The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing the Modern Whodunit (24 page)

For example, while I’ve written the Cuddy novels and short story collections under my own name, I decided to use the pseudonym “Terry Devane” for the Mairead O’Clare legal thrillers because “D” names are not just near the beginning of the alphabet; they’re also generally stacked within a foot of eye level for most browsers.

Invest your advance

Chances are you will receive only a small advance for a first mystery, somewhere around $1,000 from the smaller imprints, maybe as much as $10,000 from the larger. I’m not scoffing at these sums, but your agent takes 15 percent off the top, and Uncle Sam gets another 25 percent. Your share won’t substantially improve your standard of living.

I recommend investing what’s left in publicity. Now that you’re a published author, you can file a Schedule C with your 1040, and deduct these outlays as business expenses.

What are the best ways to invest your advance?

Join the writers organizations such as Private Eye Writers of America, Mystery Writers of America, Sisters-in-Crime (yes, they welcome male members), and the International Association of Crime Writers. All will provide you with newsletters and the opportunity to attend regional/state chapter meetings to network with other authors. The calendar sections of the newsletters will help you locate marketing and publicity resources.

Focus globally

Your publisher’s staff publicist is overworked and underpaid and is unlikely to give you the resources and attention you want. The solution: hire your own publicist. Publicists, for a fee, compose professional press releases and send them electronically around the country—indeed, the world—to the many forums in their databases that you’d spend more time compiling on your own than you did writing that novel. Independent publicists also can help you create the hook that might make your novel newsworthy and persuade some forums to run an article on it or on you.

Usually this hook has to be something nonfiction about your fictional mystery novel. For example, my sixth Cuddy novel,
Right to Die
, deals with a fictional law professor who crusades for the right to assisted suicide, only to receive anonymous and ominous death threats. It appeared the same summer that Dr. Jack Kevorkian was indicted for “helping” others to the other side. That nonfiction tie-in was the hook that landed me national interviews, talk-show appearances, etc.

You need to be in publicity for the long haul, but your hook needn’t be so dramatic. For example, if your novel deals with an amateur sleuth who’s into quilting as a hobby, a good publicist will trigger interviews and articles in some of the quilting magazines. Don’t laugh. I’m told there are about twenty such publications that are read rabidly by just the self-selecting audience of fans you’d love to reach with your quilting-murder novel.

You should have a website. Visit mine at www.jeremiahhealy.com or Bill Tapply’s at www.williamgtapply.com for ideas. A website is a great service to readers, reviewers, and booksellers—precisely the people who are crucial to your success.

Ask a friend with a good digital camera to take some color and black-and-white head shots of you. Once the friend provides you with some high-quality emailed photos, you can print out facsimiles as needed for magazines, newspapers, etc., since a professional-looking photo greatly enhances your chances of a distant forum running a text piece about your novel. Just be sure your friend gets a photo credit when the head shot is used, and that you send him or her a copy of the tearsheet from the publication.

Focus regionally

Okay, let’s be realistic: Unless your novel contains some especially compelling hook,
Time
or
USA Today
is not likely to be speed-dialing you for an interview. However, if your city, region, or state has a magazine, they might love to publish an article about a native son or daughter. Ditto alumni, business, and professional magazines that do short pieces on the theme: “Did you know that X writes mysteries, too?”

If you join Sisters-in-Crime, for example, you can obtain a list of mailing labels for bookstores. If you cannot justify hiring an independent publicist, plaster the stores with some kind of press kit (information about the book, a bio of you, and that photo) about you and your book. Drive to these stores and introduce yourself to the manager, always leaving enough copies of the kit for all employees, so they feel you have reached out and touched them, too.

Don’t bother scheduling formal signings in distant bookstores for your first book. Readers tend not to show up to meet an author they’ve never heard of, and you and the bookstore staff will stand around, excruciatingly embarrassed, for one of the longest hours of your life, making awkward small talk.

The place for your first formal signing is your neighborhood bookstore.

Finally, the calendar sections of those authors organizations’ newsletters list regional fan conventions, writers conferences, and—for the most bang for the buck—regional conferences of the American Booksellers Association, such as the New England Booksellers Association and the Southeast Booksellers Association. Even if your publisher won’t have a table at such events, one of the organizations you belong to might. Volunteer to staff it for a few hours so you can meet and hand a copy of your press kit to the attending bookstore owners and managers from your region in a very time-and-cost-efficient way.

Focus locally

The former Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, once said, “All politics is local.” First-time authors can substitute “publicity” for “politics,” because you must build a solid local fan base to be successful. And it’s generally free, or close to it.

First, hit your local newspapers. Typically they are dying to run feature articles on area folks, and they can time the appearance of the story to coincide with your big, local bookstore signing to which you will invite every human being who possibly might attend.

Second, many local high schools and libraries have speaker programs. Seek them out. Never turn down an invitation. It’s a great way for you to become comfortable at public presentation, and there are several hidden advantages. Often high school librarians will attend a class day and then recommend you to their librarian friends at other schools. Also, a librarian from Town A might “audition” you by being in the audience at your library talk in Town B, and if you do well, she may invite you to speak at her venue.

Schools and libraries often receive grants for paying speakers honoraria. I’ve received as little as $25 for gas and tolls, and as much as $2,000 for a one-hour speech. Don’t be afraid to ask about honoraria: They enable you to earn back some of that advance that you’ve spent on other publicity.

Third, approach your local cable-access television station. These outlets are required by law to provide “cultural” content during their broadcast hours, and you, a published author, qualify. The best of these shows are interview situations, with two chairs, a coffee table displaying your book, and an interviewer who knows how to ask questions. He or she typically will urge you to huck your novel shamelessly, creating, in effect, a free infomercial all about you.

It gets better: Station A in your town produces the show, then repeats the broadcast ten or twelve times during the next few weeks at various times of day and night on its channel, thus reaching a self-selecting audience of book-lovers that no direct-mail expert could target.

Even better, Station A will license that half-hour show to Stations B through Z in other towns, since it’s cheaper for those stations to pay a usage fee to A than to produce independent shows themselves. And then they broadcast your show to their self-selecting book-loving audiences. For a few hours of your time, you get incredible impact and breadth.

One important point: Even if you have to buy them yourself (at your author’s discount), bring enough copies of your book to inscribe not only for the interviewer, but also for the camera operators, the director, and everyone else who helps produce the show. It’s a matter of courtesy and gratitude, and it’s likely to get you invited back when your next novel comes out.

Closing comments

Regardless of what kind of publicity you do, be yourself. Don’t try to imitate anybody. People like, trust, and appreciate sincerity; they suspect phonies.

If you take your job as self-publicist seriously and do it effectively, your book will sell well enough that when your next one comes out, your publisher will have its publicity and marketing departments handle the work for you.

Chapter 19

Persistence

Vicki Stiefel

Two men stand on beach, the surf tickling their feet. Charlie yells, “Hey, Phil. I got a great title for my next novel!”

Phil smiles. “And it is?”

“
Bleaching the Bones
.” Charlie slaps his thigh. “Isn’t that great?”

“
Wow,” says Phil. He moves a little to the right and casts his lure into the sea. He’s shaking his head. He happens to know that Charlie, who calls himself a novelist, has never written a word in his life. But he’s come up with lots of terrific titles for novels.

999

Persistence is about the start—actually putting the pen to page, the fingers to keyboard. If you don’t start, you’ll never get there.

999

What does it take to persist until your novel is published? Guts, insanity, intensity, determination, stubbornness, and, most of all, passion.

999

For me, novel writing is creative and exciting. It’s all about feelings. It’s also, emphatically, about getting published. Writing with any other goal is like one hand clapping. Very Zen, but not where I’m at.

I write for many reasons. Writing satisfies something deep and personal inside me. But I always aim to get published.

999

Maybe it’s all about our individual need to overcome obstacles. Maybe persistence in writing a novel is simply a desperate, stubborn belief that it
matters.

Writing, and the persistence it takes to do it—to finish, revise, rewrite, edit, and sell a story or a novel—fulfills my need to have my imagination transformed into reality.

999

Phil the surf-caster knows all about persistence.

He was always a doer, a worker, a mover. An Olympic-caliber fencer in college, he knew what it meant to dig in, to work hard, and to keep going when the going got tough. Phil had grit, and he usually succeeded. After college, he attended the esteemed Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Then, bam! He sold his first novel. Not bad, eh?

Another novel soon flowed from his pen. It went…nowhere. Rejection notes filled his files.

Years passed. Phil got married, taught college English, sired children, traveled. And he continued to write novels—seven or eight of them, he can’t quite remember. He completed a novel every year or two. He kept writing novels.

He got nothing but rejections. After that first triumph, Phil met with no success at all.

But he persisted.

Twenty years after the sale of his first novel, he sold his second one.

Philip R. Craig now writes the popular Martha’s Vineyard mystery series.

999

Don’t give up. It’s simple. Those three words define persistence

But, really, it’s all a crock, right? Surely, you’re thinking, I wouldn’t have been asked to write this chapter in this book unless I’d published a novel. So who am I to talk?

What about all the hopeful writers who persist…and never make it, never get published, get nothing but rejections? No one asks them to write chapters about persistence.

Persistence alone matters.

It’s not a crock.

999

Here’s the recipe. True, it doesn’t work for everyone. You can follow the recipe and still fail. Haven’t you ever made a lousy meal even though you followed the recipe?

But if you
don’t
follow this recipe, you stand
no chance
of getting published.

Write every day.

Read all sorts of fiction. Read constantly.

Join a workshop or writing group.

Complete your manuscript. Finish what you start.

Revise it. Then revise it some more.

Give it to several trusted readers. Ask for their suggestions. Insist on candor.

Revise it again.

Get an agent.

Keep doing it.

Keep learning, improving, applying what you learn.

999

In 1993, I joined a writers group. We had a dozen members, and each week we read two of our members’ pieces. Most readings were from novels-in-progress.

One member, Ethan, was a talented writer. His stories were rich in voice and personality. He could paint vivid scenes and create memorable characters. But he was still a novice. Even his best stuff needed revising.

Whenever Ethan’s work was critiqued, he’d take copious notes and listen intently to our discussion about the scenes he’d presented to the group. We’d comment on what he’d written with great thought and energy and feeling, all with the aim of helping him make it better.