James Bailey's Blog, page 8

A Visit from the Pulitzer Squad

I had a friend back when I worked in Seattle who set himself a goal of reading every Pulitzer Prize winning novel. This was in the late '90s, so he would have had 75-80 titles to work through at that point. The list is much longer now. Combing through it, I can't imagine how long it would take me to catch up to my buddy, even if he quit halfway through.

I have read a stunningly low total of 4 Pulitzer winners. And at least 3 of those were by sheer coincidence. Here's the list:
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway (1953)A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole (1981)Empire Falls, Richard Russo (2002)A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan (2011)I bought The Late George Apley (1938) at a used book store about 15 years ago, but I don't think I ever made it very far. If I did, it made no impression. I don't remember any of it, so I won't take credit for having read it. So, 4 Pulitzer winners. Pretty weak.

A Confederacy of Dunces is my favorite book, ever. I've read it 3-4 times, and I'm probably due to give it another read. It's hilarious, and the kind of book I read and know I'll never ever come close to matching, quality wise. And I'm fine with that. It's brilliant. We're not all brilliant. Then again, we're not all troubled, either. John Kennedy Toole killed himself long before his book won the Pulitzer.

If I figured every Pulitzer would bring me as much joy as Dunces, I'd read them all. Empire Falls was somewhere a peg or two below it for me. I like Russo, but I enjoyed Nobody's Fool more than Empire Falls, and it didn't win. I also liked The Old Man and the Sea, which I read back in my Hemingway phase. Not a fun story, but well written and there was a fish and an old man, and I really couldn't tell you much more it's been so long.

This is all kind of a long way of saying I finished A Visit from the Goon Squad this week, and ... eh, not sure I get the Pulitzer here. Actually, I think I do, and I think this is the main reason I don't add many recent Pulitzer winners to my to-read list. I wonder if they value experimentation a little too much. Because to me, Goon Squad felt a little gimmicky, if that's the right word. It was all over the place, with different chapters about different people from wildly different points in time. There was one chapter done up like a Power Point presentation (which, from some reviews I read on Amazon, didn't go over big with people who read it on an e-reader). By the time I got to the end I still didn't know who the main character was. Or why I should care about most of them. It's not that the writing was poor. It was really well done, if you take a tree by tree view of it. It's when you back out to see the forest that the whole things falls apart. For me, anyway. I want to latch on to a character when I read a book, root for them, feel for them. That's really hard to do if I don't know who they are.

So, while I won't avoid books just because they won a Pulitzer, I'm not in any hurry to hunt down recent winners and pile them on my nightstand. Even if it might make my reading resume sound a little more impressive.

At play in the dusty corners of my brain

There's a Seinfeld episode in which Jerry rips George for his obsession with books, in particular some he lent to an ex-girlfriend, which he enlists Jerry to reclaim so as to avoid getting sucked back into the relationship. "Books, books, I need my books," he mocks, then makes a crack about how the ending of Moby Dick changes if you read it a second time.

I'm a re-reader. When we finished off our basement, we made one room a library, with floor-to-ceiling shelves, to hold mostly my books. Every so often, I pick something off the shelf and give it a second (or third, or fourth) read. And when it's been long enough between reads, it's almost like the ending changes. Maybe not quite like Seinfeld implies (Ahab and the whale don't ever become good friends), but the story I remembered doesn't always jibe with the one I'm reading.

I'm currently about 2/3 of the way through At Play in the Fields of the Lord, by Peter Matthiessen. I bought it in a used book shop shortly after moving to Rochester in 2001, and read it sometime not long after that. I remembered the characters, generally, and the setting, generally, and the plot, generally, but, man, so much of it has seeped out of my brain over the past decade and a half. Like I forgot Billy Quarrier died halfway through, even to the point I was rooting for him not too, because he's just a kid and I hate it when kids die, even in books. I forgot how far Wolfie fell after Lewis Moon ran away (though I still picture him in my head as looking like Leo from That 70s Show, which I remember doing the first time). And with 110 pages to go, I can't remember how it ends. It's like reading it for the first time. Though somehow I don't think they're all going to wind up friends at the end.

I need to get to the end so I can get back to writing, which is why I started back in on At Play in the first place. I needed a semi-controversial--but not cliche--novel for the book club within my story. When I hit the book shelf I was set back by how little I remembered of any of the books that seemed to fit the bill. Even The Sun Also Rises, which I've probably read 4 times, starting in American Lit back in college, had a lot of holes for me. Then again, I'm not sure how well I remember the books I've written myself. After being so completely immersed in them throughout the writing and editing process, I have to set them aside once the next one begins. It's not often I have the time to pick them back up. At least I still remember the endings.

Opting out of KDP Select

It's been 4 1/2 years since I first released The Greatest Show on Dirt. A lot has changed since then. While I just missed the days when indy authors were riding free promos up the Amazon rankings, I saw some steady sales figures that first year, with relatively little promotional effort on my part. I went off and on between exclusivity with Amazon and branching out to other ebook retailers, before eventually settling on an Amazon-only approach about 2 years ago.

The tradeoff was worth it for me, because I never seemed to gain any traction at B&N, Kobo, Apple, etc. The little revenue that had ever trickled in from those sites was more than offset by the money I earned from borrows via Amazon's KDP Select program. And when that started to slow, I was able to push it back up with Amazon's pay-per-click ads, which paid for themselves once I found the right price point.

But over the past few months, those have flattened as well. And I've decided to give the other ebook retailers another crack. Effective immediately, my first two books will no longer be exclusive to Amazon. Both The Greatest Show on Dirt and Nine Bucks a Pound are already available on B&N, and I'm working to get them live on other sites as well. In time, I may go the same direction with Sorry I Wasn't What You Needed as well, though for the moment that still seems to be faring okay in KDP Select.

Publishing is a game where you need to be flexible and willing to try something different, just to see what happens. It's time for me to experiment. We'll see how this goes.

The First World Problems of Jason Gunter

It's been 15 months since Sorry I Wasn't What You Needed was released, back in May 2015. It could be another year until my next book comes out. What in the heck have I been doing all this time?

Well, after a series of false starts, I finally found the right story last December. The First World Problems of Jason Gunter (working title, always subject to change) is the tale of a young man who has been waiting nearly 16 years now for his parents to grow up. While his dad loses his paycheck one ante at a time and his mom cruises the happy hour scene, Jason haunts Seattle's coffee joints and independent cinemas with his best friend and fellow intellectual Drew. The often hilarious accounts of his ill-matched odd jobs, summer fling, and the mysterious and exotic new neighbor lady are detailed in emails to Drew and others. This will be one summer Jason will never forget--try as he might.

The first draft was finished earlier this summer. There are still several rounds of buffing and polishing to go, but that isn't the real holdup. No, the delay is the next book. The sequel. I'm actually envisioning a trilogy eventually and would like to have at least two ready to go before releasing any of them. And considering I'm only a few days into the second one, it's a long road ahead. Early days.

New blog, new name, same price

Okay, so here we are, on yet another blog. Why? Well, since you asked, it boils down essentially to two things: cost and spam. My existing (since 2011) site, has become one of the most prolific spam magnets ever to fall between the cross hairs of bored Russian hackers. The comments require much more regular cleansing than I care to monitor. And the cost, well, let's just say there's something darn attractive about a Google blog. (For me; for you, the price is the same as always, just whatever you value your time at.) Actually, let's make that two darn attractive things. I think they're easier to maintain than WordPress blogs. Maybe that's on me for not investing the time to become a blog wizard. But that's kind of the point, innit? I don't want to invest that kind of time. I just want the damn thing to hurl words out into space. I don't want to deal with the rest of it. And I used to hand code the HTML and XML for my sites myself. Can't be bothered anymore. Not if I'm actually ever to finish my next book.

Second question on your mind. I can read it. I know. "What does Loose Vowel Movements mean?" Well, if you'd carefully read my second book, you'd know it was the name of Milo's band, back in the day. And I figured it kind of fit a blog as well as a band, because both songs and blog posts essentially break down to loose vowel movements, the churning of language, i.e., a word dump. Plus, jamesbailey.com was already taken, so I had to get clever, and that's about as clever as I get. So there you have it.

125 Pages and 99 Cents

Over the past few years, I’ve met a lot of cool writers and reviewers while reviewing and writing myself. When I was cranking out reviews on Bailey’s Baseball Book Reviews, I enjoyed finding a new author and shouting about their book. I did a number of interviews with authors, most of which ran on BaseballAmerica.com as well as on my site.

It’s fun to be on the other side of that now, and having gone through it as a blogger, I really appreciate the time and effort it takes for reviewers to reach out to authors. Most of us will never get a slot in the Sunday New York Times, so book blogs are a great opportunity to meet new readers. So I am excited to be part of a new feature, Author Tuesday!, on the book blog 125pages.com.

My new book, Sorry I Wasn’t What You Needed, was reviewed by 125pages.com last month. Laura Nagore, who runs the site, said she took a little while to warm up to Sorry’s protagonist, C.J. Neubauer, but she was glad she stuck with it. “The pace of the book picks up after C.J. returns to the Seattle area and the addition of characters, other than his girlfriend and neighbor, flesh out who C.J. is. The familial ties are painted with a very fine brush and really enhance the story. The further into the book, the better the story gets. About three quarters in the story morphs and instead of focusing on a petulant C.J. it wraps around the whole Neubauer family and that is what makes this book great.”

Check out our interview, which is available now. We talked about writing, reading, hidden talents, and, of course, the book. By the way, if you haven’t yet read Sorry I Wasn’t What You Needed, you can snag a copy for your Kindle this week for just 99 cents (Tuesday through Saturday). What are you waiting for?

Go ahead, judge a book by its cover

Covers are tough. As if it’s not hard enough to simply write a book, then you have to wrap it up in some attractive artwork to draw readers in. (And forget marketing, which is more mysterious than the Bermuda Triangle.) I’ve handed the job off to people much more artistic than me, and as a result I’ve been happy with the covers of my books. The first one came together real nice with some Durham Bulls elements that fit perfectly for the story and setting. The second one doesn’t seem to have pulled in as many readers as I thought it might, but I still love the little ‘roided out bobblehead. And the new one, well, I was going for a certain type and feel with this one to give the reader an inkling straight off that it’s smack in that contemporary/literary vein. (And, yeah, “contemporary” to many readers seems to equal “contemporary romance,” but it shouldn’t, so there.) I studied a lot of covers of books I like in the sweet spot I was aiming for, and described it as best I could to the company I hired to design it. And after a few tweaks of font and color, they gave me something I was really pleased with.

A lot of my cover research was done on Joel Friedlander’s site, The Book Designer. Every month he invites authors and designers to submit covers for critique. There are usually well over a hundred of them, and reading through his comments is educational if not entertaining. So shortly after I released Sorry I Wasn’t What You Needed in May, I submitted a jpg of the cover. When the cover design awards were announced last month I scrolled through, looking for mine, hoping for a kind word … and it wasn’t included. I don’t know what happened when I submitted it, but apparently it didn’t go through. So I submitted it again, and this time even got a confirmation email.

And this month my cover was there. Not just there, but it earned a Gold-Star (as one of a handful of runners-up, which out of 114 fiction covers is no small feat), along with the feedback, “A beautifully effective example of design that unifies the story and the artwork and the words into one whole that really communicates.” I’ll take that as a high compliment, because, a) it’s the best critique I’ve received there of the three (the other two got kind words, but no Gold-Stars), and b) the dude knows cover design. And as a Gold-Star recipient, I get to go to Starbucks and pay regular price for anything on the menu. I also get to display the nifty cover design badge. So I’m displaying it. Proudly.

'Nine Bucks a Pound' free for Kindle this weekend

Looking for something to read this weekend? Check out my second novel, Nine Bucks a Pound, free right now for the Kindle on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00I...). If you're not familiar with it, here's the overview from Amazon:

Three seasons into his minor league career, Del Tanner can no longer ignore the obvious: He lacks the power expected of a first baseman. Despite a smooth left-handed stroke and a slick glove, he’s regarded by the brass as nothing more than a warm body clogging a roster spot in A-ball. When his aspiring agent suggests he try steroids, Del makes a choice that will shadow him for the rest of his career.

In his second novel, James Bailey (The Greatest Show on Dirt, 2012) humanizes the players fans are so often quick to demonize. Nine Bucks a Pound ponders life on baseball’s fringe and the dreams that tempt a young man to heed the devil on his shoulder. ESPN.com’s Jayson Stark says, “Bailey hasn’t just given us a great read. He’s given us an important window into a topic we can’t seem to stop talking about.” Adds Russell Rowland, author of High and Inside, “Bailey expertly explores how the desire to succeed at any price can lead to unexpected consequences, mostly involving a man’s relationships with others, not to mention with his own conscience. This is a powerful story about the perils of success at any price.”

Shit I Don’t Want: Love Actually (the movie)

Several years back, someone in our office set up a bookshelf for people to bring in old books they no longer wanted. The idea was people might find something they liked that their co-workers either didn’t care for or didn’t figure they’d read again. Early on, it was a hot spot, with folks making regular stops to scout out the latest additions to library. I can’t remember the last time I saw someone perusing the shelves, but the books sit there still, collecting dust, a literary version of the Island of Misfit Toys.

The concept, though, is one I’d like to adopt and expand upon. I’d like someday to invite a bunch of friends over and tell them all to bring books, DVDs, and CDs they want to unload. We’ll spread them all on a table and see if something might find a new home. One friend’s trash is another friend’s treasure. Maybe. Or maybe no one else wants that Bill Cosby biography, either.

I started thinking about the idea again after watching a movie with my wife last weekend. It was a DVD she gave me for Christmas that we’d never gotten around to watching, mostly because it was 2 hours and 15 minutes long, and we watch TV in about 45 minute increments. We stretched it out a bit and knocked this one out in two nights, though, honestly, by the end of night one (an hour in) we’d seen enough to know it wasn’t going to get any better. Still, we kept at it, to the bitter end, just to confirm our suspicion that Love Actually was indeed as pitiful as we thought. If anything, it was even worse.

Of course, out of curiosity, we checked IMDB to see how much everyone else hated it. And … it had a 7.7 rating. That’s out of 10, not 100, which would have made more sense to me for a movie with no plot. And as laughable as the Hugh Grant as prime minister story line was, that was one of the better ones. I love Joanna Page (a.k.a. Stacey from Gavin & Stacey), but what the hell was with her and Tim from The Office as nude stand-ins for some film within a film? (And was that one any better?) But the entire thing jumped the shark for me when the doofy blond kid who couldn’t get any British women to fall for him flew to Milwaukee (Milwaukee, really?) and immediately fell into some kind of harem of stupid hot chicks, who were too poor to afford pajamas and all slept in one bed. We were both waiting for that to end as some kind of dream sequence. It didn’t. It was “real.” I’m not sure how that works for people, but who am I to argue with a 7.7 rating?

Obviously people see something in this festering pile of dung that I don’t. So it’s time to find this DVD a new home. Perhaps yours. Do you love Love Actually? Do you want to find out? Maybe you’ve never seen Liam Neeson playing a guy who doesn’t really seem all that broken up over the very recent death of his wife. Maybe you can’t imagine Professor Snape/Hans Gruber cheating on his wife, so amateurishly he actually buys jewelry from Mr. Bean for his special gal when he’s out shopping with his wife. (Yeah, how could that possibly go wrong?) Maybe you just have 2 hours and 15 minutes to waste, I mean, kill, oh, you get the picture.

So let’s debut a new blog feature we’ll call Shit I Don’t Want. You tell me why you want this DVD, in the comments here (or on Facebook or Twitter, even) and the most entertaining one wins it.* Deadline for entries is July 15, a week from tonight. Go!

*Contest open to U.S. residents only. Sorry, but, you know, postage and all.

Win a free copy of Sorry I Wasn’t What You Needed

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, a contest. Who doesn’t love a good contest? And how about one with great odds? Even better. Here’s your chance to win big. No, it’s not the Mega Millions, but you don’t have to cough up a buck for a ticket, either. All you have to do is sign up for my mailing list, and you will be registered to win a copy of my new novel, Sorry I Wasn’t What You Needed, in either paperback or Kindle format, your choice. (If you already have it or would prefer one of my other books, that can be arranged.)

Ugh, you’re thinking, more email. But … this is a very minimalist email list. In fact, if you hate email, this is just the list for you. Because I so rarely send emails to the list. And what’s more, I promise to never share the list with any third parties. It won’t be sold, loaned, bartered, or gambled away on poker night. Cross my heart and hope to die.

So, if I rarely send emails, what’s the point? Well, this is a list for big announcements, like new book releases or special deals. If you’re interested in those kinds of things, sign up. If you’re looking for recipes and tips on timeshare vacation rentals, this is not the list for you. But if you want to be the first person on your block to know about my next book, you’ll be sitting pretty. This is the kind of stuff one would post on Facebook. And I do, but since Facebook only sends my posts to roughly 6 percent of the people who follow me, it’s tough to get the word out. (And, yeah, that’s true. They want people to pay to “promote” their posts. If you don’t, almost no one sees them.) I tweet it on Twitter as well, but since I don’t want to be a complete tool, I don’t tweet it every hour on the hour and if you’re not on at the time I tweet, well, you might miss it. But if you check your email, hello, all set.

Are you in? All you have to do now is cough up your name and email address by July 3, 2015, and you will be automagically registered. One lucky winner will be selected at random on July 4, making the national holiday ever so slightly more festive, for them if no one else.