How to Be an Author's Dream

By Russel D McLean

(a response to “How to be an independent bookseller’s dream)

A few months ago, this article cropped up on the web, pulling ire from certain quarters for its allegedly patronising attitude to authors. On some levels, much of what it has to say is good - - basically, if you’re doing a signing at a bookstore, don’t be a dick about it. On other levels, some of it is more than a little patronising (the stuff about not reading too long is in part right, but it all depends on the author).

But the line that gets me is the one about booksellers being “very powerful people” on the night of the event because, while that should be true, some of them do not in any way use this “power” for good. In fact some of them abuse this power and still retain a horrific attitude towards the authors who, after all, are the reasons people come to the store in the first place.

Let me start by saying that I've been horrifically lucky in that ninety nine percent of my signings have been in bookstores with passionate staff, organised events programs and a real passion for the industry. And let me also that having had experience in the retail end myself, I know exactly what I do for visiting authors, and that I have seen things from the other side, both good and bad. But this is a reaction to a whole series of poorly organised events I've been to lately by stores who really should know better (and I've been as a member of the public, none of them knew I was an author).

I’ve witnessed some appallingly handled events recently by stores with allegedly good reputations. At these events, turnout has been poor and the booksellers have moaned about “internet competition” and “dwindling buyers” without even considering that part of the reason could be they are utterly failing to get proactive and, to use the vernacular of the theatre, get those bums in seats.

Let’s start with the basics:

You have a website. Put your events on it. Like, in advance. Like, in time. Sell the event to the masses. Tweet about it. The week before. The day before. On the day. It doesn’t take effort.
You have a window. You have (occasionally) showcards from the publishers. It might help to put those in your window and not hide them round the side of a desk where no one can see them. Because if your public can see there’s an event, they might just come. And even if the publishers fail to do that, hell, maybe you could create some posters of your own. You have a computer, yes? You can create a little document with words on that you can stick in the window?

You might also want to print off flyers in advance, find a tame journalist on your local paper, maybe even work with other appropriate local businesses to cross promote in some fashion. Just because you have an event does not mean people will come. They have to know you are doing the event first. And they won’t know that by osmosis or even just by being regular customers. Hell, get a word or two in the local papers and you might just bring new customers to the store. Okay, this might be above and beyond but in this climate, every little effort helps.

Which brings me to the other point. Tell your regular customers that an author is coming. Tell your not so regular customers. If someone’s buying a similar book, stick one of those flyers in their bags or talk to them about it. No one’s going to know if you don’t talk to them. Hell, your shop is about books. The point of coming to a store and not shopping online is to join in the literary conversation, to feel like you’re having that goddamn human contact. Being a bookseller is very different to other kinds of retail. You’ve got to be a little bit of a showperson. You’ve got to connect with your customers (and at the same time, of course, you have to know when to leave them alone).

If you do events regularly try and keep the formats and times similar so that people can plan around them.

Remember, you’re offering something the internet can’t - - actual contact with an author. A direct and unique kind of access. If you don’t shout about it, no one’s going to know and no one’s going to come to your store. Yes the author, too, should be shouting about it, but its your store. You are ultimately responsible for the business. So you’d better get off your arse and do something.

And when the author does come to speak, you might want to give them a little intro before they begin, maybe give those custombers who came in just for that author a reason to come back.

It’s insane and it sounds like teaching granny to suck eggs, but over and over I see certain bookstores failing to do any of the above. An author I went to see recently was mortified when the store in question had no sign at all of their presence and when the staff simply shrugged their shoulders upon the author’s arrival. And this was a shop that had booked the author over a month in advance and asked them to come overseas to do the gig. On their own dime.

If you have done your absolute best and still no one has turned up, it helps to apologise to the author. They came all the way to your store when they could have gone to that Big Box across the road or just not bothered at all and signed copies at the publisher’s warehouse to go straight out to some internet company who don’t do the human contact thing at all. Little things help.

Like saying, “Well, if you could still sign some copies, we’ll do our best to handsell them. People like signed copies and it’ll help us get a trickle effect so that while you didn’t sell any tonight, we’ll sell them for you in the coming days.” Or even, if the author’s fine with it, getting them to do their thing for the staff, who should still be interested being that they work in a bookstore and our industry should be run by outright passion (combined with business sense). I did this in LA when absolutely no one came to the store where I was signing, even by accident, and it was a great dry run for more successful subsequent events.

And I can already hear certain people asking “why should we apologise to authors?” The answer’s simple: they are your trump card. Amazon isn’t able to offer direct contact. You are. And authors talk, so if word gets around that you aren’t too interested in being at least civil, then pretty soon that trump card’s back in the deck and your hand’s worth nothing*

I’ve seen this from both sides. Having spent many years in retail and many years as an author, I know the pitfalls that can befall either side. But I have recently noticed certain bookstores not pulling their weight. Relying on the mere fact that they are open to draw crowds for book events or expecting the author to click their fingers and pull in sales. It doesn’t work like that. It can’t work like that.

In conclusion, booksellers - as the original article states quite clearly - are powerful people to authors, but equally authors are powerful people to booksellers. Without authors there are no books. Without books, booksellers have nothing to sell. We need each other. Neither one of us is more or less “necessary”. So yeah, authors should be nice to booksellers, but equally booksellers need to do their jobs and be nice to authors.

Because otherwise, from either side, what the hell is the point?

*Can I admit at this point I don’t play cards, so apologies for the poor metaphor.

What's In A Description?

Jay Stringer

I've been thinking a lot on character descriptions lately. As we work through the copy edits for my first book, and fresh eyes are examining the text, I'm seeing just how few physical descriptions I give to people.

If I mention their physicality at all, it will be vague; the way their smile turns, a particular look that they give with their eyes. The rest of my descriptions will be about their attitude, or their accent, maybe how their hands move as they talk. After that, it's all dialogue. I let them talk and talk, and wait for that to create something.

For me as a writer, I guess I like to lead the reader down a certain route, but make them do the work in terms of creating a physical image in their heads. I tend to feel that if the reader has done more of that work, whether they realise it or not, they will be more invested in those characters.

But not everyone sees it that way, and looking around at the fiction on my shelf there is a wide variety. Some authors want to give you every little detail as they create their character, to take someone that's fully formed in their head already and implant him/her in yours. I see this approach more with thrillers and action stories, books where descriptions overall are more important, maybe this follows through in the authors mind. For instance, I read some of the Gabriel Hunt books recently, and they tend far more toward physical descriptions, right down to cleft jaws, but they are also books that have to describe weapons and long actions scenes, so it's more about consistency.

In crime I often see more of a middle ground. Lawrence Block, for instance, would often give us a physical description of each of the supporting cast in the Matt Scudder books, but rarely gave us anything of Scudder himself.

I've been reading HURT MACHINE by Reed Farrel Coleman, and he's given us very little of Moe Prager over the years, though again the supporting cast are very well etched. We chatted with Reed on our podcast a while back -you'll find the episode in the itunes archive- and he told us this was deliberate. He has a firm idea of Moe in his head, and who would play him in a movie, but it's for the reader to form their own impression.

As we've worked through the copy edit, I've moved more toward that "middle ground" of description, where I'm giving you more for the supporting cast, but still leaving enough of a black hole that you as the reader have to do the rest of the work and, hopefully, get more invested as a result.

But how about you, as writers and readers, how much or how little description do you like on your page?

Series Characters: Guest Post from Hilary Davidson

By Hilary Davidson

First, thanks to my friend Steve Weddle for letting me loose on DSD today. I promised him I wouldn’t break anything, but that was only to get him to stop hovering. You know how he is.

Actually, you do know how he is, by which I mean kind and generous to fellow writers. He asked me to stop by because my second novel, THE NEXT ONE TO FALL, came out a couple of weeks ago. It’s the follow-up to THE DAMAGE DONE, and it picks up three months after the first book ends. Both novels feature Lily Moore, travel writer and accidental sleuth. I’m on tour now, and one question that keeps coming up at events is about how hard it was for me to pick up from where I’d left off, especially since THE DAMAGE DONE read like a standalone and left Lily in a very dark place at the end.

The truth is, I always intended to write several books about Lily. A big part of the reason why is that I couldn’t imagine putting Lily through the hell she goes through in THE DAMAGE DONE without following up with her later. At the beginning of THE NEXT ONE TO FALL, she’s still shell-shocked and grieving deeply. Her best friend, Jesse, has conned her into coming to Peru with him — since they both work in travel, it’s a business trip for them — and she’s sleepwalking through it, dragging her ghosts after her. At Machu Picchu, she can’t appreciate the beauty of the stone city without thinking about death. When they find a dying woman at the bottom of an Inca staircase, it’s as if the dark thoughts in Lily’s head have taken on a physical form. But later, as she hunts for the woman’s traveling companion, and discovers a trail of dead and missing women behind him, she becomes determined to get justice.

Writing the second book with Lily forced me to confront an ongoing debate about series characters and whether or not they should change. At my first Thrillerfest in 2009, Lee Child made an argument for writing a protagonist who never changes, one who goes from book to book as essentially the same person. He said that readers, when they love a character, just want to see more of that character, not an evolution that changes him.

At the time, I couldn’t have disagreed more. I love series characters who evolve over the course of several books, as Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch does, and as Spenser in Robert B. Parker’s early novels did. When I think of a character who remains the same from book to book, I think of Nancy Drew.

It was only when I was in the middle of writing THE NEXT ONE TO FALL that I started to reconsider that position. There are so many obvious ways in which Lily changes over the course of that book that I had to stop to consider what hadn’t changed about her. I also wanted to parse out the temporary changes — grief, at the start of the new book, has made her listless and passive, which is entirely unlike the Lily in the first book… and quite unlike the one in the rest of THE NEXT ONE TO FALL, who starts to come back to life as she goes after justice for the dead and missing female victims.

I realized that many of the changes aren’t so much to Lily’s character as to her perspective. When Lily encounters the sister of one of victim, who is hunting for her missing sister in Peru, it breaks her heart on one level, because it reminds her of her own search for her sister. At the same time, this woman drives Lily mad because of her stubbornness and her reckless behavior — not entirely unlike Lily’s own in THE DAMAGE DONE.

In so many ways, Lily is the same. She’s still a woman haunted by her family history, one who has classic Hollywood movies running up against verses by Edgar Allan Poe in her head, one who uses modern technology to listen to Frank Sinatra songs, one who just can’t let things go. The bad-girl side that was suppressed in the first book comes out in the second, but it was always there, lurking beneath her smooth veneer before it cracked. Even her desire for justice, which gets ever more powerful in THE NEXT ONE TO FALL, contains an echo from the first book: Lily didn’t find justice then, so she’s damned sure she’ll get it now.

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