MYSTERIOUS MONDAY: Downton Abbey, Barnes & Noble, and Carola Dunn

by Carola Dunn

A few weeks ago, my editor told me Barnes and Noble had picked my 19th Daisy Dalrymple mystery, Anthem for Doomed Youth, to be part of a nationwide promotion for Downton Abbey. Yes, I was excited!

The third season of the popular series is set in England between the wars--WWI and WWII, that is. Besides books about the period, B&N were looking for novels set at that time. They planned to have 5 or so copies of each chosen book on display near the checkout counter, in every store in the US. St. Martin's was to do a special reprint of the paperback edition for them.

My editor said the four-week promotion was to begin on January 8th. So on the day, I trotted along to the local store. I must have circled the store 3 times before I decided I just wasn't going to find the display. All the booksellers were busy, so I came home disappointed and tried to call them. Impossible to speak to a Real Person, or to leave a message, or even to stay on hold. At last, later that evening I got through.

The person I spoke to had never heard of a Downton Abbey promotion. He looked it up on his computer, and couldn't find anything that mentioned it. :-( 

I emailed my editor. I also asked my Facebook friends to pop into the nearest B&N if they happened to be passing and see what they could see. My editor contacted Macmillan's "B&N person," who promised to get onto it.

The responses I had from FB friends were not encouraging:

"There is a Downton Abbey display here in Naples, FL, but no Anthem for Doomed Youth."

"Checked the store in Fort Gratiot, MI. No Downton display but Anthem is on display in the new Mystery section."

"This was unfortunately the case last night at the W. 82nd location in Manhattan as well. I had called ahead and put Anthem on hold, but before I retrieved it, I sought out the Downton display to check out what else they had out. I found it on the endcap of the aisle that contained Mystery. So when I didn't see Anthem on display, I found it only a few feet away. I feigned ignorance tho just so I could ask an employee to find it for me and then mention I thought it was part of the Downton promo. I doubt it did any good, but I did want to mention it to them. Still glad to have a brand new copy of Anthem, which I hadn't read yet, but it was disappointing."

"I found the Downton Abbey display at the Ithaca Barnes & Noble - it was about 7 books on an endcap (no Anthem!). I caught a fellow and asked where the Anthem books were. He pulled out a paper with the particulars about the display, and it didn't include yours. He checked the computer and they had 5 new Anthems, it said they were supposed to be in a "Cash Wrap" (?) "up front". We found them stacked on a desk; so I don't know where they are going to end up. But I did impress upon him that all your 'Facebook friends' would be looking for the Anthems." 

And have to laugh at this one, I guess: "Went to B&N in Woodland Hills yesterday and they were gone. Had been there just before Christmas. The sign said they closed 12/31/12."

I forwarded all these and more to my editor, at his request. Whether they helped or not I don't know, but I'm very grateful to all those who took the time to check. Three cheers for Facebook friends!

On Sunday, I returned to the local (Eugene) store. There was Anthem, right by the cash registers, with a selection of other books set in the time period! I asked if they'd like me to sign them, which they did, and even dug out some of my other titles for me to sign.

When I got home and turned on the computer, there was an email from my editor--he had found the same in his local B&N.

I'm not sure what the moral of this story is. Be patient and they'll get around to it? Or persistence pays--keep bugging till they act?

One way or another, I'm happy to announce that if you go into a Barnes and Noble store in the next few weeks, you may--or may not--find a Downton Abbey promotion that includes Anthem for Doomed Youth!

Read about the book here: 
http://caroladunn.weebly.com/1/category/anthem%20for%20doomed%20youth/1.html
  (scroll down a bit)

Or read an excerpt here:
http://historicalfictionexcerpts.blogspot.com/2013/01/anthem-for-doomed-youth-ii.html 

It's also available as an ebook. 
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Istoria Books's "Mysterious Monday" program features posts about mystery writing, reading, bookselling and more by writers from beyond the Istoria stable.  Stop back on Mondays for insightful posts on the mystery genre. 

This post, by Carola Dunn, first appeared at the Murderous Musings blog on January 16, 2013.

Mysterious Monday posts from the past:
Jenny Milchman writes about "Putting the MIST in mystery: obscuring facts"

Coming up: Authors Gary Alexander and Joyce Yarrow talk about favorite characters and favorite character types in mystery.

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MYSTERIOUS MONDAY: Putting the MIST in Mystery: Obscuring the Facts

by Jenny Milchman

Mysteries are the most challenging genre of all.

 

I can already hear the indignant responses from romance writers (how do you keep boy-meets-girl fresh), the historical writers (all that research!), and the horror ones as well (hey, it’s grisly in there). Not to mention the literary authors. Writing a story that doesn’t rely on plot to pull the reader along is no easy task.

So, all right, perhaps each kind of book has its own unique challenges.

I’d like to go over a few that I’ve found in writing mysteries.

• Knowing when to resist formula and when to make use of it. Should a body appear in the first chapter? A dead one, I mean—presumably most novels have people in them. And should the rest of the novel go on to unravel how the dead body got there? If you don’t keep to this rubric, but your novel is fast-paced and dangerous, is it still a mystery, or some other beast? Suspense, maybe, or thriller? Defining what you’ve written is hard and getting harder all the time, given the new sub-genres out there. Yet agents and editors will want to know your definition.
• Knowing what to reveal to your reader and when. As author, you know everything, at least by the time your book is in publishable form. But if you lay out your cards too soon, you’ll have a boring book that isn’t very mysterious. Too late and your solution will be either anticlimactic or a deus ex machina—a solution delivered from above without the appropriate groundwork being laid. Navigating between these two extremes takes an ability to climb into your reader’s mind—and out of your own.
• Related to the above is the challenge of obscuring the facts throughout your mystery. They have to be there, or else you haven’t played fair with your reader. But you don’t want readers to figure out clues or see plot twists coming like a Mack truck on a narrow road. Instead what you want to do is create a highway…populated by many vehicles…driving on a misty night. Those other lanes are your subplots and dead ends. The different vehicles are your red herrings, your distractions, and characters that fill out a story and make it feel fully realized. While the mist is there for atmosphere and to obscure the one truck barreling down the road…and into your victim’s life.

How do you rise to the above challenges? I imagine that every writer has his or her own tried-and-true methods. Here are three I’ve tried, which may turn out to be true for you:

1. Don’t worry about any of the above while writing your first draft. Let the danger and excitement of the situation your character has gotten himself into carry you along. Because if you’re carried along, it’s a good bet your reader will be, too. Fine-tuning details that are too obvious or too obscure, layering in red herrings, and making sure the solution is fully satisfying are for drafts two, three, and…thirteen.
2. No? Does the thought of writing thirteen drafts scare you like your heroine is scared by the killer? Then consider the five-point structure, brought to you courtesy of film-writing guru Robert McKee, with a few tweaks by me for mystery writers: Know the beginning, middle, and end of your story. By this I mean a key scene or two you can envision. If necessary, write up background material for these, or rough versions of the scenes before you begin. Sketch out their high points, conflict, and who stands to lose or learn what. Then do the same thing for two turning points in your story—one at the 1/3 mark, between the beginning and the middle, and the second at the 2/3 mark between the middle and the end. You now have a road laid out, and should be able to see from point one to five without getting too lost.
3. See your novel as a movie and write down exactly what you’re watching at any point where you feel stuck, or even at the beginning of the process. By visualizing the scenes, you make them that much realer in your mind. Later when you’re writing, you can come back to scenes you’ve already experienced.

The biggest mystery of all to be unraveled may be how a mystery is created. I hope that in this post I’ve given you a few clues.

Jenny Milchman is a suspense novelist from New Jersey whose short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Adirondack Mysteries II, and an e-published volume called Lunch Reads. Her first novel, Cover of Snow, was released by Ballantine this January.  

Istoria Books was proud to publish Jenny's short story "The Very Old Man" in Lunch Reads Volume 1. All four volumes of Lunch Reads shorts are now available in one set digitally at Amazon's Kindle store!

Check out Istoria's mysteries here!

THE "STORY" IN "SHORT STORY"

by Libby Sternberg

Years ago, my sister and I belonged to one of those mail order book clubs, the ones that entice you to join up with offers of "four books for one dollar." From that point on, the club would send monthly fliers announcing their latest offerings, with one special--if you didn't want that book, you had to send in a card saying "no, thanks." Otherwise you'd get it. I ended up with a lot of books this way.

One of the volumes my sister received during her first four-for-a-dollar deal was the collected short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I was already a fan, having read The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise, and Tender Is the Night. Reading his shorts allowed me to visit his world some more. I devoured them. I think I read them all within one dreamy adolescent summer. "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" stayed with me for a long time. Others blended into one another in memory, leaving behind a warm sense of enjoyment. Rarely did they disappoint.

As I grew older, I almost lost touch with short stories. My reading time was spent with novels and nonfiction. Then, at various times, we ended up subscribing to the few mainstream magazines that still carried short fiction -- The Atlantic, Harper's, The New Yorker -- and I once again began to read shorts.

Let me amend that: I tried to. Regularly, I'd force myself to stick with the stories in these magazines to the bitter end. And it was often a "bitter" end in that I had not enjoyed the flavor of the story by the time I was done. Rarely did I remember them at all--not even the sense of them, of what they'd been trying to say or where they were set or who the characters were, let alone what the overall story arc contained. As to prose that sang--it often fell flat to this reader's ear.

Two exceptions stand out. One was a short story by Amy Tan. It happened to be a chapter from her debut novel The Joy Luck Club, which I made sure to buy when it was released.

The other was a haunting tale of a woman in California waiting for her husband after he went off to war in the Pacific during the 1940s. I just remembered the story, not its title or author.

That story stayed with me for a long time--the poetry in its prose affected me deeply, and even if I couldn't remember the precise plot points, its mood and tone left an impression.

Years later, I became a fan of the novelist Mark Helprin. His novels Soldier of the Great War and Memoir from Antproof Case, as well as his novella Ellis Island, left me reeling from encountering such a talent. As a Christmas gift around that time, my son presented me with a signed copy of Helprin's short story collection The Pacific. I read it eagerly. When I came to the final eponymous story, I met an old friend--"The Pacific" was the story of the war bride I'd read years ago in The Atlantic Magazine! I revisited this treasure with great joy, marveling at its power to move me once again.

Stories such as "The Pacific" are hard to forget but also hard to find. At this stage of my life, I don't like to waste time. So I have to admit to passing over a lot of short fiction I encounter in the few magazines that still publish it. Their short fiction doesn't pull me in. It doesn't speak to me. It doesn't...tell a story. At least not ones I want to hear.

I'm not sure when this happened--when short stories stopped being a draw, not just for me, but for millions of others. Now, shorts live mostly in literary journals published by colleges and universities and are read by those who teach or study there (see my rant about "academic fiction" below). Yet there used to be a time when a writer like Fitzgerald made most of his money from writing and selling short stories. They were a commercial success, in other words, as well as an artistic one.

It bothers me that short stories have "evolved' to a point where they are not well-read or well-appreciated now. Their inclusion in magazines mostly devoted to nonfiction allowed those nonfiction readers to sample fiction, something many of them might not do outside the short story milieu. I believe in the transformative power of fiction, in its ability to challenge readers, to open minds to new ideas and viewpoints. It's distressing to think other readers might have given up on short fiction, too.

This is one of the reasons that Istoria Books is dedicating its resources to a series of shorts. Called Lunch Reads, this collection will feature two stories in each volume for 99 cents . E-publishing is the perfect platform for shorts. There are no word-count restrictions--no short is too long or too brief for inclusion.

We kicked off the series with mysteries. First, there is a suspense tale by Jenny Milchman paired with a "cozy" mystery by yours truly in Volume I.

In Volume 2, Gary Alexander (Istoria has published his literary novel, Dragon Lady) provides two humorous pieces that I like to think of as O. Henry meets The Twilight Zone--ironic twists abound, as well as loopy characters. Gary's roots are in mystery writing, so he's a natural at weaving such tales.

And in Volume 3, it's humor again with Ellen Holzman's clever longish short, a murder mystery told entirely in letters to the editor of a small town newspaper, coupled with a short short by Edmund de Jesus. Anyone who's lived in a small town will recognize the characters in Holzman's witty story and admire her storytelling talent as she eventually reveals the murderer to the reader through artful characterization and precicse plotting. De Jesus' short is the cherry on top--a well-written tale taking place within a grocery story, with a surprise ending that colors the rest of the piece.

These stories are meant to be light entertainments, something you can read on your lunch hour. But we hope they become addictive. We hope that readers will find in them the same sense of pleasure and joy that readers of short stories used to find when encountering good stories, well-told, in magazines of yesteryear.

Although we're starting with mystery, we will branch out into other areas in the near future. That includes "literary" fiction, as well.

With Lunch Reads, we want to lure skeptical readers back to embracing the short story once again. And we hope to become the place for talented writers crafting these tales to place their works.

Give Lunch Reads a try--for 99 cents, can you really go wrong?