Through the Internet Rabbit Hole

One of the habits I have gotten into since Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead was released, is searching for my book on the web. I am clearly not alone in this. From what I gather, most working authors do it. Checking on one’s book’s web presence is part of the job of marketing and selling your work.

I have learned some interesting things from doing these searches. For one, I have found that my book can be ordered from any number of online book sellers in any number of countries around the world. It is kind of fun seeing your book (written in English) being listed on a site in, say, Sweden or Russia.

Sometimes the title shows up in a way that is totally a surprise—like when it was mentioned on the Spanish language Facebook page of a South American writer based in Paris. It turns out that he is an acquaintance of my friend Mañuco, one of the people to whom I dedicated the novel.

The strangest search result, however, was the one I came across a couple of weeks ago. The excerpt that Google highlighted read like this: “The typical story Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead of the Gingerbread Boy. Not everyone will love this modern version…” Whoa. Apparently, somebody was doing some interesting analysis of my little tale of wayward youth. Naturally, I had to read the whole thing.

But when I clicked through to the link, which was on a site called socialistorganizer.org, I found a discussion board for comic books and ebooks. There was no mention of the Gingerbread Boy. Instead there was discussion, apparently among students, about an English assignment.

“I have to read 3 books over the summer for AP English,” wrote someone called Enmenre. “My parents can’t afford to buy them and they said I’ll have to read them online. Is there a website that I can download books from as documents? I want to read Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead by Scott R. Larson.”

My heart was all aflutter. Some young person had somehow heard of my book and wanted to read it! And it didn’t even seem to be a friend or relative. This was a great. Someone else responded to say that a great place to get it was a site called Booklibrary. Enmenre replied, “Guess what just happened? haha, I found the book I was looking for, all thanks to BookLibrary. YES! I’m so stocked right now, been looking like forever for this old book, and finally I found it! Loving it!”

Very cool that Enmenre was loving the novel. But “this old book”? Hey, give me a break. It was only released last June. Other commenters chimed in with feedback on the book. “This book is a fate,” said Rinbeydo (whatever that might mean). “Interesting and easy to read,” said Iculob, inserting a “WINNAH!!!” emoticon. “Don’t waste your time reading it. Nothing interesting,” wrote a spoilsport called Primourco.

I followed the link that had allegedly led the happy Enmenre to my book. It turned out to be something called download-genius.com, and it did list several servers around the world from which Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead could be purportedly downloaded. It even offered the choice of paperback, ebook and audio versions—which was interesting since, as far as I know (and, as the author, I should know) there is no audio version. Of course, before you could actually do any downloading, you had to “sign up.” I had come across sites like this before. They promise you all kinds of free digital stuff, i.e. games, movies, books, etc. In exchange, they want (at the least) your name and email address and maybe more personal information or even a credit card for the “membership fee.”

Did this site really have my book available for download? Something I had prepared myself for since uploading the Kindle version of Maximilian and Carlotta to Amazon was that at some point I might come across it on a pirate web site. Just about every book ever published seems to show up on these sites, as many authors will readily attest. In a strange and perverse way, the fact that someone would go to the trouble to pirate your book is actually some kind of a cockeyed compliment. At least it means that there is a demand for your work out there.

One of the strangest stories I have heard in this regard was in an interview on public radio’s On the Media program with Peter Mountford about his novel A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism. I paid attention when the interview came on because I had read and enjoyed Mountford’s book. Set in Bolivia, it has a very passing similarity to mine in that it deals with a young American getting to know something of Latin American culture. Mountford recounted how he got an email out of the blue from a Russian asking him to explain the nuances of various passages in his book. In pursuing this, Mountford learned that his correspondent had been hired to do a Russian translation of the book—one that was in no way authorized. In the end, the author decided to help the Russian come up with the best translation possible. His reasoning was that, if there was going to be a pirated Russian version out there, he would prefer that it be of the best quality.

But back to my question. Did that site really have my book for download? My guess is that it didn’t. I would guess that the site is a scam looking to rip off naive and/or dishonest consumers of digital stuff. Strangely, when I went back to the original URL, it was no longer a comic book/ebook discussion. It was now a more literary site purporting to do book reviews, but still mentioning Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead in vaguely non-sequitur kinds of ways. As far as I could tell, the web page was dynamically taking my search query and intelligently weaving it into something that appeared like a real discussion—all with the aim of directing the gullible to the scam download site.

The internet is truly a strange and bizarre (and sometimes risky) place.

So Enmenre almost certainly doesn’t exist and didn’t hear about and want to read my “old” book. So were the owners of the socialistorganizer.org domain part of the scam or were they victims as well? When I went back to the URL more recently (not through a Google search), it led me to a page that looked just as you would expect something called socialistorganizer.org to look. “For A Labor party. For A Workers’ International,” it intones next to a clinched black fist in front of a red star. It gives every indication of legitimately being the web site of a leftist labor organization. Its only similarity to download-genius.com is that it too offers to take your payment details.

Bad Buzz

A couple of posts ago I proudly announced that Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead had made the list of finalists in the historical fiction category of the Prize Writer Competition of BookBzz.com. When I submitted my novel, I had no illusions about my chances of making that list. So when I exceeded my own expectations, I was delighted. I had no expectation of actually getting a prize—especially since the process favored those who could best exploit legions of fans through social media. I’m the first to admit that the whole “social media” thing is not my strong suit. Thus, there was no real disappointment at not picking up a prize.

What I did get, though, was the entitlement to put a Prize Writer Competition 2015 BookBzz.com Finalist sticker on my blog. What I did not expect was that I would also get a genuinely and intriguing story out of the experience.

Bookbzz.com was one of a number of web sites I discovered in the inevitable process of marketing my book. I learned that there are numerous such sites out there—ranging from straightforward blogs, curated by writing and/or reading enthusiasts, to more elaborate web sites that are run as businesses and therefore aim to make money. What they all have in common is the purpose of being of mutual benefit to writers, readers and, not least, the web site proprietor. Bookbzz.com belonged to a subcategory of sites that essentially want to be a destination akin to the granddaddy of book web sites, Goodreads but with a more in-your-face approach about providing services for which they can charge. Fair enough. Everybody is entitled to make a buck if they can. The truth is, though, I didn’t really know much about Bookbzz.com aside from what I’ve just recounted and the fact that it is based in London.

I know more now. While I was visiting the U.S. over the recent Easter school break, an email landed in my inbox. It was from Conrad Murray, Bookbzz.com’s publisher, and it apparently went out to everyone on the site’s mailing list. It can also be read on the site’s home page, accompanied by a photo of a forlorn-looking Murray and his dog. That is how I learned that the writers who did get selected as winners in the site’s competition had not received their promised cash prizes. It turns out that Bookbzz.com has ceased to function—although the web site is still up with its many book listings, including my own. As explained by Murray, it had been a joint project with Susannah, his partner of a quarter-century, and it all went pear-shaped earlier this year when that relationship broke down. And here’s where it gets really interesting.

He blamed Susannah’s 39-year-old daughter Charlotte who, it turns out, is rather notorious in the British press. Murray linked to a Daily Mail article from a year-and-a-half ago that details Charlotte’s somewhat spotted history and her attempts to lay claim to the estate of her father, a Scottish baronet whose relationship with Susannah years ago was, as they say, without the benefit of clergy. While Sir Malcolm supported Charlotte financially through her childhood and beyond, he apparently drew the line when she began advertising herself to well-heeled clients on escort web sites under the name of Charlie Foxtrot.

More information is available on a very useful web site that I cannot believe I had not found earlier. It is called Writer Beware and is a volunteer service sponsored by various writers’ organizations. It provides advice and information for writers with the aim of shining a light on “the shadow-world of literary scams, schemes, and pitfalls.” It reports that, not surprisingly, the competition winners are pretty unhappy about not receiving their prizes. It also provides additional background information on the web site and Conrad Murray. Clearly, many writers believe that the web site was a scam from start to finish.

Murray says that the business’s accounts “all were systematically emptied” by Susannah, but he has promised to eventually pay the prize winners from his own personal resources—after “legal complications” have been overcome. He says he hopes to have this completed by the end of April.

Frankly, I don’t know what to make of it all. I don’t feel personally aggrieved since I never expected to get any money out of the experience. I will leave my Finalist sticker on this page for now—until such time as I become convinced that the honor is utterly bogus. But I am upset for the entrants who entered in good faith and then were promised prizes. Time will tell if Murray is some kind of con artist or just a very unfortunate businessman.

In the meantime, the best way to profit from the situation might be to write about it. The story has everything—mystery, money, aristocracy, bad behavior and more than a whiff of sex. Indeed, it has all the makings of a very interesting article—or even a book.

Imagining the Possibilities

Nearly ten months after Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead was first released, I continue to have thrilling vicarious experiences of re-discovering it—through the eyes of other people.

It is a heck of a lot of fun to hear reactions from people who are only now reading it for the first time.

I think my favorite reaction so far was from the person who wrote a review on Amazon that said, “I could not finish this book. After about 3 or 4 chapters I was done. It felt like a very immature drunk teenager wrote the book. Sorry, didn’t like at all.” No, I’m not being facetious. I was actually delighted to read this for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the voice of a very immature drunk teenager was exactly what I was shooting for. Believe me, it is not easy to write convincingly like a drunk teenager when you are my age and (mostly) sober. For another thing, the fact that I got a one-star review meant that it is not only my personal friends who are reading the book.

What has been particularly interesting has been the questions I get from people after reading the book. Probably the most frequent query is, is it a true story? Did the things recounted in the book actually happen to you personally? That is a reasonable enough question coming from people know nothing about me other than what it says in my author bio. Or even from people who only met me years after I ceased to 18 years old—the age of my narrator/protagonist Dallas Green. But it does seem a bit strange when it comes from people who actually did know me when I was 18 or even from those who have known me since I was born. But then, why not? We all have stories that many of our own friends and families do not know about—especially from the years around our 18th birthdays. And a number of people who did know me then thought they perceived some definite similarities between Dallas’s wild best friend Lonnie and my own childhood best pal.

The answer to the question is that the story in the book is a work of fiction that I created in my own head. But I did include elements—and even some incidents—from my own life at the time, so it is not surprising that people who knew me then might have certain glimmers of recognition.

The other really common question that I get—and, frankly, one that at first surprised me—is whether there will be a sequel. Every time I get that question, I am pleased because it means that the reader got sufficiently invested in the characters to want to see their stories continued. I conceived the story as something complete and self-contained and never thought of it as the first of a series. I already had too many other books started and, honestly, Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead 2 wasn’t one of them. Besides, after years of making snide jokes about sequels on my movie blog, I wasn’t particularly inclined to keep going back to the same well creatively. For one thing, I had promised myself that I would never again write a novel in the first person—especially when the narrator was an very immature drunk teenager.

But people wanted to know what happened to Dallas afterwards. And they wanted to know what happened to a couple of the other characters who disappeared from the story and whose fates were left a mystery—you know, like happens in real life. One friend even came up with a great idea for an opening scene for the sequel, which picks up Dallas’s story five years later. In fact, it was such a good scene that I immediately wanted to use it, if not in a novel, then in a movie or a TV series.

The funny thing is that the same thing happened to me as I was writing the last chapter of the book. I found myself wanting to know what would happen to the various characters. But, unlike my readers, I had the luxury of knowing what would happen to them. I could plot out their destinies and see where they would wind up. But my initial instinct that, for the reader, Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead was actually a better story for not having those questions answered by me. After all, each reader could imagine the characters’ destinies for themselves, just as I had. Besides, while having one’s curiosity satisfied is a nice feeling, it can also be satisfying to leave characters frozen in a moment for all time—never to go grow old or, worse, to grow boring.

Given the way my brain is, though, I found I couldn’t stop thinking of plots for a possible sequel. Could I come up with a story that would not disappoint people who liked the first book but would be a worthwhile literary endeavor in its own right. I still do not have a definitive answer. Any time I have for plotting and writing has been used for the last while on another book, a fantasy story that is light years away from Max & Carly and yet is, in some ways, the same basic story reworked. And after that, the plan was to complete what was supposed to be my opus major, a sprawling story about people in Seattle in the 1980s. And my dozen years in Ireland have also caused me to come up with a story set in this country as well. And, as if that is not enough, I have lately become consumed with the idea of revising a gothic supernatural story, which I originally wrote in my teens, as a cockeyed homage to my beloved Dark Shadows. Both that one and the one I am currently finishing could easily be the first entries in their own series of books.

So where would Max & Carly 2 fit into all that, given that I am not exactly the fastest producer of prose on the planet? Who knows? So many ideas for books and so little time.

Short-listed!

Well, so far, so good.



I am informed that Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead has been short-listed (I’ve always wanted to use that term in relation to a book I wrote!) for BookBzz.com’s Prize Writer Competition. The competition now goes to a public vote, which runs during the entire month of February. Prize winners will be announced on March 5.

Strangely, the thought that most prominently comes to mind is a sentence that I have mocked many times on my movie web site. But darn it, it is actually true. It’s an honor just to be nominated!

Some Bzz

The web site BookBzz.com has been coming on strong in making itself a place for authors to promote themselves. I’m still working out whether it’s meant to be an alternative or a competitor or a supplement to GoodReads, which seems to be the main place for authors and readers to meet one another.

As I continue trying to figure out this whole marketing part of writing and publishing a book, I have entered Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead into BookBzz’s Prize Writer Competition. You can see my book’s listing by clicking this link. There will be 33 winners in 11 categories, which will be announced on World Book Day, March 5.

Wish me luck!

Amazon’s Reign Forest

One of the interesting side effects of writing and publishing a book is that you end up learning a fair amount about certain people’s reading preferences and habits. And you get disabused of certain things you thought you knew.

For example, before publishing I had completely bought into what I was reading and hearing seemingly everywhere: that digital books had largely supplanted print books. And maybe that is actually still true. After all, what I had been led to understand is that J.K. Rowling single-handedly converted new young generations into ravenous readers. And there is certainly evidence of that. Look at the endless numbers of titles published in the young adult and fantasy categories. Surely, somebody is reading a lot of those books and those somebodies must logically fit into age categories corresponding to readers who were young when Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (or Sorcerer’s Stone, as Rowling consented to for American versions, to her eternal regret) first came out.

And why wouldn’t those ravenous young readers prefer to be reading on digital devices? After all, young people are about nothing if not about their electronic devices. So it made sense that digital books would have caught on—just as music downloading and streaming had caught on. And surprising numbers of older people whom I knew were into their Kindles as well. And why wouldn’t they be? They are easier to read in terms of being able to enlarge text if necessary. I myself was a quick and unassailable convert to ebooks when they first appeared—although, strangely, I have never owned a Kindle. That was kind of an accident since I was hot to get an ebook reader before the Kindle was available in Europe, so my only choice was a Sony device. By the time Kindles arrived in the nearest Tesco, I was already addicted to reading books on my iPad. (Reading app of choice: Marvin by Appstafarian.)

So when it came time for me to publish I was convinced that there would quite likely not be a print version. After all, print was dead. Lots of niche authors were eschewing hardbacks and paperbacks and, in many cases, any format other than the Kindle’s. So I published for the Kindle with the plan to follow up with other digital formats after three months. As for a paperback version, I kept an open mind but did not make it a priority.

What I was not expecting was the number of people who informed me that they would wait until a paper version came out to read the book. Furthermore, I was surprised at how many people—in many cases younger than myself—were not familiar with ebooks and not interested in them. This includes people with whom I worked on the cutting edge of the software industry in the 1980s and 1990s—the very people you would think would embrace new technology. (A surprising number of them are pretty retro in their personal lives.) So I prepared a paperback version to be released at the same time as the non-Kindle digital versions. And the reaction was pretty much universal that the release of the paperback was the “real” release of the “real” book.

Something else I encountered, to a lesser degree, was that a number of people would have nothing at all to do with Amazon. That wasn’t exactly a shock. After all, Amazon is a huge corporation which has a competitive advantage over the small neighborhood bookstores and funky quaint book shops where lots of us book lovers would love to spend all our time hanging out. Amazon is the kind of business that is always portrayed as evil in the movies.

My own attitude toward Jeff Bezos’s operation has always been fond. After all I was living in Seattle when it was founded and I loved the idea of making every book available to everybody. I like it even better now that I live “in the back of beyond” where the nearest mom-and-pop book shop is a significant drive away. But I respect people who consciously choose to give all their book buying business to small shops. Some people I know will not even frequent chain bookstores like Eason’s or Waterstone’s.

The economic reality, though, is that my book will almost certainly never be stocked in a small shop. At best a determined customer might be able to ask the staff to special order my book—if the staff are even willing. A friend tried this at a Barnes & Noble in Bakersfield, California (where my book is partly set) and was told to go home and order it on B&N’s web site.

This creates an interesting paradox. Amazon has made self-publishing an attainable reality for multitudes of authors who otherwise would likely remain unpublished. But it is also endangering the quaint and traditional book shops that so many of us cherish. This is because the economics of those traditional bookshops always meant that a self-supporting author was necessarily a member of a relatively exclusive club.

Amazon’s business model is definitely more democratic and inclusive for authors and readers. But it also forces change that is not always comfortable. Thus it has ever been—at least as far back as the time Johannes Gutenberg put an unknown number of calligraphers out of business.

A final note: despite all the feedback about paperbacks and mega-bookstores, the vast majority of sales for my book to date have been for the Amazon Kindle. Despite this, when my next book comes out, it will be released in paperback first.

At Swim Tequila Oil

I am sure that this is typical of first-time authors, but I was so excited about and so focused on the milestone of getting my novel finished and published that I was not really prepared for all the work that would come after. Yes, I had heard and read lots of times and in lots of places about the importance of distribution and marketing and how much time it all requires. But I still was not quite prepared.

I have no illusions about the fact that I have not given that phase of the process the attention and effort and time that others do. Even so, for a while there, it seemed as though all I was doing was contacting potential reviewers and sending out copies of the book—as well as trying to post fairly regularly on this blog and on my other ones. My dream of immediately proceeding to (actually returning to, since I had already started) the next book was essentially a mirage.

Well, the mirage has since become reality, as I have gotten back to the writing, which is all I ever wanted to be doing. Yes, the guilt nags at me that there is more I should be doing on behalf of the first book, but I have gotten good at ignoring it. And this time I have the extra motivation of knowing that the second book will be one I can hand to my younger relatives and friends without feeling so sheepish about the language. But more on that anon.

One of the side benefits of the publishing/distribution/marketing phase was that it left my brain free for other literary activities since I wasn’t doing much writing. That included reading other people’s books. And the last couple I read were fascinating for me because they felt like variations on my own opus.

I had long been meaning to read Jamie O’Neill’s 2001 novel At Swim Two Boys, and darned if it didn’t turn out to be the quarterly read for the Irish group on Goodreads—which I had joined as part of my efforts to reach out to readers. Like Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead, it is the story of a close friendship between male teenagers set against dramatic historical events. Beyond that, however, O’Neill’s book couldn’t more dissimilar from mine. His heavily researched novel covers events in Dublin leading up to the 1916 Easter Rising. At the center of all this is the friendship (and eventual love affair) between studious middle class lad Jim and political firebrand Doyler.

The strength of the book is the portrait it draws of daily life at the time, as well as the various religious and political strands interweaving through society during a time when Irish boys were participating via the British military in the First World War while nationalist groups were becoming bolder within Ireland. If there is a weakness, it is the way O’Neill occasionally puts words that feel anachronistic into the mouths of certain characters to drive home his historical points. The settings and set pieces are so entertaining that I found myself thinking the story could easily be adapted into a great musical. In fact, in my mind’s eye Jim and Doyler were basically slightly older versions of Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger. And the final section would certainly lend itself to rousing songs on the barricades à la Les Miserables. If you’re wondering about the title, in addition to referring to the boys’ bonding swims at Forty Foot on Dublin Bay it is a play on the title of Flann O’Brien’s seminal 1939 novel At Swim-Two-Birds, which is a translation of an Irish place name on the River Shannon.

As soon as I finished O’Neill’s book, I immediately dove into a memoir by British writer/filmmaker Hugh Thomson called Tequila Oil. I came across the book while researching my novel and immediately bought it—and then locked it away so that I would not be tempted to read it until my own book was done. The similarities between his (true) story and my (completely made up) tale were eerie. In the 1970s, at the age of 18, Thomson undertook a seemingly crazy journey the length of Mexico in a big old GM automobile.

Fortunately, there are enough differences for me to credibly avoid charges of blatant plagiarism. Thomson was English and on his own—unlike my very American characters, Dallas and Lonnie, who also had young Antonio in tow. Moreover, he undertook his journey eight years after the events portrayed in my book. Perhaps most crucially, he was driving an Oldsmobile and not a Chevrolet. But, if anything, Thomson’s true story is more fanciful than my fictional one, but with many of the same elements: dodgy encounters with the locals, much drinking (the title refers to a potent mixed drink), friendships, complications with government paperwork, and at least one experience with gastrointestinal distress.

Thomson’s youthful adventures make for great reading, not only for his entertaining antics but also because the story is being told by a veteran travel writer and documentarian who brings a lot of historical, cultural and literary perspective. At the end of the book, Thomson returns thirty years later to Belize, where his original journey ended, looking for some sort of closure. It leaves a bittersweet taste, perhaps not unlike the titular tequila concoction.

I’m very glad I read Tequila Oil, but I’m even more glad that I only read it after completing my own book—and not before.