Quacking Alone

(Upset Hubby Alert – I can’t remember where I read it!)

Read somewhere (hence the hubby alert above) that some of the editors at the big publishing houses are now looking for contemporary romances.  Actually, I think I read in a couple of different places over the last week or two, news that contemporaries may be the next hot thing.  What do I say to that?

THANK GOD, THE GREAT GREEN TOAD FROG AND ALL THE RE-FRIED CLAMS IN THE UNIVERSE!!!

I like historicals and I write historicals, but there are times, many times, when only a contemporary will do.  Some of my favs from that genre are folks like Diana Palmer, Linda Howard, Susan Elizabeth Phillips and Jayne Anne Krentz.  I can curl up in a chair and watch hours pass like minutes while I read one of theirs in paperback form,  or – as I add more to my Sony Reader – in ebook form.  I’m eyeballing a purchase of a Diana Palmer and a Brenda Jackson Westmoreland anthology for my e-reader as we speak. 

I also love contemporaries.  I also WRITE contemporaries.  I previously published Email Enticement, a contemporary set in my home town of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.  I just published Griffin’s Law, a contemporary set at the University of South Carolina’s Law School in Columbia, SC.  Both books take place at that interesting mental spot where love and the law intersect. So, does my gratitude about the return of the contemporary contain some amount of self-interest?  You bet’cha.

But, keep in mind, that I write contemporaries because I read contemporaries.  I write contemporaries because I love contemporaries.  I don’t agree that you have to write what you know.   I do agree that you have to write what you love.   Enthusiasm and joy and a page turning experience will never happen for a reader if they didn’t first happen for the writer.  Fun is contagious. 

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The book that, to date, I had the most fun writing, Griffin’s Law, is being published as I type. It’s out there on Smashwords and almost out there (it should be through the publishing grinder shortly ) at Kindle. It’ll take a couple of weeks or so for us to get the paperback version out.

The Amazon process for Kindle puts the book out in stages. As I write this post, Griffin’s Law is up on the Amazon site, complete with hubby’s fantabulous cover image and, by the Great Green Toad Frog, with a buy button. The cover blurb hasn’t fed up yet. And this blog post is partly about Griffin’s and why it was my most fun book to write, and partly about that cover blurb.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I’m a huge fan of Grey’s Anatomy and of its creator, Shonda Sunshine (Rhimes). And Grey’s Anatomy inspired this book. One night, as I watched the folks at Seattle Grace Hospital, I asked myself one question – What if Grey’s Anatomy took place in a law school? 

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The not-so-jolly fat man here again, peeps. Apparently Mary Anne had wanted a serious post, even though she knows I hate serious. I think everything should be fun and funny, especially for an audience. I’m not so different from my wife in that aspect; she’s trying to provide her readers an escape from their humdrum everyday lives through fantastic love stories, where I try to lighten everyone’s mood via humor.

But she wants serious, so now I’ll take you there.

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Hello everyone, it’s Mary Anne’s husband, Angry Old Fat Man (AOFM for short).

If you’re a regular reader of this site, you probably know that I, AOFM, create all of Mary Anne’s book covers for her. She expressed her desire to let you, the reader, have a peek behind the scenes of the creative process I go through to make nebulous clouds of thought into solid color images on thick cover stock paper.

So come along with me while I indulge her.

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This week’s Grey’s Anatomy was the first after a wee hiatus and it gives a glimpse into where the show is headed down the trail and possibly to the end of its run.  Ellen Pompeo (Meredith) hinted this week that the show would last about 2 more years.  If that’s the case, it looks like Shonda Sunshine is heading it back to where it started.  After all, Derek, on the heels of learning that his wife (Addison) had slept with his best friend (Mark), finally accepted Richard’s invitation to come to his hospital where Derek would be groomed as Chief.  Except, after Derek got there, Richard’s life and marriage disintegrated leaving Richard nothing to hold onto except the power for which he’d traded everything else. 

After years of waiting in the wings, Derek staged a coup and got the job he’d come West to take.   Richard’s fall off the wagon might have justified Derek’s sneak attack if only McDreamy hadn’t traded on inside information from the love of his life to pull it off.  In this episode, Richard sat in a conference room for hours, torn between whether to sign one document that gave up his job and medical license permanently, and another that committed to going into rehab and coming out to resume power.  What had Richard torn was the rehab part – he didn’t want to give up drinking b/c it was all he had left.  Finally though, Richard signed and headed to rehab and Derek got ready to take charge.  By the time Richard returns, there may be a battle, but I bet Derek will have learned that power ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

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E-books have arrived.  There’s no longer any doubt about that because in the wake of the plethora of e-readers, Apple’s iPad is about to enter the market.  The bigs have stopped throwing down over whether e-books should exist.  Now they’re throwing down over how much they should cost.  The journey from whether to how much marks the milestone of an industry change.

This week Amazon and Macmillan locked horns over price point.  At the iPad announcement, Steve Jobs indicated that Apple would only take a 30% commission off the sale of each e-book.  Under the Apple scheme, publishers would set the price.  Boy, howdy, that would suit the publishers just fine but the public – not so much.  After the iPad was out and about and had established itself with a sales history, the pricing structure would have given publishers leverage over Amazon.  Note that I said AFTER. 

One publisher didn’t want to wait.  Before the stories from Job’s launch announcement had gone to print, John Sergent, CEO of Macmillan, decided to go all Godfather on Amazon.  Sergent told the e-tailer giant to adopt Apple’s price structure and abandon its pricing insanity ($9.99 as the max for an e-book) OR Macmillan would do “extensive and deep windowing of titles”.  In other words, Macmillan said, give us control of pricing or lose the right to sell our newest and most popular books. 

Sergent made the worst of all negotiating errors – he made a threat he couldn’t or shouldn’t back up.  And Amazon took him at his word.  The e-tailer didn’t just give a verbal response, it gave a real world response.  Amazon removed the buy button from all of Macmillan’s titles, e-books and print.  Now Amazon sells a lot of e-books, but it doesn’t out and out dominate the market because that market is too new, it’s evolving daily.  However, no bookstore on the planet sells the number of print copies that Amazon does.

Now Macmilian is in a corner without a fallback position.  It overlooked the fact that even after the Apple launch, it will still need Amazon.  Macmillan reacted by issuing a “letter” to its authors/illustrators and the literary agent community.  As the blog Dear Author noted, the letter missed its most important audience — the readers. Macmillan wants to make money on its product, Amazon wants to sell a lot of its product, and the readers want to buy books and e-books at a fair price. 

The delicate balancing act of marketing/price structure can’t work if total control is given to the publisher.  Amazon talks about anti-trust and in response, Macmillan cites a US Supreme Court decision legalizing retail price maintenance for luxury goods.  Common sense and the free market can imagine more practical reasons for not giving a producer control of the price of its goods.  What would Wal Mart or Dollar General have to charge for goods if the manufacturer set the price? 

If Amazon wants to make money on volume instead of price margin, that helps the consumer.  If Macmillan weren’t so short sighted, it would realize that it helps the publisher and its authors too.  People all over America (like me) are caught like rats in the trap of the economic crunch and we can’t afford to pay big prices for books.  But the crunch won’t last forever (please God) and when it passes, readers will be able to pay more for books. 

Macmillan forgot the most important lesson of the Godfather – if you’re making the other party an offer it can’t refuse, first you better be sure it can’t refuse.  Amazon could and it did.  Be careful what you ask for publishers, because you might get it. 

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I’d never realized it until yesterday, but I’ve been a literary segregationist.  Oh I’ve never had a mental partition over race, or at least, I’m not aware of one, but yesterday I realized I had one over age.  Books written about high school kids are intended for that age through college age kids, right?  That means they’re not meant for me. 

So a while back Stephanie Meyer started releasing books in her Twilight series.   It’s a romance series and I write romance.  Lord knows, I read romance and I’ve surely been a reader of the genre for much longer than I’ve been a writer.  And I heard good things about these books everywhere.  But never once was I tempted to pick one up.  They weren’t written for me, now were they? 

My eldest son read the books and he flat out loves them.  Keep in mind, Zack doesn’t read romance.  The boy refuses to read anything I write and that’s natural enough – him reading my books would make me a wee bit antsy too.  But my eldest won’t even read this blog.  I’ve given him fair warning that from time to time I write about him, but still, he won’t read it.  Where does he get such stubbornness from? 

Okay, okay, maybe Zack and his Mom have a thing or two in common.

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Hello again chiljens, it’s me the angry old fat dude. Just popping in to tell you Mary Anne has been very busy not working on one book, but two books. Her muse is working overtime, swinging her back and forth between two time periods. Hell, I have trouble keeping up with what year it is in real life, much less numerous crazy fantasy worlds.

Anyways, Mr. Brick has not been seen recently, so we suspect Muse is working like a maniac to avoid him. She is alive and well, though, unlike many others who’ve had run-ins with His Brickness.

In the meantime, I present Mr. Brick’s premiere video, The Bricks-For-Me Challenge, which was his answer to the infamous Blasphemy Challenge. Enjoy, and until later, kiddies, AOFM out.

I held a Kindle.

Yes, I actually had a real, live, working Kindle in my very own hands. My hands shook, my palms sweated, my fingers gripped it tight, so very, very tight. My brown eyes glistened with lust that turned to love at first grasp. But then came the time of horror, of desolation, of pain. My hubby, my own ever-loving hubby looked at me and said, “You have to give it back now.”

My fingers held it tighter and I shook my head no, no, NO. And John said, “It’s not yours. You have to give it back.” He held out his hands, very carefully, like a cop trying to talk a deranged psycho holding a gun into giving it up. I could have made him fight me for it. I could have forced him to pry it out of my clinging hands. But then, the Kindle might have been hurt. I couldn’t hurt the precious little device. So I untangled my fingers, and handed it back.

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My muse is either very fickle or very smart.  Or, perhaps, I’m either exceptionally stubborn or exceptionally stupid.  More likely, it’s all of the above.

I had a plan.  I blogged about my plan last time.  I was working on a new historical romance.  Once it was done or (at least) well underway, about the beginning of next year, I was going to stop and do an edit of Griffin’s Law.  The next to be published Griffin’s is complete and has been resting pending an edit.  Griffin’s is a contemporary romance set in a law school and is sort of a crossover between E-mail Enticement and a historical.  Okay – if you insist- think of Griffin’s  as the Grey’s Anatomy of the legal profession.

Anyway, I’ve been hard at work writing my new historical.  Rather, I’ve been trying to be hard at work on the historical.  I’ve been coming home after work and opening the computer to the MS every night.  I’ve been opening it faithfully every Saturday and Sunday morning for the past few weekends.  Sometimes, I’ve even written a few lines on it.  But inevitably, after a line or two, the story leaves me and I start sneaking over to my desktop to play Snood or Solitaire.  Or flipping over to check sales on Amazon, Createspace, Scribd, Smashwords, etc.  Or getting sucked into something on Google News that I keep in customized form as my homepage for Internet Explorer.

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