Scribblers Page 12

  That friend returns the favor, calling Jack’s first mystery, The Death of Adam Stone, “a tense tale that will keep you snatching at pages right up to the surprising end.”

  Jack releases The Death of Adam Stone under Eileen Johnson’s imprint, Wolfhound Press. When one reviewer gives the opinion that the book should have been rewritten, Jack writes back on Wolfhound stationery, says the magazine could stand some editing itself, and signs his letter Lenore Johnson, one of Eileen’s aliases.

  Our undisputed king of self-publishing is Steve Brown.

  Steve makes the trip to Asheville from Greenville, South Carolina, and so is the second-farthest-traveled member of the group, after me. He is the kind of person I normally don’t like—loud, opinionated, driven. Then again, he is kindhearted and protective of those in need. Among all the members, Steve is the person most welcoming of guests and is always the first to leap to the defense of anyone verbally challenged by the group, as he did for me on one occasion.

  An Alabama native, Steve was a combat platoon leader in Vietnam and later worked in sales. At the time I met him, he had been writing novels for fifteen years but had never published a single word. He spoke freely of mystery greats like Raymond Chandler and John D. MacDonald, of big advances and movie deals, as if he were a member of the club, but it was easy to sense his frustration.

  In the end, all it took was a serious conversation with Jack Pyle, who told him he could continue standing on one side of the table with the book-buying public, or he could move to the other side and sit with the authors. If there was no one willing to publish his stuff, and if he really believed in it, he should assume the burden himself.

  Steve’s first self-published novel is Of Love & War, a story of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Following that comes Color Her Dead, a mystery starring Myrtle Beach lifeguard and part-time finder of runaways Susan Chase. Next is Black Fire, a literary novel set in Alabama, and then Stripped to Kill, a second Susan Chase mystery. All appear under Steve’s imprint, Chick Springs Publishing, coined from Chick Springs Plantation in Black Fire.

  The last page of Black Fire is followed by an excerpt from its proposed prequel, “Black Funk.” Color Her Dead has a free excerpt from Stripped to Kill, which in turn features both an excerpt from a third Susan Chase mystery and an interview with Steve Brown.

  Steve possesses a flair for garnering blurbs—quotes touting a books merits, usually featured on the back cover. He asks me to write one for Of Love & War, and I oblige. But when the book comes out, my quote is nowhere to be found, though there are four others on the back cover, one on the front, and twenty-four inside, before the title page. They come mostly from World War II veterans but also from people identified as bookstore managers, professors of history, ministers, doctors, attorneys, retirees, secretaries, students, teachers, and writers. By Color Her Dead, he is getting quotes from published authors.

  At one of the writers’ group meetings, I sing the praises of Charles Price and the novel of his I’ve edited. Steve asks me for Charles’s address so he can solicit a quote for Black Fire. Charles has mixed feelings about the matter and so writes an endorsement he feels won’t be used. Black Fire, he says, is “crowded with incident” and reads “like an action-movie scenario.” Steve runs it prominently.

  By his fifth book—Radio Secrets, a stalker novel—he no longer needs to ask for quotes, as he is able to use review excerpts from publications as mighty as Library Journal and Booklist.

  Always a popular man among the group, Steve blossoms into a hero for the downtrodden unpublished. There is an air of excitement when he blows into the room. His absence is publicly regretted during those sessions when he has obligations elsewhere.

  He talks of his editor in North Carolina, his artists in Asheville and Dallas, his printer in Michigan. He shows off the plastic table tents he sets up for his book signings. “Myrtle Beach Mysteries,” one of them reads. “Suspense,” “Southern Gothic,” and “Pearl Harbor” are the others. He brings his color-coded index cards bearing the names of bookstore contacts from Asheville to Atlanta. He tells about the legwork he does in advance of each of his autographings. He describes the bumper sticker on his car, which advertises his Susan Chase website, not to be confused with his Chick Springs Publishing website. Visitors to those sites can see Steve’s schedule of autographings and read a chapter from each of his novels, chapters from a couple of books not yet published, and a complete novella, In the Fast Lane, which is dedicated to Stephen King.

  In the span of eighteen months, he puts out six novels and sells twelve thousand copies. Of Love & War goes into a second printing of two thousand copies and Color Her Dead into a third.

  As far as I know, his overarching ambitions are still to be picked up by a New York house and to get a movie contract. If he remains a distance from those goals, he is at least closer than he was.

  At last word, Steve has been approached by a couple of writers about publishing under the Chick Springs imprint. He is working out an arrangement whereby he would collect a consulting fee for guiding them through the entire self-publishing process. They would pay all costs—which Steve estimates at eight thousand to ten thousand dollars per title—and ship the books from their own homes, just as he does.

  The total of self-published works by members quickly reaches thirty. I purchase most of these and read a good many.

  There are some well-written gems and several handsomely designed volumes among them, but most can be identified as self-published from a distance of fifty feet. The cover design is below commercial quality, as is the interior layout. The prose, notwithstanding the editorial help the members have sought out and paid for, is in need of editing. I have a book that begins with “Chapter 1” and continues with “Chapter Two,” and in which the odd-numbered pages are on the right for the first half of the story, as they should be, and on the left for the remainder. I have another that begins at the top of page 2 in the middle of a sentence. Page 1 is profoundly blank, as are pages 4, 5, 8, 9, 12, 13, 16, 17, and 20, which gets the book off to a rather rocky start. All of this serves to reaffirm my belief in industry standards.

  Then again, the big houses are not above putting out shoddy stuff, as everyone laments. Commercially published books—including my own—have plenty of embarrassing gaffes. And proofreading is a lost art even in the works of major authors.

  The members have struggled at their desks as long as the pros, and they put greater effort into marketing their wares.

  So why shouldn’t they have a place at the banquet?

  I drive an aged red Ford with an oil leak. Every time it downshifts going uphill, I expect it to leave its transmission on the pavement. It has a hole in its muffler. The steering makes noise. Worst is its worn-out wiring, which sometimes causes it to stall. I’ve spent a few hundred dollars on diagnostic tests to pin down this latter problem, only to be told that the car will likely have to fail completely before the defect can be identified.

  The Ford has always responded to coddling if I need something special from it, as now, when I’m driving to Asheville. I overfill the oil, pour a container of leak-slowing chemical in the crankcase, fill the tank with premium-grade gas, and drive it through the automatic carwash.

  It runs loudly but well the first hour in the rolling country through Statesville and Hickory. As I begin to climb past Morganton to Marion, traffic comes to a halt in a construction zone. Without air hitting the radiator, the engine heats up and the fan comes noisily to life. I can see and smell a light breath of oil smoke.

  I’ve not slept well in my own bed lately, but slumber comes easily when I’m behind the wheel. Lukewarm root beer is my stimulant of choice. I pop open my second one of the afternoon.

  The occasion is a party for several members of the writers’ group, who will be giving a joint discussion of their newly self-published books at the main public library in Asheville. The principal attraction is Jack Pyle. Jack suffered a heart attack on Halloween and underwent dou
ble bypass surgery shortly thereafter. It is now less than two weeks before Christmas, and his first public venture, to no one’s surprise, will be to promote his book and to speak for the broader cause of writing. Eileen Johnson will be presenting, too. The event is judged to be of such moment that the group has canceled its regular monthly meeting in an effort to encourage people to attend the party. That really wasn’t necessary, as all the members without obligations are sure to come. I hope my own effort in making the drive will help soothe any bad feelings I may have created with the Bill Brooks flap, but mainly I just want to enjoy the company and to hear what the speakers have to say.

  I put down my root beer when traffic starts moving again.

  If I have mixed feelings about their self-publishing ventures, I also acknowledge that they’ve accomplished more than I have lately. I’ve saved two weeks of vacation at the end of the year to work on my book. Unfortunately, I am presently editing a restaurant guide containing some two hundred and forty eateries. I find myself with fifty-three entries to go and only three scheduled working days. My most optimistic projections leave me with twenty entries to edit over Christmas. I’ll also have to edit the contents page, the acknowledgments, the general introduction, and the six smaller introductions to the various sections of the book. Then I’ll need to spell-check the files and enter all the author’s corrections. Meanwhile, my own project will languish, I’ll be surly at family occasions over the holidays, and I’ll continue sleepless.

  Despite its faults, the Ford is the best mountain climber I’ve ever owned. It maintains an effortless sixty on the big hill up from Old Fort, where greater vehicles fail.

  From the edge of my vision, I note the temperature gauge rising and the dashboard lights popping on one by one: SEATBELT, DOOR AJAR, WATER, SERVICE ENGINE SOON, OIL.

  It seems to run better when it’s all lit up.

  CHAPTER 8

  Ham-and-Eggers

  I’m riding a bus with my daughter’s fifth-grade class. I’m chaperoning a field trip to a science museum an hour away.

  I’ve just begun reading a romance novel, Essence of My Desire by Jill Jones. On its hot-pink cover is an antique perfume bottle. In the center of the bottle, an inch-square peekaboo cutaway reveals a bouquet of flowers on the first interior page. After that comes a page with capsule raves from publications called Affaire de Coeur, Romantic Times, and Belles and Beaux of Romance.

  The story begins in New Orleans as Simone Lefèvre receives a mysterious package containing an unidentified perfume. The daughter of the late master perfumer Jean René Lefèvre, Simone has fallen on hard times since Englishman Nick Rutledge, her first lover, stole her father’s secret formulas and left town. Meanwhile, in London, Nick Rutledge, too, takes delivery of a strange perfume. Like Simone, Nick has seen his fortunes slide. Crafty Frenchman Antoine Dupuis tricked him into his theft of Jean René Lefèvre’s life’s work, then gained control of Nick’s family’s perfume empire, the House of Rutledge.

  An ocean apart, Simone and Nick test the perfume and find it has a highly erotic effect. In their dreams, they are transported to a land of indigo mist and an hour of sizzling passion with … each other!

  Simone is enraged; Nick Rutledge is her sworn enemy.

  Nick is tormented; he is ashamed of his duplicity toward Simone.

  Before long, Simone receives an invitation from Antoine Dupuis to come to London to interview for a position at the House of Rutledge. In England, she rents a cottage on a country estate. It is, she learns, the former home of a witch and the place where her mysterious perfume was concocted. Meanwhile, Nick decides to take a weekend at his country estate, where he has just begun renting out an old cottage to bring in some needed cash. He parks his Triumph roadster, saddles his Arabian stallion to go introduce himself to his new renter at the cottage, knocks on the door, and—

  “Enjoying your book?”

  It’s the lady in the seat in front of me, another of the chaperons. She’s been bending the teacher’s ear up to this point and has apparently worn her out.

  “Book?” I say.

  “Are you enjoying your book?”

  “It’s okay.”

  I go back to reading.

  “Is it something for work?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say that.”

  She’s not accustomed to having her curiosity go unsatisfied, I can tell. Her daughter is the star of the class, and that ought to command a certain amount of deference from someone like me. She’s turned sideways. I catch her looking over the seat every now and then, trying to see what it is I’m reading. I have to tilt the top edge down until the book is flat across my leg.

  She finally leaves me alone—until we pull up outside the museum.

  “What’s that you’re reading?”

  I pretend I don’t hear.

  “What’s that you’re reading?”

  “Uh, nothing.”

  That answer, so flagrantly false, stuns her long enough for me to slip past, tucking the book in the inside pocket of my jacket, where it will stay until I can continue in peace.

  I ask Jill Jones how it feels to be a moneymaker for the publishing industry and yet to be disparaged by many book people for being a genre author. I ask how it feels to be denied the luxury of writer’s block but to be criticized for spewing formula stuff on a tight schedule. I want to know what it’s like to be a guilty pleasure to people like me.

  “Here’s my answer,” she says. “Show me the money. Genre writers make more money than literary writers, and I am not embarrassed to be a genre writer. And no, we don’t get the literary accolades and all that kind of thing, but it doesn’t matter to me. I have people who write me wonderful fan letters, saying things like, ‘I was sick and I read your book, and it took my mind off my worries,’ or ‘You entertained me. You kept me up all night.’ Those are the good words. Those are my critics.

  “First of all, I don’t get reviewed in a lot of the highbrow magazines, so that’s not an issue. I feel like I’m in the entertainment business. I’m not necessarily in the literature business. And if I write a story that keeps people up at night and keeps them turning pages, then I’m entertaining them. That’s the same as somebody who’s on TV or somebody who’s in the movies. It’s just a different medium.”

  Jill lives in Montreat, east of Asheville, where she works part-time as an administrator for the Swannanoa Valley Museum. Her husband owns a travel agency and is a gourmet chef and a cookbook author. Jill enjoys house painting and home restoration. Indeed, I catch her with cement on her hands when I reach her by phone. She’s been laying tile.

  Born in Oklahoma, she grew up in the oil patches of Texas and Louisiana. After earning a degree in journalism and professional writing, she worked for fifteen years in advertising—“the ultimate fiction,” she calls it. It was after that when her thoughts turned to the possibilities of love.

  “I joined the Romance Writers of America, at the recommendation of a friend who was a romance writer wannabe,” she says. “I went to one of their conferences, and I didn’t even know what the romance genre was at the time. There were eight hundred people there, and they were among the most professional writers I’d ever met. These were 99 percent women. The guest speaker was Mary Higgins Clark, and the luncheon guest speaker was LaVyrle Spencer, and it was kind of an eye-opener for me.

  “And so then I joined an RWA chapter. I had a critique group, and I was very lucky, because I was the only unpublished writer in the whole group, so I had a lot of mentors.”

  Jill’s writing breakthrough came while she was working on a manuscript with a reincarnation theme. She happened to purchase a self-hypnosis tape designed to help listeners touch their past lives. One day when she entered her trance state while playing the tape, Jill visualized herself standing in a hilly countryside covered by tall grass. To her left were a man and a woman locked in an embrace. It seemed that they were afraid of being caught together. The name Emily Brontë came to Jill just before she departed her
trance.

  She then conceived a story in which Emily Brontë was not the lonely spinster of popular belief but rather had a forbidden Gypsy lover, who became the model for Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.

  “Do I think I was Emily Brontë in a former life?” Jill says. “No, I don’t, but it was fun to try to jump into her skin.”

  “How much of a leap was it?” I ask.

  “I don’t know how I wrote that, but I didn’t change a word of it, and my editor didn’t change a word of it. And I ran it by some of the people that I met in the Brontë Society, who are nuts about the Brontës. They know every little detail. In the diary part of the manuscript, I made mention of a hawk that Emily had rescued on the moors, and I made it at a date after which the hawk had died. Well, he got redlined, but that was the only change. And I felt like if that’s the only thing they could find, then I did my homework. And they all loved the voice.”

  That book, Emily’s Secret, won Jill a Maggie Award and launched her career. Since then have come ten more books in less than eight years.

  “So you’ve been writing them at nearly a rate of three books every two years. Is that a matter of contractual deadline pressure, or do you set your own pace?” I ask.

  “Well, I can pretty much set my own pace, but two things. You need to be out there at least once a year if you’re in the mass-market arena, to keep your name in front of people. And to make some money. You know, one book a year is about the minimum for genre fiction. Now, if you’re writing the Great American Novel, people can take ten years to do it, I suppose. But if you’re writing romance or mystery or suspense or Westerns or sci-fi/fantasy—the paperback market—you’ve got to keep something out there about once a year or more.”

  Given that pressure to maintain a presence in the marketplace, competition for space in bookstores is stiff. Genre fiction has a high turnover rate and therefore a small window in which to grab a readership; romance novels, mysteries, and Westerns are pulled from shelves quicker than, say, psychology titles and history books. It’s a testament to the popularity of genre novels that they can sell three or four times—first in retail bookstores and then repeatedly in secondhand paperback shops and at flea markets. In fact, if you want to peruse the full set of titles by Jill Jones or anyone else who isn’t a top-ten name in their genre, the best place to do so is an aftermarket store.