Pieces of Mind

by Vincent Zandri

  The place has evolved into a country day prep school that boasts a whole bunch of happy-go-lucky students, and that to me is a refreshing sight to see (Believe me, when I was there I used to sweat out the polish on my shoes, not to mention my math homework, and holy crap, Herman Melville went here. When do we start reading Moby Dick?).

  I was greeted by the new headmaster, who immediately took my hand in his, and told me he was reading The Remains on Kindle, and that he was "loving it." This same man graduated from the school in 1958 and despite our generation gap, proudly pronounced his love of the E-Book. When I told him how many I was selling these days (2-3,000 per day) he nearly fell over. Next on his list is The Innocent. I promised him a nice endowment if my sales keep up . . . Wink again

  Then came the moment of absolute truth.

  I was led to a podium inside the "Chapel" where I began to deliver an address to two-hundred or so students and faculty. I spoke about writing my first story at the school, and the influence one writing teacher by the name of Frank Nash had on me. Nash had turned me onto Papa Hemingway and from that day forward I knew I wanted to be like the adventurous writer. I wanted to do what he did, minus the suicide of course.

  I offered bulleted advice to the students regarding the writing life, which included, "Live in Europe for a year," "Don't get married," and "You must learn to develop the ability to write interestingly about a teabag," a quote which originates from my RT South African journalist colleague, Lizette Potgeiter. By the time I was finished with my worldly advice the students were applauding, laughing, cheering. And then something strange happened.

  From what I was told later, the students almost never raise their hands and pose questions at the completion of a Distinguished Alumni speech. Being kids, they usually want to get the hell out to burn some steam. But in this case, dozens of hands were raised while some pretty intelligent questions were posed to me. Everything from, "Do you speak Italian?" (not yet) to "What are your books about (check out my website www.vincentzandri.com), to "Are you Harrison Zandri's father?" (Yup, he's home writing his first novel and bench pressing 250 pounds).

  I'll be honest here. It isn't easy going back to your old school. I was a crappy student, and usually ended up in summer school for math. Some of my classmates must surely be more distinguished than I am. Andy Rooney graduated from the school for God's sakes. I couldn't imagine what I had accomplished that would make the school want me to share my wisdom with the students. With these thoughts stirring in the back of my brain, I simply spoke the truth.

  But later on, when it was all over, the headmaster once more warmly shook my hand, and he told me something that will stick with me forever. He told me that the advice I offered the kids was "real." And that's why they invited me back to school, and keeping it real is what made the difference in their young lives, if only for one brief sun-filled afternoon in April.

  —2011

  New York Times . . . Hellllloooooo?????

  I'm selling more books than Stephen King right now.

  Ok . . . E-Books.

  Kindle E-Books to be even more specific.

  And I have been for about a month now since The Innocent broke the Amazon Kindle TOP 100 and settled into the TOP 10 where it's been holding under the No. 5 spot for more than two weeks.

  You with me here????

  Believe me when I tell you, I am super proud of this accomplishment. So is my publisher. But here's where it gets a little sticky for me. When I look at The New York Times Bestseller list for "E-Books," it lists the first two bestsellers, The Lincoln Lawyer, followed by Water for Elephants, but then it skips me and lists The Land of Painted Caves as next in line . . . far as I can tell, "Painted Caves" doesn't appear anywhere on the Amazon Top Ten.

  What am I missing here?

  The Innocent has sold almost 50,000 copies in the past FOUR weeks alone. It's currently moving around 2,000 to upwards of 3,000 units per day. My novels Godchild and The Remains follow close in its wake. All combined (and I'm not even including the ten to fifteen copies per day Moonlight Falls sells at $8.99), I'm looking at around 3,000 to 3,500 Kindle units moved per day. Yet the NYT doesn't acknowledge it.

  Could it be that my Barnes and Nobles sales, although good, haven't quite caught up to the Amazon sales?

  Could it be that The Innocent was published previously under a Random House imprint?

  Could it be that I'm a traditionally pub'd indie?

  Should my agent be getting on the horn?

  I don't have the answers. But I've seen evidence where even self-pub'd authors will on occasion be included in the list. Like Amanda Hocking or Debbie Mack. But maybe their inclusion is not the norm. Because if the NYT were to include more self-pub'd and indie authors, I believe they would dominate the list. LJ Sellers would be there. Joe Konrath would be there. So would CJ West, and so on, and so forth.

  Ok, I couldn't be happier about this past month, and I could not be more thankful. But I'm just curious as to how the NYT decides what to include in their list and what not to include, and well, if it even matters anymore.

  However, how cool would it be to tell my parents I made the NYT list or USA Today?

  My guess is that if I hang in there, and keep writing good books, it will happen. But by then, I might not really care all that much about it . . . Ah, who you kiddn' Zandri, yes you will!!!

  —2011

  How I Sold 100,000 EBooks in 60 Days:

  A Letter to my Mom

  Dear Mom,

  For the one-thousandth time, NO, I'M NOT GOING TO GET A 'REAL JOB!' I don't need to. I just sold over 100,000 E-Books in 60 days. Yah, that's right mom. That's not a typo. No I'm not drunk again, and no I'm not smoking crack or puffing on whacky weed. I don't do drugs.

  But I sold 100,000 books and I did it with the help of my new publisher. Ok, I know, I've had publishers before. Big publishers who gave me a quarter-million bucks in advance for a couple of books that barely made it off the runway before crashing and burning. I know the embarrassment it caused you at the beauty parlor while all those chatty women kept asking you, "Whatever happened to your son? Does he still write?" Well, now you can tell them I hit the 100,000 book club, and when they look at you with disbelieving eyes from under the bulbous transparent hair-dryers and ask you how on earth I did it, you can tell them this:

  1. I'm obsessed with my numbers. Kindle numbers. So what's the first thing I do in the morning even before getting out of bed, I check my numbers via my Blackberry. The information grounds me and gives me a sense of which book or books I might want push that day.

  2. Then, after making the coffee and washing up, I hit the Facebook. While in the old days I might have posted something stupid like, "Buy my new book THE INNOCENT!" I rarely go for that direct marketing approach anymore. Better to take the indirect approach. My FB friends get kind of sick of me asking them to always buy, buy, buy. Better to simply post your thoughts and feelings for that moment in time. Even if they're just silly. People can relate to "I could go for a beer right now!" better than they do, "Buy This Book!" It's the difference between becoming a real person someone likes and enjoys as a friend, as opposed to a used car salesman whom they most definitely do not. And if people like and appreciate you for who you are, they will probably give your books a try. I.E. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer didn't survive as bestsellers on talent alone: they spent a great deal of time building their cult of personality.

  3. While still on Facebook, I might check out some of the pages I belong to like Amazon Kindle and NOOK. While once a week, I'm allowed to push one of my books like directly on the pages, I use these forums more to contribute to whatever conversation is at present going on. Or if there isn't a particular thread being explored, I might start one, such as "Are Mommy Bloggers More Powerful than the New York Times Review of Books?" E-Book readers are a chatty bunch and they don't consider their electronic reading devices simply a means for reading the latest and greatest. That e-reader gripped in their hands means
they belong to an exclusive club. That club allows its many voices to be heard on the FB pages. It's fun for readers and fans to hear from the authors they are reading now and again.

  4. Same goes for KindleBoards. After hitting up the FB pages, I might log onto that site and either contribute to an ongoing topic at the Writer's Cafe, or post my own topic. Being on KindleBoards lets other authors like me know that I care enough about their triumphs and pitfalls to comment on them. We offer encouragement when things are bad, and kudos when things are going well. It's sort of like a student union for writers.

  5. From there I navigate my way to my other online communities . . . My Twitter, my Edgy Christian Fiction, my Goodreads, my Crimespace, my LinkedIn, and more. if I don't have something to post there in their respective blog sections, I'll maybe provide a real-time status update, such as, 'I'll be appearing on Suspense Magazine's Blog Talk Radio . . . ' I'll offer up a link to the program along with the time and date of my scheduled appearance.

  6. Once all that's done, I might take an hour to write a new blog for The Vincent Zandri Vox. The blog topic will usually be one that has to do with writing or publishing. On occasion, I'll write about my experiences in marketing my work. Other writers, especially newbies are starving for information and stories from those who have been there before them. Especially from authors who have been published by both the Big 6 and the Indies like myself. They like to get the inside scoop on what it's like to be more or less screwed over by a company like Random House only to emerge from the dark wilderness and into the welcome arms of an indie publisher. Many of these new authors are also interested in the self-publishing process. But that's more for a very popular blog like JA Konrath's, "A Newbies Guide to Publishing" blog. I highly recommend it for the DIY author.

  7. When the blog is completed, it's time to make it viral (no mom, I'm not trying to make people sick!). That means I'll post it to all the social networks like FB, Twitter, Delicious, Google Buzz, Myspace, Digg . . . you name it. If the blog is discussion worthy, I'll re-post it to KindleBoards and a few other discussion-related groups and forums I belong to on FB, Yahoo, Crimespace, and even Goodreads. Lastly, I'll post the new blog on my fan page and my FB page for The Vincent Zandri Vox.

  8. If I have a virtual tour going on, I'll want to check in on the tour-stop of the day, which can be a review, a guest blog post, an interview, or even a live chat which usually will happen in the evening after dinner. On occasion I might have a blog talk radio scheduled for that day, which can run about an hour.

  9. At some point in the day, I'll want to email some fellow authors and ask them for guest posts for The Vincent Zandri Vox, because your author blog shouldn't be narrow or static. It shouldn't be all about you! It should be a communal place where not only my books and opinions are discussed, but a whole range of books and topics.

  10. At some point in the day, I'll check in with my publisher. We'll strategize and make plans over which books we have coming out when, such as the new special edition combo I have going with the great noir legend, Dave Zeltserman (Dying Memories/Godchild) and my brand new forthcoming novel, Concrete Pearl. Or we'll talk pricing. The great thing about being with an indie publisher is that they have a lot of freedom to experiment with pricing. My publisher understands the importance of offering up a great book for the lowest price possible. Wow, what concept, huh mom? Our pricing strategy for now is based on the concept of the "rotation." An author should always have one or two books available at $.99 and maybe another couple at $2.99, perhaps one at $4.99 and, as is the case with my catalog, even one at $8.95. Having some books on sale ensures that your audience is always expanding and even though you might invite a bad review or two by underpricing your books temporarily, the benefits inherent with creating new fans far outweigh the negatives. In any case, all this pricing stuff is a work in progress.

  11. Ok, so when all that's done, it's time to think about the real thing behind the success. The writing. What's the most surefire way to sell 100,000 e-books in 60 days? Good, if not great writing. And great writing takes time. It can't be rushed, even if this is the new era of authors meeting the challenge of publishing two, three, and in some cases, four books per year—a feat unheard of back when I was publishing with the biggies. E-books are forever, and never will they go out of print. So, for as long as a book still resides in your gray matter and not on the printed cyber-page (and yes, mom, trade paperback!), it's not earning money. However, putting lots of books out for public consumption doesn't mean skimping on quality. What's the fastest way to guarantee never to sell 100,000 e-books in 60 days again? Bad writing.

  Well, I hope this gives you some idea of what it takes to sell all those books, mom. And I guess you can see now how impossible it would be for me to have a real job. I work seven days a week right now as it is. Talk about a time consuming career. Don't believe me? Just ask your two ex-daughter in-laws. I'm sure they'd both have something to say on the topic.

  But let me ask you something else, mom.

  What real job out there would pay me close to $20,000 in a single month to do something I absolutely love? Would I get 20 Gs per month project managing construction projects? Would I get 20Gs per month if I were an accountant? Would I get 20 G's per month if I were teaching high school? If I were writing public relations and advertising copy?

  Probably not, which is why I choose to be a full-time writer in this, the new golden age of publishing.

  I have to go now, mom. Lots of work to do. Tell dad, I said hi! And I hope you guys can come and visit me in Italy soon. Oh, yeah, did I forget to tell you that I can write and conduct my writing business from anywhere in the world???? Now try and do that with a real job and two weeks vacation per year!

  All my love,

  Vince

  —2011

  "One True Sentence"

  Then there was a young man who no longer wanted to pursue a traditional education. That young man would be my son, Harrison, whom we refer to as "Bear" because he looks like one in every bit of that cuddly, dark, and furry curl-up-to-him kind of way. Recently the Bear came to me to ask if he could stop attending his high school (where he was an A student) in order to pursue a writing career. Naturally I was both thrilled and frightened by this notion. While on one hand I was happy that he wanted to engage in a career that has become my own life-passion, I was also concerned that he too would have to experience many of the pitfalls, calamities, frustrations, depressions, losses too many to count, and all those hardships that can go with the writing life, not to mention being scary broke at times.

  But having expressed my feelings to him (and some of these so called "expressions" occurred in the form of heated discussions to say the least), I acquiesced to his desires. And I did so for one reason and one reason only. I wanted him to be happy.

  Fast forward to the present.

  That said, the young literary neophyte hasn't given up his education. It's just that his education is no longer the traditional public high school You-Read-What-We-Tell-You-To-Read-Or-Else program. Now, I'm more or less home-schooling the Bear and in the process, utilizing my library of paper books and his brand new Kindle as a learning tool.

  We've been focusing a lot on Hemingway as a foundation, since Papa was so instrumental in my own education and also because the public high schools of today have fallen out of favor with Hemingway as not being "PC." This past Sunday we sat down for two hours to watch a two-part biography on Ernest Hemingway produced by the BBC in the mid-1980s that I had video-taped off the television back when I wasn't that much older than the Bear. Having watched the program for the first time in years, I was once again struck by Hemingway's notion of wanting to write "one true sentence;" how as a young writer struggling to write his first publishable stories in 1920's Paris, Hemingway came up with the idea that if he could only write the truest sentence he knew, then the rest of the words would follow. When the writing was finally going well, he could stop for the day in a place where he would know what wou
ld happen next. That way he could be assured of continuing on the next day with, of course, another "true sentence."

  Writing from a cold room that overlooked a sawmill in the Montparnasse section of Paris, Hemingway expressed the difficulty in trying to write one true sentence along with the story that would follow. On the days "it wouldn't come," he would have to remind himself that he had written before and he would most definitely write again. But in his words, you not only sense an overriding fear or anxiety that it might never come again, you also sense a tragic prophecy in the making:

  "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."

  I remember a writing teacher of mine giving a lecture to the student body of my MFA school up in Vermont posing the question: "What the hell does 'one true sentence mean?'" I guess in the usual academic sense of beginning with a subject and adding a verb to it in order to spark some action and inevitably a plot, the concept of "one true sentence" might not exactly fit the bill for would-be writers trying to learn their chops. But in the context of where Hemingway was at in his young life, and how his entire well-being would come to depend upon that first sentence, and the one that would follow that, and the one that would follow that, "true" begins to take on another meaning entirely other than something that is real, or that had certainly happened, or that he had personally witnessed. True begins to take on a more philosophical context of self. Rather, in this case, the existential parts (or personalities) that make up the self and that are constantly at battle with one another.