Author Archives: Phil Rosette

About Phil Rosette

THE FREYA PROJECT was my first novel (Countinghouse Press, 2004). FREYA is a globe-trotting technology suspense that is still in print. I had a lot of fun doing readings at more than a dozen bookstores and book clubs throughout Michigan when it first came out. In 2009, I digitally self-published SEOUL LEGACY, THE ORPHAN’S FLU, a story about the buildup to WW III started on the Korean Peninsula by pandemic. I promote SEOUL LEGACY on my website.

The Contenders

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Received a lot of good responses to last month’s blog about coming up with a better moniker for Knock Softly.

Everyone agrees that the title is a deciding factor when selecting a new read. That and the cover image(s) are the only things people see before they pick up your book. Those two things and the blurb on the back cover have to say “buy me now.” If not, every other word you’ve written is pointless. I want a strong title that not only draws you in, but also carries its own ballooning weight as the story progresses. Ideally, this title should cause an afterglow effect once the reader has finished the novel. That’s what I’m shooting for.

The need for a title to “sum up” the story came into question, and that was unexpected. I was reminded that some of the best titles intrigue or entice without explaining themselves at all, or not until the very end. Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides is a good example. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind is another.

As far as which title everyone thought best, I have to laugh. As responses started coming in, I was reminded of something my brother, Dave, once told me way back in the 20th century. He’s ten years older and light-years wiser, and he said that, “People don’t know what they want, they only want what they know.” I laughed because all the first suggestions said don’t change the title, or put the ellipsis back in. Then, I started to get other suggestions. I’ve narrowed it down to seven, but first, here’s a draft of a 100-word synopsis for the back cover blurb:

There are things worse than death. Reoccurring cancer is one.

Elizabeth Bergman, mother, lover, wife and special education teacher, won her first bout with cancer ten years ago. She recovered and led the perfect life until an unexpected pregnancy coincided with cancer’s return.

Only mitochondrial DNA can save her now, but to get it, her husband must first unlock a dark and secret past his wife has kept from him and the children. Her desire to die with her secret is almost as strong as her will to live for her children and the child she carries, and for the life she hopes to carry on.

And now, the Contenders…

  1. Knock Softly…
  2. Knock Softly
  3. Ring Around the Twisted Ladder (the double helix & ring around the rosy)
  4. Carry on, Mrs. Bergman (or, Carry on, Mr. & Mrs. Bergman)
  5. Elizabeth! (Several by this title, none with the !, almost all about Queen E. or E. Taylor)
  6. Both Sides Now (Joni Mitchel’s song. Look up the lyrics if unfamiliar; spot on.)
  7. All to Die For (or, All to Die For, Baby. Liz’s outlook from start to finish)

The last two are somewhat ambiguous, but so are the first two.

Now what works best in your mind?

How Important is the Title?

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What weight should we give to the title of a novel?

If the sum of a book is 100%, is the title worth 20% or 80%? On the one hand, if the title isn’t catchy then potential book buyers may never pick it up. All the efforts the author has put in will never be tested. What a waste for both author and reader. On the other hand, if the title is too convoluted readers may not understand the direction the author is taking them. Like a four-star chef, authors want readers to finish their creation. Putting it aside half-finished is worse than having never started. It is the difference between telling the waiter, “I’ll try something else, thank you,” and telling your friends, “I’ll never eat in that restaurant again.”

This question has been weighing heavily on my mind for the past few months as I turn the final corner on writing Knock Softly (working title). I’ve asked a few fellow writers – those who are in my writing group and have read the manuscript so far – to think of something better. Nothing is sticking. I try not to fret about it, tell myself it’s not important until you finish, but that finish line is now in sight and the fret is turning into sweat.

Let’s look at the responsibility of a title. That’s right, a title has responsibilities. First and foremost it has to succinctly sum up your story. It also has to be catchy enough to cause a reaction. It should say either “pick me up” or “not for me.” But is that all? Shouldn’t the title also come into to play at the end of the read? Shouldn’t the reader be able to see that title again on someone else’s shelf and be able to recall the entire story? Have an engaging conversation with that person over the book? Gone with the Wind does that. So does Hunt for Red October and To Kill a Mockingbird, and numerous others. That’s my dilemma with Knock Softly. I want a title that will recall the entire tome when next you see it again.

I came up with Knock Softly strictly as a constant reminder to myself that no main characters die in this story – there are things worse than death. Cancer is the villain. Curing our heroine is the story’s master thread, and keeping that central to the other events in the story hasn’t been difficult. Those other events include our heroine’s infidelity and a tortured past life she’s kept secret from her husband and children. Only mitochondrial DNA can save her now. To get it, her husband must delve into her dark past. Her desire to die with her secret is almost as strong as her will to live for her children and the child she carries. Knock Softly doesn’t convey any of that.

In Knock Softly, we have a mother of two, pregnant with another man’s child and suffering stage-4 cancer. She refuses to abort the baby, even though it increasingly diminishes her own chances of survival. Her husband rides the full length of the emotional rapids as he discovers there is so much more to the woman he married.

I don’t have the answer to my question; what weight should we give to the title of a novel?

I suspect it’s a squishy number, based on how strong the author’s own name is. Steven King could call his next novel Untitled and it would sell out. I doubt 100 copies would sell if my name were on it. For someone like me, a mild-mannered suspense writer whose day job is composing coherent internet ads in forty characters or less, I suspect the title is worth nearly half of everything written. It is in advertising, and in selling newspapers.

Now taking good suggestions for A.K.A. Knock Softly. Anyone?

Imagining Fiction in the Electronic Age

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I received a good response to last month’s apocalyptic post on pulp, mostly notes of reminiscences. I had no idea people time-stamped their best reads like they were best dates. Two folks thought enough to put fingers to keyboard and tell me just how wrong I was, and one good friend about chewed my ear off with the same message. But one woman wrote about following a person off a subway, up a flight of stairs and all the way to the crosswalk without that person ever looking up from their Kindle. She didn’t say if they were male or female, old or young, but earlier she had seen the same thing play out from subway to crosswalk, only this person was reading a paperback. What she noticed was how engrossed both readers were in their stories, not the format they were reading them on. To her, and to me, it proves that Content will always be King.

Thanks to all who commented.

 

Tomorrow’s bestselling fiction authors need to wade through new and exciting waters if they want readers to enjoy their digital content. The future fiction story has to be engaging on every page. Good news! Authors can now use more than just words to engage their readers!

Meaningful graphics strategically placed in the body of the works is soon to be the new norm. Children’s fiction has always been picture book format, so it will just be business as usual for that age group. Adult fiction authors, however, strive to paint just enough of a character or a scene, yet still leave something for the reader’s own imagination. We want to draw characters that remind readers of someone they’ve known: the bitchy boss, the nearsighted neighbor, the real estate lady who knows no quit.

Authors run great risks in the future if they use the wrong graphics. This becomes a fault, graphically speaking, when authors use a well-known person as a metaphor. For example, one of my references to Elizabeth, a main character in my upcoming novel, Knock Softly (working title), says she looks like Little Orphan Annie in one childhood photograph. The reader already knows that Elizabeth is a redhead so that is all I say. I leave all her other attributes to the reader’s imagination; young Elizabeth’s height, voice, dimples or not. Adult fiction readers can color in all the “known” minutiae much faster, and clearer, than the author can. In this case, any companion image of a young Elizabeth would spoil the reader’s own imagination.

Other trip-ups include using well known locations, like Disneyland or the Grand Canyon for example. You don’t want to alter whatever image your reader already has; you want them to recall it. Authors can only do that with words that metaphorically develop their characters against such landmarks. The great e-novel of the future will illuminate the text with images that only the author can bring to life.

Color, not black and white, will adorn future e-pages. Without ink, there is no cost consideration for digitally printing in color, so descriptive hues, shades and shadows will matter as never before. For that reason, future authors need to be just as considerate for what they choose to leave out as what they choose to spell out. Even the very colors that illustrators use have to complement the scene’s mood and drama, otherwise the visuals will wind up competing with the words. It’s a subliminal thing, but ad agencies have been refining the use of color for decades to convey stature, sensuality and attitude. This is nothing new, it’s just found a new home. Black and white will only be used to depict dark and dreary scenes, or to shadow horror too repulsive for vivid interpretation.

Here’s the rub: e-novel readers cannot see how “heavy” a tome is before they buy it. There is no page count. Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken weighs as much as James Joyce’s Ulysses in e-book format. Instead, there is an indicator at the bottom of each page showing what percentage you’ve completed. It feels like a journey, not a read. Authors need to be aware of this from their first draft onwards. That indicator is like the kids in the backseat of your mind asking, Are we there yet? There is less time for a story to “breathe” in the future e-novel, where pictures purpose the pauses. Each page has to be reason enough for the reader to carry on. Authors are going to have to make the journey just as entertaining as the destination if they want to shut up the brats in the backseat of their reader’s mind. The percentage indicator is neither good nor bad; it’s just a new way of telling time in a novel. We’ll all get used to it. By next Thursday.

E-novels will probably be 75,000 to 100,000 words with a dozen-odd illustrations to richen up the read. Last chapters will be written like soap opera; effectively, lead-ins for tomorrow’s adventure in a continuing series. Authors who create quirky characters that readers want to follow from adventure to adventure will do well.

Paper’s First Mass Extinction

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The digital age is upon us, it’s everywhere we look today. Literally, no industry is safe when doctors can now print 3-D parts for a heart valve repair minutes later. What possible chance do printed books have by the year 2025? Slim to none, sorry to say.

By then, publishers will only print Limited Edition books that authors and illustrators will sign and that collectors and fans will treat like trophies. Books will only be purchased – and thus printed – for their beauty or their collector appeal by 2025. Attractive, leather bindings with inlaid gold designs touting popular titles will command hundreds of dollars, but the “trade editions” will all be ninety-nine cent digital versions.

Text books – all learning material for that matter – will fall like dinosaurs during the first mass extinction of pulp. These books will die out because of their sheer weight alone, but so, too, will all sci-fi, suspense, mystery and romance stories. Novels will lose out because they hold no advantage on paper. They are more expensive and take longer for everyone involved, from author to publisher to seller to readers. In the end, economics rule. Without some other inherent value, there will be no reason to keep a novel once you’re done reading it. If that’s the case and e-books remain cheaper, then print is dead. Long live E!

Some genres should survive until 2025. Children’s books will still be in print because they are illustrated, but their days are numbered, too. Biographies with their childhood photographs, documents, maps, and other such supporting evidence have a home on the future bookshelf for those very reasons, at least for a while longer. Religious material will continue in print because you take this Book with you to Church to read along with the faithful. Even so, at some point, churches, too, will be distributing prayers, sermons and missals on e-readers left in the pews.

Cookbooks and other reference material – the kinds of books that people dog-ear and write in the margins of – will continue to be printed because we treat them like tools while working on related projects. It’s hard to see other formats surviving, though. How are you going to convince today’s youth to put down their iPhones and pick up something printed on paper?

The year 2025 is only a decade away. For the first mass extinction of paper to come true by then, all these dire predictions will need to travel at the speed of light.

Exactly!

A decade from now, authors, Amazon, and the publishers who are sure to follow, will be too busy translating their e-novels into other languages without making embarrassing mistakes. That will be everyone’s main concern. The war over “cover price” will be long over. Free market enterprise will set the price. It always does in the end.

I think third world countries will be the new marketing frontier ten years from now, not just for books but for e-everything. Authors and publishers could thrive with the Polaroid Theory of Marketing in those countries by providing them with cheap e-readers and free internet.

Dr. Edwin Land’s marketing strategy in the 1960s was to effectively “give away the camera to sell the film.” This was akin to financial suicide in an industry where cameras cost hundreds of dollars and the photographic film costs pennies to turn into pictures. But Land had a theory, which was this: people will pay dearly for instant gratification.

Land priced one version, the Polaroid Swinger,  under $20.00. Cameras were not household items in the 1960s until Land’s affordable entry pricing made them popular. But, where 35mm film was cheap – $4.00 to develop a roll of 36 photos – it had to be mailed to a company to be turned into pictures. It took about a week to process, and sometimes you got someone else’s pictures back instead of your own. That could get embarrassing. Polaroid sold ten pictures for $7.00, but you held your Polaroid picture in your hand one minute later, while the moment was still fresh. It was our first taste of instant gratification, and we showed great marketers like Edwin Land, Bill Gates and Steven Jobs just how much more we were willing to pay for it.

Create a $20.00 e-reader today and the Polaroid Theory guarantees that everyone of age in Africa, Asia and the poorer parts of the Americas will have access to all kinds of books. With today’s technology, all it requires is a few drones parked in the sky to gain access to millions – billions – of potential e-book buyers. This means instant global gratification for e-books and global extinction for print. A $20.00 e-reader could conquer the world with ten books for seven bucks instead of ten pictures. Everyone from author to publisher makes more money with the Polaroid Theory because millions of more copies are sold. The costs to create more copies spiral down with the economy-of-scale, and if the novel never catches on, the cost of failure is survivable.

Think bigger than that. It is possible bilingual e-books could give rise to English as Earth’s common language by 2025. It almost is now. Think of what that means to all fiction authors, regardless their native tongue.

Printed matter’s second life is destined to become firewood at some point during in the next decade. Even something as sought after today as a first edition of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I’m sorry to say. As an antiquarian dealer, I worry about this a lot. I’ve stopped investing in modern classics produced after 1980.

Tomorrow’s bookshelf is today’s trophy cabinet. By 2025, we’ll keep our treasured tomes locked behind glass and out of direct sunlight. When someone asks if they can take one out, we’ll smile and say, “I’ve got that book on my iPad, too, if you’d like to read it.”

Next Month: Back to the topic of writing. If the future of fiction novels is strictly digital, how will that affect the way authors pace their stories? Are we headed for the 140-character novel? Will an author need to work with an illustrator to have any chance of success? Is writing a novel morphing from solitude to team project? And, if so, then whose e-voice is this, anyway? Stop by next month and explore these thoughts with me.

Slogging Through the Jungle with a Hatchet

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You may have heard something about the ongoing fight between Amazon and Hachette Book Group. It started in the boardrooms of both companies over the new contracts that, effectively, allow Amazon to set the prices for Hachette’s and eventually all publishers products.

But that’s not all. It also says the publisher, by a certain future date, must submit “electronic versions” of their books – and covers – with shipments, and to allow Amazon to print-on-demand (POD) any orders the publishers cannot fulfill within a specified amount of time. I haven’t seen the contract, but enough people have to warrant over 1000 authors signing a letter and buying a two-page ad in the New York Times Sunday Edition to protest the contract’s language. It’s getting nasty, just the kind of stuff that good, suspense novels are made of!

Diana Hirsch got this topic started back in August with her Amazon, Hachette and the wretched $9.99 price point, but I saw a sidebar there that warrants a bit more discussion. I wear both hats in this fight. My first novel, The Freya Project, was published by Countinghouse Press. I self-published my second book, Seoul Legacy, the Orphan’s Flu, with aid of the University of Michigan Library’s Espresso Book Machine. Anyone can use their million-dollar “book” printer. My per-unit cost in each case (tradition vs. POD) was about the same. The difference was that I could have printed just one POD book if I wanted instead of hundreds or thousands, so the overall publishing cost difference was huge and that’s what drove my decision to POD for my second book.

You can bet Amazon has a few Espresso Book Machines at the ready, and what’s really at stake here are jobs. Thousands of workers bees throughout the book distribution channel are about to be handed pink slips. Traditional printing houses will fall if they don’t get onboard the e-train, and the biggest ones will fall the hardest. Publishing is going to bleed all the way back to the pulp forests. This contract, this new business model, if it comes to fruition, will literally rewrite the definition of the word “print” in all dictionaries by the year 2050. I alluded to this in my blog back in March, And now, the 2050 POE prize winner for…. Amazon has already captured the prize – the consumer.

Don’t blame Jeff Bezos and his Amazon.com; he just expanded the vision. Blame Johannes Gutenberg; he started it when he put all the first scribes out of business! By 1460 – a mere 21 years after he invented it – Gutenberg’s moveable type presses were operating all over Europe. What happened next changed the course of history. Over the next 500 years, print would evolve into the worldwide format for all sciences, medicines, religions, and all other forms of education. It allowed us to record history and for the masses to learn. Jeff is merely taking over where Johannes left off.

I don’t care how they define “print” in 2050, so long I’m still able to read it. That’s the consumer’s hat I wear in this fight, and it’s the hat I care about the most. I don’t care what price point publishers put on e-books, either, so long as Mr. Bezos & Co. keep their long-standing consumer protection clause; Amazon’s seven-day, no questions asked, money back guarantee. If you don’t like an e-book, return it for a full refund within a week. I have both bought and sold eBooks this way on Amazon.com for years, and have yet to experience a refund from under either hat.

Amazon’s consumer protection clause is the rising tide that lifts all boats. If the author or publishing house insists on staying anchored to their price-point, then let them, just as long as the consumer can get a refund if they don’t like the book for whatever reason. Frankly, Amazon’s seven-day policy should be thirty-days, to encourage bulk purchases.

The main reason new authors have such a hard time breaking into the industry has been the same for hundreds of years; they are just not-quite-good-enough to warrant the all expenses required to “launch” a new author. Amazon’s proposed business model finally buries that hatchet. It allows a publisher to take a chance with someone or something new without the fear of going broke. It allows the author to take a chance without the fear of losing audience. It also allows the reader to take a chance without wasting a lot of time, or money.

Too many good voices are going unheard. For every one David Baldacci there are fifty Bonnie Virag’s. I dare you to put down her The Stovepipe, a true story about growing up in the Canadian Children’s Aid Society. Hers is the most gripping novel I’ve read since Frank McCort’s Angela’s Ashes. Virag only has 29 five-star reviews on Amazon.com, compared to McCort’s 2,400, but download The Stovepipe and I guarantee you will want to be number 30.

As I see it, new authors are the only authors who will need an agent – a megaphone, if you will – in the Amazon business model. Word-of-mouth has always been the best form of advertising. If readers like what you write they will tell two friends who will tell two friends, etc. They always have and they always will, especially where reading material is concerned. The internet only amplifies today’s voice, but it does so on the same scale that moveable type amplified reading almost 500 years ago.

Right now, Hachette & Co. should be driving fast and taking chances instead of slogging along in the fast lane and holding up traffic. Think of the internet as the carpool lane in rush hour, Mr. Hachette – give someone else a lift and you’ll both get there faster.  Smaller advances, say, a tenth of the size of Baldacci’s, could be paid to new promising authors. All publishers should be trying to find –and fund – new voices like Ms. Virag’s. If only one turned out to be as successful as David Baldacci or Frank McCort have they’d be in the money. Two or more and they’d be fat cats with cigars. Again.

 

Next Month. A look at what the future holds for pulp.

I have no doubt someone will print a 600th Anniversary edition of the Gutenberg Bible. I suspect all religious material will still be in “print” by 2055, but what chance do newspapers have? Or magazines? Or books? And, what does history hold for all the printed matter in existence now? Is a first edition of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire treasure or trash? Those questions answered, and more, in November. Thanks for dropping by!