By John Gilstrap
I pen this week’s post from Bakersfield, California, where I’m teaching a two-day seminar on safety and health issues in the recycling industry. It’s a great class so far, packed with a lot of motivated and enthusiastic students. The fact that it took me 17 hours to get here, thanks to Mama Nature doesn’t take away from my enjoyment of the process, but it does mean that I’m tired. With tired comes cranky.

And nothing spins me up quite like unsolicited recorded phone calls.
I felt my pocket buzzing while I was in the middle of my lecture and of course ignored it because, well, I was in the middle of my lecture. During the break, I looked at my phone and found an 866 number, identified as “unknown.” I remember a friend of mine telling me about online reverse phone lookup websites that can identify unknown and scam callers, and would have saved me a lot of time!

I called the number back and reached a recorded greeting that told me, “be aware that we are a debt collector.” I suspected that it was either a scam or a wrong number, so after a minute or two on hold, I hung up and went back to work.

Then I got to thinking. This has been the year of compromised credit cards for us. It’s happened at least four times. While we’re current on all our bills, was it possible that something slipped through? There’s also the matter of a denied medical claim that we’re still negotiating with the insurance company. Could that be the problem? I really wish I’d just known how to check phone number ownership, it could have saved me such a headache.

They called back when I could actually take the call, and it turns out that a Mr. and Mrs. Ngyuen are behind on their house payments. The call goes like this:

“If this is Mr. or Mrs. Ngyuen, press one. If not, press two.”

I press two.

“If you need a moment to bring them to the phone, press one. If this is the wrong number, press two.”

I press two.

“If you want to stop receiving these phone calls, press one.”

I press one. (Really. Does anyone NOT want to stop receiving these calls?)

“To be removed from the call list, you must talk to a customer service representative. Please hold.”

I hold. For six minutes, being told regularly how important my phone call is.

Finally, a young man answers, “Hello?”

“Hello?” I say. “Really? That’s it? Hello?”

“Who is this?” he asks.

“You called me,” I say.

“Are you looking for the modification department?”

“I don’t know what a modification department is. I’m calling to be taken off your list.”

“What list?”

“The one you called me from.”

“I’m sorry, sir, I think you have the wrong number.”

“It can’t be the wrong number,” I say. “I pressed one.”

“One what?”

“The number one. You called me. Your recording told me to press one to get taken off the list. I can’t have called a wrong number.”

“Oh,” he says. “Let me pass you to someone who can take you off the list.”

“What list?” I ask.

“Huh?”

“I few seconds ago, you didn’t know what the list is. How are you going to take me off of it if you don’t know what it is?”

“I’ll transfer you to someone.”

“Let me talk to your supervisor.”

“I’ll transfer you to someone.”

“You’re not listening. I’m already talking to someone. Another someone doesn’t do me any good. I want to talk to your supervisor.”

“He’s not available.”

“I’ll talk to his supervisor, then.”

“Please hold.”

I endure three more minutes of assurances that my call is important.

“Um, sir? They weren’t available.”

“Your supervisor’s supervisor?”

“No sir. Someone else.”

“So if someone’s not there, that means no one’s there. Are you in a room by yourself?”

“No, sir.”

“Then someone must be there.”

“Sir, if you can just give me your phone number, we can take you off the list.”

“The right list? The one I want to be taken off of?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The list you don’t know.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you can guarantee that I’ll be removed.”

“I think so.”

I give him the number. “And what about the Ngyuens?” I ask.

“Excuse me?”

“The Ngyuens. The ones who are behind on their payments. Someone should call them and let them know.”

“Um.”

“They’re not at this number. I think we’ve established that.”

“They must have had that number before you.”

“This is a cell phone. I’ve had this number for over ten years.”

“Sir, I’ll tell the right person, and they’ll take the number off the list.”

“Okay,” I say. “I don’t want to have this conversation again.”

“I understand, sir. Neither do I.”

John Ramsey Miller

We have all seen movies on television where key scenes are deleted or language altered–often comically when they try to make the word fit the actor’s lip movements, or change “you Mother F*cker!” to “you silly nut” –that we are accustomed to it. The other night I was watching one of the new shows (Harry’s Law maybe)and one character called another an asshole. Did the censors stop working at the networks and go to work on Disney cartoons?

You know I like realism and I’ve got a cast-iron gut, but I was stunned last night watching BONES. This “Gravedigger”, a red-headed female serial killer, ex-prosecuting attorney in an orange jump suit stepped from a paddy wagon and was walking to the courthouse door when her head vaporized in a red wet cloud. Most realistic head blowing up I’ve ever seen and it was so seamless that, had I not known how illegal it is, I would have sworn they killed an actress (you know who was about to die of some dread disease anyway) for the shot. Then they showed closeups of people being washed with gore. It friggin looked like the special effects guy tossed a giant slurpee glass full of blood and brain tissue into the actor’s face and shirt. I was so startled I laughed. That was followed by the slow panning of the corpse, whose head was just not there, a cluttered pool of blood. This wasn’t HBO, this was Fox (I think). I’ve always thought of BONES as a light-weight drama. Those days are over.

I think some things are best shown …well, maybe less graphically. The parts of the exploded head were given a close up as the lab team prepared to reconstruct the skull on a lazy susan. Why the hell put it together? Identification to check what amount of her head actually evaporated? The shot made what was left look like a meat-lovers pizza special where the a drunk chef used half a side of beef on it. I’m talking chunks the size of toddler fists with teeth, with features and some with tufts of red hair. Man-o-man. Actually, woman-o-woman. Then they showed a corpse in a tub of lye. Everything below the waterline was bone sticking through mushy tissue… And then they had a scene with that corpse on a table in the lab. Ugggghhh!

Did I mention that my four-year-old grandson saw it? I’m sure his mind will never be the same. He was at the table behind me, and when I laughed he looked up from his coloring book. “Dotz, I want to see it again.” I changed the channel to Sponge Bob, after pressing the record button, and I had to explain special effects just like I have explained to him that Jurassic Park doesn’t have actual dinosaurs, or that there are no Transformers demolishing buildings and so forth.

So here’s my point. Do you think audiences have become so desensitized as to accept these radical changes involving what is on the tube. Where do we go from here? When is reality too real? Have I finally become as old fuddy duddy? Well, I didn’t think I was. Truth is I know the next steps and how close we are to leaving NOTHING to the imagination. That, I find truly sad.

I feel for kids. We had Roy Rogers and six guns that shot dozens of rounds if the cowboys were in a running fight. Our kids have bullets exploding heads. I’m going to start wearing a raincoat when I watch TV, just in case blood splashes through the screen.

By John Gilstrap
In my effort to maintain a digital footprint in the Worldwide Web, I participate on several writers’ boards on Facebook and LinkedIn.  For the most part, those boards are filled with shameless self-promotion of self-published books, but every now and then, I find thread that piques my interest.  Recently, I found two: One dealt with authors’ needs to brand themselves, and a second with the pricing of eBooks.  In my mind, the two topics are closely related, and I thought I’d nudge a discussion here in the Killzone.

As I see things, the act of writing a story is an art form that not everyone is cut out to do.  There’s an X-factor to story creation that transends the mechanics of writing (which can be taught), and involves a certain clarity of vision which cannot be taught.  For lack of a better term, we’ll call that X-factor talent. 

That said, the selling of one’s art is 100% commerce, reducing the finished work to a product among other products that are seeking attention from the same customer base.  Like any product, a book needs to be noticed before it can be successful.

This brings me to the notion of branding.  Given the nature of our product, there are only two options that I can see: we can brand the book, or we can brand the author.  In a perfect world, we brand both.  As consumers become comfortable with the way a particular author tells a story, they’ll start looking forward to the next release.

Branding presents a delicate mix.  Covers from an author should invoke some sense of the previous books, and the stories from book to book should take readers on the same kind of ride without becoming repetitious.  In my own case, I jealously guard my July 1 pub date, ever aware that readers are learning to look for the new releases at that time of year.  All of these little detals perpetuate the brand.

Branding can’t be rushed.  Except for the occasional first-novel lightning strike, the common denominator I see among the mega-sellers in our industry is the regular production of books.  Year after year–more or less at the same place in the calendar–they produce yet another story for their readers.  Over time, they create a critical mass, and then they’re off and running.  Huge marketing budgets and media campaigns aside–all of which are justified only by growing readership–bestsellers are born of word-of mouth.  I honestly don’t think there’s a way to force it.

Which brings me to the subject of pricing, whether you have control over your cover price, or if that is controlled by your publisher.  All too often in this business model, the production side of the business looks too hard at their own interests while turning a blind eye to their customers.  Here’s the question that we and our publishers need to ask when it comes to pricing: What’s the level that will give incentive to readers to read our book instead of a book by an author who’s far better known in the genre?

There’s a lot of noise on the other boards about authors disrespecting themselves by pricing their books too low.  This is nonsense.  Given all the entertainment alternatives, it’s in our best interest to get people to read our works at virtually any price.  The fact that we need $X to make ends meet is irrelevant to a reader’s decision to buy our work.  If they’ve never heard of us, but are intrigued by all the other things that have to go right for success to even be an option, we’ve got to make that a low-risk gamble.  Vince Flynn and I write in a similar genre, but he has many more fans than I do, who are clearly willing to shell out $28 every year for his next story.  God bless him.  If I want to tap into that reader base–and I do, as does my publisher–then we need to give readers a reason.  If their rationale for picking up their first Gilstrap book is, “What the heck, it’s only $4.00,” I’m okay with that.  I’m also confident that they’ll feel they got a great ride for their investment.

With luck, that reader will share his perception of value with his friends, and come next summer–or the one after that–those friends will dare to take a chance on their own.  Do it enough times, and a critical mass is born.

So, what do y’all think?  Is it worth it to surrender some coin on per-copy compensation to increase the reader base?  Have you been driven to buy a book you otherwise wouldn’t have because the price was right?

John Ramsey Miller

In the 1970s and through the early 90s I was a professional photographer and although technology made yearly advances (improvements) to be kept up with, everything I captured was on film stock of one kind or another. I read the other day that Kodachrome (the most remarkably permanent color transparency stock) was no longer being sold or processed by Kodak. If you’ve seen color pictures from World War II they were made on Kodachrome or Kodacolor prints. My father used Kodachrome exclusively in the fifties and those chromes are as crisp and bright today as they were when he shot them. I read this news with a sense of sadness. Over the years I have seen so many of the tools I used, loved, and even mastered become obsolete. There’s black & White silver based paper and film stock and the chemicals associated with them. (Well they are available for perfectionists, but expensive and increasingly harder to get). There were vibrant Dye Transfers and Cibachrome Prints, Polaroid 4×5 positive negative in B&W. I could go on and on, but we all know the drill. I had a friend in the late seventies whose custom color lab I used. He told me that one day in the not-to-distant future all pictures would be taken by means of circuitry and pictures would be stored on tape in digital form as was the case with video cameras. I said there would always be film based on what I knew about digital images and the problems with storage. Boy was he right.

An holographic scientist told me that by using holography lenses of any focal length––even zooms––could be created on paper thin sheets of clear plastic and function as well as a lens made by Zeiss.

I’ve gone with the flow. Today my old Crown Graphic is in a box somewhere in the shed. My Nikon is digital D-50 and I have about as much memory capacity in my computer and extra hard drives as MIT had in the seventies in their mainframes. (I’m just guessing here). I also read that digital point and shoot cameras are going the way of the rotary dial telephone because cell phone cameras are taking their place.

So, old things are made obsolete by new things that are better––or that are are accepted and used by more people than others. This is evolution at work, or natural selection. The marketplace dictates which technology is rules and for how long. So we see amazing changes. CDs are no more necessary to enjoy music than are LPs or reel-to reel-tapes. In fact with my iPod and iTunes my CDs are just wasting space.

We have discussed the future of paper books here a lot and as much as us old guys and gals are fighting the thought of a paperless library, our grandchildren’s children will probably have no choice to make. As our children never used a rotary phone, theirs will not have bookshelves in their homes as we do.

Book stores are in trouble, especially the huge chains. This may mean that independent stores will have a profitable place in the market again. At least while our generation is reading and buying books.

I admit that I really love my Kindle (I’m presently reading something called VAMPIRE EMPIRE) on it. I would rather listen to a book than read it. I’m thinking out loud here that the future of mid-list authors may not lie with the publishers we have always depended on. We’ve been conditioned to think we can’t be real authors without our work being produced by a house. We have been conditioned to believe that hard covers validate a work, that paperback originals are inferior to hard covers, and that the best work goes to the top of the market. Now those assumptions are looking like aging out illusions as the world changes we and publishers follow as best we can.

I appreciate the publisher of my novels and I love my editors. In the old days publishers nourished us mid-list authors, nurtured them, and were content to make their money on runs batted in and not focusing on home runs. As more and more people bought books, and more money was made by the houses, they were merged into a few huge houses, and bean counters took over and the which-authors’-books-were-bought decisions were made by marketing departments, and everything became bonuses and stockholder dividends and authors who weren’t their best selling authors were ignored and cast aside. Okay, so business is business, and pigs is pigs and in the end we are seen as no more to a publisher than a parts producer is seen by an automobile company. We are either making an Edsel grill or a windshield wiper motor.

Okay, kids, it’s extinction time. The dinosaurs will chew their cuds until they they discover there’s no grass to eat, they’ll drop on a barren landscape while the quick little guys who saw the sky turning yellow and got into caves live to eat another day.

I think a lot of authors are going to figure out how to live without publishers and their advances in lieu of a larger percentage of profits. Publishers have been expecting authors to do their own promoting and marketing for a while now. Most authors won’t be needing the paper book distribution networks, or the cookie-cutter promotion departments that send out the same form-promo sheets to the same people. New and well-told stories will always be in demand, I’m just no longer sure publishers are going to be as necessary to the process as they have been. Amazon and the other fulfillment outlets will pay the author the lion’s share of the sale price of the ebooks, where publishers pay far less, or split the profits after expenses or something.

There were something like a million books published last year, and there will be more (or a few less) published this year. The trick will be, as it always has been, to be able to produce a book that rises through the din and sells in sufficient numbers to pay the author for the effort.

I think what most of us authors will continue to need are the same quality of editors that publishers have on their payrolls, and little else they have to offer. Cover artists are easy to find. I hope editors are more appreciated and better paid than they have been, or they will find they can make a better living taking free-lance projects and a percentage of the profits. For the moment a lot of us still think its important, if not crucial, to be affiliated with a house for credibility or prestige or whatever, but I think individual authors can gain their own credibility and status by writing books that people enjoy and talk about. I doubt readers in the future will care who publishes the books they read. I truly believe that the future, though confusing and out of focus at the moment for a lot of us, is going to provide more opportunity and prove brighter than ever.

As I learned by watching what happened to my beloved and trusted film, the medium matters only as a transmission platform for the message. A story on paper hits me with the same impact that one on a screen or in words traveling into my ear.

Bullshit, smoke, money, and mirrors aside, it’s always been and will always be about the stories. I’m pretty sure that much is impervious to natural selection.

John Ramsey Miller

Last week I uploaded a completed manuscript I finished a year ago to my Kindle and started reading it. After having read it numerous times on the computer screen and on paper, I was amazed how on my Kindle I found myself reading it differently as it was more just book-like. It was easier for me to spot my typos, see the weaknesses and flaws that I missed on the other passes. Of course correcting on the Kindle is beyond my understanding and abilities, so I will have to go back to the lap box. It’s one of those novels with good bones, but it needs work. I know my strengths, but not as well as I know my weaknesses. My friend Phillip Hawley read it and made a lot of very valuable and insightful comments and suggestions. In fact he’d make a great editor. I’ve had four great editors, and they made my books what they were. No doubt about it. In fact, sometimes I feel like I am one of them singers who’s records are only great because of the producer’s mastery of soundboards and studio tricks that fool the ears of just about everybody.

Speaking of my Kindle, I noticed one of the novels I read by Ken Follett (A Dangerous Fortune) contained several typos–probably put there by the typesetter. Just made me wonder why they weren’t caught in the years since the book was published and lately transferred to Kindle format. There’s nothing more annoying than finding typos in your book that were put in after the final edits, or missed by the final set of checkers after everybody else missed them. Worse still is finding them early and then having them “not” be corrected.

Of late I’ve been reading a lot more than I usually do. Maybe it’s the time of year and the gloomy days. I think I should be reading less, living and writing more.

I hope everybody reading this had a great Thanksgiving. Mine was Norman Rockwell perfect until the first shots were fired across the table. I’m looking forward to our annual Christmas fiasco.

I love a good history. This week, while I’ve been healing, I’ve been reading a history on my Kindle. BLOODLANDS, by Timothy Snyder. It is the true story of the largest loss of human life in human history, and all due to the efforts of two men: Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Hitler is the illustration for evil, but Stalin made Hitler look like Mother Theressa. I’m not talking about their soldiers killing each other, and people in the way of those battling forces, but innocent people targeted specifically. Genocide and ethnic cleansing and murder and destruction of life on such a scale that it is inconceivable. The thought of having tens of thousands of people to slaughter millions is so stunning there is no word to describe it.

We write books about threats on a personal level, not wholesale butchery. As I read the statistics––fifty thousand here, three hundred thousand there ––I realized that the scale made less of an impression than two here and ten there. Each of these forty or fifty million individuals had a life and a story, as each killer had, but with few exceptions they were never recorded except as a name and number, a space in a hole or bones under the sky. If you want to read the whys and hows of the mega murder of whole ethnic populations, political movements, and religious groups, it’s a good enough book. But in all of the numbers and statistics and justifications and evil there was one scene that most horrified and affected me. There were two orphaned Jewish children on the street in the Warsaw ghetto when a van stopped to collect them for death. The girl, holding her brother’s hand, told the German soldiers, “Please, sir, don’t hit us. We will get into the truck ourselves.” I am more haunted by those words, and that scene, than by all the murder and mayhem in the entire book. Sometimes, one personalizing paragraph is worth a library of facts and figures. You suddenly can imagine your own children or grandchildren in the same situation and it breaks your heart on a whole new level.

What I’m driving at here is the small stories within larger ones often make the difference to the reader.