Clayton Lindemuth's Blog, page 6

My Results with Twitter Ads, Facebook Ads, Goodreads Ads, Guest Posting, Readings, and Organic Social Media

My Results with Twitter Ads, Facebook Ads, Goodreads Ads, Guest Posting, Readings, and Organic Social Media

I didn’t do a $120,000 ad buy like recent articles suggest is required to be effective on Twitter. If I had $120,000 to blow I’d move to a cabin in an undisclosed location to hunt bear, read Ernest Hemingway, and grow a beard.

I did, however, blow a limited budget testing a few ideas. First, the caveats: I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not a trained marketer, though I’ve been in sales all of my adult life. My social media awareness was zero a year ago. It’s only a notch or two higher today.

What was my thinking before venturing into paid advertising?

When I published Cold Quiet Country a year ago, it kind of caught me by surprise. The first imprint that bought the novel disintegrated before paying the advance. Meantime, my employment situation changed, and changed again, and my real focus was on paying bills, not promoting my fiction. MP Publishing acquired and published Cold Quiet Country, but because the editing was minimal and my feedback on the publishing process largely unheeded, the run-up to getting my first book in print was background noise.

But when I held the book in my hands something clicked. I’d started writing stories in second grade. By seventh I read a book a day. Won a fiction contest in college with a terrible story called Old Fart. Through my Army enlistment and work life I always thought I’d return to writing… once I had something to say. Well, I finally had something to say, pure rage at learning my grandfather was a pedophile, and learning too late—two weeks after he died of natural causes—to influence the manner of his exit.

So I wrote with fury and produced a novel a handful of reviewers regarded highly. A month after Cold Quiet Country’s release, I realized that my dream had come and gone without me paying attention.

I hit the brakes, invested a couple bucks in a WordPress website through Bluehost, (thumbs up, big recommend there) started building a fledgling Twitter audience, irritated the hell out my Facebook friends, and sold a few books.

In the year following the release of Cold Quiet Country, it has been as high as #5 on the St. Louis bestseller list, #32,996 of all books in the Amazon universe, and the Kindle version has been as high as #753 on the thriller list. (It’s also been as low as #6907). Cold Quiet Country had a couple advantages—a great Publishers Weekly starred review, being selected as a best book of the week by Publishers Weekly, and being selected on the Indie Next List the month after release.

The book also had a few disadvantages: a crappy cover, a publisher with small reach, and an author with absolutely no platform.

Before I share what I learned about spending a limited budget on social media advertising, here’s what I learned before spending a limited budget on advertising:

Facebook

As a relationship platform, Facebook fetches results. Taking the time to post well-considered, intelligent, funny updates frequently sends traffic to my website and I’ve seen a good Facebook post nudge my Amazon Author Central line north. After the initial flurry of people who like you enough to buy your book, whether they think they’ll like the book or not, success hinges on getting other people to send your message to their network. My wife drove more sales by making two posts (six months apart) than I did with everything I’ve done on Facebook. The lesson is that Facebook is a great tool if you spend the time on building relationships, but for a drive-by poster like me, not so much. Facebook didn’t fail me; I just didn’t utilize it very well.

Twitter

I’ve read a considerable amount on the do’s and don’ts of Twitter, and try to limit self-promotion to about 25% or less of my posts. I’ve found that Twitter easily drives clicks to my website, my Amazon page, and dozens of other sites I promote to build awareness of my friends’ writing efforts. Because of my early success with Twitter, I’ve developed a morning routine around a couple of third party tools I use to gain efficiency.

First, I use the paid version of ManageFlitter ($12 a month) to follow people based on their use of keywords that make them likely to find value in what I post. I largely look for readers and writers. I also use ManageFlitter to unfollow folks I’ve inadvertently followed who don’t post in English, haven’t posted recently, or who haven’t followed me back after a month.

Second, I use the free version of Hootsuite to tweet, monitor the tweets of my readers (who I’ve grouped) so I can retweet them or respond to them, save tweets, and schedule tweets. Hootsuite makes it very easy to building relationships with other users of Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin, and probably others. You can schedule tweets in advance, view analytics, and more. I can’t imagine using Twitter without the tools Hootsuite provides free of charge.

Third, I use the RSS feeder Inoreader (free) to follow all of the authors and bloggers I’ve found who I’ve chosen to promote (basically, awesome authors or educators) so I can quickly scan everything any of them have blogged in the last day. From this material I construct tweets (on Hootsuite) referencing the great blog posts and articles I’ve found, and schedule them for various times, once a day, for the following week. One of the studies (DanZarralla.com) I read suggested that retweets and clicks fall when you post more than one link per hour, so my default is to find three new terrific posts per day, which I schedule for up to seven days at varying times.

My morning Twitter routine is usually about a half an hour.

On Twitter, the keys seem to be:

Post during the afternoon and early evening
Tweet more on Thursday through Sunday
Limit posts to 120 characters so they can more easily be retweeted
Retweet others frequently
Try to be of service to other people: meaning, talk more about the great stuff you find out there than your own great stuff.
You can find a lot of research on how to use Twitter and other social media effectively here: http://danzarrella.com/

Reading Events

Reading events didn’t work for me. (Outside of a Noir at the Bar reading that worked because it wasn’t all about me…) My publisher managed to schedule one event, which I did not realize I was exclusively responsible for promoting. Three people showed: my wife, the gay guy who worked the bookstore cash register (this guy was so gay he’d be offended if I didn’t call him gay) and one older businessman shopper the gay guy corralled to my reading when it became apparent that no one was going to arrive.

If you’re going to do a book reading, be sure to take responsibility on yourself to drive enough attendance that you won’t humiliate yourself.

Blogging

I read John Locke’s book on how he sold a million eBooks and tried part of his method. I wrote a few blog entries, Tweeted about them, drove some traffic, made some sales. Building a blog audience is an art unto itself, though, so I modified the strategy. I started posting reviews of books I read to stay abreast of other authors. It blended well with my Twitter strategy of being of service to others and providing value. There are a lot of amazingly talented authors out there with voices worthy of amplification. Being able to say nice things publicly about their work wins in every dimension.

Guest Posting

I’ve guest posted one time so far. I stumbled across Writeitsideways.com and thought the site was great. I connected with the site’s owner on Twitter, started promoting the site’s coolest articles, and submitted (per the website’s instructions) a blog entry I’d composed that seemed a good match for Writeitsideways.com’s audience.

A month later my guest post Use a Nonlinear Format to Grab Your Reader by the Eyeballs was up.

J Coincidentally J that day my Amazon Author Central numbers shot up as well—close to their all-time highs. Although writeitsideways.com doesn’t have the reach of some other blogs for authors and readers, my guest post was the single most powerful marketing action I’ve taken to date. I’d like to send a heartfelt thank you to Suzannah W Freeman, the proprietor of Writeitsideways.com, for letting me guest blog. Follow her on twitter here.

Happily, I’ve had a guest blog post accepted by WriterUnboxed that will post in January.

Incidentally, when I saw the stunning result of my guest blog post, I tweeted a heartfelt thanks—which was retweeted more than any of my other tweets, and which sent the following day’s Author Central line even higher.

 

I Spent Money On:

Goodreads Book Giveaway

I gave away five copies of Cold Quiet Country through the Goodreads giveaway program. Three people posted reviews that averaged lukewarm. I theorize that people enter to receive books for free that they would never spend a dime to buy, and because of this, when they actually win, they are less likely to be a member of an author’s ideal audience.

Think of it this way: my book cover is gray, showing a foggy forest. I don’t like my book cover, and the concern I raised at the beginning went unheeded: even if the book cover is evocative and leads to someone buying the book, he or she is less likely to become a raving fan because the book cover created a false impression of what the book was about. No one gets chased through a foggy evening forest in Cold Quiet Country. It takes place during a “blizzard of the century” in Wyoming.

I think the real endgame for authors is building an audience of true raving fans, whereas advertisers and book publishers seem to think (sometimes) that it’s about duping people into buying books. This ties in with the book giveaway on Goodreads because the alignment isn’t perfect. We don’t necessarily match the right book with the right reader, and the reader is less satisfied for it.

The good thing about the Goodreads book giveaway was that it resulted in 747 people entering to win. 742 didn’t win, and about 400 added Cold Quiet Country to their want to read lists. I’m sure many of them bought the book, and in that way, the giveaway helped create awareness that led to people who would probably like the book actually buying it. For the cost of mailing five books, the giveaway was worthwhile.

Goodreads Ads

I’ve had an ad up on Goodreads for two months. It isn’t working. I won’t bid high. I know the concept of a loss leader, and that creating a buzz is great, and if you can get a whole bunch of people to buy at the same time, your Amazon ranking will go up, and if it breaks into the top 100, other synergies kick in that reward you for all the money you spent getting there. I get it.

My Goodreads ad approach was a simple proof of concept that didn’t prove out for me. Three clicks, three dollars, over two months. The ad was “seen” by 12,283 people and generated three clicks.

I think part of the problem is the book cover. It doesn’t draw the eye at all, and when placed as a thumbnail against a zillion other books with colorful covers, it looks like background. Another part of the problem is the format of the Goodreads page where the ad shows up… lost among a hundred other books. I tinkered with the ad language a couple of times to no avail.

A true test of the Goodreads ad would be to pump some serious money into it, hoping the sum of the concerted energies of a wide and costly campaign would lead to results beyond the campaign.

For a limited budget with a gray book, it’s an epic fail.

Facebook sidebar ads

This seemed to be a good idea. Facebook posts a small ad with my book cover and about a hundred characters of ad text (a guess) on the right side of targeted users’ pages. My ads were shown 4,142 times, generated 19 “engagements,” and no sales. An engagement is when someone clicks on the ad and either goes to my Facebook page or the link in the ad, which led to Amazon. Granted, the cost was $8 and I didn’t tweak the ad language.

The weakness seems to be that unless your Facebook page is highly effective at converting folks who browse by into a sale, the effort will be lost. I can generate the same clicks in a few minutes without spending $8, so as with Goodreads, unless a Facebook ad is part of a big-dollar awareness effort, I don’t see the value.

Facebook promoted posts

I thought the Facebook promoted posts idea was sound. Write something clever, substantially longer than you can get onto one of their tiny ads, (with a greater opportunity to hook a reader) and pay Facebook to insert the post into the timelines of people who have given evidence they are in your potential market. (They do this by scribing some of your keywords.)

I spent fifteen dollars to get a post that read like the inside flap of a book cover in front of 8,500 people. That generated nine clicks and three likes. The clicks, though were not necessarily to my Amazon link. They could also have been to my Facebook page—which I think is a flaw. I’m not paying to promote Facebook; I’m paying to drive traffic to the exact location my prospect can click a button and buy my book.

Again, I can drive those clicks through organic social media fairly easily, so why spend the fifteen dollars? The answer time and again is, it might work for a big budget, but not a small one.

Admittedly, I didn’t run multiple tests, varying language, post times, key words, and the like. As a proof of concept, though, it doesn’t work. The margin on a book sale varies, but the only way I can imagine it would ever work to promote a book this way is if it results in momentum that eventually fuels itself through word of mouth. Buying book sales one by one is an inherently flawed concept.

Twitter promoted tweets

Given the insight above, that buying clicks and selling books one by one is fatally flawed thinking, the next logical inquiry would be: what’s the cheapest way to start the avalanche? If I’m going to put some money into it hoping for a magnified effect that results in word of mouth taking over, what’s the best value for my dollar?

So far it seems to be Twitter’s promoted tweets.

The concept is like the others above. Choose your keywords, review your tweets for something that seems to work, in terms of clicks and retweets, and pay Twitter to promote the tweet. They do this by inserting it one time into the timelines and search results of people who use your keywords. Twitter seems to be hugely mindful of user experience, so they don’t hit people with tons of ads, or repeat ads. (Facebook, on the other hand, repeats ads to the same viewers).

Hootsuite allowed me to research the stats for links I’ve tweeted. I selected two that worked well and paid Twitter ten bucks to promote them. One of the tweets did okay. It was approved first, consumed 80% of my budget, and produced seventeen engagements. The other did much better, consuming 20% of the budget, producing 11 engagements, for about half the average cost per engagement.

The Results

My Twitter promoted tweets cost $.25 per engagement.

My Facebook ads cost $.26 per engagement.

My Facebook promoted posts cost $1.25 per engagement.

My Goodreads clicks cost $1.00 each.

What did all of that engagement create, in terms of sales?

Zero.

Or probably zero—while running a special 99 Cent Kindle version promotion, to make it super easy to make the decision to buy Cold Quiet Country. (As of this post you can still snap up that bargain. And frankly, you’d be a fool not to.)(I say that as a concerned friend.)

The only retailer I linked to was Amazon. I kept a close watch on my author rank, both kindle and print, while testing the aforementioned ads.

I also kept a tally of the number of books available on Amazon. For example, during the duration of my last test ad, Amazon had available four new copies, plus thirty two new copies through other vendors, and twenty four available used. None sold as a result of all those paid engagements.

Sure, someone could have been so stoked that he ran to his local Barnes and Noble to pay full price. And someone could have searched my title on another website he prefers.

But the conclusion is inescapable. During the weeks I engaged people with money instead of relationship, my book sales declined.

For me, people respond to tweets and Facebook posts largely because they know me or are familiar with me over time. A post that gets results with my own tribe falters when inserted into the timelines of the masses—even when those masses frequently use the keywords I think make them a potential reader.

There are a million reasons you might have different results. You might have a kickass book cover that attracts the eye. You might have better ad copy skills. You might have a better website. I’m sure all of those are factors and a small improvement in each could have netted a gigantic difference in total performance.

The lesson for me, though, boils down to this: an author with a small budget will likely get more return from spending time bringing value than spending money creating awareness.

Tell me your thoughts in the comments section below, and if you think others might find some value in this long, long blog entry, please use some of the share links to the left.

 

Use a Nonlinear Format to Grab Your Reader by the Eyeballs

I was fortunate enough to guest blog at Writeitsideways.com, one of my favorite blogs. Here’s how my post begins… and please check out the site…

 

Reviewers and editors have commended the nonlinear format of Cold Quiet Country—a novel set in a single day, but with shards of backstory scattered across almost every page. Two dueling first-person narrators vie to control the story, each slipping into escalating past-tense flashbacks. A fifth viewpoint—of the missing girl who is the focal point of the war between narrators—is told in third person, forcing the reader to suspect the worst regarding her fate.

The only view on flashbacks that I recall having read is by Stephen King, and his advice was to avoid them. Instead I found that flashbacks are an integral component of a nonlinear story, and provide authors an entirely different toolbox of tension inducing wrenches.

Read the article at http://writeitsideways.com/use-a-nonlinear-format-to-grab-your-reader-by-the-eyeballs/

A baseball movie and writing

A BASEBALL MOVIE AND WRITING

I watched a Kevin Costner movie last night. The Series wasn’t on and I wanted a baseball bridge between games 2 and 3. I don’t like baseball, mind you. In fact, the sport is explosively dull. But for the last two weeks as the Cards and the Sox have been battling to come together, I’ve kind of enjoyed tuning in. Religiously, without fail.

So I pulled a VHS off the shelf. Yes, I still have them. In fact two years ago I stopped at a Goodwill because sometimes you can find an odd cable or charger or something for about fifty cents–and I noticed they have everyone’s old VHS tapes for a buck. I bought about two hundred of them, and FOR LOVE OF THE GAME was one.

In said movie, Costner is a 40 year old pitcher faced with being traded or retiring. His girl, who he’s never really fully realized he’s in love with, has just decided she has to move to London, even if it means losing him. So he goes out and pitches the game of his life, also seemingly unaware that he is doing so, until late in the game, when he looks at the scoreboard and sees he’s close to completing a no hitter.

I love the setup; it’s the same as I used in Cold Quiet Country. The possible no-hitter story is the “present” of the movie. The love story is a series of flashbacks that start with boy meeting girl, progressing through boy and girl having a lot of great sex, sex with others, boy losing girl, regaining, losing, etc. In Cold Quiet Country I did that with two dueling first person narrators, so I loved seeing the technique done well.

I also greatly enjoyed Costner’s acting. I’ve always been a fan. I’m probably the one guy who walked out of Waterworld thinking, not too bad. I actually like the Postman.

Here’s the point of this post, though. There was a moment where, faced with the decision to retire or not, Costner is in the locker room. He pinches the flab on the side of his belly. Picks up his baseball glove and inhales deeply of the leather.

It is a perfect moment of storytelling. A movie doesn’t often work in first person. It’s usually third limited, meaning we only see what happens. We learn emotions from seeing behavior or hearing tone–unlike in writing, where you can have internal monologues and whatnot. (That often become crutches.)

The raw power of the Costner scene struck me. He could have mumbled, I’m getting old, but shit I love the game, the game is everything to me. I’ll lose everything in my life if I’m not careful, I love this game so much.

But he didn’t. He conveyed the thoughts by showing a perfect sequence of actions that speak at a raw level, without need of so poor a middleman as words.

That is powerful storytelling–giving access to a man’s inner voice by so perfectly constructing his actions that they communicate on a wordless human level.

The same lesson applies to writing, and allowing your reader to get it without you telling him or her what to get. If you’ve chosen the right action, you’ll never need to explain why it is significant. And if you’ve chosen the wrong action, chances are it isn’t Story. As writers we’ll always be constrained by the medium; no writer is going to get very far without words. But choosing to deploy them in a way that allows your reader to view action, and internalize the significance of that action, is far more powerful than shortcutting, and simply telling the reader the emotional state you’re trying to create.

Long ago I started using this editing technique: highlight every instance in your novel of the words, feel, felt, see, saw, wonder, think, thought, believe, etc.

These are the places where we can most easily increase storytelling impact. Just my two cents, and all I know is what seems to work for me. But I try to build scenes so I’m not explaining why they are significant. Hope that helps, if only to clarify and bring to front of mind what you already figured out!

I gotta run. Game 3 is on in a couple hours and I have to make lasagna!

Review of Cottonwood, by Scott Phillips

Holy shit, buy this book.

I know I’m a latecomer to the Scott Phillips Fan Party, but this guy does something magical with words. I used to wander around the book store, browsing titles, reading first pages, sick with the sure knowledge I’d bet and lose. Nothing’s worse than getting a chapter in and realizing the author doesn’t know where he’s going. Lucky for me that a friend introduced me to Scott over a beer, and I felt compelled to pick up a title I otherwise might have missed.

Scott Phillips is a mountain goat. Follow his feet and he’ll lead you through a literary landscape fraught with surprises and twists, jagged plots and some of the boldest humor you’ll see in legitimate print.

That one stopped me in my tracks. “You pleasured Lincoln and Booth?”

She slipped her arm into the crook of mine with a serenely proprietary smile. At close range she appeared old enough to have serviced the Continental Congress…

And some simply beautiful cowboy prose:

“There I got a tin cup of coffee like axle grease and horseshit along with a plate of biscuits, and set about eating them as quickly as I could.”

You can read Cottonwood as historical fiction, as it deals with the Bender family, mass murderers who performed surprisingly brutal acts of killing upon dozens of men during the late 1800′s.

You can read Cottonwood as a suspense novel, as I assure you from page to page you’ll not guess what comes next.

You can read Cottonwood as a character study. The protagonist is a farmer/barkeep/photographer who seems to be able to get any passing woman to agree to cunnilingus. Narrated in first person, the protagonists’ use of language is exactly what you’d expect if you dropped a scholar of Greek classics–which he is–into 1880 Kansas. “Elegantly stilted” comes to mind.

Within a couple pages you’ll know you’re in the hands of a master storyteller, one who leaves nothing to chance. Phillips weaves words together so marvelously you’ll find yourself going back to read a paragraph over and over to see how he planted a thought in your mind without directly saying it.

It’s damn nice to be in the hands of an author who leaves nothing to chance. Who knows how to convey a thought that is deeper than the words he uses to convey it. Consider this sequence: “I couldn’t stand another of those damned prayer sessions without bursting out with the news that I’d been laying his wife so frequently that the only excitement left in it was the increasingly likely possibility that we’d be found out.”  The other man, though, is kind and generous, and this quickly follows: “By the time I left I disliked Harding because he had treated me kindly and fairly, thereby failing to give me a reason to justify the wrong I had done him.”

The protagonist is a complicated man in some regards, blatantly simple in others. Cottonwood is laugh out loud funny–but here’s the thing–when you get laughing, slow down. Scott Phillips is running a clinic on writing, and you don’t want to miss a lesson.

Eat and Run: book review

I was sick of looking at the same old movies on Netflix and bumbled over to Google. I’ve been a bit of a runner for a few years… have completed seven marathons, two in under four hours. As an amateur that makes me serious, but not at all good.

I found a video about the Badwater ultra marathon, a race that starts at the bottom of Death Valley and 135 miles later winds up somewhere close to the top of Mount Whitney. Obviously, this is a different kind of run. I found myself hypnotized by the protagonist’s efforts, and stunned as he ultimately crossed the finish line with the potential of winning the race.

The problem, of course, was that the start happened in waves, and in a later wave, a fellow by the name of Scott Jurek let out a cry that launched him hot on the protagonist’s trail. You don’t learn about Scott Jurek until the end of the video—it’s not about him—but when you see him beat the hero, you kind of wonder. Who the hell is this guy?

- See more at: http://www.claytonlindemuth.com/2013/...

Eat and Run: book review

I was sick of looking at the same old movies on Netflix and bumbled over to Google. I’ve been a bit of a runner for a few years… have completed seven marathons, two in under four hours. As an amateur that makes me serious, but not at all good.

I found a video about the Badwater ultra marathon, a race that starts at the bottom of Death Valley and 135 miles later winds up somewhere close to the top of Mount Whitney. Obviously, this is a different kind of run. I found myself hypnotized by the protagonist’s efforts, and stunned as he ultimately crossed the finish line with the potential of winning the race.

The problem, of course, was that the start happened in waves, and in a later wave, a fellow by the name of Scott Jurek let out a cry that launched him hot on the protagonist’s trail. You don’t learn about Scott Jurek until the end of the video—it’s not about him—but when you see him beat the hero, you kind of wonder. Who the hell is this guy?

Turns out, anyone who digs ultra running knows the name Scott Jurek. To folks on the outside, to folks who think a marathon is just insane, let me introduce you: Scott Jurek spent a decade and a half obliterating records almost anywhere he ran, usually on courses that spanned at least a hundred miles, and again, usually through mountains, or deserts, or jungles… I think he kicked ass on Mars as well.

To an amateur distance runner, learning about Scott Jurek’s career is stunning on two fronts: you get to see how amazing a human being can be, in terms of capacity to make the body do remarkable feats. You also get a sense of just how lame you are, getting excited about a four hour marathon. Because Scott Jurek is one of a handful of people on the planet who can do four of them back to back through snow and mountain terrain, at nosebleed elevations. I think the only animal that could do it faster is a bird.

Scott could have delivered mail faster than the Pony Express. That’s not something cute to say. He can run a hundred miles faster than a fucking horse. And to truly bring it back to my front porch, Scott Jurek could blast through a regular 100 mile run like Western States (which he won seven times… another record) guzzle a jug of Gatorade, and then kick my ass from here to Sunday running another marathon, say, my cozy little Rock N Roll St. Louis.

Enough preamble.

Eat and Run is Scott’s book. It’s a little about his life before running, a lot about his running, and a lot about his diet. He’s been vegan for most of his career, and provides recipes throughout. Some of them look fantastic. All of them make me sick wanting to be healthier.

What I found inspirational about the book is that Scott Jurek wasn’t just a great runner. If you measure every great runner and find that each shares certain God-given traits, such as their body’s ability to get oxygen to the muscles, or whatever, you’ll find that Scott is in the ballpark. Meaning he wasn’t born with a straight flush for ultra running.

Instead what you’ll find is Scott has an amazing capacity to use his mind—both in training, in life choices, and on the trail, seventy miles into a run, when it seems like the only thing possible is to quit.

Most of us think in terms of Nature vs. Nurture. We have genetic traits that give us something to work with, and the environment we live in shapes us.

Scott Jurek adds a dimension: he’s an agent in his own life. His will is equal to or greater than the other forces, and the success he’s achieved, the records he’s set, the boundaries he’s pushed, have been all him.

I’ve never read anything that is as life-affirming and motivational as Eat and Run. I picked a lesson off every page, and inspiration throughout. Grab a copy.

 

 

Dope Thief: You’ll Care About the Damnedest People

Dennis Tafoya’s Dope Thief: You’ll Care About the Damnedest People

 

Dennis Tafoya’s Dope Thief presents a reviewer with problems: How to praise the book adequately, without giving away the fundamental surprise that makes it so worthwhile?

I don’t know how to do that, so I will limit myself to comments about Dope Thief that have more to do with the mechanics and art of it, and not the story. About the story I’ll limit my comments to these: you will not be disappointed, period. It is fast paced, lots of turns, surprises, relationships, danger, reality. Everything is there, bound together with a magical ingredient: meaning. There’s value that lasts longer than the emotional satisfaction of a good read.

On to the mechanics of Dope Thief. We have a cast of flawed characters. We have unpretentious prose that feels like it is in large print, it’s so easy to read. That’s good, because Dennis keeps the tension high from page to page. You’ll be reading fast. We have occasional literary surprises, a word that stands out on a page because it works better than the ten cent word that a person would ordinarily choose, that enriches the storytelling without disrupting the reader’s belief that the words are real, the lives are real, the story is actually unfolding, right now, within the pages.

I’ve read stories that contain brutality and ugliness for questionable motives, and to them I always ascribe the same legitimacy: it is fair for an author to record without comment the brutality that is present on this planet. But it feels cheap, like I’m defending someone I wouldn’t enjoy drinking a beer with. Recording ugliness has merit, but I don’t want to read the record of it. I want meaning. I need values affirmed or expanded or questioned. Not ugliness for the sake of ugliness. There’s enough of that without art.

Dope Thief has all the noir violence and seedy ugliness that you need, no matter your taste. Dennis grabs you by the back of the head and shoves your face in the rough and ugly, in some places. What I want to hold up to exceptional praise is that there is an inspired purpose behind his writing, and you’ll resonate with it even before you read the third act and understand what it is.

Dope Thief is an enriching read. It is elegant. And all the stuff I can’t talk about without giving it away—that’s the real reason you should read it. You can be certain I’ll be reading more Dennis Tafoya, and furthermore, I’ll be moving his stuff to the top of the pile.

Grab you by the nuts and drag you to the comedy club kind of writing…

Frank Sinatra in a Blender

 

I’m not going to try to be as clever or original in this review as Matthew McBride is in Frank Sinatra in a Blender. Holy hell, what a ride!

Just some thoughts. My Kindle ran out of highlighter while I was reading Frank Sinatra in a Blender. See, I started on page two highlighting everything that made me laugh or taught me something about raw noir writing. The book is a perfect expression of noir. Hell, Plato might call it Noir.

What I appreciate about Matthew McBride’s voice is this: deadpan delivery, outrageously clever constructions, wild juxtapositions of ideas that normally don’t go together.

Another thing I thought of while reading FSIAB is that the plotting was similar to Raymond Chandler’s: fast paced, always veering left and right, catch you with a two by four to the back of your head kind of plots. You’re going one direction full tilt and then next scene, you’re in a different character’s head. And here’s the thing: this is noir. You’re not supposed to suspend disbelief completely. But Matthew’s revolving narrators keep you guessing, and you get involved in the twists and turns. And when Frank is shoved in a blender, believe me, you’re in it. You’re not supposed to believe in it. But you do. Weird.

Another thought: I read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy years ago, and I thought it was funny, but I could only handle a few pages at a time before the silliness started to piss me off. There was no real story there, just Douglas Adams riffing one liners. Frank Sinatra in a Blender is a different kind of humor. A weird balance between a series of hysterically funny observations and one liners, and an actual story with characters, action, blood, guts, and lots of drugs and alcohol.

Lots of drugs and alcohol.

Frank Sinatra in a Blender works. The genius of it is that somehow, it works. I’ve never read anything that sustained top-shelf humor for so long, with such originality, and in a way that kept me turning the pages.

Make no mistake about it. This is an art form. It’s rough, in your face, grab you by the nuts and drag you to the comedy club kind of writing.

Review: Crimes in Southern Indiana

Review: Crimes in Southern Indiana, by Frank Bill

 

The complexity of Tom Franklin, the mesmerizing exposition of Donald Ray Pollock, the gutwrenching poignancy of Ron Rash’s One Foot in Eden, all in one story: The Old Mechanic, included in Crimes in Southern Indiana, by Frank Bill.

Many reviewers have written about how powerfully Frank Bill charges through the gate. The first story sets a pace that will damn near exhaust you. And just as I was beginning to wonder if Frank Bill had enough dexterity and depth to slow it down and make me think hard, I turned the page to the short story, The Old Mechanic.

The story begins heavy on exposition—but not like we’re used to, not the boring, author-filling-in-backstory for the sake of expanding word count, or listing facts that tell you what the unfolding story must become. The Old Mechanic takes about three or four lines and then viola! Frank Bill has hypnotized you. He uses exposition to create a scene, a feeling, an emotional trauma so wounding you check yourself for blood. The details make you remember your own details. The pain vibrates and harmonizes with yours. I haven’t seen anyone but Pollock create such an overwhelming sense of setting that the story could almost end without any action taking place, and it would still be a challenging, effective read.

After the exposition we learn that there’s a solid possibility the story is real. The child protagonist is named Frank, and the more details Frank Bill relates about the child’s fears, the more I thought of my own grandfather, recalled similar realizations, nuggets of grandfatherly wisdom that totally exposed him as a naked piece of shit.

The tension builds, but you’re not expecting a surprise, not feeling the protagonist is in present danger. No, you brace yourself for the reality of it. You trust that the events caused real wounds, and from the nature of the harms so far revealed, you tighten your stomach for the ones yet to come.

And then when the horror arrives, it is not what you foresaw. It is more chilling and haunting than you could have guessed, because the art of the story lies in misdirection, or rather, Frank Bill’s ability to run the gamut of the full range of human emotions and experience. He could have ended the story a thousand ways, and he chose the most devastating.

Crimes in Southern Indiana will knock you on your ass. The Old Mechanic does it a different way. It rounds out Frank Bill’s display of talent, demonstrating he isn’t just a 5.0 liter Mustang doing literary donuts in the parking lot. He’s also maybe an F-150, doing the hard work of opening minds, changing readers by showing paths into themselves that warrant exploration.

Bravo, Frank, for that one. Very nice work.

Local Bestseller!

Cold Quiet Country debuts at #5 on the St. Louis Bestseller List!

 

 

Adult Bestsellers:

1. Tenth of December: Stories by George Saunders

2. A Memory of Light by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

3. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

4. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

5. Cold Quiet Country by Clayton Lindemuth

6. Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie

7. Home by Toni Morrison

8. Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens by Christopher Hitchens

9. My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop by Ronald Rice

10. Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda