How To Succeed at the Kindle Without Even Trying

I think I can safely say my experiment in online publishing was a failure. After a couple months of availability on the Kindle I sold 10 copies and four copies of the PDF version. This isn’t very unexpected. Other than announcements on Twitter, FaceBook, my blog, and a couple of the Kindle forums, I didn’t do much else to promote the thing. I appreciate all of the people who posted on their blogs and retweeted my posts, but I just don’t think this thing was destined to work. Short stories seem to be the worst possible sellers for the kindle which surprises me a little. I think short stories and novellas seem to be ripe for electronic publishing more than books.

But all of this got me thinking about what else of mine might be profitable for the Kindle. I still don’t want to put up any of my unpublished novels (even though this seems to be the area where people have had the most success) but I thought my blog might be a possibility. I’ve mentioned here before that I started a blog because I always wanted to be a newspaper columnist and that seemed to feed the urge for me. Well, most columnists build a nice little cottage industry around publishing collections of their best columns and I wondered if publishing a collection of my best blog posts would be a good idea. So I went through and read through five years of blog posts and came to a couple of realizations:

1) Blogging, more than any other writing I’ve done, seems to be my most natural form to work in. The words flow smoothly and I think I have a good style and narrative tone.

2) My blog reads like a novel. There’s plenty of recurring characters, a few subplots, and a dramatic arc as I go from single writer struggling to make it in a college town to married man then a father trying to juggle family life with the real world and with my dreams.

3) My writing and my life are tied very closely together. I initially thought about separating out the writing posts from the other posts about the daily hoo ha in my life but I found that in almost every writing post I related it back to something going on in my life at that time, and that in a lot of my regular life posts I talked about being a writer or some such thing. I think this is reflected in much of my fiction that is heavily season with tidbits from my real life.

4) I miss blogging. Even if nobody read the blog it’s nice to have a record of everything that’s gone on in my life over the past five years. I suspect that once I’m done with the book I’m working on now I’ll pick up blogging again more regularly.

Who knows if I’ll do anything right away with the collection. I don’t really have the time or desire to go through and polish it up enough to be worth anyone paying money for, but once I eventually get a foothold in the industry publishing novels and such it night make a neat little collection to publish.

Why I Hate Home Ownership Part XXXXXIVVVVIII.3

I’m not really feeling the word coming on the book, so maybe venting what I’ve been obsessing over in my mind will free up the gates. I find that sometimes just the act of typing is enough to wedge loose the crap in the story part of my brain. But really it’s just an excuse to talk about how much I hate my house.

The inside I don’t mind so much. We have sweet granite counter tops, new appliances, wood floors, lots of storage, etc. The only parts of the house I don’t like are the bathroom which needs a new tub, the trim around most of the doors (which really just need to be painted) and most of the closet doors which need to be replaced. For a house that was almost entirely gutted when we bought it, that’s not bad. If those were the only repairs I could take care of it in a few weekends with minimal effort. But no, there’s still the basement which is a nasty, spider-infested, seeping wet mess with a drain that backs up every time it rains and floods everything. It’s got plenty of space for storage as long as it’s in plastic, but I really hate going down there and want to finish it.

But the true gem of homeowner nastiness are the yards. We just spent an unholy amount of money to remove two giant trees from our very small lot because the mess and potential damage to our basement was intolerable. Neighbors for a mile in each direction cheered as those bitches went down. But that’s only the beginning. The front yard itself is nice without the tree. It’s easy to mow and mostly made of real grass not that crappy shrubby stuff. But good holy sweet mercy, the flower bed is a nightmare. It’s a giant bed of stones and weeds and a shrub that until recently threatened to consume the entire front part of our house. After spending an entire Saturday trigging to dig up the stones and take the most aggressive weeds out at the roots without success, I used an entire bottle of weed killer on the damn thing. Of course all it did was kill off the flowers and brought the weeds back with the bloody vengeance of a slasher villain.

I hate this flower bed.

The only solution I see is to dig up all of the stones (which cover an area almost the entire length of our house and four feet long), dig out all of the flowers and start from scratch. All of that sounds fine except for the digging out all of the stones part. That could take almost the entire summer working every weekend. And with Baby Number Two on the way and a novel to finish before then, I don’t have the time or the desire to do that. I use my little electric weed trimmer to keep things in check so it doesn’t look like one of the crack houses for sale in Detroit, but that’s about all I can promise.

And then there’s back yard. Yes I’m happy to have the tree gone. I’m happy I won’t have to deal with hip high piles of helicopters in the spring and leaves in the fall but we still have a weedy fire pit, chunks of yard missing from where the tree roots were removed, another viciously weedy flower bed that I haven’t even bothered to touch, a warped deck, a nasty rusted shed, and a forest of armed and violent weeds behind the shed. I mow to keep the grass down and I trim the weeds around the shed, but again, without expensive equipment and massive amounts of free time, there’s no way this place is going to look decent any time soon.

I wish I could just not care at all. I’ve never been overly proud to be a homeowner, in fact I’ve been pretty miserable about the whole affair, but something inside of me is feeding and egging on this amateur landscaper and I can’t let it rest. I’m sure in the end, my natural laziness and more pressing artistic demands will put the final stake in my lawn dreams, but still, I wish I could just move some place new that didn’t have all of these issues. But I’m sure every home has its own issues. I’m really mean to be a city boy with compact living, public transportation and all of the included joys. No basements, no yards, nothing. That’s MY American Dream.

An Experiment in E-Publishing and Gender Roles

My wife and I have one baby and are expecting another in a few months. Next year we’d like to take the whole family to Disney World so my wife has started a little fund that she’s been putting change into and other spare cash we get. But then she got a decent sized bonus for her work and dropped that into the fund and I started feeling a bit in adequate as a provider for my family. So I started thinking about ways I could contribute to the Disney fund. I don’t get bonuses at work and I don’t really have the time or the energy for a second job so that was out. But there was one thing that had brought in a little cash over the last year or so and that was my short stories.

Around this same time I read a series of fascinating blog posts from Joe Konrath detailing his experiments with selling electronic versions of his short stories and novels through PayPal and for the Amazon Kindle E-Reader.

Hmmmmmmm.

I wasn’t comfortable putting up my unsold novels for sale, because I truly believe they are unsold for a reason. And the short stories that have made me some money in the past are still readily available at bookstores in the fine anthologies they were purchased for. Instead, I took three of my favorite stories that had been previously published online or in small circulation magazine but are now almost impossible to find and bundled them together in a collection I’m calling A LOAD OF QUERTERMOUS.

Featured in the collection are the following stories:

LOAD – The tale of a sperm back robbery in Detroit gone off the rails, originally published in CRIMESPREE MAGAZINE

MR. SATURDAY NIGHT SPECIAL – A little ditty about a private detective in Flint, MI who spends his daughter’s birthday helping his ex-wife’s lawyer save his son from jail, originally published in CRIMESCENE SCOTLAND

ALTER ROAD – A story that follows a preacher with a violent past who faces the greatest test of faith and grace when his son is murdered by hillbilly meth dealers, originally published in THUGLIT

I’ve also written brand new introductions for all three stories discussing their creation and the inspiration behind them. This collection is available now for the amazing low price of $.99 and can be had as PDF file for reading on any computer (or for printing to read on the train or in bed or wherever) or as a download for the Amazon Kindle. The Amazon dowload is immediate but the PDF will come once PayPal sends me an email indication a donation has been made and then I’ll zip it off to the email address used for the donation.

I really don’t know what to expect from this little experiment so you all can learn with me. If you aren’t able to make a donation, you can still help by spreading the word. I thank you, my kids thank you, and the Disney Empire thanks you.

Continuing Literature Education

I’ve been off the reservation for a while, but not in the fun, action movie sort of do my own shit kind of way. I’ve mostly been writing and reading. Well, I was writing until Becky and Spenser and I took a trip to Vegas at the end of March. I didn’t write much while we were gone and when I did, I started to see some problems with the plot that needed immediate work. All of my supporting characters were off doing cool stuff and getting into shit and propelling the plot along while my main character and his girlfriend sat in a casino and didn’t do much else. So I tried a couple different ways to get them out of the casino and I think I finally found one that works and I’m back to where I left off before we went to Vegas.

Vegas was interesting. I was kind of disappointed while I was there, it didn’t at all live up to the vision I had in my head, but since I’ve been back I’ve missed it and think about ways I can get back. What I’d really like to do is go back and do Vegas the way your supposed to. With a lot of money. Get a nice car to ride from the airport to the fancy hotel. Stay in a suite. Play the high limit tables and get good seats to a show. That may be a bit off in the future though.

Today though, I was thinking about something at lunch that I wanted to talk about and thought this might be the place to do it. Somebody I work with commented on how much I read and asked how I found the time. I explained it in relation to our workplace. The doctors we work with have to do so much Continuing Education to maintain their licenses. This helps them keep up to date with the latest techniques and skills and keeps them fresh. That’s what reading does for a writer.

You can read all of the blogs you want and read the trade magazines and Writer’s Digest and all of that, but the only way to really know what’s being done in the world of fiction is to get out there and read fiction. And not just in your own genre. See what they’re doing in sci-fi, fantasy, romance, memoir, whatever. I never understood the bullshit about writers who don’t read or who stop reading fiction once they start publishing. The minute you aren’t aware of what’s being done currently is the minute you start the slip toward stale, rehashed prose.

So while I’ll agree that for a writer, writing every day is important, I think reading every day is even more important. Harlan Coben calls it filling the vessel. He says that at the end of writing a book his vessel is empty and he needs to refill it by reading and seeing movies and going to plays at looking at art. You can write a hundred pages every day, but unless those pages are coming from someplace deep inside you, someplace filled with material from your reading, the sentences will fail.

A while ago on one of the blogs or another, Paul Guyot got chided for a comment that I think was spot on. He said (and I’m paraphrasing here with a crappy memory) that anyone who has to ask where a writer gets their ideas from will never be a writer. He said writers become writers because the ideas bubble around and jack up the brain so much that they just have to come out and writing is the only way to do that. And I think the only way you get those ideas bubbling is by reading. Every day.

End Public Service Announcement.

The End: Part Two

This will come as no surprise to most who know me, but I’m ending this blog. Again.

Reasons both personal and professionally have contributed to this decision but what it comes down to is my writing was going well when I wasn’t blogging and now I’m all jammed up mentally and creatively since I started it back up again.

I’ll still be updating through Twitter because I can do that from my cell phone when I’m bored out in the world, and you can keep up with pictures of Spenser and the rest of the family on my Facebook page. But read my lips: no new blog posts.

My Town Tuesday

I know these are usually done on Mondays, but let’s talk about My Town Tuesday. As I sit here in this vile state with an awful economy, frigid temperatures, and about a foot of ugly, dirty snow on everything I’m prone to contemplate why I’m still here.

First of all, because Becky and I both seem to have bucked the trend of unemployment in the area and have good jobs with good benefits. Also, both of our families are here and that makes it very nice for Spenser. But what about before Becky? Before my new family life? Why did I stick around?

It’s not like I didn’t try to get out of here. I lived in New York City for a while. But while that was a great experience, I realized I have no business living someplace that expensive if I’m not willing to work a hundred jobs and sacrifice greatly to live there. Once I came back, I ended up eventually in Ann Arbor and that seemed to be good enough for me. It had everything I liked about New York — independent cinema, good restaurants, lots of bookstores, a good theater community, a good writing community, etc.– and was cheaper by comparison.

I toyed with the idea of being a screenwriter or TV writer for a while, but the only step I took to getting out to LA was applying for a couple of fellowships. I suspect the reason I never moved someplace else, more specifically some place warm, was fear. I’ve never been good with money and most of my independent living adventures resulted in me living back with my parents for a time. That’s all well and good when you’re close to home, but on the other side of the country it seems a bit harder to pull off.

My other brief consideration of moving someplace warm was a time I wanted to move to Florida so I could go to grad school at Florida International University where Dennis Lehane, among others, had studied creative writing. I even went so far as to attend Sleuthfest in 2003 where some of the staff were attending. It seemed like a good idea because grad school would provide more stability than just up and moving someplace for the fun of it. But on that one I took the easy way out, again more out of fear than anything else.

So there you have it. But I still tell Becky every now and then that we might have to move to LA if I get a screenwriting or movie offer that I can’t refuse. And these days she seems more than happy to go along with that.

Truth from Babes

The photo, as promised.

Thanks to Paul Guyot for the clothing for our chunky baby.

You Don’t Mess with the Snowhan

I don’t know where that bout of blog productivity came from last week, but I posted every day except Sunday which is quite a bit for me lately. And I enjoyed it. Back in the day when I started this thing I know I had all sorts of energy to blog every day and write a bunch of short stories and do the Blog Short Story Project and manage Demolition. Ah, the energy of a younger man…But I think these days the work I’m turning out is at a higher level and I guess I’ll make that sacrifice.

The weekend was nice and snowy which gave me the excuse to stay in and not do much except read and work on revisions. I didn’t get as far as I wanted to on revisions because I hit a bit of a wall and then panicked and wondered if I should be working on this at all. But I took a deep breath and went out to shovel the driveway (while the brand friggin new snow blower I just bought sat uncooperatively on the porch) and when I came back I figured out what to do.

We had every intention of going to church on Sunday since we haven’t been in ages and I’ve been missing it, but with that much snow on the ground I wasn’t taking Spenser out until I had a chance to shovel. So I read some more in TOROS AND TORSOS and it’s only getting better. I also watched some playoff football, ate some sirloin burger soup, and we capped the night off with a viewing of YOU DON’T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN. This was a movie that was better than I expected when I added it to the Netflix que. The Israel-Palestine subplot was interesting to view in light of recent activity over there. I think it was handled well with humor and made some interesting points without being preachy…which I guess is easy to do with enough bare backsides flopping around.

I also promised Paul I would post a picture of Spenser in a shirt that he bought for him but of course I forgot to upload it from the camera so look for that later today.

On Patrol

I’m writing this with a nice Johnny Walker and water next to me and the Pittsburgh San Diego football game on the TV. Becky is feeding Spenser at the end of the couch and it’s generally a cozy night here at the Q homestead.

I finally read THE DAWN PATROL and regret every moment I spent not having read it. (Actually that’s not true because when the book first came out I was in the middle of an ugly reading and writing funk and needed to read outside of the crime circle for a while so this was the perfect time to read it) What a great book. I could go on and on like so many others about what a great book this is, but I had an interesting reaction to this book. While I was blown away at how good it was, I thought at the end “I could do this.” Maybe not right now, and maybe not in the near future, but this is the kind of book I could write when I put my time in. Winslow has a great quick conversational style that I’m able to do in som e of my better sections of work.

This isn’t to say I’m claiming to be as good as Don Winslow, I’m not and this book made me feel like a schlub in many ways. But it gave me something to aim for. I love Dennis Lehane but there is no way I’ll be able to do what he does, and I don’t really want to. I’m not aiming for literary respect or anything like that, but I want to be operating at the top of my chosen form. Like Winslow. And like Michael Connelly. It gave me fresh energy as I pound into my revisions.

I’m also thinking about going back and finally reading Winslow’s Shamus Award Winning CALIFORNIA FIRE AND LIFE. I’ve held out for so long because I was angry that this book won the Shamus over Robert Crais’s LA REQUIEM which I still consider one of the best PI novels of modern times. But after THE DAWN PATROL I think it’s time to let that chip fall.

So next on the docket for me is Craig McDonald’s TOROS AND TORSOS. This series has intrigues me because I love stories about writers, and I’m a big Hemingway fan, and I like that whole adventure writer scene of that time, but I never got around to reading anything in the series. And then at the library today it was right there in the new releases so I read a few pages and was hooked. After that is either LUSH LIFE (I know I know, this is right up there with missing on TDP) or Charles Bock’s BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN.

What’s in your TBR?

A Post-Christmas Carol

I’m taking down the Christmas decoration tomorrow and it only seems appropriate that we have a blizzard on the way. For some reason the end of the holiday season seemed to come quite abruptly this year. I suspect it has something to do with spending the long New Year’s weekend– when everybody else was slowly phasing out their Christmas stuff– in 80 degree weather in Florida. So we come back home and everybody else has moved on and the Christmas music on satellite radio is gone and I’m left looking at the ugly side of winter in Michigan.

I love the Christmas season but it can be such a huge let down as well. Especially this year since I will be the one doing the un-decorating. In the past, my mom did most of it when I lived at home and when I lived on my own, my decorations consisted of a small Christmas tree that went right back into it’s trash bag for storage at the end of the season. But this year I have to take down all of the ornaments, the whole tree, the stockings, the garland, and the outside lights. This is stuff that’s fun to do the day after Thanksgiving but not so much afterward. And to top it off, football season is almost over and it wasn’t even a very good one to begin with.

So instead of wallowing in my misery, here are a few things I’m looking forward to in the next few months:

1) Getting my new book done and getting it out into the market. Also getting started on the next novel project

2) Love is Murder in Chicago in less than a month – This is like a little mini local Bouchercon. It will be nice to catch up with all of my chums, but I also have some very important meetings on the burner as well for this regarding the previously mentioned book.

3) Family vacation to Las Vegas and Arizona in March – Becky, Spenser and I will be once more planing it to some place warm, this time to visit relatives. I’ve always wanted to visit Vegas and Becky just so happens to have family out there. Yay for family.

4) There’s also just the unknown possibilities out there. This is a fresh year. I could win the lottery, get a book deal, or do any number of cool things that I don’t even know are possible right now.

But first I have to get the stupid decorations down.