by Stephen Campbell | Jan 3, 2014 | Research
If you enjoy running, then the idea of running on a beach is one of those things that seem wonderful, but sometimes the realities of tides, winds and temperatures can get in the way of that wonderful experience.
Two of my fictional characters, Jack & Jessica Stillwell, live on the beach in Naples, and they run the beach every morning they’re in town. Unlike me, they’ll go out regardless of the weather, or conditions on the beach. I’m not nearly as hardy as the Stillwells. If it’s too cold, if it’s raining, if the wind is blowing too hard, I’m either not going at all, or I’m waiting until things get better.
This morning was one of those mornings when I couldn’t find a reason not to run, and since I like to pretend that beach running is actually research, I wanted to take advantage of what seemed like one of those mornings where all of the conditions come together to make a perfect beach run. What makes for perfect conditions? Well for me it’s three things, tides, winds and crowds.
Running anytime around low tide means you’ll have a running surface of hard packed sand, which is very easy to run on. Low tide this morning was at 7:26 and I started around 7:00. Just about perfect.
Low tide - perfect running conditions
Winds this morning were nearly ideal, as well. There was just enough wind to kick up some soft waves, the sound of which provides the perfect background music for any beach run. It amazes me to see people running on the beach with headphones jammed into their ears. The sound of the surf is one of nature’s great gifts. The idea of blocking it out while you’re running seems criminal to me, but to each his or her own.
The third component of a great beach run is the lack of crowds on the beach. It was a little chilly this morning, so there weren’t a lot of people out. I was able to run two miles, to the sound end of the Naples beach, and two miles back and to track my own footsteps in the sand. The combination of the low tide and a hard rain last night turned the beach into a blank canvas this morning. For most of my run, I saw only my own footprints and the imprints of a barefoot walker who must have come and gone before dawn.
I never know what I’ll see in the morning when running the beach, but there’s very often something special that makes me smile. Today, that something special, was a love note left in the sand.
by Stephen Campbell | Nov 25, 2013 | Reading
Since publishing GONE TOMORROW on Amazon, I’ve grown more curious about how the best seller rankings work.
It was a laughable moment for me when I saw that my short story was ranking higher than several books that had been best sellers a year ago. I wondered how that was possible since mine had sold only a handful of copies on the day it was posted.
It turns out the Best Seller rankings are essentially a number that represents the number of books selling more copies than your book is selling, over an extremely short period of time. The ranking has nothing to do with cumulative sales, instead it has much more to do with sales velocity.
Book rankings are updated every two hours, so it’s possible for a book to significantly jump, or fall in the overall rankings very quickly.
Some research shows that selling as few as ten copies of a book a day will keep your book in the top 3,000 of the paid best sellers listing. (Please note - I’m talking about the paid best sellers list, not the free best sellers list.)
Some authors manage to get their books ranked into specific categories, rather than just being ranked against all paid books. You may have seen things as specific as this:
So in this case, the book THE VILLIANS SIDEKICK, is ranked #45 in the Noir category, so people searching specifically for Noir fiction are fairly likely to come across this book. Of course, the author can also claim a top 50 seller on Amazon as well.
Most book postings don’t have that level of detail in the best seller ranks, but a few do. There’s obviously a secret, and I intend to find out by the time I post my next book. If anyone knows the secret please post it in the comments.
by Stephen Campbell | Nov 19, 2013 | New Releases, Short Stories
As I get closer to finally publishing my first full length novel it occurred to me that I have much to learn about the process of publishing my work. So, as an experiment, I decided to have one of my short stories edited and to post it on Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes and Noble. So far it’s a work in process, but I’m learning a great deal as I go.
Interesting things I’ve learned so far include:
- You need separate source files for Amazon and Smashwords. Presumably a third source file will be required for Barnes and Noble. (Update 11/21 - Yes, I did create a separate source file for B&N - see below)
- I’ve read that the best way to publish to Amazon is with HTML files, but I found that using Scrivener and creating a .mobi file works just as well.
- I couldn’t figure out a way to set up an Amazon Authors Page without first publishing something. Once my short story, GONE TOMORROW, goes live, I’ll set up my authors page.
- The royalty structure at Smashwords is pretty good, especially for things like short stories. Unfortunately, the distribution provided by Amazon dwarfs that benefit.
- There are lots of nit-picky little things you’ve got to get right in order to get your book / story to look good.
- Submitting to Smashwords is a lot faster at 5:00 in the afternoon than it is at 8:00 in the evening. (My first submission took only a few minutes, but it was flawed. I’m now on my fifth submission of GONE TOMORROW, trying to correct formatting issues that you don’t see until after you submit. (Update - The Fifth Submission was successful, but the Kindle version still doesn’t work. Time to do some more research)
- It takes about a half day to get something approved and in the Amazon store. I posted at 5:00 PM so by the time I wake up it should be there. (Update - It would up taking 11 1/2 hours to get to book online. I received the email at 4:30 in the morning.)
- Update - Setting up the Amazon author’s page, once you have a book / story posted as an author is simple. But, once you click the button to set it up, they display a page saying they’ll email you when it’s done. It may take up to seven days. In my case it took only a few minutes, but then I had only one item. Here’s the link to my Amazon Author’s Page.)
- It feels pretty darn good to have this first story
in the process of being published.
Update 11/21/13 - Adding an author account and publishing GONE TOMORROW with Barnes and Noble proved to be surprisingly simple, once I found the right starting point, which was https://www.nookpress.com/. They make it easy to set things up, and the initial publishing process was straight forward. For Barnes and Noble I created yet a third edition of the book, and uploaded an iPub file version of the file.
Barnes and Noble provides a ‘preview’ function for your manuscript, which didn’t work for me. The preview showed the text on each page as being centered. UGH! I double checked the ePub version and it seemed fine so I went to Google to research the problem. I found other ‘issues’ with the B&N preview function but none that were specifically like the problem I was having, so I went ahead and published the file and then bought a copy to test with, knowing that I could pull it if it wasn’t right. It turns out the book displayed perfectly on the Nook so the problem was limited to the preview version.
Unlike Amazon and Smashwords, Barnes and Noble does not appear to offer Authors Pages.
by Stephen Campbell | Oct 4, 2013 | Personal
I love to eat. I love food, especially good food, though not necessarily food that is good for you. Because I love to eat and I don’t like being too overweight I find myself going on a diet every two years.
Here’s my pattern, beginning with the start of the diet:
- I realize I’ve gained too much weight as soon as I can no longer stand to look at my self in the mirror.
- Weigh myself and try not to scream too loud.
- Write down that weight on a 3 x 5 index card
- Start that day to eat differently, much differently, for as long as it takes to get my weight down to where I want it to be, which for me is 155 pounds.
Yes, my handwriting really is that bad
So – that’s the beginning.
I’ve been successful doing this for several years now, and the particulars of the diet are less important than you might think. Any old diet will basically work for me, as long as I stick too it. It takes me anywhere between two and three months of dieting and then I go back to what I hope will be a ‘new and improved’ style of eating. So far that new and improved style of eating hasn’t been effective enough from keeping me from needing to diet again in another two years.
My current diet is what Tim Ferris called a ‘Slow Carb’ diet in his book, the 4 HOUR BODY. It’s a low carb diet with a kicker. You can eat whatever you want on one day of the week. For some reason that makes this particular diet much easier for me to deal with. If there’s something I want to eat I put in on the list for Saturday, my ‘eat whatever I want day.’ This Saturday extravaganza keeps me from feeling too deprived while I’m on the diet.
This year’s version started on August 24th when I tipped the scales at a robust (for me) 172.5 pounds. This morning I hit 159, so it’s working pretty well. At this rate I’ll be done in too months and can go back to eating better, more nutritious meals, but without the restrictions I’m currently on.
For anyone who’s curious, this is an average days eating for me:
Breakfast – A six once package of Chobani Greek Yogurt. I add nuts and flax seed to the yogurt.
Lunch & Dinner Beef, Chicken or Fish, (no buns or bread of any type) with either beans or a small salad, dressed with vinegar and oil.
I have two snacks a day. I have one handful of nuts and either some cottage cheese or a hard boiled egg.
I don’t drink anything with calories during the week.
That’s it. Then on Saturday, I can eat whatever I want. Interestingly enough, after making myself sick the first Saturday, I normally eat similar foods, but add bread, fruits, and whatever it is that I feel like I missed through the course of the previous week.
Is this diet scientifically valid? I have no idea, but it works for me. I’ve also lost weight by severely limiting fat. I expect the secret is to just pick a diet that works for you and stick with it.
It’s amazing what happens when you go a week without fried foods or sugar. First, you feel better, but second, when you eat them on Saturday you feel like crap. That’s why I normally only seriously over indulge on the first Saturday.
Then, when the diet is over, the real battle begins. Trying (again) to eat good food that’s good for me. One thing I have in my favor this time is that my wife, who never gains weight, is now seriously into healthy eating.
by Stephen Campbell | Sep 24, 2013 | Reading
I’ve got nine ten physical books sitting on my desk to read as preparation for interviews. I’ve got three more sitting on my Kindle that need to be read within the next six days. I’m in the middle of four books that I’m reading purely for pleasure and three other non-fiction books that I’m reading for educational purposes.
That’s nineteen books that I’m either reading, or will soon be reading. That doesn’t count all of the books I’ve purchased electronically over the past three months that I haven’t even been able to start yet.
Last night I spent time reading four different books. Why? So I can keep the story lines in mind.
I love reading, but this is getting out of control. I’m reading books by authors whose work I adore and treating the reading as a task, rather than a pleasure.
I love reading and have tremendous respect for the amazing authors who create the characters and worlds that we as readers want to keep visiting. But, I can’t help but feel as though I’m doing them a disservice by allowing my reading focus to become so fractured.
The solution? Get my books, both physical and digital organized in such a way that my reading ADD becomes more difficult to feed. Instead of opening one of my Kindles and seeing hundreds of choices. Open it and see three. One non-fiction, one book that I’m reading as interview prep, and one book that I’m reading purely for pleasure.
The easiest way of doing this would be to use some kind of web app from Amazon (my e-reader of choice) to organize all of my digital books, across various Kindles. But, to the best of my knowledge there is no such app. It’s possible to organize collections of books on your Kindles, but those collections are device specific. I use both a Kindle Fire and a Kindle Paperwhite, so that isn’t a good long term solution for me.
I’ve read about people who’ve successfully used the Goodreads To Be Read list to organize this kind of reading, but that too requires manually entering your books and organizing them.
Amazon already has all of my E-Books in their database. Why the heck can’t I use that database to organize books on the different devices? Come on Amazon. Making it easier to read across multiple devices is one of your strengths. Why not expand that to making it easier to organize over multiple devices?
I’m going to try using Goodreads to organize my reading for now, but I sure would like a less manual solution. If anybody knows of one will you please let me know?
Creative Commons Image by Kristin Nador
by Stephen Campbell | Sep 11, 2013 | Writing
Books aren’t written - they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it”. - Michael Crichton
I found this quote this morning as I was coming to terms with just how much work the rewriting process was going to be if I actually wanted to publish my first novel.
Writing for publication is different, much different, than writing to say you’ve written. I can say I’ve written two books, and about a dozen short stories. But I can’t say I’ve published any of them. They were practice. I’m the type who learns by doing and the only way to learn how to write is to actually do it, right?
Well, it was challenging. I learned a lot, and it was fun. Hey - this writing stuff is pretty cool, right?
Then I decided it was time to up the stakes. To write for publication. I finished what I thought was a pretty good first draft of a novel. Then I painstakingly went through it, line by line, page by page, making the changes I felt would get it ready to send to a professional editor. Whew - this editing stuff is tough, but not that bad. I made the changes, then decided to read it again.
Writing is rewriting”. - Earnest Hemingway
What I read horrified me. Had it actually gotten worse?
No, it hadn’t gotten worse, it just hadn’t gotten much better. I’d fixed the obvious things, but there is still much to do. I’ve got scenes that don’t advance the story. I’ve got too much lame dialog. I’ve got vague settings, and I’ve got too many adverbs. Basically, what I’ve got is a second draft that isn’t yet close to being a polished manuscript.
When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.” - Stephen King
That’s where I’m at now, at the beginning phase of realizing just how much work is going to go into this thing before it’s ready for another living soul to read it.
by Stephen Campbell | Aug 9, 2013 | Awards, Reading
The Shamus Awards are presented annually by the Private Eye Writers of America to recognize outstanding achievements in Private Eye fiction. This years winners will be presented at the PWA banquet on September 20, 2013, in Albany, New York, at the annual mystery conference called Bouchercon.
The finalists for each of the awards were announced in July, but since this site didn’t exist then I’m posting them now. Chuck Greaves, the author of Best First P.I. Novel nominee for Hush Money, will be a guest on Murders, Mysteries and Mayhem in October.
BEST HARDCOVER P.I. NOVEL
- Robert B. Parker’s Lullaby by Ace Atkins *
- Taken by Robert Crais *
- Hunting Sweetie Rose by Jack Fredrickson
- Blues in the Night by Dick Lochte
- The Other Woman by Hank Phillippi Ryan *
BEST FIRST P.I. NOVEL
- Hush Money by Chuck Greaves *
- Murder Unscripted by Clive Rosengren
- Black Fridays by Michael Sears
- Racing the Devil by Jaden Terrell
- The Twenty-Year Death by Ariel S. Winter
BEST ORIGINAL PAPERBACK P.I. NOVEL
- Death Warmed Over by Kevin J. Anderson
- And She Was by Alison Gaylin
- Archie Meets Nero Wolfe by Robert Goldsborough *
- False Negative by Joseph Koenig
- Pulse by John Lutz
BEST P.I. SHORT STORY
- “The Sequel” by Jeffrey Deaver in The Strand
- “After Cana” by Terence Faherty in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
- “O’Nelligan and the Lost Fates” by Michael Nethercott in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
- “Illegitimati Non Carborundum” by Stephen D. Rogers in Crimespree
- “Ghost Negligence” by John Shepphird in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
BEST INDIE P.I. NOVEL
- Stranger in Town by Cheryl Bradshaw *
- Enamorted by O’Neil De Noux
- One-Eyed Jack by Christopher J. Lynch
- White Heat by Paul Marks
- Devil May Care by James Mullaney
* Books I’ve read at the time of this posting.
by Stephen | Jul 23, 2013 | Reading
“Books are uniquely portable magic.” So said Stephen King in his classic book on the craft of writing, On Writing. If you’re a reader, you know just how true it is.
The book, whether physical or electronic, can be taken anywhere, but the magic remains.
I’ve read thousands of books, and I often forget titles, and even authors, but I find that I often remember where I read them.
I was sitting on a bench on a beautiful fall afternoon the day I began John D. McDonald’s One Fearful Yellow Eye, the eighth book in the Travis McGee series. I remember that day, and the excitement I felt reading the book, as though it were yesterday. Of course, as soon as I finished the book, I went to the local bookstore to buy books one through seven in the series.
I was on vacation in Las Vegas, at the Bellagio Hotel, and I’d finished every book I’d packed for the trip. So, like any self respecting reader I went into the bookstore, browsed through their modest selection and found a futuristic crime thriller by someone named J.D. Robb. I took that book, Origin in Death, to the pool, and fell right into the story of a New York City police detective that took place 45 years in the future. I’d never read anything like it before.
I’ll admit to being mortified when I found out the book what actually written by the amazingly prolific romance writer, Nora Roberts, but by that time I didn’t care. I was hooked on the series.
I was about 40 miles north of Fort Lauderdale, on a small island, resting up for a long bike ride when I opened my first Elmore Leonard novel. It was Get Shorty. I read the first half next to the pool on one day and the second next to the Atlantic, the next.
I’d read every Nero Wolfe story I could get my hands on by the early 1990s when I learned that another author, Robert Goldsborough, had continued the Wolfe series, with novels of his own. I was able to get one of his books, I believe it was The Bloodied Ivy, at a local book store, while I was spending time with my retired parent in their Airstream travel trailer. I read that entire book, which stayed fairly close to the way I remembered Nero and Archie, in the small living room of that travel trailer.
I was Camp LeJeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina a few years ago. My wife and I were there to see our son, who’s Marine, off on his first deployment to Afganistan. I’d taken a couple of non-fiction books with me, but there were some delays, and I finished them and needed something new. The last thing I wanted to read at that time was a pulse pounding, hard core thriller where I’d feel a sense of fear for the protagonist. We already had enough of that in real life with this deployment. I wanted a light, funny mystery. I drove off base to the local Barnes and Noble and found Wanna Get Lucky, by Deborah Coonts sitting on the front display I bought it, and spent every spare minute in the world the author created until we left for home. Ms. Coonts and Lucky O’Toole have been on my must buy since that day.
Through the years, the overwhelming majority of my reading has taken place inside my home, wherever that may have been. But it’s comforting to know that the magic of reading is portable, it goes wherever you choose to take it.
Photo by David Jace
