Are We There Yet?

We’re rolling along the I-10 eastbound, chasing destiny in a rented minivan. The sun is broiling the hard-pack California desert outside our little bubble, but inside we’re more than comfortable. To get ready for our four-week, 10-state book-flogging odyssey, my two kids supplemented our vehicle’s considerable amenities with a few of their own--a cooler full of “snicky-snacks,” dual Game Boys, Auto Bingo cards, journals, donated audio books, a CD player and 25 favorite CDs. We are a 75-mph, climate-controlled entertainment complex.

More important, we have a box full of my second novel, “Shadow Image,” and a supply of foam-board sales displays featuring its cover, each churned out on an after-school assembly line by 9-year-old Lanie and 6-year-old Parker. We have 3,000 promotional postcards that I designed and paid for, and a schedule of events organized by an independent publicist I hired to help promote the second in my three-book series of psychological thrillers keyed to the vagaries of human memory.

A quick glance in my rearview mirror lets me know I’m not alone. My friend and fellow author, Philip Reed, is tailing us in a nearly identical minivan with his two sons, Andrew, a 12-year-old chess master, and Tony, an 8-year-old air-guitar impresario. Phil is promoting “Low Rider,” the second novel in a “car noir” series published by Pocket Books. The New York Times called the first “a volatile concoction of speed, sex and sleaze.”

Together, as our wives back home work at the less-risky jobs that sustain our families, we’re barnstorming a circuit that will take us from Southern California in a counterclockwise, 6,500-mile loop around the West. Along the way, we intend to sign books and read selected passages to anyone who’ll listen. We’ll pass out free copies to influential booksellers and exploit the novelty of our self-styled Dads Tour to get air time on radio and feature stories in local newspapers. When things get slow in the larger stores, I’ll play my harmonica as loudly as I can to attract a crowd.

Silence equals death in our line of work, and we’re out to make some noise. We’re shedding the mien of serious novelists to become a bookstore version of those human directionals who point giant foam fingers at model homes.

This is not exactly what we envisioned when we gave up regular paychecks to spin crime fiction, but reality for newcomers like us is as cold and hard as the bottom line: Critical acclaim is nice, but most publishers bet on sales figures, not kind words. And so we’re on the road--Kerouac and Kesey for the ‘90s, as one Colorado bookstore owner dubbed us--driving hard toward a dream, bestseller or bust.

“Are we there yet?” my impatient boy asks just 40 miles into the trip, and I tell him no, we aren’t there yet. He focuses again on his Game Boy. I refocus on the horizon, but his question perches on my shoulder like a mockingbird. The answer is unavoidable: No, I’m not there yet.

*

Most mystery or crime-fiction writers get just a few chances in which to evolve from a flyspeck on the literary landscape into something approaching a John Grisham, Patricia Cornwell or Dean Koontz. “Figure you’ve got five books to make it,” Koontz told me after I signed my two-book contract with Jove in 1994. Used to be, he said, publishers gave promising writers time to develop an audience. And even if their books never became bestsellers, those novelists could make a decent living writing so-called midlist books. Today, the midlist has virtually disappeared as the industry risks fewer and fewer dollars on books of modest potential. “There’s the top of the list and then there’s everything else,” says Hillary Cige of Jove, who edited my books. “No one can afford to do little [books] anymore. And the stores just don’t support little.”

Koontz’s five-book estimate seems, in retrospect, wildly optimistic. More than 50,000 new titles will be published in the United States this year, about 1,400 of them in the broad genre known as mystery or crime fiction. Only a handful will break through to the bestseller lists. Some will get there because they’re great books hand-sold by enthusiastic bookstore owners. Others will stink, but will get there anyway thanks to huge promotional budgets or an incomprehensible alchemy of topic, timing and public mood.

Then there are books such as “Shadow Image” and “Low Rider,” which arrive at stores like abandoned children--and sometimes don’t arrive at all. Mass-market paperback originals like mine have a life span only slightly longer than that of a mayfly--three to six weeks, during which they’re reviewed, recommended by booksellers and displayed prominently in stores. After that, many stores keep a copy or two, then strip the covers off the rest and ship them back for a refund. If a book’s sell-through rate is less than 50%, the publisher starts to worry. Your editor wonders what went wrong, and your agent may lose faith. It’s brutal, and effective promotion is critical.

“The day I got my author copies of ‘Bird Dog,’ I thought my job was finally done,” Phil says of his first book. “I thought if the reviews were good, I could sit back and the book would sell. But that was the very moment I needed to get my energy back up, to change gears and go out and promote. I realized if I didn’t, it might disappear without a trace.”

That means shedding the literary-lion persona you projected in your author photograph, armoring yourself with a crush-proof ego, and proceeding with the determination of a door-to-door salesman. “It seems to be almost accepted now in our genre that you’re going to promote your own book and you’re going to pay for it,” says Baltimore novelist Laura Lippman, who this year won crime fiction’s top honor, an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. “And if you’re not willing to do it, your publisher interprets it as, ‘You’re not that serious.’ ”

It helps to know that many bestselling authors, including James Ellroy and Michael Connelly, spent staggering amounts of time and money promoting their work before they earned the loyalty of readers and the marketing support of their publishers. Ellroy, the author of “L.A. Confidential” and other international blockbusters, advised me to pump every cent of my proceeds into promotion, as he once did.

Many crime writers today schmooze booksellers at trade shows and conventions, hawk books on personal Web sites, pool resources to get the best travel deals. (Jan Burke says she and fellow Long Beach writer Wendy Hornsby once used Southwest Airlines’ “Friends Fly Free” program as the basis of a joint promotional tour.) Some authors now hand out home-baked cookies at signings, auction T-shirts, raffle door prizes, wear costumes or otherwise behave like slicer-dicer hucksters on late-night infomercials. “Mystery writers have shown the rest of the world how to do it,” says Dulcy Brainard, mystery forecast editor for the trade magazine Publishers Weekly. “It’s a testament to their feisty spirit as a group that they didn’t waste their time beating their breasts and pulling their hair out, saying, ‘Poor me!’ They figured out a way to do something about it.”

With overwhelming odds against breakout success, many crime writers develop a sort of wartime camaraderie, exchanging contacts at the nation’s 100-plus mysteries-only bookstores, sharing the stage at workshops, writing cover blurbs for each other’s books. Phil and I met last fall at a mystery convention in Monterey. After speaking together on a panel of first-time novelists, one of whom had spent more than $60,000 flogging a book for which he received an $8,000 advance, we retreated to lunch and decided there had to be an alternative to emptying our bank accounts. We knew that promotion was a do-it-yourself job. But we also knew the commercial and critical performances of our first books had given us a head-start. My “Time Release” went into a second printing, and Phil’s “Bird Dog” sold out its first printing; both were nominated for crime-fiction awards. The sales of our second books would either move us closer to the dream or further from it.

The solution, we decided, was to do something completely nuts.

*

When we arrive at Tucson’s Clues Unlimited for the first of more than 50 store and media events, my minivan looks more like a garbage scow than a sophisticated mobile entertainment complex. Maps, fast-food wrappers and Game Boy cartridges tumble to the pavement every time the doors open. The front grille features the start of a squashed-bug collection that, three weeks later, would prompt someone in San Francisco to note: “Scrape that stuff off, you could make a nice soup.” And that was long after my son removed the hummingbird.

Phil, pathologically neat, arrives a few minutes later in a van that looks showroom fresh, Gallant to my Goofus. We are ushered to a table piled high with copies of our books and survey the store. We are, we notice, the only people present who do not actually work there.

“It’s this heat,” explains Charlene Taylor, one of the store’s owners, referring to the 105 degrees outside.

As a crime writer, you are the Master of the Universe. Characters behave as you wish. You reward good, punish evil, dispense justice. But we quickly discovered that as a self-promoter, you control nothing. Our little caravan through the Southwest coincided precisely with what scientists now say was the hottest July since reliable record-keeping began.

At one southern Colorado store, the resident cat attracts a larger crowd than we do during the 90 minutes we spend disassembling and reassembling our ballpoint pens. Exasperated, we later ask a Barnes & Noble salesclerk in Denver what she feels is the best way to promote a book. “TV,” she said. “You know, ‘Oprah,’ ‘Good Morning America.’ That sort of thing really helps.”

Last we checked our messages, neither had returned our calls.

We soldier on, looking ahead to the Pacific Northwest, with its reliable gloom. But the heat wave continues and the turnouts remain thin. We make the best of it, but at night, as we watch our kids cooling down in motel pools, Phil and I ponder whether our literary careers might hinge on something other than our skill at creating memorable characters and fast-paced plots.

We’d realized by now that the infernal hot spell was not the only hindrance. Five days into the trip, Phil noticed an alarming trend on our “drive-by signings”--unscheduled stops to chat with a store manager and sign the books on-hand. Though a fixture in the mystery bookstores, the hardcover “Low Rider” often was absent in the big chain outfits.

Had someone screwed up the distribution? Had his book been “orphaned” by the untimely departure of its editor, the person who typically champions a book from conception to delivery? Had the chains’ centralized ordering staffs simply passed on it? These are troubling questions when you’re halfway into a self-financed, 6,500-mile tour, the kids are cranky, your gas credit cards are worn thin and you’ve eaten nothing but gorditas for weeks. Besides, it made no sense considering the success of Phil’s first book. “The worst thing was, I couldn’t get a straight answer out of anyone,” he says.

As writers, we were prepared to have our egos battered by critics. As self-promoters, we were willing to become the Barnum & Bailey of American letters. But Phil made a seemingly safe assumption, before spending thousands of dollars to promote “Low Rider,” that it would actually be in stores.

Confronted with a problem too large for us to solve, we reconsidered our future one sweltering day in Seattle as we taxied by a Jack in the Box. The sign on the window read, “Ask us about career opportunities,” and we thought, hmmm.

*

One evening after two weeks on the road, we saw a vivid demonstration of how outmatched our books were. A segment on CBS’ “48 Hours” described how Warner Books--the same publisher that in 1992 made book-marketing history with the widely panned megahit “The Bridges of Madison County”--had launched a megabucks campaign to put Nicholas Sparks’ first book on national bestseller lists. The prime-time feature was perfectly timed to boost Sparks’ second book onto bestseller lists, and in that strategy I sensed the work of a promotional wizard.

The Dads Tour, on the other hand, sometimes seemed like the work of a sitcom writer. The day before our Clues Unlimited appearance, for example, Phil and I had arranged to call a Tucson radio host from separate pay phones so we could appear together on his talk show. I chose a secluded bank of phones at an elegant resort and admonished my kids to keep absolutely silent while I was on the air. They cooperated beautifully, but just as we went live, a gaggle of pre-teens paraded into the nearby bathrooms.

It sounded as if I were calling from prison.

Without my wife’s steely sense of law and order, the civilization inside our minivan quickly degenerated into anarchy, “Lord of the Flies” on wheels. At Page One bookstore in Albuquerque, my kids disappeared into the children’s section while I spoke to a dozen or so people in the center of the store.

I was deep into my spiel on memory when people started laughing. I turned to find my 6-year-old engaged in a spirited puppet show from behind a low wall. Like a rubber-faced Chevy Chase to my somber Jane Curtin, the dragon he’d found was mimicking my every word and gesture.

At a store in Bellingham, Wash., our raucous little horde swarmed through the doors, overwhelming a staff that, until then, had found the Dads Tour idea rather charming. My daughter was doing her best Sarah McLachlan imitation on the store’s sound system when a nervous manager snatched the microphone from her hands and urged us to begin our talk.

By then, Phil and I were wondering what possible difference our efforts could make. And yet in that isolated corner of the United States, a thousand miles from home, a stranger came by on a Saturday afternoon and introduced himself. He’d read and enjoyed “Bird Dog,” Phil’s first book, and had brought his copy for Phil to sign. He then bought a copy of “Low Rider” and had Phil sign that, too. In our headlong rush toward the dream, we’d lost sight of something real: the passion and reverence that many people still reserve for books. “Seeing that firsthand was enormously gratifying,” Phil said later.

Things changed for us that day, and for the rest of the trip through Washington, Oregon and Northern California, we focused on the journey instead of the destination.

*

The minivan that i am about to turn in to a rental agent at Long Beach Airport is undamaged but far different from the one my kids and I picked up. We’ve nearly quadrupled the odometer reading. The front end looks like the fallout of an entomological explosion. In the road dust on the rear window, the names of the Dads Tour survivors are inscribed in our children’s scrawl.

“You can’t wash it now,” Phil had said one day late in the trip. “It’s like folk art.”

I unload the duffel bags and camping equipment, then drain the cooler. I shovel out the spent batteries and broken kids’ meal trinkets. I empty the glove compartment of its lump of maps, Triptiks and Auto Club travel guides, and place the rental papers into the empty cavern. The last thing I remove is a Native American souvenir that my kids bought in Santa Fe. It had dangled for weeks from the minivan’s rearview mirror, an odd assembly of leather, feathers, beads and webbing called a Dream Catcher.

According to legend, the night air is filled with dreams. A Dream Catcher hung just above one’s head can capture those dreams. Good dreams slip through a hole at center of the web, and those you get to keep. Bad dreams get tangled in the web and perish with the first light of a new day. The Dream Catcher instructions say, “Native Americans believe that dreams have magical qualities, the ability to change or direct one’s path in life,” and I believe that, in many ways, the magic already has worked for me.

But as I close the minivan door for the last time, I wonder if the ancients ever envisioned a chase vehicle quite like this.