Ebooks Rise (again)

I recently attended the wonderful "Love is Murder" con in Chicago, and was struck all over again by how publishing is changing. I sat in on several panels with publishers, editors, and agents representing such companies as Murder Ink, Five Star Mysteries, and the brand new Ampicellis Ebooks.

The theme of the conference seemed to be that despite the closing of brick and mortar stores, authors have more options than ever before. We heard Joe Konrath (The Kindle King) talk about his publishing model, now entirely electronic after having a traditional publisher and NY agent. True, we have more choices, but each one of us must think carefully about where she wants to be in the general scheme of things. Do you want to be a NY author with a NY agent and publishing company? Then the traditional route (hobnob at conferences, find an agent, hold out for a good deal) is probably the way to go. For many of us, though, it makes sense to explore smaller publishing companies that offer both trade paperback and ebook editions and a focus on online marketing.

It is an exciting time to be an author, and I am willing to try new roads to publication. Launching what I hope will be a new series (historical mysteries set in central Illinois), I plan to explore all the options. I sure hope my books can still be available in some kind of print--I definitely love the feel and heft of the physical book. and the smell of the paper...

WHY I WRITE MYSTERIES

I grew up in a house full of readers where everyone’s favorite pastime was to gather around the fireplace and read, talk about books, or read aloud from books such as The Hound of the Baskervilles. Gradually I became aware that some of my parents’ favorite books were mysteries, but I didn’t really understand why until I started to write one.

Traditional mysteries are layered puzzles, like archaeological digs. The best ones are rich in character and setting, hard to put down but satisfying to finish because (usually) evil is contained and chaos is tamed. Such stories offer a welcome respite from daily life, where bad guys thrive and events and personalities are usually messier and more complicated than in fiction.

I like layers and puzzles—that’s not surprising, since I am an archaeologist at the University of Illinois in my “day job.” Although I no longer shovel much dirt myself, I spend many hours reconstructing the history of excavated objects with incomplete information, much like a detective trying to ferret out clues when suspects refuse to talk.

My heroine, Lisa Donahue, is an archaeologist and museum curator with a background suspiciously like my own. She works in a Boston museum that resembles a dusty labyrinth and deals with layered complications in her job—difficult bosses, jealous colleagues—and in her personal life—a troubled stepson and an overworked, oblivious husband.

In my most recent mystery, The Fall of Augustus ( October 2009), Lisa’s museum loses two directors in quick succession in the middle of a nightmarish move to a new building. The first director is crushed by a falling statue and the second turns up as a mummy The plot layers include the machinations of a vicious woman—the sort of villain we all love to hate—the theft of valuable Celtic artifacts, and the rocky relationship between Lisa’s best friend, Ellen, and their oversexed colleague, Dylan.

Hopefully, as the reader “digs” into my mystery, she will enjoy excavating layered personalities as well as occasional esoteric facts about Greek vases and Egyptian mummification. The tricky part for me was embedding those facts deep into the plot so they become essential clues to the murders, like Roman coins found six feet under that help an archaeologist date an entire civilization.

If I’ve done my job as a writer, I’ve created something like an excavation-in-a-box for public schools: a rich micro-environment full of clues and quandaries—easy enough to reconstruct, complex enough to serve as a setting for future stories.

Kindle Publishing

To Kindle or not to Kindle, that should be the question for every author who retains rights to his or her published material. Since I have two ebooks and several online short stories to offer, I was excited to see a new device (with a wireless download feature) that was actually selling.

When I wrote my first Lisa Donahue mystery novel, "Bound for Eternity," several agents and small publishers were interested enough to read it and comment favorably, but the major objection was, "we don't know how to market it." I was surprised: surely a story about an Egyptian mummy and murder in a creepy old attic museum had some selling points?

This forced me to think hard about what I had to offer as an archaeologist to the marketing of fiction. Since "Bound" was based on a real mummy project at the University of Illinois, I realized that my best "sales gimmick" was to market the novel along with the non-fiction book "The Virtual Mummy."

Self-publishing is not for everyone (and yes, there is definitely a stigma attached to it), but it my case it proved a successful strategy for getting the novel out before the companion book went out of print. I used iUniverse, which meant I retained my rights to everything except the final formatting of the manuscript and the cover design.

A month ago I decided a Kindle edition of "Bound" was worth trying, especially since preparing it cost me nothing but my time. The website is streamlined and user-friendly, and in a few hours I had reformatted the manuscript and a prepared a new cover.

To my astonishment, uploading the Kindle edition generated a favorable, new review in Midwest Book Review within days.

I expect no more than a modest increase in sales for my novel, but I'm thrilled at the new exposure. An electronic edition will never go out of print...as long as there is a server to offer it and a program like Amazon's.

Turning Points

Exactly seven years ago, my husband Charlie and I set off on a safari of Kenya and Tanzania to celebrate our 25th anniversary. We quickly discovered that a trip in a safari vehicle--one with a top that comes off so tourists can take pictures without getting eaten by animals--is a kind of confinement. You're not allowed to walk around, you have to have an iron bladder, and you'd better like your fellow passengers, including the tse tse flies.

The first part of the trip was great--I saw Olduvai Gorge and some of the oldest skulls on the planet lying around loose in the Nairobi museum. We headed south into Tanzania and a guide wrapped a boa constrictor around my neck so Charlie could take a picture of my horrified face. We enjoyed watching lions and flamingos in the Ngorongoro Crater.

Then we had the accident. A tire blew so suddenly that our vehicle tipped over and rolled on a perfectly good road in the Serengeti. One man was thrown out through the open roof and killed instantly. Three others were injured badly enough to end up in hospital, including Charlie.

I was uninjured because I'd found an ancient, tangled seatbelt and put it on. My seatmate, Andy, who was only 11, hung on safely to the driver's seat. We became roommates back in Nairobi after our relatives were hospitalized.

Charlie had 8 broken ribs and a punctured lung. That meant staying in Kenya an extra three weeks until he was well enough to fly. But he was alive--and the man he'd changed places with on the morning of the accident was not.

As we reflected on this, I realized our lives would never be the same. Neither of us would take our marriage--or life itself--for granted again.

But sometimes good things come out of terrible experiences. My husband, a physician, decided to retire early to make mixed media art. I realized it was time to take my fiction-writing seriously and began to work harder on my first novel.

Eventually I wrote a short story "Safari," inspired by the African experience. It conveys some of the experience of traveling with strangers in a small vehicle in an exotic setting--and a different kind of "accident."


To download this story, go to Echelon
Press.

The Mystery of the Getty Kouros

The saga of the Getty Kouros is a perfect example of a mystery that neither scientists nor classical archaeologists can solve. In the late 1980's the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California, heard of an unusually fine Greek marble statue, a kouros or youth, available for purchase. Stylistically, it appeared to date to the sixth century B.C., but experts were divided about whether the statue was authentic. Why was it so pristine and white? Why did the style of the hair not match that of the feet? Would an ancient sculptor have mixed so many styles in one statue? The discussion was complicated by the fact that most existing kouroi are in fragments--only about thirteen exist that are in as good condition as this one.

So how does an archaeologist or museum curator proceed? The Getty Museum asked for some scientific testing of the marble, hoping geologists could determine where the marble came from and whether the surface crust was ancient or modern.

Here’s where the story gets as twisty as a good Agatha Christie novel before Hercule Poirot steps in. A geologist sourced the marble to the island of Thasos, an ancient quarry site, and said the statue had a calcite crust that could have only developed over a long period of time. This was enough for the Getty, and they purchased the statue.

But then it emerged that the provenance papers were faked(!) and there was another torso, an obvious fake, with striking stylistic similarities. The Museum purchased that sculpture too and took the kouros off display for further tests.

New results revealed that the surface crust on the kouros was much more complex that originally thought (a calcium oxalate monohydrate rather than calcium carbonate) with certain characteristics that could not be duplicated in the laboratory. Furthermore, the kouros did not have the same surface as the torso, which was apparently treated in an acid bath.

At a conference in 1992, archaeologists and scientists met to debate all the evidence. Unfortunately, no forger stood up and confessed; the scholars were split down the middle on the authenticity of the kouros. The Getty kouros remains either one of the finest ancient Greek statues ever discovered, or one of the best fakes ever produced.

Even Poirot can’t solve this one…

Interview with Barbara D'Amato

One of the great pleasures of attending mystery conferences such as "Of Dark and Stormy Nights" and "Love is Murder" (now combined into one meeting in February) or "Malice Domestic" is meeting wonderful people. I'm honored and delighted to present today's interview with Chicago author Barbara D'Amato.

Your bio says you were once an assistant tiger handler. How did that happen? Did you like the tigers?

My husband and I had written a musical comedy called “The Magic Man.” It starred David Copperfield in his first theatrical role. When we spun off a children’s theater version, called “The Magic of Young Houdini,” I found that the stagehands did not want to handle the tiger in the change-the-lady-into-a-tiger illusion. It takes two people, the tiger’s trainer and an assistant, to get the tiger from his travel cage into the illusion equipment and out again. I worked this job for quite some time. But the trainer is a skilled person. An assistant handler, like me, is unskilled. And maybe stupid [I did like the tiger and probably didn’t fear him enough]. However, I also worked as carpenter and repair person for the big illusions for years, which was a huge amount of fun. I could tell you how the beautiful young lady is balanced on the points of three swords or levitates or how you cut a person in half. But I won’t.


A writer can learn new techniques by going back and forth between fiction, non-fiction, plays, and poetry. How did writing plays make you a better mystery novelist?

Well, I hope I’m better. One of the things you learn in plays is that you can’t black out between scenes and leave the audience hanging. Grab them right away, get them into the new scene. The mental-change problem is even more difficult in the “magical musicals” Tony and I wrote. After a magic illusion the audience is still saying, “How’d they do that?” when you’re trying to remind them of the plot. And to a large extent this is also true after songs in musicals. I suppose—bottom line—I learned to keep the main plot in the forefront of my mind.


Which of your books or stories is your personal favorite and why?

My favorite story was “Steak Tartare.” It will be reprinted in the anthology “Sisters on the Case,” which contains stories by all the presidents of Sisters in Crime and will be published in October.


“Hard Tack” is a great example of a locked room mystery—in a boat on Lake Michigan during a humdinger of a storm. It also shows a detailed knowledge of sailing. Did you write this from your own experience, or someone else’s?

I have never sailed a big luxury yacht, like the one in the book. But I’ve lived on Lake Michigan all my life. I used to sail a Sailfish out on the Big Lake. This is kind of like sailing a good-sized coffee table. But the basic idea of making use of the power of the wind, of tacking, of coming about, is the same. The difference is that in a Sailfish, there’s no cabin; icy cold Lake Michigan waves are breaking over you all the time. I did go on a real yacht in the course of doing the research.


One doesn’t normally associate dead bodies with Christmas trees. Did you grow up knowing about the Christmas tree industry in West Michigan, or did you research it especially for “Hard Christmas?”

I researched it for the book. I realized I’d been driving past Christmas tree farms all my life and never knew basic things about growing the trees. Much to my surprise, the growers say fertilizers don’t help. The important things are enough water and making sure the trees aren’t crowded or shaded, so that they grow bushy. They are also sheared to make them bushier. The experts use long, ultra sharp blades that look like big bread knives. Christmas trees are one of very few agricultural crops that are harvested in winter.



What is the story behind the story in “Death of a Thousand Cuts?”

Bruno Bettelheim was a spectacularly successful man who wrote books about child development and ran a residential facility in the 1950s and 60s for what he claimed were autistic children. He claimed that autism was caused by cold parenting, especially on the part of the mother. He told the parents of his patients that they had caused their children’s problems and he told the children that it was their patents’ fault. Even back then, researchers saw that boys were at least four times as likely to be autistic than girls and if one of a pair of identical twins was autistic, the other was much more likely to be than a randomly selected child—clear tests for a genetic component. Bettelheim was not a doctor and not trained in psychology. But people took him at his own valuation, and he ruined many lives. Living in Chicago as long as I have, I had heard early on how wonderful he was, then heard the stories come out that he was abusive to his charges, that few of his patients were autistic in the first place, and that few really improved. The Bettelheim character in Death of a Thousand Cuts is a Dr. Schermerhorn, who, unlike Bettelheim, at least has a medical degree. Early in the book, he is gruesomely murdered. Heh, heh.


What are you working on now? Is this project taking you places you've never been before?

The new book stars a woman archaeologist from Northwestern University. She visits coastal Peru, researching the Moche, who lived 1700 years ago, and Anatolia in central Turkey, researching Çatalhöyük, which was a thriving city seven thousand years ago. I’ve been fascinated by what I’ve found out in the last year about ancient cultures, but I have frequently wished that I was as knowledgeable as you.

For more on Barbara's books and stories, visit her website here.

The Archaeology of Mystery Writing

Since I'm new to the world of blogging, I'm going to explore it in layers. That's appropriate, since I'm an archaeologist in my "day job" at the University of Illinois.

My other job is mystery writing. Gradually I'm excavating my own life to unearth situations and characters that will make good mysteries. Creepy old attic museums--digs in Israel, Italy, and Nevada--peculiar academic characters who become murderers (or murderees!).

Like an archaeological dig, a good mystery is constructed in layers: the top layer, or stratum, is what the reader sees and where the main story takes place. A couple of strata down is where the villain hangs out, plotting and planning away, occasionally rising to the surface like a misplaced artifact in an ancient garbage pit.

Garbage pits definitely loom large in an archaeologist's life because stratigraphy is rarely orderly. People in the past were always digging holes to lay a foundation trench, bury something (or someone), or to hide some garbage before constructing a new floor.

Personalities have layers too, and it's the job of writers to reveal the layers in their characters in ways that move the story along. And everyone has a garbage pit--the family traumas from the past, the dysfunctional relationships of the present. Garbage, like compost, can provide rich beginnings for new stories.