Dot Dead Diary

4 Unanswerable Ebook Questions

    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.

Under Cross-examination

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?

Palo Alto, My Hometown

Keith here.

(Photo credit: Palo Alto Historical Association)

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.

 

Keith 5.0

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.

Taking on The Merc

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.)

Trading Places

When I was a boy, my grandfather distributed Topps baseball cards. (Pez, too, but that's another story.) As you can imagine, I had quite a collection. I traded them with my chums and even clothespinned a couple of duplicates to the spokes on my bike to get just the right sound as I pedaled around the 'hood.

I was eight when we moved from Chicago to Palo Alto. My cards disappeared. My mom probably saw no reason to keep them. I guess the reason old cards are worth so much now is lots of moms saw no reason to keep them. (That one Willie Mays card on the left lists at $400; his 1952 rookie card lists at $3000.) I had some autographs, too, including one of Dale Long who hit a home run in eight straight games.

A baseball fan I remain, and my friends and colleagues know it. At the instant my Giants won the World Series last fall, I received a text from my literary agent that said, "Now you can die in peace." Thanks, Josh.

Nowadays there are shows where cards are sold and where all-stars sell their autographs, but I'm not interested in baseball cards and autographs anymore.

Two weeks ago, on March 26, I spoke at TEDx in San Jose. All attendees were given a pack of cards, one for each speaker. (That's the front and back of mine below.) People brought up my card for me to sign. For a moment - at least in my head - I was an all-star. And heck, don't we writers deserve the recognition that ballplayers get? Why doesn't someone start producing writer cards anyway? What would I give for a Malliet or Jaffarian? I'd buy one at any price. How about trading? Would anyone take 10 Raffels for one Hank Phillippi Ryan or Karen Olson or Cara Black? No? Okay. I'll give up a damaged Raffel for five Orloffs. (If he wins the Agatha, though, it will only take two.)

Let's deal!

High Tech to the Rescue of Independent Bookstores?

Of the 200 Borders stores across the company that are closing, I’ve done signings in half a dozen. That makes the chain's bankruptcy just a little more personal. I recently spoke to the proprietor of a large independent bookstore near where I live in Palo Alto. I suggested that there was some consolation -- at least Borders’ problems would be good for his store. He disabused me of that notion, saying that after getting stiffed for tens of millions of dollars by Borders, publishers are tightening up on credit with his store and other independents. He doesn’t need another problem given the threat posed by e-books to his book-and-mortar store.

So is there any future at all for the independent bookstore? Today, the independents, along with Borders and Barnes & Noble, are becoming less booksellers and more book showrooms. People wander through these brick-and-mortar stores, look around, and then go home to buy print-and-ink copies of their choices from Amazon or, alternatively, they buy downloads from Amazon or another e-book retailer. This is no secret. Booksellers at brick-and-mortar stores tell me looky-loos in their store shamelessly admit they are looking to find a good book so they can go home and purchase it over the Web. But here’s the critical point: these looky-loos prefer seeing books on shelves and talking to booksellers who know their stuff as compared to trolling through websites to look for a book to read. The problem with their preference, of course, is that there will be no book-and-mortar stores to shop at if people just come to bookstore to look without buying.

Google is making a first effort at addressing this problem. Google eBooks permits independent bookstores to offer their e-books on their websites today. (See here for example.) The store then gets a cut of the sale. Of course, buyers can also download books directly from Google’s own site. The portent may be promising, but even here in Silicon Valley not too many people are bothering to go through the bookstore sites. Still, here’s what I suspect is coming and, if it’s not, it should be. People who are checking out the shelves in an independent store will just point their iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android phone, e-book reading device at the book they want and have it instantly downloaded. The device will interpret the new generation barcode with the squiggly lines that’s already being used on billboards and magazines to send potential customers to websites, maps, videos, and such. (It's just to the left of the bottom of the Mountain Dew bottle in the ad to the right.) The e-book will be downloaded right then and there.

And guess what? Most of those devices have GPS software built in. That means Google eBooks or other e-book suppliers will know exactly what bookstore the purchaser is standing in and can pay a commission to the store. This way the store is compensated for acting as a showroom staffed with bibliophiles. By the way, with this approach, a user of Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader can just point it at a book on the shelf at a B&N and have the book ready to read, too. The model doesn’t work for the leading e-reader, Amazon’s Kindle, because Amazon doesn’t want you buying a book or e-book from anybody but them. On the other hand, a model where readers can download an e-book instantly while holding the print-and-ink version in their hands will begin to give Amazon a run for its money.

So, here’s the future. You'll go to your independent bookstore and point and click. Poof. An e-book is on your reading device even before you leave the store. Instant gratification. Rumor has it that the American Booksellers Association is working to make this all a reality. I can’t wait.

 

 

 

 

 

Left: That's #3 ready to download Marcus Sakey's latest.

Anglophilia Attack

It’s happened again. Like recurrent malaria, I’ve just suffered another attack of Anglophilia.

I’m not sure what brought it on, but it became particularly acute this week as I watched the six hour English-made miniseries Downton Abbey on PBS. There’s a beautiful estate, a righteous nobleman, a couple of headstrong daughters, a rich American wife, a downstairs filled with servants who have intrigues and loves of their own, and an acerbic harridan of a mother (played by the inimitable Dame Maggie Smith!).

I cannot pinpoint precisely when the mosquito-vector carrying Anglophilia bit me for the first time. I did love Sherlock Holmes as a boy. The first time I went to England I stayed a block from 221B Baker Street (or at least where it should be). After college, I studied English history over there along with cricket and lawn tennis and pubs and garden parties. What a life.

I remember Blackwell’s, my favorite bookstore in the world, located on Broad Street in Oxford. I know women who go shopping for shoes to cheer themselves up. Me? During my two years in England, when the least bit bored or out of sorts, I’d just drop by Blackwell’s and leave in the best of spirits. Back then, you didn’t even have to worry about paying for your books. On the way out of the store, I’d just wave a volume and call out my name. At the end of the quarter, a bill would show up. When it came time to move back to the States, I dropped off all my books at Blackwell's and they packed and shipped them to me. (My memory says there were four dozen cartons, but reason tells me there could not have been that many.)

In the last month or so I’ve read memoirs by Ivana Lowell about her privileged (and crazy) upbringing as granddaughter of a marquess and by Dame Antonia Fraser, historian, mystery novelist, daughter of an earl, and widow of Harold Pinter. I’ve also knocked off The Lessons by Naomi Alderman, which is set against a background in Oxford, and Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question, the Man Booker Prize winner that explores being a Jew in England – which I was, at least for two years.

The United States has a population over 300 million compared to England’s 51 million, but do we write six times more novels worth reading? And why do the English do television so much better than we do? In addition to Downton Abbey, thanks to Netflix, I’ve recently watched the fabulous mini-series The Politician’s Wife and State of Play; the movie version of the latter with Russell Crowe couldn’t hold a candle to the original.

I wish I could say the books I write have been influenced by my Anglophilia. Nope, not that I can tell. My two published books are set right smack dab in Silicon Valley where I grew up and live now. The action in my latest manuscript is centered in Washington, D.C. I think I’d better start following the example of pal and fellow Inkster G.M. Malliett, who is setting another series in England. (Her Wicked Autumn featuring an MI5 agent who has retired as an English vicar will be out, when else, this autumn.) Ah, her research trips must be wonderful. Maybe I should take a chance and get myself over there and wait for inspiration to overtake me. But in the meantime, I’ll just keep reading those English novels and watching those English TV programmes until this latest bout of Anglophilia subsides.

Cheers!

What's Coming? Something Real?

In 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010, I started a new book in January. Each year I finished that manuscript by December. About three weeks ago, I sent off my latest to my agent. What does that mean? I reckon that I should get started on something new. Right?

Like most writers, the most common question I'm asked is "Where do you get your ideas from?" I do have an idea for a book and like my Dot Dead and Smasher, it's set against a Silicon Valley background. Weirdly though, this time it's non-fiction. Here in the Valley, history is written and rewritten every day. Way back before I was a software guy, I was a history grad student. Maybe I can combine both those earlier callings with my current one as a writer. I'm going to call an editor friend of mine who specializes in business books and see if my idea makes sense to him. Wish me luck.

In Touch With Reality -- Maybe

As an author I spend an awful lot of time in Fantasyland. When I’m writing, that world seems just about as real this one. Remembering which world I’m in is important, but sometimes I get confused. Driving past Arastradero Road in the foothills above Palo Alto, I can say to someone, “Oh, this is where Rowena got run down.” And that someone can reply, “Oh, how sad, but, um, who’s Rowena?” And then I remember she’s a character in that other world which exists only in my mind and in the mind of readers of Smasher.

Now, though, I am really confused.

I’ve told friends that I just wanted the Giants to win the World Series before I die. Monday night I think I saw them win their fourth game on TV. Did I really? Am I still in Fantasyland?  I've never written anything so unlikely in one of my novels.

I grew up watching the Giants finish in 2nd place five straight seasons despite the presence of such baseball deities as Willie Mays and Juan Marichal. I was in the stands at Candlestick just before game 3 of the World Series when the Loma Prieta Earthquake struck. In 2002 I was not surprised when the Giants were up five runs only six outs away from winning the Series and still managed to lose to the Angels.

This lifelong experience with the Giants has colored my outlook on life. Something bad is always ready to snatch away consummation of your dream. This world-view might be what drove me to writing fiction. In Fantasyland I can control what happens.

So now I am still dazed. Did the Giants win or have I turned even more delusional?  Didn't I see Brian Sabean holding the World Series Trophy at the parade yesterday?  (See left.)

If this is a delusion, don’t wake me up!