How Many Pies til I Break Even?

This from Amanda  Hocking’s blog, the overnight best selling author of young adult, paranormal kiss and bite books….

“There is so much stress in doing it all yourself. The editing is never good enough. And finding an editor isn't as easy everyone thinks. People thinking an editor is just having someone read through it a few times, checking for basic grammar and spelling, and while that is part of it, it's also much larger than that. It's helping tighten up sentences, watching repeated phrases, helping with flow, etc.

And it is really, really hard (or at least, it has been for me) to find an editor that can do all that. My books have all been edited - several times, by dozens of people with varying backgrounds - and people still find errors.”

And, she’s just talking about the writing.  Not the marketing part. Fortunately, I worked with three good editors.  Just when I thought the world was my oyster, Suitcase Filled with Nails, was finally published and the orders would come rolling in, the pearl fell out of the shell and landed in my lap.

 I never planned on being in the book business.  Now, I  am and doing the math and facing the reality that I might pocket a buck, maybe less from my book which retails for $16.95.   It’s like an author is a pastry chef and she or he works really hard making the best pie possible and in the end she or he  receives  the smallest piece cut from the whole.

Blue Hole

Last night’s reading at Pacific Mist Books in Sequim, Olympic Peninsula’s alleged blue hole, was a cozy affair.  Chairs were already filled when I arrived ten minutes early. Lots of educators and some old friends were there.  Surrounded by books and people buying books, I read and fielded questions and signed the books people bought. 

This was the third reading/signing in one week, not as large as the one drawing over a hundred people and requiring me to use a microphone.  But in this intimacy, the audience sitting in chairs only feet away, I felt appreciated.  This supportive audience, unlike some reviewers, like dark holes, did not make allegations they would not defend.

No One Has Promised me a Rose Garden

In the past three weeks I’ve started three different blogs, all shedding light upon and lamenting this book business.  But, I’ve gotten  bogged down with bad barcodes,  distracted by distribution, sell at cost, sell at a loss- publishing problems I want no part of but must face. 

The only high point in all this mind-boggling brouhaha is getting to meet some of the bookstore owners who sell Suitcase, three different book stores with three different and personable book store owners.   In all three cases the stores were busy with buyers.

I love book stores.  I love books.  By the time I was ten I had my own library, a check out desk, the whole wad, all shelved in my bedroom.  This was years before my mother said to me “You can always afford to buy a book.”  This came after I said I wanted to buy “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,” but I didn’t have enough money when I saw it in the book store.  The next day, when I came home from the 7^th grade a new copy of “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,” was waiting for me on the kitchen counter.

If only the give and take of the book business was this simple and direct.

Anchor Babies

Stranded in the tiny berg of Cle Elum while waiting for a replacement catalytic heater for our truck, two days before Christmas, gave me time to read two books; Bossy Pants, Tina Fey, My Point…And I Do Have One, Ellen Degeneres.  Why do they make a joke out of everything, force funniness, I thought about the comedic formalistic tone of both authors.  Then it dawned on me.  Tina and Ellen are not really authors but comedians who write.   It is their life work to make a joke out of life.

Stuck in a small motel with a cat, dog and husband, all sharing one bed was not very funny.  We were though comforted by knowing our unanticipated calamity could have been worse.   We could have all ended up road kill on the snowy Snoqualmie Summit where the truck sputtered and died. Semi trucks the length of Manhattan screamed past close enough to part my hair.

After a long and expensive tow we were deposited at a motel with nothing more than us.  Luckily, I’d packed cat and dog food and managed to improvise a litter box for a cat born in Kuwait and now through the miracle of travel could pee freely in Eastern Washington gravel.  Aside from two books the only distraction was cable television.  On Comedy Central, the Colbert Report was listing new definitions included in the new American Heritage Dictionary.  Anchor Babies, was included.

“Did you hear that?”  I asked my husband who is hard of hearing.  He nodded.  The dog looked up and the cat just slept, undisturbed as I jolted upright.

When I referred to anchor babies (p. 195) in Suitcase, I thought it might, like other pontifications in my book, be construed as offensive.  Now, according to one comedian, the term is fully defined in a respected reference book. Or is this just another joke?

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/12/09/revised-definition-anchor-baby-part-leftist-agenda-critics-say/

That's the Spirit

I’m going to get off the rag about this self, myself, vanity, in vane, independent, dependent, publishing swill.  It’s Christmastime after all.  This is the point I want to briefly rag on.

 I am actually able to walk fast (four months after a total hip replacement…another rag) with members of my running group who no longer can run because of hip and knee issues. 

We walk faster than most people can think, let alone can run. 

In December, at 7 am. we huff along  the waterfront trail. Moon light winks on waves, seagulls scream, and fast walking ladies and their dogs leave steam puffs in their wake.  My little dog Henry wears an orange, reflective jacket and is not let off leash until there is enough daylight to see his little cat-sized body before it might be swooped upwards into the evergreens by wide-eyed owls.

My fast walking, talking companions muse on family gatherings, kids, grand kids, a banana split of people they will gift, feed and house over the holidays.  Quite honestly I am left out of the conversation.  There is nothing I have to add except, “Being an orphan with no family means I don’t buy, wrap or rapp.”  There is a short pause and their conversation continues.

I listen.  I think.  I listen.  My thinking grows darker as the sun rises.  I think I feel what a recovering alcoholic would feel at a party where everyone else was drinking, laughing and sharing good will, and, I am standing in a corner with an empty glass. It’s not like I can’t imbibe.  It’s just that this holiday spirit stuff seems like swill because my cup leaked empty a long time ago.

Late afternoon I take Henry to the beach down town.  The sun is setting on a picture postcard day- Mount Rainer a warm icy glow beyond the frigid bay, the community Christmas tree blinking, a doctor in a dark brown fedora walks by, his silhouette contrasts the sails of a boat flapping off-shore.  I also see a rag-tag gathering of people with back packs gathering outside a red brick building.  Gritty duct tape holds together a grimy orange parka one woman wears.  She also wears a bright red and white Santa hat.  The people around her point to her head smile and laugh as they wait for the doors of the homeless shelter to open.   

Reviews That Loose: Give me a little Nookie

“Out of this world”  Dean Koontz

“Scary Good”  Stephen King

“Worth Killing for” James Patterson

“I could burst into song” Jane Lynch

No, these praise-worthy blurbs were not penned  for Suitcase Filled with Nails, a tangible piece of writing, words inked on paper pages and set between slick cardboard covers.

These literary notaries and those of notoriety are praising a piece of plastic.  In particular, a Nook Tablet.  Their blurbs published in print on a full page ad in the New York Times Book Review.  Another interesting twist in the publishing paradigm…an ethereal one.  

No Hypocrites

On my second cup of coffee, I am still trying to face the day, slicing open a new box of books to sell at the last day of this weekend Arts and Crafts.  It is 7 am, the sun is rising and the phone in my office starts ringing.

True to her word, Susan Jane Gillman is telephoning from Geneva, Switzerland where the sun is setting on the dawning cocktail hour.  She has called to tell me how much she likes Suitcase Filled with Nails.  We talk for an hour.  She talks like the words she writes in her best selling books…honestly, no-holds barred, ballsy, politically aware and politically incorrect if she wants to make a point, or mock a point. 

The point, and I must be so in-your-face about this again, is she likes my book.  It is I who should be bowing before the master (mistress).  She is the author of New York Times best sellers not me… Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress,  Kiss My Tiara: How to Rule the World as a SmartMouth Goddes, and Undress me in the Temple of Heaven.

My first summer home (2005) after teaching in Kuwait, I serendipitously selected Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, from the shelves of our town’s highly revered Carnegie Library.  I’d never heard of Susan Jane Gilman before and judged the book by its cover – a pouting girl in a pouffy white dress.  Check it out of your own library or buy it…for the full story.

One passage from Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress wedged within my withering brain matter (I’ll toast to that).  I would remember it again and again as the going got rough, those six years in Kuwait where I learned to duck and cover, stave off  back stabs and deliberate frontal attacks in an office warfare I wanted no part of.  Susan sums it up better.

     Had I been more experienced in office warfare, I might have strategized cunning ways to defend myself and retaliate.

     A horrendous job is like a chronic illness, a rotting tooth. It infects everything in your life: your world constricts and collapses into the toxic, throbbing ache of it. You can’t go into a café, walk your dog, or go away for a weekend without a constant, low-grade sense of dread.    (excerpted from  Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress and included, HONEST TO  god with PERMISSION  in Suitcase Filled with Nails).

I’ve sipped my second cup of coffee dry while talking to Susan.  Coyotes cry in the background as the moon sinks and the sun slinks higher, mustering enough sweat to warm away a Pacific Northwest cloud cover.   Susan says Suitcase Filled with Nails reminded her of experiences she wrote about in Undress me in the Temple of Heaven.  “Had I read it?”

Of course.  After I had written Suitcase Filled with Nails.

By the time we hang up the sun has set in Switzerland and it is sunny in Seattle.  Among other dichotomies and similarities we shared we identified with what it was like to be in a country where you had no rights and were subject to the whims of a not so whimsical government.  We are not alone in our observations and lived experiences.