By John Gilstrap
http://www.johngilstrap.com/

My next book—the second installment of the Jonathan Grave thriller series, to be published next July—finally has a title: Hostage Zero. It’s got heft, I think. It sounds intriguing. And it provides lots of opportunities for the art director to design a terrific cover. At the end of the day, that’s what a title is all about, right?

Good title + great artwork = interested consumer.

For me, a title and a cover have done their job when they compel a potential customer to pick up the book and crack the spine. After that, the prose of the book takes over as sales agent. A book is a consumer product, after all, and packaging matters.

I just wish that the journey to nail down a title was less arduous. I’m coming to grips with the fact that I’m just not very good with titles. They rarely stick. Here’s my publishing history to date (my original titles are in parentheses):

Nathan’s Run (Nathan!)
At All Costs (Most Wanted)
Even Steven (Even Steven)
Scott Free (Scott Free)
Six Minutes to Freedom (Six Minutes to Freedom)
No Mercy (Grave Secrets)

I know it looks like a three-three split, but no one in the entire publishing pantheon liked Six Minutes to Freedom as a title, but it stuck because no one could think of anything else.

A week or so ago, I floated a title trial balloon via Twitter and Facebook to see what people thought of Hard Target as a title for the new book. The response was swift and overwhelmingly negative. Who knew that a bad Jean-Claude Van Damme movie could sully a two-word phrase forever? And who knew how many people are titillated by the word “hard.” I mean really, people. . .

Over the weekend, I got what I thought was a great inspiration for a title, and I floated it to my colleagues here on The Killzone: The Cost of Betrayal. The response was supportive (although not particularly enthusiastic), but it was received warmly enough for me to proffer it to my publisher. The return email read, “er . . . keep thinking.” It was too specific, I was told. We need to think more “atmospheric.”

I have no idea what an atmospheric title is, but on Monday, I floated the possibility of either Mortal Wounds, Mortally Wounded or Precious Cargo. Yeah, I know they all suck, but I wanted a damn title. I’m tired of calling a year-long project Grave 2.

Then I got this email from my editor: “Here’s a title I like a lot: Exit Strategy. This won a ‘great’ from [our sales manager].” I liked it. Done deal, right? I mean, if the author, the editor and the sales manager like a title, what could go wrong?

The publisher hated it. Yep, even used the H-word. I don’t know why she reacted so negatively, but she’s really good at what she does, so I concede to her tastes.

Finally, someone came up with Hostage Zero. It feels right and it tastes right. I have a title!

So what about you folks? How much do you stew over your titles? Do your working titles typically last through to publication, or do they change? As avid readers, do titles matter beyond that first impulse to look at a book? Are titles more than just marketing devices?

John Ramsey Miller

One of the perks of being a published author is that authors and publishers will ask you for blurbs. Some are gems and writing a blurb is a pleasure, and you get to see and understand how difficult it is to write a great blurb that will do the book justice. Flip the coin.

Sometimes you eat the bear…

This week I received a book from an editor at Delacorte asking for my opinion on a book she edited that is being published in January 2010. I read the manuscript and the first 8o pages literally rocked my world. I’m serious. I found myself holding my breath as I read. This is a first novel by an unknown author and I read the book in five hours and I was blown away. Blown away. Blown away. The terms: an exciting new voice, and a talented storyteller, are tossed around every time a first novel is introduced, and often they are just marketing fluff from the book of standard sales phrases that was written in about 1820. I’ll just say one thing with conviction. This woman can flat write a coon up a tree backwards. The author’s name is Carla Buckley, and THE THINGS THAT KEEP US HERE should be a huge success. Hopefully this will be the first of many. It’s manuscripts like this that keep me excited about the requests and ready to read another manuscript.

Then …. sometimes the bear eats you.
I have also been asked to blurb a book and after reading it, wished I hadn’t said I would. Occasionally the author is a friend, or connected to a friend, the best I can do is write something that isn’t dishonest. Years ago, I hated to disappoint people. Now I say I only blurb books scheduled for publication and submitted to me by the publisher. Years ago I didn’t want any aspiring author to think that I thought I was too good to help them out. Yesterday I found a list of blurbs I wrote ten years ago and sent to an author who was a friend of a friend and owed this weekend author his life or something. I’ll withhold the name of the publisher (an internet on-demand publisher) and the author, who is no longer among the living.

Here are a handful:
“Few authors would have even attempted to incorporate so many seemingly unrelated characters and plots into one novel.”

“ ___________ is an author who is truly in a class of his own.”

“Never before has an author utilized so many genres in one novel.”

“You will laugh and you will cry and you will not believe just one person wrote this book.”

“I was so entertained by _______________ that I found myself reading long sections of the book over the phone to my friends until my voice played out.”

“A rich tapestry of plots, genres and styles that will have the reader laughing one minute and crying the next.”

“If you live to be 100, you’ll never again read anything like ___________________.”

The author actually used two of the blurbs on the cover. I didn’t lie in any of the blurbs, and everybody was happy.

The book whose name cannot be said, was literature’s PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. It had a time-traveling villain who wore white robes so he could appear in any time period without drawing stares, a vampire dog, a thirty page sea battle that it turned out was a tank commander’s dream, a virus that could destroy the earth’s flora and fauna, a haunted house where a child lived with an old pirate, a gay ghost who followed the tank commander around, a lesbian detective who looked like Rip Torn, an alcoholic cigar-smoking chimpanzee, and more. Characters appeared suddenly, delivered a volume of information, and just vanished forever. The author wrote one chapter in first person and narrated the next. One chapter was simply dialog between a deer and an alligator as they discussed the viral threat to their habitat from the mad scientist villain. A gay ghost (I kid you not) lamented the fact that being protoplasm made him able to create suction. There was a battle between an evil army of swordsmen and a villain turned good by love, at the end that broke up an opera. The lesbian detective fired her pistol at the bad villain and accidentally killed the fat lady before she could sing. And the audience sat watching until it was over, whereupon they applauded. What New Yorker who attends operas would actually know a battle in the aisles was not part of the opera they had paid to see? And the gay ghost who had simply vanished halfway through the book returned to sit in the audience for the action. Out of about nine plots, none was more important than any other and none of the loose ends were tied up so (as the author told me) there could be a sequel. The author also told me that he never planned anything he wrote ahead, and always had a drink or two then simply wrote the characters that appeared and “pen to paper” he went traipsing wherever the characters led him. I suspect he was completely unaware that they’d taken LSD and led him on a wild goose chase through a burning asylum.

Some have it and some don’t.

So, authors, got any good blurb stories?

By John Gilstrap
www.johngilstrap.com

Have you ever noticed how much of our lives are spent preparing for failure? We set our “sights high, but our expectations low.” We “say a little prayer,” while we “plan for the best but expect the worst.” Then, when good news does arrive (and let’s be honest: good outweighs bad in the end for most people), we hesitate to celebrate as we “wait for the other shoe to drop.”

Most people, it seems to me, are perfectly happy to be around others who talk themselves down, yet get uncomfortable around acquaintances who say positive things about themselves. We are awash in pejoratives for people who are confident in their own abilities—narcissistic, egotistical, too big for his britches, precocious, swelled head—but where are the pejoratives for people who keep their talents hidden?

I can’t think of a single one. Instead, we call those folks humble, and we pretend to hold humility in high esteem.

Such hypocrisy. Talent denied is a key ingredient for mediocrity—a lifelong role in the chorus while the soloists command the spotlight. Mediocrity is beige. It’s safe, it’s boring and it’s comfortable, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s no way to live life. I guess it’s fine for those who are genetically predisposed to the ho-hum; but if you want to squeeze all of the drama out of life, and certainly if you want to make a living writing books, or acting, or practicing any other art form, then you’d best start living loud colors.

Start by owning up to your talent. I think you owe God that much for giving it to you.

Somebody asked me the other day when I first realized that I could write well. Not too long ago, I would have hemmed and shuffled and said something self-deprecating about how a lot of people would tell you that I still don’t write well. I’d have played it for a laugh and then said something about having been lucky in my life.

In short, I would have dodged the question. But that was before my new commitment to honesty and living loud colors.

For this questioner, I took the truth for a test-drive. I told her that I’ve known I was a good writer for as long as I can remember. I knew it, in fact, long before I had any tangible proof that I was right. I knew it because I wanted so badly to be good. In elementary school, I was the one who wrote stories for fun, and then re-wrote them four and five times because I wanted them to be better.

I’ve known for as long as I can remember that I was going to be a published novelist. Truly, there was never a doubt. I had no idea how long it would take, but that didn’t matter because I was willing to do whatever was necessary to learn the craft. I knew it would happen because I wanted it so badly, and because I was well enough read to know that my stuff was good. I knew that my storytelling was better than a lot of what I bought at the bookstore. If, in fact, I never did publish a novel, it would have been because I’d died too early.

I’ve rewritten that last paragraph six times now trying to make it sound not-arrogant. If I failed, forgive me, because I don’t feel arrogant. I feel blessed. And it ain’t braggin’ if it’s true.

If you feel blessed by talent, you should say it out loud when people ask. Try it now. Come on, we can do it together: “I’m proud of the gift I’ve been given. I’m proud of the endless, continuing hard work I put into it. I will be successful.”

If you can’t say it, how can it ever happen? I’m not talking self-delusion here, or new-age gobbledygook about some Secret where visions make your dreams come true. I’m talking simple honesty.

When I’m elected king, children will be taught to drench themselves in the exotic colors of life and to pursue their dreams with focus and vigor. Beige will be outlawed for all but those who are born to be boring. Adults will be as honest about their successes as they are about their failures, and they will be utterly shocked every time they don’t win.

What we envision for ourselves defines who we can become.

By John Gilstrap
www.johngilstrap.com

Dear Bookseller,

Thank you for inviting me to your store to sign copies of No Mercy. And thank you for the work you do. You are the lynchpin in the machinery that keeps the book world on its axis despite a culture that seems to value the written word less and less. It’s important that we work together to do whatever we can to pull people into stores to buy books. That’s why you invite me, and that’s why I show up. We’re a team.

It’s a shame we didn’t sell more copies, but it was great getting to know you and your staff. I’ve been thinking about the event since we last saw each other, and I believe I might have found some areas for improvement in the future:

Perhaps you should consider putting me inside your store. Yes, I know that things are a little cramped, but customers aren’t seeing me out there in the mall. They’re just seeing a guy at a table with a bunch of books, and judging from the looks on their faces, I think they’re a little creeped out by it. It’s the way they pull their children a little closer as they pass. Let’s share retail space as well as love.

The signage was a great idea; thanks for that. There’s actually only one L in Gilstrap, but hey, these things happen sometimes. Next time, though, along with the big picture of the book cover on the sign, could you display the picture of me that my publicist sent? If people can match a face to a poster it might take some of the creepiness out of the whole guy-sitting-at-a-table thing.

Please don’t think me ungrateful or overly pushy, but for the brief time I’m taking up space in your store, what say we all sell my book? That’s right, mine—the current Gilstrap; not the next Grisham or Baldacci or Miller. Sure, they’re fine authors, but they’re not here right now. Remember that lady who came to the desk while I was there and asked where she could find the new Jack Reacher book? That would have been the perfect time to say, “Oh, if you like that kind of thriller, you might want to meet John Gilstrap. He happens to be sitting right there.”

Perhaps I’m not the best judge on this particular form of etiquette, but it seems reasonable to inform every customer that there’s an author in the house. Perhaps it seems obvious what with the table and all, but believe me it’s not. People get tunnel vision when they shop. They need a little nudging. Ask around. Many of the independent stores and the more experienced chain stores do it that way. Hand selling really moves books.

While we’re on this topic, let’s talk about all those books you stacked around me at the table. It made for a great display, but I think half of them or even more should displayed inside the store away from me. I think it’s intimidating for people to evaluate the merit of a book while the author is watching. Just ask my wife. (I’m a hoverer as she reads my manuscripts, but that’s not important right now.) I think copies should even be stacked at the register so that the salespeople can hand each customer a book while they inform them that there’s an author in the house.

Thank you for your time and attention. As I close, I’d love to hear how I and my fellow authors can make your bookselling job easier. Should I have made up bookmarks and handed you a stack, or would you just see that as more clutter for your desk? I know I end up doing little but sitting at that table, but would you prefer that I walk around and chat up your customers? Truthfully, because of the aforementioned creepiness factor, I hesitate to approach readers on the prowl.

Finally, please know that I’m grateful for all of this. How else can we make the book signing thing more beneficial to everyone?

Warmest regards,
John Gilstrap

By John Gilstrap

You’ve been working on the story for the better part of a year. The plot is all you think it should be, and you love the characters you’ve created. Finally, you reach the day when you get to type every author’s favorite phrase: The End. You do your little happy-dance around the office and maybe celebrate with the family.

Then you read what you’ve written. Uh-oh. That big twist in Chapter Seventeen wasn’t as well set-up as you wanted it to be. And jeeze-oh-peeze that dialogue seems flat in Chapter Seven. And the spelling errors! Oh, my God! You hunker down and make those changes, plus dozens more. Woo-hoo! You’re done.

Then you read what you’ve written. Damn. Now that you’ve changed Chapters Four, Eight and Eleven, that Chapter Seventeen twist is so obvious that people will see it coming from ten miles away. And your protagonist’s hair color has somehow miraculously changed in Chapter Twenty-Four. Besides, you know what? This whole story might just suck. Maybe treating the story as a mystery is a mistake from the beginning. Maybe it needs to be romantic suspense. Maybe you need to start over from page one.

Maybe it was better before you started diddling with it. Maybe . . . blah, blah, blah.

A friend of mine who is a landscape painter told me once that good artists and great artists are separated by the ability to know when the trees in the painting have exactly the right number of leaves. You can have too few, and you can have too many, and a great artist knows when to quit. A successful writer knows when his story is finished and it’s time to let it go.

I struggle with this on every book I write. Hell, I struggle with it on every one of these blog posts. I’m an obsessive re-writer, but I can’t stand the notion of something being “out there” that is not exactly the way I want it to be. And more times than not, when I look at it one more time, there’s something else I feel compelled to change.

How do you all determine when it’s time to move on? How do you gather the courage to quit?

John Ramsey Miller

Human beings will do anything to turn a profit, to gain an edge. Conspiracies will exist forever and throughout the universe. Greed rules the world. Always has, always will. We thriller authors know this and have learned that you cannot really write over-the-top bad guys as long as you keep the motivation real and the character true to his or her motives. Wealth, social or political power, elevation of status, feeding a sense of self-importance, protection of the status quo, a desire to stay out of prison, a need for accolades are all motives for forming or joining a conspiracy.

When you watch a James Bond movie, how do you not wonder how the evil geniuses go about recruiting hundreds of people that will kill any and all comers, threaten the world with selective destruction for extortion of money from world powers. You have to wonder where the bad guys got the cash to build a secret base on an island or in a false volcano where the receding lake is made of steel painted to look like water. How much do they pay their evil workers? Short of buying an out-of-work army from a third world country, or recruiting in mental hospitals catering to the criminally insane, how do you find hundreds of psychopaths who will also do exactly what they are told and will live with other criminals in the middle of nowhere?
Back to conspiracies. Not all are believable, but if you remember to keep them in proper sliding scale, you’ll pull it off. The only difference between a street gang leader, a mafia don, the head of a very large business enterprise, and head of a government agency often lies in the trappings and degree reward at stake. There is little difference between the way a small time drug dealer and the head of a large bureaucracy think and plot.

I just read how organic food is no healthier than food grown using insecticides and commercial fertilizers by a conglomerate. So a chicken raised on feed made from other chickens and injected with steroids and antibiotics is no better for you than one raised by a farmer’s wife who feeds them only natural grains, roasted soybeans, corn and kelp, etc… Well that sounds a lot like what the tobacco companies used to say about the safety of cigarettes. I read about bills introduced to heavily regulate produce sold in farmers markets due to fears of salmonella and other contaminates. How many cases of food poisoning comes from local produces grown on farms as opposed to government regulated large commercially outfits? It sounds like something a Con Agra would pull because people are buying that produce from farmers markets and not the local grocery store. There’s a conspiracy to write a thriller around. The possibilities are endless and we’ll never write them all.

There is no doubt that people working for governments commit murder in the name of protecting secrets, or getting rid of obstacles and critics of the regime. It happens every day. King David sent a brave soldier to a certain death in battle so he could have that man’s wife. Joseph Stalin killed 30 million of his own people out of paranoia and in the guise of progress. Our government killed off and enslaved thousands of native Americans in order to utilize the land they inhabited.

The secret of writing conspiracies is to keep it on the page, and to always tell a little story within the bigger story that the reader can identify with, a character they can identify with and root for. Nobody who loves a thriller wants to read about a battle between titans who are equally matched and you’ve got a perfect yawn machine on paper. But you pit a preteen boy armed only with a slingshot against an armored giant with a spear and sword on a battlefield, and you have the boy kill the giant, and you’ve got yourself a story. Why? Because we are all facing giants every day of our lives, and there’s a chance that any one of us could be the boy with a slingshot.

John Ramsey Miller

I got an email this week from Jennifer Chappelle. She is opening a new bookstore in downtown Locust, NC called Uwharrie Books (U War EE). Her new shop is going to feature books by North Carolina authors and she intends to make Saturdays author event day where authors can come in and sign their books for local book lovers. Locust is a small town, but one with a Walmart for serious competition. If there are enough readers in the area who will shop at an independent, hopefully Uwharrie Books will do well. It’s refreshing to see someone willing to swim upstream against a swift current. We’ve seen the trend of readers to buy cheap at any cost (the small hand sellers who were once the backbone of the industry), an erosion of customer loyalty, and a trend away from reading for the TVs, Gaming devices, and PCs. All of these trends can change when people get fed up with insipid TV content, winning an imaginary war, and shopping at giant box stores that are taking over the world. If and when “they” decide to try thinking and imagining once again, and decide that a few cents more to maintain stores owned by actual members of their community, who reinvest in that community, strikes a chord. Please, don’t the Waltons have enough in the bank yet?

Walter Cronkite was buried Thursday in New York. Uncle Walter was a fixture for my generation, a supreme and trusted journalist who had watched from the sidelines as the news he was devoted to reporting (without injecting his own bias, well, except for declaring the Vietnam War lost, which is still being debated) evolved into a cross between a carnival fright ride and a candy store. The media seems intent on keeping the populace scared to death, depressed about the state of the world, and aware of the importance of keeping up with the latest fads. The Today Show is nothing but one long commercial for products, punctuated by celebrity shenanigans, quick bursts of terrifying news and sound-bites of political propaganda. It bothers me. It bothers me a lot. Newsmen seem to be chosen for their pleasing appearance, rather than their journalistic abilities. Just as people get the Government they deserve, so goes it with the news. We are asking for this and for it to continue. Hard to imagine this superficiality is so widely accepted. It is our job as thriller authors to entertain and scare the crap out of people, and the news outlets are usurping our positions. Why do people need us if they can get the crap scared out of them every time they turn on their TV sets?

And the trend toward reality shows should be helping bookellers. I’d rather read War & Peace in Russian than watch Survivor, Bridezilla, Housewives of Orange County, New York City, or New Jersey, or I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! So you’d think people would be reading more as TV hurdles down the slippery slope greased so thoroughly by Jerry and Maury. The sad thing is I see it getting much worse before it gets any better. What does that say about us? You know very well what it says.

John Ramsey Miller

Here I am, a once-upon-a-time-NYT-best-selling author, back at the beginning of my career yet again, but with a couple of million books in print. This is the third time I’ve been writing a novel without a publishing contract and I’m not getting any younger and other than writing novels I have few prospects for an alternative career. Writing thrillers is easy for me. Everything else looks really hard.

In my life––if you count the part time gig in high school––I’ve had exactly four jobs as an employee of someone else. I drove a delivery truck for Solomon’s Dry Cleaners in the eleventh grade. I got fired after my fourth accident in two weeks. Mrs. Solomon was nice about it. Her insurance company insisted she replace me. After high school I worked a summer on a tow boat that ran up and down the Mississippi River non-stop at five knots maximum from New Orleans to somewhere up the Ohio River. The engines were so loud you couldn’t have a conversation except out on the barges. The food was excellent. They had to put me off in Greenville, Mississippi after I got sun poisoning after spending a day on the barges outside New Orleans. Fair skin made a day laborer in the sunshine a pipe dream, and truthfully it lacked something crucial. My third actual job was as a graphic artist/photographer for a TV station in the Mississippi Delta. I got fired because I hid Martha Mitchell out from the media and the TV station thought that was some sort of a breech of media ethics. Evidently I was supposed to hold her down while they skewered her. I was glad I got fired. Working at a TV station sucks. My fourth job was in 1978 as the official disseminator or public information for Leflore County Schools, the poorest county school district in Mississippi, which means poorest in the free world. The predominantly black county schools had books from the 1960s that the white school students had dog-eared, scribbled in until they looked like redacted documents from the FBI, and could either burn or hand off to the county. There were actually high-school teachers at the county schools who didn’t have a college degree and were no more than babysitters. In Mississippi the county schools were historically parking places until crop season. The federal government paid my salary. That job I quit. I can’t remember exactly why, but I guess it was being that I figured being depressed was something I could manage on my own without the government’s help.

Before I started writing, I made a living as an artist or a free lance photographer or something else I did to earn money and I never went hungry. I’ve made my living writing since the mid-eighties. First as an ad copy writer, a journalist, a non-fiction author, as a scriptwriter, and a thriller author. I have made a living at it, although not as good a living as some, better, I suppose, than most fiction authors. I do have a book in the can and I’m going to do some painting and sculpting before I start another book. This writing thing keeps me off balance and maybe I’m as insecure as most other authors I know. It’s just a weird business, and its the business side I don’t think I’ll ever understand or master. I’m not much for politics, and self promotion has never been easy for me. I grew up in a “be modest” and “don’t blow your own horn” family. I guess I need a larger ego than I possess, more self assurance or something.

Writing has always been easy for me. I just sit down. I see the scenes and I transcribe them. Maybe it’s too easy. It’s something I know I’m good at. I enjoy doing it. It has been my art form and I have painted my words, told my stories, on an international scale. I have touched people, made their lives better for a moment or two. I am blessed and lucky and fulfilled in the writing thing. As long as I enjoy it, I will keep doing it, but not one moment longer. You have to make a living, but life is too short to do a thing you don’t love doing.

http://www.johnramseymiller.com