How To Fall in Love With Your Work, by Josh Stallings

Q: What hooks you into an idea enough so that you want to write it? Character, setting, plot, genre? Or …?

A: Anything I’ve ever written that I felt was of value, came from a place of pure intuition. My most intricate and well laid out plans inevitably led me to drivel. I wish that wasn’t true. If I knew how to come up with the big idea and then write it, I would. Just isn’t how my process works.

What pulls me into an idea? I am attracted to writing about worlds and genres I haven’t done before. The challenge of the unknown excites and terrifies me. But that is often a secondary consideration. First thing that gets my attention is a glimmer I see in my periphery. Stare too intently it will disappear. I will think about it while walking in the woods. With no pressure to develop it farther. 

I was eleven years old when I fell in love with the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I read anything I could find on the real life outlaws. In a book written by Butch Cassidy’s sister I discovered the true story of how it ended. After that famous freeze frame, Sundance was dead, Butch wasn’t so lucky. This tickled my pre-teen creative brain. Four years later I heard The Who’s Behind Blue Eyes. In a flash I saw a film I wanted to write. I wanted to tell the story of Butch’s life after Sundance was killed. How did he go back to ranching after all he’d seen and done? I never got that story written, but it still feels like a cool idea. 

Elvis Costello’s Oliver’s Army led me to write a screenplay about a young man who lies to a group of mercenaries, telling them about his demolitions expertise. It wasn’t bad, almost got made for a minute. Point is those two ideas sparked from listening to music. 

My most recent work came from driving with my son Dylan making up songs. By accident we came up with the theme song to a story that didn’t exist. So I decided I should write it. Like a faithful detective I have hunted that story down, following the leads where they take me. 

One of the concepts I felt strongly about in TRICKY was the danger of confirmation bias. Bad things happen when a homicide detective believes they know what happened before they have all the facts. The same applies to writing, but with less dire consequences. If I believe I have all the answers I will never discover the truth in a story. Knowing everything limits what I learn along the way.

Does this sound crazy? Yes, it does. But it’s the only way I know to access the intuitive part of my brain. The part that knows what I don’t know.

Sometimes I know a character from page one, Cisco in TRICKY was based on Dylan. But as I wrote he slowly morphed into his own person. Cisco has Dylan’s humor. But Cisco also carries a heavy load of guilt. Cisco worries that his past makes him a bad man. Dylan seems sure he’s a good guy who makes mistakes. I wouldn’t have discovered these differences if I had decided I already knew who was who and how they should be reacting. I try to take this into real life. Realizing I know very little about what other people are thinking or feeling, allows my view of them to evolve.  

Sidebar: Is there anything worse than having come up with a very clever plot turn only to discover that your character wouldn’t do what you have them doing?

My first book Beautiful Naked & Dead started from an opening line that I heard in my head. That opening line is the only thing that survived all the many drafts. And it is still the best opening I’ve written. It contained the entire DNA sequence of what the novel would become. 

Regardless of where the spark comes from, I am aware of how damn hard writing a book is. It’s also joyous and thrilling and frustrating and big fun and hard work. To take the writing of a book on I need to find a reason to fall in love with it.

A couple of days ago Erika and I celebrated our 44th Valentine's Day together. That’s a long time to love someone. And it all started when I met a pretty girl with a sweet smile, a wicked intelligence, and a strong heart that called to me. Along the way it’s been hard work mixed with long days of riotous joy. Sometimes we cut each other deep. Danger of pain from unintentional cruelty comes in equal proportions to how much and how long you love a person. I have felt loving support and tender words at the exact moment I needed them. 

The late night I asked Erika to marry me, I was a scared kid running from everything. There was no logical reason for us to expect getting hitched was a good idea. At the time I dreamed of making it in film or theater, but I had no job or backup plan. All I had was a deep feeling that this was the correct next move. Pure intuition. Faith in her. Faith that I wouldn’t irrevocably fuck it up. Turns out by trusting our guts we beat the odds. 

This is the same as falling in love with a story idea. Intuitively I have to know that it won’t be easy but the book will be worth whatever the cost it extracts from me.

All faith is blind. 

Following intuition is by definition illogical. 

It is also the only way I know to discover stories worth writing.

****** 

My latest reads: 

Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. The New York Times named this one of the 10 best books of 2023. It is one of the best novels on incarceration in the USA. It is a dystopian world where prisoners can fight and kill each other for reduced sentences. But it is so much more, it speaks to the morals involved with who we as a nation are becoming. It also has flawless footnotes to keep you tethered to the factual basis of the not far fetched story. It isn’t for the squeamish, but damn it is important.   

City of the Beast by Isabel Allende, translated from Spanish to English by Margaret Sayers Peden. Published in 2002. A fun YA book set in the Amazonian rain forest. While on an anthropological search two teenagers come in contact with real magic and local gods. My only problem with the book was its use of the word “Indian” to describe the indigenous people. This may be from the translation, or it may just be that in the last twenty years we’ve learned to use more accurate language when speaking of first nation folk.   

Writing The Book You Love, by Josh Stallings

Q: What advice would you have for emerging writers about writing satisfying endings? Pitfalls? Things to avoid? Tips?

A: There are three vital sections in a novel that you have to get right - 

1) The first twenty pages, get those wrong and most readers will move on to another book. Cold but true. And not just readers, agents, editors, publishers, hell everyone but your family will drop it. Honestly even your family will put it down, but most of them care enough to lie to you.

“I love your new book, Son.”

“Yeah, what part?”

“You know, the, um, the word choices and metaphors. It’s perfect.”

2) Next vital part is the end. It is as the say, “The take away.”  No matter how well you nail the book if the end fails to satisfy readers they will fail to tell everyone right down to the bus driver, that they all need to read your book. Book sales depend on evangelized readers.

3) The last vital part is everything in between the first twenty pages and the ending. Vital but not as vital. Readers want to love your book. If you hook them on characters they care about and root for, set in a unique/clever plot and world, do all that in twenty pages and most readers will forgive a stumble here or there. So I guess there are two vital sections and one very very very important section.

This week the Criminal Minds have out done themselves, you really should read each of their answers. The four earlier essays will ground you in the writing of a book's ending. Susan, Gabriel, Cathy, and Catriona have done the intellectual heavy lifting and left me to stop typing. But that feels lazy. So I’ll muddle down my synaptic highways and dirt roads in search of an answer I can claim as my own.

Last week the Ladybug Readers Book Club met at the Idyllwild Library to discuses TRICKY. They were kind enough to ask me to join them for a Q and A. Their questions and comments were witty and insightful. I’m not just saying that because they really got and dug TRICKY. One question they asked stumped me for a moment, paraphrasing, “Do you write with a particular reader in mind?”

“Absolutely, I write for intelligent, open minded, caring readers.” Would have been the correct answer. But hearing these readers share honestly about my work pushed me to do the same. “When I’m actively writing, not thinking but typing words, the only person I care to please is myself.” Is this egotistical or rude? Maybe. It is also the truth. I started writing because there were books I wanted to read that no one but me could write. 

Pragmatically I figure if I write a book I’d want to read, we have at least one sale. If I write a book I don’t want to read we may have zero. 

I understand that readers have expectations for a book’s ending. I don’t know how to write to that expectation without it coming off mechanical and manipulative. To pull off an organically satisfying ending I need to trust myself and write/rewrite until it clicks or sings or makes me feel.  

I don’t think too deeply about sub genre, or even genre as a whole. Having read a shit-ton of different types of books I feel I have internalized structural ideas and constraints leaving me free to follow the story and characters where they lead me. I used to give newer writers the advice that they should read voraciously. I stopped this when it hit me that every writer I know reads all the time. None of us go into the craft without a love of books. Same is true regardless of where you are on your writing journey. Get a group of writers together and the first thing we talk about is what we are reading. 

This is supposed to be about endings, right?

I’m on it.

Looking over the books I’ve written I discover I like the symmetry of going full circle. My first book Beautiful, Naked & Dead started with Mosses McGuire’s morning ritual of playing Russian roulette.

“There is nothing quite like the cold taste of gun oil on a stainless steel barrel to bring your life into focus.”

 

And ended with… 

“I’ve stopped putting guns in my mouth and whiskey in my gut. Somewhere on the road, I had traveled from suicidal to homicidal, not much, but it’s growth. All in all, I have a good life, a dog who adores me, a friend to drink coffee with and another day above ground. For children of the battle zone that’s called winning.” - Beautiful, Naked & Dead. 

For a novel to feel complete I need for the main characters to have grown and gotten better at being humans, even if the movements are incremental. It is the struggle not the result that I find noble. I am a romantic and humanist at heart.   

Nihilism should be left to the young, and those lucky enough to have escaped the deep hurts that force you to realize most days hope is all we have. 

Suffering doesn’t ennoble, it just hurts. As Moses McGuire says, “That which does not kill you, leaves you scarred for life.”

If you’ve read all five essays this week, you will see every one of us has some gripes or what-not-to-do rules. And they are good to consider… then throw them away and write your own rules. 

What do you like — no that’s too weak — what do you love in a book? 

Write what you love even if doing that means breaking every rule you’ve been taught.

Write with passion. 

Believe in yourself. 

Remember, when you are done with that first draft there are scores of people who will take your work apart. Don’t you be one of them, unless it motivates you to dig deeper. 

Lastly — this is key — If and when someone takes your manuscript apart in a way that makes it better, don’t forget to thank them.  

Genre? We Don't Need No Stinking Genre, by Josh Stallings

Q: Okay, we write about crime, but if you had to dip a toe into another genre, which would you add to the mix, and why?

A: This is a wonderful question in that it runs my mind down multiple tracks of thought. I call myself a crime writer, and yet I’m not sure I believe in genre except as a way to organize bookstore shelves. 

Gary Phillips One-Shot Harry is clearly a crime book, and it is equally a historical novel about race, civil rights, politics and the police in 1963 Los Angeles. It is also a fine and wonderful novel. 

Naomi Hirahara’s Clark and Division is crime fiction, and it is a historical novel depicting Japanese Americans who, when released from mass incarceration were sent to live in Chicago. It can be read and enjoyed as a mystery, but the facts and history lessons buried in it are unavoidable. And this is where genre lets us down, no good book is just one thing, or even two for that matter. 

Is Steinbeck’s reworking of Arthurian legends in Tortilla Flat a crime novel? Danny and his mates commit crimes, they are in and out of jail. The story without the writer’s voice could be noir. Crime novel or character study or…?

  

Is To Kill A Mocking Bird a crime novel, legal thriller, or a coming of age novel? It has elements of all of these, as does any great book regardless of the genre we place it in.

SUB GENRES:

Inside crime writing we have Traditional, Hard Boiled, Noir, Cozy, Detective, Police Procedural, Spy, Heist, etc…. That’s before we get to thrillers and all its hyphenates. (I’m sure I’ve left many out.) 

I think of crime fiction like the blues. John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, BB King, and Mississippi John Hurt all work within the same 12 bars, 3 chords, 6 notes constraint. And yet they each express their own voice inside it. Chicago Blues and Delta Blues have less in common than Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler yet they are in the same section of iTunes. And even with the simplicity of the blues, these artists spent their lives exploring those 12 bars. 

So far everything I’ve written fits into crime fiction, but I have danced in multiple sub-genres. The Moses McGuire trilogy was spot on hard boiled. Then I wrote a memoir. Then a disco heist novel. 

With Tricky I wanted to write about a good cop like my grand father had been. I also needed to speak to how intellectually disabled people are treated by the police. Katrina Niidas Holm at Mystery Scene Magazine wrote, “Stallings manages to entertain while advocating for criminal justice reform and calling out unexamined societal biases.” Which sounds like a social justice crime novel, yet it is categorized as a police procedural.

I start every new book with a wisp of an idea so ephemeral that anything as solid as genre would blow it away. This is totally true, until it isn’t. Coming off the Moses books I was beat. Looking for a new idea I thought about writing a story harkening back to my misspent youth as a glitter kid in the ‘70s. The words, “Disco Heist” came to me. Hadn’t a clue what it meant except that heist was a sub genre. Excluding Young Americans, I wait until the book is done and with the help of my agent and editor we discover a marketing approach, part of that will be discovering the best genre to place it in. 

And there it is, I just stumbled onto why I don’t think of genre when working; trying to decide how to sell a car before you even know if will have wheels or wings, or could be a boat, doesn’t help me as a writer. (Side note, genre also doesn’t help me as a reader.)

Back to the question, are their other genres I might try out? Sure. I am enamored with Emily St. John Mandel’s work. I would love to write a post-apocalyptic tale like her Station Eleven. The way she drifts through time and place with a powerful emotional through line is stunning. I’ve also had a western kicking around my head for a while… We’ll have to see if either of these climb their way to the top of my to-be-written pile.

My current work in progress may not have any crime in it. I pitched my agent a rough outline. Added, “Bad news, it may not be crime fiction.” She told me it didn’t matter, just pour my heart into it. And that’s what I’ll do. Pour my heart on the page and let marketing figure out this genre deal.

Make Them All Unforgettable Characters, by Josh Stallings

Q: How much air time do you give to secondary characters? Have any threatened to take over a book?

A: I give them as much time as they need to be fully there. A paragraph, a chapter, I don’t have a formula. The tension between narrative drive and character exploration comes down to personal taste. I can feel when editing when I come to a section that’s off the main story if I want to blow past it, it means it needs work, either to cut it down or make it sing. 

I’m dancing around the question because though I understand the term “secondary characters” I don’t think about any characters as secondary. Every one of us believes we are the hero of the story. I realize this phrase is both vague and over used, so I’ll dig a bit deeper into my process. Because I mostly write from beginning to end not knowing where the tangled twisting path leads, I am forced to treat every character that stumbles onto the stage as if they might be a key player, and they might. One of my best friends since we were glittery rock teenagers is Tad Williams. He writes these MASSIVE epic fantasy series, because of the size and scope he peoples them with a huge cast, some will be spear holders and others may step forward in book three and save the day. Sitting at the starting line he can’t see seven years of writing down the line who will be what, they all must be worthy of taking the lead.

Another way of thinking about this is, the best stories make me feel like they are showing me a small portion of a real world, one that exists beyond the page. Everyone we meet is coming from somewhere and going to someplace else.

Great paintings work this way for me. I was a weird kid, I loved landscape painting. My father was an artist, and my mother was a teacher who believed art was an integral part of any education, so I spent a lot of time in museums. I was drawn to work where I would day dream about what was around the next corner on a country road, behind a tree in the forest.

Two early lessons in theater school were, “Know where your character was before they walk on stage.” And “Write your character’s biography.” Even if you only have a one line walk on, doesn’t matter. The audience will never see this work but if you do it, they’ll feel the truth. Same thing for writing. I have to know my characters intimately, I often discover who they are as I’m writing. Once I really know them, I go back and build a document with only their scenes, I read and edit them to be sure they track with who I know they are now. 

Part of the joy in writing TRICKY was getting to show the intellectually disabled community as individuals. I wanted the group home where Cisco lives to be peopled with three dimensional characters. They all started out based on people I’ve known, or observed. But once I start writing they take on lives of their own. 

Meet Pris, with wild unkempt long hair and smeared on make-up. She claims the staff cut her hands, “Staff say I’m too pretty to live. Like a butterfly on fire.” Only when she shows her palms to the detective there are no signs of any damage.

And Donald, in his Star Wars wheelchair and Rebel X-Wing tee shirt, “June, June, June.” He calls to the house manager.

“Donald, what is it?”

“June, June, June.”

“What?” June smiled at Donald.

“Um I forgot. God damn it!”

“Language, Donald.”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

And Lilly, a wonderful innocent who we discover has feelings for Cisco as she explains to Detective Madsen, “I think he’s beautiful.” 

“Did David and Cisco get along?”

“Everyone likes Cisco. Do you like him?”

“I just met him today.”

“That’s all it takes. Maybe you think too much.” She scrunched up her eyes, mimicking over concentration. “It is okay to trust.”

Combined they illustrate that being intellectually disabled doesn’t preclude one from being delusional, or paranoid, or use profanity and be really into Star Wars, or have crushes and fall in love. But none of them are stand-ins for an idea, they are characters I’ve gotten to know well enough that I could write a book about any of them, they just happened to show up in Cisco’s book.

Now as for characters threatening to take over a book? All the time. Early on in TRICKY I had wanted to write much more about Lilly with Cisco. I’m a romantic. But what I want and what the novel needs are often very different. I feel like that tension helps make a better book. I want Cisco and Lilly to have a love story, hopefully so do readers, the tension lies in will it won't it happen? If it doesn’t happen in the novel, it still remains as a possibility and that creates a world beyond the book in the reader’s mind.

YOUNG AMERICANS is a disco glitter rock heist novel told through the eyes of the intelligent but naïve Jacob Stern, and his safe cracking sister Sam. Set in 1976 their crew is full of flamboyantly wonderful characters, but it was Valentina Creamarosa who stole my heart and could have walked away with the whole damn book if I’d let her.

 

Valentina spun through life trailing glitter and feathers molting from her thrift store boa. Six foot two and muscular, she vibed Tina Turner on steroids. 

A trans-gender badass and the patron saint of Fabulousness. She was an expert in firearms and lip liner. Vulnerable, loyal, damaged and deadly. 

“Settle down you dazzling bitches, class is in session.” Valentina unzipped an olive canvas duffle bag that was sitting on the coffee table in the Creekside Apartment living room. It was full of guns.

“Oh, fuck me.” Terry turned a lighter shade of pale.

“You OK, Terr-Terr, this shit getting a little too real?” Valentina tossed a snub-nosed .38 to Terry. He recoiled and the revolver bounced off his chest, landing on his lap. “Pick it up, Ms. Cutie.” Terry looked scared. “Pick. It. Up. Bitch.”

“Leave him alone, Val,” Jacob said, reaching for the gun.

“Stop. Terr-Terr either pulls his weight or he walks.”

“Fine, fine, I’m cool.” Terry picked up the snub-nose.

“I want the nickel-plated Smith & Wesson,” Candy said. “I have a silver snakeskin belt that will go perfectly with it.”

“Done, girl. Style points are always appreciated. We may be robbing this joint, but there is no excuse for looking tacky.”

Valentina is the character I’ve gotten the most requests to write a book about. And I get it, I love her, who wouldn’t? A local coffee joint owner loves her so much whenever I pick up a latte instead of my name it says, “For Valentina.” 

I guess that’s the point of this job, to become invisible and write characters people can’t forget.  

Bookclub for Dyslexics by Josh Stallings

Q: Book club members are usually free to say anything about the book they just read. People attending author events usually say nice things or nothing. But what about when authors visit bookclubs? Do rules exist? Should we invent them?

A: I love books. I love reading, aways have. I’m not averse to clubs. When we were teens my siblings, friends and I built The My-O-My Club, a disco for teenagers. I’m currently a member of Costco, AA and AAA. 

Clearly I like books and clubs, but combine the two into a Bookclub and my dyslexic brain panics.

In school a reading list always felt like a long list of tasks I would fail. Yet as long as I can remember I have had a book  I was reading. Just slowly. 

When a friend tells me they are reading X and I should too so we can discuss it… Even though we start at the same time, by the time I finish the book, odds are they will have moved on and are thinking about a new book. 

Weird thing about my reading superpower, when I was in 3rd grade they ran some tests to try and figure me out. They discovered that my reading speed was several grades below where I should’ve been. My comprehension was several grades above where I should’ve been. Additionally, my vocabulary was advanced. Looking back I can see that my brain doesn’t allow skim reading. I have to read every word or they scramble. So when I read a book, I read every word. 

Knowing all this, you can guess that I’ve never been a member of a book club. I have yet to be asked to speak to a book club. I do love talking books, mine and other writer’s. I have opinions. Every reader does. A great book taps into our personal experiences. For that reason they effect each of us differently. I can talk craft easily, or why this book moves me.

If I were to put one rule into a book discussion group it would be that we remove vague value judgments. “It sucks.” “It was dull.” “It was great.” They give me nothing to chew on. 

“The fluid way they drift through multiple time periods was great.” That statements leads me to think about how some writers put time stamps at the beginning of chapters while others leave it loose and catch up the reader with a prop (a pager, or a payphone) to tap you into the year. The point is by being specific in how you speak about a book you lead others to join in. 

We live in an era of thumbs up or down. How many likes did the cute picture of my curated life get? We are left to feel that our’s and other’s feelings are more important than critical thinking. 

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is a brutal book. Not in a blood orgy cheap way. It is bloody. But it neither glorifies nor condemns violence. McCarthy just shows it to us. Add to that his crystal clean prose. Like a poet he has no time for extra words. Hell he doesn’t even have time for quotation marks. I have been lost in his writing but I always catch up. Clarity is sacrificed for pace and rhythm. Do I LIKE Blood Meridian? No, that is too tame a word. I love it. I need it in the world. It was a hard read. I don’t know that I will ever read it again. Subjectively it’s brilliant. Objectively, I grew up with Quaker/nonviolence advocating parents who got violent with us kids. Then my father left when I was eight, leaving me confused as to what a “man” was or how to become that mythical beast. I used movies as a cultural starting point. The recipe they gave me was; two shakes of Taxi Driver and a pinch of Dirt Harry and just a splash of "Gravedigger" Jones. Confusing, right? I was also prone to irrational rages. This is a taste of the violent gumbo in my head that Cormac McCarthy helped me sort out. And that is personal. Critically I can say, McCarthy deals with the cost of violence to both the victim and the perpetrator. And I believe that is important to see in a book dealing with violence. 

I believe a book must be about something bigger than the plot. As a writer I don’t aways know what a book is about until I’m deep into the writing. Any messages we want to place in a book should be covert not overt. 

If I tweeted, “Intellectually disabled people are humans too.” I might get some likes. If I made it cleverer it might go viral. But if I wrote a book, say TRICKY and let the reader experience the truth of that statement. Introduced them to Cisco and had them spend time with a complex intellectually disabled character, I might help them have a richer sense of all the ways a neurodiverse person can be. 

What I like or don’t like is far less important than what moves me, helps me grow, and alters my viewpoint.

*****

Here’s a few more thoughts on neurodiversity -

https://crimereads.com/crime-fiction-needs-neurodiversity/

Don’t Write For Free, by Josh Stallings

Q: “I recently heard a comment that the big publishers are trying to hold onto an old model of publishing that doesn’t work so well anymore. Is this true? Why doesn’t it work, and how could the model be changed?”

A: I self-published books in the early days of that movement. I have been published by a micro publisher, and (currently by) a stellar independent publisher. I have good friends who have been published in every way possible. With my lack of experience with legacy publishing houses, I’ll attack this question from a slightly different angle, looking at the book business as an industry. And more importantly, what do I want in trade for a piece of my hard-won sales dollars. What can I rightfully expect?

(*For a brilliant overview of publishing scroll back to Cathy Ace’s Wednesday post. )  

State of the Books Business:

(This is based on my experience, so odds are I got lots wrong.)

The Times, London, ten or so years ago had an article claiming, in the new publishing economy only the rich or retired would be able to afford writing careers. They foretold the death of the midlist writers, and to some degree they were correct. 

TANGENT ALERT — I remember when Hollywood studios had a couple of big tent pole films a year and the rest were smaller films, dramas and comedies shot on reasonable budgets and thus could make a return on investments. The 1980’s brought us all- mega-hits-all-the-time. As an added bonus we got sequels ad infinitum. It happened (not un-coincidentally) around the same time electronic and beverage corporations started buying up controlling interests in the studios. — END TANGENT

With legacy publishers merging and being bought by media companies, they have taken on a much more corporate approach to business. Thus they, too, are in the blockbuster business, placing a greater weight on  high-concept material than ever before. The all-important tight “elevator” pitch that swept Hollywood is here to stay in publishing.   

      

Add to this, a seeming anomaly, with more outlets like e-readers, phones and other devices to read a book, the income of most writers has fallen. Even bestselling authors are struggling to make ends meet. Fact is, most crime writers I know have full time jobs to support their lives and write books as a beloved side-hustle. The lucky ones write for TV or film, but those gigs are so all-consuming that it often leaves them with no time to write books. 

The loss of sales looks like a twofold issue: one, people who would never steal a book unless Abby Hoffman told them to (a reference for any old hippies out there,) will happily download an ebook copy without paying. The second thing was Amazon made self-publishing an easy click away. The good news, the gatekeepers couldn’t stop anyone’s books from getting to readers. The bad news: not everyone is at a place in their career where they should be publishing. This freedom flooded the independent book market, making it even harder to make a living at it.

Yes — before anyone yells at me — it’s more complicated and nuanced than this. Some self and independently published books have broken huge, and some midlist writers continue to be published by legacy houses. 

Moving on…

Why do we need publishers? Originally it was because they owned the presses, and the means of warehousing and distribution for crates of big heavy objects. Both no small things. However, print on demand and ebooks have somewhat rendered this argument unsustainable. But that isn’t—or it shouldn’t be—all a publisher offers. 

Here’s breakdown of what I love and need from a publisher:

A really good editor, someone who can see what I was going for, and where I missed the mark. A great editor can take a good book and make it fantastic. “You have twenty pages at the most to hook a reader, and as written, you’ve lost them.” I hated hearing this about TRICKY. But I trusted my editor, and the book is better for it.

A really good copyeditor. I’m dyslexic, so the need for this should be self-explanatory.

Marketing. People whose job it is to see the greater potential of your work in a cultural sense and can exploit this to reach beyond your friends and fellow writers.

Art directors who can come up with an eye catching cover, that both pleases and sells.

There are more but this a good start. All of these jobs you can do, or hire out. But it is both time consuming and expensive. And I have discovered with my novels I spend so long describing the roots and moss, that I lose the forest entirely. 

As for marketing—and movie marketing was my job for a long time—when it comes to my work, again, I can’t see the wider context of it.

Are these tasks worth between 90% and 75% (depending on hard cover, ebook, etc…) of the book’s revenue? Maybe. Is 10% to an agent worth it? 

It’s complicated, they are both artistic and business decisions. Subjectively, do they make the work better? Objectively, do they increase sales enough that my piece of the pie is smaller, but my income greater than what I could generate on my own? Clearly when a book comes out it is all educated guess work. I know my past track record, but every book is different. And sometimes sales fall a bit when striking out into new territory as an author, and the gains may not be seen for a book or two.

I don’t know if publishers paid for travel in the past, but I felt good when starting out if my sales paid for BCon and LCC trips. I remember I was at a bestselling writer’s signing in Carson, or another small So Cal town. I think five readers showed up, including me and my son. When I later asked why travel so far for so few readers, they said to me, “I do it partly for the readers, sure, but mostly to shake hands with the people working for the bookstore.” They were aware that these folks work tirelessly to get our words into readers hands. 

Scott Montgomery at Austin’s Book People has led more people to my books than anyone I can think of. When Scott asks me to travel to Texas for a reading or panel discussion, I do it. I mean it helps I have family in Texas to stay with, but I’d work it out if I didn’t.

Which brings me to a… RANT—Scott has never treated independently published writers (me) differently from the likes of Joe R. Lansdale. He put us together on a panel because he saw something in our work that sparked. And I suspect because he knew that getting me in front of Joe’s readers would help to broaden my readership. 

This is something the crime conventions fail at more that not. My first Bouchercon was Chicago 2005, where all the more independent writers were stuffed into an overfull basement room. This remains true today. Most panels pair best and better selling authors together, while up and coming or marginalized writes are smooshed in the small rooms at times where they have no way to compete for new readers.

There have been notable exceptions, such as LLC in Vancouver. I was on a panel about neurodiversity, it was diverse group of writers and because of it I met readers from all kinds of backgrounds, and tastes. We all read broadly, I have readers who also love cozies, hell, I love a good cozy. Why do the conventions rigidly separate writers as if it was a Borders bookstore? (Yeah I know they went out of business, kinda my point.) 

Why isn’t an author who writes “Small Town Police Procedurals,” put on the social justice panel? I know this means more work for the organizers, but the deal is we writers are paying to be the entertainment (and admittedly to get to hang with our peeps.) From a business standpoint, if these events don’t show an uptick in book sales that at least covers the cost of attendance, we really need to question their validity. — RANT OVER!

Final important note,

I don’t write for the money, in fact I’ve written and hidden away more words than I’ve published. I — like most writers — am driven to write. I do it for the love of the craft. I’ve dug ditches and I’ve driven taxis, and getting to spend my days inside these books is the greatest job I can imagine. And yet…

Because of my racial and gender privilege I was able to stash enough money from film work so that when the chance to write full time came I could jump at it. That’s not true for all, or even many. If we want diverse books, we need to make sure writers are being treated with equity.

Again, we’d write for free, and have, but we shouldn’t have to.