THE
SELF-IMPORTANT AUTHOR’S GUIDE TO
MANAGING EXPECTATIONS
By
Michael Bowen
I thought that Percival’s Question was a brilliant
title for a political crime story set in Washington just after the victory of
the West in the Cold War. Percival was
the knight who found the Holy Grail – the successful completion of the ultimate
quest for King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table. Percival had dedicated his life to this quest
and now it was complete. What does he do
the next morning? He’s just written the
first line of his obituary, for crying out loud. Wouldn’t killing a pesky dragon or evicting
trolls from underneath a bridge seem a little meh for him now? In the same way, the Cold War had basically
defined my life from the day of my birth in a hospital at Fort Monroe,
Virginia, where my dad was stationed after being called up for the Korean War,
to those air raid drills in grade school, to the Berlin Wall going up, to the
space race, to the last of our soldiers being choppered out of Saigon, to
Carter’s failures and Reagan’s successes, all the way through to the Berlin
Wall coming down. So, like Percival,
what would we do now that we’d won?
As my story careened toward printing and distribution,
however, my editor at St. Martin’s Press, Anne Savarese, called with unpleasant
news. She said that SMP’s salespeople
hoped that I could come up with a different title. It would take too long to explain to
bookstore owners, she said, so we needed something, you know, simpler and less
cerebral.
I pushed back a tiny bit.
I was really proud of the title and the deep thinking it reflected. Couldn’t we discuss this a bit.
“We can discuss it all you’d like, Mike,” she said. “But you’re talent and they’re sales. Sales versus talent, sales wins.”
Right. Good to know.
Anne also pulled the short straw on my next story with SMP, Corruptly
Procured. She sent me the cover art
on a 2 x 2 Kodachrome slide “for approval.”
(This was the early ’nineties. No
email. Sort of a time-capsule
experience.) I called her with my
assessment.
“I really like the concept,” I said. “It captures key elements of the plot very
well. But the premise of this story is
that a man would commit treason to have a relationship with the femme
fatale, and I don’t want to come off as too sexist, but I wouldn’t run a
red light to have a relationship with the woman on the cover.”
“Yes,” she said understandingly. “It looks like the artist had some trouble
with the female figure.”
“Okay,” I said. “Do
you think we could ask the artist to try again?”
“I don’t think so,” Anne replied, “because we’ve already
paid him.”
I paused, but just for a moment.
“Okay, Anne, I understand.
I’m not Robert Parker and I can’t throw a temper tantrum over this. But, under the circumstances, why did you
send me the cover art ‘for approval’?”
“Oh, Mike,” she said in a tone you might use to soothe a
six-year old after telling him that he can’t have a pony, “we were just being
polite.”
I did appreciate the politesse.
I carried those valuable lessons forward, and I think they
saved me a lot of frustration. The
publishing world that was already emerging and that fully blossomed after 2000
– the world where an author whose books aren’t bestsellers is, strictly
speaking, not terribly important if, by “not terribly important” you mean has
no importance whatsoever – came as a rude shock to many authors. Not to me.
I had been thoroughly and gently prepared for it. I had my expectations properly under control.
Michael Bowen is the author of twenty-one
published novels including nineteen mysteries.
False Flag in Autumn, published in October, 2019 and exploring
“October surprises” intended to influence the 2018 and 2020 elections, is his
most recent.
Title: False Flag
Genre: Political Thriller
Author: Michael Bowen
Publisher: Farragut Square Publications
About the Book:
Josie Kendall is an ambitious political apparatchik whose memoirs will not be titled Nancy Drew Goes to Washington. Josie has no objection to the truth—but she doesn’t let it push her around. When a rogue White House aide tries to use her as an unwitting pawn in a plot for a spectacular October surprise before the 2018 mid-term elections, Josie calls on her D.C.-insider husband, her edgy uncle, and colorful denizens of the Louisiana demi-monde to help her out-hustle the hustlers. But then Josie finds herself facing an even more daunting question: is there a false-flag attack planned in order to influence the 2020 presidential election? Josie will be forced to decide whether to venture out of the Beltway cocoon—where the weapons are leaks, winks, nudges, and spin—into a darker world where the weapons are actual weapons. Josie will end up on the side of the angels even if, Josie begin Josie, the angels play a little dirty.
