Author Archives: James Scott Bell

About James Scott Bell

International Thriller Writers Award winner, #1 bestselling author of THRILLERS and BOOKS ON WRITING. Subscribe to JSB's NEWSLETTER.

Act First, Explain Later

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by James Scott Bell

Greetings, thrill seekers. We have another first page for critique. Give it a read and join me on the other side.

Title: PROTECTED PERSONS. Genre: Thriller.

PART ONE — NATURAL CAUSES

Prologue

Davos, Switzerland. 11:40. Pulse 61.

The Prime Minister of Canada has nine minutes to live, and he is going to spend one of them on a joke.

His name is Marc Delorme. I watch him on a television with the sound off, in a cheap hotel room across town from the World Economic Forum. It is late January. The clock in the corner of the screen says twenty to twelve.

I know when he will die because I chose the minute: eleven forty-nine, in the main hall, four minutes before the end of his speech.

The voice in my head does not choose the names, or the minute. I do. It came to me in a hospital, in a white room, after a bomb, when I could not move my hands or remember my own name. It still comes with a hum behind my left ear, low and steady, like a fridge in an empty flat. It never tells me who. Mostly it says the same few sentences it has always said, in the even voice of someone reading out a rule.

Those who stand in the way must be removed.

It must look like nature.

What they meant to say must not be heard.

The rest is my work. The newspapers tell me who stands in the way, and they are very helpful about it. They print it every week, with photographs: a face at a lectern, announcing that his country will build a network of its own and need nobody else’s. In the way of what, the voice has never said. I was a soldier for a long time, and a soldier with clear orders sleeps well.

***

JSB: We have here a promising opening salvo for an international thriller. It has a Day of the Jackal type feel. The First Person Present POV, if it holds for the entire book (I’m guessing it does not) presents some challenges (which are beyond the scope of this post). For one thing, it prevents cross-cutting to other POVs for suspense purposes. Well, not always. You can certainly mix POVs, using First Person for one character, and Third Person for others. James Patterson has done this, and he’s sold a few books.

But today we’re looking at this first page and our question is: would I want to read on?

With some tweaks, my answer is yes. So let’s tweak.

We’ve talked about prologues several times here at TKZ. See here, here, and here.

Critique group chatter often holds that editors and agents don’t like prologues, so never use them. Tush. A prologue can make a great hook if it is a scene that works well on its own.

In the past I’ve counseled writers not to use the label Prologue. Just give us the scene with no heading, then do Chapter 1 next (as in Harlan Coben’s Tell No One). I read a thriller that started with 0 (a prologue scene), then came 1, 2, 3 etc.

Your book has Parts, so that’s necessary to label. My advice is to ditch the word Prologue.

That leaves you with the place/time stamp. That’s fine. I was thrown by Pulse 61 at first, then figured it’s the narrator describing his own. This seems needlessly confusing. If the guy is tracking his own pulse, let him tell us in the narrative. Maybe this is to be a recurring stamp. If so, I’d get tired of it.

The Prime Minister of Canada has nine minutes to live, and he is going to spend one of them on a joke.

I’d cut the last part. The Prime Minister of Canada has nine minutes to live. Boom. Let it stand alone. The part about the joke dilutes the impact.

His name is Marc Delorme. I watch him on a television with the sound off, in a cheap hotel room across town from the World Economic Forum. It is late January. The clock in the corner of the screen says twenty to twelve.

Good. You’ve given us the essential setting for the narrator, and main event, the World Economic Forum.

I know when he will die because I chose the minute: eleven forty-nine, in the main hall, four minutes before the end of his speech.

I’m interested. How has the narrator chosen the time, and how will he pull it off?

The voice in my head does not choose the names, or the minute. I do. It came to me in a hospital, in a white room, after a bomb, when I could not move my hands or remember my own name.

Good, marbled-in backstory. Some teachers say “No backstory in the opening!” I don’t subscribe to that. But I do counsel using it sparingly in the first few pages so it does not slow down the action. Here we have a guy who survived a bomb and gets a voice in his head. Voice? What’s that about? At this point it is a mystery, and that’s how I’d leave it for the moment. Unanswered questions are a great way to make a reader turn the page. You can reveal more about the voice later.

Give us some action now. You can save the rest of this page for later. But let’s have a look anyway:

It still comes with a hum behind my left ear, low and steady, like a fridge in an empty flat. It never tells me who. Mostly it says the same few sentences it has always said, in the even voice of someone reading out a rule.

Those who stand in the way must be removed.

It must look like nature.

What they meant to say must not be heard.

I like a fridge in an empty flat. That’s a great way to describe this mysterious voice.

For the three lines of the voice, I’d go ahead and use italics. Italics can be helpful, IMO, unless they come in big blocks. Yours do not. Italics would help readers “hear” the voice.

The rest is my work. The newspapers tell me who stands in the way, and they are very helpful about it. They print it every week, with photographs: a face at a lectern, announcing that his country will build a network of its own and need nobody else’s. In the way of what, the voice has never said. I was a soldier for a long time, and a soldier with clear orders sleeps well.

This paragraph is all exposition, and we don’t need it yet. My axiom is: Act first, explain later. What this first page needs is a character in motion, not in explanation.

All that said, I am intrigued. We have an impending assassination on a world stage, and a guy who hears a voice, and who is somehow going to make this happen. I would turn this page.

How about you, TKZers?

Quotable

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“There is no finer form of fiction than the mystery. It has structure, a story line and a sense of place and pace. It is the one genre where the reader and the writer are pitted against each other. Readers don’t want to guess the ending, but they don’t want to be so baffled that it annoys them. … The research you do is crucial. In mystery fiction, you have to tell the truth. You can’t fool the reader and expect to get away with it.” – Sue Grafton

Beware the Schmagent

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by James Scott Bell

“Talking of agents, when I opened the morning paper one morning last week I saw that it had finally happened: somebody shot one. It was probably for the wrong reasons, but at least it was a step in the right direction.” – Raymond Chandler, The Raymond Chandler Papers

Years ago I was teaching at one of the biggest writers conferences in the country. In addition to the conferees, this one always featured an abundance of top editors, agents, and faculty.

This particular year, a new agent was present. He had been an editor at one of the larger publishers, and was now hanging up his agent shingle. As the conference went on, I started to pick up a ripple of excitement among many of the newbies. They were giddy and saying things like, “I just got an agent!” and “He requested a full!” The bottom line was that a large number of brand-spanking new, unpublished writers came away from the conference believing they had a champion to escort them through the gates of the Forbidden City.

A year or so later the agent quit. It turns out his method was to sign as many as he could and throw their proposals out like so much wet spaghetti, hoping some would stick to the walls of the City. Not one deal was made. My surmise is that the powers inside the walls knew a “schmagent” (shady, ineffectual agent) when they saw one.

The real bottom line was that all these young writers were cast to the winds, a precious year wasted in their quest to get published.

I’ve always said having no agent is better than having a bad agent. And it is well known that anyone can call themselves a literary agent. There is no agent exam or licensing requirement.

Back in the days when proposals were submitted on actual paper (which meant printing and mailing costs), and industry relationships were formed in and around New York City (which meant office space), there was a hefty barrier to entry to the agent game. In today’s digital world, a cheap website is all you need to get started. Want to be an agent tomorrow? Get a Wix and start trolling.

According to industry expert Jane Friedman:

However you measure it, I find more literary agents operating today than in decades prior. The Guide to Literary Agents directory, published since 1995, started with about 400 listings. The most recent edition, released in 2021, had about 1,000. According to my own reporting, the number of new agents announced per year in 2023, 2024, and 2025 was at least double the number announced in 2022. If you look at the number of contacts in Publishers Marketplace that carry the agent label, there are more than 3,000, although not all of them have reported deals. The number of Publishers Marketplace editors? About 3,800.

This means there are a goodly number of schmagents, too. Without top-line clients, how are they making money? By charging writers for editorial services. This used to be frowned upon, but recently the Association of American Literary Agents (AALA) revised its Canon of Ethics to loosen restrictions. Before the revision, agents were allowed to charge for editorial services to non-clients, but were required to reimburse those costs if they signed the writer as a client. Not anymore. Friedman:

Instead, reimbursement is subject to “mutual agreement” between the agent and prospective client. What I fear: Agents may charge non-clients for editorial work knowing very well they may make an offer of representation and have no intention of returning the money. This would be a straight-forward way to get compensated for what they’re not supposed to charge for. (I do think authors will readily agree to let the agent keep the editing money if representation is on the table.) 

And this:

A big part of the problem is that writers have always cared too much about what agents think. Even people with good business sense tend to lose critical-thinking skills when offered representation and have a hard time recognizing that lackluster representation can be more harmful than no representation. Less scrupulous agents already take advantage of writers’ deep desire to be validated or discovered. I fear these changes will only fuel such behavior.

The glittering lights of the Forbidden City still burn bright for many writers (brighter than the innumerable campfires in the forests of the indie world). This despite fewer deals, fewer spaces, lower advances, and tighter contracts. The bright lights are analogous to Las Vegas. Exciting, with a chance to win big (auction, Netflix series, Good Morning America!).

But how many gamblers come away from Vegas with a big score? About as many as writers who make the A-list. But if that’s your dream, at least make sure your agent is not a schamgent.

  1. Look at their website. It should have a list of clients who are actually published. Research several of those clients on Amazon. See who publishes them and what their sales rank is. Scammers are getting quite sophisticated at putting up pretty websites with no substance behind them.
  2. Legit agents don’t make unsolicited offers to unpublished writers, by way of email or social media.
  3. Legit agents do not charge a “reading fee” to consider your proposal.
  4. It must be made clear by the agent that any paid services do not imply or guarantee future representation. This must be explicit in a written agreement. 
  5. Search the name at Writer Beware.

All that said, this is not to cast aspersions on agents as a whole. I do believe most operate in good faith. They have to make a living, too, in these most challenging of times. Income from services and third-party referrals can be a benefit so long as the terms of the arrangement are made clear up front, and do not imply a possible offer of representation.

And another thing should be clear: your glasses. Remove the rose-colored tint. This is a business, not a flowery meadow. Your homework: read this article by Jane Friedman.

Comments welcome.

The Green-Eyed Monster

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by James Scott Bell

I love the play and movie Amadeus. (I saw the play in L.A. with the great David Suchet as Salieri.) The gist of the plot is simple. Salieri has dedicated his life to music and managed to rise to the position of court composer in Vienna. Suddenly, a crude young man appears on the scene, with no social graces, and claims to be a composer. Salieria despises this buffoon, but then! Mozart’s music is so lovely, so transcendent, that Salieri cannot deny he is a genius. But undeservedly so! He, Salieri, who lived only for music, was denied the the divine gift, yet it was given to this loutish youth. A fatal case of jealousy takes root. So much so that Salieri declares…well, watch:

Yikes!

Which reminds me of the chapter on jealousy in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird.

If you continue to write, you are probably going to have to deal with jealousy because some wonderful, dazzling successes are going to happen for some of the most awful, angry, undeserving writers you know—people who are, in other words, not you … You are going to feel awful beyond words. You are going to have a number of days in a row where you hate everyone and don’t believe in anything. If you do know the author whose turn it is, he or she will inevitably say that it will be your turn next, which is what the bride always says to you at each successive wedding, while you grow older and more decayed. It can wreak just the tiniest bit of havoc with your self-esteem to find that you are hoping for small bad things to happen to this friend—for, say, her head to blow up.

Okay, funny, not funny. Envy is a real B. Fortunately there is a morsel of good we can find in the green-eyed monster. As I say in my book The Mental Game of Writing:

Here’s a surprise for you: Envy is 5% positive. That’s the 5% that tells you that you care deeply about what you’re doing, that you want it to matter to other people, the way some other writers matter.

The other 95% is toxic. Fifty-seven percent of that toxicity wishes something bad would happen to the object of your envy (see Anne’s passage, above). The other 38% of toxic envy is you feeling bad about yourself and your writing, thinking you’re no good and you don’t have what it takes, and maybe never will.

(By the way, those percentages are from my own unscientific imagination, so don’t envy my methodology).

Envy tries to sneak into your head. You mustn’t let it take up residence there. If it tries, write something about it, just for yourself. Getting a confession down on paper helps. Tell yourself not to hold anything against the other writer. The other writer is just doing his thing and getting his own reward.

But what if he really is a rotten human being?

Then go ahead and wish that his head would explode.

For five minutes.

Then forget all about it and immediately get to work on a project of your own.

Festering envy can lead to ugly behavior. There have been several cases in the recent past of authors creating sock-puppet accounts to review-bomb rival authors. You can read about some of them here, here, and here.

Back in the good old days of paper pages, author feuds were slow boils in printed media. I recall journalist Renata Adler’s takedown of her fellow New Yorker writer, Pauline Kael. At the time Kael was the most respected film critic in the country. Adler wrote an 8,000-word review of Kael’s book When the Lights Go Down, declaring it “piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.”

Barbara Grizzutti Harrison took a literary hatchet to no less than Joan Didion: “Sometimes her tricks appear to be merely cheap, when in fact they are pernicious…Didion is the lyricist of the irrational. Some people find that charming. I do not.”

But all that was child’s play compared to the years-long feud between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, both of whom seemed to love punching (Mailer, literally) other writers, e.g., Vidal v. Truman Capote; Mailer v. William Styron and Saul Bellow. The Vidal-Mailer discord began in 1971 with Vidal’s review of Mailer’s book about feminism, A Prisoner of Sex. Vidal grouped Mailer with Henry Miller and Charles Manson (!) as examples of malignant male aggression.

Shortly after this, Dick Cavett had the grand idea of hosting the pair on his show (along with famed journalist Janet Flanner). It didn’t go well for Mailer, who reportedly had a few snorts before going on. Nor did he possess the rapier-like wit of Vidal. One exchange:

Mailer: “Are you ready to apologize?”

Vidal: “I will apologize if it hurts your feelings, of course I will.”

Mailer: “No, it hurts my sense of intellectual pollution.”

Vidal: “Well, as an expert, you should know about that.”

Mailer kept emphasizing his superior intellect, and at one point moved his chair further away from the others, prompting Cavett to ask, “Perhaps you’d like two more chairs to contain your giant intellect.” The audience howled. Mailer had lost the room. But instead of taking the L and moving on, he accused the audience of being unfairly hostile toward him. He looked at them and said, “Are you really all truly idiots, or is it me?” The audience shouted, “YOU!” (You can watch the whole interview here.)

A few years later, at a New York party for the literati, Mailer went up to Vidal, threw a drink in his face, and punched him. Vidal wiped his face and said, “Once again, words fail Norman Mailer.” Mailer demanded the hostess kick Vidal out. She refused. So Mailer left. Later asked about the incident, Vidal expressed “sympathy” for his rival. “After all, it’s not easy being a failure like Norman.” [Note: In their later years Mailer and Vidal did reconcile.]

So why am I bringing all this up? Because we are awash in 24/7 vitriol, thrashing around just to survive in the “mood slime” of digital discourse. (Mood slime was the New York subterranean muck created by all the hate and anger up top, in Ghostbusters II.) Don’t let it get into you. If you feel the tendrils of envy tickling your anterior insula (the part of your brain that processes unpleasant feelings), stop it in its tracks.

Do what you do—write!

The Secret Sauce(s) of Fiction

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by James Scott Bell

I love me a good burger. As master of the grill, I make a killer patty on my Traeger. Nothing like smoky goodness in brisket-blend ground beef. From there I make it personal: Colby jack cheese nicely melted, a slice of white onion, a slice of tomato (the way Miracle Max likes them, “perky”), and a crisp lettuce leaf, topped with Stubbs Sweet Heat BBQ sauce.

When it comes to fast-food burgers, there is only one place I’ll consider: In-N-Out. My go-to is their Double-Double—two patties with American cheese, lettuce, tomato and grilled onions.

And, of course, their secret sauce (“spread”). The nice thing is you can ask for extra spread if you like, and I like, one for splooching a bit on the next bite, and one for my fries. (You can look up recipes online that purport to duplicate In-N-Out spread, but it’s still officially a secret). It’s that sauce that makes all the difference.

Which invites the question: is there a secret sauce for fiction? I believe every author can make their own recipe, and should. It’s the way we can stand out from the generic, tasteless condiment produced by the machine.

I do believe that the writers who enjoy massive success all have a secret sauce.

For Dickens, it was in his cast of characters. As I wrote this, many came to mind, as fresh as when I first encountered them: Mr. Micawber, Peggotty, Betsy Trotwood, Mr. Dick, Fagin, The Artful Dodger, Mr. Bumble, Scrooge, Madame Defarge, Miss Havisham. I’ve often talked about supporting characters being the “spice” of fiction. Don’t ever waste them as a cliché or stereotype. This is one of the most potent ingredients in any sauce.

For Chandler, it was style. His was unique and tangy, often imitated, never surpassed.

I lit a cigarette. It tasted like a plumber’s handkerchief.

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.

From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.

John D. MacDonald also had a singular style, what he called “unobtrusive poetry.”

She sat up slowly, looked in turn at each of us, and her dark eyes were like twin entrances to two deep caves.  Nothing lived in those caves. Maybe something had, once upon a time. There were piles of picked bones back in there, some scribbling on the walls, and some gray ash where the fires had been.

Another word for style is voice. Sometimes that voice is the main ingredient in the sauce, as with the novels of Tom Wolfe and Douglas Adams.

For Harlan Coben, it’s about the plot, with more twists than a pretzel.

Elmore Leonard was a master of dialogue, and it’s spread throughout all his books.

   “I don’t know what it is,” his dad said, “you’re not a bad-looking guy. You could give a little more thought to your grooming. Get your hair trimmed, wear a white shirt now and then, see if that works. What kind of aftershave you use?”

     “I’m serious.”

     “I know you are and I’m glad you came to me. When’d she throw you out, last night?”

     “She didn’t throw me out, I left. I phoned, you weren’t home, so I stayed at Jerry’s.”

     “When you needed me most,” his dad said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here.”

“Actually,” Chris said, “you get right down to it, Phyllis’s the one does all the talking.” (Freaky Deaky)

For Ken Follett it’s historical detail, deftly woven, not larded on. As one critic put it:

Readers do learn a lot about cathedral building in The Pillars of the Earth and about how Gothic architecture developed, but in a way that serves a clear and clever purpose in the story. It doesn’t feel stuck-on or like an excuse for the author to write endlessly about his passion and share the fruits of research. The exposition plays naturally and complements rather than impedes the flow of the narrative and build of suspense.

With Carl Hiaasen, humor is the main ingredient.

When I was conceiving my series hero, Mike Romeo, I asked myself what my secret sauce would be. What can I bring to the character that will make him unique and not just some knockoff of what’s worked for others? So far, with #11 out there now, I think my sauce is working. It’s a mix of dialogue, philosophy, a touch of humor, spicy minor characters, and horticulture. He is a former cage fighter who loves flowers, Plato, and his wife, Sophie.

A few secret sauce tips:

  1. Be judicious with it. Too much sauce of any kind can overpower the meat. Your sauce should enhance, not overwhelm, the book.
  2. It must be tasty. Not every mixture is palatable to the reading public. Of course, if you don’t care about sales, splatter on whatever spread you make.
  3. Don’t use AI to come up with your recipe. Mix it in your own mental kitchen.

And so I ask, do you have a secret sauce? Maybe you haven’t thought about it, but looking at your work so far, do you see a consistent ingredient that marks your books as uniquely yours?

What’s the secret sauce for some of your favorite writers?

Let’s talk about it. Bon appétit!

Writing for Short Attention Spans

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by James Scott Bell

My new Romeo thriller, Romeo’s World, is live today. Like all the others, it does not have chapters. It has scenes, as long or short as they need to be. Each scene is set off with a drop cap, like this (click to enlarge):

I find this freeing and cinematic (as in “jump cuts” to move to another scene).

In the thriller market, short, numbered chapters roared into fashion with Mr. James Patterson, who I predict will break out soon. I wrote my Try series this way, each book with well over one hundred chapters. I now find it a bit absurd to have a TOC with 191 chapters listed, like one would expect a reader to think, “Gosh, I want to read Chapter 148 again. It was so good!”

So I don’t do the number thing, though in a future stand-alone I might. Either way, we’re all dealing with shorter attention spans these days.

A recent PW article reported on the move in Middle Grade fiction toward shorter books:

In recent years, educational surveys, sales data, and anecdotal evidence from teachers and librarians have all pointed to the same discouraging fact: that the share of kids ages nine and up reading for pleasure is at a record low.

***

Conversations in middle grade have increasingly gravitated toward length. Page counts under 200 are cropping up more frequently on fall and spring lists.

“We have a new type of kid now,” says author and agent Jackie Garcia-Morales at Storm Literary Agency. “They’re reading, but they’re reading in different ways—the simplest form being memes and GIFs. In that in-between age of middle grade, they’re moving away not only from longer books but also from longer-form videos and entertainment.”

***

[Krista Vitola, executive editor at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers] echoes that sentiment. “Kids have so many time constraints and competing interests, including sports and other activities. They don’t have those long windows to get lost in books like previous generations had.” Creating books that can be read in shorter stretches is a strategy for helping them fit reading in.

All that applies to adults, too, does it not? We’re all on our phones 17/7, more if we have insomnia. Who has time and attention to just sit and “get lost in a book” anymore?

A commercial novel can be long, of course (looking at you JK “Robert Galbraith” Rowling), so long as the author knows how to make readers want/need to turn the page (a subject for another time). Like The Martian by Andy Weir, which started as an indie project and comes in at a hefty 105k words.

I write in the pulp tradition, which means crisp, fast-moving stories, rarely over 80k.

Thank you for your kind attention.

Now over to you. Do your books have an average length? Do you think “shorter,” or just let the words fall as they may?

How’s your reading time these days? When was the last time you got lost in a book for over an hour?

Quotable

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“I am happiest writing in small rooms. They make me feel comfortable and secure. And it took me years to figure out that I need to write in a corner. Like a small animal burrowing into its hole, I shift furniture around, and back myself into a cozy corner, with my back to the wall … and then I can write.” —Danielle Steel

The Argument Against Transformation

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by James Scott Bell

“A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!”

In Super Structure, I explain a beat called “the argument against transformation.” It is the linchpin of the character arc. It pays off the end, when the character “proves their transformation” at the end.

In It’s a Wonderful Life, the young George Bailey argues against small town existence. He tells the two girls, Mary and Violet, that he’s going to be an explorer, maybe have a harem and a couple of wives. That desire to get away gnaws at George throughout, until he breaks and almost jumps off the bridge. At the end, of course, he realizes how much he loves his family and town, and how much they love him. He has overcome the argument against transformation, and proved it by crying out to live again.

This adds dimension to any story because readers anticipate a character journey. The character goes through the dark world, defeats death, and comes out a better version of himself.

There can be a negative transformation, as in The Godfather. At the opening wedding scene, Michael “argues” to Kay that he’s not going to be part of his father’s business. In the very last scene he proves his transformation into a ruthless crime lord by calmly lying to Kay’s face about ordering Carlo’s murder.

At the end of Casablanca, Rick has transformed from an angry loner to a sacrificial hero. Early in Act 1, however, he “argues” against that. “I stick my neck out for nobody.” That piques the readers’ interest. Will Rick ever stick his neck out? Boy, does he ever prove it at the end. He is ready to sacrifice his own life to get Ilsa and Victor out of Nazi clutches. A surprise twist saves him, and he walks off with his new BFF.

In Lethal Weapon, Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) is a suicidal cop. His wife was murdered. He doesn’t care if he gets killed in the line of duty. Indeed, he longs for it. After getting a jumper off a roof in a most unorthodox fashion, his partner, Murtaugh (Danny Glover) pulls him aside and screams at him. “Do you want to die?”

Riggs screams back at him. Yes, he wants to die! He thinks all the time about eating a bullet. Riggs pulls out a hollow point that he carries around with him, holds it up, says this will blow the back of his head off. He tells Murtaugh he has to think of a reason not to do it, every single day.

Does he transform at the end? Indeed he does, and it’s proved with a beautiful visual—the bullet wrapped in a ribbon. He gives it to Murtaugh’s daughter, who he saved from the bad guys at the cost of his own life (almost). “Give this to your dad, okay? It’s a present for him. Tell him l won’t need it anymore.”

All that to say, the argument against transformation adds a secret ingredient to entice the reader onward. And that is more important now than ever, because of (you guessed it) AI-slop.

Now, let’s agree that AI-slop novels are not horrible. Soulless, but competent. The argument against transformation and the transformation proved adds the soul.

Readers are consumers. We writers are producers. Our books are our goods. Amazon is our distributor. KENP is one aspect of that distribution. I think we all know that the supply of goods has exploded because of AI-slop. What has not increased is the supply of readers and the time they give to reading.

Thousands (tens of thousands?) of books are added to the Kindle pool every day. But a reader’s time stays the same. And because of the slop more and more of that time is spent sampling the ever-increasing supply.

The argument against transformation early in your book (so it shows in the Kindle sample) is an added inducement to read on.

A small thing? Perhaps, but we need to use every advantage we can muster in the war with the machines.

What is Scrooge’s opening argument?

“Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”

Of course at the end, he loves Christmas, and proves it by buying the prize turkey for the Cratchits, going to church, reconciling with his nephew, and becoming a “second father” to Tiny Tim.

He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.

And that’s why A Christmas Carol is the one of the most beloved stories ever written.

Can a machine do that?

Humbug!

Comments welcome.

The Best Marketing is Still Between the Covers of the Book

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by James Scott Bell

It’s horn-tooting time at TKZ. I am pleased to announce that the new Mike Romeo thriller is now up for Kindle pre-order. ROMEO’S WORLD is the title, and the publisher has generously agreed to give it a pre-pub price of $2.99 (reg. $4.99). The marketing department has also spent weeks drafting the following: “Grab your copy today!”

You can do that by going HERE. If you’re outside the U.S., go to your Amazon store and search for: B0HJSNCX13

The text above is called marketing. For an author, it used to be so simple. You got a contract with a publisher (happy day!). But because you were not a household name, your publisher expended few dollars (if any) to publicize your book. Perhaps a small ad in a newspaper or trade journal…if you were lucky.

So what could you do? You could start making the rounds of local bookstores, and try to set up a book signing. There were lots of local bookstores back then. And when one of them gave you the space, you showed up and sat at a table with your stack of books, two or three of which you sold…if you were lucky. If the store gave you a place to speak, you gave a little talk to the three people who came, one of whom was your mom, another your close friend, and the last one a stranger who just wanted to rest her feet.

And that was about it. Today, however, marketing has morphed into a tangled web of bits and bytes, drilling deeper and deeper into the subterranean world of the algorithm. A few years ago it was all about learning SEO—Search Engine Optimization. Your primary aim was to up the visibility of your website in the various search engines.

This year all the talk is about GEO—Generative Engine Optimization, which is explained thus:

GEO goes beyond traditional SEO by focusing on creating content that is not only easily understood by search engine crawlers but also by advanced AI language models. By understanding the intricacies of how AI processes information, businesses can optimize their content to rank higher in search engine results and attract more organic traffic.

Now we are told to spend our time trying to to leverage the power of the bots. I am no expert in how to do that, but if you want to get into it you can start with podcasts by Thomas Umstattd Jr. and Joanna Penn.)

I am old-school enough to believe that the most important marketing tool, the one that never changes, is the book itself. Ricardo Fayet of Reedsy agrees, as he stated in conversation with Joanna Penn (see above link):

One of my big mantras when it comes to marketing is that product is more important than marketing. So having a great book is going to be more important, in my opinion, than being a great marketer. 

Thus, I spend 90% of my book time on the writing. The other 10% is for prep work—formatting (with Vellum), cover, back matter. When I’m ready to publish, I announce the pre-sale to my email list and prepare a blog post about it (check). When the book is live, I claim a new release announcement on BookBub (free). After that, I mostly leave it to word-of-mouth to do the heavy lifting, because that’s always the best driver of sales.

That’s how I see it, anyway. What about you? What are your thoughts about marketing books in this brave crazy new world?