Today will be a brief post.\u00a0 Blame it on the day job.\u00a0 You know, the one that pays the bills?\u00a0 I exist for the day when I can write full time, but this ain't that day (yet).\u00a0 My boss - the trial lawyer at the firm where I do\u00a0research and legal writing - is trying a big case next week.\u00a0 I also have a brief due to the Court of Appeals next Friday so\u00a0next week\u00a0promises to be a real ole' humdinger.<\/p>\n
Thought I'd post a brief mention about my great experiment on Amazon<\/a>.\u00a0 I'm playing with book blurbs or product descriptions again.\u00a0 Or maybe I should say that I'm playing with book descriptions still.\u00a0 It's sort of an ongoing battle.\u00a0\u00a0 See, my contemporaries -\u00a0Griffin's Law<\/a><\/em> and E-mail Enticement<\/a><\/em> - haven't yet found their audience.\u00a0 And I'm convinced that if I describe 'em just\u00a0right people will check out the\u00a0sample and then buy the ebooks for their Kindles<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Oh, I know, everyone says that nobody reads contemporaries.\u00a0 Everybody says that contemporary romances\u00a0don't bloomin' sell as well as historicals unless Oprah picks 'em for her book club<\/a> or Shonda Rhimes<\/a>, Ron Howard<\/a>,\u00a0or Stephen King<\/a> or Spielberg<\/a>\u00a0(or whoever)\u00a0buys the movie rights.\u00a0 I'm still waiting for the call from\u00a0Oprah or a film mogul.\u00a0 But despite that, I'm convinced that readers would enjoy the books if they gave 'em a shot.<\/p>\n I've been changing the descriptions of E-mail<\/em> and Griffin's<\/em> on sort of an ongoing and manic basis.\u00a0 (I've been waiting for the guys at Amazon's DTP to\u00a0call the\u00a0rubber room police to come get me.)\u00a0\u00a0First, I changed both to add the blog posts describing my process of writing each book.\u00a0 Nada.\u00a0 Just, nada.\u00a0 Then I went back and wrote a pithy, catchy\u00a03 or 4\u00a0paragraph description of each.\u00a0<\/p>\n You know what happened?\u00a0 Yep, more Nada.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Then, the other day, a light bulb went off in my head while a\u00a0hammer struck my noggin repeatedly.\u00a0 (Okay, just the light bulb.\u00a0 I think Mr. Quack was responsible for the hammer.)\u00a0 Anyway, I had sort of a ta-da moment.\u00a0<\/p>\n I was looking at Brotherly Love<\/a><\/em>, which remains my best seller across all platforms.\u00a0\u00a0(That's especially interesting BTW.\u00a0 Back in the bad old days when I was one of the many hopeful nobodies knocking at the Castle Walls of the NY Publishing Royals, Brotherly<\/em> was the book that confused literary agents the most.\u00a0 Was it a historical romance?\u00a0\u00a0No, they decided.\u00a0 It contains things people would have to think about.\u00a0 The Royals told me it would confuse romance readers.\u00a0 It must be literary fiction, they said.\u00a0 But wait, it has too much explicit sex.\u00a0 That would make literary readers uncomfortable.\u00a0 So you know what happened?\u00a0 It didn't fit one of their labels so they said - no thanks.\u00a0 We don't want anything different.\u00a0 We just want more of the same.)<\/p>\n So, I was trolling my books at Amazon the other day and looking at the page for Brotherly<\/em><\/a> and it hit me.\u00a0\u00a0I've got a nice, long, lovely blurb for Brotherly.\u00a0 It's on the back cover of the paperback.\u00a0 But you know what?\u00a0 It ain't on Amazon.\u00a0 The description posted there is the very short 3 sentence or so one that I wrote for Smashwords.\u00a0 SW has a very strict limitation for descriptions.\u00a0 And I'd always considered that limit a real pain in my way-too-large arse.\u00a0 But you know what?\u00a0 Mark Coker, the SW founder<\/a> is a damned smart guy.\u00a0<\/p>\n Maybe keeping a description short means it only tells readers enough to hook 'em\u00a0into checking out the sample.\u00a0\u00a0Maybe, there's method to Mark's SW madness.\u00a0<\/p>\n I decided to try that for Griffin's Law<\/em>.\u00a0 It's my newest book out there and it's an awesome story and a very fun read.\u00a0 It is my tribute to Grey's Anatomy<\/a>.\u00a0 The story was born of the day I imagined what would happen if Grey's took place in a law school.\u00a0\u00a0There's a McDreamy<\/a> professor with a rule about never getting involved with students.\u00a0 There's lots of the ambiance and attitude\u00a0that good\u00a0old Seattle Grace\u00a0Hospital <\/a>would have if you transplanted it to a Southern\u00a0law school.\u00a0 So shades of the Paper Chase<\/a> creep in too.\u00a0 They have to, really, because, well, it's a law school.\u00a0<\/p>\n With the success of Brotherly<\/em> in mind, I went to SW<\/a> and copied my short little old 3 sentence or so description of Griffin's<\/em>, pasted it onto the book page\u00a0at DTP and republished the book.\u00a0 The description teases my having written the book as an ode to Grey's\u00a0Anatomy a la The Paper Chase and it mentions the McDreamy professor.\u00a0 It doesn't do a lot more than that.<\/p>\n Now, I'm waiting to see.\u00a0 Is less more?\u00a0 There's no post-it\u00a0wedding, but Griffin's<\/em> is my over-the-top look at what a McDreamy Seattle Grace\u00a0style romance would look like in a Southern law school.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n If you've got a Kindle, check out Griffin's Law<\/em> at Amazon<\/a> and let me know what you think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today will be a brief post.\u00a0 Blame it on the day job.\u00a0 You know, the one that pays the bills?\u00a0 I exist for the day when I can write full time, but this ain't that day (yet).\u00a0 My boss - the trial lawyer at the firm where I do\u00a0research and legal writing - is trying ...continue reading \"Is Less Really More?\"<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,6,7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1312"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1318,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312\/revisions\/1318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}