Noir fiction for the modern reader.

Dorchester, one of the country’s leading publishers of romance novels, has announced that they’re eliminating their print division and will publish in the digital format exclusively.

This is huge.

Following a 25% drop in sales (their figures), they’ve decided to make the leap. Very good. Very forward-thinking. They’re right out there on the cutting edge. BUT…

If they charge $7.99 for their ebooks, they’ll find very little success.

Here’s my take on it.

It looks like their thinking runs this way: “Well, let’s cut out all our expenses involved with print books–you know, all that ink and paper and shipping and stuff–and let’s just shovel digital books into the e-world. It costs nothing to ship! With our expenses slashed, we’ll make a ton of money.” This, of course, fully assumes that readers will pay as much for an ebook as they will for a mass market paperback.

This is the kind of thinking that often paralyzes corporate America.

The people who made this decision certainly realize it’s a big leap. Therefore, their primary instinct is to cover themselves. To insulate themselves from blame in case something goes wrong and their corporate higher-ups, who I imagine in Dorchester’s case would be their board of directors, start looking for heads to chop off.

In order to properly create this ass-covering, they no doubt prepared lots of fancy charts and slide shows indicating the growing popularity of e-readers, Amazon e-tail figures, steadily declining hardback sales, and so on. So in the midst of all the dogs and ponies, they slip in the $7.99 number without any evidence whatsoever that it might be the optimum price.

And certainly without any evidence that there could well be a consumer revolt against paying the same price for an ebook as they would for a paperback.

Problem is, they’re afraid to take the final step that might really bail them out. Namely, presenting their product at a competitive price. Afraid because, remember, they have to cover themselves, and a $2.99 price leaves them no cover at all.

I mean, you can’t sell a novel by an established author for $2.99. We’re getting over $25 for a hardcover right now! $2.99 is what all those wannabes sell theirs at, right? “Real” authors and publishers can’t stoop that low, right? Besides, we’ve still got expenses, right? Even after the original slashfest. We’ve got editors, office space, utilities, management people, marketing people (wait a minute, aren’t authors supposed to do their own marketing now?). So we have to charge $7.99 per book, right? Right?

I’d be willing to bet money that, during their meeting when this change was approved, nobody made any mention at all about the rising trend of established writers self-pubbing their own material on Kindle and making money at it. They’re continuing to live under the myth that all self-pubbed books are crap and beneath contempt. So for a New York publisher to get into the cesspool with self-pubbed authors would just be incomprehensible. Oh, the humanity!

Of course, now that I think about it, even if they deigned to sell my ebook for $2.99, would they give me a 70% royalty?

So then, apart from editing and a cover, which I can farm out to indie editors and artists, what can they do for me that justifies their giving me anything less than 70%?

Hmmmmm.

By the way, my rock & roll novel, Cadillac’s Comin’, a hard tale of a rockabilly one-hit wonder who recorded for Sun Records in the 1950s, is up on Kindle for $2.99.

But wait! There’s more!

It’s now on Smashwords for only $1.99. That’s right. You read it correctly. Only $1.99! So you don’t forget, order before midnight tomorrow.

This very moment, as I sit at my computer sipping wine in between righteous thoughts, people are arguing over whether or not the new trend toward online self-publishing is going to bring any tangible results (read: money) to the authors who indulge in it.

A lot has been written about a few who have become hugely successful. By now, a lot of us know about Joe Konrath and Boyd Morrison and their unlikely triumphs in the e-world. “Flashes in the pan,” some say. “They’re not typical of what an author can expect if he or she self-publishes online.”

“But it’s the coming thing,” others say. “If they can do it, I can do it, too. I just have to work hard at promoting myself and my book.”

Pardon me while I take another sip. This is good stuff.

I have to come down on the side of the true believers. There are some big changes coming, and they’re coming sooner than we think. It’s not happening in a vacuum, though. There’s some historical perspective that should be considered.

Just a very few years ago, if you wanted to buy a book, you got your ass off the couch, went out to your car, got in it, and drove to a bookstore, or somewhere else that offered books for sale, such as Wal-Mart. Maybe you knew the exact book you wanted, or maybe you didn’t. Either way, off your ass and out the door, or else no book.

Then: Amazon. As home computers spread across the land, Amazon proved that people would sit home and order books by the millions. Before you could say, “One-click ordering”, independent bookstores all over the country started closing down. Even big chains like Doubleday were gobbled up by bigger chains. And when Amazon started the clever come-on of “now that you bought this book, you’ll love these”, people were instantly exposed to more books in that genre. Many people obediently bought some of those books that they might otherwise never have known about.

Amazon’s bigshots were undoubtedly sitting around one day asking themselves, “Well, now that we’ve got everybody ordering books from us, what do we do for an encore?” And somebody around the table blurted out “Kindle!”

So here comes the e-reader. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony, and even Apple begin shoveling these devices out as fast as they can. Dad gives Mom one for Mother’s Day, they give Junior one for Christmas, boyfriend gives one to girlfriend, and on and on. Pretty soon, millions of people have them and they’re buying NY-published books at $9.99 apiece. What a deal! Right?

Whew! My heart is pumping here. Time for another sip of the vino.

Okay, now Amazon is making about fifty billion dollars a day and the heavyweights are sitting around saying, “How can we top this?” And somebody suggests, “How about letting people self-publish on Kindle?”

Well, this one probably spurred a little discussion, you know, about letting just anybody self-publish or restricting it only to “real” authors. Of course, the open-door faction won that one, and here we are.

Millions of self-pubbed books will clutter up the e-bookstores for sure. And most of them will be crap. But many will be very good, and some will be great, and most if not all of these would’ve had no shot whatsoever with the bloated New York publishing world, insatiably thirsting for blockbusters. These gems WILL find an audience. Maybe not in the same easy fashion as Stephen King finds his audience, but the readers out there will open themselves up to these new authors.

How, you might ask?  For starters, not everyone lives in LA (something that is hard for LA residents to grasp), and therefore most of us lack easy access to quality bookstores. Amazon has proven that people don’t really need a neighborhood bookstore, or even a big-box Barnes & Noble.

Secondly, through online reviews and recommendations (which are being read more and more), self-published online authors will get their noses above the waterline. Remember, people who own an e-reader will never tire of finding books to download into it, and they will search these books out through online book clubs and reviews.

Thirdly, and this is very important, with prices of self-published books generally ranging from $1-$3, they look awfully good to someone who’s been shelling out ten bucks a pop for his favorite digital bestsellers. At that price, they can afford a couple of missteps without being discouraged. This goes a long way toward exposing them to authors and books they might otherwise never consider.

Some say that authors will now have to go online and slap a lot of backs and come across as a gregarious social butterfly, when many of us are in fact born introverts. Why should being an extrovert be a requirement for a successful author, some ask. To which I reply: for the same reason that a successful author is required to be a marketer, salesman, blogger, and book tour promoter. You know, the same stuff that NY publishers pay people to do, but which they now insist that we must do.

Finally, authors are now able to draw a straight line from their computer screens directly to the readers, much the same as musicians before us, who can now sell their albums directly to their fans without having to wait for the one-in-a-million shot at a record deal.

By the way, did I mention I have a rock & roll novel up on Kindle? No? Well, let me say that Cadillac’s Comin’, a hard tale of a rockabilly one-hit wonder who recorded for Sun Records in the 1950s, is now available at your friendly neighborhood Kindle store.

I think I’m going to pour another glass of this wine. I really like it.

A few years ago, I wrote a rock & roll novel called Cadillac’s Comin’. Today, it went up on Kindle. It’s a hard tale of a rockabilly one-hit wonder who recorded for Sun Records back in the 1950s. For the uninitiated, Sun was a small company, but became the iconic label of that era, responsible for many of the great early rock & roll hits.

The book has the requisite sex, drugs, and rock & roll throughout, but the second half of the novel, which takes place in the 1980s, is noirish, so I feel it’s appropriate to talk about it in this space.

As I mention in a bio I wrote somewhere, thirty years of playing music isn’t exactly the best training for becoming an author. Thirty years of writing would be more like it. But playing music was what I did, so that’s what I had to work with. I say this because when I first sat down to write many years ago, the temptation was strong to “write what I know”, in other words, a rock & roll novel. Oh, was I tempted. Characters popped into my head from all sides, plots swirled around me…how could I resist?

But I had to resist, you know?  Because I didn’t want to shoot my wad with one music novel. I wanted to write a lot of books, and I knew that rock & roll was not exactly a beckoning genre for successful novelists. So after a couple of missteps, I got into crime.

After I’d written a couple of crime/noir novels, I had convinced myself that I could actually write, so I finally gave release to those rock & roll demons inside my head. Cadillac’s Comin’ was the result. Of course, no agent or publisher would touch it, so after a few years of languishing on my hard drive, it resurfaced and got my attention once more. I tightened it up, polished it, and today I put it up on Kindle.

For those of you who have considered self-publishing on Kindle, I strongly recommend you read every word of Joe Konrath’s blogs for the last six months before you take the step. He has…well, just read the blogs and you’ll see what I mean. Once you do, and IF you decide to go ahead with it, be ready to step into The Formatting Swamp of Doom. You’ll need to go over your novel line by line–I mean it–and in some spots, word by word in order to format it correctly for Kindle.

If you make it to the other side of the swamp, set your price, throw it up there and hope for the best. Of course, you’ll need to promote it heavily, which will occupy virtually every waking moment of your foreseeable future. So good luck!

Now here’s a brief synopsis of Cadillac’s Comin’.

***

It is June, 1958.  Elvis Presley has gone into the army, while Jerry Lee Lewis has just returned from a career-shattering trip to England with his 13-year-old wife.  Rock & roll music is under attack from all sides and is in real danger of disappearing, as its two most dynamic artists are effectively removed from the picture.  Sun Records, an independent Memphis label responsible for many of the seminal rock & roll hits, has chosen piano rocker Ike Thacker, native of Greenville, Mississippi, from its impressive stable of artists to assume the mantle of the “King of Rock & Roll”.

Ike is one of the most powerful performers on the American scene, combining an explosive stage presence with his natural talent for writing big songs.  This one-two punch makes him the prime candidate for the top rock & roll artist in the world, and he makes up to five thousand dollars a night, a fortune by 1958 standards.

Sam Phillips, Sun’s founder and president, sees an opportunity to push his company into the highest echelons of the record business, becoming, in trade parlance, a “major label”.  But first, the fledgling music called rock & roll must be firmly established with a hero, a leader at the top, who of course is under contract to Sun.  Sam’s got it all planned out:  Ike will do a starmaking tour, as his new record, Cadillac’s Comin’, shoots up the charts.  The record will become a smash hit, a movie deal will then be signed, and he’s even slated to make an appearance on the prestigious Ed Sullivan Show, following which he will be universally recognized as the king of rock & roll.  And of course, Sun will move into a controlling position in the music industry, selling millions of records in the process.  All very nice, but Ike proves difficult to control.

Set in Memphis in the turbulent early years of rock & roll, and later in New Orleans’ shadowy demimonde, Cadillac’s Comin’ is a valentine to the rockabilly pioneers of the 1950s, who operated in the dark, with no rules, no guidelines, no precedents, and virtually no adult supervision.  Against this chaotic backdrop, they nevertheless managed to solidify rock & roll’s place in American culture.

***

For those of you who have a Kindle, just download it. The price is a measly $2.99. If you don’t have a Kindle, you can go to Amazon.com, then Kindle, where you can download the Kindle app for free onto your computer. Then you can download the novel.

Yes, it can all be yours in mere moments! Buy it now!

Over at the Ink Spot blog today, Darrell James posted a very interesting piece on song lyrics and how they influenced his writing. I would’ve left a comment, but Ink Spot doesn’t take URL signatures, and for some reason they have never accepted my Google ID, so I don’t bother commenting there.

But Darrell’s blog is worth noting. He had met the 1960s folk-rock group the New Christy Minstrels in a parking lot one day and, since he was a longtime fan, happened to have a CD of theirs in his car. They all signed it gladly and promised to buy his book. He went on to say that, as a child of the folk-rock generation, where it’s all about the lyrics and the story, music has played an important role in his writing.

Amen. I spent most of my adult life as a professional musician (piano), playing rock & roll, rhythm & blues, and country for decades. When I first turned to writing, I sat in front of a blank sheet of white paper with a pencil in my hand (I didn’t even own a typewriter in those days) for what seemed like hours. No ideas, no story, no character, nothing. Then, a line from a song flew into my head. It was from The House Of The Rising Sun, a big hit in the 1960s for the Animals. In fact, it was an old folk tune about a girl who is forced to choose between a life of poverty and one of prostitution, knowing that either way, she’s doomed. The line was this one:

I got one foot on the platform, the other foot on the train

I’m goin’ down to New Orleans to wear that ball and chain

Bingo! I was off to the races. I had my lead character, my story, and my setting. Of course, the novel went nowhere, but at least I had one under my belt.

Other novels of mine have started on such flimsy threads. Cadillac’s Comin‘, a rock & roll novel about a one-hit wonder from the 1950s, is about to go up on Kindle as a self-pub. It grew out of two famous lines from the Eagles:

Freedom, oh freedom, that’s just some people talkin’

Your prison is walkin’ through this world all alone.

I have a print novel coming out in a few months from a traditional publisher. It’s a noir effort called The Take, and sprang from possibly the greatest noir song of all time, El Paso by Marty Robbins. These were the lines that gave me the basis for the novel:

Blacker than night were the eyes of Felina, wicked and evil while casting a spell.

My love was deep for this Mexican maiden. I was in love but in vain I could tell.

You know, it just doesn’t get any more noir than that. (I blogged about this song sometime back. It was called “Music Would Play And Felina Would Whirl” and you can access it by clicking on “Personal” under the Categories.)

The thing is, I used to do all of these songs back in my playing days, and those lines always stood out for me. When it came time for me to write novels, the lines just found their way to the front burner and inspired three different books. Maybe there are others waiting their turn. I sure hope so.