...'cause today is being devoted to a long road trip. Never you mind why we're traveling on this Tuesday (it's medical but not scary, meaning the hours will pass slowly, but the day will be broken up by new and various bookstores so it's not all bad), just know that we're putting rubber on the road. Which means that this post is going to be a teensy bit abbreviated because we didn't think to get it written earlier.
 
If you'll remember, we were about to share the secrets behind writing a best-selling novel. They weren't our secrets, though. These tips come from the giant brain known as Dean Koontz. And he should know how to write a best-selling novel since he's written so many of them.
 
Random interruption here: Did you know that Amazon has a list of their top 100-selling authors? Yes, you probably did, you probably go -- here -- all the time, but it was new to us. Going over the list, we see that DK is currently clocking in at #63, which seems a little low to us. James Patterson is #1 in the rankings (not in our house, no, but we've only read part of one of his books and we're not even sure he wrote it. It was credited to JAMES PATTERSON and Maxine Paetro and it was a big best-seller. The novel might have gotten better and better as it went along but we bailed at Chapter Five and never looked back). Stephen King is #23 -- we love us some King -- with J.D. Robb at #25, and considering how many J.D. Robb books we're seeing lately, we'd have thought she'd have cracked the Top Ten easily.
 
End of random interruption.
 
Before we were going to share Dean's secrets, we needed to know if the book was still in print. It isn't but, if you have a spare C-note, you'll find copies -- here -- and on Amazon. Even though we spent much less on our volume (25¢), at least your hardback will come with a only slightly torn dust jacket.
 
We wish ours had a dust jacket. We'd be eBaying the thing tomorrow.
 
Since it's jacket-less, and since our friends are generally fairly broke, we'll share a chunk of its wisdom with you. Even though it was written in 1981, it's still filled with some strong advice. To begin with, remember when we ranted that a writer could be fast or good but shouldn't count on being fast and good? As it turns out, that's just us. During his six years as a full-time novelist, Dean wrote quickly in an attempt to establish a sound financial base. He wrote bunches of everything, including porn. Sitting at the typewriter each and every day of the week, he was able to produce a series of Gothic romance novels. Each one took him about a week.
 
A week!
 
It took us three months to do a Young Adult work-for-hire manuscript that was, we'd guess, at least 10,000 words shorter. Young Dean was a stud. He wasn't the only one, though. With a little bit of investigation, we discovered that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote 413,000 words of published fiction in 1913 alone. John D. MacDonald, one of Harrell's favorite authors, said he completed 800,000 words of "typed manuscript" in FOUR MONTHS.
 
He tapped out more words than many writers will produce in their entire lives. How did he do it? "I worked twelve and fourteen hours a day, seven days a week." (This from Maybe You Should Write a Book by Ralph Daigh, also out-of-print and currently available, used, for a penny. Worth it, too.)
 
The takeaway from today's "How to write a best-seller" workshop? Put butt in chair. Keep it there and work. Hit the keys until your fingers bleed.
 
We never said it would be easy. (Well, yes, last week we said it would be easy. You can't live in the past.)
 
Quote for the day: “I think it is important to have goals in life, as long as you understand that achieving those goals will not make you happy” – Joe Queenan

…but we’re thinking you should, too.  It’s going to be easy.

The idea came to us while Harrell was flipping through some old magazines. He came across a 30+ year old interview with a writer he enjoys. For some reason not yet clear to anyone, he decided he needed to read that interview. Even though, again, the magazine was 30+ years old.
 
Even though Harrell had promised to spend the afternoon working on the back yard watering system.

It is FINALLY less cold in Northern AZ.
 
In the ancient interview, the writer declared that he was ready to sit down and make some serious money. Name Withheld said, "Every asshole who reads under a hairdryer or while sitting with a can of beer in his hand is going to be buying and reading the book that I will be writing, the novel that I'm writing, and that will be top of the bestseller list. I promise you. Number one bestseller in the nation."
 
He felt he could write his bestseller in a couple of years. This sparked our attention. 

(If you happened to have read the interview, once upon a time, feel free to fill in the Name Withheld part. We’re not comfortable doing it here. If you haven't read the interview, just know that Name Withheld is a writer of some repute. He is unquestionably gifted and his stories are award-winning. That’s the good news. That bad news is, NW is reputed to be touchy as hell and happy to initiate a lawsuit at the drop of a hat. We’re hoping not to be sued this year. At least, not until after we’ve written our best-seller and can afford a really good attorney.)

NW clearly thought it wasn’t much of a challenge for someone to climb the bestseller’s list. And NW should know. He’s still in the writing game, he's been there for a long, long time and he knows the ins and outs of the publishing biz. As far as we know, he never actually got around to creating his #1 smash hit novel but we’re sure there’s a good reason why he didn't.

Maybe he was spending too much time in court.

Respecting NW’s expertise, we wondered if someone could decide to just sit down and write a #1 bestselling novel. After all, when it comes to writing popular fiction, how hard can it be? Novice author E. L. James came out of the gate with three huge #1 hits. Financially, it worked out very nicely for her. At one point, she was reported to be making over a million dollars a week from her work. 

For had that kind of coin, we decided we should write one, too.

Now, our beautiful daughter had already provided us with the template for writing success – Rachel’s Rules and Regs of Writing a Successful Romance – but we’ve tried that. Yes, we did. While you assumed we were lying around the house, one of us recuperating from surgery and the other one failing to fix the backyard water system, we were also writing.

So far, our new book’s sales have failed to soar into the six and seven digits. Or the five digits. Which makes sense, considering that it came out a heart beat ago, but the audience's immediate response leaves us wondering if we’ve truly written America’s Next Literary Obsession. We doubt it and, consequently, we’re doubting Rachel’s Rules. You may be asking, Did we follow the instructions exactly as given? Good question. We didn’t follow every single little tiny syllable, no, but basically we followed them. Yeah.

Since our newest work doesn't appear destined for the New York Times Bestseller list, we've decided we’ll look for inspiration elsewhere. Three days ago, we found our inspiration at a used book sale. We located our very own hardcover guide to fame and fortune and it only cost us twenty-five cents.  

Half of Team Turner believed we should put the book aside while fixing the water system while the other one knew we needed to focus on the 304 pages of brilliant advice in front of us. If you’d like to know which one of us won the argument, here’s a hint: the shrubs in back are turning brown.

Wander this way next week and we’ll reveal all. Or, at least, a little more.

…by William Goldman, then you’ve probably discovered a few things about the book. You’ve learned that it’s a delightful read, everyone loves the story, and the cover image on the left has nothing to do with the novel. At all.

Even if the cover makes no sense, this is the face of the paperback that Harrell has owned for years. With the cover starting to separate from the spine, he thought it was time to replace it and with a lookalike if possible. When he went looking for the same edition, he discovered that his little paperback is now a collector’s item, runs in the $150+ range, and it was time to look for something a little cheaper.

So he decided to do a little on-line shopping. Which is when he discovered, to his surprise, that not EVERYONE loves The Princess Bride.  

(From Amazon.com – as are all of the reviews we mention here) "Why can’t you rate something 0 stars? This book not only deserves 0 stars...IT DESERVES NEGATIVE INFINITY STARS! This book is the absolute worst book I have ever read!" 

Now, we’ve had our share of bad reviews but we’ve never been told we deserve negative infinity stars. That’s a lot of stars. And this was for a novel that is…well, not universally beloved, apparently, but largely considered one of the highlights of Bill Goldman’s award-winning writing career.

The review made Harrell laugh because it was so over the top. It also made him curious if there’d been any negative response to his favorite Stephen King novel, Salem’s Lot:

"I had nothing to do so I read this book. Man! was it boring. No interesting characters. Didnt really scare me a bit. Boring plot. Man! "

Man! That’s one unhappy reader! Man!

Again, Harrell laughed…and why not? Both of these novels have been received with joy; they’ve each received hundreds of positive reviews on Amazon and the negative comments are definitely few and far-between. But now it was a game and he began to look for one- star reviews of some of our favorite books.

**For fun’s sake, we’re only taking a small portion of each review but we are quoting the reviews exactly as written. The bolded sections are bolded on Amazon**

"Garbage and pseudo-scientific gobbledly-gook I decided that I would finish this book, even though I knew at about the half-way point, I would have to dispose of it so that at least there would be one fewer copy on the face of the earth when I was done." (Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child)

We love the idea that the reader hates this book so much that s/he’s going to destroy it – but only after reading the entire thing.

"read my rewiew for this horrible book  This was the worst book I ever read. It was dragged out 249 pages longer than it need to be. Get as far away from this book as possible." (Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie)

This edition of Murder was 336 pages long.

"Do not read this book It is sooo bad. It goes from bad to worse, and then it gets really bad. I am not a person who will write reviews, but I wish someone had steered me clear of this one." (Midnight by Dean Koontz)

So it starts at “bad”….

Couldn't wait for it to be over With some decent editing this could have been a half way decent book. As it stands it is interminable. Unless you can suspend disbelief to the point of self-hypnosis, then give it a wide berth. (Ghost Story by Peter Straub)

Finally, a review that places the blame where it belongs: on the editor.

"An awful book that should get 0 or less stars This is just a horrible book. My school is forcing me to read it. It is just so boreing. I don't even think my teacher can take it anymore beacause we have been reading it for 3 monthes and we only got up to chapter 10. You see, we have to read it outloud in class. I dought we will ever finish this horrible book. Spend your money on Harry Potter instead." (The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien)

…and speaking of the first Harry Potter novel:

"this book is probably the worst book i will ever read!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! it took me weeks to finish this book. the words are to small and the is as thick as my head. this book is for people with bad taste in books." (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling)

It’s all the exclamation marks that we love.

That review led us to wonder if anyone had a story that hadn’t been slammed. Then we thought of our kids and how much they’d enjoyed Dr. Seuss and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. No one could possibly object to that simple and delightful little book, could they?

"Oh Puh-lease! It is like this book was written for a baby or something. Anybody looking for enlightened literature should look elsewhere."

We desperately want to add those last words to our website. "Mars Needs Writers.com Anybody looking for enlightened literature should look elsewhere."

So, when you get your next bad review, just remember: you can completely ignore it unless it includes negative infinity stars.

...we thought things had been going pretty good. Couldn't exactly say why, since this last week hasn't been particularly stellar. One of us had a (sudden, unexpected) trip to the doctor's office, while the other had a (sudden, unexpected) visit to the dental office. When we brought the car into the repair shop (scheduled), the bill ran $200+ over the (expected) total. Yet, for some reason, we were feeling vaguely optimistic.
 
Then, when we grabbed some quick Chinese take-out, we opened the first of our fortune cookies and we read -- Only tears can bring a dreamer back to earth.
 
It bugged us. We'd expected the cookie to contain some vague bit of nothing -- A man who embraces happiness is a happy man -- because that type of inspirational blather seems to be the norm these days. It never offends the customers.
 
Our cookie, though, decided to get down to business. It was not only telling us about the future, it was warning us. We only wish we knew what it meant.
 
Is there some way to spin these words into a positive inspirational message? Not that we can see.
 
That will teach us to go around, having dreams. Once life kicks in, those sobs will start coming and we'll finally see existence for the giant suck hole it is. And we've got some family members  think, it's about time.
 
Around the same time, as if to prove that life is a giant suck hole, a friend sent us an e-mail, warning us about Amazon's new Paperwhite reading device. She wrote, "I've heard that MS Word files aren't formatting correctly. You may need to reinstall your files using some other program or people won't be able to read your stuff."
 
Well, damn. (And double damn because, if you're not interested in formatting e-novels, the rest of this info is kind of boring. So, thanks for dropping by, we hope we'll see you next week, say hi to the cousins for us, okay?)
 
We didn't have a Kindle Paperwhite to try so we started contacting other writers in the area. Somebody else said our friend was wrong, a couple of somebodies said she was right, and everyone seemed to want to use a different program for their manuscripts. One person used OpenOffice (free), another used MobiPocket (also free), others used Calibre (free) or Scrivener ($40 but there's a free trial) some used Sigil (free...I think) and one guy insisted, "Like it or not, you've got to learn some html" which would be free except for the terribleness of having to study html.
 
Instead, we dropped $27, and bought 100 downloads of the Kinstant Formatter. $27 was a bargain if the program was as dead simple as advertised. The way it's supposed to work, you pays your money, you load your MS Word document (.doc, .docx or .odt) and your cover image into the Formatter, and you're done. Plus, the Formatter group promised: "Future-proof all of your books… do the work ONCE and only ONLY… because KinstantFormatter is using the ONLY tool Amazon has promised will work indefinitely." (This is a direct quote. So they're not not advertising copywriters, okay? Give 'em a break.)

It's hard to believe Amazon has promised to make the little-known Kinstant Formatter their prime formatting tool in the future but the K.I. people had never lied to us before so...
 
We plugged in our re-edited Aly's Luck. The manuscript downloaded quickly. We filled in the cover (which can be up to 5 MB but ours wasn't anything that large). Piece of cake. We put in the book title and author's name, as required, and looked at the advanced options:
 
Add/Replace TOC
Remove tabs
Remove line breaks
Remove blank lines
Try to improve bullet points
Resize images
Compress jpeg images
Force alignment
 
-- which only confused us but, happily, the K.I. people had selected some of the options for us. They also provided an instant "document analysis", revealing:

• Didn't find a table of contents
• Can't build a TOC - no Headings found
• Tabs found: 1
• Line breaks found: 2
• Blank lines found: 5

-- even if they didn't tell us why any of this mattered. Ignoring their analysis (because we didn't know what to do about it) we pushed the GENERATE Kindle epub button and, bingo!, our revised Aly was ready for our inspection. Except we couldn't read it because we hadn't downloaded Adobe Digital Editions (free), so we did that. It still didn't work. We then downloaded the Kindle Previewer, to see if that might fix the problem, and it wouldn't read it, either.
 
Over the next few hours, we worked with the K.I. customer service people to fix the problem. They were quick and responsive but they seemed as stumped as we were. Each time we tried to fix something, we used another of our 100 downloads. Use enough of those puppies and you'll need to dig out another $27.
 
Finally, we solved the problem. The people who understand nothing about computers.
 
I know. Incredible.
 
As it turns out, the Kindle Previewer settings have to be manually adjusted for Windows 7/Vista 32 or it can't read the books created by the Formatter. Since our computer runs Windows 7, it created a problem. (If you're having this problem, Amazon says, "Set the compatibility mode for Kindle Previewer to Windows XP SP3 so that it launches correctly. To set the compatibility mode, please locate the Kindle Previewer shortcut in your Start Menu. Right click on it and click on Properties. In the Compatibility tab, click on the check box labeled Run this program in compatibility mode for: and select Windows XP (Service Pack 3)" from the drop down list.) Oddly, the customer service people didn't have a clue about this but they tried to help us, and tried hard, so we forgive them.
 
After we adjusted settings, everything went smoothly. The reformatted Luck is now up on Amazon and The Atheist's Daughter is currently undergoing its review. Unless something changes, we're once again feeling happy and optimistic.
 
And our fortune cookie writer can go bite himself.
 
**One more note! Cassandra Parkin is having a birthday this week. We love Cassandra Parkin, she's a wonderful writer, and we think her New World Fairy Tales is just terrific. We're not suggesting you should download it but you'll be pleased if you do. Happy birthday, C.P.!**