Roots – Or Maybe Root Cellars

By James M. Jackson

Last night I had a fine idea for this blog. False Bottom, the sixth Seamus McCree novel, is coming out later this month. In it, Seamus returns the Boston area where he grew up. I’d include descriptions and pictures of some scenes where the action occurs—a little teaser to ramp up interest in the story. To prepare for writing False Bottom, Jan and I took a trip a couple of years ago to revisit the area, so I had plenty of pictures to choose from. My photographs, 16,000 and growing, are “organized” in Adobe Lightroom with various tags for “easy” retrieval. I couldn’t find any of the Boston pictures.

So, in true pantser fashion, I changed the title from Root to Roots – Or Maybe Root Cellars (to recognize I would have to dig through cobwebs to find those pictures) and kept writing:

Seamus is a third-generation American, the son of a Boston cop. I also have roots in the Boston area. It’s where the first Jackson’s arrived in the mid-1600s. By the mid-1700s we’d moved west to the Berkshires. By the early 1800s we lived further west in Upstate New York and stayed there for seven generations. It’s where I was born.

Boston, however, keeps calling us back. My five-greats grandfather (Col. Giles Jackson) left the Berkshires to fight outside Boston at Bunker Hill (actually Breeds Hill, but Bunker Hill got the monument) during the American Revolution. My grandfather worked for a time in Boston during the Great Depression. I returned to work in the area for two years (late 1977 - early 1980) and returned to earn my MBA from Boston University in 1985.

Now’s the point when I figured to include some of those pictures in this blog. One scene takes place in Boston Public Garden and references the “Make Way for Ducklings” sculpture. That would be nice.

So would a picture of the Swan Boats or one of the statues.

I could include a picture of the apartment complex in Waltham where much of the action takes place.

Maybe the Waltham police station where I researched murder investigations in Massachusetts and Seamus spends a little time.

Heck if nothing else, I could include a picture or two of birds from Parker River National Wildlife Refuge on Plum Island.

 “Aha!” I exclaimed. “I posted one of the pictures on Facebook. Let’s find that.” I did. It had a date. I found all the pictures in Lightroom based on dates. Because we were traveling, I had not labeled any with tags and then forgot to do it when we got home.

Pantsers aren’t known for their organizational skills. We find our stories through writing not plotting. By the time people read our tales, we’ve patched the holes and added the pictures, and they’d never know its original mess. Unless we choose to show them.

* * *

James M. Jackson authors the Seamus McCree mystery series. False Bottom, the sixth novel in the series—this one set in the Boston area—will be available later in May. You can sign up for his newsletter and find more information about Jim and his books at https://jamesmjackson.com.

Confessions of an Indie Publisher

After a long gestation period, Doubtful Relations (by James M. Jackson) is available for pre-order. Sort of.

As I write this, it’s available for Kindle (ed. note: now also at iBooks and Kobo) and in print directly from me if you’d like a signed copy or eBook directly from me. During the pre-order period, I’m offering free shipping on the print book and a dollar off on the eBook compared to buying it online—but you need to know how to load it on to your reader. Other retail outlets will come online as I work through each of their processes. Some don’t allow pre-orders, so the first time they show up will be on the official publication date, August 23. You can check my website http://jamesmjackson.com/ for purchase links.

The Big-5 publishers have a different process and retailers have different rules for them. I have no issue with that. I chose to use Wolf’s Echo Press to publish the fourth Seamus McCree novel to have greater control of price and timing. Along with that comes the knowledge that I have to go with the retailer flow when it comes to having the books listed on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, etc. Of course, I could pay someone to do all the necessary work, but I (mostly) enjoy the challenge.

Readers of my blogs know that I don’t like to read books with lots of typos, homonym errors, or poor layout. My tolerance for mistakes has increased as I’ve learned by being a published author how easy a mistake can be missed by everyone. I still rail against poor design, because that is very much a conscious decision. Knowing that it is impossible, I still don’t want any errors in MY book.

This sounds like a perfectionist streak in my personality, but those who know me realize calling me a perfectionist would do a grave injustice to the word. The issue here is that I have a double reason for things to be correct: I’m the author and I own the publishing company; any errors reflect doubly poorly on me. And truth be told, I don’t want readers to think I’m stupid because of spelling errors or using the wrong homonym.

Publishing is a very part-time adventure for me, and I have not invested in the InDesign software that many professionals use for book formatting. I use Microsoft Word, which frankly has some limitations. The one that drives me craziest is its methodology of producing a PDF file. It is NOT a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) process. I’ll have modified the spacing of lines on a page to avoid any orphans (single lines starting a page that are part of a longer paragraph), and it looks perfect in Word. Convert it to PDF and Shazaam the orphan has returned.

That gets me yelling at the computer. The air turned blue the time I inserted a soft hyphen (one that only appears if it is needed at the end of a line; it will not show if the word is in the middle of a line) because a line had a bit too much white space between words, and POOF! orphans appeared from a parallel universe. Eliminate the soft hyphen and the issue disappears. [And yes, I have checked and unchecked the various boxes deep in Word’s option menus. I learned those by trial and error—well, error and trial.]

I’m a geek, so I’m reasonably good at stuff like this, but to tell the truth, I’d rather be on my deck watching the eagle fly past and listening to the chimney swifts twittering overhead, (both of which just happened as I wrote this blog. No camera, so no picture. Sorry. Use your imagination.) Nonetheless, it’s what I signed up for when I decided to form my own little publishing company, and really, my complaints are minor ones—long after the fact, of course.

So, if you’re a Kindle reader or would like a signed print book, check out my website for the correct link. If you read Nook or Kobo or want to support your Indy bookstore, be patient while the words propagate throughout the system.

And if you do find an error, PLEASE let me know. I’ll fix it for future readers and send you a heartfelt note of thanks.

~ Jim

Online Book Pricing

In previous posts, I wondered about how Amazon priced my bridge book and followed how Barnes & Noble and Amazon chose to price Catherine Coulter’s Backfire. Since then, we had the e-book pricing suit settlement, after which publishers lost the right to require specific e-book prices. I wondered at the time how that would affect e-book pricing. I thought it would bring prices down (a boon for consumers) and there would be more pricing competition (also a boon for consumers.)

I chose to follow Michael Connelly’s Black Box for five and a half months, which includes six-weeks before the hardcover release.

E-book Pricing

Let’s start with e-book pricing. When I monitored Coulter’s Backfire, both Amazon and B&N carried the e-book at $12.99. The price did not vary from that list price on a single day. The chart below shows some changes in pricing philosophy subsequent to the suit. As I am writing this blog, Backfire is still selling for $12.99. Black Box has varied from a pre-publication high of $14.99 to a few day low of $7.50 and as of this writing rests at $7.99

Figure 1 Black Box E-Book Prices

The two “competitors” acted almost in lock-step as they moved the price of the e-books on a daily basis. The only difference was one day in February when B&N held a $12.74 price a day longer than Amazon. [In fact it could have been more or less than 24 hours, since I only checked prices on a daily basis, usually first thing in the morning.]

Hardback Pricing

Pricing on the hardback edition has been a bit more volatile. Amazon has priced the book as low or lower than B&N, with the interesting exception of a few days in February when Amazon appears to be chasing B&N down and not quite catching them.

Notice that the pre-publication price was considerably higher than the price once the book was available. Apparently the retailers have determined that an author’s fans will pay more to be first in line. Since the words don’t change and I have more books to read than time to read, I’ll not be caught paying pre-listing prices.

Figure 2 Black Box Hard Cover Pricing

For the better part of a month, B&N has priced the hard cover edition at $15.21 and Amazon at $15.22 – so rush on over to B&N and get that $.01 savings.

Paperback Pricing

The paperback edition came out about a month after the hardback release.

Figure 3 Black Box Paperback Prices

Other than the dope-smoking episode B&N engaged in the second week of February, which was a relapse of their initial pricing decision, the two have danced a dance of “can you top this?” It appears B&N has taken the lead and Amazon has been the follower.

In my blog Whither Barnes & Noble I predicted the demise of B&N unless they changed their focus. Based on this sample of one, they have not. In the blog I suggested B&N should become THE place for readers to learn about books and authors. Had B&N followed the logic of my blog, they would have been the one buying Goodreads. Instead Amazon has snapped them up. I see nothing from Barnes & Noble to change my prediction of their demise.

And based on this limited sample of one e-book, pricing in e-books is still not being done in the same competitive way hardcover and paperbacks are. Simply look at the pricing volatility for paperbacks and hardcovers compared to the stability of e-books.

I’ve seen this same thing with the pricing of my novel Bad Policy. It’s been available less than a month, but the paperback price fluctuates frequently and the e-book pricing is constant. As Smoky Robinson sang, “My mother told me, you better shop around.”

~ Jim