Mary Louise Kelly proclaims the book tour not dead yet

HALLIE EPHRON: Every once in a while, an article “goes viral” behind the scenes here on Jungle Red. Last week Hank sent us a link to an essay by Mary Louise Kelly (author of THE BULLET) that ran in the Washington Post. It had the long and provocative (especially to an author) title:

Do book tours sell books? Maybe not, but that shouldn’t stop you from having a good time The book tour ain't dead yet

What she had to say struck a nerve. So true and so funny. Timely, too, because one of the Reds is invariably “on tour.” (Rhys is out with MALICE AT THE PALACE; in October Hank will be launching WHAT YOU SEE and Susan will be launching MRS. ROOSEVELT'S CONFIDANTE)

And on tour, the one… make that TWO things we invariably ask ourselves:
- Are we having fun yet?
- Is anything that I’m doing making a difference?
Along comes Mary Louise Kelly’s hilarious essay with a few answers of her own. She’s just coming down from launching THE BULLET, her tour taking her from Atlanta to Seattle to Damariscotta, Maine, and she shares her insights and 7 stellar tips.

I especially love this quote she got from David Baldacci, whose books will hit the best seller lists whether he goes on tour or not: “It’s far better to go out on book tour than it is to sit and tweet.”

Mary Louise, Now that you’re back from book tour, do you agree?

MARY LOUISE KELLY: Most definitely. There's always a moment at a reading where I have to stop and pinch myself, because it hits me all over again: these people are here to talk about a book that I WROTE! And look, there it is, my book! Sitting there all perky on the shelf in an actual bookstore!

I don't know how many bestsellers you have to write before you stop being struck by that sense of wonder, but I'm not there yet. Speaking of bestsellers, my favorite quote from Baldacci was that he once flew to Nebraska for a pot roast dinner, served at a book club with all of three members. Now, THAT is book tour dedication.

HALLIE: You advise us NOT to read from our books, unless we pick a really provocative passage. Just wondering, can a passage be too provocative?

MARY LOUISE:  Yes, it does make you wonder how E.L. James (of Fifty Shades of Grey fame) fares on book tour, doesn't it? I did a book event in Atlanta recently, and the venue was a lovely big hall inside an Episcopal church. My books aren't especially racy, but the passage I'd chosen to read contained some, ahem, shall we say salty language. I got halfway through it and thought -- I can't read this out loud to all these nice church ladies! I toned down a couple of words and just let roll with the rest. The crowd appeared to enjoy themselves, they bought lots of books, and I'm happy to report I was not struck down by lightning.

HALLIE: I laughed when I saw your advice #6 Don’t say yes to every invitation followed by #7 Say yes to every invitation. That nailed it.

MARY LOUISE:  It's like Whitman says:  "Do I contradict myself? Very well I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes." Walt Whitman must have been a force to be reckoned with on book tour, by the way.

HALLIE: And I love your advice, “Don’t wear stilettos.” I only wish I still could. Any advice about sharing the stage with other writers?

MARY LOUISE:  One reader complained to me about that stiletto comment, harrumphing that I was being sexist and setting different rules for male and female writers. I assured him that I would advise male writers to stay away from stilettos too...

As for sharing the stage with other writers, I love it. I always learn something. I did an event this spring with Julia Dahl (author of the clever Brooklyn-based thrillers Invisible City and Run You Down). We hadn't met until five minutes before we climbed onto stage, but we hit it off and had each other doubled over in giggles. I can only hope the audience had half as much fun as we did. Afterwards we sneaked off to a French bistro, polished off a bottle of good wine and swapped book tour stories until she had to run for the train.

HALLIE: SO jealous! I'm a huge Julia Dahl fan. We hosted her in this very space not that long ago.

I’m betting that your Washington Post article sold a lot of books, more than an appearance for sure. But you’d never have been able to publish the article if you hadn’t done the appearances. Another Catch-22 of book promotion.

What feedback have you gotten?

MARY LOUISE: The thing is that it's impossible to measure, right? I hope the Post article sold a lot of books, but other than furtively checking my Amazon rankings -- a bad habit I fight valiantly to suppress -- there's no way to know.

I do believe, though, that book publicity is a cumulative affair. Meaning: maybe no one buys my book because I wrote an essay in the Washington Post. But maybe they read that essay, and then they find your way to this Q&A on Jungle Red (which only happened because of the Post article), or they come hear me talk at a big mid-Atlantic book festival (an invitation which arrived because of the Post article)... And all of it adds up to convince people that they want to read my book. And if not, well -- as an author I can only say that I feel extraordinarily lucky to have the chance to do all those things, and that I'm having a heck of a good time.

HALLIE: What a fantastic attitude. For me, events and book groups are the silver lining of a writing career, and boy aren't we lucky!?

Today's question: Do you think tours are worthwhile or would authors be better off to just sit and Tweet?

ABOUT The Bullet by Mary Louise Kelly
   Two words: The bullet.
   That’s all it takes to shatter her life.
   Caroline Cashion is beautiful, intelligent, a professor of French literature. But in a split second, everything she’s known is proved to be a lie.
   A single bullet, gracefully tapered at one end, is found lodged at the base of her skull. Caroline is stunned. It makes no sense: she has never been shot. She has no entry wound. No scar. Then, over the course of one awful evening, she learns the truth: that she was adopted when she was three years old, after her real parents were murdered. Caroline was there the night they were attacked. She was wounded too, a gunshot to the neck. Surgeons had stitched up the traumatized little girl, with the bullet still there, nestled deep among vital nerves and blood vessels.
   That was thirty-four years ago.
   Now, Caroline has to find the truth of her past. Why were her parents killed? Why is she still alive? She returns to her hometown where she meets a cop who lets slip that the bullet in her neck is the same bullet that killed her mother. Full-metal jacket, .38 Special. It hit Caroline’s mother and kept going, hurtling through the mother’s chest and into the child hiding behind her.
   She is horrified—and in danger. When a gun is fired it leaves markings on the bullet. Tiny grooves, almost as unique as a fingerprint. The bullet in her neck could finger a murderer. A frantic race is set in motion: Can Caroline unravel the clues to her past, before the killer tracks her down?

Jon Land--Romance with a Bullet

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Welcome to thriller-writer extraordinaire Jon Land! I just saw Jon at the Books in the Basin Literary Festival in Odessa, Texas (that's the Permian Basin, in case you were wondering), and how nice it is to have him here on JRW today! Jon is not only a writer whose output I envy, but a super nice guy. And when he guests on Jungle Red he always has something to say that really gives us reason to think. (And I love  his Caitlin Strong books--can't wait to read the new one!

Here's Jon:

ROMANCE WITH A BULLET

    Why isn’t there more romance in thrillers?  Obviously I’m not talking about those titles shelved under the nebulous heading of “romantic suspense.”  No.  I’m talking about thrillers by the likes of Lee Child, Steve Berry, James Rollins, Brad Thor.  Let’s explore.

    I believe it starts with the fact that the majority of thrillers unfold over a very short period of time—a couple weeks, ten days maybe, often even less.  And that’s not long enough to build anything even remotely resembling Scarlet O’Hara and Rhett Butler of Gone With the Wind fame, leaving us mostly with existing relationships that are used as thinly disguised plot points.  A kidnapped wife or lover, an ex-girl friend who turns out to be a femme fatale. 

In the wonderful suburban terror tales by the likes of the great Harlan Coben and equally great Lisa Gardner, the very nature of love, romance and the integrity of the family find themselves in peril, turned on their ear.  Even that, though, often takes a backseat to the maneuvers and mechanizations of some creepy villain who’s pulling all the strings.

    Beyond that, thrillers are defined by the fact that lots, the whole world or at least country, is often at stake.  And, let’s face it, who has time for romance when you’re racing to save millions of people from some despicable villain’s dastardly plot?  It’s a matter of priorities and as far as the kind of books the best and biggest thriller writers are known for, romance doesn’t necessarily make the list. 

Sure, there are exceptions; Ken Follett’s Eye of the Needle, for example.  David Morrell’s Double Image or The Shimmer come to mind too.  With thrillers pacing is everything and normally that pacing doesn’t allow for the development of a relationship.  But just because the vast majority of thrillers lack traditional romance doesn’t at all mean they aren’t romantic.

    Huh?  What did he say?

    Allow me to elaborate.  Great thrillers, like all great books in general, are about emotion, about making us feel something.  If we don’t have a reason to care, we don’t have a reason, really, to read.  And that reason to care doesn’t have to spring from romance per se.  Thrillers, you see, owe their structure to the western motif, the lone hero standing against the evil land baron to defend the frontier. 

These tales were almost never traditional romances, but they were inherently romantic.  And the protagonists of some of our greatest thrillers today define the nature of the romantic hero perfectly.  Lee Child’s wondrous Jack Reacher, for example.  Reacher never stays in a relationship because he’s always on the move.  His romance is with the great expanse that remains America, traveled in his case mostly by buses and hitchhiking.  Reacher doesn’t have to be that way, he wants to be that way because it defines his nature as the quintessential loner hero in love with the anachronistic notion of owning no more than what he can carry.  The lack of possessions is his greatest possession of all.  Heroes like Reacher exist to defend the innocent and stand up against those who would abuse them.  Theirs is a noble quest and that in itself is inherently romantic in the truest sense of the rugged American mythos that birthed the form of the thriller as birthed in the western.

    Well, what about relationships, you ask?  Good question!  And let’s consult no less of an expert than the brilliant literary critic Leslie Fiedler for the answer.  Fiedler authored one of the premier works of literary criticism in his brilliant Love and Death in the American Novel which postulated that the greatest relationships in American literature are have normally been between two men.  Playing off that western motif again, with a little Huck and Jim tossed in for good measure. 

And we can see that same motif on display clearly in modern thrillers as well.  James Fennimore Cooper’s Natty Bumpo and Chingotchgook became Robert Crais’ Elvis Cole and Joe Pike.  Or Robert Parker’s Hawk and Spencer, Harlan Coben’s Myron Bolitar and Win, the great James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcell. 

These relationships span generations, highlighted by the conflicted give and take that somehow strengthens the bond between hero and quasi-sidekick instead of fraying it.  Characters just short of life partners who accept each other warts and all while complementing each other’s strengths as well as flaws perfectly.  Hmmmmm, sounds like romance, doesn’t it?

    Okay, so we’ve got the romantic hero and this whole nature of the bromance.  How about one more?  Jimmy Cagney once famously said, “Never do a scene with a kid or a dog.”  Well, thriller writers are expert at mining both for the kind of emotion normally gleaned from traditional romance.  Think about the movie Taken, maybe the simplest story of all time, simple and yet brilliant:  a father who’ll do anything to save his daughter. 

That’s romantic heroism without being romance, because Liam Neeson’s Brian Mills is fighting for something he loves and nothing more.  Steve Berry recently featured Cotton Malone’s sixteen-year-old son in an entry in that terrific series, while in The Innocent David Baldacci turns assassin Will Robie into a runaway teenage girl’s protector.  James Rollins and Grant Blackwood recently went that one better in The Kill Switch that features not just bookdom’s greatest modern day canine hero, but also scenes from that dog’s POV.  No, it’s not romance but it’s emotive; it makes us feel which is the same thing romance does.

    And that’s the point.  Great books, thrillers and otherwise, make us feel something so we’ll respond on an emotional level.  And emotion is not synonymous with romance.  My female Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong is never going to get with her lover Cort Wesley Masters on a full-time basis, no weddings or babies in their future, because in order to be together they need to be separate.  Theirs is a non-traditional romance based on the limitations they’ve accepted in each other, and the maternal instincts Cort Wesley’s teenage sons bring out in Caitlin is emotional gold in my mind.  It defines a relationship at its strongest when those boys, or themselves, are threatened by violence.

    So let’s finish with an example of me practicing what I preach, specifically a simple father-son scene from STRONG DARKNESS that takes place in the elevator of a New York City building between Cort Wesley and Dylan.

He snatched the card from his father’s grasp and angled it in front of a lens higher up on the panel Cort Wesley had taken for a security camera.  As Dylan held the black access card near it, though, the lens glowed blue and the elevator doors closed.  A moment later, the car was in motion, streaking for a floor that shouldn’t have existed with the two of them as the only passengers.
“Those jeans are too tight,” Cort Wesley said suddenly, not exactly sure why.
    “That’s the way they’re supposed to fit.”
    “Well, son, it looks like you already outgrew them from where I’m standing.”  Cort Wesley stole another glance, in spite of Dylan’s caustic stare.  “I can almost tell the last number you dialed on that throwaway cell phone we grabbed down the street.”
    “Oh, man,” the boy muttered, as the elevator continue to zoom upward, making no other stops.
    “I saw your credit card statement.  How is it they cost so much when there’s so little to them?”
    “They don’t cost that much, dad.”
    “That’s because you’re not paying.”
    Dylan gave his father a long look, as if sizing him up.  “You look naked.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “You’re not carrying a gun.”


    Now I’d like to hear what YOU think!   How about coming up with your favorite example of a relationship packed with feeling and emotion, but not necessarily romance?  I’ve got a bunch in mind already, so let’s compare notes.



DEBS:  Great excerpt, great question!!! REDS and readers, how about some examples? I'm with Jon--I can think of some great ones right off the bat!

And if you want to know more about the new Caitlin Strong book, here's a peek:

1883:  Texas Ranger William Ray Strong teams up with Judge Roy Bean to track down the Old West’s first serial killer who’s stitching a trail of death along the railroad lines slicing their way through Texas.

The Present:  Fifth Generation Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong finds herself pursuing another serial killer whose methods are eerily similar to the one pursued by her great-grandfather almost a century-and-a-half before.  But that’s just the beginning of the problems confronting Caitlin in her biggest and most dangerous adventure yet, starting off when the son of her reformed outlaw boy friend Cort Wesley Masters is nearly beaten to death while at college.

The trail of that attack at Brown University leads all the way back to Texas and a Chinese high-tech company recently awarded the contract to build the nation’s Fifth Generation wireless network.  Li Zhen, a rare self-made man in China and the company’s founder, counts that as the greatest achievement of his career.  But it’s an achievement that hides the true motivations behind a rise fueled by events dating back to the time of Caitlin’s great-grandfather.  Because the same era that spawned a serial killer who has impossibly resurfaced today also hides the secrets behind Li’s thirst for nothing less than China’s total domination of the United States.

His fiendishly clever plan is backed by all-powerful elements of the Chinese underworld that will stop at nothing to insure its success.  Up against an army at Li’s disposal, Caitlin and Cort Wesley blaze a violent trail across country and continent in search of secrets hidden in the past, but it’s a secret from the present that holds the means to stop their adversary’s plot in its tracks, even as a climactic battle dawns with nothing less than the fate of the U.S. at stake.   Because there’s a darkness coming, and only Caitlin Strong can find the light before it’s too late.



 





   

On Revision with a Pro

HALLIE: When I wrote my first mystery novel, I was old enough to know that I didn’t want to waste a lot of time sending out a manuscript that wasn’t ready for prime time. So I took it as far as I could on my own, and then I brought it to freelance editor Lorraine Bodger.

The good news was that I had a great plot. The bad news was that my characters were, well, insufficiently developed. Cardboard and bland. I had a major revision ahead. But when I was finished, I did find an agent.

Lorrie has published more than thirty books of her own, and she’s been a professional freelance editor for more than fifteen years. She says, “Writing books makes me a better editor, and editing makes me a better writer.” And though most of her own books are nonfiction, she found that she had a gift for editing fiction and personal memoir. “It’s all about telling a story.”

She remembers working with author Ted Kerasote on his first novel. Until then he’d written only nonfiction about the wild. “He came to me with a 450-page manuscript that his agent wanted cut by at least 100 pages. Which we did, and it was a wonderful story, but it never quite worked. After that it was hard for Ted to find his next book, and I kept telling him, ‘You talk to me all the time about your dog, why don’t you write about your dog?’ I nudged him mercilessly. And finally he wrote his hugely best-selling Merle’s Door.”

Lorrie, welcome to Jungle Red Writers. (Lorrie can be reached at roxielifton “at” hotmail dot com.)

JRW: You see a lot of crime fiction from aspiring writers. What are the most common problems?

LORRIE: Top of the list: unoriginal plot and undeveloped characters.

JRW: Yikes, that about covers it. What do you usually see lacking in the plot?

LORRIE: Invention. The plot feels like chewed-over material—too imitative of David Baldacci or Agatha Christie, for instance. The writer hasn’t found or worked with his or her own originality. Often it’s missing an interesting hook, or the plot points aren’t clear enough, or they come too soon or too late, or the story isn’t hanging together in a compelling way. A good mystery or thriller keeps you turning the pages.

JRW: And what’s wrong with the characters?

LORRIE: They’re flat, two-dimensional. Or they’re generic to the point that you could give them titles like “The He-man” or “The Nasty Mother-in-law”—so stock that they’re not interesting.

JRW: Are writers surprised when you tell them the plot and characters are weak?

LORRIE: Writers I work with are often astonished when I explain the problems. They’re too close to the manuscript and they can’t “see” it anymore. Every writer suffers that—it’s why we have other writers read our work. But it’s extreme with new writers, and that’s the value of having a fresh and professional eye look at your draft.

JRW: What do you look for in an opening?

LORRIE: The important thing is that the reader must attach to the main character. And I almost always tell writers to think twice about starting with a prologue. With rare exceptions, and of course there are those, it’s a distraction that keeps the reader from getting into the book. Better to plunge right in and take the reader with you.

JRW: Do you think most new writers are willing to do what it takes to revise a manuscript?

LORRIE: What I’ve found is that people who are open to change are more likely to be able to do the crucial rewrites—because they’re flexible enough to change direction and make the work better.

But I couldn’t count the number of writers whose manuscripts I’ve read and critted who say, “I’m going to go back and revise it,” and then don’t. What distinguishes an amateur writer from a budding professional is understanding that good writing takes time and doesn’t happen on the first try. You have to take the long view. And it’s very hard for impatient new writers to take the long view.

One of the best writers I’ve worked with was a woman living in a small town in Oregon. The minute I read her manuscript I said whoa, she’s really got it. It was a little bit Sue Grafton, but it was also very original. She worked really hard and took crit really well. She got a lot of agents to read her manuscript, and she got very close to a sale. If she goes on and writes another manuscript or even does more rewrite on the first one, there’s a good chance she’ll get her work published. You have to understand that getting close is a very big deal.

JRW: Is that the measure of success a new writer should shoot for?

LORRIE: Aim for publication, of course, but to get an agent to read more than your query letter and your five submitted pages is major. It opens the door for the future. You can go back to those agents with your next query and manuscript and they’ll respond positively to hearing from you. And you can’t get anywhere without an agent.

JRW: Do you think that if a writer works long and hard enough, and writes a good enough manuscript, that it will find a publisher?

LORRIE: Not necessarily. I wish I could be more positive, but lots of very good work doesn’t find a publisher. It’s totally unpredictable. There are so many uncontrollable exigencies of the marketplace at the moment you send out your manuscript. What you can do is pay attention to what’s happening in your genre right this minute. But at the same time, search for your own originality.

JRW: If a writer is going to work with a freelance editor, when is the best time to do it?

LORRIE: When you have a complete manuscript—preferably copy-edited and using industry-standard page setup—and you’ve taken the writing as far as you can get on your own.

JRW: Thanks, Lorrie. Any questions for Lorrie? Now’s your chance… Or reach Lorrie one-on-one, e-mail her: roxielifton “at” hotmail dot com.