DSD Welcomes Back Kristi Belcamino

Today I welcome back DSD alumna Kristi Belcamino. Her YA novel, City of Angels, comes out Tuesday, and trust me cuz I've read it, you do not want to miss it. It's gritty and harrowing and packs an emotional wallop. There's more on that below, but first, here's a story about staying true to your writer's heart, a subject that Kristi has mastered.

Cinderella Story

By Kristi Belcamino

My journey to publication was a slog. A soul-crushing, ego-stomping, uphill battle through the query trenches, amassing rejection letter after rejection letter along the way. It took nearly a year and 100 rejections, but I finally did get an agent. It took another year - and many more rejections - to get a book deal. 

But that's another story. (See here and here for great advice on querying from Kristi.)

Instead of hearing my dreary—albeit somewhat typical story—let’s talk about my friend’s Cinderella Story because that’s what we all want to happen to us, right?

From appearances, my friend’s story truly is a Cinderella Story – she queries agents, gets multiple offers of representation, picks the agent who loves her the very most, said agent sells her book at auction within a few days.

Dream. Come. True. Right?

Don’t believe everything you read.

Behind every overnight success story is the truth.

So, let’s back up and see how all this went down. Keep in mind I am summarizing what really happened in a smart alec way because that’s how I am:

Once upon a time, many years ago, my friend wrote her first book. And then spent years polishing that baby. Making it sing, making it pretty. Until it was so good that her writing group members CRIED IN PUBLIC reading it. (Okay, maybe just one writing group member—who shall remain anonymous—wept in public, multiple times, reading it.) It was THAT good.

Magical.

Then a year before Glass Slipper time, my friend began querying literary agents. She sends her book to an agent she admires. A super smart, butt-kicking, garnering-huge-book-deals-all-the-time agent. A Big Shot Agent.

Big Shot Agent read her book and said, “I LOVE IT. BUT.” The “but” was that the book was too darn SAD. Too many dead people. Big Shot Agent said, “I think this one dude should live. Then the book would be perfect. If you rewrite the story and the one dude lives I will love it forever and it will be the Best Book Ever.”

So, my friend rewrote the book with one dude living. He lives!

But. Her writer’s group read the new version and said, “We liked it better when dude dies.”

My friend was bummed. Majorly bummed. She’d spent months revising so dude LIVED.

I asked my friend, “So Big Shot Agent, being a Big Shot Agent, could sell your book with Dude Living. But is that the book of your heart? The book you want to see on the shelves at the bookstore when you walk in? Or do you want to see book the way you originally wrote it – with Dude Dying?”

After much soul searching, my friend decided to stick to Dude Dying version and began querying agents again. This time, she got multiple bites. Several agents were chomping at the bit to represent her. One agent said, “I LOVE IT. BUT.”

This agent said it was okay if Dude Died, but that really the whole book should be about something completely different. In other words, she would represent my friend, but wanted my friend to rewrite the entire book. Is this sounding a tiny bit familiar?

Meanwhile, another Really Awesome Big Shot Agent said, “I LOVE IT.”

No “buts.”

He told her the book was GREAT exactly as it was.

My friend did some more soul searching.

She went with the agent who loved it without any “buts.”

Even so, she worried. What if the other agents were right? What if their concerns about keeping it the way it was meant it would never sell to editors?

But this IS a Cinderella Story so we all know that didn’t happen.

Before long, her agent sent it out to editors. In a normal story (see my slog story above) it often takes a few months before editors even get back to agents about books they are considering buying.

Not in this Cinderella Story. In this story, agents began to respond within a few days. Within a week, the book sold at auction.

So, what’s the moral of this story?

Write the book you want to write. Stick to your guns. It’s worth staying loyal to the book of your heart instead of writing what someone else tells you to do. Even agents and editors. My friend refused, despite very heady temptation, to change her story. She gambled on her book never seeing the light of day. And guess what?

She won. Big time.

Cinderella Story.

And they all lived happily ever after.

Well, of course, except for the dude who died.

Kristi Belcamino is a Macavity, Barry, and Anthony Award-nominated author, a newspaper cops reporter, and an Italian mama who makes a tasty biscotti. As an award-winning crime reporter at newspapers in California, she flew over Big Sur in an FA-18 jet with the Blue Angels, raced a Dodge Viper at Laguna Seca and watched autopsies. She is the author of the Gabriella Giovanni mystery series (HarperCollins). 

Belcamino’s debut young adult mystery, CITY OF ANGELS (Polis Books), comes out May 9, 2017. Find out more at http://www.kristibelcamino.com or order the book here. 

The Magic of Advertising...Naturally

By
Scott D Parker

So on 1 May, I tried something: I advertised my books. It wasn't like I've never done it before. I've had people review my novels and the stories ever since I begin publishing them in 2015. I have promoted them on Facebook, Twitter, my own blog, and the blogs of other folks. Some have even been nominated for awards, giving those stories a little extra push.

But until this past Monday, I have never actually purchased any advertising. I now have.

On 1 May, I relaunched my re-branded westerns, all now having S. D. Parker listed as the author. And, as a further experiment, I put them in Kindle Unlimited. At this stage of my career, it seems like a good time to try going solely with Kindle. Lastly, I bought my first Facebook ad. I have hit publish for eight stories so far. That first one was scary, the one with butterflies in my stomach. Pretty much every other story I have published since then was exciting, but not nearly as exciting as that first book. I had an equal type of reaction when I clicked promote on that Facebook ad. It was exciting, a little scary, but mostly it was thrilling.

Later on this past week, I also began running ads on Amazon itself. The irony is that a mere three days after that Facebook ad, I had no issues hitting promote on Amazon's site. I guess you could call that experience.

The results were not immediate on the Facebook ad. Let's be honest: most of us have a vision that when we  submit an advertisement, the readers will pour in. That never happens of course. This publishing business is long term. Sure there are some overnight sensations, but for the vast majority of us, we are in it for the long-haul, the slow burn and build up of awareness by readers of our work.

The Amazon ads, however, produced some immediate results. On the first day I ran the ads, I earned some page reads. The day after, a little more. I am not one of those people who checks their sales ranking constantly throughout the day. I am a writer. Therefore I write. But it was fantastic to see movement.

So for all you fellow independent writers out there, what type of advertisements do you run? Where have you had success?

Twenty-Five Years of Reservoir Dogs

When I was in junior high we had a small, family owned video store around the corner called U.E.P. Video. I never knew what it stood for, but I'd regularly get a few bucks from my mom to go down and rent a video. There was never any real restriction on what we watched (though, I suppose my mom would have put her foot down on porn), so the small store was full of possibilities. My uncle has recommended From Dusk Till Dawn to my parents and we watched it together. He didn't mention it was a vampire movie, and none of us had seen the previews that made it clear. It was a huge, fabulous surprise. At least, for me. My parents hated it.

The internet was young back then. Only two or three people I knew had it at home, and it seemed like the majority of the internet was shitty message boards and porn we didn't even want to see (and weird shit edited to get through the parental filters, and absolutely no such thing as "Safe Search"). But even then, if you typed "Quentin Tarantino" or "Robert Rodriguez" into a search engine, you could find out what other movies they made.

Armed with a few bucks and new knowledge, I went down to U.E.P. to rent Reservoir Dogs.

They wouldn't let me.

Now, I had rented R rated movies before, I'm sure of it. This was before you had to have an ID or parental chaperone to see R rated movies in the theater. People generally guessed that parents would do whatever parents do, and kids would probably find ways around it, and R rated movies couldn't hurt anyone too badly or require too much therapy in adulthood. But they wouldn't let me rent Reservoir Dogs. I was fucking pissed. I called my mom at work to tell her about this grave injustice, told her that now U.E.P. said she would have to sign some waiver letting me rent R rated movies or that she would have to rent them for me. And just what the hell was I supposed to do today between finishing homework and my parents getting home? How was I going to relish these beautiful hours when no one was fighting over the TV (I always lost).

My mom went down to U.E.P. on her way home from work to sign the waiver and pick the movie up. I got a call from the store, my mom on the other line, "What was the movie you wanted? River Rats?"

I corrected her, and she got the movie for me. I had to wait until the next day to watch it, because by that time of day, I was on the losing side of every argument about what would be on TV. The next day, I guess my mom was at work because I remember what happened so clearly.

I was watching Reservoir Dogs (for the second time), and my mom was standing behind the sectional listening to Tarantino's Mr. Brown give his theory on the song "Live A Virgin." Right after he says, "Dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick" my mom took a deep breath, like she wanted to say something, and then shook her head. "I was going to make a comment about the language in this movie but I guess it's not any worse than what you hear in your own living room." She walked out.

I don't remember buying it, but I must have because I saw it easily fifty times that year in between sampling all of Tarantino's movies and dipping into Robert Rodriguez's oeuvre as well. I had the most fun showing them to my dad who loved crime movies and had no reservations about watching Tarantino wax philosophical about big dicks with me sitting next to him. As strained and tumultuous as my relationship with my dad was, we could always have a good time with Tarantino or Rodriguez. Always.

So it's the 25th anniversary of Reservoir Dogs. I haven't got to watch it again this week because I've got a sick kid at home who isn't sleeping at her regular times and I'm zonked by the time I get her to bed, but I could probably recite the movie from first line to end line (including Mr. Pink begging for mercy outside the warehouse at the end). I told my brother recently that Reservoir Dogs was always going to be my favorite movie because it's been my favorite movie for so long. There's so many memories attached to it, it opened so many ideas for me. I know it's maybe a little ironic, being the outspoken feminist, and citing the one Tarantino film were not a single woman exists in the foreground as my favorite, but it is what it is. It fascinated me, it gripped me. The dialogue lit me up (I was already experimenting with writing novels by then), and everything about it was exciting. It held up to second, third, and thirtieth viewings. Even now, all these years later, I find new and different things to love about the story, about the way it's shot, about how fucking insane Michael Madsen is as Mr. Blonde.