Wayne Franklin's Blog

There are certain questions in life that simply must be answered. "What motivates you?" "What do you believe is the purpose of your life?" "Who ya for?" (That one is particular to the state of Alabama and can only correctly be answered with either "War Eagle" or "Roll Tide.") And for authors, it's "What's your category?"

In a recent review, a reader suggested Midlife Mouse was miscategorized and should be consider YA (young adult). For those unfamiliar with the vagaries of publishing categories, young adult is defined as

... fiction written, published, or marketed to adolescents and young adults. The vast majority of YA stories portray an adolescent, rather than an adult or child, as the protagonist. Themes in YA stories often focus on the challenges of youth, sometimes referred to as problem novels or coming-of-age novels.

Admittedly, I wrote Midlife Mouse with the hope that it would be something families could read together. To that end, I tried to keep the language a "soft PG" and, on the advice of some of my Beta readers, made the verbiage a bit more accessible. Those qualities alone might make it read like a YA novel. So, the point is legitimate in that regard.

However, I don't believe it is YA. Call me crazy, but I don't think the average 13-year-old will identify with the struggles of a 39-year-old man going through a premature midlife crisis after failing at his business. Then again, kids do grow up fast these days...

That begs the question: if not a YA novel, what type of novel is it? This is the million-dollar question for every author. (Warning: we're shifting gears from art to commerce here.) Books, like any other products are most effectively sold when they can be marketed to the specific tastes of customers. If your goal is to go a traditional route by getting an agent and a publishing deal, this is doubly important. In fact, the process of finding an agent and/or publisher begins with finding those who best match the category of your book(s). If you want your book to sell, you should write to a specific category.

I didn't. I probably never will. I'm stubborn that way.

When I think of Midlife Mouse, I consider it first and foremost a satire. Fortunately, Amazon has a category for satirical fiction, and that's where the book has performed best. Most stores and book-related sites (like Goodreads) do not. For some reason, humor is a legitimate non-fiction genre, but not so in fiction.

One of my Beta readers pointed out to me early on that he felt the book was primarily a fantasy. There are no dragons, wizards, elves or orcs. So the classic definition of fantasy is out. There are, however, prophecies, spirits and other elements of magical realism that would seem to place the book in the contemporary fantasy category. But it's not a perfect fit.

One aspect of the book that doesn't sit well with certain readers is its sympathetic portrayal of protagonist Bill Durmer's Christian faith. Other readers, who happen to be adherents of Christianity, have reacted favorably to this same aspect.

Does the non-mocking portrayal of Christian characters make it a "Christian book," then? I am not really a fan of that particular label, but marketers are. Just as an experiment, I have changed my secondary category on the Kindle store to "Christian fiction." However, just as many non-Christians have enjoyed the book as Christians, and I don't want to limit its audience.

Since I wrote it with the intention of making it a family novel, perhaps that's a fitting category. That is, it would be, but the category doesn't exist. Like humor, it exists only in nonfiction. Once again, I've managed to write a book ideally suited to a nonexistent category.

If you look at the Amazon recommendations associated with Midlife Mouse, you will see that most of the people who have purchased the book have also purchased books about Disney history. There is a heaping dose of real Disney company history mixed into the book's story, but it's not a history book. It's not a Disney vacation planning guide or a behind-the-scenes look at "the Magic," either. There is not even a non-fiction category for Disney-related books, much less fiction. but there probably should be. It's a big market. (That makes three non-existent categories, for those keeping score at home.)

Then there is the Southern angle. The story is set entirely in the Southeast, with half of it taking place in the fictional Alabama town of Decent Chance. More than just the settings, the book has a decidedly Southern feel. As a native Alabamian writing Southern characters in their Southern towns, it should. As a newbie author, I was surprised to find that there is no category for Southern fiction. To me, it's as distinct a genre as horror or mystery. (Four.)

Where does that leave me? It leaves me wishing for a category for satirical, semi-Christian, family friendly, light contemporary fantastical, Disney-fied Southern fiction. I'm fairly sure if that category existed, I would totally dominate it.

If any of you have ever wondered what I sound like (and really, who hasn't?), now's your chance to find out. I was recently interviewed by host Bill Thompson for The Bookcast, a podcast dedicated to interviews of indie authors.

Now all of your burning questions can be answered: Does Wayne have a Southern accent? Does he lisp, because he writes like a lisper? Does he pronounce the word "oil" as "earl"? Does he even say the word "oil" in the interview so we'll know?

The answers to all these questions and more await you on the Midlife Mouse edition of The Bookcast.

What a great way to keep things moving here on MouseFirst Thursday – we just received a message from blogger Kathleen Everett of The Course of Our Seasons. She recently read Midlife Mouse and sent us a link to her awesome review.

Here's an excerpt:

"There are a few authors whose books I’m not allowed to read in bed. Basically because I wake my poor husband up to read him hilarious passages, or my loud guffaws disturb his sleep. Bill Bryson, Fannie Flagg, Garrison Keillor – their books are all relegated to the den. And now I add one more: Wayne Franklin and his wonderful book, Midlife Mouse."

You can read the whole thing here at Kathleen's blog. Check out her other work while you're there. Her combination of photography and poetry is always a heart and head-stimulating delight. She's a classic, classy Southern lady through and through.

To experience the book for yourself, get Midlife Mouse for $1.99 on Kindle today!

MouseFirst!

As you may know, Midlife Mouse has been on sale for only $1.99 for the last week at Amazon's Kindle Store. As happens with these types of promotions, we had a good surge of activity for the first few days, the result of which was that the book reached as high as the top-10 of Amazon's bestsellers list for satire, surrounded by names like Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller. It has also been listed as a "Hot New Release" in satire for most of the week, alongside Carl Hiaasen and Helen Fielding.

The $1.99 sale will end this Thursday, June 13, but we want to go out with a bang. Our goal is to make Midlife Mouse #1 in satire for that day. That's where you come in.

We're creating a day-long, online event during which fans of Midlife Mouse and author Wayne Franklin can help us get the word out about the last day of the sale. We're calling it MouseFirst Thursday.

How You Can Help:

1. If you haven't already, buy a Kindle copy of Midlife Mouse this Thursday. (If you already own a copy or don't use the Kindle format, move on to step 2.)

2. Promote MouseFirst to your friends on Facebook. We've found the book has appeal to far more than just Disney fans. Here are some sample status updates you can use, depending on where you live or what your interests are:

If you're a Disney fan or a fan of good fiction, help make Midlife Mouse the #1 Kindle title in satire. Only $1.99 today! http://amzn.com/B00CWSHY16

Help Mobile native Wayne Franklin take his novel, Midlife Mouse, to #1 of Kindle's bestsellers in satire. Only $1.99 today!
http://amzn.com/B00CWSHY16

Help Birmingham's own Wayne Franklin reach #1 on the Kindle bestseller list for satire with his novel, Midlife Mouse. Only $1.99 today!
http://amzn.com/B00CWSHY16

Help make Midlife Mouse #1 in satire. Reviewers call it "Magical!" "part Big Fish, part Disney lore and all heart" and "filled to the brim with charm and graceful humor." Only $1.99 today!
http://amzn.com/B00CWSHY16

3. Tweet about it. Be sure to include the permalink: http://amzn.com/B00CWSHY16
You can also include the twitter handles @MidlifeMouse and @AmazonKindle, and hashtags like #MouseFirst, #indiepublishing and #Disney.

Example:

Support #indiepublishing. Make @MidlifeMouse #1 in satire for @AmazonKindle. Only $1.99 today! #MouseFirst #Disney http://amzn.com/B00CWSHY16

Or you can appeal to fans of Wayne's alma mater:

Help Bama grad @wannabef get his novel, @MidlifeMouse, to #1 in satire! Only $1.99 today! #rolltide #rtr #Disney http://amzn.com/B00CWSHY16

Or for the Disney fans:

Help make the novel that name-checks Hench, Crump, Blair, Wells, the Nine Old Men and Roy E. the #1 title in satire! http://amzn.com/B00CWSHY16

4. Post about Midlife Mouse on your blog. Let's get the word out to as many folks as possible.

5. Review or rate the book. Positive reviews and ratings on Amazon help us in Amazon's ranking system and cause the book to show up as a recommendation to more readers. Reviews and ratings on Goodreads are helpful, too.

6. Give Midlife Mouse on Kindle as a gift. It's only two bucks. Just click the "Give as a Gift" button on the right side of the Kindle listing.

Why You Should Help:

1. You love an underdog. Midlife Mouse, an indie published title, is going toe-to-toe with big names from big publishing houses. Let's send a message: indie authors have as much right to be on bestseller lists as the big boys.

2. You love the book. Midlife Mouse currently enjoys five-star ratings on both Amazon and Goodreads. And reviews have been overwhelmingly positive. The book resonates with readers. If you're one of them, let everyone know!

3. You love a good summer read. Several reviewers have pointed out that Midlife Mouse, with its quick pace, chapter-ending cliffhangers and wry wit, is the perfect beach or poolside read.

4. You love Disney. Yes, there's no getting around it. This book is awash in Disney geekdom. Reviewers have mentioned how much they enjoyed the interweaving of real Disney history with the book's invented mythology. And they've said that, in reading the book, you can almost imagine you're at Walt Disney World, walking right alongside Bill Durmer and the motley cast of characters.

5. You love the South. As much as Midlife Mouse is about Disney, it's also steeped in Southern culture. Even our friends from up north have praised the charming portrait of Southern life the book paints. Readers have made comparisons to works by Daniel Wallace, Fannie Flagg, Mark Childress and Winston Groom.

6. You love kittens. Seriously, Wayne has a couple of kittens left for which he needs to find homes. Help us out, and one of those could be yours!

That's it. That's the plan for MouseFirst Thursday. Join us, and win one for the little guy. (In this case, a really little guy. Not Wayne, the mouse.)

All week, Midlife Mouse has been hovering in the #10-20 range in the list of Kindle bestsellers for satire. It has also been consistently featured as one of the "Hot New Releases" in satire, alongside the likes of satirist Carl Hiaasen and Helen Fielding in her pre-sales for the next Bridget Jones title.

In fact, we keep jockeying back and forth with the titular Ms. Jones in the rankings. We think it's time to put her and her Zellwegerness in their proper place: behind Midlife Mouse once and for all. (And don't even get us started on that pesky Kurt Vonnegut, what with all his many titles...)

Here's the problem: we want to be able to call Midlife Mouse a "bestseller." In order to justify that, we need photographic proof, and the best way to get that photographic proof is to push it up to the top-6 of Kindle bestsellers in satire. (That way, I can capture the header reading "Bestsellers" and the book cover in the same shot. You know what, it's a composition thing; don't even worry your little head about the details.)

So, here's how you can help us get there: buy the book. It's that simple! As we've mentioned before, the book is only $1.99 now through June 14 on the Kindle Store.

"But I don't own a Kindle," says you.

"Not a problem," says we. (And by "we," I mean the royal we. It's just me, Wayne, typing these things. It's not like I have a sweatshop full of blogging minions to handle these posts for me. What do I have, Vonnegut money?)

Of course, you could always add Kindle books to the Kindle Cloud Reader in your browser and onto your iPhone, iPad, Android phone and other such format-agnostic devices. However, you can now even add them to your NOOK. As fellow author -- of the brilliant Zombie Bible series -- Stant Litore pointed out, you can now install Google Play on the NOOK, allowing you access to a world of apps ... including the Kindle app for Android. Here's a little more on that.

So step up, and spend less than the cost of a gallon of gas for 97,000+ words. We even put them in a right nice order for you. They tell a story and everything.

I published this earlier today on my southern culture blog, real-southern.com:

Needless to say, we (and by "we," I mean "I") haven't been posting here much over the last few months. There are a number of reasons for that. Many of them have to do with my efforts to self-publish my first novel, Midlife Mouse (now available at most online retailers, including Amazon).

Why self-publish, you ask? That's a question I've been asking myself with increasing frequency of late. When I was still in the throes of writing, I didn't think I would self-publish. In fact, an imprint of Simon & Schuster took a liking to the first five chapters of the book and asked for the rest of the manuscript. There was only one problem: there was no rest of the manuscript. (Needless to say, there is a rest of the manuscript now, and you can buy it at most online retailers, including Kobo.)

It took me about three months to finish the book, writing feverishly over the summer of 2010. Once the first draft of the full manuscript was complete, I passed it along to the editor at the imprint. She seemed eager to read it. Then ... nothing. Radio silence. She stopped taking my calls. She stopped responding to my emails. It felt like one of those situations where you're dating someone, and they suddenly learn all your dark, horrible secrets by looking up your name with the Googler and reading your arrest records and all the news stories that you could probably explain away if only you were there with them at the time, but now you'll never get the chance, because they've moved away and changed their phone number and their legal name, and they've hired a large Swedish bodyguard named Sven just in case you find them and show up to peek in their windows, just to see if maybe they've simply left the phone off the hook. Yeah, it was like that.

To this day, I have no idea if it was something I did. But this editor who had been very high on my writing, based on a five-chapter sample, had suddenly disappeared. Maybe the first word of Chapter Six suddenly changed her opinion. The first word of Chapter Six is the name Katherine, by the way. Maybe the editor had bad associations with the name. Maybe she was attacked by a pack of wild Katherines as a child. It happens.

Then again, perhaps the answer is a darker one. Perhaps she died. I find that many editors lose interest in their work posthumously. It's a well-known, but rarely discussed reality in the publishing world. Someone should do a documentary.

The process of garnering interest from Simon & Schuster had been so easy, I was convinced that the power of my writing would cause editors and agents alike to swoon (just as it will make you swoon, as soon as you purchase it from one of many online retailers, including Smashwords). I could see the six-figure advances and seven-figure movie deals flowing in like ... I don't know, something that flows. What am I, a writer?

So I started the process of querying. It's a queer word, querying, and the process itself is even queerer...er. You try to sum up 97,000 words of your blood and sweat and heart and soul in a couple of paragraphs. You try to make yourself seem witty, debonair, charming and exceedingly prolific so as to ensure repeats of your impending success, and you have to make all that happen within a single page. Then, you send it out into the ether. Well, not the ether exactly, but when emailing editors and agents, it seems that way.

In my case, I was very strategic with my queries, only choosing a dozen or so agents to whom to send the work. Those were carefully chosen after weeks of poring over thousands of agency listings that gave some indication of each individual's tastes in books, previous successes and current needs. I followed them on Twitter and liked their Facebook pages. I read their blogs. There are few things in the world less interesting than a literary agent's blog, I assure you. I learned their personality quirks, their favorite movies and their shoe sizes. Then I sent out the letters.

Next came my favorite part: the waiting.

No one warns you about the waiting. You've spent months -- in my case, about three months spread out over the course of a full year -- writing your book. You've labored and sweated, hoped and fretted like an expectant mother. By the time you finish the work, you are completely convinced that it is simultaneously the most glorious piece of literature ever achieved by mortal man and the most insipid, insignificant wad of twaddle ever slapped on a page. You've researched your potential market. You've mastered your "elevator pitch" and refined your one-page summary. You've prepared yourself for every eventuality. Except the waiting.

Some of those agents I queried rejected me within a couple of weeks. Others within two months. Others still haven't responded. After two years. More Katherinephobes, no doubt.

From the time I wrote the book to the time I decided to self-publish, I kept myself plenty busy. I created this site (partially inspired by the things I was writing in the book, now available at most online retailers, including Diesel), completed a couple of music documentaries, experienced highs and lows in my TV production business and moved my office and home. Twice. Once time allowed, and it became perfectly clear that some of those agents simply couldn't be bothered to reject me, I decided to take on the world of self-publishing.

I could have done like many writers have and queried dozens, if not hundreds, more agents. As I read more about some self-publishing successes (like my friend Robert Kroese), I became convinced that self-publishing was a legitimate, and perhaps even preferred, choice for my first novel.

That being said, the thing you need to know about self-publishing is this: in the greater publishing world, self-published authors are regarded as being slightly more respectable than personal injury lawyers but significantly less respectable than your average ex-con. This is odd to me. I come from the film world, where the label "indie" is worn as a badge of honor, proof that you have the chutzpah to eschew the gatekeepers of the industry and sneak your way in through the back. Or simply kick down the gates. Not so in publishing.

Most literary journals still won't review the works of indie authors. There are literary societies (in my home state of Alabama, for example) that you cannot join, nor can you attend their events, unless you are "traditionally published." While e-book retailers and print-on-demand services have made self-publishing easier than ever, getting your self-published books in actual brick-and-mortar stores may be harder than ever before. You can reach the entire world by self-publishing through Amazon, but just try getting that Amazon-printed title into your local independent bookseller. (Did I mention that my book, Midlife Mouse, is now available at Amazon among other online retailers? I thought I might have.)

Nevertheless, I took on the challenge. In the next installment of this series, we'll take a closer look at the sausage-making that is indie publishing. In the meantime, might a recommend a stellar addition to your summer reading? It's this little book about one Southern man's midlife crisis. It's now available at ... well, you know the rest.