Robert R. Peecher Jr.'s Blog, page 10

Q&A with author Arthur Glowka

One of my favorite people in the world is Arthur Glowka. He was my Arthurian Lit and History of the English Language professor in college. I interned with him for a quarter putting together a Georgia College publication, and especially when I worked at the Macon Telegraph I interviewed him a number of times for stories.

Over the past year Dr. Glowka has published three books, all available through Amazon.com.

Recently I asked him some questions and he answered them:

Q. Let’s talk about “The Texiad.” What prompted you to want to write an epic poem about the Texas Revolution?

I had two motives for working on such an ambitious project. One, I have been wanting to write an epic poem for some forty years, and I have kept up the practice of writing metrical poetry and doing weird things like talking to myself in blank verse while I drive. My previous book was a verse translation of a 12th-century Old French chronicle poem (“The French Book of Brutus: A Verse Translation of Wace’s ‘Roman de Brut’”), and in the ten years I worked on getting that book published, I imagined that I was in training for my next work, an epic poem.

Two, I grew up in San Antonio, Texas, and have been fascinated with the Alamo and the Texas Revolution since early childhood. About 8 years ago, I got very homesick, took a trip to San Antonio, revisited the Alamo, bought a pile of books on the revolution, and then began writing one Sunday morning as I sat in my car, waiting for my children to get out of Sunday school.

Q. I know your research was extensive. What was the most interesting thing you learned in doing your research that you did not already know?

I learned that the story about William Barrett Travis and the line drawn in the sand was probably fiction and not fact. I also learned that the Mexican gun powder was so bad that a man could get hit in the forehead with a musket ball and live—since it might just bounce off. The main injury in that case was the jokes made by comrades about the victim’s hard headedness.

Q. You mention in your acknowledgements that there are areas where you go astray of the historical record and I know you go into some disputed history with Zuber’s account of Louie Rose. And epics, historically, tend to exaggerate anyway. So in writing an epic poem about the Texas Revolution, how important was it to you that the history be accurate and how willing were you to stray from that?

I started off trying to be historically accurate, but the story did not take form or get much traction until I hit on the idea of having William P. Zuber as the narrator. That decision freed me to tell the story from the perspective of the man responsible for the account of Travis’s line in the sand. I could then elaborate on my own about Santa Anna’s love affair, throw in a talking, prophetic devil, and invent the details of a conversation between Santa Anna and Andrew Jackson. Epic creates and enshrines legendary history. The legends become myths that explain who we are and what we value in a form more exciting than that in an analytical historical account.

Q. I absolutely love that the narration in “The Texiad” comes from William Zuber. Honestly, I didn’t know all that much about him prior to reading “The Texiad,” but now I’m completely enthralled with the image of the last surviving veteran of the Texas Revolution wandering around lecturing kids about his war. Tell me about the idea to use Zuber in such a fashion – where did it come from?

Zuber’s account of the last days of the Alamo as told to his mother by family friend Louis Rose was controversial in his lifetime. In fact, he spent a great deal of energy defending the veracity of his account in print. When he was a very old man, he got a job as a tour guide at the Texas state capitol, and I could not imagine that this man with his passion for the Texas Revolution would not tell Rose’s story and others like it to visitors whenever he could. With him as a vehicle, I was not limited to documentary evidence, and I became free to invent details and scenes that inquiring minds simply want to know about.

Q. Writing in verse, to me, is about the most painful thing that I can imagine. I can’t imagine how hard it is to write an epic poem. Will you write another epic poem, and if so what topic?

I have practiced writing rhymed metrical verse for almost 50 years, but the use of the rhyme royal stanza slowed me down considerably. Sometimes I would spend up to an hour trying to place a rhyme word in a sentence without disturbing either the sense or the meter of what I was writing. If I write another epic, I will use blank verse. I have toyed with the idea of an epic about Jesus, King David, or Revelation.

Q. In addition to “The Texiad,” you’ve also written “The Seduction of Sir Gawain,” and you’ll soon have a Lancelot book published. Having taken your Arthurian Legend course and your History of the English Language course at Georgia College, in my mind I always associated you more with Le Morte d’Arthur than I did Le Morte de Travis. Is Arthurian legend more comfortable ground for you?

I am very much at home in Arthurian romance. I find the stories patently humorous, even when they are not intended to be humorous. The fall of Arthur’s kingdom, of course, is not humorous at all, but the individual romances strung together by Malory are very charming and leave much unsaid. I see great potential in developing the unsaid parts of the romances.

Q. Why prose for your Gawain book and not epic poem? Too many Arthurian epic poems already, or were you just simply unwilling to go toe-to-toe with Edmund Spenser for sales?

“The Seduction of Sir Gawain” is a retelling of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” an anonymous romance of the late 14th century. This romance is told in alliterative verse in a very difficult dialect. The verse translations of the poem I have read with students are not much easier to read than the original. So I thought that I would retell the story within the conventions of modern prose narrative and allow myself room to add to the story and change details to suit my own ends. So the story ends very differently: Sir Gawain wins a bride he doesn’t want (a detail from another story about Sir Gawain), and we get to hear his hilarious confession — after he gives into a temptation he resists in the original. The confession is my favorite part. I tried to impart some of the flavor of a Harlequin Blaze romance I read in preparation for writing the book.

Q. Which do you prefer to write, prose or verse?

I like both, but after spending some 18 years writing long works in verse, I thought it would be fun and liberating to try prose. I have at least two other prose works in planning. But I am still obsessed with the idea of writing some kind of Biblical epic.

Q. I don’t know if you know this, but when you published the Texiad that was sort of my inspiration to self publish. I remember you posted on Facebook that you felt like Caxton (William Caxton, who introduced the printing press to England). I read all the time about big publishing houses having trouble. I read recently that there are something like 700,000 self-published authors now thanks to Smashwords and CreateSpace and similar publishing platforms. Do you think we’re in the beginning stages of something that will have as big an impact on the world as Caxton’s printing press did?

For well over a hundred years after Caxton opened up shop in England, poets still thought printing was beneath them and passed their poems around in manuscript. Friends published them, often without permission. Manuscript copying also continued for a long time, and early books were attempts to make printed text look like handwritten text. The contemporary publishing house with an editorial staff devoted to choosing and developing texts that it thinks will bring a financial return on the massive expenses of printing and distributing paper books will continue for a while, but I imagine that the traditional publishing house and the mass market bookstore may soon go the way of the medieval scriptorium and the late-20th-century video store.

This week Dr. Glowka published his second Arthurian tale – The Humiliation of Sir Lancelot. It is currently (May 17) available for free to download on Kindle, as is The Texiad.

Dave Ramsey and my teenager

Recently my oldest son Harrison had an opportunity to disappoint me in a fairly big way. As a 17-year-old, Harrison has these opportunities once every four or five times he takes a breath. Most of the time when these opportunities come along he makes good decisions. Sometimes he does not.

Let me be clear on this: I poke a lot of fun in my columns about my children and their mishaps. But exaggeration is part of the humor. My children are never quite as awful as I make them out to be in my columns. Mostly, they are very, very good kids who make me proud. As I said, teenagers have a thousand opportunities a day to make poor decisions, and most often Harrison rejects these opportunities.

And when my sons are really, truly awful, I don’t write about that. That’s not funny stuff. That’s when I sit them down in my bedroom and yell at them for 45 minutes about how they are morons, and those are terrible, painful moments and nobody’s laughing or poking fun or writing humor columns about those moments.

But Jean and I recently had one of those 45-minute conversations in our bedroom with Harrison. He had made a very foolish decision, and Jean and I during that conversation expressed our disappointment.

“You’re not the only teenager who was doing exactly what you did this weekend,” I told him. “In fact, I would guess a very high percentage of teenagers were being just as moronic as you were in exactly the same way.”

Harrison, looking at his feet, mumbled that I was probably right.

“Do you know what that makes you, Harrison?” I asked him.

“A moron,” he dutifully answered, mumbling to his feet.

“No,” I said. “It makes you average.”

Now he looked up from his feet. I think that stung. I think that got his attention.

“I want you to think for a minute about all of the time your mother and I spent talking to you when you were little. Think about the conversations you and I had about history and economics and science. Think about the time we spent reading to you.”

I paused to give him time to remember.

“Do you think we spent all that time with you because we were raising you to be average?” I asked. Still looking at me, Harrison shook his head. “We raised you to be exceptional,” I told him. “We raised you to be better than average. And that’s what I expect from you. I expect you to be exceptional.”

I think that registered with him. I think he left my bedroom feeling like he had let himself down. And that’s how I wanted him to feel. I want it to sting when I tell him he’s being average, because I want him to want to be exceptional.

I’m a big fan of Dave Ramsey. In my columns I’ve joked about having a “Dave Ramsey Budget” at home, but I really did go through his Financial Peace University and it really did change my life and I really do have a Dave Ramsey Budget at home. I did go to his one-day EntreLeadership seminar in Atlanta a year ago and it really did improve how I run my business.

Without elaboration, I’ve said this before: There is no one in this country today who is doing more good for more people than Dave Ramsey.

I see people criticize Dave Ramsey and claim that he is trying to get broke people to spend money on his programs, but if you really want to take a measure of the value of the man, look at the people who – like me – will tell you that his program changed their lives. I think it cost about $100 for my wife and me to take the class. Wouldn’t you spend $100 to dramatically improve the condition of your financial life?

On Twitter, Ramsey often tweets out Bible verses (which is probably the true reason he draws such ire from some corners), and he also tweets out motivational tweets. Recently he tweeted: “Normal is broke. Normal is a Victim Mentality. Normal sucks. Go be diligent and excellent today. BE WEIRD.”

When I read that tweet, I realized it was Dave Ramsey who was seeping into my subconscious and Dave Ramsey who I was channeling in my conversation with Harrison.

Ramsey’s tweets and his messages are very positive. His EntreLeadership program, summed up in a couple of words is: Be exceptional at what you do.

He offers a step-by-step plan in Financial Peace University and in EntreLeadership for how you can be exceptional, but the advice is not as important as the message: Don’t be average, anyone can be average and most people are, but you should strive for excellence every day and rise above normal.

I cannot tell you how soon it will be that Harrison and Jean and I have another 45-minute conversation in my bedroom. Probably sooner than any of us want. But I can tell you that it’s been a week and a half since that last 45-minute conversation, and I’ve seen a real change in Harrison’s attitude and his behavior. It’s a subtle change, because he was never that bad to begin with, but it is definitely there. I believe he is striving to be exceptional because Dave Ramsey and I got to him the other day.

He came home from school bragging the other day, “I got a 97 on my test and it was the highest grade in the class!”

He’s been diligently studying for his end of course exams and his AP tests for a week.

His high school soccer team is in the Final Four of the state playoffs, and Harrison has been playing harder and better than ever.

He is even being nice to his little brothers!

Of course, Harrison didn’t just get a 45-minute Dave Ramsey lecture; he also got grounded indefinitely. So I suppose it’s possible he’s not so much striving for exceptionalism as he is being extra special good so I’ll let him hang out with his friends this weekend.

Rob Peecher is editor of The Oconee Leader and he is forever and always proud of his exceptional children, even when they’re just average.

If you enjoyed this column and are interested in reading more, click here for the Kindle version of my book “Four Things My Wife Hates About Mornings” or click here for the paperback version of “Four Things My Wife Hates About Mornings.” You’ll enjoy the book. Seriously. Just look at the cover. It’s great fun!

Celebrating last place

Recently, on a whim, I decided to offer two of my books for free to Kindle users through Amazon.com.

If you publish through Kindle Direct Publishing you can enroll in KDPSelect, and one of the benefits of that program is that every 90 days you can offer your book to download for free for up to five days. The idea is that you can use these free days to build a following and if people got your book for free and they enjoyed it, maybe they’ll feel obliged to leave a review of your book on Amazon.com or tell their friends about your book. Most readers, I suspect, don’t realize how important reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations are to authors in their effort to find new readers. The idea of the free days is that you generate future sales.

When it comes to marketing my books, I’m still in the “write more books” phase. I am slowly putting together a future marketing plan, but based on what I’ve read from seriously successful indie authors, I continue to believe the most important factor for selling books is that I need to have books (emphasis on plural) for sale. I feel like I’ll get more serious about marketing when I’ve got five or six books available.

So I’m writing more Jackson Speed novels and not really focusing on book sales or marketing yet.

Up to now, my marketing has mostly consisted of the “Field of Dreams” marketing plan: If you write it they will read.

To indie authors who are highly focused on sales, I encourage you to find a better marketing strategy than the “Field of Dreams” marking plan because it does not work. You can’t just hit the “publish” button and start getting sales.

Occasionally I do some haphazard stuff – like scheduling free downloads – and sometimes I do some purposeful stuff to get an idea of what works and what doesn’t work.

My recent free downloads fell into the category of haphazard. I scheduled the free days “just cause.” Just cause I could. Just cause I felt like it. Just cause I didn’t have anything else to do at that particular moment.

If you own a Kindle or a similar device, you’ve probably scrolled through the free books to see if you could find anything that might interest you. The hope for an author like me is that by offering the books for free we may stand a better chance of getting noticed by people who are interested in books in our genre who otherwise would never know that we (or more importantly our books) even exist.

And the fun thing about free days – even though not a penny comes my way from them – is to watch during the day as the downloads move from a couple to a couple dozen to (sometimes) a couple hundred. Meanwhile, if you look at your book’s Amazon page, you also get to see your book shooting to the top of your genre in the free downloads section.

So last week I had two different books in the top 20 free downloads of two different genres.

The first Jackson Speed book, “El Teneria,” was ranked Number 13 in the war genre. And when I first logged onto Amazon the morning the free downloads started, my book of humor columns, “Four Things My Wife Hates About Mornings” was ranked at Number 2 in the genre Family and Parenting Humor.

Number 2! You can’t beat that unless you’re Number 1!

When I clicked over to look at my competition, I was a little dismayed to learn that at the time there were only two books available for free downloads in the Family and Parenting Humor genre.

I re-corked the champagne bottles when I realized that my book was ranked Number 2 out of 2. It’s like coming in second in a race and celebrating your success and then finding out that the only people racing were you and the guy who beat you: It just doesn’t feel as good to celebrate last place.

During the course of the day, though, the number of downloads continued to increase and my book shot to the Number 1 position in its genre. I had a Number 1 bestseller (minus the sales)! Even better, four other books popped up for free in my genre, so I wasn’t just winning a race of two, but I was Number 1 out of six.

Regardless of whether I am running in last place or 13th place or first place, the good part of that race was that a fair number of people have been exposed to my books who knew nothing about them prior to this weekend.

Books usually fall to tastes, and I realize that not everyone who downloads a Jackson Speed book is going to become a fan. My hope is that for every dozen or so books that were downloaded I can pick up a couple of loyal future readers. And if I’m lucky, those future readers will leave a review at Amazon.com. And if I’m really, super lucky, those future readers will encourage their friends to read “El Teneria” or “Four Things” at a time when I’m not doing free days and I’ll get real, actual sales that involve the transfer of money.

One thing your wife will love for Mother’s Day

If you’re looking for a different sort of gift for your mom or your wife this Mother’s Day, give a thought to buying her “Four Things My Wife Hates About Mornings.”

This collection of some of the humor columns I’ve written over the years will keep her laughing and, if nothing else, convince her that her own children really aren’t that bad.

For several years I have written a weekly humor column that traces difficulties and joys of raising three sons. Most of these columns come from when my oldest was in middle school, a truly awful time in life when children are devoid of all cerebral functioning, and my two younger sons were in elementary school and were still (mostly) adorable.

You’ll get to read about hot chicks with cheat codes, the exploding tooth paste prank, and find out the four things my wife hates about mornings.

Seriously, if you have kids, you should get your wife this book. In fact, get two so you can read it, too, and you’ll know what she’s laughing about.

Historical smut

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One star review: “I’m glad I didn’t pay for it.”

While trying to convince people who have read my books to leave reviews at Amazon.com, a couple of times I have said something along the lines of: If you do not like my book you have a moral obligation to leave a critical review and warn others away.

I said this jokingly and in no way intended for someone to take me up on the offer, but woe is me, I received my first one star review.

I suppose being so harshly judged might have bothered me more, but as my friends know, the review happened to be posted on the same day that I learned that my pal James Guthrie had died, and so one-star reviews had little impact on my already rattled emotions.

In the interest of sparing you the time and trouble of visiting Amazon.com to find the review for yourself, I will quote it verbatim and in full here in this post. However, I find my delicate sensibilities are offended by the vulgarity of the review, and I would encourage parents to use caution in exposing their children to this review.

The review is titled: Not a Historical novel

“I borrowed this for my free Amazon Prime monthly download. I’m glad I didn’t pay for it. I didn’t finish reading the book. Sorry, I’m not interested in hearing about how many times a 15 year old boy gets laid.”

I can’t, and wouldn’t, argue any of the points in her review. She didn’t pay for my book and does appear to be glad that she didn’t. Obviously, she did not finish reading my book or she’d have left a much better review. And, I suspect, she is truthful when she says that she is not interested in reading of the sexual exploits of Jackson Speed who, at the beginning of “El Teneria,” is in fact 15 years old.

I’m flabbergasted, however, by her chosen title. “Not a Historical novel.”

Indisputably, “Jackson Speed: The Hero of El Teneria” is a historical novel.

The novel is set during the 1840s. The book takes up Jackson Speed’s early residence in Scull Shoals, Georgia. Sculls Shoals, now abandoned, was a thriving mill village on the banks of the Oconee River in the 1840s. In 1845, the mill burned to the ground. The owner, Dr. Thomas Poullain, went to considerable personal expense to have the mill rebuilt and paid his employees while the mill was being rebuilt. That’s historical. The “novel” part comes along when the fictional Jackson Speed explains why the mill burned.

As those who have read the book understand, Speed finds himself headed west to Mexico with the Jasper Greens volunteer militia from Savannah. Again, the Jasper Greens are historical, the scene in Macon is historical and even the outrageous Battle of the Boat is historical. In fact, I have the muster rolls of the Jasper Greens and some personal information about some of them, and that’s all historical. Speed’s presence among them and his activities with them is “novel.”

The Battle of Monterrey scenes are historically accurate. Wherever possible, I quoted Jefferson Davis and others accurately. I went to great lengths to follow Jefferson Davis’s movements through the city during the 3-day battle. A.S. Johnston’s appearance in the cornfield and what he did there is historical. Speed’s presence with Davis and the Mississippians is “novel.”

Speed links up with the Texas Rangers, during these chapters I at times describe the tactics the Texas Rangers used while riding the road from the army in Monterrey to its staging base in Camargo. These tactics are historically accurate. Speed’s employment of these tactics – that’s “novel.”

So I take exception to the notion that Jackson Speed doesn’t qualify as a historical novel, and I wish the reviewer would have been accurate in her review title. Perhaps she might have identified it as “historical smut” or “historical porn” or “a distasteful historical novel” or something along those lines, rather than attempting to negate the hours of research and the effort that went in to making certain I got the history correct.

On that note, an actual historian read the book and recently wrote me a letter. He was extraordinarily kind in the letter, but he did note that his opinion was that the Milledgeville general store referred to in some of the opening chapters was “located a little outside the mainstream of commerce.”

In describing Milledgeville in the book I relied on a variety of sources, including my own recollections of living there, some writing I’d done (primarily about the Governor’s Mansion and Old Capitol Building) and some other sources. Among the other sources was an 1845 map of Milledgeville. After receiving this letter from this historian, I’ve gone back to that map, and I agree that the location of the general store was too far from the center of town. So, rather than identifying the location of the general store as historical, we’ll call that “novel” also.

That’s one of the nice things about writing historical fiction: If I get the history wrong, then I can simply say that I exercised my prerogative as a novelist and altered the historical record in order to move along the plot.

So really, other than the title of my first negative review, there’s not much I can argue with. Novels, like anything else, generally fall to personal tastes, and I can certainly understand if some people find Jackson Speed and my novels distasteful. He was intended, after all, to be an unsavory character and I’ve been very frank and straight-forward about that.

I suspect I’ll receive many more negative reviews. The book was only ever going to appeal to a certain sort of person anyway, but I do hope in the future the reviewers will avoid the coarse and unpleasant language adopted by this particular reviewer.

In the meantime, I am hoping that the lure of some 1840s sex will help to sell more books.

I’ve got books to write

Probably I should be passing the time at book release parties in New York City, sipping champagne and accepting attaboys and back pats.

But the truth is, I’m feeling a little under the gun.

On Good Friday I published the second of the Jackson Speed Memoirs. Jackson Speed and the Blood Tubs is now available through Amazon.com.

On Easter Sunday the folks at The eReader Café were kind enough to publish an author interview with me. Thankfully, I’d published Blood Tubs just in time that they were able to use links and cover images in the interview. Whew!

And on Monday, April Fool’s Day, I published Four Things My Wife Hates About Mornings & Other Collected Stories.

In the span of four days, I tripled the number of books I’ve authored and published.

So I am kind of a big deal.

It was chance and chance alone that brought the culmination of both these projects over the same weekend.

My extraordinary editor, India Powell at Lightswitch Communications, finished editing the Blood Tubs a couple of weeks ago. I was going through her edits and formatting the chapters into the book as I received the chapters back from her, so it was all ready to go. Last week, Kate Sherrill – the unbelievably talented artist who did the cover illustration for the Blood Tubs – finished the painting and provided me with a high res digital file.

I also finished editing and formatting my columns for “Four Things” last weekend. The cover photo was shot in December and all that needed to be done was put the pieces together.

My beautiful and talented wife, Jean, who does the cover designs for my books, ended up being the one who decided which book would be published first because she decided to design the Blood Tubs cover and then work on the Four Things cover.

Even though it was by chance, it was still a lot of fun to see the completion of two big projects on the same weekend. I’ve been in one stage or another of working on both of these books for several months, and especially in the last few weeks I was getting increasingly excited to finally have them completed.

So today, as Four Things went live on Amazon, I was sitting here admiring the vast array of books available if you do a search for Robert Peecher on Amazon.com, and that’s when I realized what a dreadful spot I’m in.

I’m dropping books like it’s easy (it’s not, and, oddly enough, it is), but I’ve also got a timeline for the next two Jackson Speed books.

My intention is to have both of these books coincide with the 150th anniversaries of the battles during which they are set.

Jackson Speed on the Orange Turnpike (which sees our reluctant hero stepping out of the woods just in time to send the entirety of the Army of the Potomac back across the Rappahannock) takes place at Chancellorsville. The 150th anniversary of Chancellorsville is now just a month away.

The next book, Jackson Speed at the High Tide, sees Ol’ Speedy fighting for both the Federals and the Confederates at Gettysburg. The sesquicentennial for Gettysburg is only three months away.

The Orange Turnpike is essentially written. High Tide is not quite half done.

I can do it. But it will not be easy. I don’t know about my editor and my illustrator and my designer, but my hope is to get all of them equally excited about sesquicentennials.

Anyway, I shot an email to my social secretary and I told her she was going to have to postpone the New York City parties and the champagne sipping and the attaboying and the back patting.

I’ve got books to write.

Inteview with James Best

James D. Best, author of the Steve Dancy series and other books, was kind enough to answer some questions from me for an author interview. I think readers and writers alike will find his answers interesting. If you’re an indie-author looking for advice, I think the advice he offers is outstanding and right on point. What he has to say about large print and audio books is particularly useful for indie-authors who might not have considered that as their foot in a library’s door.

Author James Best

If you enjoy good historical fiction and Westerns, I would strongly encourage you to check out Best’s books. I’m a big fan, and you should be too.

Q. You’ve written American historical fiction (Tempest at Dawn) and Westerns (the Steve Dancy series). I suppose Westerns are more than just American historical fiction set west of the Mississippi river. In your mind, what differentiates a Western from other American historical fiction?

Best: L’Amour once said, “If you write about a bygone period east of the Mississippi River, it’s a historical novel. If it’s west of the Mississippi it’s a Western.” He added, “I don’t give a damn what anyone else thinks, I know it’s literature and I know it will be read 100 years from now.” In the recent past, Westerns were a staple of fiction, Hollywood, television, and daydreams. Good Westerns are about people and their struggle to survive a rough and tumble frontier. This is a timeless theme for science fiction, fantasy, or Westerns.

Q. When you’re writing a Steve Dancy book, are there rules to the genre you try to adhere to?

Best: There are norms that enthusiasts expect to find in a Western. I try to adhere to most of them so genre fans are not disappointed. My continuing characters are traditional heroes, there’s gunplay, and the moral code is consistent with popularly perceived ethics of the Wild West. I also break many Western stereotypes to appeal to a broader audience. My protagonist is rich, there are few cowboys in my stories, and I strive to make my villains unconventional. In the real Old West, mining brought more people to the frontier than ranching, so my stories take place in mining camps. In The Shopkeeper, my villains include an accountant, a showboat, and a particularly nasty woman.

Q. One of the things I like about Steve Dancy is that he’s not clearly a white-hat wearing good guy. He blurs some lines on ethics. Not to spoil the plot, because I really want my readers to give your books a try, but Dancy doesn’t seem to have any qualms about setting his enemies up to be murdered. What is Dancy’s personal code of conduct?

Best: I classify heroes into three types: the wholesome hero (Roy Rogers), the flawed hero (Chris Adams in The Magnificent Seven), and the antihero (Ben Wade in the movie versions of 3:10 to Yuma). I’ve always preferred the flawed hero. Also, if you study the real Old West, a stand-up duel was rare. Lawmen and outlaws who survived didn’t wait for the other guy to draw first. Dancy does what is right in a larger sense and begins nonviolently. When forced to resolve issues with a gun, his ethics are sometimes sacrificed for survival.

Q. When you started writing did you know Steve Dancy’s character, or did he develop for you through the telling of the story?

Best: I knew his character from the start, but that said, every character must grow or the story will become stale. By the fourth book, he is a much more mature character than at the beginning of the series. I had nothing to do with it. He learned and grew as he ventured around the frontier and I scribbled down what he did and how he did it.

First three in the Steve Dancy series. Read these.

Q. I read in another interview where you used more than 100 history books in writing your historical novel Tempest at Dawn, based on the Constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Obviously for that novel historical accuracy was critical to you. But how about with the Dancy novels, how much research do you do into the time period, the people and their customs? How important is historical accuracy when you write your Westerns?

Best: Historical accuracy about the times is important to me, and I insert historical references into my Westerns. I like the research, but it is also one of the ways I make the Steve Dancy Tales different than run-of-the-mill oaters. I try to be truthful, but I’m not always accurate. For example, Virgil Earp is a minor character In Murder at Thumb Butte, which takes place in Prescott, Arizona. A reader wrote to me saying he was under the impression Virgil Earp left Prescott to join his brothers in Tombstone about three months prior to my story taking place. I wrote back that he was correct, but one of the minor powers of a novelist is the ability to bend time.

Q. I saw on your blog recently that Thomas Edison is going to make an appearance in the next Dancy novel. I assume, too, that all or at least most of the characters in Tempest at Dawn were actual people. When you write about historical figures in a novel, do you endeavor to accurately portray those people in their speech and behavior, or do they become characters in your book who speak and behave according to your imagination?

Best: I attempt to reflect historical figures true to their personalities. That’s the reason for the hundred research books for Tempest at Dawn. Probably only five or six were about the convention. I read, or seriously scanned, at least three biographies of each major character. To be honest, I’m not as meticulous with historical figures in my Westerns, but I still seek out multiple descriptions of their personalities. Once I have their character firmly in mind, they do seem to take their own path, just like my fictional characters.

Q. I read on your blog in November that total sales of all of your books have topped 50,000. For an indie-author I think that’s pretty phenomenal success. What is your advice to the self-published and small-press authors for increasing sales? How do you find and connect with readers? Was there a time when 50,000 in sales seemed impossible, or have you always been confident you’d get there?

Best: Traditional publishers need to be experts at big-bang publicity because bookstores want fresh books that move quickly off their shelves. Indie-publishing is not constrained by a tight timeline, so authors can take longer to build a following. The secret to large sales for indie-authors is multiple books in multiple formats. Beyond garnering more shelf-space, multiple books and formats convey legitimacy.

Also indie-publishing does not preclude traditional publishing for the same book. For example, I’ve been asked how I got into so many libraries. It’s difficult to get a librarian on a tight budget to buy a trade paperback, but they’ll gladly order large print books to satisfy senior citizens. This is a neglected format that still has substantial demand. Unfortunately, you need a traditional publisher to break into the large print category. Look up large print publishers on the internet and then query them to see if you can mail them a copy of your book. If you get a positive response, you are more than halfway there. You can use the same approach for audio books. Again, you need a traditional publisher in order to distribute through audible.com.

When I started, I thought I would easily sell a hundred thousand books. After my first year, I wondered if I would ever sell ten thousand. It’s hard to build momentum, but once you get things going in the right direction, sales gradually improve month over month. I’ve been indie-publishing for five years and only in the last year or so have I made enough money not to consider writing a hobby. If you want to sell lots of books, I have three pieces of advice: persevere, persevere, persevere.

Q. Last question: When someone finishes reading one of your books, what do you want the walk-away to be for them? Do you hope they’ve learned something or felt something or just had a good time?

Best: I think of myself as a storyteller. I want to entertain, but I also hope to enlarge the reader’s view of the world. As Philip Pullman said, “Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.”

For more on James D. Best, the Steve Dancy series and his other books, you can visit his blog or check out his author page at Amazon.com.

Again, I really appreciate James taking the time to answer some questions. One of the things that I’ve really enjoyed about self-publishing my book is the chance to meet (face-to-face or virtually) a lot of interesting indie-authors. Personally, I think there’s a real revolution going on that is re-defining the book industry. These indie-authors are true pioneers and entrepreneurs (not surprisingly, a fair number of them that I’ve communicated with turn out to be small business owners).

St. Patrick’s Day free books

I’ve got some blog posts in the works that I’m very excited about. I’ve done or am working on a couple of author interviews that I think will be great and you’ll enjoy quite a bit. But the demands of my paying job are keeping me busy these last couple of weeks, so blog posts and book stuff and author interviewers and other stuff have taken a back seat.

Click the cover to buy the book!

In the meantime, I’ve decided this St. Patrick’s Day to offer “Jackson Speed: The Hero of El Teneria” for free for Kindle users (and those who have a Kindle reader app on their various devices) in honor of the Jasper Greens.

Fleeing an enraged and cuckolded and murderous Uriah Franks, Speedy joined up with the Jasper Greens volunteer company out of Savannah who were off to fight Santa Anna in Mexico.

Like good Irishmen, they stayed drunk most of the time, played music and got in one of the most bizarre fights of any U.S. army unit in all of history when they engaged in what became known as The Battle of the Boat. On the deck of the Corvette on the Rio Grande, the Jasper Greens threw down with some boys from Kennesaw and some Illinois volunteers. Speedy, of course, kept his head down throughout the fighting.

Get it free on St. Patrick’s Day in honor of the Irishmen who went to Mexico to fight other US troops!

 

Lost in research, and a chance to win a signed copy of the next Jackson Speed book

The trouble with writing historical novels is getting lost in your research.

I write at a pretty rapid pace. The first of the Jackson Speed novels (at 75,000 words) took 28 days to write. The second novel (about 85,000 words) took four months, but there were a couple of long periods when I didn’t write at all because other projects were occupying my time.

A cover from one of the issues of Harper’s Weekly.

I am currently writing the third novel and that is also moving along rapidly. My goal is to have it finished by late April.

I’ve written one thing or another all my life, and particularly as a journalist I am accustomed to writing quickly under deadline pressure. I developed this skill when I was a student and would put off writing lengthy essays until the very last minute. My teachers and my parents thought I was procrastinating, but actually I was developing skills that would benefit me as a future journalist and novelist.

Or maybe I was procrastinating.

But as I write these novels, a big part of my time is spent in research. My friends know that if I’m going to write a historical novel it is going to be historically accurate. If I write in a novel that the first gun fired in advance of Pickett’s Charge on the third day of Gettysburg was shot off at 1:07 in the afternoon, I write that because that’s what time it was fired. You can take it to the bank. If I write that General Taylor ordered a retreat just as Colonel Jefferson Davis was about to take the Grand Plaza at Monterrey, I write it because that’s what history recorded.

My desire to be historically accurate stems from my love of history. I’ve always been a sort of arm chair historian, and any time I’ve run across inaccuracies in films or novels it has always rankled me.

As a result, when I start to do research for a book or a chapter or a scene, I tend to get lost in my research. I’m easily distracted. I go to find out what road Fitz Lee was on when he discovered Hooker’s flank on the Orange Turnpike at Chancellorsville, and two hours later I’m reading about Dan Sickles shooting Francis Scott Key’s son for fooling around with Mrs. Sickles.

One of my favorite sites for research is sonofthesouth.net where they have posted all the Harper’s Weekly issues published during the Civil War. I could (and do) spend hours reading these and studying the sketches and forgetting the nugget of history I was there to discover.

Today in the mail I received a book that contains diary and journal entries, letters and other first-hand accounts of Gettysburg, not from the generals or soldiers (whose accounts I have by the hundreds already) but from the civilians who lived in Gettysburg.

I am currently working on the third novel in the Jackson Speed series “Jackson Speed at the High Tide.”

In it, Speed deserts his way into the biggest battle of the war, and on the first day at Gettysburg finds himself caught in the town between the two armies.

I’ll give you one guess what brought Ol’ Speedy to Gettysburg in the first place. The first person who comments here on my blog with the correct answer wins a free, signed copy of “Jackson Speed and the Blood Tubs” (due out in late March).

So in doing my research I sought accounts from Gettysburg’s citizens and found this book. Seriously, I salivate over civilian accounts of the American Civil War and am most fascinated by those.

So I bought this book for “research,” and I will use it accordingly, but I doubt very seriously I will be doing any quality writing in the next few days as I once again get lost in my research.

Indie authors should give it their Best

I suspect that there is a sense out there among many people that if a book is written by an indie author then it probably means the book wasn’t good enough to get published by a legitimate, traditional publishing house.

Well, let me tell you about James D. Best’s “The Shopkeeper.”

Author James Best

A few months ago I decided to purposely try to find some indie authors to read. I feel compelled to support fellow indie authors because we share a struggle.

After searching around a bit, I landed on the Steve Dancy novels by James Best. I clicked on the “Look Inside” button and after perusing the first couple of pages of the first book in the series, I bought all three of the Steve Dancy novels. I couldn’t wait to get into the first book in the series when “the box with the smile on it” showed up at the door.

Seriously, “The Shopkeeper” is what every indie author should hope to be writing. It’s compelling fiction. It’s well written. Nothing about the book suggests that Best is an indie author. Best (who I’ll soon be interviewing for a post on the blog) has published the Steve Dancy series through Wheatmark.

I’ve only seen the print books and not the ebooks, but Best’s print books are professional in design and layout. There are not weird formatting problems that leave the impression the author has never seen the way a book is laid out before.

Also, the books are well edited, avoiding another complaint readers often have of the self-published and indie authors: There aren’t a lot of typos or mistakes that will hang up a reader.

But more important than the layout and design of a book is the content. If it’s a good story, I can get past a widow here or an orphan there.

“The Shopkeeper” is great on content. Best’s characters are well-developed, his plot is unique and engaging. At no time reading his book did it cross my mind that I was reading a book by an indie author. I found myself caught up in the story to the point that when I got to the last few chapters I abandoned all other plans for the day and just read until I finished the novel.

Best’s “The Shopkeeper” is the quality we should all be aspiring to. It’s a good story and it’s well told, and it will disabuse readers of the notion that indie authors aren’t good enough to be published by traditional publishing houses.

Let’s face it, publishing, like any other business, is driven by trends that produce dollars, and not all books – no matter how good they might be – are going to hit the bestseller lists. Publishers aren’t looking for a good book as much as they are looking for a book that will sell.

If you don’t believe me, then explain how it is that the pop star Ke$ha has a book published by Simon & Schuster’s Touchstone imprint. Is this quality literature or is it something that offers Simon & Shuster guaranteed dollars because Ke$ha brings a fan base?

So, as an indie author, I love it that there are books out there like James D. Best’s “The Shopkeeper” that dispel the notion that indie fiction can’t be good fiction.

If you enjoy a good Western, do yourself a favor and order “The Shopkeeper.”

First three in the Steve Dancy series. Read these.