Mysterious Matters: Mystery Publishing Demystified

And The Winner Is ... Brevity

Submissions always increase this time of year, and a few good things seem to be coming down the pike. 

The conventional wisdom is not always wise, but when it comes to word count for a first novel, it is. Writers who are trying to get published: Do stay within the 70,000-75,000-word limit.  If it comes in shorter than that (say, 65K) there is absolutely no need to pad! Short is good. Short is fun. Short lets you tell your story, introduce a few good characters, and not overstay your welcome.

The joke in my office is "Agatho has never seen a manuscript from which he can't cut 5,000 words." You might actually be surprised how easy it is to cut and slash.  My brain immediately disengages when I get to passages, pages, paragraphs, chapters that don't further anything.  If I'm asking myself "Why is this here?" the red pencil gets poised.  And if the answer isn't "To further the plot or explore character," then down comes the red pencil. But remember that character can be drawn, conveyed, hinted at just as well in a sentence as in a page.

In cutting mode, I also get my snippers out when dialogue goes on too long.  A philosophical discussion is nice once in a while, but if it puts people to sleep - that's not a good thing.

Keeping your manuscript to 70,000 words doesn't mean that your first draft can't be 80K or 85K.  I can only imagine what would happen to writers if they had to keep track of their word count as they write. But during the revision process, my friend - be brutal with yourselves.  You shouldn't keep in a scene, a paragraph, a line just because you like it.  If you can switch off your writerly side for the revision and turn yourself into a reader or reviewer, you'll be much more likely to say to yourself, "What the heck is this doing here?  Out it goes."

I do see a fair number of first novels that have the kernel of something good tied up inside something dense, wordy, unreaderly.  Good stories and good characters are derailed when the author can't step outside him/herself and take a hatchet to his or her own work.  When I get a manuscript that's been written by a good reviser (whether self-directed, based on feedback from a writer's group, or based on advice from an agent), I can tell immediately, because I get through the first 30 or so pages of the manuscript without once thinking, "This needs to go - this is pointless - it's way too soon for this." And those, my friends, are the people who get contracts. 

Small Press Raves: Devil-Devil, Death Line

This week I'm pleased to recommend two fairly new indie books published by terrific small presses.

  DEVIL-DEVIL

  By Grame Kent

  SoHo Crime 

 

I admit to being a huge fan of SoHo Crime, which I think consistently publishes some of the most genre-pushing books published today.  I also love how they take chances on stories that may not seem "mainstream" but are worthy for many other reasons.

Ironically, I'd say that Graeme Kent's Devil-Devil is fairly mainstream (and that is meant as a compliment, because it deserves to have a wide readership).  The first in a new series set in the South Pacific (Solomon Islands) of the 1960s, the book features native police sergeant Ben Kella and Sister Conchita, an American missionary.  With its colonial setting and its respect for native cultures, it reminds me quite a bit of Upfield's Napoleon Bonaparte series.  Devil-Devil, though, has the decided advantage of being written recently and therefore being much easier to read!  

I always feel that writers who set their books in little-known places have a fine line to walk.  There is so much to explore and so much description to be done that the book can feel more like a travelogue or cultural guidebook than a novel. That's not the case here; native religion, local description, colonial politics, and good solid mystery/plot all intermingle here in a seamless way that keeps the story moving right along.  Kent has also left a bit of mystery about the outspoken Sister Conchita, a wise choice for first book in a series.  Perhaps Kent was the recipient of one of my favorite pieces of editorial advice: "Don't satisfy the reader fully - Hold back just a little so that s/he has reason to come back."

 

DEATH LINE

By Maureen Carter

Creme de la Crime

 

Now, here is one of my favorite topics: The dilemma of the "likable" protagonist.  As an editor I get so tired of seeing these protags who are the embodiment of all that is funny, virtuous, and intrepid.  Yes, those are all elements of good genre fiction, and yes, we do want a best friend who fits that bill - but I always find those who are somewhat, moderately, or even heavily unlikable much more interest.  And Maureen Carter has no illusions that any reader will want to become best friends with her detective, Bev Morriss - a foul-tempered, vindictive, Birmingham detective who couldn't care less if you love her or hate her.  She's brimming over with tempest, and a surfeit of emotions that will make many readers uncomfortable.  But I like feeling uncomfortable with a character - it only makes me want to watch her more closely.

Readers of Mysterious Matters may know that I'm a fan of Stuart MacBride and his Aberdeen series; his D.I. Roberta Steele, I had thought, was the most profane and over-the-top police in modern crime fiction.  And then I met Bev and realized that Steele is Louise Penny in comparison.  This book goes right for the gut, dealing with child abduction and child abuse - and the knife attack that almost killed Morriss but did succeed in killing her unborn twins.  It's not for the weak or sensitive, but if you like Vachss, Macbride, Ellroy, or any of the other toughies - you need to make Maureen Carter's acquaintance.

No, I Will Not Sell My Books for 99 Cents

The nice thing about having a blog is the ability to rant and rave a little when I'm worked up about something.  I don't get worked up regularly, or even frequently, but today I'm good and worked up about the eBook pricing model.

I do follow many of the online discussions and listservs, and conversation over the last several months has often centered on eBooks, and this week HarperCollins made the news by announcing a limit on the number of times it will allow a library to loan an eBook (bad idea, Harper, but more on that later).  

What I'm seeing is a lot of people opining from only half-informed (at most) positions about the way publishers "should" price their eBooks.  Oh, the number of posts I've seen from the self-published who argue that they're selling scads of copies by pricing their Kindle books at 99 cents, 1.99, or even 2.99. Frankly, I think a lot of them are lying outright about the number of copies they've sold, but I guess I can't get mad at them, since we editors have been known to "inflate" the number of copies we've sold, often for purposes of our own ego gratification.

I'm sorry, but the books my company publishes are worth a hell of a lot more than 99 cents.  They're also worth a hell of a lot more than 2 or 3 bucks, and I'll be damned if I'm going to allow them to be priced this way.  Tell me - who's going to pay the editor? The cover designer? The proofreader? The person who actually formats the book?  And please don't tell me it's as simple as hitting a "convert" button.  The ePub file that we send to Kindle doesn't work exactly the same way as it works for Nook, so we need to do separate versions.  And the ePub file we send to Apple for sale on its iPad store requires even further tweaks.  So how is this any of this different from paying a typesetter to do the same thing?  

And how about all the reviewers out there who refuse to review eBooks, and for good reason?  Listen, I admit I'm not an eBook person myself, but I see their appeal and I have no desire to become a crusty old dinosaur who doesn't evolve with the times.  But a lot of reviewers don't WANT to read on a screen, and I don't blame them, because I don't want to, either. So how do we get publicity for our books, then?  Do we do special limited "print" runs of eBooks, and who pays for those when we're getting net revenue of a whopping 70 cents per copy sold?  

But there's more to it than that.  I remember from my economics courses in university that price is a signal.  That is, it signals the worth of a product.  Look at it this way: When you go to a $1 store, do you think you're getting high-quality products?  No, you know you're getting cheap junk for the most part, but at least you're not paying the insane markup that the supermarket charges.  Let's say you found a slew of books for $1 at the dollar store.  Are you going to think, "Wow, what great books these must be?" Of course not.  

The books that are professionally published require a lot of work by a lot of people. We are not mass-producing widgets, here; each work is an independent product and the process cannot be mechanized. Our profit margins are tiny enough as it is.  We have the right to charge fair value for quality merchandise.  And $2.99 is not fair value for a professionally published book.  Maybe it is for a self-published book with no overhead, but I won't even get into that whole self-publishing thing here.  Let me just say it's a different animal, and I understand reviewers' reluctance to ever engage with the self-published.

All those folks out there loudly declaiming on Amazon and elsewhere that we must set our eBook prices lower: Do you tell your grocery store how much to charge for groceries?  Do you call the utility company and demand that they lower the cost of electricity to something that would send them into immediate bankruptcy?  Do you tell your landlord that you'll pay a maximum of $100 a month for your apartment, and if he doesn't like it, you'll walk?

So, as of right now, we charge what we think is a fair and reasonable price for our ebooks.  Under $10, but certainly more than $2.99.  And let's not forget, shall we, that these prices are less than what anyone would pay for a print product.  How much more of a discount do you want, exactly?  Because if everyone starts to refuse to pay more than $3 for a book, you're going to see a lot of really good publishers go out of business, and a lot of real garbage hitting your screen. 

I suppose a lot of authors out there are feeling caught in the middle - they're afraid that their publishers are setting their ebook prices too high, and that they're going to lose sales to the self-published who are practically giving their stuff away.  Maybe that's happening, and maybe it isn't.  But the truth of the matter is, at the end of the day - Professionally published books are WORTH MORE than self-published books, and I suspect that most people know that.  Who's worth more - a plumber with a license or a vagabond you hire to unclog your pipes?  If you really think about it, the $15 you pay for a hardback (after Amazon discount) is a hell of a lot of bang for your buck, so can you please stop bitching about the price of books when a 12-ounce bottle of water sells for $2, a gallon of gas costs $3.50, and Nike charges $100 for sneakers made in the Northern Mariana Islands for 45 cents?

Now, as for you, HarperCollins: You really must not bite the hand the feeds you.  As an independent publisher, we have had a tremendous amount of support from libraries and librarians over the years. They buy our books and we thank them.  They don't tell us how to run our business, and we don't tell them how to run theirs. Somehow, it all has worked out: We sell books; libraries buy them; authors get royalties; people on limited incomes get to borrow them for free; everyone is happy.  Now, I understand the desire to ask libraries to loan out a purchased eBook to only one person at a time, which is how it works with the print books; that seems fair and reasonable to both parties.  But to say that an eBook can be loaned only 26 times before it expires?  That's bad karma, Harper, and I suspect you know it.

Eureka! The Answer - "Why Do We Love Amateur Sleuths?"

For a while, "hobby"-based mysteries were all the rage (and still are, in some quarters); "profession"-based mysteries are also quite popular; the quirkier the hobby and/or profession, the better, of course. As an industry I think we've gone away from these emphases in terms of acquisitions strategy, but we still do get plenty of queries of this type.

I hadn't been able to put my finger on why these types of books became popular so suddenly - and then yesterday it hit me.

Think about the heroes of yesteryear - the lawyers who wrote our wills; the police who protected us; the doctors who took care of us; the bankers who protected our money, or loaned it to us when we wanted to buy our first houses.

Now think about these professions today.  Lawyers are universally reviled; the average person sees the average lawyer as a money-hungry, unethical bottom-feeder. Doctors, once the most respected profession, have come under fire for being callous, uncaring, greedy, money-hungry, arrogant.  The tales of police corruption are rampant and everywhere (I am always amazed listening to my friends, relatives, and neighbors talk about how much they loathe the police in the area I live).  As for bankers--well, we know whom to thank for the economic issues of the last several years, don't we?

Don't shoot the messenger, please.  Of course there are many individuals practicing these professions who are ethical and fabulous individuals.  But editors have to pick up on what's on the wind at the moment, and this particular editor isn't thinking that a lot of readers want a doctor, lawyer, banker hero/protagonist.  Rather, these are the bad guys (and if you work in the pharmaceutical industry, you might as well wear a button that says "Proud Worshipper of Satan"). The good news is, we can still have journalists as hero(ine)s, as long as their job lasts, but these would have to be small-town reporters who don't get caught up in the extremely divisive politics of the largest news organizations.

The hobby/profession-based mysteries take us away from these professions and people whom we as a society no longer like or respect.  They move us from macro to micro - from the world of the powerful (against whom we have little or no defense) and into the world of the individual, where (say) one herbalist, one florist, or one medieval history scholar can help fight for truth and justice. Our amateur sleuths aren't in anyone's pocket - they're investigating because they want to, perhaps for a personal reason, and we know they aren't corrupt, on the take, or power-hungry/arrogant. Maybe, just maybe, that appeals to readers who feel that every day is a battle against "the system." The amateur is often David taking on Goliath, and we love watching Goliath go down.

Now, I know that we do have some very successful practitioners out there with lawyers-as-heroes: Michael Connolly, David Rosenfelt, John Grisham...  Their attorneys succeed, I would argue, because they buck the system and try to be more "human" than the typical attorney is perceived to be.  Also, these gents have been writing a long time and have had time to build up a following.  But are any of us acquiring new attorney or doctor mysteries?  Not that I know of....

 

Appreciations: Final Approach, Hounds

I've been getting some email asking me to do more book reviews.  What stops me from doing them is I feel that once I start, I would be unable to stop.  Mysterious Matters isn't meant to be a review site per se, but I do realize that I can further my mission of making the world aware of fabulous small-press/independent publisher books by reviewing some of the best of them.  So, I'm thinking, for the next few weeks, I'll blog about such titles.

 

FINAL APPROACH
Rachel Brady

Poisoned Pen Press

A debut I quite enjoyed was Rachel Brady's Final Approach.  Certainly the skydiving theme is one that I haven't seen explored before, and it is always pleasant to enter a new milieu and learn something about it and the characters who inhabit it.  (And lest anyone believe that skydivers are any less fanatical than, say, rock climbers or bungee jumpers, Final Approach will prove you wrong.)  One problem I often find in debut novels is pacing; they can be slow to start or burdened in the early chapters by backstory.  Final Approach takes off like a shot and features a likable heroine, Emily Locke, who lost her husband and child to a mysterious accident four years earlier.  She's recruited by a disgraced former detective, now a P.I., for her help in another missing-child case.  The plot moves along nicely, and the dialogue is enjoyable; Emily trades barbs with her best friend, Jeannie, while finding several possible love interests not only in the P.I. but also in a  - yes - cowboy.  Of course we know that people can't just drop their lives and fly to Houston to skydive and help solve the disappearances of children, but somehow Brady makes it all work.  I thoroughly enjoyed the book and have the recently published sequel, Dead Lift, on my TBR pile. 

 

 

HOUND

Vincent McCaffrey

Small Beer Press

A very different book is Vincent McCaffrey's Hound, one of those P.D. James-type mystery-cum-literary fiction books.  By that I mean, the writing is so assured, and the observations so crystalline, that it really did not need to be a "mystery" to work. Yet I'm glad the book is positioned as a mystery, because that gives it a much larger potential market and readership, which it so richly deserves.

     Our hero is Henry Sullivan, a Boston bookseller.  The mystery comes in as he searches for the killer of an old girlfriend.  There's a lot of thought put into the book business in Hound; Sullivan bewails what's become of the book business, in which the ghostwritten books of airheaded Hollywood celebs reach the heights of the bestseller lists while quality books by writers who toil in obscurity find themselves remaindered and pulped, or not even reviewed.  But Sullivan's not just an effete, bookish type; he knows how to hold his own, which makes him a thinking man's hero with just the right amount of macho.  One might see Hound as the male version of Diane Satterfield's The Thirteenth Tale - but Hound is the better book.  Both McCaffrey's and Satterfield's protagonists are intense bibliophiles, but while Satterfield's is mopey and sometimes unsympathetic, McCaffrey's is more balanced and functional.  The pace of Hound is slower than one would want in a traditional "mystery," but somehow that doesn't matter--I'm reminded of another book that made me feel this way, Ashna Graves' Death Pans Out.  Hound's tone is nostalgic and sometimes sad, but this is a great read for book lovers, and indeed for all of us who look back to the "good old days" when life seemed simpler and where the fantasy reigned supreme that "merit" was the only criterion for publication (or any other type of success).  My only fear is that the "book" theme will peg the book as for "book lovers" only; the book deserves a wider readership than that (and a better cover, too).