turn out to be a skilled helicopter pilot. To me that’s just not believable.

Q: What are you working on now?

Robert: Promoting Deadly Straits is taking a big chunk of time, but I’m also working on a sequel in which my hero Tom Dugan takes on the Somali pirates. I actually have some (very peripheral) insight into the pirate situation. The M/V Biscaglia, a ship on which I supervised repairs, was hijacked several months after she left the yard in Singapore. By that time, I was no longer involved, but having gotten to know the crew in the yard, I followed the situation closely. The ship and crew were finally released two months later when the owner paid the ransom. It really changes one’s perspective when the you know the hostages as individuals.

Q: Final thoughts?

Robert: Like all new authors, I really need exposure, so I’m making an offer to your readers. I’ll send the first fifty readers that contact me a free copy of Deadly Straits (ebook only). They can reach me though the contact page of my site at www.remcdermott.com/contact. They should include the words COPY REQUEST in the subject line of the message and indicate their preferred format in the body of the message.
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Jeffrey Mariotte on The Writing Race

The Tortoise and the Hare

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

Literarily speaking, I’m something of a late bloomer.

Though I won a literary award in college, for a short story I wrote there, I didn’t sell a short story to a professional market until I was 33 years old. Another eleven years passed before I sold a novel. In between, I sold some comic book scripts, but I was a long way from making a living as a writer in those days.

Once I got going, I did my best to make up for lost time. Between 1998 and now, I’ve had 46 novels published (some of which were collaborations with other writers). I’ve also written or contributed to six nonfiction books. I’ve had more than 130 comic books/graphic novels published. I’ve written trading cards. I wrote a DVD game. Maybe a couple dozen short stories. Probably other stuff I’ve long since forgotten. I’ve won some awards, hit some bestseller lists, and kept on plugging.

I’ve been a busy guy, you could say. I wouldn’t disagree.

In those days, I was the hare. During that time, I managed to make the break that most writers dream of. I quit the day job and supported myself and my family primarily on my writing income. That was my dream, anyway, and I was living it. I even gave lectures on it, mostly to audiences of impressionable young people.

Then things changed. Literally, between the time that I accepted a speaking gig at an art college and the time I arrived there for the event, the dream had run up against hard, cold reality. The economy broke, and it broke at the same time that publishing was finding itself faced with a new reality. Bookstores were fading away (not all of them—I’m delighted to report that Mysterious Galaxy, the indie genre bookstore of which I’m a co-owner, is about to open its second location—but a lot of them). Borders was on the ropes, and it was a big chunk of every publisher’s pie. Mostly, the e-book revolution was kicking in, and publishers had not figured out how to monetize it effectively. They still haven’t. The result of this double-whammy was that publishing lines were cut, editors were fired, houses became ever pickier about what they’d publish, and the advances they offered were lower than they had been.

So when I gave those speeches at that art college, I had to tell the students that it was possible to live the dream of supporting one’s self through one’s art, but that it was hard, damn hard, and there might come times that one had to take a day job to get through the rough patches.

As I had done.

I still have that day job. It’s been a year and a few months, now. I was hoping it would last six months, maximum. But publishing hasn’t turned around. If anything, it’s getting ever tougher.

Scott—our host, here—he’s always been a hare. He’s put out an impressive number of novels, and done other writing besides. Perhaps more germane to the current conversation: he realized early on the potential of e-books. He exploited that potential, and he’s making a living with his writing. He’s living that dream—my dream.

But I was a tortoise in that regard--or, to mix a metaphor painfully, a print dinosaur. A long-time bookseller, a bookstore owner, and someone who had toiled in the publishing business lo these many years, I was not ready to give up on print. I’m still not. I don’t believe digital will replace print, just like TV didn’t replace movies and paperbacks didn’t replace hardcovers. But I do believe that the business is changing, quickly and inexorably. I believe that digital has opened new avenues for stories to be told, and even though its rise has closed down some of the old avenues, the new ones outnumber the closed ones. The end result is that writers will have more places to tell stories, and readers will have more ways to enjoy them.

That is, believe me, a hard admission to make. But I believe it’s the truth.

I’m a digital tortoise, just now beginning to explore the world that pioneer hares discovered. My first original e-book effort was a paranormal YA adventure called Carnival Summer, that I didn’t really ever try to promote effectively. If you put it up, they will come, I hoped. They didn’t. But with e-books, it turns out, once you publish something, it remains available. What a concept! When Simon & Schuster puts out volume 1 of my paranormal YA series Dark Vengeance this fall, maybe those readers will be drawn to it. Carnival Summer, like my other ventures into digital, is available at both Amazon.com and Smashwords.

More recently, I have become ever more intrigued with e-publishing. My second release was a digital reprint of The Slab, a well reviewed horror epic that had originally appeared, in an expensive, illustrated edition, from a small press. My edition was neither illustrated nor expensive. Once again, it can be found at Amazon and Smashwords.

I followed that with an original thriller called The Devil’s Bait. It garnered a great blurb from e-book bestseller J. Carson Black, who—like Scott—recently signed a deal with Amazon’s Thomas & Mercer imprint. J. Carson Black is another of the gurus I look up to when it comes to this e-book world—another hare in whose footprints I’m plodding. The Devil’s Bait is taut, suspenseful, and loaded with action, or so I like to think. Find it at Amazon or Smashwords.

My most recent release is a collection of short horror stories called Nine Frights. It’s my first short fiction collection, and it contains stories that have been previously published, in some reasonably prestigious places like the anthology Hellbound Hearts, as well as stories I never bothered trying to find a home for, because I was too busy writing novels and comics to shop around short stories. Amazon and Smashwords? You bet.

Can a tortoise morph into a hare?

We’ll see. I have to hope so. I have to hope that this new world of e-books is still welcoming to latecomers. I have to hope that a writer who’s been well reviewed, who’s received way too much generous praise from folks like David Morrell and Andrew Klavan and Christopher Golden and Don Winslow—and, yes, Scott Nicholson—and put out enough books to strain a shelf, can remake his career.

I haven’t given up on traditional publishing—my agent is out there right now with a new manuscript. But I have given up on the idea that traditional publishing is the only game in town. Or even the most important game.

Pass me one of those carrots, wouldya?

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Bookstore guilt: Not Interested

The closing of Borders led to a rash of articles like this one lamenting the loss of bookshelves, delivering the underlying message that now people will have fewer places to get books and caring people should all feel sad and depressed. Such nostalgia-driven sentiments are understandable, and you can't tell someone what they should feel nostalgia about (any more than you can tell them which faith to have or whom to fall in love with), but the arguments are logically flawed.

The reality is bookshelves are expanding at a more rapid rate than ever. The decline in new paper books is way more than offset by the avalanche of new digital titles. And it's not just the current crop of indie authors leading the charge. Small presses and digital publishers are staying fast and lean, moving rapidly to take advantage of the era's opportunities.

I don't celebrate the decline of bookstores, but I am not overly nostalgic about them, either. While I have done numerous signings in them and purchased books there, I get much of my reading material at thrift shops, yard sales, and the library. I am not a collector. Aside from a few core favorites, I read a book and then pass it on. I don't feel smarter standing in a bookstore, and even though I might discover titles by browsing, I see exponentially more titles on my computer every single day. And I don't think people are going to go out of their way to support inconvenient behaviors such as driving to the store unless they want the experience instead of the product.

My father-in-law was once CEO of a chain of 100 family-owned retail stores in the Midwest. They were expanding rapidly though the 1960s and 1970s. Then some Wal-Mart executives came to the family and showed the Sam Walton plan for market domination and made a reasonable offer to buy out the family chain, more as a courtesy than a cut-throat business move. After all, Wal-Mart planned to kill the chain one way or another and had little to gain with the offer.

My father-in-law said the family turned down the deal because Wal-Mart's plan was "impossible." The traditional retail business was built on a profit margin of 33 percent, while Wal-Mart was planning a 28 percent margin. It would never work, and even if it did, customers would remain loyal to the family chain where they'd been shopping for decades, even if they had to pay just a little bit more.

Wrong and wrong. The family chain collapsed within several years, and my father-in-law said the big shocking lesson was that people DID NOT CARE about nostalgia. They were going to go to the place that gave them the best deal at the most convenient location.

I was at a little bookstore in a small Kentucky town recently and I asked the owner if she could survive the digital revolution. She said, "People will always want books." I told her she had a great location, and she answered "This used to be the town bus station." She did not see the irony.

Just because bookstores die doesn't mean people will read any less. In fact, we are reading more, because it's cheaper, more convenient, and most of us have a device at our fingertips for reading. I am not going to feel guilty because "we didn't save the bookstores." The closing of a bookstore doesn't make us morally weaker, dumber, or less civilized. It's not a referendum on our ability to communicate or our intellectual curiosity. It's not any kind of harbinger at all except for the simple one that the bookstores are not serving our collective needs at enough volume to maintain a profit.

We aren't killing bookstores. We are birthing a new Golden Era of literature, by writing and reading and sharing ideas, and that's far, far more important.

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International bestsellerdom

Thanks to the talents of Christa Polkinhorn, our translation of The Skull Ring (Der Schadelring) hit #48 in the German Kindle store. The little note beside it says it has spent 17 days in the Top 100. so it must have entered a couple of months ago for a while. Due to a pricing snafu related to the European value-added-tax (VAT), Amazon actually unpublished it because the price was lower elsewhere.

After I put it up and couldn't achieve the 70 percent royalty, I decided to go ahead and make it the lowest possible price. We'll earn less money but the volume should be higher until I can get the price set at $3.99 worldwide. The lesson here is, if you have a foreign edition, price it at least a dollar higher everywhere else besides your Amazon market. (Christa has a handy list of the book's various markets.)

The other interesting aspect is the German bestseller is clearly luck, an early entry into a developing market. I have done zero marketing, and I wouldn't even know where to begin if I wanted. The lower price also helps, although I was selling pretty well at around 3 euros, whereas now is 1 euro. I doubt if I will sell three times as many copies, but at least I will be able to gauge the size of the market (I'd guess the German market is about 1/2 to 1 percent the size of the US market).

I am currently developing French and Portuguese translations in addition to a deal I just signed in China. I will be developing a page to solicit translators, and there are a ton of opportunities for people with translating skills who are willing to work on a progressive, profit-sharing model. I have raised my royalty rate to 20 percent net for the translators, so even though it won't be a lot of money up front, over time it should really add up.

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Bestselling author Victorine Lieske of the Summer Book Club

Victorine Lieske is the author featured this week on The Summer Book Club, one of last year's prominent breakthrough indie success stories. Here she is!

You know, it’s funny, I never set out to become an author. I thought it would be cool to be able to tell people that I wrote a novel. That was my whole motivation. It’s really kind of a silly thing, now that I think about it.

And of course, being a silly thought, I wasn’t very serious about it. I started a novel once, then about ten pages in I lost interest in it. Years later I started another one, but got busy and it never went anywhere.

Then, one day I was getting my daughter out of the car and my back seized up. I literally couldn’t move. I was put on bed rest to heal. Since I was stuck in bed with nothing to do, I decided to write that novel I always wanted to write. Easy, right? I set my laptop on my lap and just started typing. I wanted to write about a rich business man going incognito and meeting up with a woman on the run. I thought it would be fun to combine a light romance with a suspenseful mystery. I finished the first draft of Not What She Seems in one week. (I had no idea that was fast for a first draft. I knew nothing about writing.)

After finishing that first draft I thought I was done. I didn’t know writers edited. Funny, right? (Really, it was more scary than funny.) Luckily I decided to figure out if my book was any good. That’s when I found critiquecircle.com . I submitted my book, chapter by chapter, through the critique website. I learned that my first draft needed work. A lot of work! In fact, I threw out the last half of the novel and rewrote it. Then I submitted the book again. It took me four years to get the book into shape.

But I knew I had something interesting when I got comments from other authors telling me they couldn’t wait to read more of my book. They would ask me why my book wasn’t published already, and ask when the next chapter would come out. Honestly, this is why I kept going with it. I loved hearing the feedback from people who enjoyed reading my story.

Even though I’ve sold over 113,000 copies and made it on the NYT’s best seller list and signed with an agent, I can honestly say my favorite part of this whole journey is when I get an email from a fan. It makes it all worth it.

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Not What She Seems is 99 cents on  Kindle and Nook.

Visit  Summer Book Club Facebook page for a chat with Victorine at 2 pm EST Saturday, Aug. 6. Shewill be giving away a free signed paperback copy of Not What She Seems.

Nicholson signs book deal with Amazon

The third-person caption is to help with those keyword searches...the media gurus tell me to do so.

As first announced through my newsletter, I have signed with Amazon to publish two books with their Thomas & Mercer thriller imprint. Liquid Fear and its sequel Chronic Fear will be released on Dec. 20. Liquid Fear will remain available in current form until then, but I am working with a developmental editor to make it and the sequel even better!

I will be blogging elsewhere about my reasons for doing this, since I don't want to dwell too much on writer talk here at the blog. The short answer is Amazon is the best publisher on Earth and knows more about selling books than any entity in history. Amazon, with its Kindle, already helped me fulfill my dream of writing full time as a career, and this relationship will open up plenty more opportunities and freedom in the years ahead.

So if you don't have Liquid Fear, I think it's still on sale for 99 cents in some places but the price is going up soon. And, of course, once Amazon publishes, the books will only be available through the Kindle and in select print outlets. Good times. Thanks much for your support, especially those who stuck with me when I was practically invisible in the literary world. What a difference a few years and some faith can make!

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P.S. I could be crass and say my guide The Indie Journey tells how I did it, but I believe more importantly it shows how YOU can do it! Also, check out Be Nicholson's Agent! for huge September giveaways--yes, I am giving away 15 percent of my income for the month...