The Author's Journey

August 21, 2009

The first blurbs have come in, and it turns out that I have written a “masterpiece.” Or, so says Shane Gerricke, best-selling author of Cut to the Bone. (Note to myself: Buy a copy this afternoon.) I immediately send an electronic thank you note to Shane, who responds that he actually did like it. “You did a good job.” He shares that he is grateful to the writers who helped him when he was starting out, and – my words, not his – feels a need to pay back. Also, he says, “Now, John owes me a scotch.” (He’s referring to John Cheesman, the Oceanview project manager for Fortuna.)

I am forwarded a second blurb from Deborah Shlian It reads:

Written by an obvious computer pro, Fortuna plunges Jason, a Stanford IT grad student into a lush, virtual Renaissance Florentine world – at first an escape from the boredom of his RL (real life). he soon learns it’s not just a game. Highly imaginative, this is one for
anyone who loves intelligent, high-tech thrillers!

In her e-mail, she says she would love to know more about me, but when she went to my web site, “It wasn’t working.”

I immediately e-mail Deborah, thank her for her kind words, and offer her access to my bio, as well as my phone number.

My nemesis at Oceanview is at it again! (See Post No. 33.) I am so pissed! I didn’t want to give her my url until the site was up and running, but she pushed and pushed, and I had been so forcefully uncooperative about the blurbs I felt I should give a little. What a twit! She has done the one thing I asked her not to do: release the url to the outside world before the site is up.

Over drinks with my friend Christopher St. John on Friday night, I share the situation with a friend who has promoted his band Outgrabe extensively over the web. He tells me in no uncertain terms that I have to get something up immediately, even if it’s a lame “under construction” notice.

“There may be only one person who goes there,” he says, “but that one person could be really important. You can’t afford to look flakey.” So here I am at the café on Saturday morning sketching out something reasonably presentable, a sort of “coming soon” announcement with a ticker that counts down the days, hours, minutes and seconds left before the site will go live.

August 23, 2009

Over the weekend, I receive an e-mail from a high school friend. “I presume you’re aware of this,” he writes, with a link. When I click on it, I’m presented with an Oceanview web page touting my book… with the wrong cover! Not for a different book. That would be over the top. Just the wrong version of the Fortuna cover.

Over the weekend I have also realized that Shane’s terrific blurb has an error that I didn’t catch in the ego rush of seeing Fortuna termed a “masterpiece.” He incorrectly makes reference to Venice, not Florence, as the site of the game.

I send a note to John at Oceanview, and he promises to make the fixes.

Deborah (who wrote the other blurb) responds to my note of thanks. She and her husband are coming up for a few days in December. Would I like to get together? She also asks about book stores in Northern California that she might approach about a reading. I pass on the recommendations given to me by Louise Ure: Book Passage in Marin County, (hot tub capital of the world) and M is for Mystery on what we call “The Peninsula,” just a bit north of Silicon Valley. Louise passed on that these two book stores influence both the local and New York Times best seller lists.

I reflect that all I have to do is win a prize or get Fortuna into a paperback edition and I’ll get to write a blurb for somebody else.

To be continued…

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael (Magicmichael is my twitter name.)

Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com

 Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a few weeks.

August 5, 2009

I am still on the phone with ______________ from Oceanview. We have agreed to disagree about blurbs, and now we’re onto the question of my web site.

I explain that I don’t have one yet, but I’m working on it, and it will be live at the end of September.

“Do you have a url?”

“Yes.”

“Oh good.” These are the first genuine-sounding words to have come out of her mouth.

She wants the url. I explain that, since the site won’t be live until end-of-September, it makes no sense to publicize the url now. We go back and forth, and finally I understand her need: She wants the url now so it can be included in printed material that won’t be distributed for a couple of months. I promise to send her the url today, and further, that the site will be live end-of-September.

“Well, if you can do it any sooner, that would be great.” I reflect that this endless pushiness would server her well in a junior position at one of the large corporations that are my clients.

We hang up with civility. The call is over, but I can’t just let the situation with the blurbs slide. (See Post No. 32.) So I immediately call my agent, Kimberly Cameron.

Help!

I reprise the conversation with __________  and confess that I was about to tell her that if the blurb issue was a deal breaker I would return my advance and go elsewhere. Kimberley is of course glad that I held my tongue, and I tell her (in truth) that it was at least partly for her sake. She has worked so hard, and long ago I promised her to be calm and reasonable with any publisher she found.

“I’ll intervene,” she says without a moment’s hesitation.

I explain that I genuinely can’t help with blurbs, and ask her if there’s something in the contract I missed.

“It’s expected,” she explains. Apparently, in the old days, publishers just turned to their stable of writers and got one or two of them to say good things about one of their compatriots. But now, it’s up to the author. She then rattles off a list of her clients. “A got seven [blurbs]. B got nine. C has eight so far.”

Okay, I get the point.

To be continued…

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael (Magicmichael is my twitter name.)

Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com

 Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a few weeks.

August 5, 2009

I am furious. Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I was furious. Not I am only mildly pissed.

Yesterday I received a call from ______________ at Oceanview –  I won’t name her – congratulating me on joining the ranks of published authors. I guess a have more of a delicate ego than I’d like to think, because this instantly pissed me off. What she should have said – at least, if she wanted to win me over – was something about how happy the folks at Oceanview were to have such a promising property. Anyway… after congratulating me on my good fortune, she referred to a “Welcome to Oceanview” booklet I had been mailed some time ago,  hinting that there were some tasks I needed to accomplish “to move Fortuna towards publication.” Of course, I hadn’t bothered to read the book, but I did immediately call back.

I finally reach her this morning. After a few minutes of syrupy chat, she finally gets to the point: Where are my blurbs? I explain that I don’t have any, that I have told Susan (the CEO) that I don’t, and won’t have any, that I just don’t read that many books, that I often don’t remember authors  names, and since Susan has a good relationship with Lincoln Child (the one author whose name I could come up with who writes “books like mine”), she has agreed to chat him up at Thrillerfest for our mutual benefit.

I can’t get ______________ to back off, and when I finally say, “What is it about ‘no’ that you don’t understand?” she comes back with, “Well, if things don’t work out, we’ll have to put our heads together.” In other words, she’s not taking “no” for an answer, but rather pushing everything into the future.

I say, “Fine, I’m happy to participate in any meeting. But I want to make it absolutely, positively clear that I will not take responsibility for obtaining blurbs. I have been in business a long time, and I’ve learned that it’s not a good idea to make a promise you can’t keep. Is that clear?”

She responds with ten seconds of stunned silence. Then, finally, “Well, let’s move on to the other issue. Do you have a web site?”

To be continued…

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/magicmichael (Magicmichael is my twitter name.)

Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com

 Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a few weeks.