Best Selling Authors – The Writers in Residence

by Jill Amadio

Yesterday I watched a three-hour TV documentary on Henry David Thoreau. The life of the writer, poet, essayist, photographer, and author of several books, including “Walden,” was laid out in phenomenal detail. His opinions, deep thoughts, and reflections later led me to realize, as I subsequently watched “Murder, She Wrote,” that I have no such thoughts. I rarely reflect on nature, as Thoreau did, although I appreciate and enjoy it tremendously when I look out my slider at the newly budding trees that look back at me. I greet them every morning, but unless there is a decent breeze to indicate some kind of response by shaking their leaves, they ignore my enthusiastic “hello, there!”

The longer I listened and watched the history of Thoreau’s output of 20 volumes, the more I came to realize that my own thoughts and reflections are quite shallow.

I have no profound insights to share with readers, no cutting-edge philosophy to present as my own, no Thoreau-style literary observations.

But all is not lost, I comforted myself. My brand new reflection after that three-hour devotion to one of America’s most revered writers (born 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts) is that it is acceptable to be shallow. I have quite a few friends I regard lovingly as shallow, at least by the way they write and demonstrate, by their talks with me.

Shallow is sometimes a reputation given to mystery writers who write solely to present a puzzle. For this, they are to be celebrated and congratulated. Figuring out plots and sub-pots is, to my mind, quite an exercise in innovation, subtlety, at least a partial knowledge of forensics and weaponry, and, above all, a good grasp of human behavior. Yet these attributes and talents are not always appreciated.

Writers are urged to observe people in cafes, employees and bosses at work, and various situations that can provide grist for the mill.

A couple of blank faces stared back at me in my writing class last week when I talked about this, one of my favorite idioms. Grist for the mill that can provide an overwhelming preponderance of research we can’t use, or exactly the clue we are seeking to complete the puzzle.

I think that shallow thoughts are a gift. They prevent us from digging too deeply into a subject, wasting precious writing time on too much information. Shallow thoughts, however, can become too simplistic when we write ridiculous plots and create absurd characters.

On the other hand, an advantage of shallowness is a sense of freedom that comes with writing whatever we like and to heck with traditional publishers. Hail Amazon’s KDP!

Admittedly, several books published on their site are a waste of money, but they can serve as a lesson in what not to create.

I have not heard the word “shallow” spoken anywhere, perhaps never, not even with regard to the ocean or swimming pools. Yet to my mind, the word sounds exactly like the condition it is describing: of little depth.

I am not offended by my shallowness. It affords a certain caché to a sentence when written for all levels of readers, especially foreigners.

Another writing exercise I sometimes enjoy is substituting “shallow” for a word, turning a sentence into a conundrum that requires more thought than originally written, simply by considering the replacement.

I read that Thoreau advocated abandoning waste and illusion to discover life’s true essential needs. I’m not quite sure what that all means, but it is probably extremely profound. A writer’s needs are, I am sure, infinitesimal compared to those of the great writer when he wrote in longhand, while we have the luxury of laptops.

Thoreau died in 1861 at the age of 44, but his wide-ranging output and influence spanned abolitionism, civil disobedience, and world figures, including Mahatma Gandhi, Tolstoy, and Martin Luther King. All I seem to influence is my neighbor’s Beagle when it wants a treat.

Among my shallow thoughts are those of finances. How would I ever be able to afford the clothes with which to meet King Charles III, George Clooney, or Ralph Lauren? My shoe collection has dwindled to a few flat Mary Janes, and all my heels have gone to Goodwill.

Whither my latest mystery? Awaiting a bolt from the blue, or at the very least, a few shallow thoughts with which to proceed.

What is it like to sell 10 million copies of your books? I found it mind-boggling until I recently watched the Jackie Collins documentary. She sold 500 million copies of her 32 novels. But, hold on, Barbara Cartland wrote 723 romances and sold over a billion of them.

I recently interviewed Jane Green, who wrote a chick lit book “for fun” and went on to pen 20 more romance novels. She’s the author who sold the 10 million copies, and every title was a New York Times bestseller. I guess the numbing numbers are all relative when you consider that many other writers’ sales are up in the stratosphere, too.

The way the book business is these days sudden fame and fortune can appear out of nowhere, even after you’ve given up hope. J.K. Rowling wrote and self-published two books, one a Harry Potter, that went nowhere until a publisher picked it up from a bin in a secondhand bookstore as something to read on the train, as the story goes.

Fifty Shades by EL James, was also self-published as an eBook on an obscure Australian online blog site, The Writer’s Coffee Shop, until the novel was scooped up by traditional publisher Random House. The erotic novel subsequently sold 15.2 million copies. It is now a trilogy. Back in 2016 the original online publishers, two ladies, were fighting over royalties of the books in a Texas courthouse. It appears to be a tangled web as the plaintiff was a school teacher who claimed she was “done wrong” as Eliza would say, regarding her share of royalties. Which begs the question: why should the Coffee Shop blog owners receive royalties rather than a one-time fee? My research failed to answer such questions, especially one on how Texas and the Coffee Shop, based in a Sydney suburb, became embroiled in a lawsuit in the U.S. It sure sounds like a jolly interesting plot for a murder mystery.

Do I find it daunting to read about such sales? Do you? Should these figures encourage us to keep writing? Happily, I feel neither jealousy nor resentment. The more people are reading, the more they will buy books, although one is tempted to throw a few sex scenes into the mix.

Since moving to Connecticut and just an hour from New York City that throbs with best-selling authors, I feel inspired to keep going and in fact, I am resurrecting the Tosca mysteries between marketing the memoir I just published. It will be great to get back to creating a chilling murder after writing about aviation art.

There are book clubs galore here along the Eastern seaboard with Very Earnest Members, although I am still searching for one that discusses crime novels. Sisters In Crime Conneticut is a start. I know there are some book clubs online but after two years locked up I am relishing attending meetings in person.

As for book sales, I think of the tortoise and the hare and I plod along, blessed by the fact that I am able to write as freely as I wish without worrying about numbers or having a publisher breathing down my neck. A local writer said his Big Five publisher made him change his POV twice, and another writer confessed she was forced to rewrite her ending to suit the Highly Important Editor. Thomas Wolfe is famous for arguing incessantly with his editor, Maxwell Perkins, about cutting his classic Look Homeward, Angel down to a reasonable word count from the 333,000 words Wolfe is said to have written, but it worked and the result was magnificent. It continues to sell today. As it should.

Your thoughts on the big bucks?

Image by kalhh from Pixabay