Why give away an e-book?

Posted on May 9, 2014 by Richard Bowker

The Portal continues to be free on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The main idea here is to generate customer reviews, because reviews are what stimulate e-book sales. As my publisher says:

The more reviews, the more sales. In other words, “people are interested in buying what other people are interested in reviewing”. This is the basic definition of Social Engagement.

Reviews are hard to come by, actually. I don’t know what percentage of readers leave reviews, but it can’t be very high. Giving the book away for a while increases the pool of readers, which increases your odds of getting reviews.

My publisher is more interested in the number of reviews than how positive the reviews are, but obviously that matters to the author! It also matters to some potential advertisers, who aren’t interested in promoting books unless they have received a certain number of reviews at a certain quality level (e.g., at least 10 reviews, average higher than 4.0).

Here are the first couple of (five-star) reviews that have come in as a result of this promotion. Both readers have a similar reaction — which is exactly the reaction I was hoping for, actually. This one is titled “A Lot of Heart”:

I thought at first this was going to be another YA gimmicky novel with kids complaining about their lives and using the device of dimension travel just to come up with random quirky things, but this book is much more than that. You really get to know and care about the characters, and things move along quite well and not predictably. The really surprising part is the life lessons learned by the characters – they really leave you with something more than just a fun little read. Glad I read it!

And this one is titled “Very Enjoyable”:

Really enjoyed this book. At first I thought it was going to be kind of silly but it didn’t take long till I could hardly put the book down. I found myself identifying with the curiosities of Larry.

Really hope there is a second in the series coming!

So, thanks to these readers, and everyone else who takes the time to leave a review.

“The Portal” is now free on the Nook!

Posted on April 28, 2014 by Richard Bowker

For a limited time only, presumably. Presumably Amazon will follow suit before long and lower its price to zero, but you should probably go ahead and pay real money for it anyway.

Here’s a recent 5-star customer review from Amazon:

In this new entry in the Young Adult fiction category, Richard Bowker explores questions of our relationship to the world we live in by telling the tale of a young adolescent who discovers a portal to an alternate version of that world. By creating that world as one with underdeveloped technology, he is able to paint a vivid picture of what life might have been like in the mid 18th century in colonial New England (even though the portal is not a time-travel device). His characters are well-drawn, and his descriptions of battle scenes between the New Englanders and the Portuguese soldiers are gripping, especially with regard to the angst his protagonist, Larry Barnes, feels about having killed an enemy. In the end, Larry has to make a choice — one that is surprisingly difficult and thought-provoking and which wouldn’t have been anticipated earlier in the story.

Writers in movies: Hemingway & Gellhorn

Posted on April 27, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Another in an occasional series.

Like An Invisible Woman, Hemingway & Gellhorn is about a famous novelist’s relationship with a woman — in this case, the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn. This was an HBO original movie and got a ton of Emmy nominations. Unlike An Invisible Woman, this movie has an A-list actress, Nicole Kidman, playing the woman. She’s pretty good! Clive Owen as Hemingway, however, never convinced me the way Ralph Fiennes as Dickens convinced me. Surely the director (Philip Kaufman) could have found an American who’d have done a better job. (At least an American could have gotten the accent right.)

The other major problem with the movie is the script. It never settles down and becomes about anything. It just dramatizes a series of real-life incidents, usually with clever camera work and editing, and that becomes the film.

We do, of course, see Hemingway writing, and I assume they got that right. He types standing up, his typewriter on a dresser, floating discarded sheets of paper in the direction of a wastebasket at his feet. He types as bombs fall in the street outside, and he types after a long night of drinking, while Gellhorn is too hung over to get out of bed. And the script is full of what I assume are accurate Hemingway quotes, such as: “Writing’s like Mass. God gets mad if you don’t show up.” All good stuff. But they didn’t make me like the movie.

World building

Posted on April 26, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Here’s a bland paragraph from the novel I’m working on:

She was sitting on our patched brown Victorian sofa wearing her patched blue robe. Two glasses of cider and a plate of bread and cheese and apple slices sat on a side table. She had lit a fire in the fireplace, so the front parlor wasn’t as cold as it usually was. She patted the sofa next to her, and I sat down gratefully. She snuggled up against me.

What’s wrong with that? But when my writing group was discussing this chapter, it raised a question from Mary: Where did they get the wood?

This is in the post-apocalyptic world of my Last P.I. series, so it’s not an unreasonable question. But it’s one that has never occurred to me.

World building is in some ways straightforward. For the Last P.I. world, the big picture is easy enough. There was a nuclear war a couple of decades ago; Boston is still struggling in the aftermath. People are poor; they’re still salvaging what they can from the past and figuring out how to survive in the present. And it’s also not hard to come up with lots of details to flesh out the world: people wear patched robes and sit on patched furniture. Auto parts are scarce and valuable; most people don’t have central heat or electricity…

What’s tricky is calibrating the level of detail to convey in the actual novels, from sentence to sentence. A few readers have complained that I haven’t given enough back story about the war. That’s a big picture issue. Mary wants to know about firewood; that’s an issue about the details. My goal is to put in enough detail to make the world convincing and vivid, without piling on so much information that the story’s momentum is lost.

I have some ideas about how to handle the firewood question. But you’ll have to buy the book if you really want to know the answer.

Writers in Movies: The Invisible Woman

Posted on April 20, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Another in an occasional series.

Like Young Cassidy, The Invisible Woman is a biopic about a famous writer. Unlike Young Cassidy, it is really really good.

It’s the story of Charles Dickens and his mistress, the actress Ellen Ternan. Ralph Fiennes directed the movie and plays Dickens; Felicity Jones plays Ternan. I like the way the film captures the complexities of the relationship: this wasn’t a love story. Ternan admired Dickens, but above all she needed money and security; Dickens was fond of Ternan, but above all he needed a young, pretty woman to admire him.

Beyond that, I like that they got Dickens right. Dickens was a creep in his personal life: he was awful to his wife, dismissive of his children . . . but he was also haunted by a dreadful childhood that goes a long way toward explaining the mess he made of things. And there was his art and his public, both of which were more important to him than his wife and children. The film captures that: he is constantly writing, and when he isn’t writing, he is performing.

Finally, the emotional climax of the movie is Ternan’s explication of the alternative endings of Great Expectations. How cool is that?

The movie seems to have been kind of a flop, which is too bad. There are plenty of reasons why, I suppose. It’s not especially romantic; there’s no musical soundtrack (which worked for me); Dickens is probably considered old-fashioned and sentimental. But I found it more satisfying than almost every other movie I’ve seen lately.

(By the way, someday I might start an occasional series of Shakespeare on film. The previous movie that Fiennes directed was a modern-day version of Corialanus, with Vanessa Redgrave and Jessica Chastain. That, too, was pretty good. And also kind of a flop. Maybe Fiennes needs to sign on to direct Iron Man 4.)

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Posted on April 19, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Novels just don’t get any better than that. I don’t really have much more to say about it, but I feel like quoting its first sentence, which is one of the best first sentences ever:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

RIP, Gabriel García Márquez.

Why Barnes & Noble keeps offering to sell me a book I wrote

Posted on April 13, 2014 by Richard Bowker

As I described here, I’ve been baffled by why Barnes & Noble keeps showing me ads that include a book I wrote. I was finally smart enough to track this down and, as people suggested, it has to do with cookies. Turns out there’s a little hard-to-see link in these ads. Click it, and it brings you to an explanatory page that includes an opt-out option. The company behind the ads is called Criteo, and the technology is called personalized retargeting. It’s been around for years. Here’s a New York Times article about it from 2010:

People have grown accustomed to being tracked online and shown ads for categories of products they have shown interest in, be it tennis or bank loans.

Increasingly, however, the ads tailored to them are for specific products that they have perused online. While the technique, which the ad industry calls personalized retargeting or remarketing, is not new, it is becoming more pervasive as companies like Google and Microsoft have entered the field. And retargeting has reached a level of precision that is leaving consumers with the palpable feeling that they are being watched as they roam the virtual aisles of online stores.

So, my cookies tell the software that I’ve visited the pages for Richard Bowker novels on the Barnes & Noble web site. And the software puts up ads that keep reminding me of these very fine novels until I break down and buy one. This is one of those technologies that is equal parts helpful and creepy. I’m not quite ready to get off the grid, like Jack Reacher, but maybe the day will come.

Do you write and tell?

Posted on April 6, 2014 by Richard Bowker

The New York Times runs occasional pieces on writing in its Draft feature. They are of variable quality. The latest one, called “Not Telling” is pretty good. The writer, a novelist I’ve never heard of named Alice Mattison, is obsessively secret about her novels while she’s writing them:

If I talk about the book, I believe — I cannot help believing — my characters will be angry, and will no longer confide in me about their embarrassing, troubled lives.

She won’t even talk about the novel with her husband:

Once, I decided I should tell my husband a little about the novel I was writing. I informed him that I was about to do so and he sat up straight and looked eager. He’d been waiting for a while. I said — certain I was revealing something of interest — “It’s in five parts.” Then I sat back and waited for enthusiasm.

I have a lot of sympathy. I share my drafts with my writing group, but no one else. My lovely wife has been informed that I’m writing another one of those Walter Sands private eye novels, but that’s it. In my case, I’m not afraid of my characters getting angry; I’m afraid that talking out loud about the plot will make it sound stupid — to me as well as to the listener — and I’ll lose the hubris I need to keep going. At an early stage of writing, my plot is kind of stupid. Not to mention my prose is scattered and unfocused, as I figure out motivations and settings. But I need to stay confident that things are going to get better. I need to keep the world I’m creating safe from outsiders until I’m sure enough in it to pull back the curtain. Then, if people don’t like what I’ve created, I can figure out what, if anything, I need to change — without deciding the whole damn thing’s no good.

Are missing apostrophes more important than dying teenagers?

Posted on March 29, 2014 by Richard Bowker

We report, you decide.

A bizarre battle is raging in towns across Britain between lovers of the English language and local councils that are culling the humble apostrophe from street signs.

The historic university city of Cambridge was the latest in a series of places this year that have made the change, which transforms names such as King’s Road into Kings Road.

Cambridge was forced to backtrack after anonymous punctuation protectors mounted a guerrilla campaign, going out in the dead of night and using black marker pens to fill in the missing apostrophes.

Apparently an apostrophe error earlier this year caused an ambulance to go to a wrong address, resulting in a teenager dying of an asthma attack.

“National guidelines recommended not allocating new street names that required any punctuation, as, we gather, this was not well coped with by some emergency services’ software,” Tim Ward of Cambridge City Council told AFP.

Although I’m not one of those who think the language is going to hell in a handbasket, I have some sympathy for the protesters who say the solution to the problem is not to make punctuation worse, but to make the software that emergency services use better.

On a vaguely related topic: At some point when I wasn’t paying attention, the Catholic Church seems to have removed the possessive from church and school names — at least in my neck of the woods. When I was a lad,we lived in Saint Columbkille’s parish; this is now Saint Columbkille parish. The parochial school down the street from me is Saint Paul School. And so on. A brief Google search indicates that if the school uses the possessive, “Saint Paul’s,” it’s Episcopalian.

The possessive doesn’t make a lot of sense in this context, I suppose. Public schools don’t use it; there aren’t any Martin Luther King’s High Schools. But the possessive usage for saints is so ingrained in my neurons that I’m always stopped short when I encounter the new style.

Next thing you know I’ll be demanding that the Mass return to Latin, which, after all, is the language that God speaks.

Keep it short, except when it needs to be long

Posted on March 26, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Here’s a New York Times op-ed that spends 800 words or so extolling the virtues of brevity when it comes to writing. Except, of course, the author doesn’t really mean that. It’s only towards the end that he quotes from Strunk and White, who say what he really means:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Got it. Now, why did we need the other 700 words?

This comes to mind when reading this listicle from The American Scholar listing the “ten best sentences,” which presumably boils down to “ten sentences that the editors really like.” Many of them are decidedly not short, like this one from Nicholas Nickleby:

There are many pleasant fictions of the law in constant operation, but there is not one so pleasant or practically humorous as that which supposes every man to be of equal value in its impartial eye, and the benefits of all laws to be equally attainable by all men, without the smallest reference to the furniture of their pockets.

But here is a brief beauty from Lolita: