Why a book fails while another succeeds?

When I write a book, I don't think whether it will be successful with the buying public. In the first place, most of my books were written before I even dreamed of something like ePub. I wrote them because they came to me. I didn't aim them at editors either, although some were sent into publishing houses as part of a query.

Dark Angel never was submitted. I wrote it because the hero came to me in a dream. The story is a bit of a fairy tale which I only recognized after I had completed it and was beginning to edit/edit/edit. It is beauty and the beast. A lot of good romances were first laid out in a fairy tale. After all, there are only so many basic plots out there. It's what you do with it after the basics that separates the books.

Now a real life beauty and the beast (I just watched Hemingway and Gellhorn) wouldn't end happily. Real life tends to get in the way of happy endings, and when you have a man who is a beast, he is likely to be impossible to live with-- especially for an intelligent woman (Hemingway said-- 'Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know').

Actually their story did have a happy ending, if you ended the story before WWII and the real conflict they eventually faced between the intense career and emotional needs each of them had. Real life often starts where a romance leaves off.


Distracted again-- back to Dark Angel. The beast in this story is not a man who is difficult like Hemingway, but it is where opposites attract. Kind of like that old Billy Joel song Uptown Girl with a downtown guy.  Actually he sang another about this combo also earlier where he was the boy your mama warned you about.

Dill is all of that but he's mostly a good man in a bad spot. Seemingly you'd think it'd be a popular story. Maybe too many had read it already with the fairy tales? Perhaps they thought dark angel meant evil, and it doesn't but is the title maybe wrong for it? Well I don't know.


Asking why a book doesn't attract readers is the kind of question writers do ask. With mine, sometimes I know with say a story like Moon Dust where it's dealing with the adult ramifications of childhood abuse. Golden Chains had some fearing erotica and others not that interested in the art community.

Dark Angel though seems more generally of interest, with a tough and interesting hero coming together with a beautiful and strong heroine. There is, however, for it one possibility that seems as likely as a plot that turned readers off. I never did a free day.

When I got onto Kindle, I liked the idea of the free day promotions that are part of Select. I am an unknown quantity as a writer. People don't want to take the risk even when it's only $2.99. I feel those free days allowed me to introduce myself to a lot of readers. They would then know what to expect from a Rain Trueax book. And there are certain dependable elements.

Then I began to hear people in the forums saying they waited for free books. The system has spoiled them for buying at all. That eventually becomes self-defeating for the writer who would like to have the books be profitable.

So Dark Angel never got that freebie boost. No book of mine will from now on even if they disappear into the darkness of Kindle where they never see the light. The goal for me now is to see my books available other places, reviewed in other blogs and find readers apart from Amazon. Since now a lot of readers do know my work, I don't see the benefit of undermining readers who paid for a book by giving it away next week. That just proves upsetting.

Now there might be other reasons why Dark Angel didn't do well besides no free day. I really have never understood why readers choose what they do or why one book will suddenly sell 10 copies while another sits there and to me both are good stories in their own way. Anyway, enjoy the trailer as it gives a flavor of the story-- a beauty and the beast story that eventually, after a lot of travails, will end as a fairy tale should. Shame about Gellhorn and Hemingway.

Excerpt from Sky Daughter

Seeking peace in Idaho's mountains, Maggie first shoots a stranger, then saves his life. She's pulled into danger, passion, occult secrets; a world where no one is who she thought.

Once in awhile, experts suggest it's good to put out an excerpt as a way to give readers a taste of your writing. All of my books on Kindle offer the first chapter as such a sample, but I thought it'd be fun to pick a scene to stand alone.  I can't say it's a favorite. I like them all, but it's one I particularly relate to and think readers here might also.

In this simple scene from Sky Daughter more is revealed as to who Maggie is, what she is learning about the life she has chosen and who her grandmother had been. That it's about gardening is a bonus.

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In the kitchen, Maggie picked up the flats of plants she had optimistically grown from seed. The first little plants had gone outside too soon and had their leaves blackened by a late frost, but she could protect these no longer. Most likely the deer would eat them before they got settled in, but she would give them a chance, a moment in the sun.

  Planting was part of the heritage of her grandmother. The urge to continue the cycle of growth, of planting and sowing ran strongly through her veins. After so much loss, so many aborted opportunities and lives, she had a need to see life reach fruition.

  Working in the sun-warmed soil, Maggie put everything from her mind except weeding carefully around the lavender plants, loosening the soil by the rosemary. She hummed as she worked, then came words about planting and releasing to grow. As quickly as the words came to her, they were gone. She sighed. The song would’ve never satisfied her managers anyway.

   She dug a hole for one of the marigolds, threw in a bit of fertilizer and then tamped the soil back around the tender plant. Planting meant a belief in the future, a desire for improving the present, and a reaching back to the past. It encompassed all of life to sow it with the hope of someday reaping.

   She sat in the garden when she had finished, feeling the warmth of the sun on her skin, the coolness of the soil beneath her knees. Why were tears running down her cheeks?

   Maggie girl. The words seemed almost real. She closed her eyes as she again heard her grandmother’s voice, seemingly could almost smell the blend of soap and the fragrance of herbs that was so much a part of every memory she had about her. She could feel the touch of that precious hand on her shoulder, soothing and giving her subtle energy. God, she missed that woman. She remembered her grandmother’s tall form as she would walk across the mountain, calling to Maggie and taking her with her into the woods, teaching her about the woods plants, which ones healed, which ones could be used for a fever, which ones poisoned.

   When had she forgotten the names, forgotten those words? She had been taught so much and it seemed it was all gone. She remembered one of the many conversations.

   ‘Dream, Sky Daughter, dream of the future and of all that will be.’

   ‘Grandma, I don’t remember my dreams.’

   ‘You must try harder. Dreams are the spirits speaking to you. They are your power.’

    ‘Mama says they’re not.’

    ‘Your mama had to follow her path and you must follow yours. They are not the same.’

   ‘How do you know?’

   ‘I know and you will too when the time comes.’

   ‘How?’

   Her grandmother just smiled. ‘You will.’

   ‘You could tell me now.’

   ‘No one should tell another their path, Sky Daughter, but someday you will know yours.’

   Maggie felt tears running down her cheeks and wiped the back of her hands across her eyes, to brush them away. “I miss you so. I thought you’d be here to teach me, to always tell me. Why did you have to go?”

   A hummingbird buzzed her, warning her off from the area, letting her know she was intruding on protected ground. Somewhere nearby was probably its nest. It was operating by instinct as she had found herself doing with Reuben.

  She looked toward the forest. She tried to force a change in reality, to go back in time, to see those, who had gone, come walking toward her. They would be laughing and talking about how much fun they would have had on a picnic at the falls. Her childish voice would be raised in excitement as it had been in those days of feeling so protected and loved.

  She waited, but all she could hear was the sound of a raven calling from higher up the mountain, the angry scream of a hawk, and the soothing tweets of smaller birds in nearby bushes. Never again would her loved ones be with her, and she had to face that reality.

Sky Daughter, a paranormal romance based in Idaho, is available at Amazon Kindle 

Metaphors and writing

 The first of these metaphors for writing or even reading a book came to me a few weeks ago.

A story is like weaving on a loom. 

The warp is the characters (hero, heroine, villain, sidekick, misc.) and the weft is what happens, the plot elements. So you start with a loom and on it are strung vertically the warp-- although you can add warp into the design as it develops.

A shuttle carries the weft across the threads or yarns and designs become obvious. You can add colors going vertically also as the design requires.

With a book, it's in a basic frame with these important people, some introduced immediately and others as the story goes along. They are influenced and changed by what comes at them both through their own decisions and those of others.

In the end, you have a whole, the rug or cloth and all the elements fit it. If they don't, the weaving was unsuccessful and you might tear the whole thing apart.

I thought about writing this down but at the time just let it be with the idea sometime it would work for a blog here. Well and also be sure my own story weavings were consistent, with strong and interesting designs.

Then last night, I had a dream which when it had ended gave me another metaphor.

A story is like a picture puzzle. 

You start putting together the pieces and guessing how it will turn out, what fits there, what does that piece seem to be saying? Sometimes you begin seeing a box photo of where you are going but sometimes you just start finding pieces that work to create a satisfying design. If a piece doesn't fit or is missing, the puzzle is a frustration.

So in writing a book there is a goal, a set of pieces that will be put together to satisfactorily meet the needs of that goal. A reader will be happy when they finish a book where all the pieces worked together to create something the reader had never seen the same way before.

Just for the fun to add to this, I'll tell you the general story. I don't see it as becoming a plot for one of my books, but it was a very enthralling dream movie.

The hero and heroine are married and working with government forces in a strange country. This is what they do. They are living in a very big home, well set up structurally, and not living with the main body of military personnel which says they were probably CIA or something like that. The country is in turmoil.

I think there were at least three scenes that mattered, that were important parts of the puzzle. In  a way my characters were also putting together a puzzle. There were others in their home off and on who were working for the same goals regarding this country.

The folloowing section was when I saw the analogy to writing most clearly. Things had gone wrong and worse the government body with which they worked wasn't really effective. It looked like it would all fall apart and the mission fail when the hero basically got together some of his friends, told them to come to the home and they were about to start their own military action.

The next pieces of the story would be gathering the personnel and tools together to win something that all the bigger bodies were about to lose completely.

There wasn't much romance because this couple were already together and had no marital problems. They were an enjoyable couple to watch; so it had plenty of interest as they were both good at what they did-- paramilitary fighting (think Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt). Fun dialogue to write, and put together how they would win in the end with a small force. But not a romance.

It was however a great metaphor for putting together a good story or how you feel after you have read one. The tiny piece that didn't seem important when you looked at it is often a key element to making the puzzle work.

My father used to like to play tricks with puzzles. He would hide one piece; so that when we got to the end, we'd know something never seemed to be there. Then he got to put it in. There is a real satisfaction when writing a story when the last piece goes into place and you may not have even seen it mattered but suddenly you know it was the key to it all.