Matthew Dicks

I am not a Starbucks zombie.

I recently read in the Harvard Business Review that Starbucks seeks to train its customers at nearly the same level as its employees. This is why a Starbucks cashier will convert my request for a medium coffee into a grande when passing the order onto the barista.

It’s not for the barista’s benefit (since everyone knows what a medium is). It’s to teach the customer to use the word grande next time. Starbucks hopes that engraining its culture into customers will increase brand loyalty. Use of the special Starbucks language is just one of the ways of doing this.

 

According to Starbucks, this type of training works on 95% of its customers. Only the most oppositional 5% of customers will reject this training entirely.

I am only a Starbucks customer in that I frequently purchase coffee for my wife and an occasional blueberry cake for myself.

But I am most assuredly in the oppositional 5%.

I can’t help it. I’m just jerky that way.

Cat Stevens taught me that authors should not act like jerks.

I have a more-than-slight tendency to act like a jerk. I can be biting, sarcastic, oppositional, confrontational, aggravating, nonconforming and disagreeable.

My mother consistently referred to me as The Instigator.

I know all this must be surprising to you. I am typically perceived as sweet, perpetually pleasant and lovable. I know. 

This is because I have learned to restrain myself. I have chosen to become more civil. I try desperately to be more polite. I have made the conscious decision to not express every thought and idea that comes to mind. 

This is not to say that I am the model of civility.  I am probably still more outspoken, opinionated and potentially offensive than most people would prefer. I still consistently express controversial and nonconformist ideas. In many ways, these ideas are the fuel that fires this blog and many of the things that I write.

But I am a much more civil and reasoned person than I was ten years ago. I measure my words much more carefully today.  

Part of this has been a natural, albeit exceedingly slow, maturing process.

Part of this has been a conscious decision on my part to choose my battles more wisely. 

Part of it has been the positive influence of my wife, who is universally acknowledged to be the kindest, sweetest person on the planet (unless you cut her in line or attempt to cheat at Scrabble). 

But part of it has also been my recognition that a reader’s perception of me as a person will likely impact his or her opinion of my books.

If a reader does not like the author as a person, the likelihood that he or she will not like the author’s books increases considerably, regardless of the quality of the story or the writing itself.

While this may not seem fair, it is undeniably true.   

Cat Stevens taught me this.

I discovered Cat Stevens’ music more than a decade after he had recorded his final song, and I fell in love with it immediately. The folksy guitar sound and award-winning lyrics hooked me at once.

I think Oh Very Young and Peace Train are utterly perfect songs in a small, under-populated pantheon of perfect songs.

For a time, my personal theme song was Stevens’ Cant Keep It In (an homage to my inability to refrain from speaking my mind). Later, I changed my theme song to Stevens’ slightly less aggressive If You Want To Sing Out, Sing Out.

For a fraction of a second, my love for Cat Stevens might have surpassed that of Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi and The Beatles. 

In the height of my personal adoration of his music, I learned about Stevens’ remarks supporting the fatwa against Salman Rushdie following his conversion to Islam.

These remarks, which Stevens later denied and then retracted, cast his music in a new and unfortunate light for me. A pall descended over something that I had once seen as beautiful and perfect, and though the actual songs had not changed, it seemed as if they had.

It makes no sense. If I love the music, why should the opinions of the artist make a difference to me? Great music is great music. I loved it without reservation yesterday. Why should today be any different.

But it was. 

For many, and perhaps most people, their opinion of the artist will unavoidably impact their opinion of the work.

As an author, this is an important lesson to remember. We are in the business of expressing our opinions and ideas. Opinions and ideas are the capital through which we earn our living.  

In my short time working in the publishing industry, I have met many authors.  The great majority have been incredibly kind, surprisingly humble and endlessly generous people.

A few have not.

And whether I intended it to happen or not, my opinion of their work changed upon learning that they were not as nice as I had once hoped.

This is not to say that authors and other public figures should be disingenuous. I believe that honesty is the most important quality in any public figure, and authors, when expressing themselves, should keep this in the forefront of their minds. 

Sometimes my absolute adherence to honesty still gets me in trouble. 

But tied for a close second behind honesty should be qualities like thoughtfulness nuance, politeness, civility and respect.

These are qualities that I was lacking a decade ago.  

Though I may sometimes come close to line in terms of being potentially rude and offensive in the ideas I express, I rarely step over the line today. I may operate close to or even on the line, but there there was a time in my life when I only existed on the other side of the line.

I have since learned that Cat Stevens has been recognized by organizations around the world as a philanthropist and humanitarian. His departure from music industry led him to a lifetime of good work on behalf of children and the poor around the world. 

And recently Stevens returned to making music under the name Yusuf Islam. His first album was released in 2009. I purchased it immediately.

It’s okay. Not but close to the greatness of his earlier work.

Is this because I cannot help but allow his comments about Salman Rushdie to taint my opinion, even after Stevens retracted them?

I’m not sure.

And therein lies the problem of acting like a jerk. It’s impossible to know if your artistry is being harmed by your jerkiness.

So don’t be a jerk.

Be honest. Be forthright. Be opinionated. Be controversial.

But be respectful and polite, too. At least a little. 

Does knowing the author enhance the story?

I recently wrote:

A book talk places the author in the position of salesperson.  He can sell the product or sell himself.  I believe the latter to be always preferable.

I have always believed that if I can offer an audience some insight about my life and a few laughs along the way, they will be more likely to read my book and like my book than if I had spent my time touting the book itself.

As a result, my book talks and speaking engagements tend to be storytelling sessions that do not focus so much on my books as they do on my life. 

But I’ve often wondered if this is the best way to sell a book.  While my choice of strategy is hardly new, I have noted over the years that some of the more prolific and best selling authors spend a great deal of time reading from their books and talking about the stories themselves while revealing little about themselves. 

As an reader and audience member, I’ve wondered:

Am I the only person who wants to know more about the author than the book he or she is hocking? 

Last week NPR reported on a story that seems to support my position. 

In an effort to get more attention for their band, record label Luaka Bop asked writer Chuck Klosterman to write a bio for the band Delicate Steve sight unseen. 

The label’s President, Yale Evelev, wanted something different that would grab the music industries attention and get people to actually read it.

"I thought, since I'm really tired of bios for bands, wouldn't it be great just to tell Chuck to write whatever the hell he wanted as a bio for the band? So I wrote him an email and I said, 'Chuck, would you do a bio for Delicate Steve? You don't have to talk to the band and you don't even have to hear the record.' He wrote me back: 'I don't do bios.' And then, two minutes later, he wrote back again: 'Wait a minute. Do you mean I don't have to talk to the band or listen to the record? That's AWESOME! OK, I'll do it!'"

And it worked.  NPR reporter Franne Kelley received the press release, noted the unusual bio of the band, and decided to check out the band.

The result was this story, which garnered Delicate Steve a great deal of free publicity.   

Kelley writes: 

“One of the reasons Klosterman was able to pull this off in the first place is that we NEED stories about music, and those stories really do change how we hear the music.”

And the research backs up her claim. 

Michael Beckerman, chair of the music department at NYU, has done research on this very subject.

From the NPR story:

Five years ago, he invited a group of people to listen to a piece of music in a church in Germany. He gave program notes to half of the audience that told them the piece they were about to hear was written in a concentration camp, by a composer who was sent to Auschwitz only days later, where he died. He told the other half nothing other than the composer's name.

"Afterwards," Beckerman says, "we interviewed everybody. And the people who didn't get program notes thought it was sort of a sweet, lovely, folksy, Eastern European piece. And the people who got program notes almost uniformly tended to understand it at as one of the great tragic statements of the century."

It would seem that knowledge of a piece of music changes the listeners opinion of it. 

I would argue that the same holds true for books.  Knowing the author changes the way that a reader views a story.

And liking the author as a person will go a long way in helping a reader enjoy a book.

I was recently participating in an online discussion about my first book, SOMETHING MISSING.  A book rep for a major publisher was hosting the chat, and while she initially liked it a great deal when it was published in 2009, she admitted that knowing me personally has changed the way she views my work.

I assume it changed for the better, but I was afraid to ask. 

But the same has held true for me.  In the three years since I published SOMETHING MISSING, I have met a great many authors and gotten to know a few very well.  And in each instance, I have found that the way in which I read their work has changed as I have gotten to know them on a more personal level.  When I know an author, his or her books tend to take on more subtlety and nuance, and I am better able to detect those connections that the novels make to the real world.

And in every instance, I find myself liking the book more.

But I still wonder if I am in the minority.  When I am delivering a book talk, should I be pitching product or person?    

In two weeks I will be speaking at the Connecticut Literary Festival, and while I rarely know what I will say before approaching the podium and often change my mind midstream, I will invariably begin telling stories about my life.  It’s what I have always done, and frankly, it’s what I enjoy most. 

And halfway through the talk, I will have to remind myself to mention my books, because my instinct will be to push them aside and use my time to allow my audience to get to know me. 

If they know me and like me and become interested in my life story, how could they not want to read my books?

Right? 

Or wrong? 

Feminine hygiene products meet SOMETHING MISSING

Ever think that your feminine hygiene product could use a little more pizazz?

Kotex did, and that’s why they are sponsoring a design contest that allows you to “Make your Mark on the Future of Feminine Protection.”

I opted to design a pad, though I could have restyled “a period stash” or created an “inspiration board” as well. 

Unsure what either of these things are, I went with the pad. 

And while I was at it, I thought I’d throw in a little bit self promotion as well.

I think my publicist would be proud. 

Can you imagine if Kotex contest judge and “fashion visionary”  Patricia Field chose my pad design out of the millions she will surely receive?

Has there ever been a more captive audience?

Is it time for product placement in fiction?

A month after SOMETHING MISSING hit the store shelves, I began receiving the occasional but persistent email from readers asking and sometimes accusing me of having made product placement deals in the writing of my book.  It would seem that my frequent use of specific brand names in the book had struck a nerve and caused them to wonder why an author would choose to be so specific. 

Clearly, they had not yet read Stieg Larsson.

I answered those emails with the assurance that my attention to detail and use of brand names was only an attempt to paint the clearest picture possible in my reader’s mind.  But I also told readers that if Subaru had wanted to pay me for my mention of my protagonist’s Outback, I’m not sure if I would have complained.

A year later, at my first appearance for UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO, a reader asked if I had ever considered contacting Smucker’s and working out an endorsement deal with them.  My protagonist, Milo, is saddled with the compulsive need to open jars of Smucker’s grape jelly, and so this particular brand of jelly is featured prominently in the book.

Again, I told the reader that the use of the brand name was not intended to garner any corporate attention or an advertising windfall, though I also admitted that it would have been a great idea had I thought of it soon enough.

Last week The Wall Street Journal created quite a kerfuffle with a piece suggesting that it won’t be long before ads find their way into e-books.    

“With e-reader prices dropping like a stone and major tech players jumping into the book retail business, what room is left for publishers’ profits? The surprising answer: ads. They’re coming soon to a book near you.”

Still reading my books the old fashioned way, I cannot say for sure how I feel about the possibility of ads on an e-reader, but I can assure you that I would hate to see them on the pages of a pulp-and-ink book. 

However, product placement might be an entirely different story. 

While I can’t imagine striking deals with companies before or during the writing of a book, what’s wrong with my agent contacting companies like Subaru or Smuckers after the fact and attempting to make a deal?  If UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO is made into a film, the producers will undoubtedly attempt to do the same, and even switch the brand of jelly if necessary in order to make a profit.

Why shouldn’t authors also cash in when they can?

And as I think about this idea, I find myself wondering if deals could also be struck during the writing of a book as well? 

Consider this:

I am writing UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO.  I decide that one of Milo’s compulsions will be the need to open jars of jelly, thus releasing the pressurized seals on the lid.  I grew up eating Smuckers grape jelly, so this is the brand that I am inclined to use, but I contact my agent and inform her that jelly will be playing an important role in my next book, appearing multiple times and always in a relatively favorable light.  “I’m inclined to use Smuckers,” I tell her, “but the actual brand name is unimportant, so if you can make a product placement deal with a jelly company, go for it.”

Do you see a problem with this?

Naturally, there will be a concern that an author might write a book with the sole purpose of product placement, or that the proliferation of product placement might somehow erode the creative process and bastardize stories, but wouldn’t those books stick out like sore thumbs?  Wouldn’t these authors be spurned as sell-outs?  Wouldn’t these stories be ignored? 

Companies willing to invest in product placement would want the books in which their products are mentioned to garner favorable reviews and sell well, and as such, the use of product placement would need to be subtle and appear as a natural part of the story.  A brand of jelly was predestined to appear in UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO, and if choice of brand name is arbitrary, why not make some money in the process?

I’m not entirely sold on the idea yet, but as a writer who frequently mentions brand names as a means of being specific, the idea of product placement and the profits that it might garner has a certain appeal to me.

Stieg Larsson’s books could have brought in a fortune on product placement deals.

Another fortune, I mean. 

UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO update

My book tour continues this week with appearances at The Book Cellar in Brattleboro, Vermont on Thursday night at 7:00 and at Water Street Books in Essex, New Hampshire on Saturday night at 7:00.

I’ve been guest blogging about book tours on Water Street’s blog, which you can read about here.  My final post in the three-part series goes up this week.

The following week I will be in New York City, appearing at Posman Books in Chelsea Market on Tuesday, August 24 at 7:00 and Wednesday, August 25 at WORD in Brooklyn at 7:30.

Information on my WORD appearance ran in New York Magazine and in Time Out New York this week, both of which gave me a minor thrill.

Also, the first line of UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO was chosen by The Financial Post as their Opening Line of the Week.  It reads:

The moment that Milo Slade had attempted to avoid for nearly his entire life finally arrived under the sodium glow of a parking lot fluorescent at a Burger King just south of Washington, D.C., along Interstate 95.

Following today’s New York Times book Review write-up, all of this has made for an exciting week.

An idiot with a difficult name

A surprisingly large piece about me and the book appeared in the New London Day on Sunday.  There was a photo of my book on the front page of the paper and a reference to the story, which was a full page spread on the front page of the Daybreak section.

Reading an article about yourself is a little surreal.  You speak to someone for an hour or two and then wait to see what the person found interesting.  It also provides some insight into your own character, as seen through the eyes of another, significantly less biased individual.

For example, in this particular article, I refer to myself as stupid and an idiot.

I’m an excellent self-promoter.  Don’t you think?

I’d like to think that these self-referential put-downs signal a lack of pretension and a willingness to be self-deprecating and honest, but perhaps it just means that I was correct in my assessment of my mental faculties.

I’m probably just an idiot.

The write is kind enough to assert that I have a “self-critical” disposition.  This is probably true, but it doesn’t mean that I am any less of an idiot at times.   

Oh, it’s also interesting to note that the S was left off my name once in the article, a depressingly common occurrence in my life. 

Does this happen to everyone whose name ends with S?

Or perhaps only those in which the S appears to make a word plural?

Probably only when Dicks can become Dick.  Right? 

Like my name wasn’t tough enough to start. 

Daily Candy and The Wall Street Journal!

This has been a good day. 

UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO hit bookstore shelves yesterday, and today it was reviewed by Daily Candy and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. 

Daily Candy, an enormously popular website that everyone seemed to know about prior to the review with the exception of me, ran their review on their front page and made it the subject of their Daily Candy email blast, which goes to seemingly half the people I know (unbeknownst to me).

Daily Candy said:

“We all know if you spot a mysterious bag underneath a bench, you should probably move away quickly and call the authorities.

Unless it’s full of old videotapes. In which case, you should go home and watch every last one. At least, that’s what Milo Slade, protagonist in Matthew Dicks’s new novel, Unexpectedly, Milo, does.

The earnest voyeur discovers a video diary belonging to a young woman (whom he dubs Freckles) and quickly becomes fixated on her best friend, Tess, who ran away when the two were just teenagers and was never heard from again. Slade decides Tess is alive and embarks on a cross-country road trip to find her — all the while battling a demon or two (or twenty) of his own, including the recent dissolution of his marriage and a severe case of OCD.

Sound depressing? It’s not. Dicks manages to make us laugh out loud with crazed characters, like Linda, the pancake saleswoman, and Macy, a busty Southern waitress. The end result: an adventure of a summer read you’ll never put down.”

The Wall Street Journal said:

“The contemporary Connecticut of Matthew Dicks's amusing and engaging second novel, "Unexpectedly, Milo," is a much more whimsical place than Mr. Yoshida's Japan, yet it is a slightly disturbing place, too.

Mr. Dicks's peculiar protagonist—Milo Slade, a 33-year-old home health-care aide—suffers from habitual, unignorable impulses to do any number of odd, "pressure-releasing" actions, from twisting open the vacuum-sealed tops of jelly jars (he keeps a supply on hand in his car trunk) to inducing others to speak aloud in spontaneous conversation a random word ("loquacious," for instance) that has popped into Milo's head.

Milo's odd urges have plagued him his whole life: "He couldn't help but attribute them to some other force, one he often imagined as a German U-boat captain on duty somewhere in his brain, gray uniform adorned with gold epaulets, standing ramrod straight, eyes pressed into a periscope, capable of watching Milo's every move, just waiting to twist the valves and raise the levers that would increase the pressure of the demand at the appropriate moment."

By chance, Milo finds a stash of confessional videocam tapes made by a woman he doesn't know who feels seems to feel responsible for the disappearance and possible death of a former high-school classmate of hers. The obsessive, empathetic Milo determines to find the missing woman and relieve the camcorder-confessor of her long-time guilt: "He couldn't begin to imagine the joy and the sense of relief that she would feel on realizing that she was free from her burden."

Whether Milo himself will ever achieve a comparable equilibrium and happiness is part of the cosmic mystery surrounding this unexpectedly endearing hero, whose self-chosen motto is: "I'm not crazy, I'm just colorful."

My wife said:

Things are a little surreal up in here...

She’s right. 

The demise of the book tour and the rise of its replacement

The Los Angeles Times published a piece on how book tours have transformed over the years, and especially now in this economy. 

Author Carolyn Kellogg writes:

“As the business of publishing changes, book tours increasingly look like bad risks. ‘In 99.9% of cases," says Peter Miller, director of publicity at Bloomsbury USA, "you can't justify the costs through regular book sales.

Book tours used to be about local media. "You would go to these places to get reviews, interviews, TV and radio," Miller explains, but with print outlets closing down and cutting coverage and new technologies enabling long-distance video interviews, "it is becoming less important to do that kind of tour."

I’ve heard this sentiment echoed by at least two novelists who told me that they didn’t think their national book tours did much in terms of generating sales.  Instead, it would seem that well-placed, positive reviews, an adept use of digital media and some good old fashioned luck play more important roles in the success of a book.

Of course, writing a great book helps, too.

While a whirlwind national book tour sounds fun for someone like me who enjoys speaking to large groups of people, my obsession with my daughter and my desire to spend more time with her and my wife has me somewhat pleased that the book tours of the past have been scaled back.  As my publicist and I begin planning appearances for the release of UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO this summer, we’re limiting them to New England and New York.  While there are bookstores around the country who have inquired about my availability, the cost of such a book tour, in combination with my desire to remain close to home, have forced us to politely decline these requests. 

But in place of the old-fashioned book tour is the Internet.  This blog, in combination with my Twitter account, my Facebook page, my Flickr feed, and even the Android app that I designed to compile my online content have all helped me reach more readers in a week than your average book appearance.

This week alone (and eight months after the release of SOMETHING MISSING), I was contacted by seven different readers, three booksellers, three librarians requesting appearances, and two bloggers, one of whom I am sending a galley of UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO to so she can review the book and conduct an author interview. She loved SOMETHING MISSING and has been kind enough to say (more than once) that the book did not receive enough attention from the blogosphere upon its release.  She wants to change that for my next book (provided she likes it, of course) and I’m thrilled to help her in any way possible.  

I also picked up half a dozen Twitter followers this week (including two booksellers) became friends with three new readers on Facebook, and was invited to attend two different book club meetings about my book.    

All of this in one week, and this week was not unusual. 

Compared to the book tours that have been described to me, this week was much more successful in terms of reaching out to readers and building a brand. 

Sure, it would have been nice to appear on The Today Show or Oprah (are you listening, Ms. Winfrey?), and yes, I would love to travel the country someday, meeting with scores of readers and talking about my book and the process of writing.  But at the same time, I also love coming home each afternoon to my wife, my daughter, my pets, and the all-too-short evenings that I spend writing.

For now, a local book tour and a strong online presence is just find by me.

Getting the word out

It’s been a good week in terms of getting my name out.  An article that was written about me by Janet Cyr, a college student, has now run in three different Connecticut papers, including the Journal Inquirer and the West Hartford News, a hometown paper of sorts for me.

She’s really making the most of her assignment, both for her and for me.    

Sadly, neither paper provides links to the article.

Yesterday the blog Coffee with a Canine, written by Marshal Zeringue, featured a post about me and my dog, Kaleigh. 

Marshal was kind enough to offer me the opportunity even though I’ve never had a cup of coffee in my life.  Coffee cake, he told me, would suffice.