Dot Dead Diary

Swan Song

I said I'd report on book sales this weekend.  Saturday I spent from 10 to 6 at Kepler's in Menlo Park.  The head buyer reported the store had 86 copies of Dot Dead in stock.  When I left, I thought all had been sold, but I was in the store this morning to pick up two books and spotted one more on the mystery table. Someone must have taken one to look over and been too embarrassed to put it down by me.  So maybe only 85 were rung up.  Anyway for a store that had suffered through a near death experience two years ago, Kepler's was bustling!  In the few moments when there was a lull, I chatted with Peter Roizen who was in the store hawking his ingenious word game, Wild Words.  Three Palo Alto High School classmates, two of whom I hadn't seen since graduation, also stopped by and said hi.  So did the queen of Palo Alto crime fiction, the talented Lora Roberts.  Sometimes it's just nice to be living in your hometown.

Yesterday I headed down to Oakridge Mall in San Jose along with my wife and kids.  They shopped and went to the movies while I stood near the front entrance of Borders with a stack of 52 Dot Deads.  Different demographic, but the book sold just as well as in Menlo Park.  I chatted with a Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Department detective and challenged him to figure out the murderer by page 50.  I ran out of books before the rest of the family was through the checkout line at Target. 

That should be it for bookstore appearances for Dot Dead.  Two days after New Year's I'm going to start on my take-no-prisoners campaign to complete a first draft of a sequel.

Happy holidays!

An Author's Got to Dream

What allows a book that sells modestly when it comes out to build momentum?  We've all heard the story of The Red Tent, which built sales through book groups and word-of-mouth until it sold millions of copies.  Same thing with The Kite Runner, which didn't take off until it came out in a trade paper format.

Of course, I dreamed of the same thing happening to Dot Dead sales.  (I also dream of the S.F. Giants winning the pennant.  What do you expect?  I write fiction where anything can happen.)  What Arthur Miller's Willy Loman says about his line of work applies to writers, too, doesn't it?  "A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory."

Dot Dead has done well, and I'm grateful.  It's in its second printing and has a shot to go to a third.  I have not been passive in watching the sales figures.  All fall, two or three days a month, I've been out flogging the book at Bay Area bookstores.  My worst showing was 27 copies and my best around 60.  I'm probably making around $8 per hour in royalties and that doesn't count the writing time.  Still, I'm trying to get the word out and it's working.  More and more, people I talk to in these stores tell me they've read the book and enjoyed it.  Many past readers even stand with me and tell passersby to purchase the book.  Gratifying.

Despite these efforts, indicators show little chance of Dot Dead reaching some kind of tipping point.  Last fall the Palo Alto Library had 40 holds on ten copies of the book.  Now four copies have been "withdrawn" from circulation (i.e., they've been sold in the monthly library sale) and only one of the remaining six is checked out.  My Amazon.com numbers have floated up from the 2,000's to today's 131,000 and probably tomorrow's 300,000+. 

As readers of this blog know, I have finished a second manuscript.  My new year's resolution is to put my head down and get cracking on Book #3 which will be a sequel to Dot Dead.  I've got a terrific idea to hang the book on. 

I want to go out with a bang in pushing Dot Dead though.  This Saturday I will be selling and signing at Kepler's.  Head buyer Frank Sanchez thinks I can sell all 86 copies they have on hand.  Maybe.  Kepler's has sold around a thousand copies of the book.  Then Sunday I will be at the Border's at Oakridge Mall in San Jose trying to convince shoppers that Dot Dead makes a good Xmas present.  I'll let you know how it goes.

Research on Small Places

Barry Eisler just got back from doing research in Istanbul.  On a research jaunt for her upcoming Granny Apples series, Sue Ann Jaffarian headed to Julian, California and had a ball staying at a quaint country inn.

And where do I get to go for research?  Paris?  Bali?  Samarkand?  Nope. The Los Altos, California branch of The Santa Clara County Library, just a few miles from the Raffel homestead. 

Why there?  the answer can be traced back to high school where I neglected to take physics.  I skipped it in college, too.  Well, my sins of omission have caught up with me after all those years.  For the sequel to Dot Dead, I need to grock the science of subatomic particles.  (If I told you why, it would kinda ruin the mystery.) Anyway, while you all are enjoying the holiday, I will be doing penance for my academic shortcomings by reading the eight books I picked up at the library this afternoon:  The Particle Hunters, The Elegant Universe, Particle Physics: A Very Short Introduction, The God Particle, The Oxford Guide to the History of Physics and Astronomy, From Clockwork to Crapshoot: A History of Physics, Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century, and Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions. 

I have a feeling I could have absorbed all this better when I was twenty.  OTOH, much of what I need to learn about had not been discovered back in those dark ages.  And to tell the truth, I might be looking forward to the reading after all.

Hitch and Me

It’s a little embarrassing when I’m asked which writers inspire me. Now, I love mysteries and have been reading them since I picked up my first Hardy Boys book decades ago. Like so many crime fiction authors I count Hammett’s Maltese Falcon, Chandler’s Philip Marlowes, and Macdonald’s Lew Archers among my all-time favorites.

But here’s the thing. All three of that Holy Trinity write about private detectives who solve mysteries and rescue maidens as part of their job. One of Chandler’s books is even titled, Trouble is My Business. When it comes to my own scribbling, I like writing not about someone who seeks trouble, but someone whom troubles ambush. You know, a poor schmuck whose comfortable existence is shattered by an unexpected crisis. I find inspiration for that kind of story not from any particular book, but instead from movies, from Alfred Hitchcock movies, in fact.

In a prototypical Hitchcock film some unsuspecting soul (often Jimmy Stewart) gets embroiled in a crisis. (Here are five of my favorite examples: A tourist stumbles upon the key to an insidious spy ring, ("The 39 Steps"), a tennis pro strikes up a conversation with a psychopath ("Strangers on A Train"), a small town woman discovers her uncle is a serial murderer ("Shadow of a Doubt"), an invalid sees a murder across the courtyard ("Rear Window"), an advertising executive is mistaken as a secret agent ("North by Northwest").) By the end of the last reel, no matter what initial reluctance has been shown, the protagonist has discovered unexpected resourcefulness and courage in doing the right thing.

I think the power in the Hitchcock formula is that the audience can identify with the protagonist. “Hey,” we might think, “I wonder how I would react if caught up in a spy ring or if the target of a serial murderer.” I know when I submerge myself in writing, it’s this idea of testing whether the main character has what it takes that drives the story forward.

In the private detective novel, main characters don’t change much; they do their job. In the Hitchcockian crime novel, main characters may lead a boring life at the outset, but by the end they have grown and become heroes.

(Cross-posted at the Inkspot blog.)

Do Not Watch These with Jello in Your Mouth

Hanukkah dinner is cooking downstairs so I only have a minute.  But I had to post these two videos for your holiday viewing enjoyment.

First is Jeff Shelby's news flash about fellow crime fiction author Lori Armstrong.  If you've seen it, watch again.

Second is a clip that captures what's going on -- with substantial hyperbole -- these days in my hometown of Palo Alto where much of Dot Dead is set.

Church of Books

#1 sent me an email entitled "Let's go!" with a link to this site which contained photos of a new bookstore in the Netherlands.  As soon as the euro goes down a little more, maybe I'll say yes.  It looks like they really worship books in Maastricht, doesn't it?