Dot Dead Diary

A Fine and Dangerous Season -- The Movie

 

   Well, it’s not hard to get us writers spinning off into the realm of unreality – spending time in Fantasy Land is what we do for a living. It's been a week since Thomas & Mercer published A Fine And Dangerous Season. So it must be about time to start casting the movie, right?

   How about a little reminder of the plot of Fine and Dangerous? Twety-three-year-old John F. Kennedy is spending the fall quarter of 1940 at Stanford as a special student. (That’s true in the real world, too.) He meets law student Nate Michaels who is in some respects JFK’s mirror image: secular Jew rather than observant Catholic; San Franciscan rather than Bostonian; son of a crusading left-wing union official rather than of a buccaneering capitalist. Opposites attract and the two become best friends until an irrevocable falling out. Twenty-two years later, in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis, now-President Kennedy needs Michaels’ help to avert nuclear war.

   So (drumroll)…. Here’s what I came up with in my daydream of playing movie producer.

   Casting JFK is the key to the movie. My wife was watching TV the other night and I saw Dr. McDreamy on Grey’s Anatomy. Patrick Dempsey is charismatic, outgoing, attractive to women, and even close to the right age. (JFK was just about 46 at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.) On top of that Dempsey has even had practice in the role. He played the lead in JFK: Reckless Youth back in 1993. (Here's a clip.)

 

 

   

   So now who is going to be Nate Michaels? Intense. Introverted. Intellectual. How about Robert Downey, Jr.? Right age, too.

 

 

    

   Back in 1962, Jackie Kennedy was 30 years old. So we need someone dark and glamorous and young.  How about Anne Hathaway? I really do think there's a resemblance there, don't you?

 

 

   At Stanford in 1940, Nate has a girlfriend he has no right to have. She’s Miriam Coblentz, 19 years old and blonde. Dianna Agron plays someone around that age on Glee even though she’s 27. She's Jewish and from the Bay Area, just like Miriam. Let’s go with her.

 

 

  What about JFK’s right hand man, brother Bobby? He’s 37, shorter than JFK and toothier too. I haven’t seen Tobey Maguire around lately. Do you think he’s available?

 

   Whoever plays the cigar-chomping General Curtis LeMay, head of the air force, should have the inside track for a supporting actor Oscar. It’s a plum of a part. He’s done with 30 Rock, so let’s give it to Alec Baldwin. (Do you think he's willing to color his hair?)

   Nate’s back channel to Moscow runs through Maxim Volkov, head of the KGB in Washington. There’s no dancing, but I’d still like to make an offer to Mikhail Baryshnikov.

    

   At the end of the book, Nate finds himself leaping across the roofs of Washington with Russian femme fatale Natalya Leontieva while two agents of Soviet military intelligence give chase. I’ve heard her Russian accent on Castle. Sounded good to me. Come on down, Stana Katic.

 

 

   Don’t like any of my choices? Fine. Am open to any bankable actors you might suggest. And if there are any producers out there with a few tens of millions to spend? Just leave your name and contact info in the comment space below. 

   In the meantime, you could always try (gasp!) reading the book. (Click here.)

 
Keith

 

(Note: All photos of people above used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.)

A Beginning and An Ending

This week Thomas & Mercer, the mystery and thriller imprint of Amazon Publishing, is bringing out a re-edited version of my thriller A Fine and Dangerous Season. My heart is pounding against my ribcage with excitement. Does this mean more sales than ever? Does this mean I will become an author who can replace a day job’s earnings with royalties? Well, we’ll find out. But I figure at what may be a turning point, it’s also time to look back. How did I get here anyway?

Unlike so many writing friends, I never had my heart set on being an author. In fact, I never had my heart set on any one career. Before writing my first book, I worked on Capitol Hill as counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee (see photo on left -- that's me on the bottom right with Vice President Mondale et al.), ran for Congress, joined a high tech telecommunications company, and then gave up a sabbatical to jump to a small networking start-up. At the latter I loved my boss and co-workers, but after five years or so, I was feeling a little stale when I came across a course on mystery writing at UC Berkeley Extension and signed up. Margaret Lucke was a terrific teacher and gave me the impetus to start writing that first novel. However, after six months, I was still restless at my day job. So, I did what anyone in Silicon Valley would do – I started a company. No boredom there. It was years of 80-hour weeks while my half-done manuscript moldered in a desk drawer. Then the company began to get some traction, and I had a little free time. So out came the manuscript. I wrote for an hour weekdays starting at 5AM and, by packing a spare battery or two, I could rap on my keyboard for the six hours of cross-country airplane flights.

Once completed, I sent Dot Dead to agents. Lots of encouraging words, but only one word mattered – “yes” – and I didn’t hear that one from the first few dozen agents I queried. Finally, a former investment banker just starting a literary agency called and signed me up. Then it was her turn to circulate the manuscript, to publishers this time. Again the encouraging words without a contract. After around six months, though, came three yesses in the same week. We went with Midnight Ink, a prolific publisher of mysteries. A year-and-a-half after we signed the contract, the book was out. Oh, rapture! I was an author. At Book Expo America, Margery Flax and her crew of volunteers from Mystery Writers of America rounded up potential readers, and I signed dozens of copies (at left). While signing at the Midnight Ink booth during that BEA, I found myself next to a couple who had written a how-to book on tantric sex. “It really works,” the female co-author assured me.

What next? The company I had started was sold and then sold again. I decided to give this writing biz a fling and started writing full-time. Midnight Ink brought out Smasher, which made it onto a national mystery bestseller list and was even optioned for film. However, it didn’t exactly make it on to the NY Times bestseller list. Have you heard the joke about the difference between a mystery and a thriller? An extra digit in the advance. So I drew on my experience in Washington and wrote a thriller. My new agent sent it to the big deal publishers. Shades of the past. Lots of compliments but no “yes.” Well, I really am a Silicon Valley guy and it was time to try something new. I published Drop By Drop as an ebook only. And the experiment worked. I sold more copies and made more money than I had with either Midnight Ink book, but still not enough to replace what I’d been earning in my day job. Time to try again. Sitting in a café around the corner from my house, I wrote another thriller called A Fine and Dangerous Season set against the background of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

After I’d finished, I went to a New Year’s Party, and the host asked if I would consider going back to a Silicon Valley job. For something different and exciting, said I. She passed the word along and a few months later, I found myself at a genetics company even though I could barely spell “DNA.” It was a thrill to be there working with doctors and researchers trying to cure cancer and other genetic diseases, but then the company was sold last March and I decided to give this writer business another try.

In the meantime, A Fine and Dangerous Season made it to #8 on Barnesandnoble.com and #34 on Amazon.com. I finished a draft of a manuscript called Temple Mount – not surprisingly a thriller set in Jerusalem. I needed something to give it an extra boost. So I tried Kickstarter, which provides a platform to crowd-source funding for creative projects. With it I would raise money to print books, do marketing, throw a launch party, and more. But most important I would gather up a cadre of fans and friends who would become advocates of the book. Well, it worked. We raised $18K from around 200 supporters. Over 50 people paid $80 or more to have a shot at editing the book. A high school friend made over 3500 comments and suggestions. Instead of relying on a publisher, we had 200 people ready to stand behind the book. (You can see the video and site we used here.)

Ah, man plans and God laughs. In September I received an email from Amazon Publishing. They were impressed with how A Fine and Dangerous Season had been doing and wanted to bring it out under their Thomas & Mercer imprint. They spelled out the marketing resources Amazon would put behind the book and I was in – pending a check with the backers of Temple Mount. I wrote to them with the news and asked if we could postpone publication of Temple Mount since it made no sense publishing the two books on top of each other. I offered to refund anyone’s pledge. I was overwhelmed with the good wishes I received. I really did have 200 supporters who were invested in the success of my writing career. That felt pretty good.

So that brings us to now. Six weeks after signing a contract with Amazon Publishing, a re-edited version of A Fine and Dangerous Season is out as an e-book and for the first time, as a paper-and-ink “real” book. The hiatus between contract and signing on Fine and Dangerous was six weeks as compared to the 16 months for Dot Dead.

Enough looking back. Right now I can’t wait to see how A Fine and Dangerous Season does as a publication of Amazon’s Thomas & Mercer.

Kick Starting My Fifth Novel

I have published four books. My first two were done the traditional way – paper and ink. Neither showed up on the New York Times bestseller list, but I have no real complaints. Bookreporter.com called my first book “the mystery debut of the year” and the second made the top 10 on a national bestseller list for crime fiction and was optioned for film. Still for my third book it was time to move on. I wanted to reach more readers and my traditional publisher could not make that happen.

Now I’m a Silicon Valley guy by upbringing and inclination. My dad went to work at Ampex, the inventor of the videotape recorder, over 50 years ago. I myself helped start a company that pioneered delivery of software over the internet. Given that background, I could not resist trying the new way of delivering the written word to readers. So I published my next two books myself as ebooks. Making my books available via Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, and other sites gave readers the chance to read one of my books for less than a third the price of a physical copy. No surprise then that my readership expanded.

Now as I leave my day job and give up a regular paycheck, I’m ready to try another model. I am hoping readers, past and future, will join with me in publishing my fifth novel, Temple Mount, a thriller set in Jerusalem.

Readers can sign-up on Kickstarter to pre-order Temple Mount in either ebook or trade paper format. They can join me at the launch, help name characters, or even take out their red pencils and edit the book. I am figuring that crowd-editing will work better than any single editor ever could. The money raised will pay for getting the book ready for publication and launch and for marketing it afterwards. Most of all, I hope that those who join the team will feel they have a stake in the venture and will help spread the word about Temple Mount.

Take a look at the Kickstarter page here and see if all this makes sense to you. If it does, please spread the word. Readers like you will make this book happen.

Thank you,

Keith

Writing Thrillers That Are Not Too Heavy to Lift

How many words in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged?  561,996. 

Wow. I heard Penelope Lively, one of my favorite authors, talk about book length; she noted that a disproportionate number of her favorite novels were short.  She mentioned William Golding in particular whose Lord of the Flies comes in at 59,900 words.

I take solace in Ms. Lively’s comments.  So many of my thriller-writing friends and colleagues whine that their editors are making them cut their manuscripts from, say, 140,000 words down to 120,000.  Still 120,000 words is a long book.  I think there’s a certain machismo among thriller authors that impels them to write big books, books that take some effort to heft, books that take up lots of room on the shelf.  

When I write, I have the opposite problem. My first draft typically comes in around 50,000 words and then I have to figure out how to lengthen it. One reason for the short length is that I don’t do outlines.  In my hurry to find out what happens next to my characters, I sometimes write too cryptically in draft #1.  I know what’s happening in my head but do not put enough on the page for a reader to follow.  Filling in the necessary details is a chore for subsequent drafts.

Why am I so sensitive about word count right now?  On August 20, my next book, A Fine and Dangerous Season, will be a Nook First selection.  (That means it’s available for download exclusively on Barnesandnoble.com for four weeks.) It’s 61,865 words long, about the same length as Erich Maria Remarque's classic, All Quiet on the Western Front.

I suspect a thriller that length works better as an ebook.  The machismo of carrying around a 500-page tome disappears because a Nook or Kindle is the same handy size no matter how big the book files inside it are.

If I Got To Cast Drop By Drop, The Movie....

Out of the blue, a pair of award-winning screenwriters optioned my second book, Smasher, back in 2010. Reading the actual script last fall, I could just imagine the characters up on the silver screen in the local multiplex. Alas, not going to happen--at least not anytime soon. The option expired a few weeks ago. The screenwriters told me they have picked up assignments from producers who liked their treatment, but Smasher: The Movie was not going to be “greenlighted.” My agent went on suicide watch, but I had expected nothing so wasn’t disappointed (much).

What about my next book? In her review of Drop By Drop, Lynn Farris wrote she “wouldn't be surprised to see this as an upcoming movie. Five stars out of five." So why not Drop By Drop as feature-length film even if not Smasher? Why not go along with the fantasy? After all, I live in the world of fiction. Let’s cast the film!

Here’s a précis of Drop By Drop:

Stanford professor Sam Rockman suffers the crushing loss of his wife in a bombing at San Francisco Airport. Seeking meaning in the ruins of his life, he accepts an offer to work for the Senate Intelligence Committee. What Sam wants out of his stint in D.C. is revenge for the death of his wife. What he gets is danger and betrayal. Secret documents are showing up on his doorstep. Russians are trying to poison him. Sam finds allies among a savvy Kentucky senator, a billionaire investment banker, his wife's old rabbi, and the president's national security advisor. Too often, he finds himself thrown together with his counterpart on the other side of the aisle, the whip-smart, six-footer Cecilia Plant. Mourning still for his wife, Sam steels himself against Cecilia's appeal and remains suspicious of her motives.

So we have to cast Sam and Cecilia first. We know he’s six feet tall because he’s the same height as she is. Other than that we don’t know what he looks like. Kind of nerdy maybe. After all, he is a Stanford history professor in his mid-thirties. Lots of candidates then but I’m going to with Jake Gyllenhaal. He’s six feet tall and 32 years old. Earnest in Love and Other Drugs, driven in Source Code. He should be bankable, too.

Next is Cecilia. Getting this part right is the key to the movie. Readers love her. Joe Hartlaub wrote in his review in Bookreporter.com, “With regard to the characters, Plant almost steals the book from Rockman; if Raffel would see fit to bring her back in a future work, I certainly wouldn’t object.” Here she is in her first meeting with Sam: 

“We need to get the motherfuckers who did that.” She didn’t snarl as she cursed. She spoke in soft tones, as if to minimize the attention that would come unbidden to a foul-mouthed, red-headed woman with a seventy-five inch span between the tips of her heels and the crown of her head.

She’s six-feet tall (the extra three inches are from her heels) and an ex-athlete. Wait, I got it! Adrianne Palicki. She’s within an inch of six-feet. She can definitely handle the bad language--having played bad-girl Tyra Collette in "Friday Night Lights." While in high school she played basketball and ran track. I’ve seen her on the screen as both a blonde and as a brunette; no reason to think she wouldn’t look just as great with auburn tresses. (Calling Clairol!) And even when she played a bad girl, she projected underlying intelligence.

Did I mention I myself worked for the Senate just as Sam Rockman did? One of my colleagues back in those days was Fred Thompson who (much later) showed his acting chops on TV’s "Law and Order." And he actually served as a senator from Tennessee. Not too much of a stretch then to see him playing a member of the upper house representing the neighboring state of Kentucky. (Always glad to help out a former colleague.)

Billionaire investment banker George Fairchild has made the Forbes list of richest people under 40. Here’s where we first see him in the book:

George measured no taller than five-five, an inch shorter than Rachel and weighed in at about 130, only five pounds more than her. No banker’s suit for George. He wore khakis with a crease sharp enough to slice a loaf of bread and a blue-striped button-down crisp enough to crackle like cellophane.

Let’s go with Ryan Phillippe most recently seen on TV in "Damages." A baby-faced 38 he makes the age cut.

 

My own rabbi says she likes the fact that rabbis in my novels are not figures of fun. Can comedic actor Paul Rudd play a serious clergyman? I say yes.

 

The president’s national security advisor is a tough, cigarette-smoking, New York dame. Let’s go with Dianne Wiest of "In Treatment" and Hannah and Her Sisters.

 

And finally, what about President Lucas? Here we see him on TV:

The guy looked so damned presidential. He reached the same six foot four Lincoln had. His hair was swept back in a Reaganesque pompadour. An aversion to ties part of his brand, he wore an open-neck French blue shirt and navy blazer. He conveyed to the voters that he was no empty suit, but the perfect fit of his clothing, the way his jacket hung from his shoulders, distinguished him from Joe Sixpack even more surely than gray pinstripes.

Here’s the casting coup of the 21st century. Mitt Romney was a neighbor of a friend of mine. I met him at her birthday party. Don’t know how good an actor he would be, but from the description of President Lucas above it wouldn’t be much of a stretch, would it? And it’s my hunch that he will be looking for work after the first Tuesday of November. 

 Thanks for humoring me in my reverie. (But if the agents of Mr. Gyllenhaal or Ms. Palicki see this post, please do not hesitate to get in touch.)

Keith

Keith’s Drop By Drop is available for a free download from Amazon.com through Saturday. (Click here.)

Thanks to imdb.com, igossip.com, huffington post, Wikipedia, accesshollywood.com, and mediaite.com for the photos above.

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?

Adding Two (Audiobook) Covers to The Mix

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!

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

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!