So: on April 30th, I made Too Close to Miss available on Amazon for free. It had been moving fewer than a dozen copies per month over the last couple months (B&N, still killing it), so I wouldn’t be losing much money by giving up sales. The shift from $2.99 to $0.00 wouldn’t take effect for a few days^*, since I was taking advantage of Amazon’s price-match guarantee rather than their KDP Select program. So I lowered the price, checked in a few days later to see if it had taken effect (it hadn’t), and promptly forgot about it.

On May 7th, I saw that Too Close to Miss was finally at $0.00 on Amazon – the price-matching algorithms had caught up. I also saw that, through no work on my part, it had moved ten thousand free copies.

Fast forward a week. As of last night, Too Close to Miss has moved 60,000 free copies. It’s the #1 free ebook in the “Women Sleuths” category and, as of Sunday, was the #2 free ebook on Amazon overall.

When you get 60,000 of anything, you need to address it somehow. So let’s talk about the meaning of “free.”

I’ve been blogging for over ten years and I’ve never written something that 60,000 people have read. Even the occasional Overthinking It article of mine that found its way to the IMDb front page (and was fraught with errors) couldn’t match those numbers. And that’s free content too! So it takes more than just a $0.00 price tag – it takes a presence in front of an interested audience.

If I showed up in Times Square with 60,000 paperbacks, I couldn’t give them away in a week. And even if I did, almost all of them would end up in the garbage. The 60K copies of TCTM that have been downloaded in the last week all went to people who wanted something to read. A significant portion of them may have deleted it after the first page. But I guarantee I had a better success rate at connecting to readers with Amazon than I would have via any other means.

This is with practically no publicity effort on my part. I let my friends and the Overthinking It twitter feed know. But I do not have 60,000 friends, and OTI does not have 60,000 regular readers.

Then how did 60,000 people know this book was free all of a sudden? Amazon has created an audience expectation that plenty of Kindle books will be available for free at any one time. Sites and subcultures, like Kindle Nation Daily and Pixel of Ink, have sprung up around this notion: automatically and frequently updating subscribers on which ebooks are available for free that day. So there are people who will scoop every free ebook onto their Kindle like the lightning round of Supermarket Sweep. Given that, I’m not opening any champagne bottles yet.

And yet, presuming 1% of those 60,000 read the book and like it enough that they want to read more, that’s 600 new fans. All at a cost of the $20 to $30 that I lost in Amazon sales for May.

Final note: I would have been happy to end the experiment at 25K free copies. But, since this is a roundabout process (change the price at Smashwords, wait for it to get pushed to retailers, wait for the retailers to notice, wait for Amazon to notice the other retailers), it’s not fully under my control. Thankfully I’m not relying on this for significant income. And it’s not costing me or anyone else anything, so I’m left with this odd, inexplicable embarrassment as free copies keep pouring out the door.

Of course, the real test will be how many copies it moves once I start charging money for it again – or how many copies the next book in the series sells. Which should be any day now …

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* Briefly: Amazon will not be undersold on an ebook if they can help it. If Amazon finds the same ebook at a lower price via another retailer, they will lower their price to match – all the way to zero if need be.

While the second book in the Mara Cunningham series undergoes its third round of edits, I decided to tackle another project. To challenge myself, I ran with an idea that had just come to me, rather than an idea I’d been brewing for a while. I was writing without an outline, sure, but I’d done a few novels that way and it hadn’t killed me yet. And I was aiming for 5000 words a day, just to keep it moving.

Seven days into the new project and I want to claw out my own brain.

What separates this project from my other (successful) ones? I have no idea where I’m going. In those other drafts, I had a strong sense of either character or plot, two of the essential ingredients for a novel. Here, I had a compelling vision for one character – and I was trying to write three. And I was making up the plot as I went. That led to my frontal lobes seizing up and grinding to a halt at about the 25K mark.

I’m pushing forward, anyway. I’ve decided to set aside the characters I can’t figure out (for now) and plunge on with the one person I can. This may result in a markedly shorter first draft. So be it! But it’s crucial that you finish the projects you start. A completed project can be remodeled, or salvaged, or at the very least harvested for parts. But an incomplete project will rust on your front lawn and scare the neighbors.

What valuable lesson have I taken from this ordeal? Will I reduce my daily page count to a more reasonable level? Will I go back to outlining projects before I launch myself at them, skull first? Will I study my characters with greater focus? Yeah, sure, probably. But most importantly, I’ve learned to forgive traditional authors their bad novels.

As a self-published author, I get to determine the arc that my work takes. The Mara Cunningham series could be two books long, or it could be twenty-two. It’s up to me. I don’t owe Random House their advance back if I can’t manage a fourth book in the series (TOO DRUNK TO SLEEP, coming September 2016).

Traditionally published authors don’t have that option.

I have enough faith in Lee Child as a craftsman to bet that he looked at the final draft of 61 Hours and thought, “This could have been better.” But he owed Delacorte a manuscript, so what choice did he have? He got that one out of his system, then turned it around with Worth Dying For and The Affair, his next two. So I forgive him 61 Hours.

And George R.R. Martin? Never again a complaint. I may not like A Dance with Dragons as much as the other books in the series. It genuinely isn’t as good. But you’ll never hear me rag on the man for taking so long to produce something sub-par.

Why not? Because through this creative battle, as I’ve let my daily deadlines wither by the roadside, as I’ve decided to shift focus away from the literary novel I’d hoped for to a more traditional thriller, as I stood in the shower this morning and thought, “Hell, maybe there’s a short story buried in there,” only one thought has kept me sane: it’s a good thing no one’s waiting for this one.

Enjoy the freedom to suck if you have it. And pour one out for those who don’t.

Too Close to Miss has 12 reviews on Amazon, out of 257 ebooks sold (it’s also available in paperback, but it’s sold maybe 10 copies there, and Amazon aggregates the reviews anyway). It has 9 reviews on Barnes & Noble, out of 929 ebooks sold – 7 of which are anonymous. The Goodreads page indicates TCTM has been added to 55 shelves (“read”, “to-read”, etc.), out of which 27 people have rated it and 10 people have written reviews.

Some observations:

• Goodreads has the highest reviewed/acquired ratio, which is especially impressive given that Goodreads isn’t a marketplace in itself. In fact, several people reviewed TCTM on Goodreads and Amazon. Is “hero” too strong a word for these people? Yes. But “champion” isn’t.
  

• Amazon has a higher reviewed/purchased ratio than B&N, despite B&N allowing anonymous reviews. So having to sign your name to something isn’t a barrier to participation. In fact, that may be part of the appeal.
  

• Not counting the Anons on B&N, Goodreads has the highest percentage of reviews by people I don’t know. This may speak more to the purpose of the site. Goodreads exists only to share information about what you’ve read with friends, whereas Amazon also serves that purpose, in addition to funneling goods to you at scandalously low prices. So a Goodreads user is, all things being equal, more likely to review a book that they added to Goodreads than an Amazon user is to review a book they acquired through Amazon. That’s the type of user the site attracts.
  

• 
  

A little more on that last bullet: I suspect people review books on Goodreads to share information with friends (real or Internet), while people review on Amazon to share information with strangers (potential future buyers). The former encourages people to write more reviews. Or maybe reviewing is just a rare behavior – how many products do you review, out of everything you buy? 10% of them? 1%? – and Goodreads aggregates a lot of reviewers into a convenient clump.

A user who reviews my book is of value to me, almost regardless of how well they review it. A review tells future buyers what to expect. One of the biggest obstacles to purchasing a book is uncertainty: is this going to entertain or enlighten me? Yeah, the marketing copy looks good, but does it live up to the hype? Even a 2-star review that goes into detail (too much sex and violence) could lure a reader off the fence.

My conclusion: Goodreads is a worthwhile place to focus on to build buzz; Amazon is important to attract buyers; and Barnes & Noble can just keep selling in massive quantities for whatever reason they choose.

If you read Too Close to Miss and thought something about it, whether good or bad, please let your friends know via a review on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Goodreads.

If you want to see why readers call Too Close to Miss a “compelling, incisively smart, and witty thriller”, then pick up your own copy!

GUIs use metaphors to make computing easier, but they are bad metaphors. Learning to use them is essentially a word game, a process of learning new definitions of words like “window” and “document” and “save” that are different from, and in many cases almost diametrically opposed to, the old. Somewhat improbably, this has worked very well, at least from a commercial standpoint, which is to say that Apple/Microsoft have made a lot of money off of it. All of the other modern operating systems have learned that in order to be accepted by users they must conceal their underlying gutwork beneath the same sort of spackle. This has some advantages: if you know how to use one GUI operating system, you can probably work out how to use any other in a few minutes. Everything works a little differently, like European plumbing–but with some fiddling around, you can type a memo or surf the web.

This stuck with me because Stephenson has a gift for giving convenient mental hooks to abstruse concepts. But it’s also lasted because the tangible sensation of metaphor shear has taken more years off my life than any other source of stress.

When confronting the sensation of knowing I should be able to do something, yet being absolutely unable to figure out how, my body produces a fight-or-flight response stronger than anything short of an actual fight. Every square inch of skin flushes. My breathing and heart rate triple. I have been known to throw whatever is in reach – a pen, a mouse, a water bottle – into whatever is out of reach – the opposite wall, the floor, an adjacent office. It’s a childish and unforgivable display, and my only excuse is that the world stopped working. Someone rewrote what words mean overnight and didn’t tell me.

Scrivener threw one of those at me this week.

I have loved Scrivener for a while. For its fullscreen and cursor centering features alone, it’s well worth the $45 for a desktop license. But I also love the “project” concept that Scrivener is built around. Everything you might use for a project – your research notes, some images you’ve looked up, your various drafts – exists in a single file. Scrivener arranges the different folders in one sidebar and displays what you’re currently working on in the center. Jump between stages of your project without losing anything. And Scrivener automatically saves, backs up and assists you with version control.

Then I tried to compile a project into a novel.

When I write a first draft, I don’t insert scene or chapter breaks. I write everything in one undifferentiated hash. Chapter breaks, for the modern thriller writer, are best used to sustain tension. I don’t know which cliffhangers need to end a chapter and which can end a scene. When writing in Word, this meant inserting page breaks, lots of carriage returns, and chapter titles manually. It also meant updating all of them if I moved the chapters around.

In Scrivener: … hmm.

First, I broke out my one large file into several text files. No dice. Then I gave each text file its own folder, naming the folders after what happened in them and trusting Scrivener to recognize them as chapters. It did, but it subtitled each chapter with the folder name, which would diminish the reading experience (“Chapter Ten: Mara Finds Dead Body”). After a little bit of poking, I disabled the function that subtitled each chapter, and compiled the Scrivener file into a PDF once more. But now the centered lines that I had used to break up scenes within each chapter were too long for the file’s margins. UGH.

Eventually, I realized that I didn’t need to insert dividing lines between scenes. If each text file were its own scene, Scrivener would do that for me when it compiled. And then the organizing principle clicked:

Novel = Project; Chapter = Folder; Text File = Scene

That’s it! That’s how you’re supposed to use Scrivener. It’s like figuring out the subjunctive tense in French: suddenly, a whole new corner of the language makes sense to you. I could write out my first draft in one headlong rush, like I usually do. Then I could split the file into separate text files during review. Then I could group those files into folders to make my chapters.

So I didn’t break anything. I didn’t throw a temper tantrum. I kept experimenting, checking and unchecking features, until I got the results I wanted. It’s a process – perhaps more of a process than it needs to be – but that’s what happens when you interact with the world through colorful menus.

If you want to read the last novel I wrote without Scrivener, check out Too Close to Miss, available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes. Readers call it “… a briskly-paced, thoroughly entertaining thriller that lives up to the heritage of the noir genre.”

Remember a year and a half ago, when I wrote this?

That’s what I’m aiming for. I want every new season of American television to have one comedy or drama depicting the savage hypocrisy of representative government. I want The Weft Wing, an Office-style mockumentary about a bunch of ambitious Harvard and Georgetown grads who figure out new euphemisms for “bombing civilians.” I want The Big Push Theory, a sitcom about four nerds who run a think tank that drafts leading opinion polls. I want Reno 911 but played straight-faced and set in Atlanta. I want Larry David’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I want stories without heroes, filled with awkward laughs and abrupt fades to black.

Armando Iannucci heard my prayers and delivered. HBO subscribers, tune in every Tuesday to “Veep”:

If you weren’t sure whether or not to watch this show, ask yourself: do I find the Professor’s political cynicism tiresome? If so, avoid. If not, subscribe.

(P.S. You can catch the entire first episode on YouTube, uploaded by HBO themselves! Don’t take my word for it)

If the serious (!) writing I’ve done as an adult has any consistent theme, it’s “nobody knows anybody, not that well.” There is a perpetual gulf between Self and Other that we spend our whole lives dealing with. Some of us retreat to our side of the gulf and curl into a ball. Some of us risk balancing on the edge to extend our fingers across. But the howling gap is always there.

Writing – like all forms of art – is an attempt to bridge that gap. It’s our best effort at translating the personal into the universal. This is what it was like to be there, says Hemingway in For Whom The Bell Tolls, says Picasso in “Guernica,” says Landis in Animal House, says Beethoven in his Third Symphony. When the translation is pleasant, we call it “escapism”; when it’s somber, we call it “literary” or “serious,” but the effect is the same.

It’s easy to take the idea that “nobody knows anybody” and wallow in existentialist sobriety. It’s certainly easy for me; I do plenty of it. And yet the writing of mine that I’m happiest with also finds the happiness in that theme. If nobody truly knows anybody, then that means everybody has the potential to delight you. George Axelrod refers to it, in his arsenal of narrative devices, as “the duchess trucks”:

[T]he audience loves it when the sinister character turns out to be lovable: “The duchess breaks into a jazz dance.”

So it’s worth remembering that the purpose of writing is to reach across the gap – or, as Erin says by quoting King, to travel through time. And it’s worth making sure that that extended hand leads you somewhere worth going.

Don’t get me wrong: “good enough” is plenty good, if the reviews are any indication. But I struggled in turning my protagonist, Mara Cunningham, into a real character. I chose a female protagonist, and women remain a mystery to me, so that didn’t help matters. But I knew I could add more depth to her. I just wasn’t sure how. She was complex! She had clear motivations and she acted on them! She had doubts but she didn’t let them defeat her! What was I missing?

It wasn’t until I started in on the next book in the series that I realized what else Mara needed. In Too Close to Miss, Mara’s investigating a deep mystery: who killed the wife and son of the married man whom she was sleeping with? She’s a complicated but determined troublemaker, dealing with her own complicated and troublesome past. With, um, determination.

In other words, Mara doesn’t want anything that the plot doesn’t also want.

As far as tight storytelling goes, this isn’t a bad thing. There’s no extraneous business and it keeps the reader flipping pages. But as far as realistic characterization goes, there’s something missing. I honed Mara down into a whip smart crimefighting attack dog and set her loose. It makes for a compelling read. But what would you and Mara talk about at the corner pub?

What does the reader want? To uncover the mystery (“what’s going to happen next?”). What does Mara Cunningham want? To uncover the mystery. These two goals shouldn’t be in conflict, but I’m not surprised some readers wanted to know more about Mara than I revealed.

Fortunately, it’s possible to create a compelling thriller with plenty of characterization. And, fortunately, the next book in the series (of which I’m editing the second draft as you read this) has loads. Fans of the first book will be delighted to learn that Mara has a romantic relationship! She has trouble at work! She has friends who support her, and whom she supports in turn! Normal human stuff.

Of course, she also plunges headlong into a mystery that pits her against ruthless killers, corruption at the highest levels, and her own complicated past. You’d be disappointed if she didn’t.

What I’ve learned about writing: no one wants to read about a shark. Characters need more than just a relentless drive to keep the plot moving. They need the human concerns that all of us recognize. Find a way to evoke these concerns through action, especially action that complements the main narrative, and you have a great story.

If you want to explore Mara Cunningham’s world from the beginning, check out Too Close to Miss, which readers call “fast paced, taut, and gripping,” available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iTunes.

If you thought Mara’s characterization was perfectly all right, then let your friends know via Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, or old-fashioned word of mouth.

I was reminded of the awesomeness of Meghan’s path when rereading Jon Acuff’s Quitter (which deserves its own post). Acuff talks about Jerry Seinfeld’s famous hour-long interview on comedy, in which he talks about his own apprenticeship in the NYC comedy scene. His method: to do two shows a night, every night, without a single night off, for eighteen months. That’s over a thousand stand-up sets.

I thought of these inspiring people because I’ve been struggling with the balance between a dream job and a day job. All of us have creative passions that inspire us. All of us also recognize the need to earn a wage and pay for health insurance. How do you balance those? When do you take the leap to pursue your dream? And is the dream that you’re about to pursue worth that leap?

I don’t have the experience to answer the first question or the financial sense to answer the second. But based on my experience, and based on what my friends (and Jerry Seinfeld) have gone through, I think I can field the third.

If you’re wondering whether or not a particular dream of yours is your true calling in life, ask yourself: how long would I be willing to labor in fruitless obscurity just for the joy of pursuing this dream?

If the answer is “weeks” or “months,” forget it. If the answer is “years,” you’re on the right track. If it’s “decades,” you have a winner.

That’s not to say that you couldn’t find overnight success. And I don’t want to perpetuate the myth of the starving artist shivering in a garret apartment. A person’s got to eat! You don’t have to suffer. You just have to be willing to suffer.

(Or, more importantly, you don’t count obscurity as “suffering”)

It’s process, not feedback, that will make your dream succeed. You have to pursue your dream with the discipline of a 40hr/week day job, only with fewer than 40 hours a week to do it in. If you’re chasing after an immediate fix, you’ll get discouraged early on. Even worse, if you find early success and don’t immediately start work on your next project, you can get distracted from your dream before it fully takes off.

Too Close to Miss has succeeded to the point that it’s paid for itself (editing, cover design, Createspace account costs). It continues to sell at a slow clip. I’m incredibly lucky in that regard. But getting to this point took a decade of experimenting with fiction, and five years of writing novels. I tell people Too Close to Miss is my first novel, meaning the first one I’ve published. In terms of manuscripts I’ve completed, it’s probably my sixth or seventh. But none of those others will ever see the light of day. They’re not marketable. I needed to write them in order to learn the novel.

Ask yourself how long you’d be willing to pursue your dream without getting paid. Not for fame, not for money, just for the joy and curiosity of practicing the craft. If the answer isn’t “a sizable portion of your life,” then it’s not your true calling. Don’t worry: you do have one. Just keep searching.

If you want to see whether my years of toiling in obscurity paid off, check out Too Close to Miss, the crime thriller that readers “stayed up way too late finishing,” available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iTunes.

If you read it and liked it, please let your friends know via Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, or old-fashioned word of mouth.

To drive an F1 kart, you have to forget half of what you know about driving. The karts lack power steering, so they respond only to vigorous turns of the wheel, but they respond quickly. It’s easy to oversteer, especially if you accelerate into a turn, slamming into walls or spinning out. Add to this the nine other racers on the course with you, each with their own agenda. You not only have to drive with skill; you need the killer instinct to pass as well.

There’s something thrilling about whipping down a straightaway at thirty miles an hour, mere inches off the ground. There’s also the joy of a job well done, applying brake and gas in just the right rhythm to squeal around a turn on the inside. But then you realize you haven’t seen another driver for the last two minutes. They’re in a knot at the opposite end of the track, jockeying for position, and you’re fighting your hardest just to keep the kart under control. Then the race ends and you stagger out of the kart, forearms shaking from exertion, and wrestle your too-small helmet off. The other racers are slapping each other on the back, exchanging friendly taunts, or recounting stories of near misses and sudden reversals. It’s as if they were in one race and you, another. And there’s still another qualifier to go, and then the final bracket. You consider shrugging out of your jumpsuit and going upstairs for a drink, but you know you have one more run in you.

I didn’t expect to win any trophies. But I got better with each race, and now I can say it’s something I’ve done.

Several friends of mine have complained recently about the injustice of Bully, a documentary about actual problems with actual teenagers, being rated R, while The Hunger Games, a fictional movie about teenagers murdering each other, is rated PG-13. The argument is that children need to see movies like Bully in order to put a face on a problem that they might otherwise ignore.

While I don’t want to take anything away from the importance of The Bully Project, it is just as important that every teenager in America sees The Hunger Games on the big screen. They need to see a world where people accept income inequality as the just outcome of wrongdoing two hundred years ago. They need to see a world where young adults are marched off to death with no objection. They need to see a world where the voices and faces of media are tools of social control. They need to see a world where it’s the villains who call ritual slaughter a “sacrifice” that needs to be “honored,” not the heroes.

But, of course, it’s fantasy. It’s a world where children are told that they need to conform to recognizable roles as early as they can or they’ll be picked off at the fringes of the herd. It’s a world where kissing the boy that society approves of gets you rewards. It’s a world from which there’s no escape – from which the idea of running away, living off the land and ignoring the arbitrary annual bloodletting, is laughed off. It’s bizarro science-fiction; look at the haircuts.

Yes, the setup is brutal, and depressing, and pointless. But what are you going to do when they start pulling names out of slips? Not send a tribute to the Capital?