Innuendo and a teaser

Something I never considered when choosing a name for this book was that I'd be listed among sex instruction manuals and religious manifestos. My only thought back then was that a little innuendo might make for a nice catchy title, a bit of titular wording to attract people's attention.  But when the book was first listed on Amazon and I gave people the title to look it up, they had to scroll through several pages of sex instruction manuals, S & M books, or texts on Mother Theresa before they got to The Missionary Position.

I'm happy to report as of today, however, that when I typed in "The Missionary Position" in Amazon's search box, my book came up number SIX! Mother Theresa is still on top (as she probably should be), but I've knocked the sex books down the list. I'm feeling pretty good about that. Sex is a hard genre to compete against when mine is admittedly a very small niche market of pulp-styled historical adventure fiction.

Now for a little teaser...I've got a number of sequels and prequels lined up for The Missionary Position. A couple have basic outlines already done, and I've got a number of ideas for the rest. One in fact is about a third written. What's my point in telling you this? All have the same innuendo style of titling as TMP. Should I veer away from this? I don't know. From a marketing standpoint I like innuendo, but it comes with a twist. By default of how I title my books I'll continue to get listed with books outside my genre if someone just types in their names. But I think it works. We'll see.

This is my first foray into indie publishing, and I've got a long way to go before I understand the pros and cons of it all. And truth be told, this genre represents only one of a couple others I'd like to publish in. Genres where innuendo titles won't necessarily come into play. For instance, I've had a novel written in the suspense-thriller genre for a couple years now, but I need to find some reliable editors and beta readers to take a look at it before I'll be comfortable putting it out into the world. The book sort of fell off my radar as I've worked these past couple years on finishing my Masters. I think it's a good read, but the longer I wait to get it ready for publication the more work it'll require to go back and update it.

Why? Well, I began writing it in 2007, and finished the first draft sometime in 2008. Think about the technology changes that have occurred since then. Some of my characters were using PDAs.

PDAs! Remember those?

Exactly.

No futz'in around

I think I should first apologize for the long delay between blogs, but times they are a'tough.  Well, not really, but they're at least pretty damned busy.  I'm nearing completion of my Master's and everything is converging in the form of papers, tests and the ominous Comps in August.  No excuse, I know.

Anyway, a little update on book distribution...

According to Smashwords, The Missionary Position (TMP) should be getting distributed to B&N, Apple, and other premium outlets either today or tomorrow.  To be honest, I'm a bit frustrated with the process, and concerned about the quality of the product they will put out.  Formatting for distribution through Smashwords did not allow me the same kind of product I achieved through Amazon's Kindle.

Granted, I didn't have a great first outing with the Kindle platform either when I looked at my "proofs," but at least with Kindle's interface I was able to make quick changes and see them implemented quite fast.  With Smashwords, I saw my initial proofs, didn't like'em, changed them, and then had to wait for daaaayys.  And then a few more weeks before it finally reached the point (today or tomorrow) that it will get to the Premium distribution channels.  I'm afraid if I go in an putz around with it again, it'll reset the whole thing and I'll have to wait an equally long time for the changes to go through and get to market again.

Don't know.  Maybe it doesn't work that way, but I unfortunately don't have the time now to futz around with it.  In a week I'll have a break and look into it, but to be honest the first priority then (book-wise) will be getting the paperback versions available.

Point is, I want to put out a quality product that represents the best possible reading and viewing experience I can provide my readers, however few of them there may be.  That means there cannot be excessive amounts of "white space" between pages, no convergent paragraphs and all that mess.  Just good story that's easy to navigate through.

Smashwords!

The Missionary Position is now listed on Smashwords for downloads to various eBook platforms. This is in addition to Amazon. Distribution through Apple, Barnes & Noble and other premium outlets are still pending. I'll keep you updated.

The price is still set at a very low US $0.99. For those wondering why, the reason is simple. I'm more interested in getting my work out there right now than making a living on it. Most authors in the world do not make a living on their writing, despite their best efforts and dreams to the contrary. As I venture into the world of published writing, I think it's more important to get an audience who is willing to read an unknown author so I can get feedback from them on my style and stories, than it is for me to try and wring their wallets. 99 cents seems a reasonable way to do that. I'll leave the wallet wringing to the Patterson's and King's of the world. They're already so good at it, why should I infringe on their territory?

Stay tuned for more info. As for me, I'm back in the (text)books for now. It took way more time knocking out the Smashwords formatting and publishing today than I'd planned for, and now I'm even further behind in these damned master's program classes than I was this morning.

You're an a-hole, not a genius

On my way out the door, so not much to write now, but I saw this some time ago and wanted to share. Pretty much captures a sentiment I've shared many times over. Cheers.

Covers are tough

I’m an indie author, which to the uninitiated basically means I have much fewer resources at my fingertips than legacy house authors do to put a book together. For an author, the process is relatively straightforward. First, write a good story. Second, kill your babies (edit). Third, send it off to your betas (test readers) for feedback. Fourth, take the inputs that work and redo it. There’s more to it, but you get the gist.

Here’s the deal, though. As an indie author, I’m also an indie publisher. So after I take off my author’s hat, I have to put on my marketer’s hat, my graphic designer’s hat, my formatter’s hat (to make the book work on various e-reader platforms and for print), and so on, and so on. Much of the formatting stuff really isn’t that difficult, but when it comes to the blurb on the back of a book that sells it to the reader and the actual cover of the book, things get tough…and quick.

Collectively, the blurb and cover are your two most important tools to attracting readers. These are the first two things a reader will see when perusing the shelves of a bookstore, or, as is the case with me, the book pages of Amazon, B & N, or Smashwords. [NOTE: I’ll be posting The Missionary Position to the latter two in the next week or so…after I finish a test and paper for grad school.] As such, it is important to get these just right. Fail to do a good job and you risk missing readers who might actually love the story within the book, but for whatever reason were turned off of giving it a chance because there was nothing in the blurb or cover that appealed to them.

Legacy publishing houses have *teams* of folks whose fulltime jobs it is to put blurbs and cover designs together for their authors. These guys are professionals, trained in graphic arts, marketing and advertising. They’ve read studies of what gets reading consumers’ attention, and bend to make the books their selling appeal to their target demographic.

The indie author has none of this. At best, we can only guess at what a potential reader would like. For me, I wrote a blurb and produced a cover that would appeal to me if I were the one searching for a good fun read. I think the target audience for TMP is probably someone who shares a similar inclination towards historical pulp-styled adventure fiction as I do. In that vein, I felt my cover had to reflect some of the old-school cover art from similar texts sold 'back in the day'.

That said, the cover was still only designed by THIS guy (two awkward thumbs pointing in my direction), a NON-graphic artist who grew up in the days when Atari was the standard bearer for graphics. That probably makes me a bit clumsy with what I can produce for covers, but all in all I think it came out okay. After all, at the end of the day my goal is really just to create a world for my readers that is not their own where they can sit back and temporarily shut down the worry centers in their brains; a place they can disappear into, even if only for a couple hours at a time.

I would like to have readers’ opinions, however, on the cover work as this might affect future iterations of the book and others down the line. Thanks.

A few words on some words in The Missionary Position

TMP is a story set in the 1930s. Back then things were different. Language was different. Decorum was different. How one handled oneself in a social setting with others in the family home rarely entailed the use of four-lettered expletives. Sure, these might escape kids’ or parents’ mouths outside of the home amongst their friends, depending on the sort of group they hung out with, but contemporary decorum had it that they did not use such language in the home, nor in social gatherings among strangers or in other friends’ family homes.

So, why am I going here do you ask? It has to do with the text in TMP. There are some four-letter words in there. Is their use untruthful to the time period the story is set in? Absolutely not.

I’ve chatted with more than a few folks who lived during this time, and I’ve seen even more interviewed on television. My decision to implement those words generally comes from the fact that the further folks wandered from home, and especially if that wandering took them to far off places in the world, the more at ease they were at letting such language escape their lips. Not that they spoke freely as kids and adults do today with every fifth word being a four-letter devil, but when they encountered stressful situations or got particularly angry…well, the word existed at the time, they knew it existed, and it fit the situation so they used it. And why not?

So, if any of you might wonder why I chose to throw some of that language in the book, there you have it.

A different kind of story from a bygone era was standard fare once upon a time

My book, The Missionary Position, was born out of the voice of one of its characters – the protagonist, Jack Halloway – barging in on my mind whilst in the middle of writing another story. But the point I want to get to now has more to do with the tone and style of how that story is told, than Jack's intrusion.

If you’ve read it, you’ll note the difference from many of today’s reads write away. And I think this has to do with the influence I felt from the old pulps that were once popular in the early to middle part of the twentieth century. I was introduced to them by Louis L’Amour, the famous writer known most for his Western stories. But what many don’t know is that Mr. L’Amour got his start writing for pulp magazines in the 30s and 40s. Maybe earlier – I’m not sure. Many of these stories were high tales of adventure, set in distant locales that to an American reader of that day were often too far off to be comprehendible.

The stories of this era – and not just Louis’ – were a simple fare, with good guys and bad guys, and plots you probably had figured out pretty early on, but it didn’t matter because the story was so rough-and-tumble fun that you couldn’t help yourself but to keep reading on. Think Indiana Jones, since these same pulp fiction stories were the inspiration for George Lucas bringing Indie to our local theaters.

That was the kind of story that popped into my mind with TMP, and I had immense fun writing it. It flowed onto the keyboard so fast out of my fingers that I hardly had time to eat or drink. It was finished, I’d guess looking back on it now, in a matter of a week or two.

And then it sat. 

I began a graduate program. I moved across the country. Life got in the way. And then one day out of boredom I went back to look at some old files and there it was, in all its shining, debacled (is that a word?) glory. I read it again, and loved it, though I did see it needed some tweaking. A buddy read it for me a while back and he made some recommendations. I decided to re-edit it, add some of those recommendations in, have others edit/look at it, and then stepped back to see what I had. 

I liked it again. Loved it, even. I hope you do too!