Copywriting for dummies: tooting my own horn

Posted on September 28, 2014 by Richard Bowker

One of the challenges of being an independent author is that you’re responsible for everything associated with publishing your book, including editing, cover design, and marketing.

I haven’t outsourced writing the marketing material for my recent novels. Hey, I’m a writer! I can do that! But it ain’t easy. Your job is to write a couple hundred compelling words explaining why the world should be thrilled to read your book. Where to begin?

Anyway, here’s my first attempt at marketing copy for Where All the Ladders Start. Does this make you want to part with three or four of your hard-earned dollars?

What I wanted to say was this:

The novel is about religion and family, not necessarily in that order. It involves two separate cases, which causes it to be about a third longer than the first two novels in the Last P.I. series. In the course of the novel, our protagonist reads the following books:

A Tale of Two Cities
Middlemarch
Great Expectations
An unnamed Harry Bosch novel
Selections from the collected poems of William Butler Yeats

His friend Doctor J, who has very different tastes in literature, reads the following books:

Civilization and Its Discontents
A Genealogy of Morals
The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

And the following things happen to our hero:

He is whacked on the head with a rock
He fights off a pack of feral humans in the wilds of Somerville
He is arrested for murder
He is shot at twice
He skins his knee
He rips his new pants climbing a fence
He is lectured to by several people about the meaning of history and the danger of making bad career choices
Against his better judgment, he travels to New York City

But most of that didn’t make it into the copy.

Maybe I should at least try to say something about Middlemarch?

The Old Manse

Posted on September 27, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Like Walden Pond, the Old Manse in Concord, MA is another American literary shrine just minutes away from where I work. I visited it decades ago, but a couple of weeks ago the entire company got to go there.

Both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in the place. Emerson wrote his essay “Nature” there; Hawthorne wrote the pieces he later collected in the book Mosses from an Old Manse.

The main feature of the house for me (the only thing I remembered from my first visit decades ago) is the little messages and sayings that Sophia Hawthorne etched on the window panes with her diamond ring; these give me a shivery sense of stepping into her long-ago life.

The original garden was planted by Thoreau, and it’s still maintained:

(The people handing out cider are new.)

The Old Manse overlooks Concord’s Old North Bridge. If you happened to be hanging out there on April 19, 1775, you would have heard “the shot heard round the world.” Here is Emerson’s poem “Concord Hymn,” which he wrote for the dedication of the Battle monument there in 1837:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare,
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

That first stanza still packs a wallop, doesn’t it?

Where All the Ladders Start

Posted on September 20, 2014 by Richard Bowker

I have looked at the novel I’ve been working on in all different seasons, at all different times of day, and I have finally decided its title is Where All the Ladders Start. Readers of a poetical persuasion will recognize the quote from the ending of the Yeats poem The Circus Animals’ Desertion:

I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Deciding to give the books in my Last P. I. series titles lifted from poems is one of the many ways in which I strive to be a commercial failure. Couldn’t I have come up with something clever — liking naming them after numbers, or colors, or letters of the alphabet?

Anyway, I am declaring the novel “pretty much done.” So you’ll have a chance to take a look at it before very long.

Faulkner on inspiration

Posted on August 31, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Two of my favorite writing quotations come from William Faulkner:

I only write when I’m inspired. Fortunately, I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.

And in a similar vein:

I don’t know anything about inspiration because I don’t know what inspiration is; I’ve heard about it, but I never saw it.

I was thinking about these quotations recently as I came to the conclusion that my next novel should be a sequel to The Portal. Fine, but what should the sequel be about? The thing to do, I have found, is to open up a blank document, start asking myself questions (starting with What is this book about?), and start trying to answer them.

In less than two hours, over the course of a couple of mornings, I had the title and the basic idea. They will probably change completely before I’m done, but at least now I’ve got a direction to head in.

The point I wanted to make here is not that I’m especially creative, but that when I say “morning”, I mean 6:30 in the damn morning. Years ago, I couldn’t have imagined being creative at that ungodly hour. But nowadays that’s the way may life happens to be organized, so that’s when I have to get my “inspiration.”

Faulkner knew what he was talking about. And it seems like someone thought that first quote was worthy of an inspirational poster:

I am loathe to criticize anyone but . . .

Posted on August 22, 2014 by Richard Bowker

I have a somewhat respectable day job in which I’m supposed to oversee a couple dozen highly experienced writers. In the past week, two different writers have sent me emails containing a sentence like the following:

I am loathe to make any changes to the content at this late date.

I generally don’t like pointing out mistakes in emails. We’re always writing fast; we don’t don’t have time to go back and edit what we’ve written. But for some reason I decided to point out to one of the writers that the word she should have used was loath. She responded:

I’m so sorry! I thought both words were one in the same.

One in the same! I started to get a pit in my stomach. Was the language changing without my even noticing? Or should I start getting more persnickety about emails?

“Shared Notes & Highlights” for Dover Beach

Posted on August 16, 2014 by Richard Bowker

How come I never noticed Amazon’s “Shared Notes & Highlights” section before? According to Amazon, these are “the thoughts and passages that Kindle readers have shared while reading this book.”

Anyway, here are the shared notes and highlights for my novel Dover Beach. Feel free to use them on Christmas cards, print them on t-shirts, etc.

“Solipsistic,” I suggested. “As if he were the only person who really existed.”

And:

“I know I’m dying,” he said, “but you’re dying, too, everyone is dying. All that matters is what you do before you take that last breath.”

And:

“Rituals are what bind us together. They shelter us from the terror of loneliness and death. They give life meaning and shape.”

I know I know, these don’t seem like quotes from a private-eye novel. But I’m pretty sure they work in context. And Dover Beach is not really a standard-issue private-eye novel.

Writers in movies: Third Star

Posted on August 11, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Haven’t done one of these in a while.

Third Star is an indie movie from 2010 starring Benedict Cumberbatch and three other young British actors. The main character is a 29-year-old aspiring writer who is dying of cancer. His friends take him on one last journey to a remote bay in Wales. Along the way they laugh, they cry, and they learn something about life, about friendship, and about loss.

I know what you’re thinking: This is just the kind of movie I want to avoid at all costs. And you would be right. The movie is nicely photographed, nicely acted, it contains no superheroes, no one meets cute . . . but it still feels very trite, very paint-by-numbers. Everyone has his own flaw, his own secret . . . and yet, at the end, we don’t really feel that we know them; instead, we feel manipulated by a screenwriter without anything deep to say.

There are actually two writers in the movie: the dying-of-cancer-so-he-will-never-achieve-his-life’s-ambition writer and the talented-writer-who-could-never-be-as-good-as-his-famous-father-so-he-gave-it-up writer. But there’s never a moment when we really see them as writers. Cumberbatch’s character feels a generalized sense of loss, of leaving this world too soon, but he never feels this loss as a writer, with stories left untold, with characters left undescribed.

Which is not to say that I can’t empathize with that loss. I sold my first novel when I was about 30; by that time Cumberbatch’s character would have been dead. And I recall that one of my strongest reactions was one of relief. I would never have to think of myself again as an aspiring writer. Instead, I could now think of myself as a published author. However unsuccessful my writing career might be, no one would be able to take that away from me. It surely would have been a cruel fate to be denied that satisfaction. I was hoping I’d get some sense of this from Third Star, but alas, I enjoyed The Two Mrs. Carrolls more.

What you can do when you’re not writing

Posted on August 10, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Go for a run and listen to Chopin. Listening to Chopin doesn’t generally make you run faster, but for me, running is about survival, not speed.
Sit on your deck, drink a Little Sumpin’ ale, and read Middlemarch. This ale is the perfect complement to a long Victorian novel. Middlemarch doesn’t have the humor and passages of stupendous genius that mark a Dickens novel, but it also doesn’t have the absurd coincidences and simpering female characters. Reading the novel, though, is taking me about as long as writing my own.
Watch The Two Mrs. Carrolls, an entertaining but incredibly bad 1947 thriller starring Humphrey Bogart (a tad out of character playing an insanely murderous artist) and Barbara Stanwyck, who only gradually comes to the realization that the artist she married is also insanely murderous. It features a ridiculously primitive application of Chekhov’s gun — “Here, I happen to have this gun. Why don’t I leave it with you in case the Yorkshire strangler happens by?” It also features what I’ll call the principle of “Barbara Stanwyck’s gun” — in a movie of a certain era, if the female lead is pointing a gun at the villain at the climax, she will find herself unable to shoot the guy, for no apparent reason. The villain will easily disarm her, but the hero will arrive in the nick of time to save her from certain death.
Go to the beach and complete the Sunday Sudoku. I am man enough to admit that I am often unable to complete the Sunday Sudoku. However, I’m here to tell you that I completed it in near-record time today. Was it the salty air? Or the knowledge that I didn’t have an unfinished novel to return to?
Read the two-page open-letter to Amazon in the New York Times signed by a bazillion famous authors, telling Amazon to basically quit using them as leverage in their negotiations with Hachette. Color me unimpressed. Here is one response to it, via The Passive Voice.
Come up with a couple more ideas for your novel. Well, yes, that can happen, too.

Draft 3 of my novel is complete — am I done yet?

Posted on August 9, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Probably not. But at least now I have a draft I can give to folks without having to apologize and explain about all the stuff I’m going to fix, really, no foolin’, I know I didn’t explain what happened to the second car–I’ll get to that.

This draft took just about a month. It involved changing a basic plot line, which involved changing the characterization of a major character. Plus the usual tinkering. Everything seems to make sense now, at least to me. At least today. So I’m declaring a partial victory.

Why I’ll never get rich from writing, part xxxvii

Posted on August 4, 2014 by Richard Bowker

This is from Hugh Howey, via The Passive Voice — the way to become successful in online publishing:

The idea is this: Annual releases are too slow to build on one another. And not just in the repetition of getting eyeballs on your works, but in how online recommendation algorithms work. Liliana suggests publishing 5 works all at once. Same day. And she thinks you should have another work sitting there ready to go a month later. While these works are gaining steam, write the next work, which if you write and edit in two months, will hit a month after the “hole” work.

Why does this work? I think it has to do with “impressions,” or the number of times people see a product before they decide to take a chance on it. (In this case, the product is your name.) It also has to do with recommendation algorithms and how new works are treated on various online bestseller lists. From my own experience, I know that it was following WOOL with four more rapid releases that helped my career take off. I followed these five releases a month later with FIRST SHIFT, and I released a work every three or four months after that (SECOND SHIFT, I, ZOMBIE, THIRD SHIFT, plus several short works).

Here I am a year and a half into the writing of my new novel, and I’m close. But I’m not quite there. Maybe a couple more months… Will I have something ready to go a month later? Yeah. Sure. No problem.