Chain vs. Indie?

Cricket McRae

 

With the release of Wined and Died last month I’ve been doing the usual promotional activities: guest posting on blogs around the Internet, sending postcards to custom lists – in this case wineries and meaderies – and showing up in bookstores to give talks, read, chat with folks and sign books.

I’m a bit of a signing addict, from the other side of the podium. I once moved to a house near one of my favorite bookstores, Third Place Books, just so I could attend more author talks. During the two years I lived there I went almost weekly to hear writers speak, including Dave Barry, Hilary Clinton, Carl Hiassen, Lewis Black, Ralph Nader and our own Keith Raffel.

I do miss living by that bookstore.

But last week I had my fifth opportunity to perform my dog-and-pony show for my Home Crafting Mysteries at Third Place, and it’s always a thrill. I’ve also appeared at a number of other independent bookstores lately, all welcoming, all with loyal customers and staff who hand sell books.

Before I left for Seattle though, I had a rather discomfiting signing at a local Barnes & Noble store. I sold one book. One. ONE. And it wasn’t even my latest.

I’m not one of those fabulously arresting personalities that draw people like moths. I can’t bring myself to wander the store and track people down in the mystery aisles, thrusting my shiny new bookmarks at them and suggesting they buy my book. But if you put me by the front door of a store, I will spend hours engaging people in a low-key way, feeding them cookies or cheese or homemade bread and butter, showing them how to spin on a drop spindle, and finding out about their lives. I always meet interesting people, often good research contacts, librarians and book club members, and at the end of the day I am usually quite satisfied with my book sales.

Barnes & Noble. One book.

I gotta say, I don’t think it was me. As the afternoon wore interminably on and my feet started to ache (never sit down!) I took notes about what I observed and here’s what I saw:

People used the bookstore to meet people and to get coffee. No books involved.

Nine Nooks went out the door. No books in hand for these folks, but good news for ebooks. Yes, I got two of them to download my first mystery, Lye in Wait, which is free for the Nook until the end of August.

At least fifteen percent of the people who came in the door were either on the phone or madly texting. No way was I going to catch their eye.

Several customers bought school supplies. Who buys school supplies at Barnes & Noble? Well, they did.

A lot of people bought gifts for children – books, games, etc. But no books for themselves. Good for the kids in their lives, though.

Of the customers who bought actual books written for adults, most were non-fiction. I saw three people walk out with three or four genre paperbacks, but otherwise they purchased travel books, how-to manuals, cookbooks, and a few had lists that made me suspect they were buying textbooks.

Oh, and The Help, of course. I’ll have to get around to reading that one of these days.

My publicist says most people who shop at the big chains are going to Borders since everything is cheap cheap cheap for their going out of business sales. Maybe. And maybe there are people who only shop at the chain stores and never venture into the independents. I dunno.

At a couple of my talks in the Seattle area I hijacked the question-and-answer period at the end of my yakking for a few of my own questions. I asked how people felt about e-readers, how many owned one, what kind, and whether they’d buy ebooks from an independent bookstore even if it were a little more trouble. I asked how they felt about self-publishing both as writers and readers (because, of course, there were a bunch of writers in the audiences). And I asked how their reading habits had changed over the last ten years.

Mostly they said that people who like to go see authors in person also prefer to read on paper. Few, if any, owned e-readers or wanted to. It was a small sampling, though, so I’m not sure their answers indicate a trend..

Have you noticed a change in the attendees at author appearances, either as an author or as a fellow audience member? Any differences between chain stores and independent bookstores?

Ah, the Writing Life

Cricket McRae

I’m writing this from the passenger seat of a Subaru Outback, speeding down I-25. We’re heading for three seventy-degree days and two thirty-seven-degree nights in the Rocky Mountains. A bed and breakfast, lake view, hiking, reading, and probably nine holes of golf.

Before I was published, I had a fantasy about the writing life. Oh, I knew it was a job, and that you had to put in the hours and effort. I knew sometimes writing is hard – after all, I was writing. I just wasn’t published yet.

But when I became a full-time writer, things were going to be different. For one thing, I’d travel a lot. You can write anywhere, so why not do it someplace fun? Plus, one of the things I like least about travel is the actual, you know, travel. Time spent in airports and on airplanes, on shuttle buses or waiting for the train. But as a writer, that time becomes downright useful. We could spend a month in Mexico or New England and keep Colorado as a home base.

And then there was the conversion van idea. Smaller than an RV, but self-sufficient. We could wander the country, exploring back roads and meeting new people. I could write just as I am right now, in the passenger seat. Or sitting at a picnic table under California redwood trees, under an umbrella with my toes in the sand.

None of that happened, of course.

Like many other writers, most of my travel involves research, or a conference or convention. Promotion takes a lot of time and organization, so it’s not just a question of hanging out with my muse and churning out the words. And we have rental properties, which we manage ourselves, so leaving for a month at a time is out of the question.

So we go on little jaunts like this, and I write in the car. I’ll put in some time on the keyboard sitting on the veranda and looking up at the lake. In another two weeks I’m heading to Seattle to promote Wined and Died, and my guy will hold down the fort at home. I’ll write on the plane and set my alarm early to get in a few pages before my hosts awaken.

It’s a good life, and I love it. I’m not giving up on the conversion van idea though.

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For the month of August my first Home Crafting Mystery, Lye in Wait, is available as a free download for the Kindle and Nook.

Cozy Fare?

Okay, first we have to talk about FREE STUFF.

In celebration of the recent release of my fifth Home Crafting Mystery, Wined and Died, you can enter to win a FREE Author Website ($900 value!) from the creative folks at Bizango Websites for Writers until July 29, 2011. The winner will also receive 2 years of FREE hosting. For more details and information on how to enter, please visit my Hearth Cricket blog.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming…

My books are billed as cozies, but I get kind of squirmy every time I say that. Not because I have any problem with cozies – love ‘em, actually – but because mine aren’t. Not really.

But they’re crafting mysteries. I was on a panel at Left Coast Crime once that discussed exactly this issue. One of the questions was, “Do the subjects of your books make them cozy?” The idea was that if you’re writing mysteries about crafts (me), antiques (Jane Cleland), or gardening (Rosemary Harris) then they must be cozies. Two panelists were unable to attend, and Reed Farrell Coleman stepped in to balance out the panel (because of the wine connection in his Moe Prager mysteries, I assume). It turned out that despite our subject matter and the fact that we were all considered cozy writers (well, all except for Reed), none of us particularly related to the cozy label.

There’s outside evidence that I color slightly outside the cozy lines. There was that cozy author I asked to write a happy little blurb for one of my books who refused to be associated with it because it featured a stalker, a possible rapist, and an elderly woman was attacked. For a (very) brief moment there I felt like Hunter S.Thompson or Harry Crews. Another blurber was somewhat taken aback by the untraditionally fast pacing.

By the way, that thing about the pacing will make my writing buddies crazy, because they’re always telling me to speed things up. “But it’s a cozy, “ I say. Even if I only kinda, sorta mean it.

“What does it mean to know someone in the biblical sense?” is the opening line of Wined and Died, and it comes from an eleven-year-old girl. Throughout the series, serious issues like alcoholism, clinical depression, cancer, suicide, abuse – oh, and murder, helllooo – keep cropping up. In Wined and Died we’ve got us a little problem with some backwoods marywanna growers, drug dealing, and addiction.

Not terribly cozy fare, though it’s generously sprinkled with soap making, herb craft, gardening, how to make dandelion wine and ginger ale, information on mead, cooking, plenty of recipes, and, I hope, a bit of humor. There isn’t any explicit sex but two main characters are recently married, so there’s reference to their sex life. There was before the wedding, too. Wined and Died doesn’t have a lot of gore, but others in the series have had their share. Now that I think about it, the then acquisitions editor asked me to tone down the first page of the first Home Crafting Mystery because the description of the dead body was too graphic. (She was right, too – I totally went overboard on the ick factor.)

Yet middle school librarians stock my books. I rate them as PG 13 on Authors Den. At nearly all of my signings, at least one teenager buys a book, and I always tell the parents that there’s some mildly bad language and references to adult behavior. “Worse than television?” And I have to shake my head and offer them another molasses-oatmeal signing cookie.

So now I call my books contemporary cozies, because I guess that’s what they really are – a little faster, a teensy bit more edgy, not – as Robin put it in her recent post – “pink.” But they’re still about colonial home crafts, and that is cozy fare. Kinda sorta. Pretty much.

There are a lot of books out there that I’d call contemporary cozies. Or do you think “cozy” has been redefined over the last decade and that modifier is unnecessary?

Wined and Died Cover

Cricket McRae

Something Borrowed, Something Bleu, my fourth Home Crafting Mystery, hit the shelves last July. I recently noticed that the fifth in the series, Wined and Died, is already available for pre-order on Amazon. But there wasn’t an image up until this week.

Here’s the final cover:

I have our own Keith Raffel to thank for his off-the-cuff title suggestion. Once I began using Wined and Died as a working title, it stuck. Before, I’d been calling the book A Drink Before Dying.

Meh.

So thanks, Keith! And expect another thank you in the acknowledgements come publication.

The “died” in the title is pretty self-explanatory, but the “wine” isn’t your usual stomped grape variety. It’s honey wine, commonly known as mead. The blue bottle is from a meadery in Boulder, Colorado. I had to do a bit of research, right? And so did Lisa Novak, my fabulous cover designer. So I had them send her a bottle. Full, of course.

I love the logo she created for the fictional Grendel Meadery in the book. The rough-hewn stone monster is perfect. So is the pewter skull wine charm. Subtle and, well, charming.

This book doesn’t start with a death – it starts with a death threat. Newlyweds Sophie Mae and Barr Ambrose are acting as surrogate parents to eleven-year-old Erin while her mother is away. When Erin stumbles into a dead psychologist’s notes regarding a homicidal client, Sophie Mae races to discover the identity of the potential killer. Clues lead her to the Grendel Meadery, a traditional honey winery operated by the tight-knit Swenson clan. Everyone has a secret, and soon Sophie Mae is up to her neck in deadly herbs and drug dealers while trying to juggle a handsome lothario, her responsibilities as a temporary parent, a major contract for her soap making business, and a strangely distant husband.

Despite the pre-order status of Wined and Died, it won’t be released until July 11, 2011. That’s eight months away, for Pete’s sake. So I’ll hush up about it for a while. Promise.

In the meantime, though, early orders usually show up in your mailbox a few weeks before the official release date. I’m just sayin’. ;)