One of the comments made by an agent who considered In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People was that the book has too much dialog, not enough narrative. She had (and presumably read all of) a partial manuscript, about the first 80 pages plus three pages containing two disconnected scenes that I had written ahead. Too much dialog? I certainly want to consider her comments, as she is a publishing industry professional who sees many books and many manuscripts.

I re-read the book in November-December-January for editing purposes. My goals were: fix the many typos I knew it had, take care of a few items identified by beta readers as unclear or not the best, and add/fix a few plot items I realized were weak. A couple of these plot items I discovered only while reading. I said something late in the book that conflicted with something early in the book. A change was needed either late or early.

To fix all these things, in consideration of the agent’s comment, I used narrative. I considered reducing the dialog in a few places, but found I liked the dialog and didn’t reduce any.

This dialog vs. narrative, or maybe scenes vs. exposition, is the subject of a recent blog post by editor Victoria Mixon. Her example author is Dashiell Hammatt, author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man. I haven’t read either of those, so I’m a bit hampered in understanding her arguments. She compares the two books, written many years apart, and mentions how Hammatt adapted to reader preferences changing around him.

Mixon says that exposition has become big in the last twenty or thirty years, at the expense of dialog. But, she says, dialog isn’t dead. I suppose I’m not quite sure what she means by “exposition” and “scenes”. Are these the same things I’m calling “dialog” and “narrative”? It seems to me that my novels are all scenes. No where do I have the type of intercalary chapters that Steinbeck used in The Grapes of Wrath. Everything in both my novels involves the characters of the story doing something or having something happen to them. How is that not scenes, even if there is no dialog?

Sigh, I have much to learn about this business of writing. And much to figure out on how to write the best books possible. Hopefully I’m not over-analyzing here.

I read writing blogs a lot. Agent blogs. Some editor or publisher blogs. Fellow writers blogs. Every day I read an average of five blogs, but not the same blogs each day. Over the course of any week I probably read 20 blogs.

Now, some of these I just skim. Sometimes one just refers to another. Some of them make frequent use of guest bloggers. A few of them, the ones I’ve read for a few years, are now recycling topics without giving much new information. So the time required to read these blogs really isn’t increasing even though the number of blogs I look at is slowly increasing.

Today Rachelle Gardner had a guest blogger, who talked about character flaws, something I’ve blogged about before. Our heroes must have faults. And it’s good if their faults are what cause them to get into hot water. The guest blogger used the example of Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With The Wind. She had her faults. Readers (and viewers) want to hate her for her flaws, but usually wind up sympathetic to her in spite of it.

This is something I struggle with. I wonder how much the general book-reading public really want the hero to have flaws. Do they want to see the mild-mannered become angry? The virtuous succumb to lust? The timid become obnoxiously bold? I wonder.

I’m out of words for right now. Maybe I’ll come back and edit more in, or just do a follow-up post.

My last post was kind of short. It was prompted by something silly. On Jan. 26 I accepted a friend request on Facebook. It was someone I didn’t know, who is a member of a certain political page I’m also a member of. No problem, I thought. He must have seen a post I made and decided to friend me. I accepted his request.

Days later, on February 1, I responded to a message on Facebook from another friend. In the process, I noticed that, when you click on the word “Messages”, not on the button, underneath “Messages” is the word “Other”. Next to “Other” was the number 1. Strange, I thought. Why didn’t that 1 show up on my news feed? I clicked on “Other”, and saw the message was from January 26, from that man who friended me. He is involved with a couple of political groups, in the real world and on FB, with many followers. He wanted to review my book Documenting America and hopefully recommend it to his followers.

Now, I was happy for the interest, but terribly upset over the fact that this request for a book and offer to review had been sitting there for six days, and Facebook never notified me. That’s what we all want: a champion for our books. Someone who will supplement whatever marketing we are doing. Someone who knows people and can expand your circle of contacts. I had it, and it almost slipped away. Maybe has, for all I know. I contacted him, he was still interested in reading and reviewing it, so I shot him an e-copy of the book. It’s only been four days since I did that, so no feedback yet.

Writing is hard enough, and marketing is harder yet, that a flub such as this, minor as it was, is disheartening at best and demotivating at worst. I did a promo post that brought at least one result that came close to dying. If promotional successes are so hard, I thought, why bother?

On his influential blog, Joe Konrath wrote about how most writers way over-promote. It’s something that is drilled into wannabe authors when they first start chasing publication, especially the e-self-publishing route. You’ve gotta get out there and promote yourself. No one else is gonna, so you’d better. Be creative. Be active. Do it regularly and often.

But it’s something I have to psyche myself up to do. And right now I’m not psyched to do it. I suppose I’ll get over it, but not yet. Plus, after Mom’s Letter being featured on the short story blog, and having no sales result, I’m questioning whether any promotion will work. I guess I won’t bother looking up phone numbers for the local Kiwanis and Lions clubs and see if they need another speaker.

Life has conspired to keep me from writing much the last few days. I think it was Sunday that I last wrote more than a paragraph. Tonight I got to look a little at In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, mainly just to check it for what pages I need to reprint after my last round of edits.

Too much is going on in life to worry about writing and promoting what I’ve already written. With all that’s going on my mind is kind of just mush. Tonight I remembered something I need to do before February 15th. It involves several days of off-hour research. That’s besides a lot of family finances stuff, which seems to pile up faster and faster these days.

Plus, given how poorly recent promotional efforts have impacted sales, I’ve lost interest in promotion. For now, if the books sell, fine. If they don’t, fine.

Sales of Documenting America have stalled. In 2011 I sold 26 copies. In 2012 I’ve sold 1.

But I’ve done no promotion of it in 2012. I joined a Facebook group called Christian Authors’ Book Marketing, and have posted a link to it on a thread on that group’s FB page. That was a day or two ago, and since that time at least ten others have posted links to that thread, bumping it out of sight. At some point I’ll start a thread about DA.

But either though the CABM or elsewhere I came across two interesting Internet posts about marketing. One is The Book Marketing Snowball, a blog post by Terry Cordingley. Terry appears to be a marketing person. This is the first time I’ve come across his site, and will have to look at it some more. The post is a reminder that, since e-books are on the shelf forever, writers have no need to make a concentrated promotional push when published. In fact, he suggests this is counter-productive in the Internet era. Rather, start small and slowly with marketing efforts, like the proverbial snowball rolling downhill. Eventually, if the book is any good, the size and speed of promotion will increase without any real effort of the author. Intuitively, this is correct. Kind of hard though, with a single sale a month.

The other is Top Ten Reasons Why Your Book Marketing Strategy Is Not Working, by Deborah H. Bateman. Deborah is an author I’ve never heard of before. She writes for the Christian market, and doesn’t appear to have many titles in either print or e-book. She might be much like me, just starting out on the self-publishing route. Her ten reasons, which came from a man named Don E. McCauley, focus on visibility of the project and the author. He mentions that your book web page needs to appear in the first three pages of search engine results or else no one will find it. So he puts great emphasis on search engine optimization (despite the fact that SEO, in my opinion, was turned on its head with the two major Google algorithm changes in 2011). The author must have a brand. The author must have reasonable expectations.

Of such web sites and such advice there seems to be no end. I’m almost tired of them, and am seriously thinking of not following links to them any more. The snowball analogy seems valid, however. So I have only a sale or two per month for a while. So in all of 2011 my two titles combined had an average of about 3.33 sales per month, or 1.65 sales per title. That’s not bad. If I can add my five titles targeted for 2012, and keep my sales at that rate, for a reasonably spread out schedule for the new titles, I could easily sell 100 copies combined of all titles in 2012. Those aren’t best seller numbers, but I think I would rejoice at those many sales. If, as the eSP pundits suggest, more  published works feed sales to each other, those sales could easily go up to 200 for the year. I could live with that.

So what is my marketing plan right now? First is to keep writing and keep publishing. Second is to work slowly to find more blogs and web sites that will interview me and promote my work. At present, there is no third. This weekend is a local, real life meeting of an on-line political group I’m in. I plan on attending, and I believe they will give me a couple of minutes to tell about Documenting America. I have nine paperbacks left in inventory, and would hope to sell a few there. One other marketing item coming up is the profile on me that’s coming in the next University of Rhode Island alumni magazine, probably in March.

So I guess I have to get busy. Tonight will be tied up with church and calculations to decide on the PPO or HSA health insurance, a decision I will have to make by Friday. That might leave me a little time for editing or reading. Not sure when marketing will earn a chunk of my time again.