Talking Titles: 'A Kiss Before You Leave Me'

When I put together a bundle of links (one super-link from which readers, mostly those who follow me on Twitter, could link further to a page for whatever edition of A Kiss Before You Leave Me interested them), I threw in a couple of additional links, to performances by Louis Armstrong and k. d. lang, respectively, of the song 'A Kiss to Build a Dream On'--performances that I'd always drawn on in my attempts to propose a 'soundtrack' for A Kiss Before You Leave Me. I was gratified to see (these things are trackable) that many readers had linked to the bundle and from there to links to buy Kiss at various ebookstores around the world--but no one took the links to the Armstrong or lang performances. Is it because everyone knows them so well, or because they don't know them at all?

If you don't know the song, please listen to one of these performances if you can; otherwise, the lyrics are available all over the Internet. The song always was a favorite of mine, long before its lyrics provided the title for my first novel. Just kiss me before you go, they seem to be saying, and the memory of that kiss will fuel my fantasies long after you're gone. One unforgettable kiss, and separation and absence are transcended by the power of the imagination: this, at least, is the argument that pleads for the kiss: for the lyrics are, in a sense, all imperative, all rhetoric. This is true even at the level of subtext: I love you massively, love me at least a little....

One of the advertising taglines I've used for the book (whether totally seriously or not is one of those mysteries of the Internet) is 'Because every kiss is a kiss before you leave me'--meaning, as I sometimes gloss it: we live and love in the context of possible loss. What varies from person to person and love to love is how we deal with that potentiality and that eventuality. A Kiss Before You Leave Me explores different ways of holding on and letting go, of taking care of self and other--and explores some of the related rhetorics as well.

I'm told that some potential readers have given the book a miss, at least at first, because its title suggested to them that Kiss might be what is usually understood to be 'a love story', a romance novel: Love's Throbbing Sword or some such thing. One very legitimate issue, of course, is that from certain perspectives the novel itself seems like a love story, at least for a while. It seems like something of a 'guilty pleasure' before it becomes readable as a 'moral tale'. Miranda Kincaid, who at least appears to be the protagonist, thinks she's getting a second chance at love, thanks to the intervention of an unlikely matchmaker. When the reader finishes the novel, it's become clear that there are quite different things going on at the same time, and the conventional rhetoric of love (as found even in some of the epigraphs in the novel) is, I hope, rendered less seductive, more subject to... well, what I would call 'reading'....

30 Days Hath September

I've been away from you for longer than I like, and, with the help of some advice from my sifu (Anthony Korahais), I'm vowing to do better in this new month. In a number of our qigong classes, he's proposed that we make resolutions for the month of September, things that we vow to do every day for these 30 days. (You'll often hear that if you want to establish a new habit, it's a good idea to repeat the action in question every day for 21 days. Thirty days? All the better.)

So I'm vowing to blog every day this month--and to practice qigong every morning. The first vow is partly an experiment: to see not so much whether I can do it (after all, I have decades of journalling behind me) as what happens when I do.

It may seem like a strange way to begin, but I'd be remiss if I didn't write something about two ebooks that appeared this morning, one in the UK and the other internationally.

What I'm calling the UK ebook is the first English-language edition of Jo Nesbø's novel Headhunters. (The US edition will appear next week.) I've been singing Nesbø's praises for years, usually talking about the Harry Hole series (nine crime novels to date, of which The Snowman was most recently published in the US), which still seem to be the books for which he's most likely to be remembered. But only a handful of the Hole novels are available in the US, and the first two haven't been published in English anywhere. For readers who are ready for something very different, the standalone Headhunters may be the ideal choice. It's been called a 'caper' novel, and I always describe it as 'freewheeling'. The less one knows about the plot in advance the better--but I can say that the title refers to corporate headhunting, that surprising crimes are involved, and that this is one of those novels in which two adversaries face off repeatedly, through all the turns of a shifting game of cat and mouse. It's also an amazing book to have written--in its own very different way almost as daring as Ian McEwan's Atonement. Will you still be thinking about it a week after you finish it? Quite possibly not--for that, read the Harry Hole novels instead. (Not that you have to choose!)

It's also worth mentioning that all of Jo Nesbø's revenues from Headhunters (in Norway and internationally, from the novel and the films based on it) go to the Harry Hole Foundation, for reading and writing programs in the Third World.

More widely publicized is this morning's release, in the US and the UK, of Stephen King's eformat-only novella Mile 81. Again, it would hardly be the one work by Stephen King that I would recommend as a starting place--but with King fewer people are looking for a starting place than with Nesbø: people may not agree about Stephen King, but most people are comfortable with their own take on him, whether they love the entire corpus (and, in some cases, read little else), strongly prefer one phase or genre over another, or view him with considerable condescension. (For the record, I personally champion the King of the later short stories but find that we neglect any of him at our peril.) But if you consider yourself a King fan, you will likely enjoy Mile 81 (which plays both the automobile-horror and the childhood cards) and the appended preview of the next full-length King book, 11/22/63, which is due in November.

I'd like to note one (further?) milestone, as I see it, in the publication of Mile 81: it's an ebook-only publication but no one is harping on the fact. There's no illusion that the novella's eformattedness is news. We've come a long way since Riding the Bullet and The Plant....

A Little Bird Told Me: Twitter

I think it was almost a year ago, from Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, in his Smashwords Book Marketing Guide, that I first got the recommendation that emerging authors use Twitter to reach more readers. Since then, Twitter usage has tripled, and even agents and 'legacy' (i.e., traditional) publishers are growing reluctant to work with new authors who don't use social media in general and Twitter in particular. But it was Jon F. Merz and his book How to Really Sell Ebooks that finally persuaded me to get on board.

I emitted my first tweet less than eight weeks ago, on 14 June, and I now have almost 700 followers, most of them added in the two weeks or so that I've been following Jon Merz's guidance. That number is modest if compared with the numbers following, say, Margaret Atwood (almost a quarter of a million) or Lady GaGa (almost 12.5 million), but it's 2.5 times my combined friends and fans numbers on Facebook after years there.

My weeks on Twitter have also seen the visitor numbers for this blog, Jascha Writes, more than triple.

I also like Twitter--for reasons I'm only beginning to understand, and that I hope to write about another day. And I appreciate my followers, and those I follow, beyond motives of PR and ebook sales.

Today I just want to welcome all my Twitter followers--past, present and future--to Jascha Writes and to promise to provide in future posts some fundamentals about myself and my work, starting with my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me. Of course, you can already use the search window in the extreme upper-left corner of this page, or the 'blog archive' listing at the foot of the right-hand column, or the 'labels cloud' a bit higher, to make your way around the posts that are here now. As always, I hope you like what you find, and that you'll want to return.

See you here, and see you on Twitter!

Thank You, Red Haircrow

It's nice, of course, to get raves, 4- and 5-star reviews, pats on the back. But it means even more to be read by someone who 'really gets' you, who reads with generosity, empathy and understanding.

I've been blessed with many such readers, but each new one is a surprise so intense as to be downright disconcerting. And I'm old-fashioned enough to be particularly surprised when these extraordinary readers weigh in over the Internet (like this one at Amazon a few weeks ago).

It was just this morning that Red Haircrow filed the latest review of A Kiss Before You Leave Me, at the blog Flying with Red Haircrow, which you'll also find (and not just starting today!) in the blog roll in the right-hand column. Red Haircrow is a blogger who deserves to be even better known and may well be the reader we're all looking for.

Thank you, Red Haircrow.

The Summer Sun: Deals on Rendell, Murdoch, Block, Kafka... and Hulbert

If I'm going to go on about ebook prices the way I have, then I should do more to put you in touch with good buying opportunities than just insert a discreet ad here and there in the right-hand column (and an infrequent post about free German-language ebooks in this one).

The fact is that summer in the Northern Hemisphere is a good time for deals on ebooks at almost all online bookstores. And Amazon's 'sunshine deals' (which in the case of coordinated offerings often outlast their competitors') are a real opportunity to get an ebook at half or two-thirds off the usual price. Publishers often pick a single title, or a few titles, by an author to reduce for a week or two, in the hope of interesting readers in the rest of the author's backlist and, in some cases, in anticipation of an upcoming new release.

Hundreds of these sunshine deals are set to expire on 27 July. You can browse them all at Amazon by clicking here. (Even if you prefer a different online store, looking first at Amazon may give you ideas of what should be comparably reduced at the store of your choice.) Today I downloaded books by Ruth Rendell, Iris Murdoch, Lawrence Block and others at an average price of a couple of dollars. (Most of these were publications of Open Road Media, but many publishers' ebooks are available on sunshine deals.)

Of course, the best deal is a free book. John Self, in a Guardian article earlier this week (which I recommend: 'Famous for the Wrong Book'), reminded me in passing of the importance of a slim volume containing Kafka's 109 Zürau Aphorisms. I won't give you a link to the English translation (available in an ebook, but priced outside the range I like to support here), but if you read at least some German you'll want to know that Amazon has made the original German text of Kafka's Aphorismen (the Zürau 109 lead off the collection) available as a free ebook.

And, finally, let me mention that my novel A Kiss Before You Leave Me is still a sunshine deal at every ebookstore  in the world that carries it--except the Sony Reader store in the U.S. Both the extension of the deal and the exemption of Sony from it would take too long to explain here; suffice it to say, the sun should be setting on the Kiss deal at the same time as on the deals on Rendell, Murdoch and Block. It's not always that I'm in such good company. But for one more week we're all workin' it together.