Unfinished Business #7: Praying for a Flood

A couple of weeks ago, I sent the final files for my ripping horror yarn Dragon’s Ark into Lightning Source/Ingram: Its short, sometimes pot-holed road to publication was reaching its terminus. I received my first copy at the end of March. It’s a lovely cover as you can see—or at least lovely in the Gothic sense: stark, hypnotic, forceful, brilliant.

In the run-up during the weeks before, Joel Friedlander, my interior designer, suggested planting a few words from one of the blurbs I’ve received on the front page, under my byline. I selected some of David Corbett’s kind and excellent words, but when I presented it to cover designer Cathi Stevenson, she couldn’t make them fit. Nor, I decided, would they have fit well higher up the cover because they might have distracted from the “Dragon’s” cruel, compelling stare. I love it as it is, how he grabs the eyes, unapologetic in his ruthless intelligence and ferocity, a character out of classic horror fiction. Like I always imagined Dracula would be.

I imagine bookstore customers coming upon it. They freeze suddenly, sunk into dumb hypnosis. They then marching stiffly over to the cashier: “Must . . . buy  . . . Dragon’s Ark . . .  mmm . . .  no . . .  buy TEN . . . copies . . . Dragon’s Ark.”

On March 31, I sent my approval for Dragon’s Ark to be released.

April 26, 2011, I thought. That day draws closer.  Plans started to congeal for the week leading up to that date. I ordered 22 copies from Ingram (my credit card screamed as its flesh was torn once again), ten of which will be for sale at my first public reading on Sunday, April 17; the rest for individual sales and gifts.

I suppose I should have waited awhile. The next day, April 1, 2010, my email box displayed a Facebook message from lovely FB friend Janna Shoemaker:

“I ORDERED your book Dragon's Ark from Amazon, I should be getting it in a week!! I CANT WAIT TO READ IT :D Thanks ! ;).”

I stammered out a reply, something along the lines of: er, um, really wasn’t intending on releasing it now you know. I was kinda gonna wait . . . .

And then I sighed . . . Oh, the hell with it . . . Let's go! as Pike Bishop says in The Wild Bunch.

You can buy Dragon’s Ark right now at your local bookstore (the ethical preferred method), or you can order it here at the non-taxpaying corporation called Amazon, at Barnes and Noble, or you can wait a couple weeks until it’s ready for the KindleNookPad.

Since then, I’ve found two text errors. I won’t tell you what they are. For those who collect ephemera such as print and continuity errors in books, you’ll have to go out and buy a copy. (People do this with movies—even great ones—so I imagine they do it with books, too. A challenging exercise in detective work, not necessarily hostile.)

I’ll find more errors. Maybe some of you will tell me yourselves. However the news comes, it’s best not to think about it now, even though I know that there will be readers who throw books into the trash the second a comma slips or an unzipped modifier shows the slightest dangle.

I will receive bad reviews. I will also receive positive reviews. And I will receive views that are negative, but interested and thoughtful and speaking with a sound, quiet voice—“Nice try, Burchfield, but here’s where you went wrong.” I look forward to those. You have to step around in front of your ego if you want to be good at what you do.

As for persnickety Amazon flatheads, like John Waters’ Serial Mom, they only want to stick their scissors in someone, it doesn’t matter who, or why. The sticking of the scissors, the knowledge that they’re causing pain, that’s the thing. They’ve been with us since the dawn of consciousness, through the Hill at Calvary, through the last awful century and into this one. There’s no point in writing for them. It’s one of the things I hate most about the Internet. Sometimes I think the web is nothing but a chorus of psychopaths, drowning out the best voices among us.

And there will also be able to who simply “don’t like this kind of thing,” whether because it’s genre fiction or horror fiction. Or maybe they think I “should be writing something else.” Nothing I can do about them, either. No book has ever pleased everyone. Dragon’s Ark will definitely be no exception.

Whatever happens, I’m not waiting to shoot up the bestseller lists. I won’t even check my sales figures for a little while. It’ll be drips and trickles at first, maybe for quite along time to come. But I’ll praying for a flood.

No, I’m not Alfred A. Knopf. (Hell, even they’re not Alfred E. Knopf anymore). Instead, let’s pretend it’s 1957 and I’m Roger Corman—a hero to scrappy talented independent artists everywhere--trying to make the best movie I can on only a dime. Maybe the editing’s a tad choppy, the dialogue flat, the camerawork shaky . . .

. . .  but darn aren’t we having fun . . . ?

Or, I hope, aren’t you having fun?

Dragon’s Ark: Go for it.

(re-edited 4/11/11)

Thomas Burchfield's contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark  is available right NOW, published by Ambler House Publishing and can be ordered through your local independent bookstore, through Amazon, Barnes and Noble and will be available as an e-book by the end of April. Other essays and postings can also be read at The Red Room website for writers. He can also be friended on Facebook, tweeted at on Twitter and e-mailed at tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net.
 

The Thrill of the Hunt

“Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot!”

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
“The Adventure of the Abbey Grange”

My wife’s smoke-sweet voice sings through the door ahead of her one cold mid-November night: “I say, Thomas! You’ve got a package!”

The package--ten uncorrected, advance review copies (meaning mistakes remain) of that roof-breaking bestseller that I know you all will line up in twos around the block to buy when it bangs into bookstores on March 15, 2011—Dragon’s Ark.

(At the exact same moment, servers everywhere will melt down into gooey rivers of silicon as you e-readers download it by the hundreds of millions, enough for me to build my mansion on the highest hilltop on Mars).

Cathi Stevenson’s cover--the snare that will grab your eye in the bookstore--is a sensation far beyond my original, clichéd expectations, an illustration so close to a scene in the novel—one she knew nothing of--that I tweaked the episode once more so cover and moment would entwine to shiver and twirl down your spine: His face, his eyes, hungry on you, a moon watching coldly as you scream, trapped, knowing it’s over, that it will be horrible and the only afterlife will be your screams. Joel Friedlander’s interior design is perfect for a story like this-elegant font, well-spaced, seems error free but for my own oversights. They both make me look so good, I almost want to write the whole damn thing one more time, but I can't.

I gasp and sprawl on my back upon the cold terra-cotta tile floor, struck down by the reality of my actions. Fear and Thrill roust about like monkeys around my heart, as though it were the highest tree in the forest.

Everything can go wrong. Nothing can go wrong. The book is great. The book is terrible. The book is everything in between, gray and forgettable. The book will sell a million copies and be despised. The book will sell zero copies and be loved. All possible movies reel through my mind, except Oprah, the Pulitzer and a visit from Homeland Security.

My wife’s fine pretty face shines upon me where I lay: “Come, Thomas, come! There is much left to do! The hunt must go on!”

The hunt for the reading world’s attention; the hunt for readers. I hunger for them. I'm looking at you. See my eyes glitter with hope?


And remember: even if I was with Random House, I'd still likely be doing this all myself.

That Saturday morn we tuck the box into the back seat of the RAV4. Elizabeth chauffeurs me to five bookstores scattered around Oakland-Berkeley, all indie stores, cozy enclaves where beloved antiquated objects still thrive.

A long line stretches along the street outside the first store. I ask someone in line the score. “Cookbook signing” and a name and title not Amanda Hesser, not The New York Times.

“Let’s go,” I growl like Parker. “They’ll look right through me, resent the interruption and forget me like flat beer. Come back later.”

But as we leave the line behind, I wish I had my postcards to pass along the row while I slap their surprised faces with the novel. Maybe it wouldn’t get me more than a shove on the beezer, but there’s no bad publicity. Not now. Not until I throw up and pass out at my first public reading (if I get a first reading; if every Bay Area bookstore doesn’t lock its doors and pull the shades against me: NO BOOKSTORE HERE!).

The next bookstore goes bingo. They’d just moved to a new spot, I haven’t shopped there in years and the place looks swell though still unpacked; the owners, friendly and interested; their duo of cats bow before me. My gut clenches when I hear I missed an event on vampire fiction the night before, the kind of happening I need to know if, to be at. I buy a John Dickson Carr novel as a token (tokens are all I have to pay in return).

On the way out, I say hopefully, “At least you’ll find me a competent writer.”

“Already looked inside.” Owner smiles. “Yeah, you are.”

Another solid drop at the next store, another famous genre shop and the most book-jammed of them all, so booked up, I tremble. What if my single effort drowns beneath the roiling paper-and-board sea of stock, like a small child in a big swamp? Oh well. I buy Joe Hill’s 20th Century Ghosts.

Store number four, late afternoon, rain low across the sky. I walk in, start my spiel: “ . . . and it’ll be out in March 2011 and it’s available through Ingram—”

“Ingram” is a black magic word. The store owner’s head balloons and explodes the second it’s spoken, a match to a short fuse  Bone, blood, and gray everywhere, windows shatter, shelves topple.

I stagger out the smoking door, my garments charred and shredded: “Mmm. Guess not everyone gets their books through Ingram.” Can’t know everything, can I? I say, my chin aloft, chipper with hope. Onward, Jeeves, onward!

By the time I cross the street to the next, last store, I’m miraculously cleaned up. It goes so smoothly, I now remember nothing of what I said, probably a good thing. By now I’m out of money, the only real book I want is Le Carre’s latest, but I must walk out one book less and pray I haven’t left a retailer’s resentment behind with my creation.

On Thanksgiving, I drop a copy at an excellent store in Burbank and later, back up here, leave one at my favorite independent local store, then another at a store in downtown Berkeley, which may not work because the store’s new fiction section is a small, discrete, huddled, facing away from the
waves and walls of used books rising behind it.

You try this, you try that. If something works, you try it again. If it doesn’t, try something else. It’s not the falling down, the slammed doors. It’s the not getting up, not knocking at the next
door. Sometimes they say yes. Nobody loses all the time.

Checks from my business haven’t arrived in for awhile, so spending is a frozen stream, but the hunt goes on, the free things I can do, whether by strung-together tin cans or Internet.  Bloggers and bookstore sites, each gets the news release, then is placed on two lists, one in Word, the other in the e-mail address book. I receive my first blurb, into the news release it goes. I sit at a bar, my book and cards displayed. Like the hunter, I watch for movement, my ears open and perking: “Say, pal, what’s that you got there?”

Maybe you’ll see me, my eyes fevered and focus, my hidden tale curling a grin my face, eager to be told. Maybe you should ask. Many have. Get in line. Maybe I’ll buy you a beer.

(re-edited 12/11/10)





Copyright 2010 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by Author


Thomas Burchfield's contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark will be published March 15, 2011 by Ambler House Publishing. Other essays and postings can also be read at The Red Room website for writers. He can also be friended on Facebook, tweeted at on Twitter and e-mailed at tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net.

E-Books: Here to Stay . . . But Where?

You’ll get no argument from me: E-readers and e-books are here to stay.

However, I’ve yet to buy an e-reader. I’m traditionally a second—or third--generation adapter: Wait until the bugs are worked out, prices fall (and my income rises), and, in the case of e-readers, distribution issues are settled. Right now, the iPad looks like the one that I want, even after my disappointment with the iPhone.

I wonder though: How far will e-books  penetrate the world of readers? Pretty far, it's fair to say, but will it be as far as the tech-topians promise? Might these dreamy notions fall a little short, along with other such predictions as the jetpack, the self-cleaning living room and “someday humans will no longer have to eat”?

Now, as a self-publisher, I’m no growling Luddite Fool. When my contemporary Dracula novel Dragon’s Ark (which you all will read, of course) comes out in March 2011, you’re darn right I plan to distribute it as an e-book through both Smashwords and Scrib’d, plus any other major e-book distribution systems that should appear between now and publication day. (The way Tech World changes, I won’t be surprised if both distributors suddenly become as passé as Lady Gaga should be right now.)

Nevertheless, Dragon’s Ark as an e-book still lingers far back in my mind, like a forgotten thumbnail on my e-drive. I’m much more thrilled by the ten advanced reading POD copies I ordered from Lightning Source now sitting in a box on the piano downstairs, ready to be placed in the hands
of actual willing book dealers and interested reviewers. Solid material objects, tangible books, 6” x 9”.with both heft and a knockout cover (by Cathi Stevenson). My heart glows with romance.

In one of his recent postings, the excellent Joel Friedlander (one of independent publishing's more tireless promoters and my book’s interior designer) claims that, statistically, more people are downloading and reading books than ever. The downloading number is easy to track, but the reading? Beyond self-reporting, I don’t know how the number of actual
readers can be confirmed.

And so, I wonder, how many of these e-books are being actually read? Or downloaded and simply forgotten among all the other noise that sprinkles onto our hard drives every day? This is especially important to consider when e-books are being sold at prices as low as 99 cents. At that
that price, that latest YA bodice ripper you bought from Smashwords could well find its way to the bottom of the digital sock drawer. (I bought the e-book of Kemble Scott’s The Sower for $2.00 and still haven’t read it.)

A bound dust-jacketed copy of War and Peace and an e-book of same are certainly the same in terms of
the text contained, but they still feel distinct from each other. One has the weight of a lovingly bounded, attractive real-world object that waves at you from your bookcase or night table whenever you pass by. (“Hey! Your wife gave me to you for Christmas! I cost $37.00! You promised you’d read
me someday!”) And when I did hold in my lap in bed, I felt the sweep and weight of its long human history, how it stretches across time. Like the soul, it felt immeasurable and lofty.

The e-book of War and Peace, I’m less sure about. As a thumbnail on my e-reader it may seem closer to a mere abstract idea, with the same status as the folder marked “Real Estate” (which I haven’t opened in two years). Among all the other files I’m sure to have on my iKindle (or KindlePad), it may be just another thumbnail. Assuming it’s cheaper, it may be even be easier to forget about. And I’ll
never receive a book of that caliber as a gift in that format.

E-readers and e-books are not the same thing. Where one goes, the other doesn’t necessarily follow. I can see using my e-reader to download basic reference works for the editing business or a book I’m writing. Or to read a novelist I’m new to and whom I’m not sure I want taking too much money or
shelf space. I’m still likely to prefer my hard copy issues of The New Yorker, especially if I forget it on the bus, drop it in the bathtub, or leave it out for my in-laws' dog to chew on. With
bound paper, I won’t be out so much.

Now, I’ll hazard a couple of predictions:

First, e-books will almost completely fill the role once played by mass market and pulp paperbacks. And, as happened with the mass markets, some fine books will wind up buried among the hundreds of thousands of volumes of  Tommy Tinkle, Teenage Detective versus the Zombie Army and DIY
Dentistry—Is It for You?

(Note to the ghosts of Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford: It’s not any easier now than it was in your day. Getting novels like Pop. 1280 and Wild Wives published is no longer the challenge. Getting them read is.)

Second, I’m willing to bet that Dragon’s Ark will sell more copies as an e-book than it will as a POD trade paperback. BUT—and here’s what I find interesting—of those who download it, how many will get around to actually reading it versus those who bought it in paper?

I’d sure like to know.

Whatever happens, despite the advice I’m hearing, my book won’t be going for 99 cents. Whatever you can say for or against Dragon’s Ark--a universe-and-a-half away from War and Peace--it’s not that forgettable.

Copyright 2010 by Thomas Burchfield 

Edited 11/19/10; 11/28/10

Photos by author


Thomas Burchfield's contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark will be published March 2011 by Ambler House Publishing. His essays and blog entries can be read at The Red Room website for writers. He can also be friended on Facebook, tweeted at on Twitter and e-mailed at tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net.