Connecting With an Audience

We’ve all been there. You’ve moved past the drafting stages, exhaustively worked over the prose like a duct-taped punching bag, and the writing is finally good. That’s when you share a scene from your book where a character is hacked in half by an ax and, after an awkward silence, your trusted reader hands it back to you, a little pale, and says something like, “It’s well-written, but not the kind of thing I like reading.” Or maybe it’s a different passage in the book, a passage you fell in love with, where your hero finally realizes romance and your reader says, “It was good, but I like the action scenes more. This is just a thought, but…when he says I love you, maybe have him holding an ax?”

Anyone familiar with even the basics of publishing knows that identifying a readership is hugely important. Agents and publishers want to know who you write like. Amazon pairs and suggests your work in accordance to reader preferences. Having a defined genre helps to identity the best reviewers for your work and find which writers you should bug for blurbs.

This was a problem for me. Even though I’m a fan and student of thrillers, I wasn’t sure where I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead fit best.

Despite its grim title, my debut thriller isn’t noir enough to be noir. It has some funny moments but isn’t a comedy, and deals with parenting but isn’t domestic. If there’s a category for a book where a man seeks revenge, hires assassins but the plan goes wrong and ends up placing himself and everyone he loves in danger, and he also has a pet rabbit, well, that’s where my book fits.

Of course I knew, as my publisher gently reminded me when my book was first accepted for publication, I’d need readers. So I decided to write a prequel for I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead – about a depressed hit man who factors in to the novel – called When the Deep Purple Falls and distribute it serially. I placed the prequel on sites like JukePop, WattPad and Tuesday Serial and, happily, people liked it. I had interest, and that was as much as I could realistically hope for. And a lot of those readers ended up reading and liking my debut. It’s become the scraggly but stubborn beginning of an audience.

Only a few lucky writers have a vast and dedicated audience – outside of their friends and family – after one book. But that is what we all want, and getting it extends beyond marketing, and beyond people buying enough books to keep you in business, or reading your genre because they know what they’re going to get. At its best, there’s love in the reader-writer contract, in the way the audience you’ve searched for feels like they found you. And it echoes that moment in your writing, when the story you’re telling surprises you, and you suddenly realize you’re working with magic. The book is good, the story is fun, you smile as you type; later, they smile as they read. It’s an odd connection, separated by time, unproven by anything physical. Readers feel it with writers; writers first felt it as readers. We’ve all been there. We want to be taken back.

About E. A. Aymar

E.A. Aymar studied creative writing and earned a Masters degree in Literature. He was born in Panama and has lived throughout the United States and Europe. He is a member of the Mystery Writers of America, the International Thriller Writers and SinC, and he and his wife live with a relatively benign animal menagerie outside of Washington, D.C. 

For more information about E.A. Aymar, and to watch the animated trailer forI'll Sleep When You're Dead, visit www.eaymar.com/novel.

About I'll Sleep When You're Dead

Tom Starks has spent the three years since his wife’s murder struggling to single-handedly raise their daughter, Julie, while haunted by memories of his dead spouse. When he learns that the man accused of her murder, Chris Taylor, has been released from prison, Tom hires a pair of hit men to get his revenge. But when the hit men botch the assassination, Tom is inadvertently pulled into their violent world.

And now those hit men are after him and his daughter.

What it Takes

By Barry Lancet

It took me ages to write JAPANTOWN. 

So many times I could have stopped.  So many times friends and family expected me to stop.  Occasionally someone advised me to stop.  But I persisted and it paid off—Simon & Schuster published it, J. J. Abrams optioned it, and foreign rights sales are rising nicely. 

Someone came up to me the other day and said, “Boy, are you ever lucky.” 

I smiled and said thank you.   When I had a free moment, I thought about the comment.  Yes, I’ve been lucky.  And I’m grateful and humbled.  But it took so much more than luck.  

Hitting a Brick Wall

The barriers I faced may be one for the record books. 

Let’s start with this:  I’ve lived in Tokyo for more than twenty-five years.  When I began to write, my day job tied me down sixty to seventy hours a week, Monday through Saturday, without counting the one-hour commute each way. 

To say I was busy was an understatement.  For one thing, I was doing this in Tokyo.  For a Japanese company.  With a wife and two kids.  In any language, this translates as “no free time.” 

For another, I came home exhausted six nights a week.  Sometimes I brought work back with me.  My office routine was so demanding that early-morning or late-night writing sessions were not options.  Family time filled in the few hours of unscheduled time that remained. 

It soon became apparent that I had no time whatsoever to write other than the two days a week I ate lunch alone.  But two hours a week will not get a novel written.  I had to find time so I poured over my schedule. 

There was none to spare. 

The First Step

Eventually, it dawned on me that I would have to make time. 

So I limited my lunch outings with friends and colleges to two a week and then one.  That gave me four lunches to write.  Occasionally I was forced to drop this back to three, but for the most part it held.  Time gained: two hours a week. 

But it still wasn’t enough. 

I became more efficient at work.  I cut out all unnecessary “water cooler time.”  I delegated some lesser chores to other in-house staff and to competent freelancers.  Yes, it took extra time to train them at first, so in the initial stages I actually lost time.  But slowly, I chipped away at my office workload.  I began to finish earlier some nights, cutting off as much as an hour, then ninety minutes.  Eventually, I was able to consistently save sixty to ninety minutes, six days a week.  Time gained: six to nine hours a week. 

But it still wasn’t enough. 

I cut back on late-night outings with friends and colleagues.  I said no when I wanted to say yes.  I set strict time limits for myself when setting up work-related meetings.  No more leisurely three-hour huddles when one would do.  This belt-tightening freed up another three or four hours a week. 

Yet it still wasn’t enough. 

Digging Deeper

All the while I was writing.  My story grew.  Characters were born.  Chapters started to take shape. 

But I desperately needed more time.  I poured over my schedule once more. Every minute of the day was accounted for.  Then my eyes fell on the line that said “daily commute.”  This took an hour each way.  Fifteen minutes on foot, then forty-five minutes on the train—standing shoulder to shoulder squeezed in with all the other commuters.  I spent the time reading.   Was it possible to turn the rush-hour crush into working time?   I decided to give it shot. 

So the first week I packed my laptop.   When a seat opened up halfway through the commute two or three days a week, I whipped out my computer, fired it up, opened my files, found my place, then had ten minutes to work before the train pulled into the station and I had to reverse the process.  Lugging the portable around every day for an additional twenty or thirty minutes a week of writing time was not a solution.

Deeper Still

I was stymied.  Then I thought, clipboard.  I printed out some manuscript pages and affixed them to a clipboard bought for my newest foray.  As soon as I was on the train, I pulled out the board and began editing, rewriting, and adding new passages. 

The train swayed.  I held the board with my left hand, the commuter strap with my right.  More than once I bumped into a neighbor when I released the strap to write something and the train hit a rough patch.  One time the clipboard flew into the lap of the passenger seated in front of me, startling him and most likely making his first cup of caffeine at the office redundant. 

This was going to require a coordinated effort on many levels. 

I dug in.  Day after day, I wrote.  Each night I reviewed my efforts and dutifully discarded them.  They were all unusable.  I couldn’t find a rhythm.  I couldn’t concentrate with the crush, the noise, the jerking motion of the train.  Not only wasn’t I producing but I’d also lost my commute reading time, which I’d always enjoyed. 

But I persisted.  Eventually, I learned how to stand with the clipboard in a balanced manner, with both hands free.  I learned to sway with the train.  I learned where the rough patches of track were.  Toward the end of the third week I wrote one new passage that read passably well that evening and again the next morning.  By the following week I finished two acceptable rewrites. 

The learning curve took two months to complete, after which I was able to produce work every single day.  I’d found a mental and physical balance and learned to tune out all exterior factors.  My overall production soared.  With the extra lunch hours, the saved meeting times, the shorter daily workloads, and my commuter output, JAPANTOWN began to take shape.  I finished a full first draft, then a second.  Then a third.  Then a complete overhaul because I grew dissatisfied with the pacing.  

Then one day it was done. 

Because I’d found time where before I’d seen none. 

Yes, I’ve been lucky.  But it takes more.  What it takes is the desire to unearth what you’re lacking—whether it’s time, confidence, better skills, more knowledge, a combination of these, or something else entirely. 

So identify what you need, track it down, then plow ahead without looking back. 

That’s what it takes. 

THE BOOK—JAPANTOWN
Five bodies.  One clue.  Not a trace of the killer.

San Francisco antique dealer Jim Brodie recently inherited a stake in his father's Tokyo-based private investigation firm, which means the single father of six-year-old Jenny is living a bi-coastal life, traveling to Japan to acquire art and artifacts for his store and consulting on Brodie Security's caseload at home and abroad.

One night, an entire family is gunned down in San Francisco's bustling Japantown neighborhood, and Brodie is called on by the SFPD to decipher the lone clue left at the crime scene: a single Japanese character printed on a slip of paper, drenched in blood.

Brodie can't read the clue either. But he may have seen it before—at the scene of his wife's death in a house fire four years ago.

With his array of Asian connections and fluency in Japanese, Brodie sets out to solve a seemingly perfect crime and at the same time learn whether his wife's tragic death was more than just an accident.  

What he unearths shocks him.  Wishing to turn back but knowing the only way is forward, he focuses on the deadly secret that threatens not only his life—but also the lives of his entire circle of family and friends. 

Author photo by Ben Simmons

THE AUTHOR
Barry Lancet moved from California to Tokyo in his twenties, where he has lived for more than two decades.  He spent twenty-five years working for one of the country’s largest publishers, developing books on dozens of Japanese subjects from art to Zen—all in English and all distributed in the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world. 

His unique position gave him access to many inner circles in cultural, business, and traditional fields most outsiders are never granted.  Early in his tenure in the Japanese capital, he was hauled in by the police for a non-criminal infraction and interrogated for three hours, one of the most heated psychological encounters he had faced in Japan to that point.  The run-in fascinated him and sparked the idea for a thriller based on his growing number of unusual experiences in Japan.  He is now at work on his next book featuring Jim Brodie. 

JAPANTOWN, his debut novel, has been optioned by J. J. Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions, in conjunction with Warner Bros.  For more information, please visit http://barrylancet.com/. 

Shock value: do you we need to put the reader through it?

by Colby Marshall

I recently read a very interesting blog post about gender and rape in fiction and the comments following it.  And while the post and ensuing conversation was all very insightful, one comment in particular intrigued me. It was :“Do I need to put the reader through this?” 

I wish more authors thought about this question. Violence for violence’s sake, for shock value is exhausting and off-putting as a reader. I’m glad to see an author asking that question, and hope others do as well."

I sat back and started thinking about this comment, because as an author, it is incredibly important to me to take care of my readers.  At the end of the day, I want to make sure people who read my books have a satisfying answer for whodunit, that they know what happened and why, and that they know anything else that they might otherwise leave the book feeling like I couldn’t manage to write a proper ending because my dinner was getting cold and the new episode of Downton Abbey was about to come on. 

I jest.  I actually don’t watch Downton Abbey.  Or eat dinner.

But this…this bugged me. After all, anyone who has ever read Chain of Command knows that it is basically a bloodbath.  With such a violent premise for a book, I'm sure many a person could read it and think at times it was violent for violent's sake.  However, as the author, I don't think it is.  When I was writing it, I didn’t think, “Now, what can I shock them with next?”  

That said, the idea that readers might think any of the violence in my books is there for the shock value made me ask myself an important question: "If I’m not doing it for the shock value, why DO I do it?" 

I found that I already knew the very simple answer.  I put in the violence because that is the way the story is formed in my head.

Now, let me backtrack here and clarify: I am not one of those authors who claims their characters speak to them at the breakfast table or tells them on the subway how they’d like to romantically pursue a different character than the author originally intended.  There’s nothing wrong with authors who work this way as long as you’re not the chick from Stranger than Fiction—that broad was crazy.  It’s just not how I operate.   

Even so, though, I do tend to have very specific visions of parts of my stories in my mind: characters’ physical traits, scene settings and locations, the movements of the characters, and yes, the events that happen in the scene.  I rarely sit down and try to think up scenarios and actions of characters.  When I write a scene, it is usually fully formed in my head already.  I might need to figure out logistics if anything turns out to be problematic, unbelievable, etc.—what editing is for, but the violence in the scenes aren’t ever contrived on my part purely to elicit shock.  They just are.

Which, for me, begs a new question.  As an author, I have a responsibility to my readers to take care of their satisfaction with the book, but at the same time, my job first and foremost is to tell readers the story.  After all, isn’t that why we as readers buy books—to read a story someone else has to tell?  Otherwise, we would all makeup our own stories all the time.  But no!  We want to be able to read someone else’s story, to live the story along with the characters never knowing what happens until the next page is flipped. 

So the question boils down to this: if an author’s foremost job is to tell their story, the one they conceived, molded, crafted, and nurtured, should the instinct of authors to take care of the needs and comfort of the audience reading the book ever trump that foremost job of telling their story?  If you think so, why?  If you don’t think so, what is your reasoning?

BIO:  Writer by day, ballroom dancer and choreographer by night, Colby has a tendency to turn every hobby she has into a job, thus ensuring that she is a perpetual workaholic.  In addition to her 9,502 regular jobs, she is also a contributing columnist for M Food and Culture magazine and is a proud member of International Thriller Writers and Sisters in Crime.  She is actively involved in local theatres as a choreographer as well as sometimes indulges her prima donna side by taking the stage as an actress.  She lives in Georgia with her family, two mutts, and an array of cats that, if she were a bit older, would qualify her immediately for crazy cat lady status.  Her debut thriller, Chain of Command is about a reporter who discovers the simultaneous assassinations of the President and Vice President may have been a plot to rocket the very first woman—the Speaker of the House—into the presidency.  Chain of Command is now available, and the second book in her McKenzie McClendon series, The Trade, is due for publication by Stairway Press in June 2013.   

Chain of Command is now available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Sony, iBooks, Kobo, other major e-readers, or in select independent bookstores.

Watch the official book trailer for Chain of Command here: http://tinyurl.com/auye6bb. You can also learn more about Colby and her books at www.colbymarshall.com