Cover of The Killing Sea

I am a big fan of Richard Lewis. I Loved his first book and have been enjoying his writing ever since. Maybe it is his unique background, or just his personality, but he brings a different sensibility and viewpoint than most authors – and I enjoy it.

His latest work was self-published as an e-book for reasons discussed below. It might not be economically viable in today’s publishing world but – like all of his books – it is an engaging and entertaining read that I hope you will check out.

BTW, in light of recent events you might want to check out Lewis’s The Killing Sea.  A novel Booklist called “a powerful fictional tale of survival and cooperation in the wake of the 2004 tsunami.”

Richard graciously agreed to answer some questions via email about his books, writing and career.  My questions in bold and his below.

Remind us how you ended up writing young adult fiction in the first place.

I wrote a book for adults called THE FLAME TREE, set in Java, against the backdrop of 9/11, about the friendship of the son of American missionary doctors and a Muslim village boy.  It went on submission after 9/11, adult houses passed, but an editor at Simon and Schuster YA read it and loved it.  I had to cut out some sub-plots, but I still think it’s adult.

And what led to your self-publishing The Last Witch as an e-book?

Essentially, my four YA novels that S&S published didn’t make them money.  My career as Richard Lewis, YA author, was pretty much done–at least in the traditional publishing sense.  One of the brutal (and impersonal) facts of the business.  I had this novel on my hard drive, and I liked it enough to think it should at least have a chance for an audience.

How do you think the ability of authors to sell directly to readers via e-books changes the self-publishing and standard publishing worlds?
Gosh, so much has ink has been spilled, and pixels aglow on blogs and industry websites, about this topic.  As Yogi Berra said, prediction is hard, especially if it’s about the future, so I’m not sure what is going to happen, but I do think some measure of equilibrium between the two will be reached (by standard publishing I mean standard publishing houses publishing both print and electronic editions).  I’ve been honored to be a part of the traditional world.  There is a sense of self-validation in being print published by a major publisher.

What’s happening in the self-publishing world (whether a printed book or an e-edition) is a growing cacophony of noise, and so it seems to me that clever, dedicated, sly, and at times very loud self promotion is key to standing out. People aren’t going to read you if they don’t know you aren’t there.  Unfortunately, I don’t have that personality. I’m a writer–I love writing stories–well, I hate writing stories because it’s a process of continuous, frustrating, hair-pulling dissonance resulting in many nights of insomnia and grouchy mornings, but I do love it too. I’ve always loved putting together puzzles, and there’s nothing like making a story fit together from out of nowhere. But the process is like having ants crawl around in your brain.

The Last Witch has elements of science, higher math, faith/religion, mysticism, etc. All of these elements have appeared in your previous books. Do you use things that might not have been used directly in previous projects or that you “collected” along the way?

Everything that I’ve ever experienced in my life, or heard about, or read about (and I read a TON of non-fiction, love it) is fodder for my imagination, plus my imagination can come up with things on its own.  Being the son of missionaries, who grew up on Bali where the mystical world is just real as the world you see, add in my education in science and math (only to a first year PhD level before I bailed to go surfing), and that’s just the start of what I have to draw on in making up my stories.

As for the LAST WITCH, I’d been doing a lot of reading in science & religion, and the “new atheism” of Dawkins, Hitchens and the other High Prophets of There is No God, plus I’d read Philip Pullman‘s GOLDEN COMPASS trilogy with its atheistic world view, and so I decided to try my hand on the other side of the ledger, so to speak.  Not that I can write like Pullman, but it was a certain aesthetic & world view I wanted to express for myself in a YA story.   (And I’m doing the same again right now, but in an adult novel).  I was not entirely satisfied with the result, but satisfied enough to let it go out into the world, alone with bag slung over the shoulder, to make its way as best it could.

Do you find it a challenge to write from the perspective of a young girl? What helps you capture that voice?

Having a daughter helps an awful lot.

What drew you to Central Park as a setting? So famous and yet probably full of little known secrets and facts.

A huge sprawling park full of nooks and crannies (Eden both pure and corrupted) in a huge sprawling city (Gotham and Babylon)?  What a set-up for a fantasy, for all kinds of what-ifs.  I devoured books and websites on the park, scoured it with Google Earth.  And I might add, I’m not the only writer attracted to that place. A colleague of mine, Lesley Livingston, used Central Park as a principal setting in her terrific faerie novel WONDROUS STRANGE

Do you write with a particular audience in mind (Americans of a certain age, etc.)?
Nope.  The story shapes itself.  Who reads it, reads it.

You like to surf. What comes first writing or surfing?  Do you have a set schedule?

Surf depends on swell, which comes and goes. So if the surf is good, yeah, I probably go surfing before I sit down to write.  I also do a lot of boat trips to outer islands to go surfing.  I don’t write, but I catch up on my reading.  (I can’t wait to get a Kindle and travel with one device with a thousand books on it–but Kindle, and other e-devices, aren’t  available in Indonesia, not just the physical platform, but the downloading service.

What is one thing that surprised you about writing YA and something you find frustrating?

Nothing particularly surprising.  Or frustrating for that matter, except for maybe the increasing PR writers are expected to do.

What’s next? On to “adult” fiction? Can you give us some insight into what you are working on now?

Oh, adult fiction for sure. Last year I wrote a very adult novel on the 1965 massacres in Bali (over 50000 Balinese massacred by other Balinese as a consequence of a Communist-inspired coup attempt in Jakarta, although it’s more complicated than that).  Impossible to get this book traditionally print published at this moment of upheaval, but there is definitely a niche audience, so I will probably get it e-published later this year.

Right now I’m working on a more commercial project, a kind of post-apocalypse set in the States, from New York to Chicago to Vegas to LA. More info later!

Related articles

• The Last Witch of Manhattan by Richard Lewis (collectedmiscellany.com)

Here is the publisher’s description:

Billy Allman is a hillbilly genius. People in Dogwood, West Virginia, say he was born with a second helping of brains and a gift for playing the mandolin but was cut short on social skills. Though he’d gladly give you the shirt off his back, they were right. Billy longs to use his life as an ode to God, a lyrical, beautiful bluegrass song played with a finely tuned heart. So with spare parts from a lifetime of collecting, he builds a radio station in his own home. People in town laugh. But Billy carries a brutal secret that keeps him from significance and purpose. Things always seem to go wrong for him.

However small his life seems, from a different perspective Billy’s song reaches far beyond the hills and hollers he calls home. Malachi is an angel sent to observe Billy. Though it is not his dream assignment, Malachi follows the man and begins to see the bigger picture of how each painful step Billy takes is a note added to a beautiful symphony that will forever change the lives of those who hear it.

A great deal of the Christian fiction I come across is just plain bad (although to be fair maybe I haven’t sampled widely enough) and let’s be honest some of the books that are free on Amazon are free for a reason.  So the first thing to say here is that Almost Heaven is not one of those books that you simply don’t want to finish. In fact, I was so interested in the opening chapter that I just kept on reading it (something I rarely do when I download a free Kindle book).

There are parts, however, that drag and the plot just seems stuck at times. The opening sequence really drew me in, and the later part of the book has some exciting and well done action scenes, but the middle part struggles as Billy Allman wrestles with the tragedy in his life and the angel Malachi seeks to find answers.

In fact, I am not sure the plot device of Malachi really adds much to the story at all. Sure, it provides some spiritual and outside descriptive narrative but it mostly slows the plot down. And to be quite honest, I didn’t find the apologetics aspect of Malachi all that convincing.

But again, Fabry does a nice job of weaving in Christian ideas and characters into a novel in such a way that they seem natural and an integral part of the story rather than forced or awkward. This is to be applauded.

Overall Almost Heaven is a touching and well drawn portrait of faithfulness through suffering and the value of commitment despite the odds.

Book is a shifty word, denoting both the physical object and the content within. As an author, I think of myself as having “written books,” when in fact I’ve typed hundreds of pages of fiction and nonfiction into various word processing files, e-mailed them to my editors, and only much later seen them take physical form. To say all that, however, seems pedantic. To describe myself as, say, a “content provider,” however fitting the term might seem, strikes me as something akin to insult. I write books.

And I’m a lover of books, too, unaccustomed to making a body/soul distinction where the printed word is concerned. The book is the object and its contents, inseparable in my mind. I dwell in a house lined with shelves, most of them bowed by the weight of their printed content. Beautiful books and ugly ones. Read and unread. Objects of comfort, outrage, derision, admiration. Some pristine and others scarred. Some bound in leather, some in paper (at least one in shagreen). Prized and cheap side by side. Tangible things, each with a history. I can tell you where they came from, where they’ve been. The ones I sought out and the ones I discovered unexpectedly. The ones kept under glass in dark bookstores and, all too often, the ones overnighted from the clean, well-lit warehouses of Amazon. All of that will disappear when the book’s body does.

What does all this mean? It means by the ancient rights of the Internets I get to step up on my soapbox and unleash a diatribe of my choosing. [OK, I made that part up ... but it sounds good doesn't it?]

But I do, however, feel like I might have some perspective on the whole e-books pricing issue both as a consumer and as someone with philosophical opinions on the matter.

So let us use this handy-dandy notebook! New York Times article on the subject as a jumping off point shall we? If you are game, see below.

First off let me just say that I will try to avoid the grand moralizing that seems to invade a few too many opinions on this matter. For example, I don’t think the Amazon v. Macmillan clash is about morality or ethics or anti-trust law or jerkiness (sorry to get into the technical terms here) but rather is simply two very large companies trying to establish a foundation for future profit and market share.

Now I am a big fan of Amazon in general and both shop there and use their affiliate programs (to be fair I also shop at Barnes & Noble, Borders and any other book store I stumble upon).  But in this case I am largely in favor of the system that Macmillan outlined.

But first, let’s establish that both consumers and authors/publishers are not particularly familiar with how prices actually work. One of the biggest misunderstandings when it comes to economics and pricing is that pricing should be tied to cost (particularly marginal costs).  Far too many consumers insist that prices be tied to what it costs to produce something and frequently very poor ideas about that cost.

Example:

“I just don’t want to be extorted,” said Joshua Levitsky, a computer technician and Kindle owner in New York. “I want to pay what it’s worth. If it costs them nothing to print the paper book, which I can’t believe, then they should be the same price. But I just don’t see how it can be the same price.”

This short paragraph is filled with confusion. First, you aren’t being extorted you are being exposed to the book market. The place where one group of people decide what to charge and other people decide what to pay. Ring a bell?  Also note the complete lack of aknowledgement that a book might be more than the paper it is printed on – as if digital = free. Note to Josh and others: Kindle formatting costs money too as do a gazillion other things involved.

But wait, authors can be just as moralistic and ill informed:

“The sense of entitlement of the American consumer is absolutely astonishing,” said Douglas Preston, whose novel “Impact” reached as high as No. 4 on The New York Times’s hardcover fiction best-seller list earlier this month. “It’s the Wal-Mart mentality, which in my view is very unhealthy for our country. It’s this notion of not wanting to pay the real price of something.”

Image via Wikipedia

Yes, it is the consumer who has the sense of entitlement! Yes, lord forbid publishers try the Wal-Mart mentality of making gobs of money by giving consumers what they want! Outrageous that consumers demand lower prices.

Um, Mr. Preston, there are no “real” prices there are is only what the market will bear or what someone wants to charge.  Now, you might want to use the cost and value of books to convince consumers to pay more than they otherwise might but there is no “real” price involved in this debate.

So let’s review:

• Everyone want to make more money; be charged less and keep more (either in the short or the long term).
• Prices ultimately are what the market will bear; they are how buyers and sellers decide what something is worth at a particular moment given a set of circumstances. Over a mind-boggling number of transactions eventually the market sets a price that reflects what people are willing to pay (all things being equal).
• Nothing says that prices have to be tied to marginal cost (the cost of the next widget) although that clearly plays a role in how prices are usually set.

Now that I have laid out my own snark filled condescension let me just say that I don’t know enough about Amazon or MacMillian to say what is best for either company in terms of pricing for a sustainable business model but I will assume they are both acting in what they see as their best interest.

Now back to the agency model that seems to have prevailed in this dispute – at least for now. The reason I support it is because it makes the most sense to me as to how pricing would work where consumers have useful price points to make decisions.

In this model books are most expensive when first released – and are assumed to have the most leverage – and get cheaper over time. A book by your favorite author – or on an important topic – comes out and you simply have to have it? Well, you will pay more for it.  The positive back end of this also applies. After a book goes into paperback and ultimately into the backlist then it should be cheaper - hopefully much cheaper.

The publisher will try to maximize profits when a book is hot but can also look to a long-tail effect where people are a still buying the backlist. In the long term I envision a world where books don’t go out of print.

To me this is about access to the most books possible. I don’t want the fear over the $9.99 price point to keep a publisher from offering an e-book version of a just released book. I want to the choice to pay more for it and I would like the choice later to pay a lot less. If we can start down a path where we experiment with these price points I think the system will work better.

This all takes place in a world where hardbacks and paperbacks are still the way the vast majority of people read books.  Now I understand that as time passes and things change this will not be the case. And I can see where there might be wisdom in moving to a high volume lower price type structure for ebooks. But for right now I just don’t see the industry set up that way and expecting it morph into that quickly is asking too much.

Let me reiterate: this is just the system that makes sense to me and makes things convenient for me as a consumer. I am not saying it is the moral way or the only way that makes sense economically or anything else. I just favor this system because it seems to allow consumers a variety of choices.

Now, if all the people ranting and complaining about books priced above $9.99 are the majority – or a powerful minority – then we are likely to see publishers react to that either by marketing, outreach and education or by lowering prices – most likely a combination of both. Again, that is how it works – buyers and sellers act in their interest and prices eventually reflect what people are willing to pay.

This endeth the rant.

What do you think?