Ketchup

This photo is of the four-color newspaper ads placed by Minotauro announcing the August 27 release of La Plaga. Yes, newspaper ads!!!

Q: Will you be moving to Europe?

A: No, the Carlsons won’t be packing up our worldly belongings and moving to the coast of Spain any time soon, although it’s nice to feel like we might be welcome. I’ve had several emails lately about Minotauro’s brain-poppingly awesome campaign in support of La Plaga as well as Piper Verlag’s sweet edition of Nano, and, yes, it’s deeply gratifying to receive that kind of attention for my work.

It’s especially great because we were nearly unable to sell Plague Year at all. Sit down here by the fire. Have a marshmallow. Wanna hear a spooky story?

I know that a lot of you are would-be or beginning writers like me. Unfortunately, what I’m about to tell you isn’t atypical. A few people find success right out of the gate. They sell their first novel or their first trilogy on their first try. Most of us have to scratch and claw a lot more than that.

Plague Year was finished early in 2003. (That’s right, I wrote the damn thing before Crichton’s Prey or ABC’s blockbuster Lost). It sold in May 2006 (and eventually saw print in August 2007). During that wait, five out of seven editors said they wanted the book but that their boss, the publisher, wouldn’t let them buy it. Why? Because first novels rarely earn out. Nobody’s ever heard of you, and there will be 399,999 other titles published the same year, and it’s practically unheard of to see any sort of promotion effort, so they just put the books out there and see if they sink or swim. Most of ‘em sink. Selling that first book is as tough as rusty bent nails in your feet. With gasoline. And maybe ants. You get the picture.

Oh, and the other two editors simply reported that they didn’t like the book. After holding onto it for several months in total silence. Because there are always so many goddamn other books on their desk that they can barely find the time to peek at a cover letter. But let’s not get sidetracked bemoaning the fate of editors!

In a lot of ways, that long, brutal wait did me good in the end. Sure, I nearly gave up writing and got a real job about twenty-three times. Yes, Diana and I had many agonizing conversations about how the heck we were ever going to support ourselves. Indeed, I considered putting my head in the microwave oven. All we kept hearing out of New York was “We love this book but there’s no room in our list for a first novel right now.” What the heck more could I be doing???

I kept writing and I kept getting better. I made more short fiction sales. I made more contacts. Many of them were heroic enough to step up and help, which is why you see such an unusually high number of top-level endorsements on the cover.

When Plague Year finally sold in a minor bidding war, those endorsements, in turn, helped Ace to decide to get behind the book with a couple ads and a lot of expensive display space. This also helped secure an unusually high number of pre-orders of the book. I’m still a long, long, loooong ways from likes of the major bestsellers, but, for a first novel, especially a science fiction novel in mass market paperback, Plague Year did well in North America. Not phenomenal, but well. Even very well if you’re feeling generous. Which in turn helped lead me to the audiobook with Recorded Books and come to the attention of some overseas publishers. Who went a little nuts.

Why? I’ll talk more about this another time. I do have some Deep Thoughts With Jeff about why Plague Year might be even more popular overseas than at home.

In the meantime, it’s awesome. Awesome awesome awesome. I’m grateful and excited and I’ll probably be sleeping in my Minotauro gas mask and the ALTAMENTE CONTAGIOSO ribbon when they arrive in the mail. While hugging two or three copies of the sexy German edition.

Probably you don’t want to be here for that. ;)

Labels: mailbag, Minotauro, Piper Verlag

Whew. It's been psychotic, and I'm behind as usual. More questions on the book trailer. I’m paraphrasing from several emails:

Q1) What is that freaky “Blair Witch” voice whispering over the opening chase sequence?

A1) Heck if I know. I think Adad ran a brief audio clip backwards in and out of the music track, which is why it’s unintelligible. The ominous voice at the end of the trailer, with the line about the Plague books being in stores now, was one of Adad’s roommates. Two of them took a stab at it, and we went with Boris Karloff. My guess is that the other guy then found his way into the trailer by doing the “Blair Witch” voice, no doubt saying something *really* scary like “Re-elect Bush again. Re-elect Bush again.”

Q2) Where was the trailer shot?

A2) We did the majority of it in Bear Valley, California, where I’ve been skiing since I was a kid. The ragged peak in the background is Iron Mountain, across the Mokolumne Valley from B.V., and we knew we could access those slopes and cliff-areas easily as well as having that spectacular backdrop.

The weather was a crap-shoot, though. Twice after getting everyone on the same page, watches synchronized, we delayed because of snow or overcast.

(Bear Valley serves as the basis for the fictional “Bear Summit” in Plague Year, btw, although I reworked the geography, the local highways, and the also fictional town of Woodbridge to better the action sequences in the book.)

At various points in the trailer, you can also see local landmarks such as Mt. Reba and, much farther eastward, Roundtop, which sits above some great backpacking country. If at any point the camera had turned west, however, you would have seen that we were just above the parking lots of the ski resort, not lost in some desolate wilderness.

The opening sequence of the running man trying to get to safe elevation was shot in the forest outside of Dorrington, further down the mountain. Again, it looks desolate, but we had to scrap one good shot because it turned out that my car was visible in the background, sitting on the edge of the highway. Ooops! ;)

Labels: book trailer questions and answers, mailbag