I cannot resist being caught up in the post-Thanksgiving shopping mania. Here's my deal. Purchase the ebook original Drop By Drop: A Thriller for $3.99 and I will send an e-copy of Smasher: A Silicon Valley Thriller to you for free!
Here's what Andrew Gross, New York Times best-selling author, said about Drop by Drop: "No one puts the crosshairs on Washington, terrorism, and intrigue better than Keith Raffel." Drop by Drop has 19 reviews on Amazon.com, all 5 stars, and not one was written by a relative!
Smasher was a national bestseller and has been optioned for film. Publisher's Weekly wrote: "“Raffel blends computer world wheeling and dealing with the academic world's lust for glory and fame in his compelling second mystery...."
Details: Purchase Drop by Drop from amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, smashwords.com, or the ibookstore in iTunes by 11.59 PM on Sunday, November 27. Then forward your proof-of-purchase to keith@keithraffel.com. Please let me know whether you prefer the Kindle or ePub format and I will email an e-copy of Smasher to you. That's it!
Yesterday was the anniversary of the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States. Each year since 1963, when November 22 slithers across the calendar, I remember that day and those that followed. The shock. The widow’s blood-stained dress. The riderless horse. The son’s salute.
In office President Kennedy stood for culture, for civil rights. He was a family man and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a student of history. Now we know the truth is far more nuanced in each case. (I visited the Kennedy Library and saw his college transcript: D+ in European History.)
I do yearn for those days when we had heroes. Remember? I did have heroes growing up, but none have lasted. Even if JFK was not the hero we thought, he did perform heroic acts. I’ve read the transcripts of the Executive Committee that met during the Cuban Missile Crisis. There he deserves his reputation. The generals wanted to bomb Cuba and invade it. He did save the world from nuclear war. And I must admit his inauguration address still inspires.
So for me November 22 is more than that horrible day when our president was murdered. In retrospect my listening over the school loudspeakers as a pre-teenaged boy was the beginning of growing up, of knowing how little can be counted on in this world we live in.
"I found Drop by Drop... to be an exciting political thriller as well as a fascinating philosophical political treatise. While the political thriller part offered the reader an excellent whodunit, the philosophical discussion is what makes it a powerful book to read....
"I love the title Drop by Drop because it serves as a metaphor for so much occurring in the book and perhaps society today. Drop by drop we are giving up our civil liberties. Drop by drop we are losing our principles. Drop by drop, our government officials break the law and others ignore it....
"I thoroughly enjoyed this book and believe that readers of all political persuasions will like it as well. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this as an upcoming movie. Five stars out of five."
Now I understand that Examiner.com is not the New York Times, but I don't care. (Well, maybe a tad, but why theTimes doesn't hire Ms. Farris is beyond me.) Any author will tell you the real joy of writing is connecting with that one reader, the one who sends you the laudatory email, the one who leaves you a Facebook message that she is gifting a dozen copies for Xmas. (BTW, I am not a friend of Ms. Farris, except now on Facebook and that doesn't really count, does it?)
Of course, it works the other way, too. Well-known mystery writer and critic Hallie Ephron gave my second book,Smasher, a real put-down in her Boston Globe review:
"We follow the narrator as he caroms among the story lines.... Too bad, because with so much going on, this novel desperately needs a main character with an emotional core that can hold it all together".
I suspect a few more people read the Globe's reviews than read Examiner.com's. While this less than stellar review might have hurt just a little less than committing hari kari with a butter knife, research shows that Ms. Ephron did me a favor. A study in Marketing Sciencefound that "For books by established authors, a negative review led to a 15% decrease in sales." Well that makes sense. But "for books by relatively unknown (new) authors, however, negative publicity has the opposite effect, increasing sales by 45%." This 45% is roughly the same, if not a little higher, than for positive reviews.
Those of us who are not quite selling as many books as James Patterson, Stephen King, or Dan Brown can take heart. A great review warms our hearts. A bad review increases sales. A win-win!
Is there one universe or many? What is the meaning of life? What happened to Jimmy Hoffa?
There are some questions that just cannot be answered.
As readers of this blog know, I am undertaking an experiment in e-publishing. My first two novels, both published in trade paper, did fine (and continue to sell). But I couldn't resist climbing aboard the ebook express and so I uploaded my latest effort, Drop By Drop: A Thriller, onto Amazon.com, BN.com, Smashwords, and Apple's iBookstore. Generally, all seems to be going well. While I miss bookstore signings, the fact I have already made more in royalties on Drop than on my last traditionally published book provides some solace.
But in the world of e-publishing, mysteries abound. There are questions for which I have no answers. Here are four:
1. How do people find out about an ebook original? I tried a little experimental advertising of Drop By Drop -- sales were not affected. Drop was greeted by a bunch of online reviews which definitely helped. Lately, there have been fewer. Still, sales have not gone down and are even trending upward. My experience is not unique. I have spoken to a couple of friends whose books were made available on the Kindle with little uptake. Only months later did their sales zoom. Why? They don't know. There's an invisible hand at work, I guess.
2. Living as I do in Silicon Valley, a few miles away from 1 Infinite Loop (Apple HQ), many readers tell me they have purchased their copy of Drop from the iBookstore. I also read about authors selling scads of books on BN.com. So here's the question: Why do I sell 20 times more books on Amazon than Barnes and Noble's BN.com and 9 times more than on Apple's iBookstore?
3. The United States has about 312 million people. The United Kingdom has about 64 million or about 20% as many. According to estimates, 750M paper-and-ink books were sold in the US in 2010 and 229M in the UK or about 30% as many. I did some Googling. According to these links, US ebook sales were $441M in 2010 and in the UK were £180M or about 60% of the US total. So why am I selling 80 times more books on Amazon.com this month than on Amazon.co.uk?
4. My second book, Smasher, made it onto a national bestseller list and was optioned for film. Reviews in paper-and-ink newspapers and mystery and publishing magazines were great. Drop By Drop was reviewed only in online publications. Smasher sells for $2.99 and Drop for $3.99. Nevertheless, Drop is selling 14 times more copies than Smasher on Amazon.com so far this month. How come?
Attention: there may be a Nobel Prize in store for whoever can answer the first question of this post, but all you get for answering any of the four ebook questions is my thanks and appreciation.
I appeared on the TV show Press:Here this morning talking about ebooks and my checkered past. Scott McGrew of NBC, Mike Krey of Investor's Business Daily, and Jon Swartz of USA Today were my interlocutors. What do you think?
The reading world is in the midst of a war over formats. We've all been following the back-and-forth between Kindle/Nook partisans and those who defiantly hold on to their paper-and-ink books. Here's which side I come down on: both.
Don't you think we authors should strive to ensure our novels can be read however our readers want to read them -- whether as words on a paper page or on an LCD screen? And what about those who might want to use their ears rather than their eyes to "read" a book? Fine with me. Let's add one more option to the mix then -- audiobooks.
My first two books have just hit the format trifecta. Dot Deadand Smasher are now available as audio downloads for iPods, MP3 players, and such on both Audible.com andAmazon.com. (You can listen to samples here and here.) Both are still available as ebooks and trade paperbacks. (Readers, pick your poison.) My third novel, Drop By Drop, is currently available only as an ebook, but if it continues to sell well (fingers crossed), I'm hoping it will be offered in print and as an audio book as well.
One side benefit to all these different formats is a flowering of covers. Dot Dead has one cover doing double duty for the ebook and trade paper and another for the audio version. Smasher -- lucky fellow -- has a different cover for all three formats. Drop By Drop is available in just the one format and hence has only one cover at present. If my arithmetic is correct, that makes a total of six covers. I'm pretty fond of all of them, but I do wonder which ones you prefer. Please let me know in your comments below or over at Inkspot!
I grew up in a lazy college town surrounded by orchards. Two-thirds of the country’s apricots were grown right there in “The Valley of Heart’s Delight.” We didn’t lock our doors. Teenagers would stick their thumbs out on the main drag and get rides to school. The local university was informally referred to as “The Farm.”
Do you know what? I’m still there. I live only eight houses away from my parents’ old place. Two of my kids graduated from the same high school I did and I have one about to be a sophomore and one who should show up there as a freshman in two years. But almost everything has changed in a single generation.
When I went to Palo Alto High, I was friends with the daughter of the school custodian. I’ll bet anything that no children of a school custodian live in the Palo Alto of today. Like schoolteachers, fire fighters, or police officers, they just couldn’t afford it. When my parents moved to Palo Alto, they bought their first house for $29,500. Now Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, has bought a house in town for $7 million. (Thank goodness, I bought a house here long ago.)
(photo from Wikipedia--one of Facebook's former buildings)
What happened? Somehow my hometown of Palo Alto became ground zero for world technology. Orchards filled with cherries and apricots have been replaced by tilt-up buildings filled with software engineers and MBAs. The Valley of Heart’s Delight has been transmogrified into Silicon Valley. Facebook is headquartered in town as is the world’s largest technology company, Hewlett-Packard. Google’s closer to my place than either, just over the city limits in Mountain View. Venture capital firms, trendy restaurants, and startups have pushed out the hardware stores, supermarkets, and bookstores in downtown Palo Alto that catered to local residents. In addition to Mark Zuckerberg, another high tech icon, Steve Jobs, lives here. Stanford University is now known throughout the world. San Francisco has become a place where Gen Y high tech employees eat, sleep, and cavort on the weekends while spending the week commuting down 101 to Palo Alto and other Valley cities. (Does that make San Francisco a suburb?)
It’s weird. I saw an article that mentioned three cities driving the world economy – New York, Shanghai, and Palo Alto. Wow! One of those cities has 23 million, one eight million, and one 60 thousand. Palo Alto now represents the high tech world in the same way Hollywood does show business.
I left Palo Alto to go to college and stayed away for 13 years. But I couldn’t resist the siren call of my hometown. And now I love having my kids go to the same high school I did, but wish they could have what I had in those simpler times.
(photo from Wikipedia--Palo Alto High)
But if push came to shove, I would not change a thing. Here in Palo Alto I’ve had the rush of working day and night to do my bit to make an Internet software company successful. I love the drive, the excitement, the people, and the opportunity it gives to build something. The Silicon Valley city-state of Palo Alto has even provided a rich vein of ore to mine in mysteries and thrillers. Plenty of crime fiction novels are set in New York, LA, and Washington, but few here. And why not here? Silicon Valley is where board members of the world’s largest high tech company hire private eyes to spy on each other. Where CEOs buy cocaine for their employees and are sentenced to prison for backdating stock options. We have as much ambition, greed, wealth, and criminal impulses as anywhere. Take that Wall Street, Hollywood, and Capitol Hill!
And yet, in a mental archeological dig, I am still reminded of the way Palo Alto used to be. My best friend from those days (and now) lives down the block, and I run into my high school girlfriend every couple of months. Beneath a thin mask that adds only a few character lines, their faces look pretty much the same. Sometimes one of my kids brings a book home from the school library, and I’ll see the name of one of my classmates scrawled inside the cover. When I consult with my lawyer, I remember sitting in the high school bleachers with a bunch of other elementary school friends and rooting for him, the best high school halfback we’d ever seen. That old Palo Alto is a ghost town occupying the same space as the high tech icon of today. I count myself lucky to live in both.
Zelda Shluker of Hadassah Magazine, the largest circulation Jewish periodical in North America, did a summer "round-up of new thrills and chills" and included an insightful review of Drop By Drop. It's interesting though, that as perceptive as the review might be, there's no good quote that can be pulled out of it. Please let me know what you think of the review.
When Sam Rockman’s pregnant wife, Rachel, is killed in a terrorist explosion at San Francisco airport, his life and psyche are upended: He leaves his position as a professor of history at Stanford to become staff director to a senior member on the Intelligence Committee. The usually liberal Rockman is so angry he is ready to support a bill that will let the C.I.A. and the military operate inside the United States against terrorists.
But the administration is trigger-happy. After hazardous material is found in a Florida highway crash—the administration says the trail leads to a Russian source by way of Sudan—the president has bombers and cruise missiles ready to attack Sudan. There is a strong movement afoot to repeal the 22nd amendment, to allow the tough anti-terror president to run for a third term.
The plot of Drop By Drop is not inherently Jewish, but Sam is, and you are reminded of this throughout; when the president, who invites Sam (who becomes a target of a killer) to head the national anti-terrorism effort, worries that having so many Jews on his staff will trigger paranoia “out there.” Though Sam believes Judaism is less about that you think and more about what you do, his desperate search for tikkun olam is part of learning how to live with his grief.
Now that I’ve been writing full-time for about four years, friends and relatives are finally getting used to the idea. I’ve impressed upon them that writing a novel does indeed count as work. They have learned not to refer to my time in the software world as “back when you were working.” And maybe out of fear of being a defendant in a wrongful death action brought by my heirs, they no longer ask if I am enjoying “retirement.” That vein that starts throbbing on my forehead gives them a warning that an apoplectic fit cannot be far away. In fact, many of those friends tell me something like, “Actually, I’ve read your latest book and it’s pretty good.” I don’t know if I should be insulted by the tone of surprise, but I’ve decided to just go with it and say “thank you.”
Well, I can’t leave well enough alone. I’m screwing the whole thing up. I’ve gone and taken on a day job. Why would I do something like that? I cannot say that writing novels has been quite as lucrative as working in software, but it’s not just the money. (I can’t say money plays no role at all. It was Dr. Johnson who said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”) For my entire post-college life I’ve just gotten that itch to try something new every four, five, or six years. And happy as I was spending my days in my neighborhood café rapping out the stories of Ian and Rowena and Sam and Cecilia, I still am excited to be started something new. Leaving aside a few flings like my six months as a gambler at the race track, I figure this newest incarnation is my fifth.
I’ve overcome the shame of admitting that I went to law school. Even worse, I went intending to become a corporate lawyer. A summer job at a Wall Street firm cured me of that folly, and I decided instead to do my bit in saving the world. (Another folly.) I pounded the hallways of the Capitol in Washington and was hired as the junior of three lawyers on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Before the end of my first year, the other two had left. I was 27 years old and the senior lawyer on the committee overseeing the government’s secret intelligence activities. Holy s**t! (I mined that experience in my latest book, Drop By Drop.) Then I got a little too big for my britches and went home to Palo Alto to run for Congress. My experience running for elective office was like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. No matter how much fun the ride was, what I remember is the landing. Splat – like an overripe tomato hitting a concrete floor! So ended my life in politics and career #1.
Next I landed at ROLM Corporation in Silicon Valley, where Ken Oshman, a brilliant and demanding executive who’d been CEO of the company from his 20s, took a chance on me. I was there when we introduced the first successful corporate voicemail systems. After we sold the company to IBM, I stuck with high tech, but eventually found myself in a company where I loved my colleagues, my boss, and the product, but I was still getting a little bored. So I did what you do in Silicon Valley under such circumstances. I left my job and started a company. That was the end of career #2 as a high tech employee and the beginning of #3 as an entrepreneur.
After six years of 70 hour weeks, we sold the company. Part of closing the deal was promising to stick around for awhile. Once my indentured servitude had lapsed though, I left and started casting around for my next move. I thought about starting another company, but an old Japanese proverb kept running through my head: “Every person should walk to the top of Mount Fuji, but only a fool does it twice.”
And so ended my third career and the start of #4 as a novelist. I love writing. When I walk into my neighborhood café, the staff turns down the music and brings me my pot of green tea. I put on noise-canceling headphones and pretty soon I’ve made the jump to another world where I have adventures as another person – one braver, smarter, and more attractive to women than I am. I’ve written five manuscripts. Midnight Ink published Dot Dead and Smasher. Drop By Drop has just come out as an ebook original – which is going great. I have delivered two more manuscripts to my agent. Writing is a great gig. But still, dammit, I found myself needing to scratch that itch to try something new.
I knew I didn’t want to do the same thing again. Whenever I thought about it, a picture of Mt. Fuji would pop into my brain.
At a New Year’s party at the beginning of the year, I mentioned to a friend that I was feeling that itch to try something new. She said something to a friend of hers, who in turn said something to her husband. And the upshot of all that? I’ve just started a job at a genetic sequencing company. What the heck is that? Well, it turns out that humans have 21,000 genes that are written in something like computer code. It cost over a billion dollars to sequence all of a human’s genes in the Human Genome Project that finished up in 2003. The company I’m at now does it for less than one hundred thousandth as much. Why does it matter? Sometimes when one or more of those genes run amok, cancer results. Anomalies in other genes can lead to a predisposition for heart disease or Alzheimer’s. Researchers are figuring all this out. In the not distant future, it will possible to take medication targeting our own specific genetic make-up (or genome). We’ll find out if we have a predisposition for diabetes or cancer and have the option to change our diet and exercise patterns accordingly. I participated in Silicon Valley’s Internet revolution. This was a chance to participate in the personalized medicine revolution that is definitely coming! Could not say no!
It turns out to be harder to leave career #4 behind than my first three. On the job only for a week and I already have ideas for thrillers set in the world of DNA sequencing and research. Yes, I am starting another career, but without abandoning the old one. I am still an author.
San Jose Mercury News Columnist Mike Cassidy and I sat down in my living room to discuss ebooks and my writing career. Over on the left is the online version of his story that ran on the front page of last Friday's business section. (Click here to read.) The headline hints at a peculiar phenomenon. I fled high tech to get into novel-writing. Now by publishing Drop By Drop as an ebook, I find myself living in a mash-up of the software and authorial worlds.
BTW, did you know The Merc trails only The New York Times and LA Times in circulation among big city dailies? (Click here.)
by Keith Raffel. (E-book, $3.99) 
