I’ve had my cell phone for 17 days and I’ve used 33 minutes. Part of that was to deal with people who were calling the guy who used to have this phone number. Seems he doesn’t pay his bills. So I’ve gotten half a dozen calls--some from payday loan places, and another from a hospital--for “Robert.” Damn welcher. Funny thing is, the calls seem to come on Friday afternoons--the idea being, I guess, that Robert gets paid on Fridays. They’re trying to collect before he goes out and blows his check on whiskey and women. And who could blame him, because he obviously has some issues to deal with.

Sorry for the short post, but I have blogger’s block at the moment.

PS: Don’t forget the contest! (See below.) Some pretty good entries so far.

For some reason, a few days ago, my wife and I started talking about 1970s-era detective and cop shows. Boy, there were a lot of them.

Mannix
Columbo
Barnaby Jones
McCloud
MacMillan and Wife
Cannon
Charlie’s Angels
Baretta
Police Woman
Starsky and Hutch

I know there are a lot more, but you get the idea.

Does anybody remember Get Christie Love? I stumped my wife with that one--she had no recollection of it at all. I think it lasted for one season.

Then, taking a break from crime-related programming, I mentioned James At 15 to a friend the other day. He didn’t remember it. I only remember it because a few people said I looked like the kid who played the lead. Not a compliment, by the way.

This is my longwinded way of saying I’m running a contest. Here’s the deal: Whoever can name the most obscure (“obscure” will be determined by me, in my sole discretion) 1970s-era TV program will win a signed hardback of Gun Shy. The only rules: The show must have lasted at least one season, and it must have run in the U.S. on ABC, NBC, or CBS. It does NOT have to be a detective or cop show. Sorry, I can’t mail to out-of-country addresses, because that means a trip to the post office, and, as you know, I’m too lazy for that.

I know it’s a hassle to post comments on this blog (you have to create an account) so feel free to email your answers to me directly. You’ll find a link on my website. If there are duplicates entries, the person who posted or emailed first takes precedence.

Contest ends in one week--on Tuesday the 15th at noon, Central time.

Good luck.

I just received thirty copies of Gun Shy via Fed Ex. Of course, these weren’t my author’s copies, they were books that a bookstore (M is for Mystery in San Mateo) had shipped to me, so I could sign them, which should, theoretically, make them easier to sell. Hope so.

It’s always exciting when a book is just coming out--but there’s also a lot of anxiety involved. Am I doing everything I can to promote it? Will I get any high-profile reviews? Will this one do better than the last one? Did I remember to use verbs?

The review situation is getting tricky. More and more newspapers are cutting back on book coverage, or axing it altogether. In fact, that issue is the talk of the industry right now. So many books (200,000 per year in the U.S.), so little room to write about them.

Is the Web replacing the print media for book coverage? To some degree, obviously. There are thousand of sites that review books, but one has to wonder if that’s enough. Occasionally I Google my latest title to see if there are any new reviews that I wasn’t aware of. Every so often, a new review will pop up--and I’ve usually never heard of the site. How many online reviews does it take to replace a review in the New York Times or the Washington Post? Nobody knows the answer, but my guess would be thousands. Of course, I’ll take every review I can get.

There’s another powerful form of marketing out there. Ever heard of co-op, as it relates to books? That’s when publishers pay bookstores to have various selected titles featured in prominent places at the front of the store. For example, when you walk into Barnes & Noble and see all those books on the New Fiction table, that’s not an accident. Most of those titles are there because of paid placement. Co-op can really get your sales moving, if your publisher buys in. I’ve always wondered why bookstores don’t follow the same strategy as convenience stores by putting the most in-demand products in the back, forcing customers to pass other products on the way. Haven’t you noticed that beer is at the back of the store? You have to pass the chips and the candy bars to get there. Why not put Clancy and King and the latest Harry Potter to the rear of the store? I wonder if they’ve ever tried that.

There’s also a lot of debate about whether ads sell books, and the general consensus is “no.” But I don’t think that’s always true. I think ads work to some degree. For instance, if you are a big fan of Author X, and you see an ad for his or her newest book, and you didn’t even know a new book was coming, that ad is likely to work. It’ll remind you to get a copy of the new book from one of your favorite authors. But will an ad convince readers to try a book by an author they’ve never heard of? Doubtful, in my opinion.

Then there’s the infamous author tour. Again, there’s a lot of debate regarding the usefulness of touring. If you spend two or three weeks on the road and sign five hundred books at twenty stores, is that worth it? Ah, but wait. What about all the bookstore employees you meet along the way? If you’re lucky (and courteous and don’t break anything), those people will continue to hand-sell your book long after you’re gone. Nothing beats a champion at a bookstore. When someone walks into a store and says they like humor in their mysteries, I want the employee to say, “Well then, you need to read Ben Rehder’s books.” That’s one of the intangibles of touring, and it can’t be weighed or measured either.

The truth is, nobody knows what sells books. Blurbs on the cover? Maybe. Reviews? Maybe. Ads? Maybe. Tours, author websites, postcards, bookmarks, bumperstickers, T-shirts, radio and TV interviews? Maybe.

There is one thing that nobody questions. Word of mouth. When a reader tells a friend how much they loved a certain book, that friend is more likely to read it. I’ve said this before--and you’ll have to believe me when I say there’s no self-interest here (or very little)--but if you love a particular author, tell a friend. That’s the best way to ensure that you’ll see more books by that author.

Last Thursday, I stopped in at the Dripping Springs Community Library to check my email, because my ISP has been having some troubles lately (don’t even get me started). While I was there, I checked to see if my books were out on loan or not (yes, it’s ego-related, I know), and I saw that they didn’t have a hardback of Bone Dry, just a paperback.

Then, when I was leaving, I noticed that they were having a raffle of fishing-related items. There was a large ice chest with all kinds of stuff crammed into and around it--with a total value of $750. Honestly, I can’t even tell you what was there--I’m not a fisherman, so I didn’t pay much attention. But I think there was a fishing rod, and some lures, and I KNOW there were several bags of chips and beef jerky. Tickets were one for $5 or three for $10. Good cause, so I sprang for three.

The next day, Friday, I decided to mail them a hardback of Bone Dry. I mean, come on, my neighborhood library should have all my books in hardback, right? So I did.

Saturday afternoon, I had a voicemail from someone with the Friends of the Library organization, and before she stated why she was calling, I figured it was to thank me for the book. Wrong. I won the dadgum raffle!

So I’ll go pick up the goodies today or later this week. Don’t tell the game warden that I don’t even have a fishing license.

P.S.: I’ll be doing a radio interview with “Baron” Ron Herron on AM 1290 KZSB in Santa Barbara tomorrow morning at 10:35 a.m. Central time. If you’re in the area, please tune in.

The Writers League of Texas asked me to write an article for their monthly newsletter, so I figured I might as well share it here, too......

One of the most common questions I’m asked at signings, panels, conventions, and the like, is “How did you get your agent?”

The person who asks is, of course, almost always an aspiring author (though there are times when it’s a reader who’s simply curious about the way the business works).

I see the look on the questioner’s face and I know he or she is hoping I’m about to reveal some big secret or shortcut. Maybe I met an agent on a plane. Or my brother-in-law is an editor. Or I somehow learned the insider’s handshake. Sorry, but the answer is much more mundane.

I queried. Broadly and aggressively. Until I had more than one hundred rejection slips. If I’d stopped when I reached triple digits, my books never would’ve seen print. But I kept going, and along at about query number 110, I finally got lucky. I signed with an agent, and she secured a two-book contract about six or seven weeks later. Total time elapsed: about twenty months.

The resource I used in my agent quest was a fat book by a man named Jeff Herman. I know, there are several other books available for this purpose, but this is the one I used, and it worked, so I recommend it.

But persistence isn’t enough. Your query letter has to be an absolute grabber. (Ironic that you might spend years pouring your heart into your manuscript, but it turns out your query letter will be the most important page you ever write.)

So I want to share a bit about my query letter, and why I think it was successful.

Actually, I had two versions: the one that I started with, and the one that ultimately landed my agent.

The first version was pretty basic. I introduced myself, described my writing background (many years in the field of advertising), and included a one-paragraph synopsis of my first novel, Buck Fever. It might’ve been a mistake, but I included a gimmick at the end. I gave them four choices, and all they had to do was check one:

___ I’m intrigued. Send three chapters.
___ What the heck, send the entire manuscript.
___ I have no faith that an advertising hack could write anything more than a
soap commercial. Please remove me from your mailing list.
___ Thank you, but I am not interested.

That letter performed okay. I got some requests for partials and fulls, but nothing ever came from any of them. What I needed, I decided, was something to separate me from the pack.

So I came up with something totally “out there.” Other than the salutation and the closing, the page was blank. I mean, not a word. But beneath my signature I included: “P.S. Sorry I couldn’t write a brilliant query letter, but I used up all my best words in my mystery novel. Want to see it?”

Again, I took a chance that the recipient wouldn’t be put off by this “clever” approach. Plenty of people warn against taking this type of tack, but I did it anyway, and it worked. The letter had an extremely high success rate, including a phone call from the woman who became my first agent.

Would this type of thing work for you? I have no idea. It depends on the type of manuscript you’ve written. I write comedy, so it seemed natural for me to try a somewhat humorous slant. But the point is, I truly believe you need to find a way to make your query letter stand out. Either that, or learn the handshake.