Interview with Mike Boyd

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Today I have the opportunity to sit down and chat with one of my AW buddies. As a man writing women’s fiction, he has an interesting perspective, but also he’ll be able to shed some light on the whole Self-Publishing question to which this week is dedicated.

Thanks for joining us, Mike!

Can you please tell me a little about your book, Medusa’s Daughter?
 
Medusa’s Daughter is the story of two people caught up in what turns out to be a spiritual journey.  Holly MacLaren is an ex-Navy fighter pilot (call sign: Medusa) who flies as a captain for a Honolulu-based airline.  Divorced from a country music star, she’s also a single mom to their psychic six-year-old daughter, Skye.
 
Holly is a consummate professional used to plenty of responsibility.  So when she starts having panic attacks, she’s at a loss to know why—or how to make them stop.  To search for their cause, she undergoes regressive hypnotherapy and learns that over 60 years ago in a past life as Ensign Robert Strawn, a crewman on the U.S.S. Arizona, she was the victim of an unsolved murder.  Before she can grasp this revelation, she finds herself stalked, her home secretly invaded by a man with ties to both the victim and his killer.
 
Skye MacLaren sees things that other first-graders don’t, though she can’t decipher much of it.  The gift gives her a hazy awareness of her mother’s problems.  Medusa’s Daughter follows the pair as they deal with the stalker’s threat.  Along the way, they discover new truths about a revered hero’s deeds at Pearl Harbor.
 
Sounds great! How did you get the idea for this project?
 
Call it extended synchronicity.  About ten years ago, I read Dr. Brian Weiss’s nonfiction bestseller, Many Lives, Many Masters.  It tells of a psychiatric patient’s bouts with panic attacks and a long list of phobias, and of their use of hypnotic regression to combat them.  The sessions uncovered numerous past lives, each ending in drowning or suffocation.  A year later, I came across Hornet’s Nest, by Lt. Missy Cummings, one of the Navy’s first female F/A-18 pilots. It’s an account of her struggles against what was then vast male resentment of women in the strike-fighter community.  And a year after that, I spent the turn of the millennium visiting my daughter and her family in Honolulu, where I had the good fortune to see Pearl Harbor and the Arizona Memorial.  As soon as this third experience was under my belt, I knew the story I had to write. But I didn’t yet know the role that my then five-year-old granddaughter would play in it. (The title, in fact, came only after the first draft was half finished.)
 
It’s great that those experiences resonated with you so much so that you just had to create a story. Would you care to elaborate on your granddaughter’s role?
 
Let’s just say she turned out to see some things her classmates couldn’t.  Skye’s second sight became an important element of the story—enough so that I felt justified in making her the title character.
 
Not to state the obvious, but you’re a man. And you write women’s fiction. What made you decide to do that?
 
I didn’t consciously set out to write women’s fiction.  What I wanted to write was dark-humored suspense.  (Think Carl Hiaasen with a tad more edge.)  But my first two novels have strong female protagonists.  And empowerment, especially as it involves workplace equality, killing off stereotypes, and coping with sexual harassment, is a theme that runs through both of them.
 
The fact that I’m the father of two grown daughters and no sons probably has a lot to do with this.  I was aware of the gender issues they faced as they grew up and headed out on their own.  Now that I think about it, my mother also worked as far back as the mid-1950s, long before two-income families were the norm.  She was a secretary because that’s one of the few things women did.  And her mother was a secretary and single parent a decade before that.  So a respect for working women has been there throughout my life.
 
Another influencing factor was my education:  I was a college professor for 30 years, and though I taught mostly corporate finance, my graduate degrees are in the broader field of economics.  In grad school in the 1970s, a big area of research interest among my professors was gender discrimination.  The idea that it’s not just morally wrong but economically stupid caught my attention and stayed with me.
 
Once I realized my books had this dual nature, I decided to pitch them as suspense novels to suspense oriented agents and as women’s fiction to WF agents.  Although I query more of the latter, I want to make clear that there are plenty of plot features that appeal to men as well as women.  Things like exotic places, paranormal events, blackmail, kidnapping, and murder.  And flying—lots of slipping the surly bonds of earth.
 
I’ve got to applaud you for surviving among all those women! But, how do you get into the head of a woman? What are some of the challenges that come with being a man writing for women’s fiction?
 
As far as writing is concerned, getting into a woman’s head isn’t a problem, for reasons I’ve mentioned.  For me the big challenge is that because so few men write it (Nicholas Sparks and Robert James Waller come to mind, but they’re a rare breed), I feel at a disadvantage when approaching the big WF agents, who are invariably women.  I guess I think they’ll see me as trying to crash their party.  This could be a sympathetic feeling to the one I know women used to have when they’d try to enter The Boys’ Club. Nowadays it’s irrational, I’m sure, but there it is.
 
For many writers the question of whether or not to self-publish is a source of stress and uncertainty. You’ve done it with success. What should a writer consider when deciding whether or not to self-publish? What has your experience been like?
 
My experience with self-publishing is limited to print-on-demand (POD) and to only one such service, Lulu.com.  Also, within that framework, I’ve done only one style of book, a dust-jacketed hardcover.  The vast majority of POD-published books are paperbacks, which probably reflects a decision by their authors to keep costs down and profit margins up, in order to make it feasible to sell them on Amazon or through bookstores.
 
Every set of hands through which a book passes in the distribution process means someone else who demands a share of the revenue.  If a 400-page hardcover costs you, say, $23 to print and ship a copy, you’d have to price it in the mid-to-high $40s to have a chance at selling it on Amazon, albeit at a price between its cover and wholesale prices.  The general rule is that there’s a 100 percent markup between wholesale and retail (cover price), because most books will end up being sold at a discount to retail.  And no reader is going to pay $40 or more for a hardcover by an unknown author when they can get the latest Nelson DeMille or Amy Tan for $27 or less.
 
It’s little wonder, then, that the POD lists tend to be filled with $20-$25 paperbacks—which are still not easy to sell, when you consider that their competition is $12-$13 paperbacks by established writers.
 
What I’m saying is that POD books are much pricier at wholesale than traditionally published ones.  Realistic margins are therefore small. And POD books aren’t returnable.  For these reasons bookstores won’t stock them—especially if they have to shell out the money.  Even if the POD author pays for the inventory, (s)he’s still competing with the big names for shelf space.  So the best you can hope for at your local Barnes & Noble or Books-A-Million is probably a book signing or two, where you run the risk of ordering too few (a bad situation) or too many (a worse one).
 
Faced with these realities, I decided that my foray into POD publishing would be very narrow in scope, and with a particular purpose in mind.
 
What purpose is that? And will you try to pursue the traditional publishing route still?
 
To answer your second question first, absolutely.
 
Regarding the first:  As my agent search for Medusa’s Daughter wound through its third year (oh, yeah, count ‘em!), I continued to polish and tighten the manuscript.  Based on the feedback of a dozen or so readers (including a hypnotherapist and two airline pilots, one of them female), I became convinced that it was too good a story to let it die in a drawer.  And I was tired of not having a way to let friends and relatives see it.  So to make it available to them, I decided to do a limited POD version.  It’s limited in that it’s a strictly personal edition, available only at the Lulu.com website.  This, I found, is also a way to archive the work in a nice, polished format that is absolutely free unless and until I want to buy a few copies.  Every now and then a stranger will come along and snag one, and that’s always nice to see, though not the real purpose of the listing.  The book has deliberately not been assigned an ISBN and has no national distribution.  So for all practical purposes it hasn’t been published in the industry’s sense of the term.  I’m free to keep pitching the manuscript and can quickly close down the POD venture if Old Man Fortune decides to find me.
 
If he does, people who have the Lulu version can schlock it on eBay with my blessing. And if he never does, their great-grandkids and mine can someday pick it up, blow the dust off of it, and know that I was here.
 
By the way, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Lulu’s dust jacket hardcovers are clothbound, not just slick cardboard.  I didn’t know they made those anymore.
 
Anyone who’d like to see a fuller description of Medusa’s Daughter or to read the first several chapters may do so at http://www.lulu.com/content/690706
 
Thanks! We’ll be sure to check it out. What are you working on now?
 
I’m trying something different this time, a YA suspense novel.  Or maybe horror—I really need to decide which.  I’ve drafted four chapters, so it’s time to fish or cut bait.  The working title is Diary of a Demonical Freak.  It’s about a 15-year-old Army brat and aspiring rock musician named Frankie MacLeod (for which demonical freak is an anagram) and his 12-year-old sister, Lily.  They live on a fictional Army post somewhere in the Great Plains.  At the outset, Lily has vanished from her school.  The story is narrated by Frankie in the form of—you guessed it—a diary.  I wish I could tell you where Lily is, how she got there, and how she’ll get back home.  Was she snatched by terrorists? Gypsies? Aliens? The tormented ghost of a dead rocker who inhabits her brother’s guitar?  At the moment I don’t have a clue.  That’s the scariest thing about the way I write.  I’m one of the last to know what’s going to happen.  All I’m sure of at this point is that Frankie will be the hero and that he’ll step in some serious poo before the story ends.
 
As writers we know that perseverance is the key to success in the business. What are some of the ways you deal with rejection and what keeps you motivated to keep writing?
 
Rejection stinks, doesn’t it? If I liked it, there’d be a psycholgical disorder listed for me in the DSM-IV.  I’d love to sound all professional and say I just shrug it off and send out another query, remember that publishing is a subjective business, no reflection on my work, and yadda-yadda-yak-yak-yak . . . (quoting from the rejection slips).  But I’m not there yet.  I’ll hold out through a half-dozen or so, then go into a minor funk—or sometimes a major one.  And then someone will pick up a copy or download one and read it and say something good about it, and I’ll be off and running again.
 
As for my motivation to keep writing (as opposed to pitching):  Quitting my day job helped—though I had to wait a lot of years to be able to afford that.  (Thank you, God, for early Social Security!)  I tried to stop writing novels when the first one didn’t find an agent.  It was fairly easy to give up then, because I still had a college teaching career that required my “serious” attention.  That hiatus lasted six years. By the time Medusa’s Daughter was finished, I was on the verge of retirement, which meant I didn’t have to spend any more energy writing high-toned journal articles with colons in their titles.  I’m sure I’ll get Diary of a Demonical Freak finished in a year or two and then see if I can find a legitimate home for it.
 
But I won’t obsess.  If it hasn’t happened by the end of a couple of years, I’ll archive it on Lulu so my dozens of screaming fans can read it, and by that time I’ll have found something else to write.
 
Great attitude and perspective on your writing career. It’s that kind of persistence that will pay off. I wonder: Do you write what you love or what you think will sell? Why?
 
I write what I love—and more pointedly, what I love to read.  That usually means a suspenseful adventure with a lot of laughs to cut the tension.  I don’t think it’s practical to try to predict now what the hot genres and settings will be three or four or five years out.  So I’ll write what entertains me in the meantime and hope that it has some legs, to use the Tina Turner-esque publishing metaphor.
 
One last question: If you could have written any book that is already published by another author, which book would it have been?
 
May I be piggy and name two? First is The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver.  It has the most richly drawn characters I’ve ever seen.  Their voices are so distinct and true.  It’s neat to see the different sisters’ assessments of their missionary family’s life in the Congo—and their views about each other!  I especially like little sister Adah, who doesn’t speak, but who thinks and writes in palindromes.  (She likes palindromes so much that she even insists on misspelling her name Ada.)
 
The second book I wish I’d written is Carl Hiaasen’s Native Tongue.  As you know, humor—especially dark humor—is a big part of what floats my literary boat.  And I love it when the bad guy gets his come-uppance in an amusingly icky fashion.  Hiaasen is masterful at this, but nowhere more so than in Native Tongue, where the villain—spoiler alert!—gets boinked to death by a horny theme-park dolphin.  Priceless!

 

Great Info, Mike. Thanks for spending time with us and I hope you’ll come back often. I’ll have to check out Medusa’s Daughter and I wish you the absolute best of luck!!

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Tags: Absolute Write, Arizona Memorial, Barbara Kingsolver, Carl Hiaasen, Dr. Brian Weiss, Hornet's Nest, interview, Lt. Missy Cummings, Lulu, Many Lives, Many Masters, Medusa's Daughter, Native Tongue, self-publishing, The Poisonwood Bible, women's fiction