by Brian Finney
My new novel, Dangerous Conjectures, ends on March 13, 2020, the day the lockdown began. That’s roughly when I opened my computer and began writing the book. In my case the lockdown was a blessing. It offered me endless uninterrupted time in which to work on the novel. Not everyone had this experience. A writer friend of mine had writer’s block and could only do weekly podcasts throughout 2020. In my case, after constructing a brief outline, I found the novel more or less wrote itself. I positively looked forward to writing each bit of it.
The spread of the coronavirus plays a major role in my novel and causes the major female character to become so afraid of it that she commits a number of errors that drive the plot and almost destroy her marriage. While I situate the novel in Oakland, California, I live in Venice, Southern California. My experience of living through the pandemic in Venice is relatively unusual, in that most Venetians showed respect for one another by wearing masks and maintaining a safe distance from each other. Elsewhere in Los Angeles this was not necessarily the case. Feeling safer in this community probably influenced the way I portrayed my principal male protagonist, a professor of computer science who remains unfazed by the rise of the virus.
Writing the book was the easy part. Next came the editing. As Stephen King observed, “Only God gets it right the first time.” I had written the narrative over a period of days, each day a separate section headed by the date and narrated in the first person alternately by one of my two leading characters. My line editor thought this read more like a diary and persuaded me to drop the dates and change to a third person omniscient narrator. Interestingly this made the narrative more personal than if I’d used third person in the first place. Still, for weeks I kept on coming across an “I” left in place, instead of a “he” or “she.”
Next came the vocabulary. I was born in Britain and, despite immigrating to Southern California 34 years ago, I still speak with an English accent and use English expressions. My characters are all Americans. It took five different readers to identify and eliminate those Anglicisms.
Additionally, some of my readers thought (rightly) that I allowed my two major characters to become reconciled after a near break-up too easily. I was reminded of Hemingway’s famous quotation from A Farewell to Arms: “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are stronger at the broken places.” I had to rewrite those sections making both characters much less reasonable and more angry with each other. Similarly, my readers got me to rewrite how the nine-year-old daughter spoke, as I had initially given her too advanced a vocabulary.
As this is my second self-published novel, I knew not only how important it is to get professional help with marketing the book, but also to allow my publicist several months prior to publication to launch the novel successfully. I enlisted the services of Nanda Dyssou who heads Coriolis Company, which had handled the launch of my first novel. She directed me to a gifted book designer in Mexico and arranged an online pre-publication campaign via social media. She sent numerous copies of the book (as pdfs or as paperbacks) to potential reviewers. I entered some half a dozen fiction competitions (most up to a year away).
She also tried to get me to persuade another author launching a novel around the same time to agree to a joint local bookstore reading, something bookstores were requiring during the pandemic. The most promising writer in my locality (Venice, California) was being published by one of the big five publishers. Although he was inclined to do a joint reading, his publisher didn’t like the idea and so this came to nothing. Another major bookstore in the Los Angeles area wasn’t making any dates for in-person author readings until May, two months after my book was published, and is still only doing online readings and interviews.
Instead Nanda turned to podcasts and blogs. To date she has arranged some dozen zoom-type interviews with me, focused principally on my latest novel. While a great way of making my book known to readers, such virtual meetings have only a limited effect on book sales. Next we are trying out free days on Kindle and an initial paid advertising campaign on Amazon.
Of course I would love to see more sales. But, as Vladimir Nabokov said, “Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.” It is early yet. Still, you can see how difficult it is to get your self-published book noticed, read, reviewed and sold these days. Despite these obstacles, I still think it is well worth it.
Brian Finney has won awards for his biography of Christopher Isherwood and for his debut suspense novel, Money Matters. His writings have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The LA Weekly, The Irish Times, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle and numerous other journals and anthologies. He has published seven nonfiction books and two novels. Money Matters (2019), his first novel, was a finalist for the American Fiction Awards in the Best New Fiction category. The second is Dangerous Conjectures (2021), a novel featuring a couple living in the Bay Area whose lives are threatened by the spread of the coronavirus and the rise of conspiracy theories. In his former life he was a literature professor in London University and several universities in Southern California. He now calls Venice, California home. You can visit him at www.bhfinney.com
