THE NAKED DAME Does Barnes & Noble

So I’m wandering the web yesterday, and suddenly I find that The Naked Dame is available at the Barnes & Noble website. It’s a nice listing, reminiscent of my Amazon page, that shows the book’s cover and $2.99 price tag, with instant download links to the Nook. The only difference being, I worked hard for my Amazon page—formatting and uploading to their unique specifications—but this B&N link just appeared out of the blue. Well, mostly out of the blue. This is thanks to all that initial work I did uploading the book to Smashwords, which has been in the business of distributing The Naked Dame far and wide for a couple months now. I uploaded the book there once, very easily, and just let it do its work.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is that this new B&N link has shot immediately to the top of Google’s search results when I type in the book title and my name. Barnes & Noble must have some heavy influence with Google’s search engine!

Interestingly, however, Amazon is still BY FAR where most of my sales traffic comes from. That’s thanks to the Kindle, obviously, as well as the Kindle app available on most smartphones and devices.

But it’s sure nice to see Dame at B&N, if only for the small twinge of nostalgia it brings me. For quite a few years in my youth, I worked at and managed a B. Dalton store (owned by parent company B&N), and it’s sorta cool to see my book on the virtual shelf of the company that once employed me. I have great memories of my B. Dalton years, mostly because of the proximity to books it afforded. There’s nothing like surrounding yourself with books every day (and taking advantage of that employee discount to immerse yourself in different worlds and eras). Perhaps that’s why I’ve spent my adult life continuing to surround myself with books and even taking a stab at creating them myself.

The Evolution of DAME Art

When I first began thinking of publishing The Naked Dame, I thought it would be a cool idea to produce a few hard copies in an actual pulpy paperback format. Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, to send self-produced paperback copies to prospective publishers? It would be a nice presentation piece to accompany the manuscript, and it would ideally give the publisher a notion of what the book might look like in published form. I’m probably naive about this kind of thinking, but if I were a publisher (and I have been), I would appreciate the extra effort on the part of a writer to send something unique, rather than just the standard, boring double-spaced Courier manuscript. I’m all into the “little details”—those facets that make any project or effort unique or noteworthy.

Normally, printing up a single copy of a book would be cost-prohibitive and time-prohibitive. You’d have to find a printing facility willing to take on such a minuscule job, and you’d have to fork over an absurd amount of cash to set up the press—a process really suited for large print runs and wasted on such an obscenely small print run. But! It is my excellent fortune to know Kirk Whitham, creator of the SimpleBind paperback binding system. With this ingenious contraption, you can easily assemble a paperback book, and all you need is your own paper, a quality printer, a nice cutter, and a glue gun. (There’s a little more to it than that, but it really is amazingly simple.)

So, together, we typeset the book to my liking, then tackled some artwork in PhotoShop for the front cover. Because this would be a not-for-sale version of the book used for presentation purposes only, we decided to use existing art from other pulp novels on the market—in particular, the classic Nude on Thin Ice by Gil Brewer, and Fade to Blonde by Max Phillips. That last book is a Hard Case Crime reprint, actually, and wouldn’t you know it, Hard Case Crime is precisely the publishing house I was aiming for. See, I wanted to get my book into the hands of Charles Ardai, the publisher of HCC.

Anyway, up at the top right is a copy of the artwork we came up with for this early version of Dame. I share it here just as a lark, and just to give you an idea of the evolution of the book’s presentation. To make a long story short, Ardai did read Dame, and he gave it a long, thoughtful, encouraging rejection. But it was the presentation that made him take notice and send such a thoughtful reply. Because I spent so much time and care assembling the submission package, I know that he felt a little extra motivated to respond to it with similar time and care. I guess I’m saying that maybe this is a lesson for some would-be authors out there submitting their work to publishers. When I was accepting submissions for Dark Highway Press, I was shocked by some of the sloppiness I saw. I received stories that didn’t have anything to do with the subject matter of the book I was publishing … I got blurry, hard-to-read xerox copies of manuscripts that had obviously been through the agent/publisher circuit repeatedly … I received stories that still had editing marks on them from past readers. Lazy! I mean, when you want someone to pay attention to your stuff, at least show them some respect! And show some creativity. Make your submission stand out in some way.

You might ask why I didn’t stick with the original cover for the Amazon and Smashwords ebook version of The Naked Dame. Well, the answer should be clear: In the presentation copy, I’d used two copyrighted images—the naked dame on the Nude on Thin Ice cover and the dude in the background on the Fade to Blonde cover. If I was going to actually sell my work, I’d have to use art that was purchased. So, the result is a fine cover—this time in collaboration with Darin Sanders—that’s original and legal.

I do like comparing the old cover with the new one, though. They’re very different illustrations, and yet the composition is quite similar. Speaks to my basic concept for the theme of the book. But the illustrations almost speak to entirely different audiences: the first one to a more pulpy, ’50s-era reader and the second one more to a present-day graphic-novel throwback audience. I guess it goes without saying that I love both of ‘em.

Meeting a DAME Fan

In Atlanta for a business conference, I hung out with a celebrity author—the legendary Mark Minasi, a great tech writer I’ve known and edited for years. He took the time to buy and start reading The Naked Dame, and gave me his thoughts about the story so far. He brought up my book on his fancy iPad 2 so that I could see how it reads there. Thanks for the support, Mark!

Here’s a pic of the moment.

Mark bought Dame for the iPad using the Kindle app, but he could also have used the Smashwords link.

Trailer for “LA Noire” Game Nicely Provides Setting for DAME

Check out this trailer for the already-released video game LA Noire, and get your pulp on! Play the game, then give The Naked Dame a read. One will feed in nicely to the other. Can’t wait to play this one.

Two More DAME Reviews!

Got a flurry of Naked Dame reviews this week at Amazon. Here are two more! Thanks to John Bryant and K. Cadigan, respectively.

Could Easily Be a Hard Case Crime Book
And that is great praise, I consider that series to be amazing and full of terrific stuff. This book was just what I was looking for to get me out of my prolonged reading funk that I had been in. A quick read, but also a good amount of substance and gives the reader some things to ponder when finished, which not every novel in this genre manages to accomplish. The next book by this author is an instant buy for me, this book earns him that luxury.

A Great Noir Read
Not having read any noir fiction before, I didn’t really know what I was in for when I started The Naked Dame. As it turns out, I was not disappointed. While the plot moves along nicely, it’s one of the few books that I’ve read recently that goes out with a bang instead of a whimper. Too many authors have their books fizzle out (such as Michael Connelly), but I was completely satisfied by how everything was tied together at the end. I would definitely recommend this book.

Latest DAME review!

Thanks to Paul Battani for this nice review!

Having never read a book in this genre before, I really wasn’t sure what to expect or have any idea about the style of the genre. However, I decided to give the book a chance based on recommendations from others … The book certainly starts off with a bang and doesn’t let up its pace throughout. From the opening words, I could tell that it was going to be an interesting ride as I made my way through each page. The one funny thing is that while reading it, I kept imagining that there was some raspy-voiced detective narrating the book just like you’d hear in those old TV detective/mystery shows.

The book was not overly long nor complex that I had to devote a good chunk of time to it. I think that it was a good length that balanced an exciting plot with effective storytelling. I have read books in the past that seemed to be unnecessarily long and suffered from extraneous text that didn’t serve any purpose. Throughout THE NAKED DAME, there were a number of interesting twists that I didn’t see [coming] which made for an enjoyable read that kept me on my toes. At one point, I expected a certain outcome for the story, only to be thrown a curve ball that rendered my prediction incorrect.

If you are a fan of this genre, I highly recommend checking this book out. Even if you never have, I would still recommend it as it was an enjoyable read, cheap at Amazon as its a Kindle book, and you’re supporting an up-and-coming author.

NAKED and Pulpy Were the Fifties

I’m often astounded by the sheer amount of female nudity that was splattered all over the pulp novels of the 1950s and 1960s. Astounded in a good way, I mean. It’s so very refreshing to know that there was at least a thriving subculture in the prim and proper black-and-white Leave It to Beaver era that relished the pleasures of the flesh. All of us—and particularly those who lean to the right—tend to be revisionist historians about previous generations. No way was my parents’ generation perverse, right?

Turns out, they were probably more perverse than we are! (Well, maybe not as perverse as you. Point taken.)

But look at these things. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that stuff like this couldn’t be published today. That’s probably true of more mainstream presses, but smaller, independent presses do print some truly shocking things these days. So I won’t go that route. But doesn’t it give you a little thrill that our forebears got off on fiction like this? Call ‘em Eisenhower-era guilty pleasures.

Personally, I love that American literature went through its pulp era, and obviously that period of paperback publishing was a big influence on The Naked Dame. There’s a sense of liberal mischief and sexual freedom wrapped up in these lurid covers, not to mention blunt, adolescent prurience, and hey—that’s okay, because the country was going through a kind of adolescence of its own. And if you’ve got that word mysogyny rattling around in your head, I’d counter that the dames in these books mostly tended toward spirited and strong and forthright and cunning. It’s the male characters who ended up weak and defeated. And see, there I’ve gone and spoiled the ending of my own book.

But we’re talking about book covers here, and often the art had very little to do with the actual contents of the book! The publishers merely wanted to lure you in with kink.

Is that what I’ve done with The Naked Dame? Sure, while designing the cover with Darin Sanders, we consciously tried to emulate those fleshy covers of yore, in an effort to increase sales. Our intentions might not have been of the highest order, but at least they weren’t unprecedented. Except that in my book, you know what? As I’ve mentioned previously in this blog, in The Naked Dame, you actually get not one, but two naked dames. That’s a lot of nakedness.

Truth in advertising! Long live the flesh!