The Writer's Life

From the time I was a boy, I wanted to be a writer. Stories seemed so magical. My mother read to me almost evert day. I can remember sitting on the sofa in the living room, tight beside her, as she read stories to me. I began writing when I was a teenager and have written most of my life. Now I’m in my seventies and am writing with new enthusiasm. 

But I have only had one story or novel accepted by a publisher, and that was never published. People have always told me I have talent. In college I always got high marks for what I wrote. I remember one professor asking if he could keep one of may papers to use as an example in his classes. But still, I have had no success.

In the last year or two, I have taken up writing again with great joy. I have rewritten two of my old novels and have self published them on Amazon. They have gone absolutely nowhere. What I consider my best novel has sold one copy.

Now, as you read this, you can say, well, he must be a terrible writer. I don’t think that’s true. Everyone who has read my book Want has praised it. It’s a good story with believable characters. True, it’s not a great novel, but it’s a good one.

So why have I had no success? The problem is not my writing or my story ideas. The problem is me.

Unless you’re a genius, if you want to be a writer, there are certain things you must do. Here is my list. Except for the first two, I have never done any of them.

1)  You must write. Constantly. Every day. Even if you have the worse case of writer’s block ever, you must try.

2)  You must read. Read everything. All the great novels. But also history, biography, philosophy. Everything.

3)  You must talk to other writers, befriend them, become part of a writer’s group. Even if you     are trying to write dark psychological novels and they are writing mysteries and romances, share with them.

4) Share your work with anyone who will read it. Listen to what they say. Your mother will always tell you it’s  good. Your best friend will be more honest.

5)  You must really try to get published. Short stories in obscure monthlies, if need be. Stories any and everywhere. Twenty-five rejections for your novel should not matter. Maybe the twenty-sixth will sell, or the eightieth.

6) Nowadays, you need an agent. When you have a track record with magazines, find a good one.

7) When you become a novelist, stick to one genre. My books are all over the place, mysteries, general fiction. I’m now working on a science fiction novel!

8) Find an audience and contact them through FaceBook and blogs. Befriend them.

9) And most importantly, learn from criticism. If someone says Chapter Four is dull, don’t reject the comment  because you see Chapter Four as your best writing ever. If your readers find it dull, it probably is.

What to write

  Now that I’ve gotten back into the novel writing business, I’m intrigued by what the rest of the country is writing. We live in really strange times in America. The divide between Red and Blue grows ever wider, we have a resurgence of evangelical Christianity, we are deep in the grip of a terrible recession (still), the gap between the super rich and the rest grows wider every day, and young people, even ones with very good educations, find it difficult to find jobs. I would think that in such times, novelists would be screaming injustice at the top of their lungs, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Of the current top ten New York Times best sellers, seven have to do with some sort of murder, one is a nostalgic love story (I think), one about a terrorist plot, and one about lawyers. These would have fit in nicely in the boom times before the great collapse of 2007.

  Is no one mad? Is no one upset that everything has gone to hell in a hand basket? Where is the Grapes of Wrath for our generation, or The Jungle? We seem to have relegated comments on current events to the non-fiction world of journalists who want to write large. Don’t get me wrong, some of these books are very good - for instance, Reckless Endangerment is a wonderful look on how the housing industry fell apart due to greed and corruption - but extended news articles, even when they are first rate, can never match the power of a good novel in depicting the times.

Poetry, I would think, is express some rage, but, sadly, poetry reaches a very limited audience these days.

  If you thumb through the books Amazon or Barnes and Noble advertise in emails or on their sites, what you see is a long list of vampires, fantasy, and troubled relationships. There is no anger in any of the works being sold.

  Now, you can blame that on the publishers, or the public. The publishers, obviously, print what will sell and once one vampire novel hits the big time, a flood will follow. And murder seems always to do well. If as many people in reality were murdered as are shown on TV or depicted in books, the population would be about the size it was a hundred years ago. Are the buying public looking only for escape? Have we all become subway readers, who only want to fill a boring commute with mind dulling murder mysteries?

  I can’t fault writers who are trying to make their livings, and hopefully their fortunes, tapping out drivel for the masses. But I can fault serious writers who want to write something worth remembering. I’m talking of serious American writers. They seem to want to use their fiction to rid their minds of their bad relationships or dysfunctional families.

  Oddly enough, with the birth of self-publishing on the web, an angry, serious writer has an easy way to present his work to the world. But even here we find endless murder mysteries, vampires, and sex.

  Anyone who reads this and also reads the novels I’ve published on the web will think I’m the biggest hypocrite in existence, because my first book is a crime novel and my second is about a family. But both of these were written years ago, before the American myth went south.

  My most current work, written late last year, deals with the problem of the divide between the one percent and the ninety-nine. I’ve sent that to a traditional magazine. When and if it gets rejected I’ll put it up on the web. The book I’m working on now is about the effect of automation on a small town factory as well as the separation of the owners from the workers. In fact, it’s working on this book at has made me look in disgust at what is being written by my fellow writers.

  I’m now and old man. I’ve lived through the absolute peak times of the American experience. I’ve seen the American Dream come true over and over again. What I see happening to my country now hurts and frightens me. We are becoming a oligarchy and no one seems to mind. 'Special Interests’ own our government and yet we seem to think the problems facing us today are the debt, abortion, gay marriage, and gun rights. Are we mad?

  It takes many things to change a trend on a national level. Perhaps a bevy of angry novelists may seem a small thing, but it’s at least something.

The hard work of writing

I hate to sound like an old fogey, but I think it was easier in the old days. In the old days, you wrote a novel, sent it to a publisher, got a rejection slip, and moved on to the next project. Now it’s far more complex. I’ve done the first part, I’ve written a novel, and, instead of sending it to a publisher, I’ve gone through CreateSpace to self publish it. That was a fairly easy task. CreateSpace, if you know nothing about it, is an Amazon company that will eventually change the world of publishing. It allows you to upload a PDF file of your book, create cover art, set up pricing, etc. When all that is done, and CreateSpace makes it very easy, the book magically appears on Amazon just like a real book. In fact, it is a real published paperback with an ISBN number and all. You can also go through Amazon directly and upload the same book for publication on the Kindle.

The only hard part of this entire process, apart for writing the darn thing in the first place, is editing it. You have no idea how many stupid little mistakes you make even with a good spell checker. But since I can’t spell for beans, I have my daughter-in-law handle the terrible editing task.

Anyway, after all that, you have a genuine paperback novel for sale. And you can actually talk some of your friends and family into buying the thing. But your friends and family are hardly going to make it a best seller or even move it past the threshold where they’ll actually send you a royalty check. What you have to do is market the book.

And this explains why publishing houses exist. They can actually force bookstores to take copies of your book and maybe even put them where people will trip over them. And they can get reviewers to read them and even put a well-placed ad somewhere if they think it worth the effort. That doesn’t mean you’ll sell even one copy or that the reviews won’t call it the worst drivel ever written. But at least it’s marketing.

None of this exists in the world of self-publishing. Lost in the hundreds of thousands of books Amazon sells and the just-over a hundred thousand self-published ones, your little book shines like a tiny star in the night sky. You are the only one who can see it because you know where it is.

In order to self-market your self-published book, I am told you must do three things. First you need a web site. The web site is to bring you closer to the faithful fans that don’t exist yet. I was a programmer in my real life, so creating a web site was sort of fun. I’m now having it reviewed by my son who has experience with this sort of thing. When that’s done I’ll put it up on the web through a web site provider who will charge me a monthly fee for hosting my site. Now I will be a little shining star in a whole other universe and still no one will know I’m there.

Next, I’m told, you have to try to sell your book of Facebook. I’ve been on Facebook for a while and still seem to miss the point of what it’s all about. Not to belittle my ‘friends’, but I seem to get an awful lot of nonsense from them, generally with pictures of people I don’t know. And one of my friends keeps trying to sell me imaginary items from his imaginary world. I recently bought two books on Facebook to see if I was missing something. One was how to market stuff and the advice was common sense that any blithering idiot would know up front. The other was how to set up Facebook, which I’d already done. Maybe I’m just too old to understand the value of Facebook, however young at heart I see myself.

The other channel the experts suggest is Twitter. To show you how out of touch I am, I thought Twitter was just for phones! I signed up the other day, and am still in the process of learning how it works, but my first impression is that Twitter is ten times better than Facebook. I see the point of it. It will take time, but I can see how you can build up a list of followers who are interested in what you say and the articles and books you recommend. And like the six degrees of separation we’ve heard do much about, your follower’s followers will give you a huge network of people who can look for that littler star of yours gleaming in the night sky. And who knows what will happen then.

So let’s review what it is you have to do to market a self published book. You must maintain a web site, make constant updates to your Facebook account, send dozens of Tweets, and even write a blog like this. Of course, none of this leaves you time to writer another book, which was what you love to do far more than any of the things listed.

Maybe rejection slips were a lot simpler.

I can prove I actually did write a book by sending you to http://www.amazon.com/Good-People-William-Ramsay/dp/1463545649/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325626827&sr=8-1

You can Tweet me at @RamsayW1.

Lost In The Shuffle

   I recently switched my internet provider from Comcast to Verizon. Of course, that required a change in eMail accounts, since I use the provider and not Google or Yahoo. Well, that fouled up my blog completely because there seems to be no way to swap your identity from one email id to another.
  To make matters worse, I switched back again because I hated everything about Verizon as a web, TV, and phone provider. But that's another story. 
  I now am back at this blog, The New World of Books.  I've copied a few of the posts I sent to the other blog back to this one in case anyone lost me when I was gone.
  I plan to stay put as far as technology goes.
  You will find me here from now on.

You're Never Too Old

When I was young - in fact quite young - I had an unquenchable desire to write. As I’ve said in other places, I wrote my first book when I was about thirteen, my autobiography. My first novel came when I was fifteen. The whole concept of storytelling seemed so unbelievably wonderful, I gave all my free time to it. Where this came from, I have no idea. There were no writers in my family that I know of. I wrote my first novel with a pencil on lined paper and then typed it out on an ancient portable typewriter my mother managed to buy me. My family thought I was crazy spending so much time typing away at something that probably would have no success at all. My father worried that I would get round shouldered writing.

I had no success, but that wasn’t the real point. The act of writing, inventing characters and situations, was something so wonderful, even now I can’t describe it. I wrote into my twenties and thirties. My one mentor thought I had talent, but that I had nothing to say. And as I think back on it, that was absolutely true. But it went deeper than that. In order to be a successful writer, you have to bare your soul. And more importantly, you have to bare the soul of those you love, because it is in them that your experience of life is found. Tom Wolf was not the first to infuriate his family by writing about them and he will not be the last. The book he produced, Look Homeward Angle, is a great book. I had a family story to tell, with interesting characters and events, but I could not tell that story. I could never hurt those I loved. And since my family was my only inspiration, I had no great social agenda, and knew little of the greater world, my novels were shallow and mostly pointless.  I had talent, but nothing if interest to say.

And, of course, in those days, everything I wrote was rejected. And as time went on, and the novels grew farther apart, I didn’t even bother sending them to publishers. I think I sent the first chapter of the first version of Good People, the book I now have up on Amazon, to a literary agent. When I think back on it, the whole incident was ridiculous. He told me the first chapter was very polished for a first time writer and that he would look at the rest of it if I paid him. So much for that. I don’t think I sent Want, which will soon by up on Amazon, to anyone.

I eventually gave up. I became a software engineer and put my writing talent into Cobol and C and Java. I loved writing code and I think I was good at it. They paid me well.

It wasn’t until I was in my late sixties that I began to think that the world that a grew up in - a really poor dairy farm - and the people I knew as a boy would be totally lost to my grandchildren. The world they will live in, the children of very well educated professionals and and even college professors, would have nothing in common with the factory workers and farmers they came from. So I decided to write a memoir to tell my grandchildren who and where they came from. Not only that, I would print it and bind it myself. 

When I looked up my family tree I found that my mother’s family came to America from England within twenty years of the Pilgrims. One of my direct ancestors died fighting in King Philip’s war before the Revolution. Others fought in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. One great great uncle was even a member of Congress. The heart of the memoir, of course, was the farm I grew up on, a worn out affair that no amount of work could have saved.

The only reason I mention this is because writing the memoir really stirred my interest in writing again. When my daughter wrote her children’s book, Turtle Soup and Tiramisu, and self published it on Amazon, the bug really hit me again. I resurrected Good People and re-wrote it, changing one of the characters completely. I then did the same for Want, which is a much longer novel and, although it has nothing to do with farming, is really a story taken in great part from the own life. It’s about a shabby hotel with great expectations.

Those two efforts only made the writing bug bore more deeply into me. I find myself now writing like a demon. I have completed a short work about a man who has a stroke, cannot talk, and watches his family fall apart at the seams, his rich son marginalizing his working class son. Think the silent majority watching as our country is turned into an oligarchy. 

And I have ten chapters done on a new novel about the triumph of capitalism, which is science fiction and takes place in the far future. The triumph is not one for the masses.

I guess the real point here is that it is never too old to do something new, even if it’s something old you did a long time ago.

My Latest Rant

I need a class in economics and maybe another one in marketing. I got an email today from Amazon touting their best books of the year. They are generally in agreement with me on good books, so I took a look. It was then that my lack of understanding of economics clicked in.  The book In the Garden of Beasts of Eric Larson sells for $13.89 as a hardcover. (If you buy $25 worth of books on Amazon, you get free shipping, so the possibility of getting this book for $13.89 is real) The Kindle edition is $12.99. In other words it costs the publisher 90 cents to print, ship, warehouse, and take this book back if not sold. If cars worked the same way I’d drive a Lexus. Amazon puts a little note in their book lists stating that the Kindle price is demanded by the publisher. There are only two marketing explanations to the Kindle pricing: 1) the book is not selling well and the publisher has overstocked and wants to unload them. The fact that the book is on the best seller list diminishes this idea, and 2) the publisher wants to dissuade people from buying the kindle edition. What the publishers have not figured out is that they can made a ton of money with very little effort selling eBooks. But then again, I suppose the buggy whip makers did everything they could to discourage the Model T.

On another note, I had a long discussion with my son, Steve, last night about the state of the American novel. The discussion started when we both commented that the most interesting novels these days are written by Indians. (He just read the White Tiger - great book). His comment was that the American novel is dead. And I think I have to agree with him. American novels I’ve read recently have been awful. I’m talking about well received, highly praised works like A Visit From The Good Squad. Others I could mention are Tinkers, Await Your Reply, Cloud Atlas, West of Here. What’s wrong with them? Well, they are praised for being well written, and they are. But they are also very boring, confusing, pointless, or lacking in characters that seem valid. Why is this?

Well, Steve thinks the point is that it’s not writing that’s changed. It’s America that’s changed. The basic story lines that have maintained English and American novels for a couple hundred years have changed. And I think he’s right. In my view they have centered on Marriage (boy meets girl, struggles, overcomes opposition, and marries to live happily ever after), class struggles (think of The Jungle, etc), the quest (think of Huck Finn and On The Road), and the struggle to overcome obstacles to succeed (Horatio Alger and any of the pioneer novels).  Ok, I will admit that my list can be torn apart any number of ways and probably leaves out many more valid themes, but I am after all just a reader and not an expert in any of this.

But the point I’m trying to make here is that each of these themes for the American novel are no longer valid. Happily ever after is laughable with a divorce rate of almost one in two and premarital sex very much the norm. Almost every American novel I’ve read in the last five years treats relationships as a mine field. Love seems to have lost its way. How many times can you read about unhappy couples without wanting to scream? It’s like listening to a friend who never talks of anything but the slug she’s married to. The pioneer novel is dead because the west had been won and pretty much destroyed by the victory. The quest has lost its way as well because the only interesting searches today are in science and a novel about finding a use for nano tubes would hardly be a page turner. The struggle to succeed has failed because of scale. The boy who struggles to open his own shop pales beside the hedge fund manager who gets multi-million dollar bonuses. And how many times can we read about sleazy traders without thinking we have no chance against the manipulators of the world. Class struggle still exists and may be more relevant today with the huge disparity between the super rich and the middle class, but it will take a genius to give us a great novel on this.

I still think there is great talent out there and maybe the great American novel can still be written.  But we need new themes to capture who we are. And mostly were have to stop sounding like that whining friend.

Back Again

I have been neglecting my blog. 


Part of the reason is that I have been very busy, but the major reason is that I have been conflicted over just what my blog should be about. It was always geared toward eBooks, and it will remain that way, but I want to enlarge the scope of what I'm interested in. At one point I said I would use the blog to review eBoooks. The problem with that is I can't read fast enough to maintain a recurring blog. And to say that I liked a book or thought it terrible is not enough. I think I would like to go more deeply into the process of writing as applied to eBooks. 


What do I mean by that? Well, since my last blog I've read two eBooks that I believe have actually made it to the best seller list. One was The Mill River Recluse by Darcie Chan and the other The Girl in the Lighthouse by Roxane Tepfer Sanford. I rather liked both of them, but they both could have been better. The Darcie Chan book was more finished, a tighter book, but like the Sanford book, it could have been improved. What both books suffered from was a lack of content editing. 


There are two parts to editing a book. First and simplest is copy editing. For some crazy reason I always get lose and loose mixed up and never see it in my own writing. This is where a copy editor comes in. Make sure the commas are correct, the typos removed, etc. Although this seems a never ending job, it is really the easiest of the two editing tasks. The more difficult one is content editing. Both books lacked this, even though they have both been well received in the self publishing world. One reason for this is we don't have a very discerning audience out there, and part of it is because content editing is hard. 


I entered my review of The Girl in The Lighthouse on Goodreads and commented that the book was too long and drawn out in it's second half. I think I said something along the lines of "I get it already, move on." Oddly enough the author commented back to me that she appreciated my review because no one had ever reviewed her work in that way. I've gone back and looked at the reviews of the book and find they all praised it; no one commented on the drawn out content. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the book could have been much, much better if it had been edited down, made tighter.


And here, I think, is the problem with self-published books. They are not edited strongly enough for content. This is what a publishing house does for you. The self publishing author has a loved-one read it, or a sympathetic friend. Really, is your mother going to tell you the scenes between Mary and John go on for fifty pages too long? Of course not.


Traditionally, writers have sought out other writers as critics. It's not an accident that the Bloomsbury Group produced so many good books. This is great if you happen to be an upper-crust Brit, live in Paris in the twenties, or New York at any time. It's difficult if you live in a small town in Nebraska and everyone you know thinks you're a dreamer because you want to write.  And if you do manage to find a group of other writers near you, you may find that while you want to write dark literary fiction, they all want to write romance novels. It should be possible on the web to form communities of writers with like interests who can read each other's work. I think this is what the self publishing world needs. 


Let's not be naive. Most of the self-published authors we find on Amazon or wherever, are there because the have been rejected by the publishing houses. Rejection in any form is had to take; receiving a rejection notice with your name spelled wrong after working for two years on a book you love is devastating. Believe me, I know.


I am probably the least successful writer working in America today. I began writing when I was thirteen. I started with my autobiography. When I was fifteen/sixteen I wrote my first novel. I have written, I think, eleven novels in all since and innumerable short stories. I am now seventy-one years old and have never been published- not once - until now.  One of my old novels is now going up on Amazon (Good People), another is in the works, and I am working on a new story. You could take from this the idea that I must be a terrible writer. I don't think so. In all those years I've never stopped reading, which is essential for an aspiring writer. I have read thousands of books. And I think I can tell a good book for a bad one. And in my writing I have learned to cut, and cut again.


I believe in the this new world of books. I think the publishing industry is in the midst of a revolution they have no idea is coming. All the self publishing world needs is a blockbuster and everything will be thrown into turmoil.  You can, of course, read from this that I hold a bitterness against the publishing industry. I don't think that's true. I have had a very successful life, have enjoyed all the books I've written, and have no regrets at all. If I were somehow in my dotage to write a masterpiece praised by the world, I would become the new J.D. Salinger and hide from it all. The old publishing industry, after all, gave me all the wonderful books I've read in my life. I just think their time is coming to an end.


But the new world of books, the self published world, needs a lot of work.


What I would really like to do is get the thousands of writers out there, who toil away on their PCs with stories they love, to somehow band together and help one another. How you do this is beyond me. But it can be done and a great book will come out of it.