Misleading Covers

By Chester Campbell

My first Sleuthfest, Mystery Writers of America Florida Chapter's annual crime writing soiree, featured Harlan Coben as the guest speaker. He was just coming into his own with his first standalone novel out. He gave his usual highly humorous presentation, but it contained a lot of good into for writers, too. One thing I remember was his complaint about a cover of one of his Myron Bolitar books that got it all wrong.

My memory is a little hazy after a decade of listening to countless speakers, but it may have been his second book in the series, Drop Shot. That story involves a tennis pro Myron is representing. Seems the cover included a basketball, which is what Myron played before being injured, but it didn't tell the real story of the book.

I've had a couple of experiences with that sort of thing. I love the covers, but they've been a bit misleading for some folks. The first was my initial foray into publishing, the first of my Greg McKenzie mystery series. The plot was built around an ancient Hebrew parchment, and the artist did a great job with the cover, as you can see here.

The only trouble was there's nothing to distinguish it as a mystery. Too many people glanced at it and figured the book was another story about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I cured the problem in the second edition which kept the same basic design but added copy in the lower right that said "An International Thriller, Greg McKenzie Mystery No 1."

The second of my covers that can be misleading is the one for The Marathon Murders. However, it only misleads people who don't pay attention to both the front and back covers. I've had people glance at it during a signing and say something like, "Does it take place during a marathon?" Well, no. The story is built around the old Marathon Motor Works that produced the only automobile made completely in the South. It was in business in Nashville between 1910 and 1914, when it was forced into bankruptcy court.

The cover features artwork of a Marathon touring car similar to one that currently appears in the old showroom  of the company's headquarters building. Both the long-abandoned plant and office buildings have been restored to provide space for artists, photographers, and musicians, among others. The book cover shows a skeleton sitting in the car, which is where the victim of a 90-year-old cold case was found. Still-fresh memories of the 1904 St. Louis Olympics was credited with the impetus for naming the company and the automobile Marathon.

The Marathon Murders' ebook will be available free for the Kindle next Monday through Wednesday (February 25-27). You'll find it in the Kindle Store at this link.

Seek and ye shall find

By Chester Campbell

Do you harness the power of your word processor’s search and replace function? Every writer knows he or she can change a character’s name throughout the book with a simple click of the mouse. And most of us have learned the hard way to specify “whole words only.” Otherwise, if Art is changed to Will, we wind up with words like “pWillnership.”

Beyond this simple but valuable strategy, using only the search feature can save lots of headaches. My first mystery came back from the editor with the comment (among lots of others) that I must have an affinity for the color blue. I had numerous blue eyes, blue cars, blue suits, blue whatevers. When I searched on the word “blue,” it came up 51 times in a 261-page manuscript.

I then searched for other colors, finding green 23 times, brown 21, red 17, and yellow 8. I combed through the book and toned down my color palette until the scorecard read brown 18, blue 17, green 17, and red 17. Yellow remained a respectable eight. When the manuscript went back to the editor, he was pleased.

Another literary bugaboo is the use of adverbs. I agree, they should be toned down, though an occasional adverb is useful in clarifying an action. In that first book I mentioned above, I searched for “ly” words and found 12 in the first three pages. My new book, The Surest Poison, has only four “ly” adverbs in the same number of pages.

I didn’t feel too badly (to use a good adverb), however. F. Scott Fitzgerald used 12 in the first three pages of his classic novel, The Great Gatsby. A random check of some popular current authors showed the following three-page results:

Harlan Coben – nine
Barbara Parker – six
Ian Rankin – five
James Lee Burke – four

I could say more about adverbs, but I'll leave that for another time.

One use I make of the search feature is to find a particular scene during the revision process. I may not remember where it is, but I can recall a character in the scene, or a place name, or some unique descriptive term. I’ll enter that in the search field and a few clicks on the “next” button will take me to the scene.

I’m only familiar with the search and replace feature in Word for Windows, but I’m sure the other word processors have something similar. If you click the “More” button, you get lots of different options. You can search up or down or through the whole file. You can choose to match the case of what you type in the search field. If you’re looking for a proper name, that will make sure the first letter is capitalized. Another option is “sounds like,” so you don’t even need to spell the word correctly.

A handy feature is the “Special” button, which allows you to search for a particular font or a special character such as an em dash or an ellipsis.

Search and replace is a powerful feature for the writer. Make full use of it if you want to save time and get things right. It no doubt offers plenty of other possibilities. Have you found particular uses that I haven’t mentioned?

By the way, I’m in the sixth day of my blog book tour for The Surest Poison. You’ll find me today at Ann Parker’s Silver Rush Mysteries blog talking about Writing the Private Eye.