Indy Selling Success Story

Things to have come full circle in the book business—well, at least in my book business. When I published my first novel nearly nine years, I didn’t bother with a paperback version. I had bought into the hype and buzz that told us that print books were dead or dying and that the future was digital.

Then, after hearing from a surprising number of potential readers that they wouldn’t be reading Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead until they could do so on paper, I corrected my course. Three months later the paperback version (with a new more printer-friendly cover) was released. Ever since, the digital and paper versions of my novels have been released simultaneously.

Despite the stubborn (determined?) paper readership out there, however, most of my sales were digital, specifically via Amazon Kindle. In the past year or two, though, that has changed. Maybe it had something to do with Covid or perhaps with the type of people who read fantasy books like The Curse of Septimus Bridge and Last of the Tuath Dé, but print books have been making up a larger share of purchases. As far as I can tell, print is definitely not dead.

In January I informed readers of this blog that I now have my own sales portal at Bookshop.org for paperbacks. The beauty of that site is that it offers the same stay-at-home-and-have-it-delivered convenience of any other online seller, but it also offers readers the possibility of supporting authors they like or any of the hundreds and hundreds of independent brick-and-mortar book stores that have also signed up with them.

I have lately learned more about the history of and philosophy behind Bookshop.org thanks to a great article by Kate Knibbs posted on Wired magazine’s website a couple of weeks ago. As chronicled in that piece, it was the brainstorm of Andy Hunter, who ran a midsize literary publisher called Catapult. The profile describes his sometimes difficult childhood and how the local library became a place of solace for him.

Hunter became obsessed by a random comment he heard over dinner from a board member of the American Booksellers Association: what if ecommerce was a boon for independent bookstores, instead of being their existential threat? That led him to propose converting the association’s IndieBound program, which promoted independent booksellers, into an alternative online bookseller.

The association wasn’t interested in that approach but offered Hunter support if he wanted to start his own online bookshop. The beauty of his concept was that neighborhood bookshops and authors can get money for selling books online with a minimum investment of time and effort, as Bookshop.org takes care of inventory and shipping by partnering with wholesaler Ingram. I suppose another way to look at it is that Bookshop.org is an online seller like any other except that it generously shares its profits with local bookstores and authors.

Hunter’s timing turned out to be fortuitous because of the pandemic, as loyal local bookshop customers couldn’t get to their favorite sellers in person. Even without an advertising budget, its growth has been spectacular. Knibbs’s article recounts small bookshop owners’ stories of the cash windfalls that bailed them out of disasters thanks to having opted into Bookshop’s earnings pool fueled by 10 percent of the operation’s sales.

It’s an inspiring story, and a great lesson of what can be accomplished in the capitalist system when people approach business with good intentions.

      * * *

You may have been wondering what I’ve been up to in the eight months since Last of the Tuath Dé was released. I can tell you that I have been writing but not much more than that. I’ve been working on something that is a departure for me, in that it’s speculative, it’s non-fiction, and it’s got a personal angle.

If anything comes of it, and I’m hopeful it will, you will be the first to learn about it here.

And yes, I plan eventually to continue the saga chronicled in The Curse of Septimus Bridge and Last of the Tuath Dé.

Same Books, New Portal

Something on this blog has changed.

At the top of this page, if you click on any of the three links for my own online bookstore Afranor Books, they will now take you to a different place than they did before.

It was only two years ago next month that I announced that I had become an online bookseller. As I acknowledged back then, calling myself a bookseller was something of an exaggeration. Ingram, the company that prints the paperback versions of my novels and distributes them to sellers, had encouraged its authors to set up their own online shops. For this purpose, they provided the portal (called Aerio), and we authors set up (within limits) the design and inventory. It was another way for readers of particular authors to find and buy their books.

Then a few days before Christmas, Aerio informed us that it was getting out of the authors-selling-books business. What? It seemed like I had only just set up my bookshop, and now I was being evicted?

The Aerio online storefronts will close down at the end of this month. If for some reason you need or want to visit my Aerio site before it vanishes, here (for the final time) is the link to it: shop.aer.io/AfranorBooks.

Aerio further suggested, if we wanted to continue to have a place (besides, of course, all the other online booksellers out there) to direct readers to purchase our books, that we consider Bookshop.org! Coincidentally, mentioned that site on this blog back in August when discussing issues with some of the more prominent online sellers.

As I wrote then, “They provide centralized ordering, delivery and customer service for a network of local independent bookstores. They are mostly in the US, but recently they have begun expanding internationally, specifically in the UK and Spain. Their website claims they’ve raised nearly $22 million for local bookstores.”

“This is how it works,” I continued. “On their website you select a local bookstore (there are more than 1,400 to choose from) you want to support. Once you’ve done that, any online orders you make from the website are fulfilled by Bookshop.org and the local bookstore gets 30 percent of the retail value.”

It turns out that Bookshop.org has an affiliate program for authors like me, so rather than giving up having my own online portal altogether, I have set up shop over there.

You can check it out by clicking this link: bookshop.org/shop/afranorbooks. Or any of the three other links (can find all of them?) at the top of this page.

Note: unlike the Aerio site, which sold both paperback and digital versions of my books, my Bookshop.org page just sells paperbacks. So, if you are looking for my novels as e‑books, you will want to select from among the many sellers of digital (and print) books listed along the right-hand side of this page.

Hand of Maradona

  To my surprise Donal called out after him, “Just for the record, mate, you lot most definitely stole the World Cup.”
  He stopped in his tracks and turned to face us.
  “The cast on van de Kerkhof’s wrist was completely illegal,” he said with annoyance.
  “Bollocks. You were stalling for time. You were doing anything you could to throw the Dutch off. You had your own referees, and they were so one-sided it was a bloody joke.”
  “What the hell are you two talking about?” I asked.
  “The 1978 World Cup. It was here in Argentina, and they bloody well stole it.”

That exchange from Chapter 14 of Searching for Cunégonde is about the first time Argentina won the World Cup in 1978. It is between Dallas Green’s English friend Donal and Alberto, one of a number of people the pair encounter in Dallas’s quest to find his long-lost friend Antonio. As they anticipate the next World Cup, Alberto tells Donal to watch out for an up-and-coming player named Maradona. Of course, Alberto has the full benefit of this author’s hindsight, but in fairness the young Maradona’s promise would have been apparent to most Argentine sports fans.

That promise would be borne out eight years later in Mexico when Argentina won its second world soccer championship thanks to Diego Maradona and his “Hand of God” goal and his “Goal of the Century.” I reflected on that two years ago when Maradona died suddenly at the age of 60.

For Argentina’s third World Cup trophy, it would have to wait until, well, yesterday. This time the World Cup was held (somewhat controversially) in Qatar, and it was Lionel Messi (born the year after Argentina’s previous most recent championship win) who led his country to victory in a knuckle-biting match with penalty shoot-out for the ages. I would like to think that, somewhere out there Alberto and Donal are still around and were watching like 14.9 million other viewers. Alberto would, of course, be crazy with joy over the triumph of his team, called la Albiceleste for its colors. Donal would be disappointed that England’s team (called the Three Lions for its insignia) crashed out at the quarter-final stage. Perhaps, though, he would take some consolation that his team did pick up the tournament’s Fair Play Award.

In other life-sort-of-almost-imitates-art news, Chile’s Láscar volcano rumbled back to life a bit more than a week ago. That wasn’t a complete surprise, as it is one of the most active volcanoes in the northern Chilean Andes. It is 38 miles from the Licanabur volcano, which isn’t believed to have been active for the past thousand years—and as far as I know still isn’t.

As readers of Last of the Tuath Dé will know, the interior of Licanabur is where the Grisial was created and is the the weakest point between our world and Tír nAill, otherwise know as the Otherworld and home of the Old Ones.

Speaking of Last of the Tuath Dé and Searching for Cunégonde, as well as my other novels, if you are stuck for gift ideas with only a few shopping days left until Christmas, books definitely make nifty presents.

Happy Holidays!

Colonel Mustard’s Return?

I have always loved the tone, quality and entertainment value of readers’ letters to The Times (“of London”). It was sort of a dream come true for me nearly a year ago when a letter of mine was actually printed in that newspaper—though it was “only” in the paper’s Irish edition. (In case you’re wondering, I was exhorting readers to sample as many diverse news sources as possible—even ones they might disagree with—in the interest of avoiding information blind spots.)

I didn’t actually sit down and write the letter on a piece of paper and then drop it in a mailbox. It was originally a comment on an article on the Times web site, and an editor contacted me to verify my identity and to ask for permission to use it in the print edition. I don’t know if anybody actually writes letters to the editor on paper anymore. My guess is it’s all electronic now.

There was a good example yesterday of a classic Times reader’s letter or, rather, comment. It was beneath an article about new information on an old murder case suggesting the crime did not happen spontaneously but, in the words of an investigator, “it makes me think the whole thing was pre-planned.”

The most highly rated comment (with 114 recommendations as of this writing) on the article: “Isn’t planning pre-planning?” Say what you want about Times readers, but they care about the language.

You may wonder why am I am taking up space with all this on my book blog. It’s because the presumed murderer in the article was a certain Lord Lucan. He has been an object of fascination for the UK (and by extension the Irish) media since he vanished without a trace in 1974. This was immediately after his wife and his children’s nanny were attacked with a lead pipe. The wife survived, but the nanny, who was attacked first in a basement kitchen, died.

The newly revealed information is that three Cluedo game cards were subsequently found in a Ford Corsair that Lord Lucan had borrowed and which was found abandoned at Newhaven in East Sussex, suggesting he may have taken his life by leaping into the sea. The cards matched ones missing from a set owned by the lord. Which cards were they? Colonel Mustard, the lead pipe and the hall. Like Lord Lucan, the fictional Colonel Mustard is a former military man with a mustache. How very Agatha Christie.

The article further reveals that subsequently a woman insisted to police that she later met Lord Lucan at a party at a villa in the Algarve in Portugal. Today’s Irish Independent (like The Times, drawing from original reporting from The Daily Mail) informs us that a facial recognition expert, using AI photo analysis, has made what he claims is a 100-percent match between photographs of Lord Lucan and an 87-year-old pensioner in Australia. If they’re not the same man, says Professor Ugail, then they’re certainly identical twins.

On the other hand, my own neighbor here thinks I solved the mystery five years ago with the release of Lautaro’s Spear. His first comment after reading the book was that “you should have never killed off the other fella.” (He never forgave me for the demise of his favorite character from Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead.) His second comment was, “We finally know what happened to Lord Lucan.”

The name of the infamous lord (born Richard John Bingham) never appears in Lautaro’s Spear, but in Chapter 3 Dallas Green and his friend Linda go to a restaurant called Balthazar’s in San Francisco where their waiter is a dapper Englishman named Richard. Later in Chapter 13 Dallas has a chat with Marty, the mysterious proprietor of a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant in the Mission District. Dallas is taken aback when Marty brings up Balthazar’s.

  “You would be surprised at the interesting stories lots of ordinary-seeming people have in their pasts. Here’s an interesting one. You ever been in a restaurant near Union Square called Balthazar’s?”
  “Yeah…” I said suspiciously.
  This was a perfect example of the weirdness that went through my conversations with Marty. Balthazar’s was the only restaurant in that area I had ever been in. What were the odds of that?
  “There’s a waiter there. His name is Richard. He’s an English guy.”
  “Yeah, he waited on a friend and me.”
  “You don’t say? Well, don’t tell anyone where you heard it, but that guy is a murderer.”
  “You’re joking, right?”
  “It’s true. I swear it.”
  “If you know this for sure, shouldn’t you tell the police or somebody?”
  “Nah, there’s no need for that. He only killed one time, and he won’t ever do it again. He was a British lord back in England—and a professional gambler—but things just didn’t go well for him. He was separated from his wife and children. One night he slipped back into the house and killed the nanny. Beat her to death with a lead pipe. Poor girl wasn’t even supposed to be working that night. Not sure if he mistook her for the wife or if she just got between him and the kids. Anyway, he took off and no one has heard of him since.”

My guess is that this exchange, which has absolutely no bearing on the rest of the book’s narrative (other than to establish Marty as a man with unusual connections and mysterious sources of information), went right over the heads of most readers. It would take someone, like my neighbor, who would be the right age and who lives on this side of the Atlantic to pick up on that reference. I believe this is what is known as an Easter egg.

Speaking holidays, it’s only 48 more shopping days until Christmas, so it behooves me to point out all the links on this page that will lead you to places to buy all kinds of great holiday gifts, including not only Lautaro’s Spear but also the other Dallas Green books as well as The Three Towers of Afranor, The Curse of Septimus Bridge and my newest tome, Last of the Tuath Dé.

Stamp of Approval?

In a generous gesture to honor a humble writer residing on its soil, Ireland’s national postal service, An Post, has released a new commemorative stamp in honor of Last of the Tuath Dé.

Okay, actually not. I only wish.

It’s just an interesting coincidence that, at the beginning of September, An Post issued stamps featuring the mythical namesake of one of my latest novel’s characters. As the official blurb explains, the stamp is “based on Balor, a legendary figure in the Formorian supernatural race in Irish mythology.” It continues:

    According to the Irish folklore tales, Balor caused great pain and anguish to the Tuatha Dé Dannan, the other supernatural race in Irish folklore.
   The legend centres on Balor having an eye that, when unleashed, could cause instant death or poisoning. Balor’s Poisoned Eye is the main focus of one stamp. The second stamp relates to the legend that claimed Balor had only to look on the landscape to cause damage, such as in the Poisoned Glen in County Donegal.
   In both cases, contemporary colours are used to create the impression of poison almost leaping off the stamp.

A domestic postage stamp depicts Balor’s Evil Eye, while an international one illustrates the Poisoned Glen. They are part of PostEurop’s collection of stamps across Europe celebrating this year’s theme of Stories & Myths. The collection includes a whole array of mythical and legendary figures from various European countries.

Other examples include Saint Hubertus from Belgium, the mermaid Melusina of Luxembourg, the Bogeyman of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Emperor Charlemagne of France and Switzerland’s William Tell. Who knew that post offices could be such a great source for potential character names for future fantasy novels?

To be clear, the authentic mythological Balor does not actually appear in Last of the Tuath Dé. That Balor is my own creation, inspired by the Irish myths. The narrative conceit is that the Tuath Dé and the Fomóire in my book were the true inspirations for the Irish stories—even though in the real world it’s the reverse that’s true.

Quite a coincidence that An Post would be highlighting Balor within just a couple of weeks after the release of Last of the Tuath Dé, eh? But wait, it gets better.

It so happens that Greece’s entry in the Stories & Myths stamp collection is none other than Orpheus. As my readers will well know, Orpheus is the Demon Hunter name—or as Hadrian the Necromant would dashingly put the term (see Chapter 12), nom de chasseur de démon—of none other than the title character of The Curse of Septimus Bridge. Sadly, the two Greek stamps depict Orpheus’s demise as he’s about to be ripped to shreds by the Thracian Maenads for having forsaken his former deity patron Dionysus in favor of the sun god Apollo. A further reminder, if any were needed, that it’s always a bad idea to tick off a Greek god.

That’s a fate even worse than being trapped for eternity in the Netherworld.

Who’s Who?

Madame Bovary, c’est moi.

That is what 19th-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert is reported to have replied when asked if the title character of his best known novel, Madame Bovary, was based on a real person. He himself was she, he said.

That seemed strange when I first heard it lo these many years ago in my student days. How could a 37-year-old bachelor writer, who was a frequent customer of prostitutes, base a young, sheltered, convent-educated female character obsessed with romantic novels on himself? Now, however, it makes perfect sense to me.

I once read or heard from a source that seemed authoritative that, when we dream, all the people in our dreams are versions of ourselves. We might think we dreamt about a friend or relative, but it was really us. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds like it might be. I suspect something similar goes on with creators of fiction. I find it plausible that the inner lives of every fictional character is essentially an extension of that of its creator.

These thoughts are prompted by my previous post in which I anticipated—and shot down—the question of whether the character Antonio, who features in Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead and its two sequels, was based on my longtime Peruvian friend Mañuco. If I think about it for very long, the real basis for Antonio becomes obvious. Antonio, c’est moi. Or more appropriately, Antonio soy yo.

No, of course, I’m not—and never have been—an abandoned Mexican street kid living by my wits on the streets of Los Angeles. But look past that. Antonio is an avid reader of comic books. He loves movies and the Spanish language. If you read Chapter 10 of Max & Carly carefully, you’ll even find circumstantial evidence that he’s a fan of the 1960s gothic soap opera Dark Shadows. The case is open and shut.

A lot of readers, including those who personally know me well, have assumed that it is the narrator Dallas who is me, and to be sure I did make Dallas’s circumstances close to my own—even to the point of having him be born in the same month and year. That, however, was to make it easy for myself in terms of getting the history right and to minimize my own need for research. What can I say? I’m basically lazy. But why waste time denying whether or not I’m Dallas? I’ve already bought into the idea that all my characters are me.

If that’s true, this has interesting implications for a literary debate that raises its head from time to time. Is it some kind of inappropriate appropriation for a male writer to attempt conveying the female experience through a fictional character? For a white fiction writer to write at length about the African-American or Hispanic experience?

For that matter, what about a California-born, straight, Scandinavian-American, male writer attempting to portray in fiction a Japanese-Canadian bisexual woman who happens to be a Demon Hunter? Yes, I had to bring the conversation around to my latest book, Last of the Tuath Dé, lest anyone forget that it is still out there and available for purchase.

Basically, I feel about fiction-writing the way I feel about the acting profession. In principle, any artist should be able to portray any character in any medium. In practice, though, it doesn’t cost me or anyone else anything to try being sensitive to legitimate issues people may have when it comes their own experiences and to history. In the end, though, my philosophy in artistic matters is to err on the side of creative freedom.

If I have my own escape clause for slipping through the imagined tentacles of the so-called political-correctness police, it is that I am either writing fantasy or else focusing on what I know personally—and none of my characters are meant to emblematic or representative of an entire group of people. I’m just telling stories.

That is why I feel secure in proclaiming, Izanami et Sapphire, ils sont moi.

Traduttore, no Traditore?

Sometime during the past few days, as I write this, my words are being or have been read out at a poetry festival. This is not something that occurs for me often. In fact, virtually never.

But wait. Are they really my words being read out? That’s a fertile subject for discussion.

You see, I have this friend. I met him years ago when I was making my way home from a year’s study in Chile and found myself with several hours to kill during a layover in Lima. Through a series of events too complicated to go into right now, I wound up being invited to his family’s home for Sunday dinner and to pass the time until my evening flight to Los Angeles. Despite a significant gap in our ages, Mañuco (as he was called within the family) and I hit it off and formed a friendship that has endured through decades, marriages, parenthood and international relocations. He has lived many years in Paris, while I have dwelled these past score of years in rural Ireland. He is a poet, designer, dancer, all-around artist and general purveyor of Peruvian culture in the City of Lights.

If his name rings a bell with my readers, it is probably because he was one of the people to whom I dedicated my very first novel. And in case you are about to ask, no, he is not Antonio, the young traveling companion of Dallas and Lonnie in Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead whose presence also weighs heavily in the two subsequent novels. Of course, any insights I gained from having a friend from a different (specifically, Latin American) culture informed the fictional character, but Antonio himself was more directly inspired by various Mexican and Mexican-American friends and acquaintances I had in my younger days. Still, the long-lasting bond between Dallas and Antonio does echo that of Mañuco and myself.

My Paris-based friend has always been a spinner of poems, and he has always written them in his native Peruvian Spanish. For years he has submitted them to various academic and literary journals. Many of these journals require works submitted in languages other than English to be accompanied by an English translation. At some point he asked me to translate one of his poems, and always up for a challenge, I gave it a go. He was delighted with the result and happily submitted it along with the original version. Since then, these requests have become a somewhat regular thing.

To be sure, I undertook this job with no small amount of trepidation. For one thing, I am not trained as a translator. My Spanish is pretty good (if I do say so myself), but translation is a whole different skill from simply understanding and communicating in a foreign language. Translation requires a specialized sort of training. Furthermore, I can in no way be considered a poet. I do read and appreciate poetry and have even churned out the odd bit of doggerel when the occasion required, but I am totally ill-equipped to write serious poetry of my own.

Despite this, I willingly produce translations of Mañuco’s poems because, for one thing, he is happy with and grateful for them. For another thing, it just seems to work because of the long and unusual mental bond between him and me. It’s a wondrous thing, as he and I are products of such different cultures, are native speakers of different languages, are different ages, and have actually spent precious little time in each other’s company. The vast majority of our communication has been through letters and, later, emails and internet audio conversations. Despite all this, when I read his poetry, I have some kind innate understanding of what he’s thinking, something he himself confirms. I do have to do a lot of research, sometimes painstakingly word by word, to find the right words or phrases, but only rarely do I have to consult Mañuco directly about his intentions or nuances. I doubt I could do the same for any other writer.

Part of the challenge of Mañuco’s poetry for a translator is that is tends toward themes of nature, earthiness and ribaldry along with a serious dose of surrealism. He tells me that my translations are invariably well received, although once he delighted in telling me a submission resulted in feedback that went roughly like this: your poem is pornography, and your translator is even more pornographic than you. It was never made clear to me whether this was contained in a letter of rejection or acceptance.

From Mañuco’s point of view at least, the old Italian aphorism traduttore, traditore (translator, betrayer) does not apply. He insists my translations make me a poet in my own right. Personally, I’m not so sure about that. Translation is definitely an art, but I’m not convinced that the translation of poetry is itself a form of poetry. I confess, though, I don’t mind the flattery.

Poetry or not, though, my English version of Mañuco’s words are being read aloud this weekend—along with the original Spanish words—at the inaugural edition of La Tour Poétique organized by the Association Apulivre in Paris. Hopefully, no fastidious listeners will be offended.

I’m definitely more comfortable with prose. And speaking of prose, allow me again to thank those of you who have purchased and read Last of the Tuath Dé. While the sales numbers certainly pose no competitive threat to the likes of James Patterson and J.K. Rowling, I’ve been gratified by the numbers of people who have sought out the book at the various online stores. I’ve been particularly impressed by the numbers of people who have gone to the expense of buying the paperback version.

Thank you all. (A translation of gracias a todos.)