Dare To Dream

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

It’s June, so another graduation season is drawing to a close. In high schools and colleges all over the United States, proud students are donning caps and gowns, and posing for pictures with even prouder parents and grandparents. Late spring is the time of unbridled opportunity. Those young men and women literally own the future—their own, to be sure, but also mine, by extension. Given the inherent joy of the season, I wonder why so many adults seem to take pleasure in screwing it all up.

When the announcement is made at the family dinner that young William or Wilhelmina has a computer science degree or a business degree, or that they’ve been accepted to the law school of their choice, the sense of approval is palpable. Everybody knows that those kids are set for life. Their future will be filled with money and material gain.

Have you noticed that music majors or creative writing majors or acting majors don’t receive the same universal acceptance? Is it because the presumed path to wealth isn’t quite so linear? Is it because liberal arts and social sciences aren’t as important to society as harvesting a new crop of lawyers? This bothers me.

I find it difficult to believe that at the doddering age of 21, every law school inductee is truly pursuing his or her passion. I could be wrong—I’ve spent a lifetime being wrong many, many times—but whenever I see a newly minted lawyer or accountant, I get the sense that in more than a few cases, their beaming smiles are reflections of just their own ambitions, but those of Mom and Dad as well.

Maybe I don’t want to see so young a person with so pedestrian a dream as being a lawyer or accountant. Age forty-one is the time for 12-hour work days and heavy responsibility, not twenty-one. Is this really their dream? For some, yes. For many, I suspect no.

You want to see lofty dreams? You want to be inspired by a youthful spirit? Sit down and talk to those creative writing students and the musicians. They know that the odds of success are stacked against them, but they don’t care. They’ve got a passion, and they’re going to pursue it to the end, until they either succeed or are forced by finances or a broken spirit to declare defeat.

If they beat the odds—and let’s face it, they are long odds—naysayers will pronounce them to be “lucky.” But that’s only if the success is huge. Like George Clooney or John Grisham huge.

Otherwise, in my experience, people will find a way to diminish true success and turn it into something less than it is. It’s only a TV movie, not a real movie. It’s only being published by a small press, not a major house. It’s only the Washington Opera company, not the Met. It’s only the touring company, not Broadway. Sure, he made it to the Chicago Bears, but he never made it above second string.

It’s a shame about William. He never really made it. Never mind that William is doing what he loves.

I feel sorry for the kids who have been career tracked by their parents. It’s foolish to think about becoming an artist, they are told, because it’s impossible to make any money at it. They’ll prove their point by reciting a litany of one hit wonders and abject failures from among their own childhoods. Give up now, son; you’ll never make it. This from the same mother or father who said never give up on the soccer field or in Math class. Those are important. Without the connections and the A-plus report card, Harvard is off the table, don’t you know.

I know that I am painting with a very broad brush here, but I’ve known these parents. I’ve had to justify why I was ruining my own son’s chances at success by not shipping him off to boarding school where he could start networking at age fourteen. (I’m not making that up. I turned the debate around, though, when I asked the overachievers why they were willing to surrender custody of their adolescent children at the moment in their lives when they most needed the steady hand and constant love of their parents.)

So listen up, graduates: It’s your life now. You have the God-given right to live it as you please. If acting like you’re forty when you’re 20 years younger is your thing, then go for it. But if you want to start a rock band or become a poet or set a new standard for sculpture, this is the time. If it doesn’t work, how much harm can you do to an accounting career that hasn’t started yet?

How do you even know that you want to be an accountant if you haven’t tried a dozen other things? I’ve got nothing against accountants, don’t get me wrong, but this is an important life choice. Suppose you hate being an accountant? Changing your mind becomes a lot harder after you’ve got kids and a mortgage, and I think that the seeds of doubt over what might have been if only you’d tried could be crippling.

I say if you’ve got talent and a dream, pursue the hell out of it. This is the time. Success only comes to those to endeavor to achieve it. Failure only comes to those who surrender.

And to surrender without trying, well, that’s just cowardice.

Why Bother with Bookscan?

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by Michelle Gagnonbook

So here’s something I didn’t find out about until after my first book was published: Nielsen, the same company that ranks TV shows, is responsible for maintaining records of book sales. And, as with the TV ratings, there’s a vast disparity between what those numbers say and what the reality might be (does anyone honestly believe that many people are watching the “Ghost Whisperer?”) Among all the industry people I’ve spoken with, it’s generally acknowledged that Bookscan tends to be wildly inaccurate.

Case in point: I know for a fact that, when compared with my royalty statements, Bookscan only counts about a third of my sales (and that’s a year after the fact). Despite their claim to “provide weekly point-of-sales data with the highest possible degree of accuracy,” there are a number of sales venues they simply don’t factor in. Amazon, for example. Or Walmart. Or airports, drugstores, supermarkets; in other words, pretty much anywhere paperbacks are sold. I’ve heard that the numbers come closer with hardcovers, but with mass market paperbacks they’re way off the mark.

So why, then, do these numbers matter? For the sad truth is that they do. During my agent search, one agent looked up my Bookscan numbers right in front of me. And few people seem to know exactly how far off they are. From various editors I’ve heard that they double, triple, or even quadruple the Bookscan numbers to approximate actual sales.

In this day and age, why isn’t a better system in place? My publisher produces “velocity reports” the first six weeks of a book’s release–they know by the end of each week exactly how many copies have sold. So where do those numbers come from, and why aren’t those reported to Bookscan?

Big box stores like Barnes and Noble and Borders also know exactly how many books they’ve sold, almost on a minute to minute basis. If they stock eight copies of a book and sell five, they’ll only buy five copies of that author’s next release (or even fewer; sad but true. Which is why, as Joe noted yesterday, so many authors adopt pseudonyms these days in an effort to beat the system). So now that all of this information is computerized, why is the one “central clearinghouse” so wrong? A friend who works as an editor in Germany claims that they can get an accurate tally at the end of each and every day. Granted, Germany is a much smaller market than the U.S., but still. There has to be a better way.

Mind you, most authors don’t have access to their Bookscan numbers- publishers and distributors pay a fee for that information. I’m a big believer in transparency, and one of the most maddening aspects of being a writer is that getting a sense of where you stand is a constant uphill battle. This is why some authors become compulsive about checking their Amazon ranking, or trying to get feedback from their publisher regarding how sales are progressing. I’m not sure why that information is in short supply, but the Bookscan monopoly can’t be helping.

Coming up on Sunday, June 14, our guest blogger will be New York Times bestselling author and ITW co-president Steve Berry discussing the impact of Dan Brown’s new thriller THE LOST SYMBOL on the publishing industry.

And watch for future Sunday guest blogs from Robert Liparulo, Paul Kemprecos, Linda Fairstein, Julie Kramer, Grant Blackwood, and more.

Just say no to dialect, y’all

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I’m visiting my family in North Carolina this week, and was pleased to run across an article in a local paper that described the enduring value of regional dialects.

However, I don’t love it when authors use too much dialect in fiction. I think the over-use of dialect in dialogue is a huge story drag.

I once belonged to a writing group where a writer insisted on loading down his eighteenth-century naval adventure story each week with enough historically “accurate” dialect to sink a clipper ship. And what’s worse, he’d write phonetically accented dialect, so that it became taxing simply to wade through a few paragraphs. By the time his characters had been at sea for five minutes, I felt like I’d been reading for five hours.

But every time I suggested to him that there was too much dialect, he’d come back with, “But that’s the way people really spoke.“

And my thought-response to that was, so what? Reading it was hell.

With all due respect to Mark Twain, I think writers today need to convey dialect through techniques that don’t involve making the reader slog through irritating, hard-to-decipher dialect. We must try to give the rhythm of natural and regional speech without making readers suffer through a surfeit of “sanging,” “you’uns,” and “Oh, Law’s.”

These tools include:

  • Local phrases – The article I linked to earlier mentioned that mountain folk might refer to a child born out of wedlock as a “woods colt.” When you sprinkle local phrases such as that into your dialogue, your readers will know exactly the type of speech your character is using.
  • Slang – You can use slang to clarify a character’s speech, but I’d use this tool sparingly. Slang can make your writing seem dated. For example, how many eras could utilize the slang phrase “booty call”?
  • Grammar – a character’s use of grammar communicates a wealth of information about his or her education, socioeconomic status, and other personal traits. But again, use that tool lightly so that ungrammatical speech doesn’t become annoying.

But maybe it’s just me. In my writing group, I seemed to be the only reader who was highly allergic to dialect. What about you? Do you mind reading dialect in books? As a writer, what are some of the do’s and don’ts that you employ to portray a sense of dialect without turning off a reader?

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Coming up Sunday, June 14, our guest blogger will be New York Times bestselling author Steve Berry. And watch for future Sunday guest blogs from Robert Liparulo, Paul Kemprecos, Linda Fairstein, Julie Kramer, Grant Blackwood, and more.

Are Writing Classes Worth It?

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by Clare Langley-Hawthorne

I have to thank Jacqueline Winspear whose post on Naked Authors inspired this post. She was writing about the exponential increase in writing classes and MFA programs and exploring the question of whether creative writing can actually be taught. I want to tackle the thorny issue that accompanies this – what do creative writing classes really teach you and (hmmm…) are they worth doing at all?

My own experience has been decidedly mixed and I have to confess I’ve taken more painting classes than I have creative writing classes so it’s not like I’ve had a wealth of experience (though I do hope my novels are better than my paintings!).

I took a hilarious course in Australia on how to write a romance but soon realized that unless you LOVE Harlequin romances then it’s bloody difficult to write them (no matter how easy it looks to many people!). This class took a lighthearted approach to the genre and all its requirements and foibles, so I actually felt like I did learn something…though not, I’m afraid, how to write well.

In California, I took a class on how to write a novel well before I even attempted Consequences of Sin…now I’m not going to name any names in this blog but my experience in that class was less than inspiring. The teacher found it almost impossible to teach how to actually write a novel and the class had the unfortunately all too common cluster of writers: the bloody awful ones; the arrogant ones who wrote the most boring crap imaginable; the ones who were only there to rip other people’s work to shreds; and the genuine sensitive souls who spent most of the time utterly disheartened by the class. I hope you can tell I was in the last category:)


In this class we each had to present a piece about a novel we had read and most people did bugger all for this (though I did a rather nifty plot chart for Jane Eyre and that helped me far more than the class ever did!); we then critiqued one person’s work for the rest of the time. When it came to my turn the range of feedback was so bizarre as to be completely unusable (from “this is so exquisite I had no comments to make” to “have you ever been in jail? Because I have…” to “This is juvenile, adolescent trash (or was it puerile, I’ve blocked it from memory)”. My teacher was less interested in providing a critique than explaining that there were similarities with her own work (I guess she wanted to make sure I didn’t sue)… After this class I swore off taking another…but then I did a week intensive course only to find it was just as frustrating. By then, I was well and truly turned off writing classes!

I’m not saying that many classes are not genuinely worthwhile or that creative writing isn’t something than can (at least to some extent) be taught – although that is certainly fodder for a whole other blog post! Here’s my take on writing classes:

  • At their best they can help provide the impetus and validation needed for some writers to move forward with their WIP – at their worst they can destroy, demotivate and crush a writer.

  • While some teachers are naturally gifted at helping nurture their students and provide genuine insights into the process of formulating a piece of creative work, many teachers are looking only to boost their own egos, grind their own axes or sell their own work (yes, I’ve had to buy a teacher’s book…)

  • Writing classes seem to work best when focused on the specifics of form: like short story writing, article writing or memoir writing. I think insights into a particular genre or form can be helpful.

A successful writing class for me would have emphasized perseverance, editing, rewriting and more editing as key tools of the trade.

To be honest, I found the most valuable writing techniques I learned were not in a class but arose out of practice – writing a novel myself, editing it, rewriting it, editing further…then doing it all over again (and again). I don’t think any class can ever teach the skills you really need in this respect, because they have to come from within and have to include a determination to write no matter what and a determination to write the very best you can while constantly honing your craft.

So what have your experiences been with writing classes? Worth every penny or not worth a dime (or somewhere in between:))?

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Coming up Sunday, June 14, our guest blogger will be New York Times bestselling author Steve Berry. And watch for future Sunday guest blogs from Robert Liparulo, Paul Kemprecos, Linda Fairstein, Julie Kramer, Grant Blackwood, and more.

What kind of title is Smash Cut?

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TKZ welcomes our guest blogger, Sandra Brown. Sandra is the author of over seventy novels including fifty-six New York Times bestsellers. Her latest is SMOKE SCREEN (August, 2008), and her new book, SMASH CUT, is scheduled for release in August, 2009.

By Sandra Brown

I can imagine the quizzical expression on the faces of most readers when they hear the title of my next book, SMASH CUT. 

brown-sandra What the heck? Is that a noun or a verb? Neither? A little of both? A noun plus an adjective or a verb plus an adverb? Unless you work in the film industry or have a more than pedestrian knowledge of script writing, you probably aren’t familiar with the term.  I’ve been a movie fan all my life, but I’d never come across that phrase until I started writing this novel and had to do some research into screen writing jargon, looking for a term that would apply to my story. Ergo – SMASH CUT. More on that later.

Most frequently asked question: Where do you get your ideas?

Most difficult question to answer: See above.

It’s tough for me to explain how an idea originated, because typically I don’t have a clue.  Colleagues often cite personal experiences on which they base stories. Either they’re bald-faced liars (and I strongly suspect this of most of them) or, by comparison, I lead a much more boring life, because nothing ever happens to me that’s exciting enough to write about.

Not that I’m complaining. I’m a card carrying coward, so I don’t go looking for adventure. I avoid encounters with mean people, and certainly with wildlife, toxic plants, biting insects, and white water. I enjoy the great outdoors, but only if I’m appreciating it from behind tempered glass. My idea of camping out is staying in a hotel that doesn’t have  room service after midnight. I have acute acrophobia, and I’ll go into the ocean only if the beach catches fire. I know, I know, I’m a barrel of laughs.

Where was I?  Oh, right.  I don’t have anything interesting to write about unless I make it up. And only sometimes can I say definitively how an idea came to me.

smash-cut1 To an extent, SMASH CUT is an exception. Because I can tell you that at least part of this idea came from my family’s habit of dropping movie quotes into our conversations. 

We’re all movie buffs.  We have family standards, movies we never tire of watching, movies we’ve seen so many times we can practically recite the entire script but enjoy re-watching anyway. I think the familiarity makes these classics even more delectable, although the diehards who will watch a movie only once, vehemently disagree.  These are also the people who will read a book only once. They are to be pitied. Probably a foundation should be started for them.

Anyhow, we in my family love movies of all kinds — funny, sad, scary, historical, contemporary, futuristic. Movies about war, cowboys, gangsters, love. Doesn’t matter. Our taste in films is as diverse as our taste in books. We like anything so long as it’s entertaining. 

sandra-brown In 2006, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Surely you’ve heard of the Academy Awards. . .) put together a list of seventy-five famous quotes and made a great looking poster out of it. Against a black background are a big gold Oscar and all these quotes written in different fonts. We had one framed for our media room, and it draws the attention of guests who get a kick out of testing their memories. Some of the quotes are easy to identify: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Some only film historians would be able to identify with alacrity.  Many are from recent pictures.  Others date back decades.

The point is, among my family members, we were able to identify all seventy-five films by title and the actor who spoke the line.

So our stockpile of movie quotes is extensive. We have a suitable quip for nearly every occasion and conversation. “Napoleon Dynamite” alone was a treasure trove. Whenever one of us drops in a line (and sometimes it’s said by several of us in unison), the rest of us “get it,” while an “outsider” is left perplexed, wondering what the heck we’re all talking/laughing about.  We’ve tried to ameliorate this rudeness by describing the movie scene and the context in which the line of dialogue was spoken, but it frequently loses it’s punch in the retelling. 

I guess you had to be there.

You may think this sounds like a real drag, something that only people with very little else to do would engage in, but in our defense, I can think of worse things families can do together.  It’s a harmless pastime.  But you’re probably asking what relevance it has to plotting a novel.  I’m getting to that, I promise. 

I suppose this family tradition was in the back of my mind when I asked myself, “What if?”

Now on this, my colleagues and I are in complete accordance. Every novelist asks, “What if. . .?”  It’s a derivative of the childhood “Play like. . .”

So I asked myself, “What if quoting lines of movie dialogue wasn’t quite so harmless? Play like one’s preoccupation with movies was detrimental or, say, deadly?”

Hmm. Interesting. Follow that and see where it goes.

About the time I began doing that, I revisited an idea which had occurred to me several years ago but had remained on the back burner: Passengers in an elevator become the targets of a vicious crime.

Hmm. Interesting. Again, follow that and see where it goes.

Are the elevator passengers acquainted or perfect strangers? Is the elevator in an office building, city hall, hospital, military post?  Who commits the crime?  Who’s the unlucky casualty?

What I didn’t realize until later is that a crime committed in an elevator poses all sorts of terrible problems, not only for the hapless fictional passengers, but for the idiotic writer who put them there!
And how would said writer tie in that scene – which was vivid in my mind and demanding to be used after languishing in my head for several years — with the movie buff? What’s the connection? And maybe the movie buff’s preoccupation with the movies isn’t a bad thing, after all. Maybe it just appears to be a negative fixation, when actually. . .

You see how this works? I keep asking, “What if?” until the plot reveals itself to me. I think of a story that way. It’s an entity that is there all along, but one day decides to shoulder its way into my consciousness. I can’t really take credit for doing anything except writing it down and passing it along to you, although more frequently than not, that shouldering thing takes months. It can be a painful process, involving a lot of hard work, self-doubt, cursing, and gnashing of teeth.

Once I had the plot for this book, I began “collecting” movie quotes and memorable scenes to incorporate into the story.  I commissioned every movie fan I know to submit suggestions, particularly favorite murder scenes. What I learned was that I’ve got some really sick friends and family members.  But I must admit, I came up with most of the film lines and images that wound up in the book. 

Now, about that title. Having done my due diligence on script writing terms, I learned that “smash cut” refers to an abrupt edit that’s specifically designed to shock, jar, or scare the living daylights out of the audience.

I hope you’ll experience a few in SMASH CUT.

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Coming up Sunday, June 14, our guest blogger will be New York Times bestselling author Steve Berry. And watch for future Sunday guest blogs from Robert Liparulo, Paul Kemprecos, Linda Fairstein, Julie Kramer, Grant Blackwood, and more.

“What’s The Frequency (Today), Kenneth?”

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John Ramsey Miller

As if authors weren’t insecure enough… the sky is falling …again.

“Holy shades of the terror, Danton.” For as long as I’ve been in this game, the publishers, agents and editors have said things have never been worse in publishing, and everybody was always looking back at the “good old days.” Maybe this time they are right. If not worse, certainly our world has changed forever. And it could get worse than it is. The shakeout is not over, but there seems to be a lull in reorganizing and reshuffling at the major houses. At least it appears the wholesale bloodletting has slowed for the moment. The publishing behemoths seem to have reshuffled their cards and, leaning the fat, have resettled on their foundations. Some are acquiring books again in increasing numbers.

I’m not a businessman, but this is what I’ve managed to figure out:
More than usual even, booksellers don’t want to tie up capital in excess inventory. Most bookstores have lots and lots of books on their shelves, and the object is to roll inventory as often as possible. Thousands of books come out. If the author is new to them, and unless the buzz is enormous, they order as few copies as possible. If those sell, they might buy more, but normally they wait to see what the demand is before doing so––ordering as people ask them to. They order their stock based on the past sales of a book by a previously published author. On a clever or lucky buy, they will sell the books before they have to pay for them. Even though they can return books to the publisher for a refund, it’s a pain to lift them up and place them in boxes for shipping them back where they came from. With paperbacks they can just tear off the covers and ship them in envelopes to get credit, or a refund. I’m not sure exactly how the flow of funds between entities works because it’s irrelevant to me. Probably they send each other checks in the mail.

This is how it seems to go. If your book sells five copies, next time the store will order up to five, but probably less than five. If you are lucky, the people who bought the last book liked it enough to buy another book you wrote. But they might order it from Amazon, so the book the seller bought in anticipation of another sale to the same [hopefully loyal as if there were such a thing] customer, gets his feelings hurt and his computer places a black ball by your name.

The good old sink or swim move. A publisher pre-sells your book to the tune of 5,000 copies. They print 10,000 copies, ship the five they’ve sold, and put the other five in a warehouse in Soprano, New Jersey just off the turnpike near a group of storage tanks filled with things like food-grade motor oil. In the good old days the IRS allowed publishers and record companies to write off the (unsold inventory) boxes of books while the pages yellowed and the glue got stiff and lost its ability to hold things together. They do not tell anybody your new book is coming out, or brag about it when it does, (which is the sink-or-swim or natural selection). If it starts selling they will promote it because that makes sense. But the IRS decided this writing off inventory for years was a bad thing (on the order of writing off three-martini lunches) and put a stop to it. Martinis are great business greasers, and I believe that the captains of industry made better decisions while under the influence thanks to the 3ML. The loss of the three-martini lunch write-off did more to kill liquor sales than prohibition, but that is another story.

The way publishing works is the sort of thing you tell a room full of potential authors at your local high school if you want to nip future competitors in the bud. But seriously, authors need to know that no matter how good their books are, there’s slim chance they’ll rise to Dan Brown’s status.

The really dedicated upcoming talent will do as we authors have done and ignore the incoming rounds, forging ahead with laptops open and take our places on the shelves. The truth is, the odds are always stacked against us, and it’s the bean counters who make the decisions about our careers, not the editors and salesmen who actually like us and love our books. Always remember the words of Michael Corleone; “It’s just business.”

What I’m actually saying is that we authors are not selling dreams, which is what we think we are doing when we get into this life, we’re actually supplying a widget for the buying public and our careers depend on how many of them want to dream with us by purchasing our gizmos.

When I spoke to my local high school’s writing class the other day, I asked how many intended to become writers. I told them that when I was their age I didn’t think I’d make my living writing. I told them that life would lead them where it wanted them, and like me, although I didn’t set out to become a storyteller, the stories just began to pile up in my head and I just decided to put them down. I might not have done so had I known the probability of ever being published, but luckily I was ignorant of the astounding odds against me. I told the young people that once they discovered what they loved doing, they might be lucky enough to make a living at it as some of us have. I know the writing side pretty well, but the business side of the industry is impossibly murky. Sure there’s no security, and the work is really hard …if you do it right.

The All Important Final Clause

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

As an author, I believe that I make a silent contract with my readers to provide them with a complete entertainment experience. The suspense is a given (I hope) but there are also the light moments, the warm moments, and even the occasional tear-jerking moment. If I do my job right, I’ll hook ’em with the first line, run them through a roller coaster through all the middle chapters, and then, at the end, leave them feeling . . .

Well, it depends. More times than not, I want that last moment we have together to be one of those where you gently close the book, maybe squeezer it a little, and then say, “Jeeze, I wish it wasn’t over already.”

Think about all the ink we’ve spilled here in the Killzone talking about kick-ass beginnings. I think that endings are even more important. It’s not just about tying up loose ends, either, although obviously that’s important. I’m talking about that final note in the literary symphony. Is it a cymbal crash or a sweet pianissimo? Maybe we want them to have trouble reading through their tears.

Whatever our plan, it’s up to us and us alone to make it happen. That last scene—the last moment my readers and I have together—mean a lot to me. I agonize over it. I look at those last sentences as the final clause in the contract that I make with the people who choose to read my work.

I’m a student of last lines. Here are some of my favorites:

“And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.” — William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.” – Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird

“But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” –Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” –Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“Tomorrow, I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.” –Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.” –A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

“. . . together they cried like babies on national television.” – John Gilstrap, Nathan’s Run

Come on, you must have a favorite finale to share. Let’s have it.

Bacon-wrapped Innovation

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by Michelle Gagnoncreme brulee guy

Bear with me, in this post there are going to be some metaphorical leaps and truly questionable analogies. I partly blame an excellent roundtable discussion by the JungleRed crew on “weeding someone else’s garden,” both literally and figuratively.

That post was on my mind when I went to my monthly book club meeting last night. Now, I love my book club for many reasons- it forces me out of my reading comfort zone (especially when it comes to non-fiction, which research aside I rarely read willingly), and also because I usually return home with some fascinating new bit of information. Last night was no exception.

One woman was complaining about a strange-let’s call it a compulsion- that her husband has developed. At 10:30 at night, he’ll suddenly get a message on his Blackberry and will run for the door, yelling, “I’ve got to go. He’s on 24th and Mission.”

Sounds suspicious, right?

Well, it turns out that her husband is a religious follower of the bacon-wrapped hot dog guy. That’s right, there’s a guy in San Francisco who operates a guerilla (read: unlicensed) food cart, selling bacon wrapped hot dogs. He moves constantly, staying one step ahead of the authorities (hopefully)–and people find him thanks to frequent Twitter updates.

This story struck me on many levels. First, how on earth is it possible that I’ve lived in a city for over a decade and had no idea that we even had street food vendors, never mind ones who sold bacon wrapped hot dogs? After further investigation, I discovered that the bacon wrapped hot dog guy is not alone. There’s a muffin man, a creme brulee guy, and a “magic curry cart.” Even one of my favorite restaurants, Chez Spencer, has a cart. This is critical, potentially life changing information.

magic curry cart This discovery also marks the first time I fully understood the point of Twitter (please don’t jump all over me, tweeters- I just hadn’t grasped any practical applications until now). The vendors post where they’ll be appearing, and followers flock to that intersection for $1 chai and amuses bouches. Genius.

When interviewed, a few of the vendors explained that thanks to the recession they lost their high end restaurant jobs, or couldn’t get one in the first place. So, rather than give up on their passion, taking jobs in telemarketing or retail, they decided to branch out on their own. It’s a lot of work, the margins are slim, but they’ve each managed to build up a steady and devout following (my friend’s husband apparently has many cohorts who share his obsession for the food carts- a tweet goes out, and they all flock to the nearest one. It’s become an impromptu party for them).

I found their commitment and creativity inspirational.

Okay, brace yourselves for the leap.

I spoke with my agent yesterday. He returned from BEA somewhat disheartened- apparently all anyone was talking about was the downturn of the industry, the plummeting sales. And when sales are down, acquisitions are down, which creates a self-fulfilling death spiral. Editors are even more overburdened than usual; if they still have a job, chances are they’ve picked up numerous projects that were initially acquired by laid-off colleagues. There were fewer vendors at fewer booths, and as opposed to previous years the air was heavy with doom and gloom (although whether or not that is a deviation from the norm is largely a matter of opinion).

Which is exactly what the restaurant industry is experiencing. Fewer customers, smaller margins, a sharp downturn. Maybe the publishing industry should take a lesson from the street vendors- when times are tough, it’s time to innovate. Maybe that means authors take advantage of something like the new Scribd publishing program we’ve discussed in earlier posts. Maybe it means eliminating remaindering and starting with smaller print runs, or figuring out a way to build support for new authors by tapping into the popularity of more established ones. Heck, maybe we should start wrapping our books in bacon. Adapt or die, as they say. And while you’re doing it, you might as well eat well.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I just got a tweet. The Korean Taco guy is a few blocks away, gotta run…

And special thanks to Cym Lowell for providing a link to this article on food cart vendors nationwide. I’m trying to convince my husband to visit DC so we can try the mango lassi popsicles.

Success is a 4-letter word

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By Joe Moore

Okay, it’s really a 7-letter word. But I know a lot of successful authors that would use a 4-letter word when asked what it’s like to be successful. Why? For a couple of reasons. First, success is impossible to obtain. You can obtain “better”. You can achieve “improved”. But you’re always working to be successful. Success can be nothing more than a carrot on a stick just beyond your nose.

Second, success means something different to everyone. It’s a lot like describing an object as being green. Are we talking forest green, lime green, Irish green, puck green, or foam green? How about that green on the Beatles Apple logo or Kermit the Frog green?

I’ll bet if you asked any author who just sold a million copies of his last book, did it make him feel good? The answer will probably be, “Absolutely!” Does he consider himself a success? 4-letter-word no! Why? Because now his publisher expects him to sell 2 million copies of that next book he hasn’t finished writing yet. No pressure there. That’s not success. That’s a problem, albeit one we would all like to have. Now his sales are a bold number on the publisher’s ledger sheet. Now employees’ jobs rely on his success. It’s not just good enough to write another great book that sells lots of copies, he has to worry about the folks that are counting on him for their salary, their jobs, and their future.

So what is success in the publishing industry? Is it when you sell 25,000 copies, 50,000 copies, a million, become a New York Times bestseller? When can a writer kick up his or her heels and declare, “Mission Accomplished”?

Here’s a tip. Success is what you predetermine it will be. It’s what you decide before it comes. If you don’t approach success in that way, you are destined for disappointment. For some, being successful is walking into a bookstore and seeing their novel on the shelf. For other’s it’s the rush of holding a book signing and seeing the line of fans snaking out the door. And for many, it’s money.

But even if it is money, try to remember that it’s more important to predetermine what you’ll do with it, rather than wanting to be “rich”. For instance, determine the amount you’ll need to quite your day job. Or to pay off your mortgage. Or to move to Cape Cod or Palm Beach, or just a bigger house.

The point is, you determine what will make you successful. Be specific, not vague. And if you achieve it, relish it, celebrate it. Because everything after that is the sauce on the steak. And if you do achieve your predetermined success, always say the two most powerful words in the English language: Thank You.

When do you consider a writer to be a success? Have you predetermined your Mission Accomplished criteria? Have you already achieved it?

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Coming up Sunday, June 7, our guest blogger will be New York Times bestselling author Sandra Brown. And watch for Sunday guest blogs from Steve Berry, Robert Liparulo, Paul Kemprecos, Linda Fairstein, Julie Kramer, Grant Blackwood, and more.

The Jedi-writers Strike Back

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I was happy to read that JA Konrath’s novella, SERIAL, has been the #1-Kindle Bestseller for the past nine days. (See his post yesterday).

Many of us have been speculating here about the potential impact of the Kindle on the publishing biz — now Konrath has leaped ahead and run his own home-grown publishing experiment over at Amazon. SERIAL (written under the name Jack Kilborn, penned with co-author Jack Crouch), is a free download. IMHO, the decision to make the download free was a stroke of marketing genius. The download brings with it branding and name recognition. And it’s a neat way to bump yourself ahead of the bestselling mega-authors, too.

Konrath announced the results of another Kindle experiment on his blog yesterday. Evidently in the month of May he made some of his smaller writings available for sale on Kindle. These were works he’d previously allowed readers to download for free from his web site. By selling those same works through Kindle, evidently he netted more than a thousand dollars in one month.

I was particularly interested to read about Konrath’s Kindle experiments in the wake of the recent news that scribd is now letting authors sell ebooks from the scribd site at an 80/20% revenue split. In a recent blog post, I mentioned that an established author (Kemble Scott) decided publish his latest book on scribd instead of going the traditional print publishing route. I just checked back over at scribd, and saw that Scott’s book, THE SOWER, has had 1933 “reads” at a list price of $2.00 each. And it’s only been posted a short time.

The way my fellow author friends are testing the ebook waters reminds me of that scene from Jurassic Park, where the guide tells the visitors that the dinos are testing the fences for weak links.

“They remember…” he says.

A few more good pushes, and some writers might actually figure out a way to do real business in the Kindle/scribd universe. It hasn’t happened yet, but that day might be coming.

I know that in terms of relative scale in today’s publishing landscape, most writers are more like scurrying mammals than T-Rex’s. But hey, we’ve got time and evolution on our side. Give us a few years, and the whole Terra unfirma could change completely.

But that’s just what I think.

What about you?

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Coming up on our Kill Zone Guest Sundays, watch for blogs from Sandra Brown, Steve Berry, Robert Liparulo, Paul Kemprecos, Linda Fairstein, Julie Kramer, Grant Blackwood, and more.