Sean Cummings's Blog: POLTERBLOG!, page 25

Some simple mathematics

Well, we're almost at the one week mark for Save Publishing - Read a Book at Bedtime. We started with just me and a couple of others last Thursday and now our little Facebook campaign has 331 people who like the idea of committing ten minutes a night at bedtime to reading a book as opposed to checking email or watching Conan. (Sorry Conan, we can always watch you later on the PVR.) We've got a website in development and a whole lot more about to be unveiled. :)

(PS - Published authors, I'd love it if you could donate some of your books that we could use for giveaways. Email me at sean AT sean DASH cummings DOT ca.)

I was just tinkering with my calculator and I reasoned that if all 331 people signed onto the campaign started a new book tonight and they read one chapter a night and the book is thirty chapters long, then around March 1st or 2nd, they might be looking for another book. So that's 331 books that could be bought at your local bookshop, downloaded from Amazon or Bookdepository.com or borrowed from the local library. If 20% borrowed from their library, that would leave 265 potential consumers, so it's possible that 265 books could be bought. Over a twelve month period if those numbers held up, that's 3180 books. If the average price of a book might be $10, then we're talking $31,800 worth of books!

It's a drop in the barrel, but every little bit helps. Reading provides more bang for your buck than any video game, blockbuster movie or prime time television show. Reading exercises your imagination, it increases your word power and it's just a great way to wind down after a hard day at work.

Just think: 3180 books from just 265 people. If we had double the number who committed to the project, that's 530 people, $5300 a month and about $63,600 worth of book sold in twelve months. (My math might be off, though, but you all get it.)

I'm excited by this project. I'm pumped by the kind words of encouragement I've received from so many people over the past week, it's just a testament to the power of social networking.

I'll close off by saying that I'm not doing this project to promote my books. If you like zombies and the supernatural and superheroes, then okay, you might like my books, but there's other authors out there and what's great about reading is there's just so much undiscovered talent. So many new voices with great stories to tell. Fantastic world building, mind-numbing tension, romance, thrills and so much more.

Books rock. Period. And everyone who has signed onto this project rocks, too. Onward! Let's commit to that ten minutes a night and help save publishing in our own little way.

Happy Groundhog Day everyone!

I'd like to save the publishing industry

It's a lofty statement, isn't it? I make it after realizing that I probably picked the worst time in the past five hundred years to become a published author. Why?

Oh, dear, God, here's why:

This.



This

This

This

This

This

This

And an entire stream of bad news on Google.

I'm not an entirely bright individual, I'd like to make that clear before I go any further. I mean, yeah, I'm published and a lot of people aren't, but that doesn't qualify me to be able to predict what kinds of apocalyptic scenarios might or might not happen as publishing goes through an incredible transition. To what, I have no idea. Fewer young people are reading. Hell, fewer grown-ups are, too. The Interweb is filled with so many gloom and doom stories about how the book industry is trouble that it's often difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I do, however, have a theory and you know what? If you think I'm on crack for putting it out to the universe, send me a comment and tell me so, it's totally cool. But I was just thinking about how we spend our time and how new technologies compete for our time every single day. We're distracted, we bring work home, we eat in front of the TV, we check our emails, we text message, we hit up Facebook, we go to the Gym, but we're not necessarily devoting a specific time of day to reading books ... or are we?

See, I think that most of us read at bedtime if we're reading at all. Outside of making babies or watching Conan on our bedroom big screens, those of us who read don't have a lot of distraction when we hit the pillow. I read every night and it helps me drift off - a great way to end the day. But those of us who read at bedtime are readers, aren't we? It's the other people who aren't reading that maybe, well, if we could get them to pick up a book and just freaking read for ten minutes at bedtime, well, maybe if enough did it, they'd buy books. Maybe they'd even buy my book.

I'm not a snob, either. I don't care if they're reading me in print or on an electronic device, I just want my words (and the words of FARRRRR better authors than me) to be read with some measure of regularity, at bedtime. If enough people did it, I suspect they'd buy more books. If they bought more books then more publishers would be in a better financial state than they are right now, more undiscovered voices would be found and literacy rates would increase dramatically.

So I'm just thinking that we can save the publishing industry if we read at bedtime, that's all. Just ten minutes a night - feel free to read for longer if you're so inclined. And I guess I'd like to start promoting this simple idea and see if it spreads. It might, and it might not. I'm not a bestselling author - just a yutz from Saskatchewan who likes to write about zombies and magic and things that go bump in the night.

Anyway, there you have it. I'm attaching a lame little graphic that I made to this blog post and if you'd like to save publishing by reading a book at bedtime, I'd really appreciate it because all this talk of publishing meeting its doom depresses the hell out of me.

[image error]

Hey look at me!! I write books! Please buy!

There's a ton of discussion about the direction publishing is going these days. If you're on Twitter and follow those who work in the publishing industry, (agents, editors) you're going to see that everyone is all over the map about whether ebooks represent the end of brick and mortar stores or whether print is even viable in the digital age. Nobody has a crystal ball and I don't presume to know what's going to happen next, but here's some facts to chew on.

2010 saw a rise in the sales of ebooks whereas US print sales declined.

Ebook readers dropped in price and experts predict further price drops in 2011.

Amazon is changing the game.

Is there a revolution afoot in the way we read? My hunch is that it's less a revolution and more of a paradigm shift because independent bookstores are closing all over the place and big box stores are in trouble. What's caused this?

I don't have the answers, but I can speculate. A big-ass global recession isn't the reason print is in big trouble. I suspect that it only acted to heighten the long-term problems that have existed in the industry since, well .. forever. (Read: publishers on the hook for unsold books)

I probably picked the worst time in human history to become a published author, but here I am, writing away and trying to make the best of it. If book sales are indeed morphing from brick and mortar shops to online marketplaces, you can imagine the challenge associated with trying to make a name for yourself when consumers can't walk into a bookstore and see a prominently placed title you've written that compels them to pick it up and check it out.

The best any newbie author like me can do is rely on a limited knowledge of social networking to get the word out and even then, it's really hard to do. You don't want to appear to be *pushing* your book on people. You can't post your book to, say, sci-fi forums because that's essentially a form of spam and people hate that. You can try to find some book reviewers and hope that you receive a good review and those in their own social network will click on over to Amazon and buy your book. But there really is no proven method to do it ... or is there?

I make no secret of my admiration for fellow Canadian author Catherine McKenzie. I'm no fan of chick lit but by golly, I've reviewed her delightful debut SPIN and her second book ARRANGED, and I think she's figured out how authors can get people's attention without looking like we're spamming the living crap out of everyone's social networks.

Early in 2010 she started a group on Goodreads called MAKE A BOOK A BESTSELLER. She's based it on a simple premise: if a bunch of people can get Betty White to host Saturday Night Live, then surely the power of people can make a book a bestseller. There's currently 343 members, they have a forum and Catherine has appeared all over the place to promote the concept - places like The Huffington Post. She's also brought the group to Facebook and it boasts a healthy membership of over 3000 and baby, THAT's where I think Catherine is going to hit critical mass with this idea, because Facebook is THE global social network bar none. Forget about Amazon taking over the world, Facebook already did and it has become a fixture in everyone's daily lives. Through Catherine's innovative vision, she's tapped into something tangible - an unobtrusive way for authors to get noticed. The Facebook group's description sums it all up: Welcome to the AUTHOR/READER EFFECT, where authors and readers band together to bring attention to deserving books. Because who says Oprah's the only one who can get people reading. Are you with me?

God love her for doing this. Also, Catherine - how in the @#$% do you find the time to spear head all this and STILL write? Oh, did I mention she also somehow manages to practice law???

I'm a member of both groups and I've bought books because of them. I think for authors in my vein of genre fiction, this is an idea that's the next step past author blogs like Dark Central Station of which I'm also a member. I think Catherine's idea works because it isn't authors shouting "Hey - buy our books" it's authors linking with readers and those reader's vital social networks that makes her idea so utterly brilliant. She's harnessing the power of the number one social network on planet earth by letting the social network be the engine for book promotion.

The woman is a smart cookie. I think every author can learn something from this project and I guess the next step for me is to have a conflab with my fellow authors at Dark Central Station to see if we can do as Catherine is doing. You know what they say, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery or better still, why reinvent the wheel?

Amazon might be changing the game, but so is Catherine McKenzie. She's identified a unique way for authors to become visible in an increasingly crowded and murky marketplace.

The Query That Landed Me An Agent

I'm told by several writer friends that I should post the query letter I sent to Jenny Savill at Andrew Nurnberg Associates on January 9, 2010. I will post it below with this disclaimer: I am not a guru for queries - I think the querying process is so utterly subjective that your query letter might work for one agent and for another it might put them to sleep. If I have any kind of advice to offer I would just say that your query needs to sound like the back cover of the book. That's pretty much how I did it.

I'm very fortunate, grateful and damned lucky that it worked. Oh, and I guess the query didn't land me the agent, so the title of this posting is kind of wrong. It should read THE QUERY THAT GOT AN AGENT TO READ POLTERGEEKS. So, here's the query for POLTERGEEKS:

Dear Andrew Nurnberg Associates:

Warning: the following query is for a young adult urban fantasy featuring a talking Great Dane, a little old lady in leopard skin outfit who pulls Jedi mind tricks on social workers, an oil company in bed with a minor deity and of course, teen romance of the awkward, non-sparkly vampire kind.

Oh ... and zombies, floating furniture and general bad juju.

What happens when a four hundred year-old grudge against witches manifests in the heart of a major city? Only a slew of off-the-scale supernatural activity and a mystery that leads to a paranormal battle between a teen witch and an entity whose hatred lives on in the after-life.

How much hatred? Oh, about this much:

"Has not this present Parliament

A Lieger to the Devil sent,

Fully impowr'd to treat about

Finding revolted witches out

And has not he, within a year,

Hang'd threescore of 'em in one shire?

Some only for not being drowned,

And some for sitting above ground,

Whole days and nights, upon their breeches,

And feeling pain, were hang'd for witches."

Fifteen-year-old Julie Richardson is about to learn that being the daughter of a witch isn't all it's cracked up to be. When she and her best friend Marcus witness an elderly lady jettisoned out the front door of her home and the old lady's cat launched through the chimney, it's pretty obvious to Julie there's a supernatural connection. The house is occupied by a poltergeist and in order to reclaim it, Julie's going to have to exorcise the spirit. Of course, she'll need her mother's help and what teenager in their right mind wants that?

Julie's mom might be skilled in witchcraft, but there's a whisper of menace behind increasing levels of poltergeist activity all over town. After a large-scale paranormal assault on Julie's high school, her mother falls victim to endless night - a dark spell that rips her mom's soul from her mortal husk, leaving her in the supernatural equivalent of a persistent vegetative state. Now it's a race against time to find out who is responsible or Julie won't just lose her mother's soul - she'll lose her mother's life.

My name is Sean Cummings and POLTERGEEKS is the first novel in what I hope to be a young adult series entitled STRANGE DAYS. My debut novel, SHADE FRIGHT, has been picked up as the first in a series by Snowbooks and will be in bookstores on March 1, 2010. Between writing the second volume in the Valerie Steven's series, I'm promoting my work mainly by means of the rapidly growing blogosphere and via online social networking.

Attached are the first three chapters for your consideration. If you're interested in reading Poltergeeks, the full 60,000 word manuscript is ready to send.

Only in Canada ... pity.

This, is bullshit.

It's typical Canadian politically correct bullshit, too. Because the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council probably doesn't know what irony means, here's the definition from Webster's:

Definition of IRONY

1: a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other's false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning --called also Socratic irony

2a : the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning b : a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony c : an ironic expression or utterance

3a (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity b : incongruity between a situation developed in a drama and the accompanying words or actions that is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play --called also dramatic irony, tragic irony

I remember PRECISELY what I was doing the very moment I heard Money For Nothing the first time. It was July 1985, and I'd just graduated high school. My friends Gerry, Doug and Terry and I were heading to the mountains to go fishing with a trunk full of O'Keefe Extra Old Stock and little food. We were celebrating our emancipation from the educational system and were about to participate in what we didn't realize at the time was a rite of passage.

We were driving on the secondary highway to Kananaskis country in a 1970 Impala and Terry cranked the cassette deck. Those classic riffs kicked in and I distinctly remember hooting at the top of my lungs at how freaking awesome Mark Knopfler was. Within weeks of this seminal event, I was in the Army, followed shortly by Gerry. Doug and Terry disappeared from my life as we went our separate ways. In hindsight, it's bittersweet.

a) The song is a Rock and Roll classic.

b) The video was likely the first time pretty much anyone on planet earth had seen computer animation - an incredible technological portent.

c) It's a milepost in my life.

I'd post the video but someone would probably take me to the Human Rights Commission and I can't afford to change my mind these days.

Review: Arranged by Catherine McKenzie

[image error]Yeah, yeah ... I know. Just as I'd mentioned in my review for Catherine McKenzie's absolutely delightful debut SPIN, chick-lit ain't exactly my strong suit.

But but but but.... I learn a helluva lot from good authors who write about stuff I don't exactly excel at, yet still require in my own novels about zombies, superheroes or a staff-wielding sorceress from Cowtown. I suck at writing romance or anything "chicky" and I recognize how important it is in my own books, so Catherine McKenzie is really a very good teacher for guys like me who suck at writing romance. Here goes.

At first glance, you'd think that Anne Blythe is a woman who should really sit back and enjoy the fact that she has it all ... or does she? I mean, her job pays well, she's scored a wicked ass book deal and she's hot - guys are totally into her. AHA! But there's a challenge here that I'm told plagues many a woman in the real world: no shortage of dudes, big shortage of quality dudes who ain't afraid to commit. (I have a theory on why women consistently fall for dudes who don't want to commit and if my agent ever decided to look at my book proposal for this project ... cough ... I'll shut up now) Anne wants that commitment, hell - she wants her cake and wants to eat it and you know what? That would bug the hell out of me, but she's a genuinely good person. You can't not like Anne Blythe - it would be like saying that chocolate tastes like crap. Can't be done.

Unfortunately, Anne's social circle are all getting married and settling down - God knows, even though I look dumb as a post most days, I'm keenly aware of the power that women's social networks have over them. There are few things worse than being left out from everyone else when they're building lives with kids and mortgages and everything else, am I right? Poor Anne starts to question herself - and no, there's nothing wrong with her - she just hasn't found that one person who connects with her - who is willing to love her unconditionally because very early in the story, you see that Anne isn't shallow. She's not a bitch - she is capable of loving in a deep and meaningful way but things just aren't working according to plan.

Everything changes when she finds a business card for an "arranged marriage company" (I'm assuming such things exist) and she figures, "F--- it, I'm gonna do it."

Comedic hi-jinks ensue - enough to make a crusty old fart like me laugh out loud and that's hard to do because I'm generally a miserable prick. Ask anyone who knows me.

Through Blythe and Company she meets a writer (gasp! cuz, like we're all poor!) and he seems to be a pretty straight up match for her. I'm not going to go into it any more than this because the book just freaking takes off from there.

Trust me ...

ARRANGED is a fun and at times dizzying display of the kinds of things women put themselves through to find true love. (And ladies, you really shouldn't. Men aren't that complicated and by the time we're forty we like to wear pants up to our armpits and complain about big government..) Anne Blythe is a quirky everywoman for all the girls out there who want to find true love. She's believable, the writing is tight, the dialogue is strong and most importantly, you're left wanting to cheer this damned Annie on!

Go Anne Blythe! Kick some ass!!! Find true love and dammit, where's my Häagen-Dazs?? This book is making me all smiley and weepy and steamy and stuff.

Astatalk and other evils

I've just learned that my book UNSEEN WORLD is on Astatalk. Never heard of Astatalk? It's like limewire but for software and now eBooks. It's a pirate site - old hat right? The web's full of illegal downloading, so what's wrong with downloading a book from Astatalk or a similar site?

You download my book illegally, then it's theft. I don't give a damn that "illegal downloading is here to stay so get used to it." Aha! You say - but people give each other used books all the time, how is this different?

Here's how - it would take a shit pile of people a long time to pass my book around compared to the shit pile that can download it without paying immediately. Pretty basic.

Lilith Saintcrow has a nice rant about downloading books illegally. She even drops the F-Bomb a lot, it bugs her that much.

Don't get me wrong - I know there's sweet bleep all I can do about it. I know that file sharing of eBooks is going to be a fact of life and that I might as well get used to it, but I don't have to like it. It took me over a year to write Unseen World. It took me longer to rewrite it. It took energy, creativity and time away from people I love to write it. I won't make much money from it, either. Snowbooks is a small independent publisher that doesn't have global distribution and I'll be lucky if it earns out my advance on royalties.

So please, don't frigging steal from me, Lilith Saintcrow or any other author who works their ass off the write a book that somehow, miraculously and against all odds, manages to get published. You have a better chance at winning the lotto than you do of getting a book published.

If you illegally download my book, or Lilith's or any other author, you're an ass and if I ever find you, I'm going to break your kneecaps.

Spend the money and buy the book you cheap bastards. If you're too cheap, get it for free at the library.

Why do we write?

So here's the thing - 2010 sucked monkey butt if you were in publishing. Seriously. Dorchester imploded, Borders closed in England and is in the process of going tits-up in the USA, HMV which owns Waterstones is in trouble. 2011 ain't starting well here at home in Canada with Key Porter Books shutting down operations and they were a government subsidized publisher!

And yet ... and yet ... we write. Mostly because we're probably crazy, but more likely because the notion of seeing that 100% real, no bullshit, no scam, no self-published, non Print on Demand, legitimately published novel for the first time, to hold in your hand, to smell the ink ... being published means something.

Perhaps some of unpublished authors think they're going to strike it rich, I hope not because statistically speaking, your first novel probably won't earn out your advance on royalties, ASSUMING you received one in the first place.

It's a personal thing, I suspect - every unpublished author I've ever met just wants to have that book in their hands. Perhaps being published is a way of saying to the world - LOOK, DAMMIT - I DID SOMETHING REALLY FREAKING SPECIAL THAT HARDLY ANYONE EVER DOES.

It's hard to get published. It's even harder to land an agent. It's such a subjective business and you truly do need some measure of courage to throw yourself out there because to be rejected on something you've poured your heart and soul into hurts. And you can't take it personally. You also shouldn't tear a strip off a reviewer when they said your book sucks on their blog..

So, why do I write?

Because I enjoy it. Because I like to see people reading my stuff. Because I hope to one day quit my day job and earn enough to write full time. I suspect that's probably what most authors waiting to be are hoping for. Do I have advice for those authors?

Not really. Just write. That's all I can say. Don't have a meltdown over your query. Just freaking write, you know? Be fearless and throw yourself out to the universe and see what the hell happens.

And may 2011 not suck for the publishing world. Amen.

YA Fiction - Making it the real @#$% deal

Apologies to my mother for the blog title. She's going to yell at me, I just know it. (She's seventy six, I suppose she has a right to yell at anyone she wants.)

It's 2011 and I'm writing something that's a pretty huge departure for me. Up until now, I've written I guess what I'd like to call "safe" urban fantasy - you know, tongue-in-cheek humor, some romantic elements, supernatural stuff as a backdrop, but I've wanted to write something much darker and disturbing for a long time.

I came up with the idea for THE NORTH, my current WIP while I was knee-deep in revisions for POLTERGEEKS (which is in my agent's hands at the time of this writing) and from the get-go, I wanted to present a different take on a bleak dystopian future for a group of teens in the army reserves. It seemed that a zombie apocalypse would present the best reason for my characters to escape the city in their armored personnel carriers and head to the arctic - and there's a certain irony in having them head to the tundra - a locale I believe is among the most unforgiving and god-forsaken places to try to survive. Along the way, I decided that if this book is to be true to life, then I absolutely must write it accurately. What does that mean?

Sex. Swearing. Killing. More swearing. A disturbing scene that will challenge the survivor's belief system - in short, a rape and meting out punishment to the perpetrator.

It was at this point that I realized I might run into problems because while there are bajillions of exceptionally good YA novels out there, a great many of them are *safe* and I don't want THE NORTH to be safe at all. I want it to be a terrifying glimpse into the very best and very worst human traits - it's just the key players are teenagers - not yet sophisticated enough or mature enough to fight for survival the way adults would. Hell, the way I intend to write their survival story is to do opposite of what adults would do in a similar situation.

As I dig into this manuscript, I've come to the conclusion that this is really heavy stuff - it's troubling on a lot of levels and I have to wonder just how much I can get away with when I don't want to feel like I'm getting away with anything in the story. At the heart of the matter is THE NORTH happens to be about a seventeen year old guy who is trying to save his eight year-old sister's life and perhaps his own. The zombie apocalypse is six months old at the start of the story and Mom has blown her head off because she couldn't deal.

I've sought out some insight in how to make this book very gritty and genuine - my literary agent's assistant Ella Kahn has pointed me in the direction of FORBIDDEN by Tabitha Suzuma - a book that deals with incest head-on, and Keren David's WHEN I WAS JOE which addresses inner city gang culture, self harm and knife crime. I've put both on my reading list as I need some frames of reference to see if I'm going in the right direction with THE NORTH.

What I'm struggling with is how much risk is involved in writing a book where the main characters are teenagers and they say things like "get your fat fucking ass on the guns and blow those fucking monsters to hell!" regularly. (And really, I'm just scratching the surface that previous quotation from my manuscript.) Can they have sex and not love because they've lost control of everything and the only thing they have control over is their bodies? (Again, barely scratching the surface of where I want to go with this book.)

(And let's face it. Teenagers are having sex. They watch a lot of Internet porn.They do drugs. They drink. They say "fuck" a lot more than I do. They get into trouble. They get out of trouble. They learn. They grow. The grow up. In short - they're human and everything they are engaged in doing whether it rubs our sensibilities the wrong way or not, adults are doing with remarkable regularity - I just want the realness of teens conveyed in this book I'm trying to write.)

Like I said, this is a huge departure for me, but I really need to write this book.

What are your thoughts? How far can an author go to make it genuine. How far should he/she go?

Merry Christmas, all!

Today is Christmas Eve.

At the time of this writing, people are racing around getting last minute gifts or groceries. (I still have to go out and get a some bread cubes for the stuffing along with a couple of other things on my list - cat food being at the top.) Around supper time so many of us will gather together with friends and family in fellowship, reminiscing about Christmases past and perhaps exchanging gifts or cracking open that special bottle of wine or a good single malt scotch. My son, Shane, is coming over for supper and spending the night. He's twenty - he just moved out this fall and is beginning his journey.

We're all on a journey, though, aren't we? As each year winds down, we're compelled to go home for Christmas. For many of us, it's perhaps the home where we grew up or a grandparent's house where the entire extended family will sit down to a feast at some point tomorrow afternoon or evening. Many of us with young children will be up until the wee hours tonight, wrapping gifts and taking steps to ensure the mystery of Santa's visit remains intact in our children's hearts and minds. We'll be awakened early tomorrow morning as the kids rev up the octane and tear into their presents. The ritual of Christmas giving is a source of fascination for me because even though we live in a world that is fraught with conflict and dangers aplenty, each year we manage to gather together in fellowship and love and perhaps even hope.

While we share in the warmth of our families and friends throughout the holiday season, let's all of us try to think about those who are spending Christmas alone. Those who are serving far away from home and whose Christmas dinner will come in a ration pack. Those who are elderly or sick, and those who are no longer with us this year.

Let's all remember what brought us together with our loved ones and celebrate the holiday with a cheerfulness that perhaps we can carry in our hearts and maybe even pass onto others.

It's Christmas Eve and for me at least, this is the one night of the year where I can step outside my door and take a deep breath. The cold might bring a tear to my eye - it does that on the Canadian prairie where I live - but I can go for a walk tonight and see every home lit up. I'll look on at other families sharing time and love with one another amid the glow of a Christmas tree, and I can listen to the silence because everyone is indoors. The streets which a few hours earlier were alive with traffic will be empty and if it's quiet enough, I might actually hear people singing. It does happen, you know. People still sing carols, and that's a wonder to me.

I'll finish my walk perhaps around 11:00 PM and as I turn the key in my back door, I'll give another hard listen and a smile will form on my lips.

Peace on Earth - a helluva thing, isn't it? Even just for one night of the year.

Merry Christmas, everyone!