The End of the Experiment (aka AAR 2)

Just like my original AAR, I'm a-doing one for On the Edge now.

I know that there was a variable "control group" since I had two different novels that I was promoting, but despite Sage's best efforts, I just don't see any great increase in sales due to the blog tour. Once again my family has come in strong ordering the bulk of the copies that have been digested by the market, and I'm wondering how many of my On the Edge novels will become "home-fill" for my Aunt Debbie and Uncle Richard's ski chalet, but I'll take home-fill over land-fill or no-fill.

That being said I'm going to try a couple more things.

First, I'm going to try a mass market promoter. This, I'm sure will provide a sterile experience that has been promised to be tailored to my specific genre. We shall see.

Secondly, I'm going to hit up the folks who reviewed my last novel, Toe the Line. Let's see if they like the second novel as much as the first.

Finally, one thing I've found, which is somewhat inspirational, for Toe the Line I got about five rave reviews and two "so-so's" and one straight up "this sucka is bad." Not so with On the Edge. By my tally, I've got about four "this is good's" and maybe two or three "I liked it alot and intend to buy more." That means growth in my book.

A Bit More Self Promotion

So over the past week, two more blogs have reviewed my novel On the Edge. Again, I'm not yet seeing any resulting downloads or purchases of my book, but the reviews are nice to read.

This first is from My Name is Sage, a blog run by the publicist, Sage Adderly, who I hired to run my blog tour for this book.

On The Edge is the second novel I've read by Dick Hannah and the growth in his writing is evident. While the plot of this story revolves around the military and disciplined fitness, two things that normally wouldn't hold my attention, Hannah's writing captivated me until the last page. 

This is a solid mystery with a group of characters that aren't what they appear to be. Protagonist Joe Malone attempts to juggle life after the war, family drama, and deceit within his work community. Hannah kept my interest with multiple twists and turns, which is necessary when executing a suspenseful tale. I liked that Dick Hannah added a light romance to the story. It added to the action-packed book without being distracting from the overall plot.

This second review is by Liz Wilkins of the Blog Liz Loves Books.

I liked the way this story flowed – well written and intriguing enough in the early stages to keep you turning pages, and with a good dose of interesting characterization it was an easy but involving read. Joe himself is well imagined – the challenges he faces to restore his mental health after the horrors he faced in Iraq are cleverly written and add great depth to his character. As for the adventure racing angle, I found this exciting to read – I don’t know a lot about this area but I found myself enjoying finding out. The author has written what he knows – and it shows.

All in all I would say this was worth a read if you like adventure, mystery and a great story well told.

Naturally I can't help but agree with both of these reviews. Secondly, these are the two most indepth reviews I've yet gotten. Unlike one or two of the others, these read as though the bloggers took time in reading the books. Of all the blog stops that did reviews I've yet to get a negative review (which is good to have) but like I mentioned above, no changes in purchases based on the blog tour.

Give Me a Reason to Care

I'm in the middle of working out some of the finer points of my novel Vapor Trail. One of those "points" is trying to find a way to make the reader care about the main character. That might seem a bit simple, but it is of vital importance to the novel and here's why.

Over the past two days I've read several reviews of the new Lone Ranger film that stars Johnny Depp. I read a review in the local paper that mentioned that the audience has a hard time caring about why they two protagonists, Tonto and the Lone Ranger, are chasing the bad guy (I would link to it but the paper's website is atrocious and I can't locate the article). Then today I read this in the WSJ by Joe Morgenstern:

Nor is there any reason to care about the masked rider on the white stallion; he's mainly Tonto's foil, a handsome boob played blandly by Armie Hammer.

"Nor is there any reason to care," that's what I'm trying to avoid in Vapor Trail. I've been focusing on plot and on story, but not on character. It's tough all the time making sure that the reader cares about the character, cares so much that they want to read on.

Right now I'm reading Les Miserables. Victor Hugo makes the reader care so much about what will happen to Jean Valjean that he can write chapters and chapters about houses and people in the Parisian suburbs, and about Waterloo, and about all sorts of other things and I'll keep on reading since I want to know what will happen to the hero.

It's my goal for the next few months . . . to give the reader a reason to care about Vapor Trail.

A Savvy Reader Speaks Up

Hopefully commenting on my post yesterday, a savvy ready, my brother, spoke up with his own two cents that concentrates on his own milieu.

Geek.com has an article by Ryan Whitman that includes a video addressing why it was impossible to fake the moon landing in the 1960's. The video is fun to watch and well done. It takes complex technology and inside baseball, well in this case inside video, topics and breaks it down into simple, easy to digest bites that just about anyone can understand.

But eventhough the video is worth the thirteen minutes it takes to watch, it was the summary or conclusion that I really keyed in on. There were two snippets that hit directly on the theme that I'm trying to impart to my novel, Vapor Trail.

The first quote from the video is:

The urge to believe drives people to trade in part of their soul in exchange for the comfort of being a rebel.

This quote directly relates to the main character I'm trying to create. The "comfort of being a rebel" isn't quite there yet, but the exchanging of the soul, that's there and it's fun to develop.

The second quote is this one:

Once you're forced to hypothesize whole new technologies to keep your conspiracy possible, you've stepped over into the realm of magic. It demands a deep and abiding faith in things you can never know.

A couple of scenes I've already drafted include the main character and the protagonist meeting different types of people who are also conspiracy theorist. One is a nutty guy who believes the most blatantly ididotic theories out there. The other is a former college professor who is more down to earth. I could see the professor lecturing the protagonist with words just like the quote above.

Vapor Trail

I am currently working on my next novel, Vapor Trail, that delves into the harmful and debilitating results of believing too much in a conspiracy theories.

One of my favorite things to do every month is to listen to a talk radio show that sponsors a conspiracy call in day, appropriately on the night of each month's full moon. I love listening to folks call in and explain their particular conspiracy. In most cases the conspiracies don't hold water, most deal with cabal's of bankers running the world in some sort of shadow government. Most people who call in believe in what Popular Mechanics calls "The Myth of Government Hyper Competency." I've worked for the government. We barely made it up to competency, much less "hyper."

The conspiracy I delve into in Vapor Trail is the mystery behind the downing of TWA Flight 800 back in 1996. I know that Nelson Demille has a great book, Sky Fall, that hits on this same subject, but mine doesn't focus on the flight as much as it does on the deterioration of a character's life due to his believe in a conspiracy, a subject I started researching by reading Among the Truther's by Jonathon Kay.

Today I ran across this snippet in the WSJ in an article by Amanda Foreman called Conspiracy Theories: Everybody's Doing It:

It doesn't help that some of the most absurd-sounding conspiracies have turned out to be true: The Central Intelligence Agency really did feed LSD to unsuspecting civilians in the 1950s as part of a mind-control experiment. Or that some of the technically plausible ones have been patently false: The moon landings were not filmed on a sound stage.

It is human nature to look for a linear cause to explain complex events. The worse the tragedy, the greater the need for a narrative that does not involve dumb luck. Eight hundred years after the destruction of Constantinople by the knights of the Fourth Crusade, the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches are still unable to agree on who or what tipped the two Christian empires into a ruinous fight against one another.

One aspect of conspiracy theories that I hope to dig down into is the theory of Occam's Razor, that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. I love the way conspiracy theorist will create an incredibly complex series of event and solutions to a problem that has many more simpler solutions. 9-11 provides 75% of the material during the call in show, and what I like about that is that my character in Vapor Trail visits other "experts" (conspiracy theorists) along his journey to the truth and most of them are focused on 9-11. None are looking at his conspiracy, the one that he finds has the simplest, most plausible explanation that everyone could see if they were just looking at it correctly.

Just as On the Edge was a step up in complexity compared to Toe the Line, Vapor Trail will be a step in the same direction. It's a tough theme to take on, but so far it's exciting to be in the midst of it.

Test Case for Others

Over at BookBlogs there are several forum posts regarding the use of blog tours and PR folks to handle the release of a novel. It was a couple of months ago that I went ahead and signed up for one. I chose a package that provided 15-20 "blog stops" and reviews.

For the most part I feel that I was given what I paid for, but in some ways I'm unimpressed. Although the tour is not yet complete, so far the evidence is that there is no difference in sales to justify the expense. The last time I released a novel I did more work, but was able to tailor the blogs and reviews to blogs that more closely matched my genre, but more importantly there was a bit more rigidity to the schedule.

To the first part, last year I had to investigate and identify different bloggers who might be interested in reading and reviewing my book for their blogs. Many, in fact I would say 50% of them, told me that my novel might not fit their genre and passed on the opportunity. For the most part however, I found about 15 total bloggers over the course of three months and received decent reviews. How much of that translated into new sales, probably not that many. When I look at the types of blogs that have been used for this blog tour, I feel like I've really missed the mark.

Last year there seemed to be more rhyme and reason to the ersatz tour I planned. It was based on reviews. If an interview popped up, which it did at times, then that was found money. This tour has not had that foundation, one of being based on reviews. I have gotten good reviews (here, and here) but I got good reviews last time as well. This has been based on cover, banner and summary. I'd rather have reviews. Secondly, and this might have been the impetus of this post, the most recent stop on the blog tour was just an interview. A short summary to be sure, but mostly interview. Personally, I'd rather have a review that leads to an interview not the other way around.

All in all I think that the old adage, "if you want something done right . . . do it yourself" has been proven out here. One of the aspects of this experiment I didn't like was that I was using two different experimental media . . . ie. two different books. Last years novel was Toe the Line, this years is On the Edge. How would I know if a decrease or increase in sales was or was not directly related to the blog tour. Now that I've come to the end of the blog tour experiment, I think I am going to try last year's approach and measure my success rate there too. Because at the moment my answer to the Bookblogs question of "are blog tours worthwhile" . . . it would be a resounding . . . nope.

UPDATE: 6-29-13 - the original post included a diatribe regarding missed dates on behalf of bloggers on the blog tour. This was not accurate. Sage and her bloggers on this tour have hit each of their dates as scheduled and as promised.

Nook Out

See, this is why you gotta keep up with current events and why I read the WSJ.

Here is an article by Jefferey A. Tractenberg entitled Barnes & Noble Throws in Towel on Tablets which covers the fact that the Nook is through. Frankly, I see this is a bit of a non-event in the grand scheme of things, but a major event in the world of e-readers.

The bookseller reported Tuesday that losses at its Nook digital business blew out in the fourth quarter, easily wiping out reduced profits generated at its bookstores. As a result Barnes & Noble said it would stop manufacturing its own color tablets, instead going with co-branded devices made by third-party manufacturers.

I also look at Barnes and Noble in much the same way I see the Post Office. Why wasn't the post office the prevailing user and first adopter of email? I remember in 1996 first using email in college. Clunky, orange on black text, an ability to only send to other users in the same community. Why didn't the USPS take that sucker and run with it. Instead of dot com every address should end with dot USPS. For the first few years the only thing we did with the internet was send mail.

I remember when Prodigy (I think that was the name) was introduced it provided local weather and some news as well. It wasn't till email became en vogue that the internet gained legs. Email . . . mail . . . where was the Post Office? They could have been sitting in the fabled cat bird seat had they leveraged that idea sooner.

Why didn't Barnes and Noble jump on the e-publishing band wagon sooner. Why did Amazon, which prior to Kindle was all about shipping goods to people, become the preeminent e-book publisher on the web? Where was Border's? Where was Barnes and Noble? They focused on their core business that's where they were and they weren't nimble enough to change. I see the same thing in my industry. Do we focus on our core? Do we dance with them who brung us? Yep and yep. But we also are expanding into new areas. 50% of our business comes from new or other than core business lines.

It's a miss in my book that Barnes and Noble and Border's aren't still in the book selling business. I imagine kiosks at bookstores that provide a discount on hard cover if you buy the e-book too. I see a store where you can go look at the book in hard cover then buy it on your Nook after you've decided to give it a try. I think about a store where e-publishing takes up as much or more of their core, conventional selling business.

Sadly what do you actually see when you look at Barnes and Noble? You see Cactus.

I Repost Cause I Must

I never intend to repost items from other blogs, but when I run across a post that just screams at me that this is something I must remember, something I must tell others about,  . . . well then I must repost.

I seem to repost a lot from The Kill Zone, and there is a distinct and clear reason why . . . they write some good stuff over on that site. Today P.J. Parrish has a terrific little article called Are Rules Made to Be Broken on breaking rules and following rules. When is it okay to break rules, when should one follow rules. The article is terribly insightful . . . who knew that Picasso had painted the first painting? (go read the article to find out what that means).

That being said, she winds up the column with a numbered list of rules from Emma Coats a storyboard artist with Pixar. There are 22 rules, I liked the following three the most:

Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.

I have yet to do this with the novel I'm presently writing. I'm glad I read this. Immediately I'm going to start chewing on and digesting the ending so that I know where I'm going.

What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don't succeed? Stack the odds against them.

This harkens back to the post I wrote the other day on challenges and hurdles for a protagonist to overcome that play such a big part in writing (here). I like the idea of "stakes" much more than just "hurdles" or "challenges." Stakes inherently imply that there are challenges right? I think so.

 Here's an exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How would you rearrange them into what you DO like.

Why have I never heard of this exercise? What a terrific idea! I was recently asked as a part of the blog tour I'm currently in about what movie have I seen that is better than the book. I skipped the question. I couldn't immediately think of one. I would have much rather been confronted with a question of "How would you have changed the worst movie you've ever seen into something better?" I can't wait to try this and I bet I reference the Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics website when I do so.

Again, so much going on that is good over at The Kill Zone and so much worthwhile in that article. Well worth the three or five minutes it takes to read it.

Couple More

So far the reviews from non-friends and family are positive. I received two more reviews from the blog tour. One from "ai love books" the other from "a book and a lattee.

The first, from ai love books said:

On The Edge by Dick Hannah is definitely a good mystery/crime novel. I like how the mystery starts right away in the first few chapters. The writing was smooth. I can’t stop reading to learn about the murder – why? And who did it? I can’t stop guessing until the end. The author did a really good job with the mystery and thriller. I love the bits on family and drama within the story. I wanted to know what will happen to Joe and his father’s relationship. Overall, On the Edge was a good mystery/thriller read laced with family drama and a little bit of romance.

I'm particularly happy with the phrase, "The writing was smooth." I'll take that.

The second review, this one from a book and a lattee said:

In Dick Hannah’s On The Edge is an extremely fantastic novel in which I absolutely loved every part of it. It wasn’t just one novel but became multiple novels all in one – a little romance, thriller, inspirational, and family drama all packed into one. I’m really hoping that Dick Hannah has a sequel to On The Edge just because I’m so intrigued by Joe’s story.

My take away . . . "It wasn’t just one novel but became multiple novels all in one."

So far none of this has resulted in any new sales, at least none that I've seen, but if nothing else this blog tour results in providing me much needed confidence boosts each week!

Entirely Apropos

Over at The Kill Zone they are asking their readers to provide some ideas for a collective noun for a group of writers.

Writers, I have found, love to use these "collective nouns" in much the same way I'm sure a woodworker would enjoy trying to build an intricate jewelry box, or a artist might like to try a new medium with which to work. Samples that most everyone can remember include:

• Murder of Crows
• Colony of Ants
• Coffle of Asses
• Troop of Baboons

The list could go on and on. What I think is so apropos about this is that I just highlighted a terrific, and I think completely original example in Les Miserables.

above the chimney piece hung a crucifix of copper, with the silver worn off, fixed on a background of threadbare velvet in a wooden frame from which the gilding had fallen; near the glass door a large table with an inkstand, laded with a confusion of papers and with huge volumes

I like that, "confusion of papers." First time I'd run across it.