Jeff Mariotte

RETURN TO THE STORYTELLERS HOMEPAGE

by Jeff Mariotte

We sit at home, or on airplanes, at work, God forbid at Starbuck’s—if we’re Ernest Hemingway, we stand naked at a podium, but how many of us, really, are Hemingway, and if you are then lock up the damn shotgun. We clack away at keyboards or we scribble in wirebound notebooks or we pierce our veins with penpoints and scrawl on scraps of human flesh. However we go about the process, we write.

And the purpose of writing is communication. By definition, we haven’t communicated unless we have reached an audience—it is the act of reading what we have written that makes our words something more than oddly shaped little figures against a contrasting background.

If we write books, as I most often do, that means getting through the publishing process and the retail process and into the hands of people who will pay money for them and then read them.

That, most often, involves booksellers.

I’m distressed whenever I see how many of my fellow authors have websites that link to Amazon.com. It’s because of their affiliate program, I’m told when I ask. They pay a few cents for every book purchased by someone who links from the site to Amazon’s site.

To which I can only say, if you’re Stephen King except you’re selling most of your books via your website instead of in bookstores, maybe you’re making some real money that way. If you’re not—and really, there is only one more Steve King among us than Hemingway—then what you’re doing benefits Amazon just fine, but it does nothing for you.

If it’s about the affiliate program money, then link to booksense.com, which also pays those few pennies per copy sold. The difference is that booksense.com drives readers to independent bookstores in your neighborhood, not to Amazon, and that is a fundamental difference. Check out my booksense.com links at www.jeffmariotte.com (and while you’re at it drop by my blog)!

If you’re serious about writing books, you should make every effort to “adopt” a local bookstore. As a horror writer, if you happen to live in the vicinity of a good specialty store like Dark Delicacies or Dark Carnival or or Dreamhaven or Mysterious Galaxy, so much the better. But it doesn’t have to be a specialty store, and it doesn’t absolutely have to be an independent.

You’re better off, though, if it is, and I’m here to tell you why. I’m speaking here not just as the author of thirty-some books, but as an bookseller of twenty-five years.

An independent bookseller, if he or she likes your work, can push you in a way that a chain can’t. Chain store display space is bought by publishers, so if your books aren’t high on their list of priorities—and except for the really big names, horror isn’t, except briefly around Halloween—you can’t count on much, if any. Independents decide for themselves what goes in the window, what goes on endcaps, what goes on the front display table. If you’d like your book to end up in any of those places, you’ve got to get yourself known to independent bookstores.

I’ve known chain store employees who were disciplined for spending too much time talking about books with customers. I’ve also encountered chain store employees who knew next to nothing about the books they’re supposed to be selling. Not every chain store employee fits into these categories, of course. But these tend not to be problems at independent bookstores. The people are there because they love books, and love the process of putting books into the hands of people who will appreciate them. It ain’t for the money, I can assure you. At independent specialty stores, in particular, the chances that the people selling your books will have actually read your books increases geometrically over chain stores.

If you can adopt an indy store where you and your work are appreciated, the benefits to your career become immediately apparent. They’re likely to keep your books on hand as long as possible, even if they go out of print. They’ll order more to begin with, and they’ll restock when they run low. They will probably have a website, to which you can link from yours, thereby generating sales that will be appreciated (which, if you think Amazon appreciates the 10 orders a year they’re getting from your site, you’re kidding yourself). They may do events for you, signings, reading, launch parties. And booksellers talk to other booksellers, so if you generate good business at one store, others will hear about it.

At the first store I managed, I was one of the couple dozen or so booksellers in the U.S. selling Clive Barker, back when we had to buy his work through an importer. I’m claiming no responsibility for making him the superstar multimillionaire that he is today—but when his stuff became available in the U.S. and he started touring for it, we had a ready-made customer base already aware of and interested in his work.

Likewise, early in James Ellroy’s career, he toured frequently, often appearing at independent bookstores like mine. Ellroy developed a persona, the “demon dog of American crime literature,” and a shtick, and in the earliest days, before he was well known, he thought nothing of buttonholing people who happened to be in the store and not paying attention to him. It wasn’t just his bookstore appearances that built him into a major bestselling author—his brilliant writing had a lot to do with it—but it didn’t hurt.

Bookstores are there to sell books. If you, as an author, can help them sell your books, they will appreciate that. They will show that appreciation by increasing orders, recommending your work, writing it up in newsletters and on websites, telling other booksellers. In this way, word about your books can spread.

Alternatively, you can link to Amazon and think you’ve done all you need to do.

Amazon sells a ton of books. Not a ton of any single book, with the very few exceptions of the Harry Potters and a few others, but small quantities of lots of different things. That’s fine, and it doesn’t hurt you to be there. But are they, as a bookstore, recommending you to readers? Are they helping you develop the personal relationship with your readers that builds lifelong fans? Are they making efforts to raise awareness of your books? Of course not. You, to Amazon, are virtually meaningless. A number, a few bucks from customers who clicked over from your site.

And when they do sell your books, the money from that purchase doesn’t even stay in your neighborhood. When someone buys your book from your local bookstore, the portion of that money that doesn’t go to pay the publisher is spent locally. It pays the bookseller, who uses it at the grocery store or for rent or mortgage, or whatever. We may stay home and write, but we still live where we do, and the more of our money that goes to support our neighbors and add to our local tax base, the better.

I’ve met authors who tell me their book is carried on Amazon, as if that gives it some legitimacy it wouldn’t otherwise have. I’ve even met at least one author I can think of who has that fact on the business card that he hands to booksellers. Frankly, as a bookseller, I don’t care if your book is on Amazon, except that if you put that on your business card I’m going to think twice about even carrying your book.

So if you have that Amazon link and only that, give it some more thought. You aren’t helping your career with it. Making friends with the bookstore in town, however, will.

Get away from the keyboard for a while and find out how.

First day of autumn.

That means, among other things, that it’s almost time to buy firewood for the winter. And I hate to do that, because it requires going back to the wood lot, and I never want to go back to the wood lot again. It’s just too scary.

Many people think that Arizona is just hot and dry all the time, and they’re wrong. Arizona is a huge state containing every ecosystem you’d find traveling from Mexico to Canada. The Flying M Ranch is a little over 4,000 feet in elevation, and in winter it gets cold. We have two woodstoves to supplement the central heating, and have at least one of them burning most nights in late fall and winter.

But there’s only one “wood guy” in our area, old Joe. The first time I called Joe last year, I asked if he had a half-cord of 16-inch logs. He told me that he did, so I got in the truck and drove over, about 20 minutes from home.

When I got there, his wife came out and said no, they didn’t have any 16s. Joe had been sick, she said, so he hadn’t been out of bed much and didn’t know that they’d sold out. But another load was expected soon, so I should check back.

Which I did. When I called a little more than a week later, Joe said he had a half-cord of 16-inchers left that I could buy. I made the drive again, hoping that he wasn’t still thinking about the one that had been sold before. But no, this time he met me at the door and volunteered to walk me out to where it was in the lot—even though, he told me, he’d had pneumonia and complications and had mostly spent the past six months in bed.

So we walked. Or I walked. I’m not sure what you call what he did. His paces were about an inch long, and his feet barely left the ground. Joe is not a small man to begin with, and six months in bed doesn’t count as an exercise regime. So I tried to not leave him too far behind, since I didn’t know where we were going, and he took these tiny steps, about as vigorous and sure-footed as an infant letting go of dad’s knees for the first time.

As we walked, the family’s dogs barked and growled at us, which they tend to do, although they didn’t approach us. I had waited too late in the season and the day was cold, leaden skied, with gusts of bitter winds.

The wood lot is less than an acre, to the east of the house. Cords of wood in 16 or 18-inch lengths, stacked between posts, scattered over bare earth. Most of the area is covered in grass and brush, but the land of the wood lot feels blighted, nothing growing there but a few scraggly weeds. Maybe the dogs knew something we didn’t, because they wouldn’t follow us in.

A little more than halfway to my half-cord, I stepped over a tiny corner of chicken wire fence laying on the ground. You know how thick chicken wire tends to be, right? Maybe 1/50th of an inch, if that?

But when Joe reached those minute strands of wire, in my wake, he couldn’t get his foot over them. Somehow that tiny big of fence tripped big Joe, and he toppled like a redwood. Face down, not even putting his hands out to stop himself as you or I would likely do. He landed with his hands still at his sides, breaking his fall with his protruding gut and his face.

I rushed to his side and helped him back to his feet. His forehead was bleeding and he was winded from the fall. Holding his arm to help keep him balanced, I assisted him to the half-cord I was looking for, and he leaned on a nearby stack of logs while I fetched my truck and started loading. Joe apologized for not helping me load, but I didn’t want to see him have a heart attack or anything, so I was happy to do it myself.

As I loaded, his wife and daughters came into the driveway in their truck, having just made a delivery. The dogs took time off from yapping at us to run and yap around the wheels of the truck, and one of them ran right into the front left tire as the truck pulled to a stop.

The dog yelped once and then fell over into the dust, twitching, trying to regain its footing.

At which point the rest of the dogs, five or six of them, turned at once into a savage pack and tore viciously into the injured animal. They snarled, snapped, bit, until the injured dog was dead and blood spattered the dusty driveway. Once he was dead, they lost interest, and wandered away.

Joe and I watched the whole thing happen, too far away to do anything even if there had been anything we could have done.

When it was over, Joe turned to me. “That one was my dog,” he said. “The rest of those are her dogs, but that one was mine. Well, I’ve got one other, that gray one.” He pointed to a dog tied near the house, unable to join the pack. “But he’s mean, and I’ve got to put him down.”

I loaded the rest of my wood as quickly as possible. When I drove away, the dead dog still lay in the dust of the driveway.

And people wonder where horror writers get our ideas….

Jeff Mariotte

http://www.jeffmariotte.com
http://jeff_mariotte.typepad.com/my_weblog/

by Brian Keene

Note: Brian Keene was supposed to post on Saturday, and Michael Laimo was supposed to post today. However, both are recovering from this past weekend’s convention, where they sold out of books and drank a beer for each book sold. After the beers, Laimo beat Keene at arm wrestling, and as the loser, Keene was supposed to take Laimo’s spot today. Keene, however, hasn’t been feeling well, so we offer this classic reprint, which first appeared in Sympathy For The Devil. If you’ve already read it, why not go back and re-read Norm Partridge’s or Jeff Mariotte’s wonderful essays instead?

Another fun aspect of being a full-time writer is having the ability to work from anywhere—-especially the comfort of your own home. Have laptop, will travel. There’s something almost Zen about getting up, making a pot of coffee, and then sliding behind the computer and opening Microsoft Word. No traffic. No commute. No Road Warrior on the Baltimore/Washington Beltway.

No hassles at all.

Except for the goddamned telephone…

As we’ve covered in previous columns, writing horror full-time barely provides necessities like groceries and rent (I would add comic books and DVDs to that list of necessities, but my wife disagrees with me). With that in mind, frivolous things like Caller ID or Call Screening are nothing more than pipe dreams. I can’t let the answering machine screen calls, because it broke and is now used as a doorstop.

So I have to answer the phone—-while writing—-all day long. To illustrate this, I kept a log today:

5AM: Wake up, shower, make coffee.

6AM: Check email, check message boards, and prepare for the day’s writing.

7AM: Begin writing. Howard Stern plays in the background but I’ve tuned him out. I’m in the zone.

7:05AM: The zone is shattered when Mom calls.

“Mom, I can’t talk right now. I’m working.”

“I thought you didn’t go to work anymore.”

“I’m writing, Mom. It’s a real job with real responsibilities.”

“Well can’t you talk and write at the same time?”

“No, I cant!”

“Well—-” (hurt tone)

(sigh) “What did you want to talk about, Mom?”

This could go on for hours, but I have a tried and tested formula for getting my Mom off the phone. I start telling her about what I’m writing.

“And then, the guy has intercourse with a zombie!”

“Got to go! Bye!”

Works every time.

7:10AM: Back into the groove.

8:00AM: A bill collector calls. I try to sell him a book, explaining that if he buys one, I’ll have some money and won’t be late with the next car payment.

8:12AM: A telemarketer calls. I spend five minutes toying with them and then hang up.

8:30AM: An editor calls. I spend half an hour toying with him and then hang up.

8:57AM: A fellow writer calls, wanting to talk about how she’s not getting any writing done. I explain to her that perhaps she should spend less time on the phone and more time writing. She fails to see the humor in this and hangs up.

9:25AM: Second bill collector of the day. I tell them Mr. Keene died in a horrible blimp accident over the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day and that my name is Mr. Pashwar Argleshwan.

9:48 AM: Wrong number. Somebody looking for Mr. Pashwar Argleshwan.

10:00AM: James Newman calls from his sound studio regarding the Talking Smack audio mix. We talk business.

10:25AM: Mom calls back. “Yes Mom, I’m still working.”

10:30AM: Another fellow writer calls, and wants to know if I’ve seen what somebody said about me on a message board. I explain that I have not, and don’t really care, at which point the fellow writer proceeds to read the entire thread to me anyway and demands that I give this person “what for”. I log on and go give the person “what for”. Hilarity ensues.

11:00 AM: A chirpy little telemarketer calls.

“Hello, sir, how are you today?”

“I am joyous because I have finally killed the White Lotus Chief who murdered my master, destroyed the Sun-Chi school, and violated my family. I used the Black Poison Palm technique to find his vital nerve and tear out his still-beating heart. Now I can raise the tablets over the school in honor once more and my vengeance is complete. Thanks for asking. How are you?”*

11:20AM: Geoff Cooper (the horror genre’s answer to Morrissey) calls to explain his latest theory on why life sucks and everyone should just frigging die.

11:52AM: Mike Oliveri calls to bitch about the fact that he can’t get any writing done, because Coop keeps calling to explain his latest theory on why life sucks and everyone should just frigging die.

Noon: I decide that life sucks and everyone should just frigging die. I call my fellow writers and tell him this.

Having decided that I will not get any writing done today, I turn off the computer and proceed to play Grand Theft Auto instead. As my little video game car tears down the freeway, I pretend that I’m commuting to work…

* Thanks to Tom Piccirilli for that very effective telemarketing rebuttal.

Last month, my turn came around as I was returning home from Comic-Con International: San Diego, an exhausting week spent in the presence of 104,000 people, sensory overload, long nights and early mornings. So I missed my deadline. Sorry, and I’ll try not to do it again.

Missing deadlines is something I’ve tried not to do, as a professional writer, and there has been no time when I’ve had control over a situation that I’ve done so. One of the functions of editors is to set deadlines, to remind the writer of those deadlines, and then to remind the writer of the consequences of missing those deadlines on the too-rare occasions when that happens. I’m currently in the midst of a big novel with a looming deadline, which I’ve promised the editor I will turn in on time.

With that in mind, a few thoughts about our friends, the book editors, if I may.

Many of us only think about editors when they accept something (in which case we love them) or reject it (in which case they’re blind, hopeless fools). But a working writer is going to be involved with many editors, over the years, and it’s helpful to know what, and what not, to expect in that relationship. An editor can be your friend, for instance—but at the same time, the editor works for the publishing company, not for you. If a decision comes down to making you happy or making money for the company, the editor has to side with making money, friendship or not. That company pays her salary, remember, and wants to remain in business publishing books by you and the rest of us for many years to come. You—any given author—is replaceable on a publishing house’s list, so always keep that in mind before delivering any ultimatums.

I’ve been an editor. It’s not an easy gig. For one thing, the pay, except at the highest of echelons, is not great considering the amount of time and effort involved. Most of them have to live in or near Manhattan, which is a pricey place to be. Most of them take work home, read manuscripts on the train, in the tub, on planes when they’re traveling. Sure, the hourly wage is still better than most freelance writers, and there are benefits. But not by much. Most editors are people who love books and reading, and yet rarely get an opportunity to read for pleasure, because their reading time is consumed by reading for work. Sometimes those overlap—they sign books by authors whose writing they enjoy, and then they get to read those. But there’s also a lot of close reading, line editing and the like, that is a far cry from reading for fun.

Besides the reading, editors have to juggle all the other parts of getting books out the door. Cover copy and art, copyright info, book design, page numbering, margins, copyediting, etc., etc. Any given book is a huge task—dozens a year, without losing sight of any single aspect, is monumental.

Worse, editors have to deal with those notorious flakes, writers. You’ve heard the cliché about herding cats? Controlling a bunch of writers is more like herding invisible cats. Greased invisible cats. High on catnip.

My theory has always been that if I turn in a professional manuscript, on time, and the words in it combine to tell an interesting, entertaining story, then the editor I’m working with will want to continue that relationship. But if I’m late, sloppy, and need a ton of editorial fixing, the editor will decide that I’m just too much trouble. Obviously, some writers are brilliant enough to overcome those hurdles and get published anyway. Other writers think they are—Thomas Harris’s Hannibal comes to mind, a book that badly needed the editing that, word has it, he refused to accept. Now, I’m a huge fan of the Hannibal Lector series, and consider Silence of the Lambs something of a masterpiece. But reading Hannibal made me wonder how much of Silence’s quality is due to a really good editorial hand, keeping Harris from doing things like, say, changing tense in the middle of a sentence for absolutely no reason. Even so, he’ll no doubt be published again. For myself, and those of us who are not at his level of success, making the editor’s life as easy as possible is still, I think, a good business plan.

During my editorial days I worked with both kinds of writers (and artists, since I edited comic books as well as books). Some were professional and timely, others were late, unhelpful, and considered deadlines as suggestions of when to start work. This experience taught me that patience is a helpful trait for editors to have. Patience and a cat-o-nine-tails, both applied judiciously.

The best editors, of which I’ve worked with a few, have a knack for working with your book, improving it, while keeping the voice and the vision yours. They’ll suggest changes, not write them in. They’ll listen to your point of view, even when it’s wrongheaded. Ultimately, in most cases, they will let you be the final judge, because they know that your name, not theirs, is on the cover. But the suggestions they make are often excellent ones, based on long experience and a more dispassionate approach to your work than you are likely to bring. They didn’t give birth to your words, so it’s not as hard for them to kill your children as it might be for you. Their goal is to arrive at the best possible book that your book can be.

One reason that booksellers are hesitant about POD and self-published books (there are many good reasons, based on discount, promotion, etc., but we’re talking about the content here) is that there isn’t necessarily any indication that the book has gone through any kind of editorial process. A capable editor is a kind of winnowing device, keeping bad books from reaching being solicited to booksellers and making good ones better. The fact that an editor has worked on a book, and let it out the door, is solace to the bookseller facing the thousands upon thousands of books offered every year.

No matter how brilliant your book, a good editor can almost always improve it. Keep that in mind when considering any editorial comment or directive. You can decide that she’s wrong, you can argue the point. Just remember, even if she’s not always on your side in every battle, she is always on the side of the book.

And since few of us are perfect, we writers, our books need all the allies we can get. With that in mind, a toast to all the book editors out there—long may their red pencils wave!

–Jeff Mariotte

Well, I can’t really blog about being on the road because a) Keene beat me to it, and b) I’m doing that on my own blog: http://jeff_mariotte.typepad.com/myweblog/. Anyway, my road trip is for fun, not work for a change, and the only books I’m signing are for friends and family. Not that I wouldn’t mind being able to write it all off, as that is one of the writerly perks that I enjoy. But I’m gonna check Keene’s website because it’s just possible that I’ll be able to show up at one of his events and ask all the obnoxious questions myself.

So with that out of the running and the fact that I’m not really working on anything while I travel (except for mulling over a proposal in my head, of which not a word has made it to virtual paper yet), I thought I’d bring up an old argument that has rippled through the horror community a time or two in the past. That argument is, are tie-in books worth the time and effort involved, and do they help a writer’s career or hurt it?

I’ve published more than 25 novels. I lose count because I’m not much good at math to begin with, and stuff I’ve written and sold hasn’t been printed yet. I think I’ve sold closer to 30, but I believe about 25 have seen the light of day.

Of those, most have been horror. There were a couple of Star Treks (a novel and a novella) and an Andromeda that were not. There were two books based on the comic Gen13, a superhero comic. Both of these were collaborations, with Chris Golden and Scott Ciencin. The one with Golden we worked hard to turn into a horror novel and also a superhero tale with a lot of horror community in-jokes, but I don’t think more than about four horror readers ever picked it up. The one with Ciencin was more of an urban thriller, but with horror elements. The rest have all been straight-ahead horror.

Five of those books, so far, have been originals. Which means the rest have been tie-ins. Which gives you an early clue about my take on the tie-in biz. I’m in favor of it, for writers and for readers, and here’s why.

Unlike some people (hi, Bev!) I really wanted to be a full-time writer with nothing else getting in the way. Now that I’ve achieved that goal–if you don’t count ranch work, which really does get in the way sometimes–I am glad I did. No day job, no boss, nothing but me and the keyboard and the deadlines. But it’s really hard for a person supporting a family to do nothing but write. Freelance checks are sporadic, and there are times that, after paying taxes and agent’s fees, there’s not much left.

I’m a long way from Stephen King wealthy, but I own my own house and some vehicles, I have no debt, and I can do things like taking a three week road trip through our under construction nation just for fun. And I can do these things because I write tie-in books. The pay is reasonably good–a lot better than many other authors get for originals. There are no royalties to speak of, which is a definite downside, but as long as the advances are healthy I can live with that. I haven’t seen royalties from my original novels either, so there’s no real difference there. Also with originals there’s always the prospect of foreign rights, or film rights, etc., which can make a financial difference, but that’s just a potential, not a certainty. I intend to keep writing originals and keep trying to exploit those other rights, but in the meantime, tie-ins help pay the bills.

And they can be fun. A TV show like Angel or Buffy has a lot of fans, and those fans can easily become fans of the books too. Some of them have become good friends. I’ve been able to attend events like a Buffy convention in London and cast parties in Hollywood. So there’s a ready-made community of people out there which doesn’t exist for original books, at least not early in most writers’ careers. It’s true that it’s hard to carry those readers over to original stuff–I think if you can draw 10% of your tie-in readers along to originals, you’re doing pretty well. But 10% is better than no one at all, which is what might otherwise await a new novel these days.

Of course, if you hate TV, or hate the particular show you’re hired to base a novel on, then chances are you’ll have a miserable time doing the book. But if you like the show–if, like Buffy or Angel, you’re working with one of the best-written shows on TV at the time, with terrific dialogue and interesting characters–then you can take pleasure in writing a book about those same characters, and be challenged by the necessity of fitting your story into the style of the show.

Writing a tie-in is not substantially different than writing an original set in a universe that you know (whether it’s in the “real world” or a fictional universe you made up) with characters (again, real or imaginary) that you have established. In an original novel, you have to be true to the characters as you’ve created them. In a tie-in, you have to be true to the characters as someone else created them. You also get to create your own supporting characters, with whom you can have just as much fun as you like. The literary challenges and opportunities are basically the same, it’s simply who owns the characters that is different. Which means it’s no harder or easier to write a tie-in book–it’s just easier to make money from a tie-in because you can get paid before you’ve written the thing, which is always a plus.

Another advantage of doing tie-ins is that, in modern publishing, people don’t stay put for very long. I sold my WITCH SEASON teen horror series to an editor who had been my editor on Angel novels, but who was moved over to doing more originals. A new editor took over WITCH SEASON, having been brought in from another house, and now she wants more original stuff with me. Other editors I’ve worked with on different projects are now at other publishing houses, doing other kinds of books. So if you can do a good job, in a timely fashion, then you can count on editors wanting to keep working with you, wherever they end up.

Finally, for readers, there are plenty of wonderful authors who work, or have worked, in the tie-in world. Christopher Golden, Nancy Holder, Yvonne Navarro, Craig Shaw Gardner, Joe Lansdale, Andrew Vachss…I’m not at home with my bookshelves, but off the top of my head in just seconds I came up with this list. There are plenty more, just within the horror community. If you add in mystery and science fiction authors the list grows by leaps and bounds.

So tie-ins? Yeah, I’m in favor of ‘em. Not as a complete diet, but certainly as an occasional treat, a career builder, a steady paycheck. Don’t discount them, not if you’re a reader and certainly not if you’re a writer.

–Jeff Mariotte