Monthly Archives: March 2009

What makes you stop reading?

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by Clare Langley-Hawthorne
http://www.clarelangleyhawthorne.com/

Aloha from rainy Hawaii! Waiting for the sunshine and inspired by a panel I attended on the weekend at Left Coast Crime on ‘things that make me stop reading’, I thought I’d offer my top 5 reasons for putting a book down (or throwing it against a wall!) and find out from you what, as readers (and writers perhaps), you consider ‘deal breakers’ – when you just cannot continue with a book.

The panelists (Hallie Ephron, Mysti Berry, Kate Stine, and Sue Trowbridge) mentioned a number of things which caused them to put down a book and not read further. Here’s some of their (abbreviated) list:

  • Stereotypes

  • Lack of clarity – where the hell are we, when are we, who is talking etc…within the first few pages.

  • Gratuitous violence, sex or animal cruelty

  • Lack of character pull – the character fails to draw them in

  • Geographical inaccuracies (like someone flying all the way from San Jose to San Francisco!)

  • Prologue that seems gratuitous, manipulative or contrived

Reducing these issues to a list always seems to lessen the impact of the discussion but I agree with all that was said and with the panelists’ assertion they will forgive almost any of these if the writing is sufficiently compelling to keep them interested.
As for my top five list – well here goes:
  1. Characters that make me a yawn- if I’m not drawn in by them then I’m not going to keep plowing through the book.

  2. Set up requires more than just a suspension of disbelief but putting aside all reality.

  3. Clunky, awkward writing that requires way too much concentration – I want the story to flow, to draw me in – I don’t want to have to take out the paddles and brave the rapids to get there.

  4. A sense of manipulation or self-awareness – if I sense the author pulling the strings I’m taken out of the story (and I’m pissed off).

  5. Blatant inaccuracies that make me doubt the writer. I think when you start a book you place a great deal of trust in an author and if that trust is broken too quickly by inaccuracies or false steps it’s hard to regain it and keep reading
So what are the deal breakers for you – what makes you stop reading a book? What about in a series – when does an author ‘blow it’ and stop you from continuing? For me bringing back dead characters (Patricia Cornwall anyone) is a deal breaker – If I want that kind of plot twist I’ll tune in to General Hospital…What about you?

Cara Black Grills Her Publisher

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CARA BLACK The Kill Zone just loves it when guest bloggers visit, especially when their posts provide an inside glimpse of the industry. So when Cara Black offered to rake her publicity and marketing directors over the coals for us, we applauded her (from a safe distance). Courtesy of Cara and the lovely people at Soho Press, today we’re bringing you answers to some of the pressing questions you’ve always wanted to ask but were afraid to…

Thanks for inviting me Michelle! I know the most important thing is to write the best book you can. Then rewrite, rewrite, rewrite as Voltaire said. But after the real work is done and the manuscript has been accepted, copy edited, and slated for publication, what happens after that? I’ve often wondered, and have frequently been asked the same question at conferences. So I thought I’d ask the experts, in this case Soho Press, who publish wonderful books (and mine, too).

I love my publisher and I know they share the love. We’ve been together for nine books over ten years. Soho is a fiercely independent book publisher, based in New York, and their specialty is crime fiction from around the world. The Wall Street Journal has described Soho’s books as, “Some of the most exotic crime fiction in the world.”

But I thought I’d use this opportunity to rake them over the coals, grilling them about what we all want to know: how do the publicity and marketing director of a publisher—in this case mine —promote, market and sell a book? Something that, as either pre-published or published writers, we’d all like to know, right?

I think the answers and insights will prove universal and, hopefully, helpful. So now with my ninth book, Murder in the Latin Quarter, available this week—yes, murder in the latinthis week-I thought I’d politely ask them about what the heck it is they do. I know it’s not a fluke that Soho authors are regularly reviewed by the New York Times and interviewed on NPR. So I spoke with Sarah Reidy, Soho’s publicity director, and Ailen Lujo, their marketing director, both superstars in my book.

Cara Black: Can you describe a sales conference? It’s a mystery to me…who’s there? I’ve heard that the chains can decide a book cover.

Sarah Reidy: A sales conference is basically a meeting in which we (publicity, marketing, and editorial) present our upcoming list (of books) to the sales force. The sales team consists of all the wonderful people who are responsible for actually getting your book into stores. They take the information we give them and share it with Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Borders, Baker & Taylor, Ingram, and all the great indie stores out there. In terms of book jackets, that’s usually determined at pre-sales. I’ll let Ailen explain that one.

Ailen Lujo: In regard to presales: Twice a year an editor and I fly out to Minnesota where our distributor consortium is based, and we introduce our potential titles to the sales and marketing staff. In many ways this meeting is even more important than the actual sales conference because we talk about the minutest details of the book, from price and format (should we do this as an original paperback or hardcover?) to book jacket designs. If our account reps hate a jacket, we go back to the drawing board. We present titles at sales conference. We discuss titles at presales.

CB: What about blogs? Conferences? Bookstore events? How effective are each or do you recommend a combination?

SR: Oh, my. This is one of those questions that really depends on the author. I think blogs are great, and there is such a variety out there almost everyone can find a good match for him or herself. There are straight review blogs, of course, but there are also a number of blogs that do author Q&A’s, accept guest blog posts, or will post podcasts and book trailers. In addition, there are blogs that serve as extensions of “traditional” media outlets, such as Papercuts (The New York Times), Jacket Copy (Los Angeles Times), NPR.com, and Washington Post Live Online. This is a market that is constantly growing and offering more opportunities. For any author, I would recommend researching literary blogs and reading them for examples and ideas. Once you get a feel for a blog, you can start coming up with ideas about how your book could fit in.

Specialized conferences are wonderful. As Cara knows, Ailen and I are both huge fans of Bouchercon for mystery authors. It’s such a close knit community, and it feels like every attendee is there for the love of a good novel. If you are a less well-known author, I think conferences and conventions are a much better option that a traditional book tour.

Bookstore events are good in some cases, and not in others. If you’re Tori Spelling or John Grisham, you should absolutely do bookstore events. People are going to turn out to see you no matter what. You lucky son of a guns. However, if you are a debut novelist with no real connection to a location, it’s hard to turn people out for these. Instead I typically recommend doing one big event in your home town, and perhaps somewhere else where you have a large community of family and friends who will come.

You should also look into reading series. There are some great series out there that set up a night with multiple authors…often at a bar! And everyone knows that drunk people are more likely to buy books (I just made that up, but I imagine it could be true). A reading series tends to have a built-in following, so it’s a good way to expose your writing to a new group of people.

Cara here. I really appreciated Sarah and Ailen taking the time to answer questions.Hopefully this parted the mist of publishing marketing and publicity somewhat. Does this mirror some of your experiences? Or does your publisher do things differently?

Cara Black writes the award nominated Aimée Leduc Investigations set in Paris. MURDER IN THE LATIN QUARTER, the ninth book in the series, was just released and is available online and at fine bookstores everywhere. In MURDER IN THE LATIN QUARTER, Aimée travels to the Left Bank unraveling the trail of a woman who claims to be her sister, murky Haitian politics and international financial scandals that lead to murder.

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CALENDAR OF UPCOMING GUESTS

Mark your calendar for the following guest bloggers at the Kill Zone:

Robert Gregory Browne, March 15
Neil Plakcy, March 22
Liz Jasper, March 29

Politicians Make Great Villains For Good Reason

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John Ramsey Miller

With a few notable exceptions, we all love to hate politicians. They are a sociopathic bunch who seem interested only in power, and most seem to sell their votes to the highest bidder all the while swearing they can’t be bought by the people who make their living bribing votes. They will swear that on the eyes of their children until the day they walk into the nearest Federal prison. They talk out of both sides of their mouths and straight out of their asses at the same time. They almost never do what they say they will do to get into office and will stay on decades after they’ve worn out their welcome. Even senility cannot pry them from the marble halls. If you need a villain every reader will hate, make them a Congressman, Senator or an assistant of some sort to the sitting President. Hell, even a President will do.

A villain will do anything to keep their jobs, including killing innocent people, or people close to a protagonist to get the protagonist worked into a lather. Almost never will a protagonist be a politician, because it’s playing against type. The good guy(s) are always fighting a corrupt official or an agency dedicated to protecting the Status Quo, which is usually the career of a powerful politician. A good villain can corrupt the Military, IRS, NSA, CIA, DEA, even the FBI and its believable because they have actually done so, and will again I am certain.

Writing thrillers is easier if you are paranoid. The longer I live, the more I understand the sanity of being among that number. Villains need to be powerful, and that is all they have to have on the line for them to do anything it takes to remain there. In the book I am writing at present the protagonist remarks how anything that rich people acquire and value so highly eventually end up in the possession of someone else. It’s a thought I have anytime I go into an antique shop, or a consignment shop. What the bad guys we write about rob and kill for is never worth what they do to get or keep it. Power is extremely intoxicating. Power is even more transitory than objects. I love writing about power and more about perceived power and the fear of losing it will cause a villain to do anything to your protagonist. Corruption and power go hand-in-hand in novels and in real life as well.

I was watching the news the other night and saw that 85 year-old President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe was throwing himself a quarter million dollar birthday party in (what was) the most financially troubled economy on earth, where disease, corruption, starvation and murder are as commonplace as chiggers in an Alabama weed field. THE MAN IS 85, for Christ’s sake. And the very next news story I watched was about bank officials here doing the exact same thing as Wild Bob Zimbob. Big party and big bucks involved. And then I watched a politician (Okay, Barney Frank) complaining that those bank executives were wasting “our” tax dollars. Amazing. How can ANY politician accuse anybody else of wasting tax dollars and keep from laughing out loud at the audacity of that accusation? Just staggering. Goes to show you that arrogance has no physical boundaries.

Next time you are looking for a villain just watch the first ten minutes of the national news, and take your pick from the lineup.

Size Matters

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by Michelle Gagnon

burritoA confession: I’m not a big short story reader. I’ve gone through phases where I was on a Chandler or Munro kick, but by and large I tend to read novels. Recently I’ve been judging a short story contest, however, and it’s been an interesting experience. What I’ve discovered is that when it comes to crime fiction, the short story format is apparently a trickier beast to wrestle down.

The stories that fail appear to fall into a few categories (food-related; humor me):

  • The Grande Burrito: The author crammed it all in, and what could have been expanded into a full manuscript has been abridged. These stories tend to open with some lovely lyrical passages before morphing into a rapid-fire ending that usually involves an information dump on the final page. In these cases, I get the sense that the writer bit off more than they could chew. Rather than focusing on a smaller, self-contained story, their scope was too broad and it ended up being a hot mess.
  • The Chinese Food Syndrome. The opposite problem: these stories left me wanting more. Not enough happened, or the scope was too small. The best short stories are self-contained, hewn down to the bare essentials, and when you turn the last page you find yourself fully satisfied. You’ve been told just what you need to know, and everything was resolved in a way that was satisfying. The perfect dessert, if you will.
  • The Pancake: Everything is flat. Two-dimensional characters whose motivation is never clear, a plot that doesn’t make sense, nothing seems to gel. You don’t need much to describe a character; the best writers can do it in a sentence. So for me to go through an entire story and come away with no sencarverse of the characters is inexcusable. One of my all-time favorite stories is “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver:
    • This blind man, feature this, he was wearing a full beard! A beard on a blind man! Too much, I say.

That one passage not only describes the blind man, it also speaks volumes about the main character, telling you everything you need to know to make the final passage of the story transcendent.

  • The Filler: Like a hamburger without the bun. These stories invariably involve characters from a recurring series. Ideally, these stores should offer another perspective on them and their actions, whetting your appetite enough to draw you into following them for a full book (or ten). But far too often Thrillerthese are an ad masquerading as a story. I love vignettes told from the point of view of a different character in the book (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is a favorite of mine). Our own Clare did this recently, as did J.A. Konrath and Lee Child in the Thriller Anthology. For me, those stories work. Less appealing is something that’s clearly excerpted from a book.

Mind you, many of the stories I loved, and all for different reasons. Most offered a glimpse of characters at a crossroad. The story depicts a flash from their lives when the crime they encounter, whether expected or unexpected, defines them in just a few short pages. A standoff in a drugstore, or a murder in an alley. Not that it has to take place in a short time frame, but by and large I don’t need to see their entire lives, and I really don’t enjoy a Christie-style parlor room “this is what happened” scene at the end. Just give it to me straight.

So what do you think makes a strong short story? And is it a tougher format for crime fiction?

Detours on the way to publication

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By Joe Moore

You’re writing a novel. Maybe you’ve even finished it. Congratulations. The hard part is over, right?

Wrong.

detour1Now comes hard part #2: getting ready to sell it to a publisher. Even before you start your search, there are some basic concepts you should research first. They can prove to be costly detours on your way to finding an agent and editor if you don’t. Having the correct information by doing your homework can make for a smoother journey to publication.

First, you need to define your audience. It’s important that you know what type of person or group will go out of their way to find and pay to read your book. What are the characteristics of your target reader such as their age, sex, education, ethnic, etc. Is there a common theme, topic or category that ties them together? And even more important, what is the size of your target audience?

For instance, if your book is a paranormal romance set in the future in which the main characters are all teenagers, is there a group that buys lots of your type of book? If not, you might need to adjust the content to appeal to a broader audience. Change the age of the characters or shift the story to present day or another time period. If your research proves that a large number of readers buy books that fall into that category, making the adjustment now could save you a boatload of frustration later.

Next, you need to define your competition. Who are you going up against? If your book falls into a specialized sub-genre dominated by a few other writers, you might have a hard time convincing a publisher that the world needs one more writer in that niche.

The opposite problem may occur if your genre is a really broad one such as cozy mysteries or romance. You’re going to have to put a unique, special spin on your book to break it out of the pack. Or accept the fact that the genre and your competition is a wide river of writers, and you only hope to jump in and go with the current. Either way, make the decision now, not later.

The next issue to consider is what makes your book different from all the others in your genre. Do your homework to determine what are the characteristics of books that your potential audience loves. This can be done online in the dozens of Internet writer and reader forums. And you can also do the research by discussing the question with librarians and books sellers. Once you know the answers, improve on what your target audience loves and avoid what they don’t.

Just keep in mind that you can’t time the market. The moment you sign a publishing contract, you’re still 12-18 months behind what’s on the new release table right now.

Another detail to consider in advance is deciding how you’ll market and promote your book. Sadly, this burden has fallen almost totally on the shoulders of the author and has virtually disappeared from the responsibilities of the publisher. Start forming an action plan including setting up a presence on the Internet in the form of a website and/or blog. Also, is there a way to tie in your theme to a particular industry? How can you promote directly to your audience? For instance, if your romance novel revolves around a sleuth who solves crimes while on tour as a golf pro, would it be advantageous to have a book promotion booth at golf industry tradeshows? If your protagonist is a computer nerd, should you be doing signings at electronics shows? How about setting up a signing at a Best Buy or CompUSA? Follow the obvious tie-ins to find your target audience.

Writing is hard work. So is determining your target audience and then promoting and marketing to them. Like any other manufacturing company, you are manufacturing a product. Doing your homework first will help avoid needless detours on the way to publication.

Are there any other speed bumps and detours that you can suggest avoiding that could cause writers to stumble while trying to get their books published?

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CALENDAR OF UPCOMING GUESTS

Mark your calendar for the following guest bloggers at the Kill Zone:

Cara Black, March 8
Robert Gregory Browne, March 15
Neil Plakcy, March 22
Liz Jasper, March 29

TARP times, hard times, a ring of death

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The national economic meltdown was brought home to me this week. Uncharacteristically, my local Big Bank put a seven-day hold on a large out-of-state check I wanted to deposit.

Seven business days? Big Bank had never done that to me before. Those bastards. That meant it would be a week and a half before I could use my funds. So in a fit of financially ill-advised pique, I snatched back my check.Then I set off with the goal of finding a Cash America, or a Paycheck America, or wherever it is America goes these days to get a check cashed instantly (for a fee, of course).

As it turns out, none of those places are located near where I live, which is by the beach in Southern California. They are all, shall we say, inland.

I finally located a check cashing place. Inside the sterile-looking, cheerless lobby, the clerks were sequestered behind bulletproof Plexiglass. While I was waiting for my paperwork to be approved, I noticed a small coffee can on the counter. It had a picture of a man and two young girls on it. “Help the Masons”, the can said. “Every penny counts.”

“Who are the Masons?” I asked the clerk.

Mason was their coworker, she explained. He’d been gunned down in the parking lot. Five bullets. Now he was paralyzed from the waist down. He’d been raising those two little girls by himself, and now… her voice trailed off.

“The streets right around here are real bad,” she said, then named four streets, gesturing with her hands. “It’s like a shooting circle. Things are getting worse. Everyone around here’s out of work. Everything’s bad.”

I asked some more questions about Mason. He has no health insurance. Pretty soon, he’ll probably get kicked out of the rehabilitation facility he’s been recovering in. Right now his mother is in town from Wisconsin, looking after the little girls. After that, no one’s sure what will happen.

I shoved five bucks into the donation jar.

As I drove away from the check-cashing store in my “rob me” Z4, I pondered a sense of unease has settled over my hometown of Los Angeles. People are losing their jobs, all over. I read last weekend that the unemployment rate in this city is over ten percent. It seems to be getting worse by the week.

In the immediate wake of hard times like the ones we’re having right now, the circles of violence like the one that swept up Mr. Mason inevitably grow and invade into new territory. There was much wringing of hands in my beach city community recently about a string of robberies that had been committed by perpetrators from–quote–outside the community. In my own postage-stamp-sized town, we’ve started to have home invasion robberies. I used to worry about frat boys stumbling up from the bars on Pier Avenue at 2 a.m. on Saturday night. Now I’m worried about desperados seeking cash.

And violence is only the dark underbelly of the recession/depression/liverwurst, whatever it is we’ve got on our hands. Little stores are closing all around in my community, one after another.

What about you? Where you live, do you see any visible signs of economic hard times? Does it make you nervous? Do the incidents that take place around you impact or inform your writing?

Getting Inside a Character’s Head

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by Clare Langley-Hawthorne

I have just finished the first part of an online short story I’m posting on my website which requires a change of perspective. Both Consequences of Sin and The Serpent and The Scorpion incorporated a distinctly Ursula-esque POV but in the new story I have delved inside the head of another character – namely Lord Wrotham – which has opened up all sorts of possibilities (I can’t help but grin as I write that).

It does, however, also raise some challenges which go to the very heart of character development. You see I have only ever viewed him the way Ursula views him. Although I know his background (I created it after all), in many ways he’s as much of a mystery to me as he is to Ursula. Hence the fun in writing the story…and for those of you who have read The Serpent and The Scorpion, the story also offers some tantalizing clues as to what led to his arrest…

When I develop characters some of them appear pretty much fully formed in my head, whereas others take a while to ‘ferment’, as I ponder their past and what has made them who they are. Now I know many writers take offence at the prospect of characters doing unexpected things (aren’t we the ones in control after all?!) but I do find that many times my characters start behaving in ways I never intended – in a way rewriting themselves as the book progresses. For me, that’s all part of the fun of character discovery and development.

So how do writers flesh out their characters and what did it take for me to write this story from another character’s perspective?…You’d think it would be a methodical, well-organized process but instead I found myself:

  1. Rummaging through my old electronic files for the backgrounder I developed for Lord Wrotham then realizing that as I wrote both Consequences of Sin and The Serpent and The Scorpion I basically discarded most of it and reinvented him as I went along (bugger!!)

  2. Rewriting the bloody backgrounder from scratch only to find a couple of minor characters unexpectedly popping up in his past (Bugger! Bugger!) which meant I had to take a closer look at them as well

  3. As I am also working on the third Ursula Marlow book, Unlikely Traitors, I then sifted through that draft manuscript to check his story and then started playing the ‘what if’ game….(triple bugger, No!!!)

So what happened at the end of this process? Well, I decided I liked pottering around in Lord Wrotham’s head…In fact, I was discovering he was one complicated sexy man…then my husband stopped talking to me.

I guess that’s what happens when characters take over.

So how do you approach character development – are you better organized than me? Do you have it all figured out? Or do your characters, just occasionally, take you by surprise? Are there any writers whose characters you wish they would explore more – characters you wish you could get inside their head and have a bit of a rummage?

Fangs for the Easy Listening Jazz

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At my first Thrillerfest in New York, I was perusing the table in the booksellers’ room when this juicy title caught my eye: X-Rated Blood Suckers, with a cover that was strikingly reminiscent of a 70s Grindhouse flick. In my opinion Mario Acevedo has, hands down, the best titles and covers in the biz. (He also has the best book trailer, see it here). And his stories, featuring vampire detective Felix Gomez, deliver all the fun and excitement those covers promise. The Kill Zone is thrilled to have him join us today for a walk on the wild side of thrillers: paranormals and the supernatural.

by Mario Acevedo

While I’m known for my vampire-detective stories, I like to think of myself as a mystery writer. What I like about the mysteMarioVampiroEditry genre is that there is no equivocation about the story question. We know what’s at risk and what motivates the protagonist. Saving his ass!

In mystery stories we writers can wallow in the dark underbelly of society and call it research.

We love asking questions such as:

“What’s the best poison given these circumstances?”

“Where’s a good place to hit a skull with a sledgehammer?”

“How can I use cross-dressing autoerotic asphyxiation as a plot device?”

At mystery writer meetings we can sit through dinner when the presentation is a medical examiner’s PowerPoint of autopsies. “May I have another slice of cheesecake and could you go back to the picture of blood spatter on the headboard?”

We can say with a straight face, “Honest Mr. Police Officer, I was only asking the price of a blow job from this woman as research. I need authentic details.”

JailbaitZombieEnhanced_TN In mystery literature we can show the complex relationships between characters. Lying. Infidelity. Betrayal. And that’s among the good guys. We can play with the motives for crime: Jealousy. Lust. Greed. We explore lives ruined by humiliation and murder. That’s entertainment!

In any novel, what keeps a reader turning pages is tension and conflict. And no genre does tension and conflict better than a good mystery. What keener source of tension than begging for your life while at the wrong end of a gun?

Since I write vampire-detective mysteries, I have to layer in the supernatural elements. Until recently, vampires were the monsters fanging humans, an act that resulted in murder, or at least assault and battery. Now vampires are the good guys and we could have them be all nice and not drink human blood (or worse, go vegan), in which case, what’s the point of being an undead bloodsucker? My challenge is weaving the supernatural with the gritty noir of a mystery.

The keys to a mystery are the committing of a crime and the threat of a bigger crime if the hero doesn’t persevere. But a crime according to who? A werewolf gnawing on your dismembered torso doesn’t regard himself a criminal anymore than does a senator whoring himself to the rich. It’s simply his nature.

So while supernatural beings might disregard human laws at will, they must abide by their own code of conduct. What are the no-no’s? Zombies don’t regard noshing on human brains as murder so what would be considered taboo for revenants? Perhaps you can only eat Catholics on Fridays.

In supernatural mysteries we have a strong story question that braids the natural and the supernatural. Our hero must solve a crime affecting not just one world but two. It can be a mystery we can all love to read.

So here’s a question: if you created a paranormal character, what would their special power be? And what would they fear? Garlic, water, easy-listening jazz?

Mario Acevedo writes the Felix Gomez vampire-detective series for Eos HarperCollins. Mario travels the astral plane (using frequent flyer miles) to research the world of vampires, zombies, and alien gangsters. He lives and writes in Denver, CO.

Check out book 4 in the Felix Gomez vampire-detective series: Jailbait Zombie (Eos HarperCollins). Vampires vs zombies in the ultimate undead smackdown. Available Feb 25 at better bookstores everywhere.

SPECIAL BONUS! You can download a copy of my first book, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats, through Feb 24 by clicking here