The Learning Curve - by Brenda Chapman

Very few writers are great at absolutely everything from the outset. How did you respond to the opening hand you were dealt? Do you play to your strengths and avoid the rest. If you try to improve, how?

Quite early on in my life’s journey, I realized that I would never make my living in the sciences or as an auto mechanic. My passion had to do with the poetry of language, not the precision of numbers or the abstractions of physics. From the get go, reading and writing were strengths that I naturally pursued and continue to work on.

Yet, with the publication of my first book in 2004, I quickly understood that being able to write a book is not the same as being able to market a book. To be successful, authors need to jump into the selling game and this can be a steep learning curve. Coming from a generation when we were told not to blow our own horns, standing in a bookstore telling strangers why they should buy my book, was way out of my comfort zone. Even giving a talk to a roomful of strangers took time to feel right, that I had something useful to say that wouldn’t bore a crowd.

Launching Bleeding Darkness at The Cross Pub

This year, I swallowed all my insecurities and worked with my Dundurn publicist to work on a media pitch. I was fortunate to get some uptake and appeared on radio and television several times. I look at each engagement as a chance to learn — to figure out what worked and where I could improve, not much different than working on a writing career really. One key discovery that I learned from media playbacks is that pausing to think when I’m giving an answer seem interminable to me, but in reality isn’t that long at all. This has helped me with pacing and not feeling that I have to fill every second of air time. With each interview, I learned to become more relaxed and to enjoy my time in front of the camera or mic. Maybe, throw out a joke or two. After all, being asked to more interviews is never a given and some day I’ll look back on this time and will think how lucky I was to have these experiences — heck, I think that now!

On Daytime Ottawa with host Dylan Black

Guest on 1310 News Radio

As for standing in front of a crowded room to give a presentation, I’ve accepted almost every invitation and feel that practice is the key to turning public speaking into a strength. Practice helps to conquer nerves. Other tips learned from speaking engagements include finding out in advance exactly what the group would like me to focus on, the time allotment, the set up of the room and the size of the audience. All of this knowledge beforehand helps with nerves and aids in giving a better presentation. Preparation, as in anything, is key, but I’ve also learned to be ready to adapt to curve balls and to adjust my presentation as necessary on the spur of the moment.

As has been said many times before, going outside the safety of your comfort zone is the only way to grow. It might also just help to sell a few books!

website: www.brendachapman.ca
Facebook: BrendaChapmanAuthor
Twitter: brendaAchapman

The Big Squeeze

Overheard at Bouchercon in Florida last month: “I don't write series *or* standalone; I write books.” Do you love/hate/mind/notice/use/ignore the publishers' and booksellers' classifications of your work?

by Paul D. Marks

It’s not a question of loving/hating/minding/noticing/using or ignoring the classifications. I do all of those, well maybe except for the first. But it’s something we have to live with. What annoys me is when the Powers That Be want to stuff us or our work into a small bag or can’t figure out what bag to stuff us into.


Pigeonholing:

Early on in my switch from scripts to prose, I wrote a novel based on a screenplay I had written. The screenplay had been optioned many times by many people or entities, but ultimately never produced – story of my life. So I decided to turn it into a novel. It’s a mystery-thriller with a touch of sci-fi. An editor at a well-known publisher wanted it. But whatever committee of faceless people make the final decisions on such things rejected it. Why? Because they didn’t know how to classify it. Was it a mystery? A thriller? Sci-fi? How do we sell it? What section of the bookstore would it go in? Things like that. So the editor, much to her regret, had to reject it.

I also agree with what Susan said on Monday re: agents or publishers trying to squeeze you into a box.

Series vs. Standalone

Why not do both? Initially, I didn’t think I’d want to be writing a series character. I thought it might get stale. But there are ways to keep series fresh and exciting. To this point I’ve written two Duke Rogers P.I. novels, White Heat and the recently released Broken Windows. And a third is slated. I’ve also written several short stories in the Ghosts of Bunker Hill series, featuring another P.I., Howard Hamm, that’s been appearing in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

The Howard Hamm series is fun to write in a lot of ways. For one thing, the narrator is dead. Yup, dead. A ghost. He was killed in the first story. You’d think being dead he’d be like an omniscient narrator who sees and knows everything. But not in this case. He pretty much sees what Howard sees over Howard’s shoulder. And even if does see something that he wants to give Howard a heads up on or wants to warn Howard about he has no way to communicate with him. Frustrating. It’s hard being a ghost. The stories are, in my humble opinion, solid mysteries, but they do have that ghostly aspect to them.

On the other hand, the Duke Rogers series is more on the hardboiled and noir side. No ghosts. Just clear doses of hard-edged reality. And so far each story, including the coming one, is set around real events. The stories take place in the 1990s. White Heat revolves around the Rodney King riots of 1992. Broken Windows around California’s anti-illegal alien Proposition 187 events of 1994. And the third one will also revolve around actual events that took place in L.A. in the later 90s. The fact that they revolve around real events that the characters find themselves in keeps it fresh on one level. But the thing that really keeps it fresh is how one deals with the characters. Hopefully, the characters are live, flesh and blood people with real problems and life stories and situations. This helps keep them alive and fresh and facing new challenges, besides the challenges of the cases they’re working or those real events that envelope the cases and characters.

Vortex is a stand-alone novel, about a returning vet, who finds more trouble at home than he did in the war. So that was a break from the series characters.


Typecasting:

On the other-other hand (I think I might be running out of hands) I don’t really want to be typecast as only the guy who does the Duke Rogers series or the Howard Hamm series. So I try to switch it up sometimes. For the Bouchercon Florida Happens anthology I did a story called There’s an Alligator in My Purse, which is a humorous take on the foibles of Florida and people. I hope readers get a chuckle or two out of it. And, though I’m known – if I’m known at all – as a noir or hardboiled writer, I do like writing humorous things once in a awhile, like that story or Continental Tilt (which you can find in the Murder in La La Land anthology), and hopefully funny stories as well. That said, Windward, my story from Coast to Coast: Private Eyes from Sea to Shining Sea, is another story about a P.I. A different kind of P.I., whose Venice Beach office is over a Cold War bomb shelter that also serves as his home. And, while that might sound a little humorous, the story really doesn’t work on that level. And, no, I don’t only write about P.I.s, but lately my works seem to be the Invasion of the Body Snatcher P.I.s. And why not, who doesn’t want to carry a gat, wear a fedora and trenchcoat and have a moll on each arm. I guess my P.I.s don’t, ’cause none of them do any of those things. Well, maybe they carry a gat when needed.

***

So the bottom line is that there’s reasons for doing series and reasons for breaking from the pattern. As long as I can do both I’m good to go. Just don’t stuff me in a bag that doesn’t fit.

***

And now for the usual BSP:

I’m honored and thrilled – more than I can say – that my story Windward appears in The Best American Mystery Stories of 2018, edited by Louise Penny and Otto Penzler, which just came out this week. I wrote a blog on that on SleuthSayers if you want to check it out: https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2018/10/the-impossible-dream.html .

I’m doubly thrilled to say that Windward won the Macavity Award at Bouchercon a few weeks ago. Wow! And thank you to everyone who voted for it.

And I’m even more thrilled by the great reviews that Broken Windows has been receiving. Here’s a small sampling:

Here’s a small sampling of excerpts from reviews for Broken Windows:

Kristin Centorcelli, Criminal Element: 

"Although it’s set in 1994, it’s eerie how timely this story is. There’s an undeniable feeling of unease that threads through the narrative, which virtually oozes with the grit, glitz, and attitude of L.A. in the ‘90s. I’m an ecstatic new fan of Duke’s."

"Duke and company practically beg for their own TV show."

John Dwaine McKenna, Mysterious Book Report:

"This electrifying novel will jolt your sensibilities, stir your conscience and give every reader plenty of ammunition for the next mixed group where the I [immigration] -word is spoken!"

Betty Webb, Mystery Scene Magazine:

"Broken Windows is extraordinary."

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The Name of the Prose

Business - Overheard at Bouchercon in Florida last month: "I don't write series *or* standalones; I write books." Do you love/hate/mind/notice/use/ignore the publishers' and booksellers' classifications of your work?

by Catriona

When I first met my good friend Eileen Rendahl (aka Lillian Bell, Kristi Abbott, and Eileen Carr) eight years ago, we were mutually intimidated. She hated me before she even clapped eyes on me because I was European and she thought I'd be toffee-nosed (she might not have used that exact phrase) and I was dumbstruck by the answer she gave to my first question.

"What do you write?" I asked.

"Urban fantasy, romantic suspense and chick lit," she replied, revealing that not only did she write in three genres but she knew what they were.

My elevator pitch for my first book was "It's about some people". 

We're over it now.

I always knew I was writing crime fiction and was happy proud to be included in the venerable list of Scottish crimewriters: Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, William McIlvanney, Val McDermid  . . . My little country punches far above its weight. It took a while to be able to call myself a mystery author with the same confidence, but now I'm completely bilingual.

Inside the genre, things were always less certain. If someone unconnected to publishing asks you what you write, I think it's better to name some names and set yourself among them than to bamboozle with sub-sub-sub genre titles. So I'll say "Do you like Dorothy L Sayers? You might like Dandy Gilver." Or "Do you like Janet Evanovich? You might like Lexy Campbell."

But if someone from the publishing and writing world asks what you write, it's a bit daft not to know and it's a wee bit precious to make out that your work defies classification, isn't it? I'd be nervous of claiming wild originality for anything I wrote in case there was a well-known and identical book that I'd somehow not heard of.  Like that time I wrote a time-travel love story and thought surely no one . . . then Audrey Niffenegger published The Time Traveller's Wife. (I've still not read it because I'm still sulking.)

If I was the boss of all this - and I'm not; I'm barely the boss of me - I'd say Dandy Gilver was in the tradition of the presposterous 1930s detective genre. That should be a real category.

And I'd say Lexy Campbell and the Last Ditch were crime capers. I much prefer that title to "humourous mysteries" because "humourous mysteries" is such a humourless expression.

When it comes to the standalones I can't improve on what I do call them, when forced to. "They're those crime suspense domestic noir psychological thriller things. You know the ones I mean." And guess what. People usually do.

my new mystery, coming later this month

My new crime novel, also coming later this month

In for the long haul? by Cathy Ace

Business - Overheard at Bouchercon in Florida last month: "I don't write series *or* standalones; I write books." Do you love/hate/mind/notice/use/ignore the publishers' and booksellers' classifications of your work?

Well now, isn’t this an interesting one…and something I’ve been giving a great deal of thought to over the past few months. 

I definitely write two series: The Cait Morgan Mysteries with eight books in it to date; the WISE Enquiries Agency Mysteries with four books in it to date. Each individual book within each series has a beginning, middle and end, and I don’t write any cliffhangers at the end of a book to “encourage” readers to read the next one…I don’t like it when authors do that to me as a reader, so I don’t do it to mine. 

Definitely a series, all the Cait Morgan Mysteries feature Cait Morgan and Bud Anderson

Each book has a satisfying conclusion to the case/s within it, and readers can choose to share the company of my recurring characters again, in another book, if they choose. 

Definitely a series, each book features the four WISE women, and the inhabitants of both Chellingworth Hall and the village of Anwen-by-Wye

There can be no doubt that each of the two “sets” of my work to date is, in fact, a series, as both were planned as such from the start. I was delighted to work with two different publishers, one for each series, and we were all pretty certain from the outset that the idea was to bring recurring characters to books to allow for a “series” to be promoted to readers.

That said, the most recent book I’ve been working on may, or may not, be the first in a new series. Why don’t I know yet? Because I don’t know how the book will sell. If it sells well, and if readers want to know what happens to “some” of the characters within it (I cannot say which ones, because that would involve spoilers) then I am more than happy to write future books featuring said character/s. But if there isn’t the appetite for that from readers then…no, I won’t push it, I’ll allow THE WRONG BOY to become a de facto standalone (it will be released on January 9^th 2019, so if you read it you can help me make a decision!).

My new "novel" will be released on January 9th 2019

As a reader I enjoy series books, but I also enjoy standalones. I also am not especially bothered by which it is when I begin to read; I don’t need to start a series at the first book. If I enjoy a series book I am likely to go back to the first in the series and work my way forward from there if I have the time/ability to do so, but I use the library a great deal, so that’s not always possible.

I don’t mind my books being categorized as series or standalone…the classifications that bother me more are the “cozy”, “traditional”, “suspense”, “thriller” type labels that are assigned to books. That’s where I would say “I am writing a book, not a classification”, rather than railing against “series or standalone”…which, to me, is a pretty obvious differentiation. 

I'd be honoured if you'd consider reading my work - you can find out about it, and me, here: cathyace.com

 

Your Type of Book

Question of the week: Overheard at Bouchercon in Florida last month: "I don't write series *or* standalone; I write books." Do you love/hate/mind/notice/use/ignore the publishers' and booksellers' classifications of your work?

Terry Shames here.

I write a series, and am working on more than one standalone. The first declaration in the “question of the week” seems a little off to me because writing series and standalones are so different. When I write books in my Samuel Craddock series, I have a whole set of characters, background, and setting to draw on that have already been with me for several books. The plot takes place in a physical, cultural, and historical setting I know well and with people that I understand. I know their back stories, what their reactions will be to plot developments, how they will interact with each other, how they react to strangers, and how events might change them.  I know them well, and I don’t have to reinvent them.

With standalones, it’s different. I know nothing about any of the characters or the setting. I have to get to know them from the first pages. Sometimes I have to write out their back story (that is, their history) so that I understand their motivations. It’s a struggle to make sure the characters are firmly rooted not just in the physical setting, but in their cultural and personal setting as well.

Writing a series book is like waking up in my house in the town I’ve lived in for years, with all the same neighbors, the same trees and gardens, the same attitudes, the same city government. Writing a standalone is like waking up in a new town with none of that familiarity. I have to find out if the neighbors are friendly, what their politics are, what the weather is like, what challenges characters face particular to their setting and their lives, where they work, if they are good neighbors, how many kids they have, how long they’ve lived here, how city government works, and much more.  Only when I know all that, can I begin to understand what might have set the story in motion and how it will affect them. That doesn’t even begin to talk about plot. I have to know the characters first.

 The second part of the question, regarding publishers’ and booksellers’ classifications is something I don’t pay too much attention to. I write what I write. Whatever they want to call it usually has something to do with “product placement” and marketing. I think those classifications are important because they help readers to choose books they might like to read. Sometimes the classification is a bit off, but I think they do the best they can to get it right, and that it’s up to authors to keep an eye on whether they are classified properly.

The series books I write are small-town police procedurals in a traditional vein. If I went into a bookstore and found them under Romance novels, I’d have a chat with the bookseller. 

If I went to Amazon and saw that they were classified as thrillers, I’d let them know I thought they had misrepresented them. 

Someone who loves hard-core thrillers might enjoy my books, but chances or he or she would find them too slow. Someone once called my “hill country noir,” which is a label I like. Noir is not the same as hard core thriller, and it isn’t cozy. My characters carry guns and sometimes use them, so cozy isn’t right either. As far as I know, though, “hill country noir” is not a sub-genre generally recognized, so I have to go with the more general description of “traditional police procedural.”

A lot of authors write multiple types of books, or write books that are not easily classified. Where do you put Daniel Woodrell’s books? James Anderson’s? Catriona McPherson writes a cozy series, but she also writes standalone psychological thrillers. They all demand their own thoughtful classification.

 I once ran across a bookseller who was trying to decide whether to stock a popular mystery novel under “Mystery” or the more general “Fiction.” She said the writing was so good in many mystery novels, that she wanted to entice readers who normally would not read mysteries to dip into them. Hard to complain about that intention. I think she is not alone. Industry professionals want people to read books. Classifying them is not meant to put them in a box, but to find ways for readers to find them. So I try to keep an eye on making sure they are classified in a general way that works, without worrying too much about the details.

Fish or Fowl?

Q: Overheard at Bouchercon in Florida last month: "I don't write series *or* standalone; I write books." Do you love/ hate/ mind/ notice/use/ignore the publishers' and booksellers' classifications of your work?

- from Susan

To answer that question on a personal level, I risk annoying my publishers, offending my agents past and present, hurting the feelings of some authors I like personally and admire professionally, and turning off readers. 

I think the marketing professionals at publishing houses vote to buy our books because they feel strongly that they can slot them into a particular spot in their ‘basket’ of offerings. They send salespeople out to bookstores with catalogs and pitches that they have determined will induce booksellers to order books. Until and unless an author has established her brand so indelibly that the brand – not a specific book – is the selling point, it’s the marketing department, not the author, that makes the call. 

And, because the literary agent is working to sell the book to the publisher, the agent is looking for and listening to clues about what that publisher believes they can sell. So, the agent, too, pitches the book according to what the publisher is confident will be saleable.

What bothers me is that the agent, genuinely working for the author’s benefit, may reach back and try to reshape the manuscript in order to make the sale, and the author, who wants to sell the manuscript, compromises and moves a step or many steps from what she originally wanted to write.

I also heard conversations about this at the recent Bouchercon. One point of view taken by some authors was that we’re really in business, and so we should write to please “our customers,” the readers. For me, that’s not quite the right argument. Writers wind up writing or modifying to please their agents or their publishers, who profess to know what the bookstores will buy. The bookstores say they know what their customers will buy. But who really knows if the customers might love the book the writers wanted to write?!

That’s one reason the results of self-publishing and direct marketing via Amazon are interesting to watch. The author has the opportunity to publish what she really wants to write, and the readers have the opportunity to like it or not. 

I have not self-published. I have sold two series, both of which are modestly but not wildly popular. My brand isn’t strong enough yet that I can define myself and my work the way I’d like. Do I like the ways my five books have been marketed? I have some doubts and regrets, but I am the first to admit I don’t have a guaranteed better strategy.

The only thing I could wish for is that more readers came to my books without expecting them to fit neatly into a well-grooved niche, that they’d read them with only one expectation: that they will meet characters they can love, places they’d like to be transported to, and stories that intrigue and surprise them.