What's in a Name?

Imagine my shock. Suddenly the hero of my first and third novels was dead. The author is always the last to know.

Okay, my protagonist is not really dead. Actually, I guess I am only presuming he is not dead since I have not yet worked out where Dallas Green would be today in 2017 and what he would be doing. Obviously, though, I have worked out where he is at least as far as the end of the upcoming book and, truth be told, a good few years after that, since I have already been plotting out the third installment in his prospective trilogy. I hope that is not a spoiler to be divulging he survives for that amount of time. I figure that, when the protagonist of a book is narrating the story in the first person, he necessarily cannot narrate past the end of his own life. Well, unless he is narrating from beyond the grave like William Holden’s character in Sunset Boulevard.

The shock I mentioned above had to do with an obituary I came across in The New York Times last month. It reported that Dallas Green had died on March 22 at the age of 82. Of course, the story was not about my fictional creation but about a real person.

The real Dallas Green (actual full name: George Dallas Green) was born in Delaware and had an undistinguished baseball pitching career before going on to manage to the Philadelphia Phillies to their first-ever World Series title in 1980 (coincidentally the very same year in which my upcoming book is set). He later was a manager for New York’s Yankees and Mets. He was known to be tall and hot-tempered and to have a booming voice. His life was marked with sadness that went beyond simply being one of numerous people fired by George Steinbrenner. His nine-year-old granddaughter was one of six people killed in the shooting that injured U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson six years ago.

One of the tricky things about writing fiction is coming up with names for characters. It is pretty much impossible to come up with a plausible-sounding monicker that does not already belong to some number of real people. Generally, one avoids using the same name as someone particularly famous—unless maybe it is a plot point or important detail for building the character. (“Unlucky enough to be named Frank by his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Sinatra, he was regularly beaten in school by bullies who insisted he sing for them with the same voice quality of his famous namesake.”) Not being much of a follower of sports, I do not think I was even aware of the existence baseball’s Dallas Green when I came up with that name for a teenager in a California farming town in the early 1970s. As for his best friend, Lonnie McKay, I don’t know how that name came to me but, after the book was published, a childhood acquaintance mentioned with some amusement on Facebook that his cousin had the very same name. Had I met or heard about the real Lonnie and then had the name stick in the back of my head somewhere?

I did learn of another real-life Dallas Green not long after Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead came out. I was listening to Weekend Edition on National Public Radio one Saturday when Scott Simon interviewed a Canadian singer/songwriter named Dallas Green. If I had missed hearing about him up until then, it may have been because he was a vocalist/guitarist in the hardcore band Alexisonfire before setting out on his own seven years ago. He has since recorded under the name City and Colour—because his name is a city followed by a color. Born in St. Catherine’s, Ontario in 1980, he was actually named after the baseball manager who achieved his World Series triumph that very same year.

I am sure there are many more Dallas Greens out there. A quick web search, for example, turns up a couple of men (a DJ in the Washington D.C. area and an Australian athlete and father who died way too young last year) and a couple of women (a technical administrator in northern California and a recent bride in North Carolina).

It is always worth doing a search on a character’s name before committing it to print but, as I say, you are never going to come up with any kind of normal name for a character that is not already being used by a whole bunch of actual real people out there. I suppose the best you can hope for is that your fictional creation does not resemble a real person to the extent that you could be looking at lawsuits—especially if your fictional creation is not very well behaved.

After the Ides

Unlike Julius Caesar, I had little to fear from the Ides of March. That was the day I officially finished my first draft of the Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead sequel. And just in the nick of time too, since two days later came St. Patrick’s Day, and that is when all the brain cells that had been holding all my pent-up prose for the final chapters were subsequently and tragically destroyed.

I am still keeping the book’s title to myself, but I can confirm that it definitely will not be Julius and Calpurnia Are Dead—at least not unless the manuscript undergoes some serious rewriting and thematic changes.

The story turned out to require 32 chapters and, at more than 116,000 words, the page count for the paper edition should be in the neighborhood of 350, making it the longest of my three tomes to date. Of course, all these statistics—as well as the title—are still subject to change, but I tend to resist too many major changes once I get to this point. Much, much work remains, but the book feels complete to me in terms of how it reads in my head if not actually on virtual paper. With a bit of ruthless editing, it could well shrink back down to the 100,000 words that had been my original target.

I have actually done this enough times now that the stages I go through mentally are very familiar to me. With the creative work of plotting pretty much over—and weeks of crafting and polishing ahead—the imaginative part of my brain has already skipped ahead. My brain is thinking about everything from what would make a nice book cover to how the story might continue in an eventual third volume. (It’s good to be thinking about that while there is still time to drop some foreshadowing into the second book.) I am also now free to develop ideas for my next project which, if I heed the reader feedback I have gotten thus far on Facebook and other places, will turn out to be the supernatural gothic tale that has been knocking around in my head since high school. (Yeah, another one of those.)

As I think I have mentioned before, I had not really intended to write a sequel to my debut novel. I thought the story of Dallas and Lonnie’s ill-advised foray into Mexico stood on its own and was complete on its own terms. After getting much prodding and continual inquiries about a follow-up, though, I began to think what kind of story might flow out of Dallas’s future life and, lo and behold, the story ended up writing itself. (Well, I can only wish it had written itself. That would have been a whole lot easier.) I hoped the effort would, in the end, feel worthwhile artistically and not end up as a mere completionist exercise. Happily, by the time I got to the end, I had a similar emotional involvement and investment as I had when I got to the end of Dallas and Lonnie’s original story. (“Of course, you would say that,” says you. “What else could you say after all?” Fair point.) Hopefully, it strikes the right balance between reproducing what readers may have liked about the first book while offering something new and different.

Do you need to have read Max & Carly in order to understand and/or enjoy the new book? All I can say is that I wrote it as if the reader had not perused the previous novel. Strangely, in fact, there were times when I thought this new book would actually be more enjoyable if you had not read the first one. After all, what you need to know gets filled in along the way. On the other hand, there are references back to the first story that will be best appreciated by those who have indeed read it.

As with the first book, the story involves a journey that is both geographical and trascendent—not to mention an inordinate amount of alcohol consumption. Dallas grew in the course of his adventures in Mexico, and the same is also meant to be true about his experiences in Europe. Just as the first book gave me an opportunity to visit places I had never been as well as to revisit places where I had been, the new book has provided me the chance to revisit places like San Francisco and Bordeaux as well as, through research and imagination, do things I had not done, like attend a film festival in Deauville and experience Berlin as it was during the Cold War.

I hope the people who pestered me into writing the book will be happy. They will definitely get the answer to some of their lingering questions. Some answers, though, they may still be pestering me to provide—in the prospective third book.

Being There

I am happy to report that I have only a few more chapters to go on the first draft of the Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead sequel. (Yes, it has a title and one that is much shorter than repeatedly calling it “the Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead sequel,” but no point committing to it publicly until I have to. After all, I might think of something better in the meantime. Also, no harm in maybe building a little suspense?)

When I say “a few more chapters,” I do not actually know for sure how many. My target page count is around 300, and I estimate that I am at about 278 but with still a lot of story to fit in at the end. My wife always says that my books feel to her like they are rushed at the end, and maybe this is why. Personally, as a reader, I like a bit of accelerating narrative pace coming down to the climax of a story, but that is just me. Anyway, either the final few chapters will be packed with story or else this book will be a bit longer than I had planned.

I hope to have the first draft wrapped up fairly soon, once I get back to it. As usual around this time of year, I have been interrupted by the midterm school break, which this time around will end with the annual all-nighter to obsessively watch the Academy Awards in real time.

As with the first book, this one has been, alternately, an exercise in jogging the old memory and spending a fair bit of time in research. Both books deal with eras that I remember well, but the story in each case brings my protagonist Dallas to places that I happen to know and also to places that I do not. For example, in Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead the locations in California are all places I know well, including Tijuana across the border. His journey with his pal Lonnie as far as Guaymas also traces a journey I myself made, although to get there my friend Rich and I actually traveled there from Mexicali by train rather than by driving a ’65 Chevy. South of Guaymas, however, that part of the journey was entirely concocted from research and imagination. I like to hope that I got away with it since a number of readers have indicated that they assumed I was writing about a road trip I had actually taken myself.

In the new book Dallas travels to France. That was pretty easy to write about—and in fact quite a bit of fun—since I have been to France several times and lived there as a student in the early 1970s. I was never there, however, in the year 1980, which is when Dallas goes, but that has not been hard to deal with. Much of his time is spent, though, in the resort of Deauville, which is a place I have never been. So back to the research and imagination. From there he travels to the city of Bordeaux, which is precisely where I myself lived so that was, relatively speaking, a piece of cake. I spent many months walking the streets of that city and its suburbs, although a few years earlier than Dallas. And, I should note, that Dallas has a few experiences there that I most certainly never had. It is important to get that on the record at the outset.

So the question that comes to my mind is this one. Is it better if a fiction writer has actually been in the place (and at the time) he is writing about, as opposed to going the research/imagination route? Or does it matter?

Armed with the above information, readers who care about this can judge for themselves when they read the book. I can tell you one thing, though. After I have written about traveling to these places in Dallas’s first-person voice, I end up having the strange feeling that I have been in those places—the same way any reader feels that she or he has been to a place after reading a vivid description of it in a novel. This is not meant to be a sneaky way of praising my own writing. It is the combination of researching, going through the imaginative process and writing it all down in another person’s voice that makes me feel as though I was in these places—kind of in a dream world or alternative reality sort of way.

It is really interesting what the mind can make itself do in the process of telling a story.

Things That Get Bumped in the Night

Years ago Jimmy Kimmel began a running gag on his talk show about Matt Damon. It started when Kimmel was wrapping up what he felt had been a very lame show (“I think my guests were a ventriloquist and a guy in a monkey suit”) and at the last minute, in an inspired fit of show business gallows humor, he threw out the line, “My apologies to Matt Damon; we ran out of time.” Thereafter he frequently repeated the line, much to occasional viewer Damon’s confusion—so much so that the actor eventually cornered Kimmel to get the explanation.

I think TV chat shows nowadays are generally too carefully scripted and produced for this to happen much any more, but I remember many occasions of getting all the way to the end of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and hearing him apologize to some hapless unseen comedian or singer about running out of time. I imagine it was the dread of any rising newcomer who finally got his or her big shot at the coveted late night television audience.

That very thing happened last Friday night to my wife’s cousin once removed. An accomplished musician and performer, she was scheduled to play her harp on RTÉ’s Late Late Show in order to promote Dublin’s upcoming TradFest festival. She was even featured in televised teasers earlier in the evening. All of us friends and family were huddled around the telly in anticipation—except for certain ones, including her parents and her nearly-90-year-old grandmother, who were actually in the front rows of the studio audience. We waited and waited for her appearance. We waited through a moving tribute to Ireland’s seaborne rescue services, a chat with a couple of veteran actors and an interminable on-stage performance of a botox procedure. Then, after literally hours, host Ryan Tubridy said the dreaded words. He apologized to Lisa and said they would have her back on a future telecast. Sigh.

Strangely, I myself could emphathize quite sincerely with her. As it happens, I was bounced from a potential spot on the airwaves just a few days before Christmas. The saga began a few weeks earlier when the wife alerted me to the fact that Joe Duffy was soliciting self-published books. If you do not listen to Irish radio and do not know who Joe Duffy is, well, it is kind of hard to explain. Basically, he is a sympathetic ear in the afternoon. While any current event, whether international or local, can be up for call-in discussion, most of his shows seem to involve listeners ringing in with stories about personal problems, travails and frustrations. Whether it is a problem with an incalcitrant bank or government red tape, Joe—a plainspoken presenter with a classic Dublin accent—can reliably be heard to utter audible sounds of sympathy and concern. Usually on Fridays the show is a forum for a panel of codgers to bring out their corny jokes.

On the day of the winter solstice, however, the topic was to be self-published books. The idea was to chat with some of the authors, and the collected books would be donated. I dropped my two in an envelope, sent them off to RTÉ and then forgot all about it—all the way up until a couple of hours before the program was to air. The phone rang, and it was Richie, a nice researcher from Joe’s show, wanting to do a pre-interview with me. He had lots of questions, mainly about Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead, and I was happy to answer all of them. It was gratifying that Richie had spent enough time with the books to be familiar with them. He took my mobile phone number and asked if I would be available if they rang me during the show. Of course, I was. When the show began at 1:45 we listened intently, keeping an ear out all the time for a phone call, knowing the radio would have to be shut off before answering it. We continued listening until the program ended at three o’clock. It turned out that they had more—way more—authors lined up than they had time for, which of course is the prudent thing to do.

The vast majority of authors interviewed had written memoirs. A lot of Richie’s questions had been about how much of Max & Carly had been based on my own experiences. I suppose it was natural for an inveterate people person like Joe Duffy to be most comfortable talking to authors about their own lives rather than their creative process. Also, in contrast to the books that got featured, neither of my books has very much to do with Ireland. One had a single secondary Irish character, and the other had characters with Irish names but were not Irish. In any event, it provided a few hours of excitement in the house to break the usual daytime routine.

As it happens, that was not the first time I had been approached about going on the air only to be cut when it came down to the wire. A few years ago a producer for an RTÉ afternoon TV show got in contact with me. It was a few days before the annual Academy Awards telecast. He had spotted my movie blog and wondered if I would be interested in participating in a panel discussion the day after the Oscars. I may not have sounded overly enthusiastic since it would have meant a three-hour drive to Dublin after little or no sleep since the Oscar telecast typically ends around six in the morning in this time zone. Besides, I had the distinct impression that I was being lined up as a contingency in case the person they really wanted could not make it. In any event, I was subsequently informed that I need not trouble myself.

I guess when it comes to Ireland’s state broadcaster, I am just its answer to Matt Damon.

You Might Also Like...

I am fascinated by book-selling web sites that use an algorithm to suggest books that may also be of interest to you, presumably based on titles you have previously searched for or links that you have clicked on.

So it was particularly exciting for me when I was able to start searching for my very own first published book and see what sorts of books got suggested for people who had searched for it. Here is a typical result.

I have to say that at least the software deduced the historical reference fairly logically.

More interesting was the result from an Australian web site.

Stephen King? Art Spiegelman? Kate Grenville? Now that’s one eclectic reading list. At least this time the algorithm was smart enough to also suggest my other book as well.

Happy Birthday, Dallas

Today marks the 64th birthday of my fictional protagonist, Dallas Green. I have no idea where he is today or how he is doing at this mature age. I have only figured out the trajectory of his life through the end of his 28th year.

I did not know his exact birthday until I began my current writing project. In Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead I had established that he and his friend Lonnie were both born in December 1952. This was necessary for the plot of the book since they both had to be born with that month-long window which would result in both their graduating from high school and being included in the draft lottery in the year 1971. I myself was born that same month, but I did not want either character to have the same birthday as me. That might be fine for wildly successfully authors like J.K. Rowling, but I want to have a bit of distance between me and my fictional creations. As it is, enough people have accused Dallas of being a thinly veiled version of myself. Hopefully, by the time readers have finished the upcoming book, the ones who actually know me will realize that Dallas is a very different person from myself. If they still persist in thinking Dallas and I are one and the same, then I will have to question how well they actually know me—or else how well I know myself.

In the new book I needed to specify the exact day that Dallas would turn 28, so I picked the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. It seemed as good a day as any and, as it happened, it kind of fit in thematically with what would be going on in his head at the time.

I have reached a midpoint in the first draft of the new book. Dallas has found himself generally at home with his new life in San Francisco but, as in the first book, events conspire to send him fleeing out of the country. The story this time is more complicated, and more characters come and go in and out of Dallas’s life. Plotting from this point onward becomes more challenging because Dallas’s story interweaves with various things that were happening in various parts of the world at the time. The more I have revisited the year 1980, the more appreciative I have become of what an event-filled tumultuous year it was. For one thing, not unlike the current year we are living through, the end of the year marked a distinct turning point in what the American government looked and acted like.

So if you are imbibing anything nice this evening, try to remember to say a little toast to Mr. Dallas Green, originally of Kern County, California. Wherever he is out there, let us hope that the sometimes ill-advised adventures of his youth were prologue to a satisfactory and happy later life.

Dallas - Part Deux

Here is some poetic justice for you.

As someone who has talked about movies nearly my whole life and who has blogged about them for a couple of decades, I have skewered more than my share of sequels—up to and including the questioning of whether there is any point to sequels at all. So what do I find myself doing these days? Yes, I am writing a sequel.

Let us be clear. There is nothing inherently bad about a sequel. After all a sequel is nothing more than a story not unlike any other story. It is only a sequel because it happens to take place in the same world and uses some or all of the same characters as a previously existing story. That should not necessarily disqualify it from being as good as any other story.

So why do sequels have such a bad reputation with critics and other film snobs? Mainly because sequels to very successful works too often give the impression of having been conceived only as a way to extract more money from people who enjoyed the original book or movie or whatever it was. Readers of my movie blog should be well familiar with the long established role of the sequel. It is to satisfy the fan’s desire to relive the enjoyment of the original (i.e. re-tell the same story) while simultaneously satisfying the fan’s desire to get something brand new (i.e. pretend to tell a different story). Here is another take on the purpose of sequels: to do the same thing over again but bigger and better. This mainly applies to movies, as studios tend to be rather risk averse. They greenlight sequels—and remakes and reboots and spinoffs and thinly disguised plagiarism—because they seem safer, having stories, characters and worlds that have already proven themselves with audiences.

So the fact that I am writing a sequel to Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead means that I am shamlessly cashing in, right? Well, hardly. There is no reason to believe that my third novel—even if it is a sequel—will shift my tax bracket any more than the first two did. So why I am writing it? Mainly because a surprising number of people told me that they really wanted to know what happened next to Dallas Green. I thought I might hear the same thing after The Three Towers of Afranor, but so far I have not had anywhere near the same interest in a follow-up. That kind of surprises me since the second book was really left more open-ended with possibilities for more stories.

To be clear, I really did conceive of Max & Carly (as I am wont to refer to it when rushed) as a one-off self-contained story that needed no further elaboration. I thought Dallas’s trajectory was left pretty clear. It had originally been that of someone who would pretty much follow the same life as his father and who would likely not stray too far from his home town. By the end of the book that trajectory had been changed by his trip to Mexico and his exposure to a wider world and more people and places. He was now going to pursue more education as well as his budding interests in photography and the Spanish language. That seemed a satisfying conclusion to me. Readers, however, still wanted to know what else would happen to him? Would he ever meet Marisol again? Would he ever find out what happened to Antonio? Would he have liver problems from all the drinking he did? Okay, no one actually asked that last question.

As it turned out, the more I got asked about this and the more I thought about it, the more curious I myself got about what life held for Dallas. As a consequence I am now ten chapters and about eighty pages into the first draft of another book about him. I had thought I had had enough of him once I finished the first book, but after a break I am finding him good company again—especially since he is now older and a bit—but only a bit—more mature. For one thing, he does not swear nearly so much. For another, he has gotten somewhat more modern in his thinking.

I will share a secret with you. Some readers guessed a few of the literary influences behind Max & Carly. (Huckleberry Finn was a big one.) But no one guessed one of the main ones. It was Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Sure, the friendship of two young rednecks in rural 1970s America may not seem to have much in common with a tale of posh English lads at Oxford during the reign of George V but, hey, male bonding is male bonding. The tip-off should have been the way Dallas’s growing interest in Antonio’s Catholicism paralleled the role that religion played with the family of young Lord Sebastian Flyte. I bring this up because Dallas’s story now faces a problem similar to that of Waugh’s protagonist Charles Ryder. Once the flamoybant and magnetic Sebastian left the scene, the story lost something. Charles on his own was not necessarily the most interesting character.

Similarly, practically everybody who has read Max & Carly has told me that their favorite character is either Lonnie or Antonio. Unfortunately for them, neither of those two are in the frame of the sequel—at least not in the early going. Will the new characters in Dallas’s life be able to fill the gap adequately?

More importantly, will it really just be the same story again—only bigger and better?

When the time comes, you can decide.

The Poet and the Figment

I am still catching up from everything that accumulated while I was in the holidaying/non-routine/non-scheduled mode of late summer. (And, yes, I know it is now October and that it has not been late summer for some time now.) It seems as though I spend a lot of my time catching up on blogs that get neglected and feeling guilty about not spending more time on promoting The Three Towers of Afranor. Now, however, it is time to put all that aside (well, most of that aside) and get focused on the next book, the one that continues the story of young Dallas Green, which began in Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead.

Something else that distracts me from getting more writing done is the fact that I always want to do more reading. So many books and so little time.

I did finish reading a book just lately, and it was quite an intriguing read. Penned by Juan Gómez Bárcena, a thirtysomething Spaniard, it takes its title, The Sky Over Lima, from an early 20th century poem written by the Nobel Prize-winning Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez. He had a long and prolific career until his death in 1958, but a fascinating footnote is that in his twenties he fell victim to an epistolary hoax. He received a letter from a Georgina Hübner in Lima, Peru, praising his poetry and asking him if he might send her some of his books. He complied, and the two carried on a correspondence that led Ramón Jiménez to become infatuated with his long-distance pen pal to the point that he actually made plans to travel 6,000 miles to visit her.

It turned out, however, that Georgina never existed. She was the creation of two young men whose initial aim was to acquire the poet’s books, which were not available in Peru. When they saw that Ramón Jiménez was smitten with her, they carried on the charade.

Gómez Bárcena tells the story from the point of view of the two young Limeños, José and (mainly) Carlos. He explores the social and artistic milieu of the time and what may have been going through their minds as they carried on their deception. In his telling, these aspiring but artistically hopeless poets find themselves in the improbable position of forming an actual work of art, i.e. a compelling narrative, out of reality. They have done nothing less than create a virtual novel in which both their imaginary Limeña and the real-life poet are characters. As Gómez Bárcena describes the reality within his book becoming a novel, his own narration becomes a commentary on itself. It’s all very meta.

As someone who has written my own book about young male friends getting into trouble while negotiating the treacherous shoals of adulthood (and who has carried on my own long-distance correspondence with a beloved Limeño), I found the book great fun. Not only is it about getting caught up in one’s own youthful fantasies, but it is also about the inexorable process of maturing and submitting to banal reality.

Because I am lazy, I did not read the book in Spanish. So I must give kudos to Andrea Rosenberg for her artful English translation. Her interpretation felt very faithful and reliable.

Now that I am properly inspired by someone else’s writing, it is high time to get back to my own authoring.

Book Bearing Fruit

If the only thing keeping you from reading The Three Towers of Afranor has been the fact that you absolutely had to read it on an Apple iOS device (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch), then I have great news for you!

My second novel is now available in digital form on Apple’s iBooks Store. If you happen to be reading this with an iOS device, then you can find it online, read a sample and/or purchase the whole book by clicking on this here link right here. There is also a link over on the right side of this page, if you prefer to click over there for some reason.

And my first book Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead continues to be on sale on the iBooks Store. There is still a link for that over in the right-hand column. Or you can click here on this string of words, if that is easier for you.

I should note that the links on this page are for the iBooks Store for the United States. If your iTunes account is for a different country, hopefully the app on your device will forward you to the right place without too much fuss. If not, just do a search on the titles. Both titles are pretty unique search-wise. Since the books are on sale in iBooks Stores for 51 different countries, so it would be a bit unwieldy to try to list all of them for you.

You might wonder why The Three Towers of Afranor is only now showing up in the iBooks Store when it has been available on Amazon, B&N Nook, Google Play and Kobo for well over three months. Well, that is quite a story—if you want to stick around and read it.

A lot of authors use aggregators (third-party businesses) to get their digital books to the various online sellers. I don’t. I prefer to upload them myself. On the whole, this is surprisingly easy—at least compared to the writing, editing, formatting and press prep that has to be done before you get to that point. Once you have all your work done, you just go to a web site and click a few buttons and fill in a bit of information and—presto—your e-book is magically published. The exception is the iBooks Store. You cannot upload your book to Apple via your browser. You have to use an app called iTunes Producer, which is available only for Mac computers. I don’t happen to have a Mac, and it’s not really worth it to me to buy one just to upload a few files every year or two or whenever I have a new book. My neighbor Brendan, who does have a Mac, bailed me out with Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead, which was really nice of him, but it wasn’t exactly ideal. I don’t want to have to bother him every time I need to make a correction or an update.

Then recently I discovered that there is another tool for uploading files to iBooks. It can be run on non-Apple computers but only by using a command line console. (Kids, ask your grandparents about MS-DOS.) This was good news because command line stuff is not a problem for someone like me who cut his teeth on UNIX in the 1980s. It did, however, require that I install Java, a programming language that I had banished from my computer sometime ago. Not only that, but it had to be an outdated version of Java, which meant registering as a software developer with Oracle to be able to download the old Java. Then followed a whole lot of trial and error since the available documentation was not the most user-friendly. Particularly tricky was creating an XML (Extensible Markup Language) file with all the book’s info, including some things I hadn’t heard about in decades, like checksums.

To make a long story slightly less long, I eventually figured it all out and got The Three Towers of Afranor uploaded successfully and on sale in 51 countries. And, if I need to make any changes or updates (or if I ever finish another book), I am all set up to handle them from my very own laptop. For me this is huge.

So if you have any interest in reading my humble little book on your iPhone or your iPad, I heartily encourage you to go to the iBooks Store right now and download it. And tell all your iOS-using friends to go download it too. Don’t just do it for me. Do it for Tim Cook and the gang at Apple. They need the money. As you may have heard, they have a pretty hefty back tax bill to pay to Ireland.

Roiling the Market

At a family event on Saturday, my wife’s Scottish brother-in-law cut to the chase.

“How many of those books have you actually sold?” he wanted to know.

I actually didn’t have a clue. I am not very good at keeping track of what’s happening with all the various sellers who carry my two titles. Their web pages are equipped to generate whatever reports I might like about books sales, whenever I might like them, but I always seem to have more pressing things to do. Counting up my sales always feels like time I should be spending on marketing my books. Marketing my books always feels like time I should be spending on writing the next book. It’s an endless cycle.

I wish I was as good at marketing my books as Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams is at marketing his. He has had a book out for the past twenty months or so called How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life. He also has a blog, where he posts something just about everyday. These days he usually blogs about Donald Trump. I do not blog as often as he does but, on the positive side, I put my comments about Donald Trump on my other blog because I like to think that people interested in my books already know as much (or more) as they want to about Donald Trump or, for that matter, Hillary Clinton.

The clever thing that Adams does is that, at the end of every blog post, no matter what he happens to be writing about, he always adds a random-sounding non-sequitur line pitching his book. They are usually quite humorous, like this one: “Everyone is talking about my book. I hope we don’t run out of Kindle versions before you get yours.”

That is funny because I don’t think anyone has ever ordered a Kindle book from Amazon only to get an email saying, “This title is temporarily out of stock. We will ship your Kindle book as soon as it becomes available.” Adams’s line about the Kindle book made me smile because it reminded me of one of the reasons I like e-books. If they are for sale, they are in stock—always.

Another reason I like Kindle books is that is the format apparently preferred by most of my readers. No less than 68 percent of my books’ sales revenues are through the U.S. Kindle store. (After my weekend conversation, I went home and checked.) Another 12.5 percent are from Kindle sales through Amazon’s non-U.S. sites. Four percent are from other e-book formats. The remaining 15.5 percent come from books distributed on good old-fashioned paper.

I wonder if that is typical. I have no idea and, apparently, it is difficult to count e-book sales as compared to paper book sales. Earlier this year an article in The Guardian estimated that 26 percent of e-books sold on Amazon in the UK were by self-published authors. By comparison 31 percent were sold by the UK’s five biggest publishers (Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Pan Macmillan and Simon & Schuster). So my guess is that my statistics may not be atypical for many independent authors.

Many self-published authors sell exclusively through the Kindle store and do not even bother with paper books. When I first started, I was not sure if I would release paperback versions of my books. Now I would not consider doing a book release that did not include a paperback version. People who prefer that format really do prefer it. And, if nothing else, paperback books make handy birthday and Christmas gifts for my relatives.

Okay, now’s the time to try a clever Scott Adams-style kicker. Here goes. If you like eating sushi in September, then you might like my book. It has no Japanese words.