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. 

What does it mean that the contemporary is about to make a comeback?  I hope it’s a sign that the economy and the job market are about to rebound.  Many contemporaries feature romances that kindle in the workplace – a boss and a secretary, a rancher and a cook, two lawyers or a lawyer and a paralegal or a client, a law professor and a student (Griffin’s Law).  Almost all contemporaries contain some elements of the story that center around what the hero and heroine do for a living.  Over the last couple of years, too many talented folks have been unemployed or underemployed, so I don’t think many readers wanted reminders of jobs and the workplace in the books they read. 

Instead, the recent rise and focus has been on the paranormal romance novels.  America fell in love with Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight novels.  Yours truly even fell victim to the Vampire Virus when I watched the first Twilight movie because I was missing my away at college son who loves the series.  My infection was brief – I never bought any of the books  – but America has been suffering from the malady for a while – a long while.  What caused the Vampire Virus?

Paranormals have been with us always and will surely continue to have their day.  But paranormals used to be mainly the work of talented, highly creative souls who created other species and crafted a world for them to inhabit.  Reading one of those books introduced us to another place, governed by other laws and inhabited by strange and exotic creatures.  In those worlds we were the visitors.  But the vampire virus plagued us right here on our home planet. 

Why?  What caused the monster malady?  And when will we be cured?  I think the plague arrived when contemporary reality became too hard to take.  Too many people either had no workplace at all or had one where they toiled at some job for which they were way overqualified.  How could they imagine love in such a setting?  When survival became a dream American women fell in love with monsters. 

I view the current rumors and rumbles about the revival of the contemporary as a sign that reality has begun to improve.  It means that we can again see love in our world as a possible dream.  Out there, on the far horizon, we see a glimmer of light and it reminds us how good sunshine feels.  America is a country born of hope and filled with fighters and dreamers.  The glimmer of light is all we need to begin pushing forward, to begin shoving the darkness behind us as we head for a world where love can bloom again.

Perhaps the vampires and the zombies served their purpose.  Americans had to embrace something, even if it was something dark and deadly.  But writers of vampire and zombie romances still had to give their monsters redeeming qualities.  Through its darkest hours, Americans still refused to embrace the worst qualities of those monsters.  And now, I hope that women are ready to put away the lovers who dwell in darkness and embrace those who toil beside them on a sunny day. 

It’s time for the vampires & zombies to exit stage right.  The cowboys and the business tycoons are waiting in the wings, ready to take center stage.

Hurrah for the contemporary romance!!  If you’re in the mood for a taste of reality, flavored with some over the top fun, pick up Email Enticement or my new one, Griffin’s Law, now available in ebook and paperback.

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? 

But no book could be set in a law school without shades of The Paper Chase  creeping in, so I let all of those thoughts twist and tangle in my perverted little brain, and Griffin’s Law was born.  The book is set in the University of South Carolina’s School of Law in Columbia, SC, which I attended.  Descriptions of the school are, as far as I recall, fairly accurate.  The book includes scenes that take place near the “tunnel” that runs under a street. It allows students to park in the Carolina Coliseum lot and then trudge a long – long (did I say long) way to the law school.  And law students carry huge, heavy stacks of books, and have to tote them uphill past the coliseum and through the tunnel. They emerge from the tunnel to walk up the staircase from hell before they arrive at the law school. 

When the school was being built, some enterprising soul who wasn’t a fan of lawyers, wrote in the wet concrete a quote from Shakespeare .. “First, kill all the lawyers.”  When I was there the quote remained to greet students entering the building.  I also included an experience of mine from orientation.  The Dean of the Law School was manning the keg to greet the first years.  I thought that Dean was the spitting image of the (now) late Jerry Falwell.  Getting a beer from the Reverend was an interesting experience for a girl that grew up going to Church a lot. 

Unfortunately, the law school did not have a single Professor McDreamy when I was there, let alone one who had an almost equally yummy Professor pal.  Sigh.   It’s just as well we didn’t have those things, because I had enough trouble getting through law school without mooning around over a professor.  Ah, but in Griffin’s, Professors McDreamy and McSteamy are there.

The book starts when a first year student at the orientation party spills a beer on a guy outside the school, near the street.  Things get hot and heavy without the pair exchanging much info at all. Then things go wrong, and the student, Shea Ramsey, delivers a kick to the balls to the McDreamy Grey Griffin.  The next day, both are surprised when they meet again in the classroom of Shea’s first law school class where Grey is the professor and Shea is the student. 

Grey is a player and he has an ever-changing list of ladies’ phone numbers in his Blackberry.  All of his Blackberry ladies know that the only thing they can expect from him is hot sex and no strings.  Grey generally has a string of students mooning around after him and batting their eyelashes at him, but the students are out of luck.  Grey lives his life by the law that he’ll never get involved with a student.  But fate follows fewer laws than even the mysterious Professor Griffin. 

When the book was finally edited and the amazing cover finally done, I had to write the “cover blurb”  that appears on the back of the book and goes up as the product description at the sales sites.  There I encountered the dilemma that inspired the title of this post — To Compare or Not To Compare?  The blurb I wanted to post went like this: 

You’ll find Professor Griffin at the intersection of Grey’s Anatomy and The Paper Chase. That is, you’ll find him there if he’s not otherwise occupied with one of his Blackberry ladies. If he’s at the intersection, he’ll be teaching a class of law students how many ways the government forgets the Constitution on a daily basis. That’s where 1L Shea Ramsey saw him the second time they met – standing at the podium of her Con Law class.

Griffin keeps the personal and the professional strictly separated by one law – he never, ever gets involved with a student. But aren’t all laws made to be broken?

But hubby felt that including the comparison in the blurb was cheap and gaudy.  Okay, I’ll plead guilty to being a damned gaudy kind of gal.  I search for the big gold earrings that hang down to my neck.  I’m still hunting for a killer pair of gold or bronze shoes that are also comfy (I’ll only sacrifice so much to the God of Gaudy!).  And boy, howdy, you should see my purse.  Got it at a TJ Maxx sale where a horde of women were pulling out and showing each other these tasteful (boring) little handbags.  I had to crawl up to the top shelf (I’m short) and fish for Bagzilla – but it’s as big and gaudy and gold as you’d ever want to see.  So gaudy, I am.  But cheap?  Hubby would be the first to tell you I tend more to the “high maintenance” than the cheap. 

So hubby’s opinion of my proposed blurb made me pause and think.  He’s good at that.  While Iwas thinking, I started to ponder the thought to end all other thoughts – WWSD – What Would Shonda Do?   Or, more accurately, WWST – What Would Shonda Think?    Shonda Sunshine might not like my book or might not appreciate me being so bold and brassy as to compare it to the world that she built. 

Griffin’s doesn’t include the characters, the setting or the plots of Grey’s.  It’s more a similarity of attidude and ambiance.  And while I hope I got some of the atmosphere spot on, Griffin’s is also my take on everything. My take is, as always, over the top.  In my version, you’ll get The Paper Chase version of Grey’s — on steroids. 

In the end, I went with a cover blurb that doesn’t include the comparison.  I describe the professor as McDreamy and I did name him Grey, so I hope readers get the intent anyway.  Maybe, at some point, when my gaudy roots finally conquer my efforts to be tasteful (likely a futile battle), I’ll change the blurbs to see how the books sell with the comparison in place. 

Griffin’s Law is the same as Grey’s Anatomy - except that it’s completely different.  What do I mean by that?  The facts and the location are different. It’s the spirit that’s the same.  I hope that Griffin’s will take the reader to the same emotional place they visit when they watch Grey’s Anatomy.

For now, I’m happy to have the book getting out there and being available for the readers to discover.  I had a fabulous time writing this one and I hope the readers will have just as much fun reading the book.  So go, and pick up Griffin’s Law on Amazon’s Kindle site or on Smashwords, and tell me what you think.

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

My humor piece last week had some kernels of truth buried in it. I do ask Mary Anne to provide me with a (very short) plot summary and who the main two or three characters are. If I give her any leeway on that she’ll ramble on for many minutes on plot tangents and minor (and sometimes even expendable) characters.

So when she tries to give me ideas on what to put on the cover, she basically wants me to put something from every single scene and event in the book. A book cover cannot and should not have a picture of every scene in the book. Reasons:

• Space - There’s simply not enough room on a blank 8″ x 5.25″ area to put a dozen or so scenes.
• Confusion – If you want to make your cover as unattractive as possible, you can start out by making it an undecipherable crazy-quilt.
• Spoilers – Should the potential reader somehow be intrigued by the aforementioned crazy-quilt and succeed in deciphering it, they will have figured out the entire book and thus have no need to read it.

I don’t blame Mary Anne really. The thought process that enables her to write these books is the very thing that prevents her from making an attractive book cover: she is inside the book looking out, not outside the book looking in.

However, it’s the latter viewpoint that must be taken into account when designing the cover, because that’s obviously the only way a potential reader can approach a book she hasn’t read yet. And nobody, especially a busy woman who needs romance novels to escape her hectic day, wants to devote a huge chunk of time just looking at a book cover to decide whether it’s worth buying or not.

So my job in designing the cover is to convey the “feel” of Mary Anne’s book without bogging it down in detail and to make it enticing to the potential reader.

There are two main things I do to accomplish these goals. I use archetypal elements and avoid facial depictions.

Archetypal elements catch the viewer’s eye immediately and allow her to get a feel for the book’s content at a glance. Color can be considered an element here as well; for example, I used different colors of butterflies to convey a symbolic struggle of good versus evil and white to symbolize innocent neutrality on the cover of A Sixth Sense of Forever.

Avoiding the depiction of faces not only allows the viewer to imagine a more beautiful heroine or a more handsome hero than you could find in time-consuming model search, but also allows her to put herself into the heroine’s place, thereby investing herself emotionally in the story both on the cover and in the book once she picks it up.

Let me further explain these techniques using the front cover I recently made for Mary Anne’s soon-to-be-published Griffin’s Law.

I gathered from her plot description and how it related to her title that it was about a law professor falling for one of his students, after some sort of reluctance to do so. Something of a seduction story. So when I think of archetypes of classroom seduction, what do I think of? Hotties in naughty schoolgirl outfits, of course! A search of stock photos brought up a nearly perfect depiction of what I wanted:

Nearly perfect, but not perfect. The setting is right, the model’s body is great, her face is definitely pretty… but I don’t want to show her face. Why? Because her face prevents the viewer from being the naughty schoolgirl. It limits the imagination, and that’s bad.

Avoiding the model’s face presented some technical problems. The right side of the picture was not big enough to simply crop the face (and the rest of the body near it) and be done with it. So what I had to do was to isolate the model from the background and move her to the left, cropping out her face in the process:

So now I had her ready to put into place, tramp stamp and all. Except… I didn’t have anything in the picture to let the viewer know the classroom was in a law school. I could have tried to integrate another entire archetype, like scales or a gavel or a Lady Liberty statuette, but that would have meant another laborious search and cluttering up the cover with more elements.

I asked myself, “How do I fix this problem?” A short analytical glance at the current element gave me my answer. The tramp stamp! It was distracting because while it served the purpose of showing the girl to be naughty, the stamp itself had no meaning.

I would simply replace it with a more relevant tramp stamp. An iconic one:

I “erased” the original stamp on the girl and did some cosmetic work on her lower back:

Then I worked some perspective, opacity, and color magic on the clipart scales and VOILA! a new tramp stamp:

Work on the naughty schoolgirl completed, I then put the chalkboard in place and added all the necessary shadows:

All of the pictoral elements were done, now for the textual elements – the title, the author, and a slogan.

Fonts are tough. Most romance novels, particularly the historical types, would have a flowery script as the typeface. Griffin’s Law, though, is a contemporary romance, so a flowing script font was not really appropriate. I needed something “lawyerly”. I chose Palatino Linotype, since it has serifs and looks professional, but it’s not the dreaded Microsoft Word default Times New Roman (ugh).

Text color is important too. I was going to go with a yellowish-golden color that matched the tramp stamp, but then I remembered that the classroom setting of Mary Anne’s book was at the University of South Carolina. Say what you want about the Gamecock mascot; the school colors of burgundy and white are terrific.

This is where I felt I needed a woman’s touch. I had a difficult time choosing between the two text color sets, golden-yellow and burgundy. I asked Mary Anne to choose, she had a hard time with it as well. So she called in the big guns – our youngest son, 12-year-old Sam. Sam asked, in his infinite pre-teen wisdom, why not use both sets? That’s when I remembered that a golden-yellow is also part of the USC mascot colors – the chicken’s feet. So I made the upper text the same color as the chicken’s body and the lower text the same color as the chicken’s feet:

And that’s how it’s done.

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.

The first things I need to know before creating the cover are what the plot, characters, and setting of Mary Anne’s book will be. So I ask my wife what her book is about. She proceeds to e-mail me the entire book in whatever stage of completion it may be in.

I look at the 100,000+ words, have a petit mal seizure, and once I become fully conscious again, promptly ignore them.

I then go back to my wife and politely ask her what the setting of her book is, what the characters look like, and what the general plot of the book is. She asks me not so politely why didn’t I read the book.

My reply? “Words words lots of words holy mother of Allah at the words many many words…” and then I devolve into grunting, hooting, and hopping around like the apemen around the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Except the monolith is Mr. Brick.

Then Mary Anne throws me a banana (potassium is important!) to calm me down and starts the most crucial part of the process – she states her own ideas about what should be on the cover.

Of course her ideas are not so much creative graphic ideas as they are attempts at telling the whole plot of the book on a 5.25″ x 8″ blank space. I imagine she looks at an empty cover the same way the Pharoahs looked at an undecorated stone wall – as an opportunity to tell everyone through a series of tiny, mysteriously unrelated pictures about how a man shtupped boatloads of women while pursuing marriage with his own sister.

And I, Ra-mentohep, did bang lots of hot babes before pledging my undying love to my sister.

I listen attentively to her ideas for the cover, nodding and affirming each and every single statement. I then have another petit mal seizure and drool for 2 hours while she continues talking.

When she leaves for coffee (I think writers and caffeine addiction must go together like chicken and rice), I regain consciousness, forget everything she told me, and flee to the refuge of my computer and its comforting hearthlike glow. Ahhhh, relief.

My mind is finally blank enough to start work on the cover. I begin gathering source images from various places. While looking for pictures pertaining to the setting (old West, Regency England – whatever/whenever the hell that was, Fairyland, etc.) I catch a glimpse of female flesh. This leads me to searches for “nubile teen contortionists in animal print lingerie” and more drooling.

Close, but not quite...

After downloading several gigs worth of backward-curled zebra-patterned goodness, I hunker down and put together two or three strong elements relating to the plot and characters of Mary Anne’s book.

If it’s a Western setting, I put a guy and a chick humping in a horse pasture.

If it’s Regency England, I put a guy and a chick humping in a castle.

If it’s Fairyland, I put a guy and a chick humping in the woods with Day-Glo butterflies flitting around their naughty bits.

If it’s a sequel to the last Fairyland book, I put a guy and a chick humping next to a stream with Day-Glo butterflies flitting around their naughty bits.

And that’s how I, AOFM, create a romance novel book cover.

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.

What got the little hamsters running around the creaky wheel in my head was Derek’s motivational speech to the employees.  He said he was starting with a clean slate.  The big, take charge types think they control the slate.  I’m editing the new one that I’ll post soon (when my edit and hubby’s cover get finished), and it’s called Griffin’s Law.  (Think – Grey’s Anatomy meets The Paper Chase)  There’s a Professor in Griffin’s named Grey who like Derek, thinks he runs his slate.   They’re both wrong of course.  Worrying about the slate and the state of the slate runs them.  There’s no door in life allowing Derek, Grey or any of us to sweep out the dirt. 

The dirt hangs around and the only way to get it off the slate is to sweep it under the rug.  If you do that, you create big bumps and bulges and eventually, no matter how careful you are, you’re gonna trip over one of them.  Dirt loses its power if you leave it out in the open and walk over it on your way to the future.  No one’s slate is clean because life is dirty.  Women can deal with the dirt, acknowledge the dirt and move on.  Men think they can rule the dirt, can control it by brute force or by fiat of will.  Men think they can say the slate is clean and therefore it is.  Men will be men and they will turn everything into a power play. 

In this episode, all the women let the men hold the slates and think they controlled them.  Take the mighty Christina Yang for example.  Owen felt belittled by Christina “giving” him to Teddy.  So in this epi, Christina let Owen dictate terms and when Teddy paged Yang for a big surgery, Owen told her not to answer the page – and she didn’t.  Even the Nazi surrendered her slate.  Bailey set off on a Nazi rant at Dr. Feel Good, the anaesthesiologist, after a patient woke up mid surgery.  But by the end of the epi, Bailey let Feel Good be in on surgery round two and she even explained herself to the man.  On the Mark/Lexi front, McSteamy had moved in a previously unknown and pregnant adult daughter and declared that he and Lexi would raise the girl.  When Lexi rebelled against raising a girl who was about her age and broke up with Mark, he reacted in typical McSteamy fashion by going off to have some rowdy sex with Addison.  And that was just fine and dandy and a thing Lexi was to forgive and forget, but when he found out that Lexi had done the same thing – sleeping with Karev- he made Lexi pay for it for the whole epi.  McSteamy gave Lexi the silent treatment and by the end had her running off an elevator in tears, ceding him the field and giving him his way.

How about the “post it” power couple, my favs, Mer/Der?  In this one, Mer quietly went along with the program, letting Derek play Chief.  She even surrendered her schedule to his, and at the end of the epi we saw the big man hard at work in his office.  The faithful little woman sat across from his desk, reading a magazine. 

I think Shonda Sunshine was setting up a lesson for the men that power and control are as empty and illusory as those clean slates.  If the men want power and the women let them think they have it, then who is really in control?  It’s just like the dirt.  The dirt of the past will always be there.  You can sweep it under the rug to give yourself a clean slate and risk tripping over the bumps or bulges. Or you can rearrange the dirt so it’s not an obstacle between yourself and your future.

But Derek thinks he wants power and now, he thinks he’s got it.  Mer won’t play the “little woman” for long because that’s not who she is.  Mer won’t quietly go to dinners and banquets when she could be in surgery or having a  drink with her friends.  Mer won’t stand by silently and let Der discipline her friends for a mistake that most of them have made but didn’t get caught for.  In short, Mer will call Der out and so will the board.  Whether or not a “post it” marriage suits the two of them, it won’t suit the suits.  I can foresee an epi down the road where the suits decide to overlook some act of Mer’s because she’s not really Der’s wife.  And I can see them putting the question to him, making him want to legalize the union.  THEN I see Mer refusing, not b/c she doesn’t want to walk down the aisle with Der, but because she only wants to do it for the right reasons.

In Griffin’s Law, my soon to be pubbed book, Grey is a law school professor and Shea is his student.  Grey thinks he has all the power and Shea lets him think so, until he goes too far.  That’s the problem with power.  It’s a potent cocktail that makes all the lines fuzzy.  Drink too much of it and you become too full of yourself, too convinced that your rules are THE rules. 

I think Derek is gonna drink too much of the me/my juice and spend too much time running around worrying about the state of his slate.  All that dirt under the rug will trip him up and leave him facing a choice that will decide his future, Mer’s future and the fate of the hospital.  He came West for power and found love instead.  Power doesn’t allow for a union of equals and true love won’t allow for anything else.

I see a clash coming that even McDreamy’s magic wand won’t fix.

Maybe I’ve been a lawyer too long, but this looks a lot like a marketing ploy cooked up at the end of a negotiation. Kindle users get upset at e-books priced over $9.99 because they feel that’s their bargain with Amazon. So how could Amazon give in and still come across as being on the Kindle owners’ side? They could play a giant shell game but not run it for long enough to do any serious damage to Macmillan or Amazon.

Was this a real dispute or a giant pacifer to Kindle owners? Either way, it opens the door and all the other publishers can now walk through. It’s the beginning of the end of that $9.99 ceiling.

I’m an indie publisher so the publishers big prices can only help my bottom line. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for Amazon’s customers.

I doubt that Kindle owners will feel terribly pacified.

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. 

The whole price point battle hit home to me in a personal way because I’ve been struggling with my pricing on Amazon’s Kindle.  My books (Email Enticement, Brotherly Love, A Faerie Fated Forever, A Golden Forever and A Sixth Sense of Forever) had been selling fairly well on Kindle at a price of $5.99, but sales could have been stronger.  How to achieve that?  Well, there are lots of folks like my family waiting out the time when the family income returns to pre-depression levels.  (Coping with that stress keeps silencing my muse) But there are other families, too many other families, like mine out there. Wouldn’t more people buy the books if they cost less? 

Yes, Virginia,  I decided that I too could become a wholesaler.  I could make a little money on a lot of sales instead of making more money on each sale.  So at the first of January I dropped my price across the board – not just on Kindle – to $4.00.  And I waited for the sales to start rolling in.  You know what?  By and large, I’m still waiting. 

Smashwords direct (sales on the site) has never been a big seller, but the site is now distributing to Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Amazon and Sony (my work hasn’t gone to Sony yet and it’s already on Amazon).  I’ve had a few sales on a couple of titles at B&N.  But on Kindle, nada, zip, zilch, nothing.  Yet so many other voices on the site say that they price around the $4.00 level and sell lots and lots.  They say that volume more than makes up for margin.  Apparently, what’s true for them is not true for me.  As usual, for me, the world is backwards.

Maybe it’s a case of my boss being right – but for the love of all that’s holy, don’t tell him I said so.  My boss, the owner and senior partner at our law firm, says that if you charge less for something then people see it as cheap and worth less.  Ye Olde Boss says that people would rather pay more to get something because then it has more value.  Yeah, he says that people believe you get what you pay for. 

‘Course, my boss also refuses to step foot into Wal Mart.  If I mentioned Dollar General, he’d act as stumped as he did the other night when he called and I told him I was watching House.  He’d never heard of the show and says he hasn’t watched much TV in decades.  So you’d think he was out of touch and about some things, he is – but business ain’t one of those things.  The instincts that helped him build a practice and that have helped him keep it going when around us so many others have floundered (2 firms went under in our area just last week)  may mean that he’s right about this. 

My hubby cautions me against playing around with the price on Amazon too much because he says their computer equipment may get confused, and I’m sure he’s right about that.  But zero sales are zero sales.  And any part of our income that we be bolstered right now has to be bolstered (I hear our creditors saying Amen in the background).  So Monday, I’m going to play with prices again – on Amazon, Smashwords, and the yet to be launched Google Books.  I’m going to hike the price a bit, but not all the way up to $5.99.   I’m going to split the difference and price at $4.99.

Why that price?  It’s less than $5.00 but not so much less that the reader might think that the book is one of those very short novels, based on the price.  Hubby warned me about that problem and he’s likely right about that too (He’s right a lot, isn’t he?  Except when he’s wrong of course.  Once in a while – when the moon is full and the seventh son of a seventh son rides by the house in a black car at the stroke of midnight [meaning, almost never] – I get to be right too) 

So, my new price structure will try to balance my concern about charging a price people can afford with my boss’s belief that people think they get what they pay for, AND with my hubby’s belief that the price should reflect that people are getting a 100K-word manuscript instead of one of the shorter books for which a $4.00 price is more the norm.  WHEW!!!  That’s a lot for any price to try to balance.

How will the new price work out?  Sales will tell and in the final analysis, readers will get the last word.  That’s the biggest thing Macmillan forgot – its audience. 

I’m trying not to forget mine.

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.

But I wish I’d been smarter, sooner and realized that these books could be another bridge between our worlds.  Because when Zack likes something, he really, really likes it.  He owns hardcover editions of all the books and he takes them everywhere.  They are big, bulky books and the boy won’t even take Amtrak home from college unless he packs the whole series.  Needless to say, he’s seen both of the movies, owns the original.  He packed it and brought it home with him over Christmas.

I guess Mr. Brick was too busy to bash me over the head at the time because the holiday came and went without the bonding moment that might have been.  But Zack’s been back in Orlando for the Spring Semester for a couple of weeks now and the “Mommy misses her baby” blues have kicked in.  So, last night, when I was flipping through the guide, I saw that Showtime was premiering the Twilight movie.  I decided to watch a few minutes of it before I switched to something else.  That way, I could email Zack that his Mom saw a little bit of Twilight. 

So I turned on the move and I soon forgot all about that few minutes.  I did email Zack after about half an hour to demand that he tell me if the movie had a happy ending.  My family knows very well that I won’t read, write or watch a romance that doesn’t have a happy ending.  Life is too short to be sad.  Zack emailed back and said as follows: 

It does have a happy ending, don’t worry- all the twilight books and movies do. Stephanie Meyer comes from the same school of romance you do. … (or a similar one, anyway. )

The comment got me thinking – my boy is as smart as they come.  I realized he was right.  About some really big things, he was right.  My work does share some similarities with that series.  One of the biggest things my books have in common with Twilight is the element of fate, destiny, of lovers who are meant to love.  

It’s not a slow, building attraction.  It’s not kindling a fire until it burns hot.  It’s spontaneous combustion. You meet the one you were born to love and you have to overcome whatever separates you because you can’t go one without them.  You’re no longer whole if you’re alone. 

That sort of force makes you overlook age differences (E-mail Enticement), being raised as siblings (Brotherly Love) or being a vampire or mortal (Twilight).  That sort of bond makes you overcome past mistakes like real infidelity (A Faerie Fated Forever), a separation plot disguised as infidelity (A Golden Forever), or an engagement to another woman (A Sixth Sense Of Forever).  It creates the sort of desperate yearning for a union that’ll keep me reading or writing all the way to the end.

Lots of people like to read or write romances about building a relationship, building feelings slowly.  I’ve read and enjoyed some of those books. But when I try to write one, the story refuses to come together for me.  I find the blend of destiny and desire to be essential ingredients for a great romance.  And yes, all of my preconceived prejudices aside, I found the Twilight story as told through the movie to be a great romance. 

But invariably, movies are restricted by time and the attention span of the audience.  So now, I guess I’ll have to buy the book to read the full story.  Thank God for my new e-reader.  It means I won’t have to lug around that big book.  It means that if I have my purse with me (and trust me, I do), that I’ve got the book with me. 

So Ms. Meyer, I look forward to reading and experiencing your complete story.  I give you mad props for doing such a good job of character crafting that you had me yearning for Edward to take a big bite of Bella.  Yeah, just like Grey’s of a few years ago had me rooting for infidelity, Twilight had me cheering for the vampires. 

Take destiny, add a hefty dose of desire and guarantee a happy ending.  That recipe inspires me as a writer and lures me as a reader. Now Ms. Meyer has shown me that the recipe, when crafted with great writing, is timeless.

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.

Okay, get your mind off of all the weirdness of MJ’s latter years.  As for the criminal charges, don’t go there.  Think about the music and the performances.  Get yourself in that mind space.  Maybe it’ll help if you squeal “Ooh” and “I’m Bad” three or four times.  Okay, focused now? 

 His death was tragic. Having a creative force like his snuffed out so quickly, so needlessly has deprived the world of years of music and magic.  So while it’s certainly his tragedy, his family’s tragedy, it’s also a loss for everyone who ever turned on a radio or downloaded music.  In the wake of the sudden loss there were many retrospectives and tributes.

As one of those tributes Fox re-broadcast the first American Idol finalist show of this season featuring the top 13 performing Michael Jackson songs.  I watch American Idol and enjoy seeing the group working and growing into music professionals.  It’s always fun to see someone working to make their dream come true.  But I’d forgotten about that MJ show because, at the time, it was just another show.  Too bad it wasn’t done later in the season with the gloved one giving the finalists performance critiques and suggestions. 

My favorite contestant of this past season was Adam Lambert.  We all recall that he finished second.  My only explanation for that is that Kris Allen was everyman — the one more like the average American watching on the sofa at home.  Adam has too much creative force to be contained or labeled in any one genre or tradition.  Adam will never be anyone’s everyman — but neither is Elton John and, of course, neither was Michael Jackson. 

As one of the last performances of the show, Adam Lambert did MJ’s “Black or White.”  Adam nailed it, standing out from the others like Sir Elton at a High School talent contest.  His performance impressed the judges too, including Simon Cowell, the one we love to hate and hate to love.  Simon’s comments made me think and inspired this post.  Simon said Adam nailed it because (and I’m paraphrasing here because I didn’t watch the episode with pen in hand) - To make a MJ song work , a performer has to be totally comfortable on stage, and he has to perform the song like Michael – over the top.

Why did that resonate with me? When Adam and MJ perform, they do it over the top.  When I write romance, I write it over the top.  For a writer or performer to succeed, he or she has to do it the way it comes naturally.  If Kris Allen tried to perform MJ over the top, it wouldn’t work for him at all.  It worked for Lambert because that’s how his art speaks to him.  It’s the same for a romance novelist.  You can only write romance over the top and have it carry the reader along if that’s how the story and the characters speak to the writer.  I understand MJ’s approach to music because I know it must have come as naturally to him as my stories come to me. 

I write romance over the top, bigger than life, because that’s how the characters in my books insist on behaving.  Does my over the top style communicate to readers?  I had a comment on Amazon from a lovely lady who’d read A Faerie Fated Forever.  She said the book was written over the top but she hadn’t been able to put it down.  Over the top done right will take the reader out of this reality and into one where love is instant, lust is imminent, seduction is inevitable and happily ever after is not just possible and plausable – it’s necessary. 

With Michael, his song lyrics were intense, almost driven.  His performances took that intensity, that drive, and multiplied them many times over.  The way he acted, sang, danced and performed carried the songs over the top and took his audience along for the ride.  Other artists performing those songs, save for the rare exception like Adam Lambert, generally come off like glass trying to imitate a diamond.  Not many performers, even very polished singers who’ve sold in the multiple millions, could do Michael and have it come off as a tribute instead of a poor imitation.  I’d love to see Elton John and Cher performing some Michael Jackson tunes,  separately and together as a duet.  I’ll bet you a re-fried frog that would be a tribute that carried the soul, the spirit and the vibrance of MJ.

Over the top can, too often, come across as parody.  It will only capture and carry the audience if it first captured and inspired the writer or artist.  As Simon commented on Adam’s performance, it has to be comfortable before it can be convincing.  When it’s done right, the view from over the top can change the way readers and audiences view parts of their lives long after the last word or the last note.  Who could experience MJ performing Man In The Mirror without examining their own choices and actions? 

I’ll never be the MJ of the literary world.  His shoes are too big, his legacy too inspiring for anyone to attempt to claim.  But if you enjoy MJ’s music, perhaps you’d enjoy some of the work of a romance novelist who writes over the top.  Brotherly Love, A Faerie Fated Forever, A Golden Forever- and my soon to be released A Sixth Sense of Forever are all over the top historicals, and E-mail Enticement is a bigger than life contemporary.  If you enjoy Michael Jackson’s music, you might find a bit of that same spirit in my writing. 

Over the top takes reality to the max.  Then, it takes it further.  It makes extreme seem normal.  In today’s world where reality is too often bad news, where too many talented folks have lost their livlihoods and must re-invent themselves to survive, over the top can be both inspiration and escape. 

Put on a MJ album and pick up an over the top romance and life can look a little brighter, goals can seem more achievable.  If you take it over the top, there is nothing you can’t do, be or accomplish.  Taking it over the top has never been harder than now when so much negativity and hardship surrounds us all.  Did some of that affect MJ as he rehearsed for his London performances?  Did the thought of trying to carry with him over the top so many folks that were so heavy with loss stress MJ beyond bearing? 

Not that there would ever have been a good time, but this was a particularly bad time to lose Michael.  He was an American original and we are lucky that his legacy lives on. 

Romance novels weren’t Michael’s medium, but if they had been, I think he’d have written them a lot like mine, but better of course.  If you’re a MJ fan, you might check out some romance novels that will take you over the top. 

Michael Jackson, I thank you for your musical legacy.  It will show many generations to come the view from over the top. MJ, Rest in Peace, at least for a bit, before you get ready for your duet with Elvis.