R. Lawson Gamble's Blog: R Lawson Gamble Books, page 25

Finding Readers

My blog posts here are following a pattern: they describe my passage into the self-publishing world, page by page. The Other, my eBook offering that is now available for your Nook, Kindle, iPad or the like has had great reviews but few reads. It has become clear to me that one may write a gem of a book, compelling and perfectly  written (not that mine is, necessarily) and it could easily become the best book never read. The problem is discoverability. An eBook on the virtual shelf of an on-line retailer that is hidden beneath wave upon wave of other books may not be found until the apocalypse. So what’s a writer to do?

One piece of advice I’ve read is to have multiple books to sell, thus insuring more than one avenue of approach to your books, just as all roads led to Rome at one time.  Some say to publish a paper book edition of your book to attract readers to the same book from two quite different directions. Others say, give  your book away for free for six months or so; here the hypothesis is that readers are more likely to purchase your free book than you $1.99 book. Seems strange, but it may be true.

What do I intend to do? All of the above. I’ve published a paperback version and I’m finishing up the editing phase of a stand-along sequel to The Other with the title Mestaclocan. And I will give my eBook away for free…for a time, anyway. And I’ll be sure to report back to you on these pages. But don’t hold your breath. Each of these options could take a long, long time.

What Friends Can Do For Authors

Most people who visit Amazon.com and browse through the infinite layers of books and eBooks probably believe (if indeed they actually think about it) that the best favor they can do for an author is to buy their book. But that would be wrong. The best thing they could do for the author is review and rate her book.

My crash course in on-line eBook marketing has exposed me to the vagaries of the virtual book market. Many authors (and I include myself) begin writing with the belief that all that is necessary to sell a book is to write a good book, the naive trust that quality must rise to the surface.

But I have since learned that there are many good books; no, there are very many good books that the average reader browsing the Amazon shelves will never see. That is because these books are buried under layers and layers of other books, many of them inferior, and will never see the light of day. And that is because a book must be read to be appreciated, but to be read it must be found, and to be found among so many books it must be hi-lighted. Reviews are the roadmaps to a book; the more reviews, the more visible the book becomes. And the more visible the book becomes the better the book sells, particularly if it is a good book.

Amazon applies other factors to its formula, of course, but it is safe to say that the book with 50 reviews will sell well while the book with just one or two, no matter its quality, will not.

Must you have read the book to review it on Amazon? No. But you must be registered on Amazon to review a book. Amazon does track whether you bought the book from their shelves before reviewing it but the review counts none-the-less (although a book that you did buy there will likely get an upward nudge).

And it’s not just Amazon; all the eBook sellers from Apple to Diesel apply similar formulas.

So help a struggling author – review a book!

Finishing The Story

Something I’ve noticed lately in my reading is that many authors have difficulty finishing their stories. They begin strong with fresh new ideas and continue strongly for a while but somewhere two-thirds of the way through the book one senses that the writer is becoming concerned that the individual strands aren’t coming together as effortlessly as had been hoped. In many of these cases I have sensed that the ending is somewhat contrived and most particularly anti-climatic in relationship to that which preceded it. This is unfortunate, of course. It can be a let-down.

And plotting the story in fine detail is not the answer, either. The story line must take on a life of its own and the author must be prepared to go with it like a bull rider  hanging on  for dear life. If this doesn’t happen, the story lacks vibrancy and energy; it will have all the interest of a series of points on a graph.

I am noticing this in the book I am currently reading, Louis L’Amour’s HONDO. This story has a strong beginning. The premise itself is strong: into the life of the attractive young widow struggling to raise her young son in her remote cabin home, freshly  deserted by her husband  and hostile Indians all around (Holy Cow!) rides the self-sufficient self-made typical L’Amour hero with his sturdy steed and mean dog. He knows Indians and how to survive .  She knows love and how to have a relationship. The story moves forward on this premise with verve – until it doesn’t. The plot brings Hondo to the widow, then takes him away from her, and then brings him back to her – with the obligatory dead Indians, dead husband, dead dog, and entire  troop of dead cavalry  in between. So he’s back to stay now, but there are still thirty pages to go. The only thing left to do is contrive. L’Amour does that as well as anyone, but in reality, the book ended much earlier.

What’s the solution to a limp ending? Let the story carry you as you write it. Follow it wherever it takes you and never worry about how it will come together. The secret is, the story will end itself. You may have no idea how, but if you let it lead you, it will take you there.

New Zack Tolliver Adventure

There is a new Zack Tolliver adventure in the works expected within the next few months. Its title is MESTACLOCAN and those of you who know what that is will have a sense of what’s coming. But this time Zack and Eagle Feather find themselves in a very different environment, one that does not lend itself quite so well to Eagle Feather’s tracking skills or Zack’s relentless pursuit. How will they adapt?

MESTACLOCAN  is the stand-alone sequel to THE OTHER and like its predecessor thrusts the reader into the midst of the action from the very start. This crime thriller moves at a fast pace and the bodies and clues pile up quickly. Zack  will need all the help he can get to solve this one.

I found writing THE OTHER a very engaging experience. It was a story which took on a life of its own as I created it. I suspect that my excitement and absorption in the process can be felt by the reader.

And MESTACLOCAN? Even more so. The many twists and turns along the way kept me guessing to the very end. And even then…?

Finding The Story

There’s a rather interesting puzzle that found its way into the story in my novel The Other, something I have yet to solve for myself. It’s an anomaly that is found near Coachella State Park just before Libby, Eagle Feather and Big Blue descend to meet Zack and the FBI team following their harrowing trek across the mountains. Big Blue follows a scent trail the entire distance only to lose it at a raised platform of rock that looks eerily as if constructed by ancient beings. When writing this part I did not intend for this to happen but when I looked down on the terrain they were crossing with Google Earth, there it was! You can see it for yourself. I have not seen it in person but I plan to make the effort next time I am in the Palm Springs area. It might be a shadow or it might be rock shaped by shadow. Or it might be just what it looks like, a large fortress like edifice overlooking the valley. Whatever it is, once I saw it I knew that Blue would lose the scent there and that Libby and Eagle Feather would be overcome by the power of the place.

If you should go there one day and find this rock rampart please tell me about it.

About The Author

R Lawson (Rich) Gamble was born in New Jersey and raised in a family of avid adventurers.

As a young man Rich experienced life. He worked for Princeton University, Gallup, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Unitron, the Forestry Service, and National Cash Register, among others. He acted in summer theatre, directed music at Newport Theatre Guild, premiered an opera with the Newport Music Festival.

Rich attempts to quench his own need for adventure in every way possible. He has climbed Mt. Kenya, he has paddled his sea kayak along much of the New England coast, run the Boston Marathon, paddled whitewater in canoe and kayak, and sky dived.

His sense of adventure energizes his stories. His experience authenticates them.  His “desire to see what most people don’t get to see” is  shared with the reader on every page. The story moves swiftly, transporting the reader to places that truly exist, right now;  landscapes that the reader might wish to go to find and experience for herself.

Excerpt From The Other

John Roundtree lived by himself west of town, not a town so much as a few dusty buildings clumped on either side of the state road that passed through on its way to more important places. His dusty old pickup out front with the cloth showing through the tires hadn’t moved in years; weeds grew high around it and lizard tracks disappeared under it. Nobody knew what John Roundtree did anymore. Few people saw him outside his house in the light of day and those who did guessed from his red eyes and wild hair that he didn’t get much sleep. They whispered around that John Roundtree spent his nights with evil spirits. John Roundtree wasn’t always like that. Used to be he built things with brick, fancy walls and such. He was a real artist with brick. At first he worked with his own sun-dried clay bricks and then when the fancier imported bricks became cheap enough he started to use those and he would build beautiful things. He lined up the bricks so the fancy designs matched and the wall looked almost like a solid piece of hand decorated stone. Back then he was in demand all over the Reservation and beyond. Most of the people in town had a Roundtree wall or patio somewhere on their property. But it was a long time since Roundtree built a wall. It was a long time since he did much of anything, for that matter. Not since the night his son died during childbirth. After that, he didn’t come into town anymore, maybe just once or twice a month to buy flour or a little sugar at the dry goods store. A rumor started floating around that Roundtree,

crazed with grief that his son was stillborn had allowed his young wife to bleed to death. After that residents of Elk Wells talked of a man-like creature they saw at night. Sometimes it appeared on a lonely road, they said, striding across it or running adjacent to moving cars before it disappeared in the darkness. About the same time sheep herders out on the mesa started to complain of lambs gone missing in the night and nothing left the next morning but pools of blood. A herder told of being awakened in the night by strange sounds and looked out to see a tall figure standing at the pasture fence, solitary against the moonlight, chanting and staring back at him. The townspeople listened to these stories and they thought of John Roundtree.

Revisiting the Masters

With the accrued knowledge and experience from writing 3 novels and countless magazine and newspaper articles I thought to return to the works of the masters of literature (or at least the literature I had been guided to read as such). My thought was (and is) to try to determine that special style, technique, or mannerism that sets the classic author apart from, say, you and me.

This is one of the most enjoyable tasks I have set for myself. To date I have revisited Richard Adams, T.C. Boyle, Richard Henry Dana, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, Larry McMurtry, Margaret Mitchell, John Steinbeck, and Owen Wister. I’d like to share just a few of the things that I have learned.

I shall not detail my discoveries for each author listed above; there is hardly space in this blog. But let me present my findings about just a few of them. First, to generalize. All of these authors write with exceeding confidence, even hubris. Each of them is in full command of the tools of writing – vocabulary, mechanics, POV, etc. – although they may regard them in quite different ways, or even ignore them in come cases. But the effect is the same; we lose consciousness of the writing to fall under the spell of the story. Very quickly. There is a certain efficiency of word use in common, a leanness that contributes to the reader’s growing hunger. Even the wordiest of the authors – McMurtry, Adams, Mitchell perhaps – proliferate not in ad-words but in action, the sentences themselves remaining lean.

But some have definable personal mannerisms and characteristics to set them apart. To some Hemingway is known for his short, declarative sentences and tough terse prose. But I find he is masterful in presenting multiple related ideas within one properly structured humongous sentence. Here, from Green hills of Africa:

“But here we had not seen a white man for two weeks, not since we had left Babati to go south, and then to run into one on this road where you met only an occasional Indian trader and the steady migration of the natives out of the famine country, to have him look like a caricature of Benchley in Tyrollean costume, to have him know your name, to call you a poet, to have read the Querschnitt, to be an admirer of Joachim Ringelnatz and to want to talk about Rilke, was too fantastic to deal with.”

Ninety-eight words. And he ends with a preposition. But honestly, he could have continued that sentence for the remainder of the book and I probably would not have noticed because he had me with the import of each clause at it related to his story. So I say, so what?

I love the sense of intimacy T.C.Boyle achieves with the simple technique of a question attached to a sentence. We are led deep inside Bev’s mind in this passage:

“Then she got up, fumbling for her blue jeans and a sweater, Till’s sweater, rough as burlap but the warmest thing she could find, and how had it gotten so cold?”

Owen Wister’s The Virginian has always enjoyed a sanctified place on my shelves, so much so that I designed my wife’s engagement ring around the Virginian’s description of his own design, an opal surrounded by four diamonds so that her month stone joined his. Wister is a master of dialogue, which is generally eavesdropped by the first person POV. Each vernacular is sculpted, each mannerism detailed, each personality presented fully and completely without the need for exposition. Deep philosophies and layered theologies and profound political observations all find themselves expressed in a cowboy twang or southern drawl and lose nothing by the conveyance.

My most loved story is Hombre from Elmore Leonard. How perfectly he captures the mysterious essence of the dangerous, self-sufficient western man. Again the first person POV – are all the great westerns from that point of view? Mysterious men described only by their exteriors and their actions, never to relinquish their inner mysteries? The obvious advantage to first person POV is the ability to express emotions without it coming from the protagonist. The narrator feels this, senses that, observes this, but Hombre remains in his mysterious single dimension. What is he thinking? What will he do? How will he react? We will never know. He will never tell. But the narrator will go through every sort of emotional upheaval on his behalf. This is where Elmore Leonard shines. He is a master of first person POV, one of the most difficult presentations. He is the puppet master. Through his narrator he pulls the strings that bring Hombre to life.

There is more, but it must wait.

Tagged: Writers authors classics technique writing tools writing skills

A Writer’s Dilemma

Lately I’ve found myself on the horns of a dilemma. The question? How to market my new novel through my social media contacts without offending my friends. I suspect that I hesitate more than most to offend people and I will admit readily that I make a very poor salesperson.

But today’s authors must be prepared to engage in marketing their product. Particularly Indie authors. In fact, marketing takes twice as much of my time as editing, which in turn takes twice the time of writing. And writing is the part that I truly enjoy. And so the dilemma.

There are authors who have large sales platforms ready to go…people with famous names, infamous people, people who have a following from a column, or a series of articles, people who lead public lives. Known names sell books. The quest for someone like me without that platform is to become well-known enough to sell my books by convincing enough people to read my books and talk about them. A lot.

Many of my friends have read my books and most have promised to write a review, and most have not. Not because they are disinclined or not excited about the books (or so I’d like to believe) but simply because there are too many things they have to do to further their own lives leaving little time to spend on furthering mine. Its a low priority, and soon forgotten. I understand. I really do.

But the dilemma remains. It is necessary to issue reminders, quite frequent reminders, in fact, to my friends and colleagues and acquaintances to read, buy, talk about, review, and otherwise advertise my work. But I face great risk in doing so. I will be seen as a nag, or self-serving, or brutally commercial, none of which accurately describes me. But the alternative is to admit defeat and not even try to sell my work.

Many authors use professionals – editors, professional reviewers, marketing experts, people who will take the book on as a project. That sound delightful. Simply hand it over and go back to what you really want to do; write. But the cost of this tactic can amount to thousands of dollars. And if the book is not one of the very few to take flight, there can be no profit margin and your writing will not support itself.

My solution? I have none. I will market my work as best I can. I will try not to alienate my friends too much and I will split my time among writing and editing and marketing and hope for the best. And I will keep searching for that magic answer, the solution to my dilemma. Because I know that all those readers out there will love my work. They just need the chance to read it.

Inside your Book

One aspect of the physical appearance of the book we write that many of us might not consider is the interior. We spend a lot of time on the cover, particularly for ePublishing, and the back matter, of course. But the physical appearance of the pages? Even as a reader, I’d not considered it.

But it rings true. When staring at a page full of print, unrelieved by white space, uninterrupted by dialogue, or a graph or a picture, how do you feel? A little intimidated, perhaps? When I stand in a book store, idly leafing through various volumes deciding which book to purchase, I am unlikely to select the book with pages and pages of unrelieved print.

Dialogue creates white space (or it should, as Browne & King remark in Self-Editing for Fiction Writers). But if you must write long sections of narrative, and sometimes you must, find ways to break it up by creating new paragraphs where it makes the most sense. The interior appearance of your book is quickly improved.

But there are other, more subtle ways to improve the interior look of your work. One such technique is employed by Steinbeck, particularly in Grapes of Wrath. In this work he creates a rhythm chapter by chapter by structuring the work in movements, much like a symphony, alternating slow movements (chapters that advance the story) with ‘allegro’ chapters (those which adopt a global informative view of the condition he describes). Thus without reading a word, but simply by glancing at the nature of the chapters, one gains an impression of the work.

The suggestion here is to consider approaching your work reflecting upon the overall design of the content, its give and take, its flow. What will be your pace? Will you relieve a story that move at a  furious gallop with brief respites, or will you sentence the reader to exhaustion? It is something to consider.

Tagged: Book flow, Steinbeck, White space, writers, writing techniques