Fascists in the Family

Every summer my father climbed to the top of a rickety ladder and hacked away at the tall arborvitae shrubs surrounding our house in the New Jersey suburbs. My brothers and I dutifully collected the dropped branches, and dragged them to our Mom, who stood ready to bundle them with twine so they could more easily be dragged to the curb for our town’s weekly trash pickup.

Mom was absurdly proud of her branch-bundling skills. If we tried to bundle them ourselves, she’d watch for a while before chiding us that we were doing it the wrong way. “Hmph,” she’d say. “You don’t know how. I learned the right way. From my grandfather!”

To this day, I am not sure I can’t even describe her method, but I could probably duplicate it if you watched me. The point was that when she was done tying, you could shake that bundle as hard as you could, and none of those branches would come loose. Yay, Mom.

I reminded one of my brothers of this annual ritual some years ago, and he chuckled, “Well, sure she knew how to bundle sticks. She was a good little Fascist.”

And we had a chuckle at our late Mom’s expense.

Joe's Mom:
Top row, second from left.

He was referring, of course, to Mom’s upbringing in Italy during the rise of Mussolini. And the freakish images (which I’m sharing here) of those days. They are a reminder to me how easy it is to mold young minds to believe that This Is The Way. The Only Way. The Way of Our Leader.

Like it or not, a war intervened and erased the world of her childhood.

The word fascist and fascism gets lot of play these days, especially this week. The word is derived, of course, from the fasces, a bundle of wooden rods (not sticks or brush) enclosing an ax, that has been a symbol of government going back to the days of the Etruscans.

I rooted around the web some time ago, trying to learn more about those wooden-rod bundles, and how fascism differs, say, from totalitarianism or authoritarianism.

The Romans meant the ax to refer to the right of the state to use violence to keep order, when necessary. When the legions returned to Rome from war, the ax was removed from the symbol carried aloft by soldiers, indicating that military power yielded to civilian authority. Minus the ax, the wooden rods alone symbolize governmental authority.

The fasces motif is still used today in that context. You’ll find them on the Great Seal of the United States, the Lincoln Memorial, on the walls of the Oval Office, and so on.

The "Doll Dance":

Mom, second from left.

I had heard growing up that the fasces were a symbol of unity. Together, went the notion, the rods were stronger than each was alone. But it turns out that that concept came later, thanks to a fable by Aesop. The earliest users of the symbol would not have ascribed that meaning to the rods and axe.

My brothers and I were surprised later in life to discover these photos of Mom in various school pageants with a giant portraits of Il Duce in the background. She had described these events to us, but seeing the photos was another thing entirely. In the context of her time, she would have been called a “Piccola Fascista,” or a “little (female) fascist”.

She was under the age of ten when these pics were taken. She hailed from a family of four siblings. Near the end of their lives, I interviewed her and her older brother, Mike, whose story was slightly more troubling. As a teen he was sent to a fascist youth camp on the Adriatic coast, where young boys trained in calisthenics, marched around in green knickers and Tyroleon hats. Later that year, they performed for Il Duce himself in their regional capital.

I don’t have a pic of Mike handy, but at the time he was a husky boy, what Italians then and now would describe as ciccione—chubby. Laughing, he described to me the trouble he had performing the most basic feats of strength required by the program. He could not, for example, climb a rope, and watched with envy as one of his camp mates performed the act handily, twirling in the air like an aerialist. When he descended, the expert rope climber strode over to my uncle, sneered at him, and slapped his face in a gesture of derision. You can’t do what I do.

Mike was rescued from further involvement in Mussolini’s program when his father returned from the U.S., where he’d gone to seek employment, and brought his oldest son back to Brooklyn, New York.

From that point forward, each half of the family had vastly different wartime experiences. Mike enlisted in the U.S. Army, fought all across Europe, and served as an engineer at Normandy. His most soul-crushing experience, he said, was carrying emaciated survivors out of Buchenwald in his arms.

My mother, her two other siblings, and their mother remained behind. Nazis camped in her grandfather’s fields, threatening the old man with a gun to get access to his barn. When the Americans started bombing, the Nazis dumped their gunpowder in her grandfather’s fields and fled. Mom, her family, and her neighbors hid in (yet another) barn to wait out the air strikes. When the smoke cleared, their village was filled with a new crop of soldiers: Americans, Brits, and their Indian allies. The family was reunited after the war, when all but one sibling moved to the U.S. with their mother.

In the immediate occupation after the war, Mike was stationed in Germany, where he was assigned to question and repatriate Italian soldiers—a portion of about 30,000 POWs at one site who had been captured by the allies. Every day for weeks, he sat at a desk in a local gymnasium, asking one soldier after another—in their native tongue—their name, rank, home province, and one question: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Fascist Party?”

To a man, every single soldier said no, they weren’t, and never had been.

One day, as he was working in the gym, Mike looked up and saw a POW climbing a rope and twirling in the air like an acrobat.

Seething, Mike waited for this Italian soldier to descend.

Mike asked him the question.

“No,” Expert Rope Climber said. “I am not a Fascist.”

Mike slapped him in the face. Sweet justice. “Liar,” he said, proceeding to spell out the athletic games where they had together performed for Mussolini: “Campo Dux. Campobasso. 1935!”

Mike estimated that he had interrogated 5,000 of his countrymen. Every single one denied involvement in the ideology that had sent a nation to war and so many to their graves.

Sick to his stomach, one day he leaned over to his captain and said, “Hey, you know what? Looks like I’m the only Fascist here!”

Angels and Devils.

Mom, first, top row left.

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Thanks for reading. See you in three weeks!

— Joe josephdagnese.com

My Resiliency Bucket Needs a Refill

 

Dog and Denise by candlelight.

My friend Tom, who lives a somewhat eremitical existence in a rural part of our North Carolina mountains, woke the morning after Tropical Storm Helene to find that the gravel road at the end of his property was blocked by downed trees and bisected by two raging gullies of water. He and his neighbors were cut off from civilization. If they didn’t do something to help themselves, they knew it would be days, possibly weeks, before city workers cut them out.

Tom cobbled together a brigade of can-do folks with chainsaws to get the job done. His A-Team consisted of characters I would hesitate to put in a fictional narrative because they would seem too far-fetched. Tom, a wild-eyed building contractor and the scion of a Texas oil family, was assisted in his endeavors by a puppeteer, a falconer, a nonagenarian bison herder, and a guy everyone on that road calls “the friendly hermit.” As the men worked, they were kept happily fed by an 80-year-old neighbor who fried up savory helpings of Spam out of her pandemic pantry. You can’t make this stuff up.

My wife and I were safely out of town at a three-day book event when the storm passed through, so I cannot share any anecdotes of those harrowing days and nights. I only know that since chainsaw-slinging puppeteers are in short supply, most of my neighbors closer to our little city of Asheville, North Carolina, were trapped in their homes as tree after tree fell and utilities gave up the ghost, and were forced to wait for help.

Our friends Jimmy and Heather found their college-aged daughter’s car squashed flat in their driveway under a massive tree. A few other trees dropped on their property, none on the house. They were the lucky ones.

Most of the neighbors on my cul de sac were equally lucky. A few trees down here and there, but their homes high, dry, and intact. Inez, the inveterate gardener at the end of the block, lost a beautiful magnolia, which fell toward the road, damaging nothing but itself. When I asked how she was, she said that after hearing how others in the surrounding region had fared, she felt “Lucky, and heartbroken.”

She did not know it, but she was speaking for many of us in Western North Carolina.

Denise and I had been in Charleston, four hours south. We returned three days after the storms to find a massive tree on our roof, and about a dozen trees down on the property, several of which smashed through the wooden privacy fence that keeps our dog from tearing after squirrels in distant yards.

For a few days I walked around measuring these behemoths. The smallest diameter I encountered was 16 inches. The tree removal estimates alone were close to $20,000, before we entertained the notion of repairing the roof, gutters, and fences, replacing the dog’s invisible fence line and the spoiled food in our fridge. In other words, we too were lucky.

We and the older couple next door have since become the de facto rulers of the street, because as soon as Good Samaritans cut the trees blocking their way out, many of our neighbors fled to places rumored to possess electricity, Internet, mobile phone coverage, and copious hot water. I don’t blame them. Some of those neighbors have kids, some are older, and some simply don’t like to be inconvenienced.

For a few nights we roamed our home with flashlights, cooked on the gas stovetop, listened to news on a hand-cranked radio, and went to bed to the sounds of sirens, chainsaws, Chinook helicopters, and humming natural gas generators. Gasoline was scarce, so we walked a few miles everyday to a guardrail near the highway that for some reason had great cell coverage. From that strange spot, we wrote everyone we could think of to assure them that we were okay.

On those cool fall mornings, when the nabe was silent, nature returned. A flock of wild turkeys traipsed through everyone’s yard. Three deer, tails twitching, skipped along the lawn across from us. And a mother bear arrived one afternoon with two cubs to investigate the trash people had left behind in their haste to bug out. For several nights, successive waves of bears feasted while our dog went nuts.

It is a mistake to think, as humans often do, that we are the masters of all we survey. No—we’re just the ones stupid enough to pay for it.

Family and friends insisted that we too consider fleeing for our own safety as soon as we could procure a full tank of gas. We have been offered guest rooms and cottages in Knoxville, Chapel Hill, Brooklyn, Idaho Falls, D.C., and Sleepy Hollow. And much as I would LOVE to spend Halloween in the reaping grounds of the Headless Horseman, we have chosen to stay.

My brother, in particular, took me to task. Denise and I were safely out of town! Why on earth would we return?

Here’s why. We felt compelled to check on the house, to see just how bad the damage was. And we needed to retrieve our dog, who was staying at the home of a trainer who worked at the kennel we normally use. This wonderful person and her family were safely out of harm’s way, not in a flood zone, but it was too much of an imposition to leave the pooch in their care indefinitely. They had a motorcycle dealership on one of the rivers to muck out. They didn’t need the extra hassle of our dog while doing so. (The grounds of the dealership have since become a staging area for helicopter search and rescue operations.)

The kennel, I should mention, had been evacuated two nights before Helene’s arrival, and is now completely wrecked.

The French Broad River that flows through our mountains is the third oldest on the planet. (Yes, I know that strains credulity. Look it up.) It is 340 million years old, four-and-a-half-times older than than the Nile.

Pardon my French, but when the old Broad gets angry and swollen, she lashes out. Nearly every business on that stretch of road near the dog kennel was erased. The brewery we’d never had a chance to visit. The artisanal tea company that formulated a brew to celebrate the launch of my wife’s Thanksgiving book. The glass company that installed our shower doors. The plumbing supply company that sold me parts for my various DIY jobs around the house. The legions of antique places. The FedEx store where we’ve shipped editorial projects. The restaurants in the historic village outside the Biltmore Estate that we adored and championed. The one-man auto body shop that repaired the dings I keep putting in my fenders. All gone. Washed from the face of the earth. That’s only one stretch of road along a tributary of the French Broad.

The River Arts District, where artists maintained studios and sold to the public, is a moonscape of twisted sheet metal, upended vehicles and trailers, scoured terrain, and toppled trees festooned with fluttering plastic. We used to call this area the RAD, but now the D in that acronym stands for debris. When we drove down to take a look, I felt numb. Tears sprung to my eyes.

The people who lived and worked here, the ones I know and the ones I don’t, are the legions of the unlucky. Their homes and livelihoods were destroyed, and they are in shock. Rescue workers continue to pull the bodies of humans and livestock from waters in the region.

I could go on. There are tons of these stories, and the list will only grow because as I write this, the news tells me that there are still—three weeks after the storms passed—600 impassable roads in the state. In a mountainous region with challenging terrain, that means people are still trapped, hungry, ill, or even dead in or near their homes, and no one will know until the roads that lead to their doors are rebuilt, or someone helicopters in to check on them. The body count keeps climbing. Power restoration efforts will take time because in so many of these areas, workers must rebuild roads or else hike into an area on foot and hand-dig holes before new electrical poles can be erected and strung.

We are proud of these mountains and their history, but they have a distinct disadvantage when dumped with excess water. On flat terrain, rainwater has a whisper of a chance to seep into the earth. When it lands on slopes, rain doesn’t so much seep as it rushes downhill, seeking the lowest point. This process happens with alarming speed. This simple concept had never occurred to me until it was explained to me by a climate scientist I interviewed when I first moved here twenty years ago. As a species, we should cultivate the habit of shutting up and listening to scientists speak more often.

That’s another reason why we remain in our home. We are safe. We have a roof over our heads. Electricity, Internet, and cell coverage work but remain erratic. As long as I can communicate, I will do so. We were trained as journalists. Stories are important to us. Someone’s got to collect them, and share them with others. I don’t own a chainsaw. I don’t keep an excavator on my property like my pal Tom. But I do what I do. They also serve who sit and write.

Now that utilities are less crappy, and gasoline is easier to come by, we have the luxury of moving on to other chores. Every morning, we get up and make a run to grab some non-potable water with which to flush our toilets. On the drive back home, we roll past a gauntlet of friendly strangers who offer us everything from free drinking water, free MREs, free ice, free cereal, free baby supplies, free bananas. It’s the bananas that kill me. Free bananas—seriously? Bananas are part of the reason we’re in this mess.

Saturday we went to the farmer’s market, where growers sell food that was coaxed from local soil, not shipped in from the tropics. Since this was the first market since the storms, the gathering was about so much more than buying groceries. A lot of hugging, a lot of swapping of stories.

My favorite farmer, the dude who always teases me with the term paisan, was not there. He, like me, is an Italian American guy from New Jersey. Earlier this spring, I texted him to ask when was the best time to get my meatball starts in the ground. He reminded me to mulch mine deeply with lasagna noodles. He’s got a beautiful sense of humor, and a smile that lights up hearts.

Why wasn’t he there? As soon as I could get back home and in range of our temperamental Wi-Fi, I dug around the web. I learned that Gaelan and Nicole’s farm was largely destroyed by Helene. Her brother-in-law had a GoFundMe site up to help them rebuild. The photos of their collapsed barn, shredded hoop houses, gullied-out crops, and upended farm equipment were horrifying.

A few days ago, my friend Steve wisely observed that everyone has a small bucket of resiliency that typically serves us in good stead, but it is surprising how quickly that bucket empties. Sitting on my patio Saturday, surrounded by piles of shattered tree limbs, a few feet from my patched roof, I broke down and wept. Can’t even call the guy to say how sorry I am about his farm. He’s out of touch until they erect temporary cell towers in his town, which is about an hour from me.

I turned 60 that weekend, and while I didn’t feel like celebrating, I certainly felt like stewing. I have literally become the old dude who shouts at clouds because they are blocking the tiny solar generator in his driveway.

Because I’m lucky does not mean I am not angry. Angry at climate change deniers. Angry at corporations who refuse to take a temporary hit to their profits to ensure that we live safely on this planet for a few more centuries. Angry at the billion-dollar corporate dickheads who own our severely understaffed local hospital, and whose rapacious greed has invited the scrutiny of our state attorney general and the feds. (This is the same hospital you may have heard about in the news, whose emergency room is so screwed right now that staffers were instructing patients to “go in buckets” that would later be emptied by nurses. The city’s lack of water means surgeons cannot easily scrub in, so please don’t need surgery, folks…)

I am angry at politicians who keep texting me to offer their thoughts and prayers during my hour of need, to tell me that they are “with me,” only to remind me a sentence later that they’re counting on my vote on November 5th.

I am angry at the jerks who jacked our local postal workers in the early days of the recovery to steal Amazon packages. Angry at the narcissists who so badly needed gasoline that they felt it necessary to threaten their neighbors at gunpoint at the pumps, then—as in one instance—run those poor people over as they drove away.

And let’s face it, I am angry because I could really use water in my damn pipes. In recent years I have become a profligate drinker of water. The cancer treatment I had back in 2022 robbed me of fully functioning salivary glands, so even the slightest physical effort leaves me parched. After a day of hauling wood and buckets of water, I am desperate to guzzle whatever is handy.

Okay, true, I sometimes slake my thirst with beer. But my tipple of choice is mostly FEMA’s bottled water. I feel increasingly guilty about the rising tide of plastic in my recycling bin.

My attorney neighbor, who grew up here, tells me that the mayor and city council have fought for seventy-five years about doing something about our rickety and woefully outdated water treatment facility. Successive administrations kept passing the buck on upgrades, because no one had the balls to come clean about the costs and probable property tax hikes, nor did they have the political will to inconvenience citizens and tourists with what could be a months-long process of interruptions at the tap. Well, guess what? The plant flooded, must now be rebuilt from scratch, and our much-vaunted tourism economy is destroyed. Great work, guys.

As the lady says, I am lucky and heartbroken. I have dry mouth and I must scream.

* * *

Apologies for the long post, and the paucity of photos.

I can only share my experience, but I’d remind visitors here that these storms impacted much of the American southeast. If you are moved to donate on the national level, the Red Cross and the Salvation Army are good options.

If you want to help my city specifically, two good organizations are Manna Food Bank and BeLoved Asheville.

Since we’re a literary blog, I’m posting links to bookstores in the region. If you’re contemplating buying books online, I’m sure that they would appreciate your business. (Before you buy, check websites to see if they are able to fulfill orders.)

Malaprop’s - Asheville, NC
Firestorm Co-op - Asheville, NC
Bagatelle Books - Asheville, NC
Plott Hound Books - Burnsville, NC
Blue Moon Books - Canton, NC
Blue Ridge Books - Waynesville, NC
Sassafrass on Sutton - Black Mountain, NC
Sassafrass on Main - Waynesville, NC
City Lights Bookstore - Sylva, NC
Little Switzerland Books & Beans - Little Switzerland, NC

Two wonderful local sources for used and rare books are:
Biblio - Asheville, NC
Irving Book Company  - Asheville, NC

Hopefully, I’ll see you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

And to Think It Was All Started by a Fish

I was ten years old when Jaws hit movie theaters in 1975. There was no particular reason why my parents would take me and my siblings to see such a movie. Even after the movie became the hit of that summer, one that forever altered the summer movie-going experience, we still didn’t go. In general, the ‘rents didn’t like shelling out for theater runs, and they certainly didn’t relish the thought of dealing with the nightmares that would inevitably ensue among their three young sons after such a viewing.

How wise they were! A few summers later, when we visited a beloved aunt who lived at the Jersey Shore, she unhesitatingly took us to see the sequel at a drive-in. It’s generally acknowledged today that that movie (and all the sequels that followed) were terrible, but tell that to a kid who refused to enter the water for the rest of his so-called beach vacation.

Even today, I don’t really “do” horror. Don’t read or watch much of it, because, well, it scares me. The Jaws movie poster and the gigantic black-and-white ads that appeared in our local newspaper that year both mesmerized and scared me off. But this was also a transitional period for me, during which I routinely dipped in and out of grown-up books. And wherever I prowled garage sales, flea markets, and library sales, the Bantam paperback edition of Jaws was ubiquitous and dirt cheap. The going rate for used paperbacks then was ten cents. Who could resist?

The book scared the bejesus out of me, of course. It was coldly scientific, and occasionally salacious. The affair between Chief Brody’s wife and ichthyologist Hooper, for one thing, is something I can recall with a crazy amount of detail today, though I haven’t looked at the book in forty-plus years. Guess their sex scene was seared into my brain. For years after, I didn’t rush to read other books Peter Benchley wrote, but they were always on my radar. I read one of his later thrillers as a slightly older kid who was now interested in writing, and I remember mulling it over for days. How few characters he needed to create conflict, how the action of the book neatly shook down into three decent acts, and so on.

After college, a girlfriend dragged me to see Jaws: The Revenge, which I frankly found repellant on so many levels that I never dipped into the franchise again.

I had occasion to reconsider my Jaws experience sometime last year when my wife bought the first and arguably only watchable film, and started leaving it on while we cooked dinner. It’s crazy; this film was such a huge part of American culture, but I don’t think I had ever watched it all the way through until now.

Once, for work, I had traveled to Martha’s Vineyard—where the movie was shot—to interview a coppersmith for a home magazine. I spent an entire day with the (now departed) Travis Tuck, driving around the island to look at all the weathervanes he had designed and constructed for his high-end clients. But the very first weathervane he created, which launched his career, was a raging shark for the top of Quint’s shack. (The artisan firm Tuck started still sells replicas, and they’ve since created a velociraptor for one of Spielberg’s homes.)

T-shirt No. 1

I knew Tuck’s story. I had seen photos of the weathervane he created, but I still never watched the entire film. And when I did, finally, two things leaped out at me. One: Hollywood would never allow such normal-looking people in movies these days. The film looks like Spielberg went to Martha’s Vineyard and just started shooting ordinary people he saw walking around. Not even the movie stars—Shaw, Scheider, Dreyfuss, etc.—look like movie stars. Two: the film adheres to a nearly flawless story structure better than Benchley’s book.

Some people call it a horror movie, but most describe it as a thriller. Our own Fran Rizer called it a “howdunnit,” because the killer is known from the beginning. We watch, she said, to learn how our heroes will catch and kill it.

Most stories need a character in a setting with a problem. The character tries to solves the problem, and fails. Their try/fail cycle continues as the stakes rise. Things go south, leading to a moment when all is nearly lost. The character must do or die. And lo—he/she succeeds and triumphs. That’s police chief Brody in Jaws.

The biggest chunk of action happens when these three very different men hit the open sea to kill the shark. Their skills levels vary, but each has their own reasons for being there. In the end, the guy with the least shark experience defeats the monster. Holy crap—a great story.

I dug deep into the lore of my new favorite old movie a few weeks ago. When my wife returned from a trip to Martha’s Vineyard with a girlfriend, she presented me a couple of Jaws T-shirts that will I never wear for fear of coffee stains. And when she told me that Vineyarders are gearing up to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the film next year, my mind was blown. The significance of the dates had escaped me.

Gee—time flies, huh, folks?

This April 1974 New York Times Magazine
cover story offered a comprehensive
behind-the-scenes look at the
book’s journey to publication.
(Link to story below.)

It’s actually a dual anniversary. The book pubbed in February 1974, which makes 2024 a 50^th anniversary suitable for a lesson in the changing world of book publishing. Imagine: a writer meets for lunch with a book editor, sketches out an idea for a book he thinks he might want to write, and the editor offers to pay him a $1,000 just to write the first three chapters, and see what they all think about the concept.

After the editor buys the full manuscript, he circulates a few chapters around the office daring his fellow staffers to read the first chapter only. They all know they have something potentially big, but they waffle on the title and cover art. I don’t think the book would have had the same punch if it had been called Leviathan Rising, or The Stillness in the Water, as originally proposed.

When the book launched, it was reviewed twice by the New York Times (something that still happens to this day), with both reviewers dismissing it snottily. Lord, what fools these mortals be! The hardcover parked itself on the Times Bestseller List for 45 weeks, and the paperback sold 9 million copies by the end of 1975, after the movie came out. (The book sales figure stands at an estimated 20 million today) Bantam’s paperback, which is the one I read and the edition we all know, is the first one to carry that indelible shark image that made the franchise. (You can read the story behind the book’s covers at a link below; apparently the original painting has been lost.)

T-shirt No. 2. Wish I knew who designed it.

The movie was Spielberg’s third. It was a big deal to entrust an $8 million movie to a neophyte director who was not yet 30. His decision to shoot on the open sea instead of a backlot tank was a choice that nearly bankrupted the production. Saltwater wreaked havoc with the pneumatic guts of “Bruce,” the three mechanical robots that brought the monster to life, causing the production to fall behind by about 100 days.

We, they, all of us laugh about this now. The finished film was the first to earn $100 million, and it taught Hollywood the wisdom of releasing summer “tentpole” or (must-see blockbusters) films. It also taught them that sequels could be a great thing for them, albeit only occasionally for us. The success transformed author Peter Benchley into a lifetime activist and advocate for marine life. A longtime lover of the sea, he was horrified to learn that the thing he created was now responsible for the wanton slaughter of sharks by macho idiots who believed that they were purging the seas of manhunters. Before he died in 2006 at age 65, he told interviewers that he regretted creating the impression that a great white would intentionally attack humans out of spite or malice.

Script is currently only available
from the licensors of the play.

It’s interesting to see how the book and film keep spawning new creations, and no, I’m not just talking about T-shirts, yellow drum earrings, and Jaws-themed etsy swag. Right before Covid, a small stage play called The Shark is Broken debuted in London, co-written by Ian Shaw, the son of actor Robert Shaw, who so masterfully portrayed the shark hunter Quint in the film. Poignantly, Ian Shaw played his father in both the London and New York productions.

The 90-minute comedy-drama is takes place during the filming of Jaws, when the three main actors—Scheider, Shaw, and Dreyfuss—are stuck aboard the set of their boat, the Orca, killing time, playing pub games, drinking heavily, and bickering while Spielberg’s team tries to fix their famously temperamental mechanical “co-star.”

I loved reading the playscript. I think it would make an engaging, funny movie in its own right, but I should probably mention that reviews have been mixed on both sides of the pond. The Shaw character struggles with his alcoholism throughout the play, and twice botches his famous USS Indianapolis scene. He despises the lines the scriptwriters have asked him to speak, and begs Spielberg’s indulgence to rewrite it. (The elder Shaw was an accomplished novelist and playwright.) The play culminates with his rendition of what is now regarded as one of the greatest monologues in cinema. It’s the scene that reveals Quint’s psychology and why he wants the shark dead.

Of course, the larger conceit of the play is that all three actors have no freaking clue how well this movie will do, and how it will forever change their lives. Well, I thought as I read, they were hardly alone, were they?

Thanks for reading. Some background material that you might enjoy:

A look back at the book phenomenon. (NYT)

An article on the making of the iconic cover design. (Print Mag)

The exhaustive 1974 article on the making of the bestseller. (NYT Mag)

Widow of Peter Benchley shares her recollections. (Marthas Vineyard Times)

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See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Giving It Away for Free, Part II

 

I'll take that with a side of crazy.

Pardon me, dearly beloved, while I rant. I had a weird week that saw me driving to and returning from a long wedding weekend when I shoulda coulda been at Bouchercon. Adding to my exasperation were a couple of weird emails from complete strangers who, on a strength of very slim connections, nevertheless felt compelled to write asking for help with their writing.

Fans of the Joe Show will recall that I have written about the dangers of offering your writing/editing expertise for free to writers who don’t do the requisite work. Since I wrote that post on the topic, I have attempted to change the error of my ways. When a close college friend asked me to read and comment on her nonfiction book proposal, I declined, saying that I didn’t feel comfortable working with friends that way. I referred her to the website reedsy.com, a wonderful organization, which, among other things, allows editorial freelancers to hang out their shingles offering services to authors, most of whom are intending to self publish. My friend did find an editor who had expertise editing titles on the geopolitical subject of her book that I was unqualified to judge. So, in that case, my brush-off was a win-win-win—for my friend, the hired editor, and me.

Years ago, as part of a class my wife and I taught on nonfiction book proposals, I offered to read any resulting proposals the students generated. Only two or three followed through on writing their proposals, and availed themselves of our offer. Which we sorta, kinda predicted. Oddly, the student with the best idea did not contact me until this past spring, a full seven years after the class ended. He offered to pay me to read, since he’d clearly blown through the window of opportunity. But I did not feel good accepting payment since I’d read the work of his classmates at no cost. Before I made a decision, I asked him to send me the first three pages of his proposal.

Holy cow, what a beautiful writer. He had absorbed all the lessons of the class, and applied it to his 19th century true story, and I knew my time would not be wasted. He’s close to submitting to agents, and I’m genuinely looking forward to reading the final draft.

But for every win, there are people like this fellow, who wrote last week. All you need to know before you read his email is that back in 2009 my wife and I traditionally published a book about the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, which has since sold more than 100,000 copies.

Subject: Creating the index for my book

Message: Hello, I am writing a book about the Signers of the Declaration of Independence. Naturally, your book has been a valuable reference. I’m to the point of creating the index and I am flummoxed amount [sic] how to do this. So far I have 380 entries in the index. The book has not been paginated yet, but, thinking ahead, is there an easy way to make the page assignments? BTW, I have a PhD from [REDACTED]. I would greatly appreciate any advice you could give me on this. Thanks.

Excuse me while I pick up the pieces of my skull off the floor, and bind my wounds. I don’t know where to start with this. Now, I’d be the first to admit that our big ol’ book of 56 biographies of the Signers is not a terribly original idea. Indeed, the first books of this type were published in the 1820s, when some of the Signers were still living. But still—who writes the author of a competing work with a manuscript formatting issue, and expects a helpful response?

Imagine writing the following email:

Dear Mr. McCullough:
I greatly enjoyed your book 1776, about Washington’s leadership of the Continental Army during the pivotal year of Independence. In fact, it inspired me to write a similar book on the exact same topic, which is also called 1776! The only trouble is, I am having trouble the setting the margins in my MS Word document, so I cannot transmit the book to my editor. Misery me, lack-a-day-dee! If you can help with this, or make time for a Zoom call to discuss, I’m free on the following days…

Holy freaking bananas.

Then, recently, there was the guy who attended one of my wife’s book events, complimented her on her boots, and thus felt entitled to write asking if we could recommend a) an editor who could read his pandemic year memoir and offer advice, or b) a literary agent who could do the same thing. The kicker: He wasn’t sure the book was ready for submission, but he felt if these fine contacts of ours read the book in its entirety, they would know exactly what do with his manuscript.

As it happens, I knew exactly what he should do with his manuscript, but I was too much of gentleman to spell it out in an email.

I know by now that I should not Engage With Crazy but how else could I come up with columns for you lovely SleuthSayers people?

So, yes, I wrote both of these guys back, politely suggesting they consider hiring editors and indexers via the site I mentioned before. (Reedsy, I’m sorry. I love you, but you’ve become my go-to brush-off suggestion.)

To my Declaration of Independence doppelgänger, I wrote saying he could hire tons of freelancers to work on his projects, including—haha—someone who could run a plagiarism check on the doc before it went out the door. Haven’t heard back, so I don’t know if he appreciated my wit.

As for the Covid memoirist, he wrote back saying he liked the online database I recommended but he was a little annoyed because he could not tell if the freelance editors on offer had decent connections to agents. What good was hiring a freelance editor, he asked, if they can’t refer you to an agent?

Did not respond. I can only afford one brain hemorrhage a week.

* * *

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Mr. Grisham Has Thoughts About Your "Book"

One of the classic tenets of the screenwriting trade is that writers make poor film protagonists. Yes, the writer character has been done well in movies such as Barton Fink, The Ghost Writer, Adaptation, and Stranger Than Fiction. But in general, it’s painful to watch a scene in a movie of someone writing a book. This applies as well to reading a novel in which a character is struggling to write…anything. This too has been done—The Shining, Wonder Boys—but it’s probably not the best premise for anyone contemplating their next book. I mean, where’s the action?

But what about a real-life story about a neophyte author who dreams of writing a thriller? The man in question is a former ad exec named Tony Vanderwarker. When we first meet him in his nonfiction memoir, he’s written a slew of unpublished books, mostly comic novels. His latest has recently landed with a splat on the desks of agents and editors in the Big Apple.

He longs to try yet again. Maybe a thriller, thinks he. His got an idea about a missing nuke he’s been itching to try. One night over dinner, he shares his pain with a fellow scribe. Mr. Vanderwarker tells us that while he himself grew up in an affluent Connecticut suburb, his friend is a son of a Mississippi cotton farmer. As the meal wraps, his buddy makes him an offer. What if I coach you through the novel-writing process? You do all the work, of course. It’s your book. But I’ll be on the sidelines, reading your outlines and manuscripts, giving you notes and pep talks along the way. What do you say?

It’s an offer Mr. Vanderwarker simply cannot refuse. The two men are dining in the tony historic city of Charlottesville, Virginia. And his neighbor and friend is none other than John Freaking Grisham.

And so the scene is set for a hilarious, rollicking Bildungsroman as these two nutty guys crisscross the nation in a nifty convertible in search—

Uh, no. Actually, it’s exactly what I told you it would be: a book called about a guy trying to write a book. It’s called Writing With the Master (Skyhorse, 2014).

Speaking as a writer who struggles to juggle my own writing with the demands of ghostwriting clients, admin tasks, my wife’s work, the house and garden, and all the other things life throws one’s way, including friends who want advice on their writing, I was frankly astonished that someone of Grisham’s caliber would surrender so much of his time to help a friend. In promo interviews, Mr. Vanderwarker said Grisham was inspired by his recent reading of an account of Chef Daniel Boulud’s mentoring of a younger chef.

In the course of 196 pages, the two writers embark on a process that is both fascinating and brutal to watch. Fascinating because it’s probably the best look anyone is ever going to get of Grisham’s creative process. (That’s the reason I bought the book. Grisham granted permission to excerpt his critiques.) Brutal because, let’s face it, unless you are a very special individual, the first few books you write will be unpublishable. They’re critical to your development, but they are usually not something you can sell. And thrillers are among the toughest genres to nail.

Mr. Vanderwarker can write. He proves it page after page, with a breezy, conversational, self-deprecating description of their process that will leave writers nodding, “Yep—been there, done that.” I must have found the book suspenseful as well, because I kept reading to find out what happens.

At that first dinner, Grisham tells Mr. V the plain truth: beginnings and endings are easy. It’s the middle that kills you. Grisham’s mantra is SIMPLICITY. The premise has to grab readers fast, hook them, and keep them reading for 360 pages without losing their attention to extraneous subplots. He instructs his pupil to first write a three-sentence synopsis, then a three-act outline.

Personally, I hate creating outlines for books. Never been able to make in-depth ones work. But many people swear by them. (If you have access to Master Class, you can actually download a PDF of one of James Patterson’s outlines.) Grisham shreds Mr. V’s first attempt, telling him to SLOW DOWN. There’s just too much going on in his proposed book. “Most plots fail because they’re too complicated,” Grisham explains. “A strong central plot that stays on track can afford the luxury of spinning off subplots, but not too many.”

Mr. Vanderwarker spends three months writing outlines before Grisham gives him the go-ahead to write—wait for it—a chapter-by-chapter outline. Mr. Vanderwarker splutters but acquiesces. When finally permitted to write the book, his first draft elicits a “Gee—that’s nice, honey,” response from his wife, and is later eviscerated by Grisham, who can only stand to read the first half.

The strength of Writing With the Master is reading the astonishingly thoughtful memos Grisham shoots back to each of Mr. V’s outlines and drafts. Some of them are so punchy and no-BS that they brought a smile to my face. You see, I read every one of my wife’s books, offering copious comments along the way. Her favorite comment of mine is the minuscule drawing I once sketched in a margin. It depicted a tiny Yoda, garbed in Jedi robes and brandishing a lightsaber. Rising from his mouth was a dialogue balloon that read: “A sentence this is not.”

Grisham’s pencil edits pull no punches. He underlines redundancies, questions plot points, tiny details, and calls his pupil out on his occasional authorial pontifications:

• Isn’t Sigma Nu a fraternity?
• not believable
• Isn’t it a Sunday?
• no one would ever trust the goons
• abrupt ending
• way too much plot
• sermon
• bad sermon

It’s tough going for our hero, who speaks often of steeling himself with a manly beverage to re-read Grisham’s notes, even weeks after he has received them.

As I read, I thought of the times I have read the work of newer writers. I wanted to value and honor what had been attempted, but often I found myself thinking, “Wow. The premise is cool. This could be really good…if they were a better writer.”

But I found that it’s really hard to put into words how something can be made better. This should be more vivid. Stronger. Tighten this. You can offer such advice, but unless you’re sitting at the keyboard, literally editing someone’s MS in front of them, they will interpret those words differently, and execute to their current level of skill.

I think that’s what Grisham is up against in this book. He knows when something isn’t working, but not always how to coach a better performance from his mentee. Like many experts, he’s running on instinct. He himself would never waste 100 words on a scene that goes nowhere because his gut just knows that it is a non-starter. But despite his caveats, the neophyte plods on, devoting thousands of words to a subplot that smacks into a wall, and must later be cut.

Years go by. Years. Mr. Vanderwarker’s third draft is far better. Grisham, perhaps up to eyeballs in missing nukes after all this time, announces that he can’t give much more help. The book is about as good as it’s ever going to be. He suggests sending it out to some agents and editors to elicit their verdict. Big shock—the book’s DOA as soon as it makes the rounds.

Mr. Vanderwarker has told interviewers that only after he wrote the nonfiction account of their mentorship did most of Grisham’s notes sink in. With fresh eyes, Mr. V revised his thriller. I don’t want to give too much away, but suffice to say the entire experience results in two published books.

And Mr. Vanderwarker surprises us all in the end with a satisfying career shift that was cleverly foreshadowed all along. Not thriller-worthy perhaps, but masterful nonetheless.

---

See you in three weeks!
— Joe
josephdagnese.com

The Franklin-Edgerton Outlining Method Revealed!

I went to journalism school. It’s one of the tracks high school guidance counselors recommend to kids who want to write. If you’re like me, you get two years into your coursework before it dawns on you that the profession expects to you do things that terrify you. Namely, ask questions of complete strangers and become an absolute noodge in service to The Story.

My college years were solidly in the 1980s, which meant that some of my writing professors were products of the era of New Journalism, which was born in the 1960s and epitomized by the nonfiction work of such writers as Truman Capote, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Jimmy Breslin, and countless others.

The first rule of New Journalism is that great nonfiction can and should borrow its techniques from great works of fiction. Because newspaper and magazine stories are short, the ideal model for a nonfiction article is the fictional short story.

Why? A great short story has a beginning, middle, and an end. A great short story gives us characters that we care about. It’s dramatic, romantic, exciting, suspenseful—depending on dictates of its genre. And regardless of genre, great stories suck you in and keep you reading. If journalists could do all that in the pages of a daily newspaper or a magazine, well, wow, they would really be onto something.

In my day, one of the oft-anthologized stories first-year journalism students encountered in their textbooks was one called “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” by Jon Franklin, a onetime science writer for The Baltimore Sun.

The story was simple. I’ll sketch it out in broad strokes, and beg your forgiveness for the eventual spoilers. A patient named Mrs. Kelly was born with a tangle of malformed blood vessels in her brain. The defect worsened as she got older, generating life-threatening aneurysms and a host of medical issues. Blindness in one eye, hemorrhages, loss of taste and smell, seizures—not fun stuff. When her brain started causing leg paralysis, Mrs. Kelly decided it was time to address the problem once and for all. She was sick of living with the monster—her words—in her brain. The trouble was, for most of her life this Gordian knot was regarded by most doctors as largely inoperable. But medical science and technology were changing. A doctor named Ducker thought it was now possible to repair the tangle. But as he and his team warned Mrs. Kelly numerous times, the surgery might well kill her. The patient agreed to take the chance. She didn’t want to live another minute with this thing in her brain.

Again, remember, this is a true story. If there is tension in this story—and believe me there is—it’s there as the result of good reporting. I can’t tell you how many times as a student I’d read a piece of creative nonfiction, and ask the professor something along the lines of, “But how the hell could Talese have known what that dude was thinking?”

The answer was always the same: “He asked.”

(See earlier reference to being a damned noodge.)

Franklin’s genius was to structure his nonfiction article from the POV of the doctor, not the patient, from the moment the doc started his day at 6:30 AM until the conclusion of the surgery at 1:43 PM. The writing is vivid, tight, and painfully suspenseful.

The article ran for the first time in The Baltimore Evening Sun in December 1978, and has the distinction of being the first newspaper feature story to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Franklin later went on to teach journalism. His book, Writing for Story, became a classic, the book nonfiction writers recommend to anyone who wants to make “real” stories come to life on the page. In the intro, Franklin talks about his struggles as a young newspaperman. He kept bashing his brains against his typewriter, hoping to find the secret to organizing his copious notes into cogent reads. Reporters amass a ton of real-life facts in their notebooks, and they can easily make the assumption that the recitation of those facts will necessarily lead to a decent piece. Wrong, says Franklin, without a plan you will more often descend into “spaghetti-ing”—the endless unfurling of facts that lead nowhere.

If he wanted his stories to have an impact, he realized that he could model his pieces on the work of great short story practitioners. The outlining method he preached was innovative at the time. When my wife and I discovered it in the early 2000s, we often started our nonfiction books by crafting out a beat sheet in the Franklin style. Denise used Franklin’s method help her structure not only her first big nonfiction book but each of its chapters. When she saw our Post-It-festooned copy on my desk when I was writing this post, her first response was, “Oh—I should use that for the one I’m writing now!”

Before I get to the method, let me switch genres—and jump back in time. It’s August 2014. The crime writer Les Edgerton describes on his blog an outlining method that he has used forever. He talks about learning how to outline in school as a kid, and how horrible that Roman numeral-A, B, C method was. Most writers are intuitive. They don’t need anything that detailed, confusing, and worthless.

To write his short story “I Should Seen a Credit Arranger,” for example, Edgerton tells us that he hammered out the following outline:

• Debt endangers Pete
• Tommy cons Pete into a kidnapping
• Pete and Tommy botch the kidnapping
• Pete escapes
• Pete pays for mistake

That’s it—five bullet points that quickly summarize the flow of the action. No line is longer than six words. With this outline, Edgerton tells us, he was able to write an 18-page short story, and later expand that story into a 92,000-word novel (The Genuine, Imitation, Plastic Kidnapping, Down & Out Books, 2014). The same outline worked perfectly for both. His discussion of the method is short and sweet; I urge you to read it at the link above because I am intentionally leaving out the good stuff.

Les taught this outlining technique to all his fiction-writing students, and at least 20 of them had gone on to land book deals, so he felt he was onto something. When someone thanked him in the comments of this blog post, he wrote: “I wish I could take credit for it, but I came across it years ago in a craft book and I wish I could remember the author so I could give him credit!”

As soon as I read the post, the cadence of those five punchy beats were immediately familiar to me. I shot him a note, telling him that he was using Franklin’s method. Considering his interest in long-form journalism, Franklin never applied the method to fiction. And that, I told Edgerton, was something I had struggled with ever since. It seemed to me that I ought to be able to apply Franklin’s method to my fiction, but doing so successfully kept eluding me. Prior to this, my story outlines were quick, dirty, and sloppy. (I’ll share some in a future post.) But Edgerton’s post is geared specifically for fiction, and shows us how to use it to craft not only stories but entire novels.

Man, was he pleased when I wrote him. “I hated not being able to give him his proper credit,” Edgerton wrote me back. “I have or had all of Jon’s books at one time but can’t locate it now so may have lost it.”

At first glance, Franklin’s outline method doesn’t look like much. It doesn’t seem like such a big deal to jot down five bullet points on a scrap of paper, and start writing. But the essence of your story boils down to choosing the right verbs in your outline.

Watch how Franklin’s outline evolved before he wrote “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster.” (And here, folks, we get to the spoilers—forgive me.)

His first outline read:

Complication: Woman gambles life
Development:
1. Ducker enters brain
2. Ducker clips aneurysm
3. Monster thwarts Ducker
Resolution: Woman loses gamble

Notice: the 1^st and 5^th points on the five-point outline are connected to each other. Complication must lead inevitably to Resolution. In the parlance of fiction, we have an inciting incident, following by three action points on the try-fail cycle, and a conclusion.

Franklin was writing a newspaper feature article. And yes, the piece was sad, but he didn’t want to bring down his readers. So he tried another outline, this time from the doctor’s POV:

Complication: Ducker challenges monster
Development:
1. Ducker enters brain
2. Ducker clips aneurysm
3. Monster ambushes Ducker
Resolution: Monster wins

This story was better, but still depressing. Franklin tried one more time, hoping to inject a ray of hope.

Complication: Ducker gambles life
Development:
1. Ducker enters brain
2. Ducker clips aneurysm
3. Monster ambushes Ducker
Resolution: Ducker accepts defeat

At the end of the operation, an exhausted Ducker staggers out of the operating room. He eats his brown-bag lunch in the hospital cafeteria, where he manages to respond to a few of Franklin’s questions. As he bites into his sandwich, you can just tell how crushed he is, but he must go on. There are tons of other patients out there, and he can’t let this outcome bring him down. He is a neurosurgeon, and this is the life. He will live to defeat more monsters, again and again.

Franklin, a reporter writing about real people, understood, captured, and reflected for his readers the greatest truth any story can ever share. Defeating monsters is one of the greatest themes in fiction. Possibly the greatest metaphor of them all.

After our exchange, I never connected with Edgerton again. In January 2024, when I saw that Franklin had died at the age of 82, I made a note to contact Les Edgerton. I thought he might find the news of interest. But it also occurred to me that Edgerton’s blog posts had for some reason stopped appearing in my RSS feed.

Investigating, I learned that Les himself passed away at age 80 in 2023 of complications from a bout with Covid. His work and his classes shaped many writers in the crime fiction community, and I know he is missed.

Both of these gentlemen—who never met—are forever linked in my mind by this single outlining method. One who unabashedly borrowed it from the world of short fiction, and the other who sensibly returned it.

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See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Mr. Swartwood’s Marvelous Box of BOGO Swag

My wife runs a monthly authors-in-conversation series at a local watering hole. She started it just before Covid hit, went virtual during the pandemic, and returned to the live event format when that sad business was over and done with. Now she’s got a steady stream of regulars who show up each month to hear her chat about the writing process with authors who probably would not have considered visiting our town if she had not sought them out (and we did not live in a place that calls itself Beer City, USA).

One of the recent authors was my longtime pal Robert Swartwood, a successful hybrid author who had recently branched into the traditional pub world with the launch of an unusual thriller, The Killing Room (Blackstone, 2023).

Last October Mr. S. trekked to North Carolina from his home in Pennsylvania for the weekend. When we arrived at the venue, he popped the trunk of his vehicle and pulled out some boxes, which contained stacks of large-format bookmarks, chunky attractive magnets, and tons of books.

Magnets, as they appear on my file cabinet.

Yes, he was well aware that our local indie bookstore was handling sales. But Robert had another idea in mind. The books he had flagrantly transported across five state lines represented a chance to do some marketing—and house cleaning—at the same time.

Most authors have a ridiculous number of their own books on their shelves. If you’re traditionally published, your contract stipulates that your publisher will send X copies of your hardcover, and another X of your paperback when that format drops. You may have bought additional copies direct from the publisher using your author discount, and you may have gotten a freebie box from your editor or agent when they tidied their office. If you’re self-pubbed, you certainly have a stash too.

At the end of his talk with Denise, Swartwood announced to the crowd that anyone who bought the new traditionally published book from our local bookstore’s on-site table could take their pick any of his previous titles for free. (While supplies lasted, of course.)

He had no idea how this Buy-One-Get-One-Free gambit would play out, but he was curious to try it. As a Big 5 publishing exec once told the New York Times, when asked to comment on the proliferation of free ebooks on the ’Zon, “Free is not a business model.” True, but sometimes it makes strategic sense.

Yes, paperbacks of Swartwood’s indie print-on-demand titles represented money out of his pocket, but those copies were a sunk cost. Copies of books he had written under a pseudonym for an Amazon imprint had cost him nothing, as they were provided under the terms of his contract. Regardless of the source, he was tired of all these books taking up space at home. And he really wanted to show his new publishers that he could move sales of the new title under the Swartwood name. So why not offer free books as giveaways?

Well, it worked! Many people that day bought more than one copy of The Killing Room, enticed by the freebies. I saw people leaving with a mix of four to six books, which confirmed my long-held theory that at any given time people at book events would probably buy multiple copies to gift to friends or family, but are holding back due to cost. (They certainly do during the Christmas season.) But in the other 10-11 months, if you gave them an excuse to spend, they go nuts.

The freebie hit of the afternoon was the short-but-sweet Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer (Norton, 2010), which Swartwood conceived and edited. The 188-page volume contains 125 short stories—no, I did not type that figure incorrectly—by modern writers such as Ha Jin, Peter Straub, James Frey, and Joyce Carol Oates that take their inspiration from the tragic Hemingway short “story” about baby shoes.

At a book event this past weekend, I too pulled a Swartwood. Ages ago, when I first taught myself how to format POD print editions of my indie fiction titles, I ordered a stack of paperbacks I had designed of four of my short stories. Back then, I mostly wanted to see what they looked like, and to judge if doing short stories in print was feasible. I had given most of them away, but I found a few stragglers on my office shelf a while ago.

Turns out, people last Saturday loved the freebies. When I asked which one of the four titles they would like, many people told me to choose for them. One guy humorously quipped, “After all, you must know my tastes pretty well based on meeting me five minutes ago!” Everyone expected me to sign those copies as well. Might well be the first time I ever signed a 23-page “book”!

It’s fun to give away free stuff. Swartwood’s lovely magnets were a hit too. Author Ben Wolf says in his book, Power Author: A Quick Guide to Mastering Live Events, that magnets are a pricy but smart giveaway at live events. Unlike bookmarks and other easily discarded paper items, magnets end up stuck to someone’s fridge or office file cabinet. They’re the gift that keeps giving—to authors. Month after month, year after year, they’re advertising your name and book—if done right.

Yes, I’m aware that all of this stuff costs. But for most of us, they are a reasonable tax deduction. The question then becomes how little do you have to spend to make people deliriously happy, and have them walk away thinking that they have gotten a bit of a steal? I was delighted to see that free short stories in print were greeted with the same enthusiasm as full-size novels. Depending on page count, the wholesale price of a POD novel costs me about $4-$7. A 60-page paperback “Bloody Signorina”—an AHMM short that was a Derringer finalist—costs me $2.30. That’s not free, but it’s a nice giveaway for friends, buyers, editors and other high-value contacts you encounter at conferences.

A 60-page paperback still has enough
 of a spine to stand up. Who knew?

In a certain sense, this little book of mine serves as a nice “business card.” In one volume, people get a sense of my crime writing style, a list of all my books, my website URL, my newsletter sign-up info, contact info, and sample chapters to another book. A nice package overall.

Some other stuff I bring to book events in my handy tote bag:

QR Sign-up: Passersby “shoot” the code, and are directed to the newsletter sign-up at your website. (It also alerts them to the fact that you have a website.) Buy a plastic “Stand-up Sign Holder” at your stationery store. (This one is the 5-x-7 inch model.) Design a 5x7-inch image on Canva with your details. Use a QR code generator that isn’t spammy; the free one by Kindlepreneur is perfect. Make sure that people can easily find the newsletter sign-up form on your web page. You don’t want them scrolling and getting lost. Optimize your website for mobile devices. If they are going to sign up, they will do so on their phones within a minute of seeing your sign, not on their desktops at home.

Clipboard & Sign-up Sheet: Besides the QR code sign-up, I still offer a hard copy sign-up sheet, because typing on phones is still too fiddly for many people. I design the sign-up sheet with book cover art, and ask for two details only: name and email address. It gives folks something to do while you sign their book. Bear in mind that hard-copy signups mean you must now transcribe everyone’s chicken-scratch accurately and upload the deets to your mailing list. Check details before they depart the table to make sure you can read their writing.

A "chunky" bookmark, with full-bleed cover image.

 

My wife's stash of bookmarks and postcards.

Swag: You already know that I am not a fan of bookmarks. I feel the same way about stickers, postcards, and the like. They’re often money thrown down the drain. That said, if you or your publisher have invested money in this stuff, by all means set it all out neatly on your table. Readers who are not ready to buy, or who prefer to buy ebooks or print books online, will grab ’em because they’re free and an easy way to remember your book or byline. Place swag on your table where it will not interfere with the business of signing books or your sign-up sheet. Set out a few pieces of swag at a time, and replenish them as you go. (This will reduce the chance of some whack job swiping your entire inventory.) Swartwood told me that he doesn’t love standard bookmarks because book covers have to be the size of a thumbnail to fit on them. Far too small, in his opinion, to make an impact. If you’re going to print your book cover, he says, go big. His bookmarks (and Denise’s postcards) offer large images of their book covers. As for the magnets, he ordered in such quantity from PureButtons that his price-per-piece was $1 each. Personally, I would keep nice swag like that hidden and offer them to buyers only.

Writing Tools: You will need a fistful of ballpoint pens for sign-up sheets, and Sharpies for signing books. Always bring more than you think you’ll need. They are sucked into black holes.

Mr. Swartwood takes the dais at ThrillerFest to accept his award.

Congrats! (The ebook hit online retailers
 before the print edition hit stores.)

Lest you think I have dropped the thread on Mr. Swartwood’s writing, fear not! At ThrillerFest 2024, he accepted the ITW Thriller Award for Best E-Book Original for The Killing Room. The second book in the series is up for pre-order, and wouldn’t you know it, if you order the new book, you can get one of his old titles for free, while supplies last. (Order via the indie bookstore in his area for a signed copy, or discover your online options in his recent post.) Everyone loves BOGO, baby!

Book 2

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See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com