The Cactus League catching helium like a tooled-up rookie

Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding hit the literary scene like a solar eclipse in the spring of 2011, the rare baseball novel released with both a high six-figure bonus and the commensurate fanfare. Reviewers mostly gushed, and Henry Skrimshander took his place among the sport's fictional underdogs.

I was knee deep in baseball books at the time, polishing off my first novel, The Greatest Show on Dirt, while also reviewing books for both Baseball America and my own blog, Bailey's Baseball Book Reviews. I've always loved a good baseball novel, and I kept a vigilant lookout for them. The Art of Fielding was a hit in my scorebook, not that it needed my backing to push its way onto the bestseller lists. Several other fine baseball novels came out over the subsequent years, though none seemed to make more than a small ripple. I banged my drum for Joseph Schuster's The Might Have Been, Jeff Gillenkirk's Home, Away, and Philip Beard's Swing, among others. But you'll forgive casual baseball readers for missing them.

The Might Have Been and Swing made Spitball Magazine's short list for its annual Casey Award, the highest honor for a baseball book. That in itself is something of an achievement, as only two other novels have survived to the finalists stage (Spitball's top 10) since The Art of Fielding did in 2011. That's an average of about one every other year.

It will be interesting to see if Emily Nemens' The Cactus League finds its way onto the list this year. I'm not quite as plugged in to the baseball book world as I was several years ago, and I only became aware of it last month when I stumbled across a link on Twitter. All of a sudden, however, I can't miss it. I'm seeing references to it everywhere. Maybe this is just it catching helium as it neared its release date (Feb. 4, which was yesterday). The downside of not reviewing books these days is I actually have to pay cash money for them (though as an author, I can totally respect and appreciate that). So last night I ponied up my pesos and ordered The Cactus League.

I know little more than what you can read about the book on its Amazon page, and I'm kind of happy to stay at that level until it arrives. Sometimes the best way to avoid letting other opinions influence your own is to simply avoid them altogether. That said, I'll certainly be willing to share mine once I get through it.

I can already tell you this much: Readers are searching for it on Amazon. And I know this because I've added it and Nemens to the list of books and authors I'm targeting with ads for The Greatest Show on Dirt. For those unfamiliar with how these Amazon ads work, as an author you "bid" what you're willing to pay for your ad to appear as a sponsored product on other pages. It's a constant effort to gauge which books help drive traffic (and more importantly, sales) to yours. Amazon's statistical dashboard is almost fascinating enough to justify the investment. Over the past seven days, I've had 47 "clicks" based on various search terms. Half of those (24) have been searches on The Cactus League, Nemens' name, or some combination thereof.

Though it hasn't actually arrived yet, The Cactus League has stepped into the on-deck circle in my book pile. By the time the real-life Cactus League gets underway, I should have a better feeling of whether it has justified its hype as--to my sense at least--the biggest baseball fiction release in nine years.

Disney World the saddest place on earth to end a career

The end of the end

You sang your song
For much too long
The songs they're wrong
The bread has gone

--"Peanuts," The Police, 1978


We need to talk about Sting.

Not for his sake, but for ours. Well, mine. I shouldn't speak for you. Perhaps you've already come to terms with the end of his meaningful career. Or perhaps you always thought he was a tosser and this only proves your point. Again.

But I grew up on his music. Synchronicity made the Police the biggest band on the planet when I was in junior high. I remember wanting to go see them in the Tacoma Dome the week before I started high school. I remember being so jealous of all the kids showing up on the first day in their concert t-shirts. My sister bought me a Synchronicity t-shirt that Christmas and I wore it until the black faded to gray and the holes in it became too large and numerous to ignore.

And then the Police broke up, walking away at the top, and I was gutted. I finally got to see Sting in concert a few years later, at the State Fair in Syracuse. I saw him three times as a solo act, and when the Police did their reunion tour in 2008 my wife and I caught them in Buffalo. My only regret looking back on it was I didn't pay for floor seats. It was my one and only chance to catch my all-time favorite band, and I should have sprung for a closer vantage point.

Reading comprehension, reviews, and jerks

There's an unwritten (but much written about) rule for authors when it comes to reviews. You cannot respond to negative reviews. Authors are supposed to have thick skin. Authors shouldn't put their work out for the masses to judge if they can't handle the criticism that will inevitably come. Even books that have a large number of positive reviews will also attract some 1-star hit jobs. We're just supposed to rise above and tune them out.

For starters, it's unprofessional to try to argue with readers. If someone thinks your book sucks, leaving a comment on their review telling them they're a bozo isn't likely to change their mind. Nothing will be gained, and there's a chance you just might unleash the dogs of the internet, who will savage you with many more terrible reviews, just because.

So I won't respond to the moronic review that was left for The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo on Amazon this week. Not on Amazon anyway. But I will vent here, in the relative obscurity of my own site. Here, among friends and spiders and bots (yeah, I see you Russians in my traffic stats).

Here, in its entirety, is the review that was written.

"Is this all nothing but emails?" Um, yes. That is why it says this in the summary of the book:

So maybe if you hate stories told through emails, don't buy a story told entirely through emails.

As for the "what a waste" portion of the review ... you may recall that I ran a free promo for First World Problems last month. Not to go too Janet Livermore on it, but my expectations weren't exactly met. I didn't get anywhere near the downloads I was hoping for. I had 900 in four days, which is pretty crappy. It did generate a few sales of Dispatches from a Tourist Trap, which I assume means there were a handful of people who enjoyed the first book enough to move onto the second. But there wasn't exactly a spike in sales of either book. Which makes me 99.9 percent sure that this reviewer got the book for free. So "what a waste," eh? They wasted none of their own money on it, and if they hate books written as emails, it should have been obvious by the first page--second if they're slow--so how much time could they have wasted figuring that out?

This reminds me of a 1-star review left for my first novel, The Greatest Show on Dirt.

That book is indeed a story about people who work in a baseball stadium. I'm not sure if I could have made that any clearer in the summary.

So, again, if that's not what someone was looking for, why buy the book? Apparently his reading comprehension is as poor as his grammar.

The most incredible part of that one is this same guy left a review for my other baseball book, Nine Bucks a Pound.

So many questions. Why did he buy a second one of my books if he hated the first so much? Why would he review a book he only started? Is it personal? Should I know this guy? Did he open the phone book and plant his finger on my name? Does he hate cans?

Reviews can be tremendously helpful for authors. (I'll pause here while you go to Amazon and write a few for some of your recent favorites.) Even negative ones can be useful if they provide honest, constructive criticism. But these, all they do is give authors something to vent about on their blog. Considering how dry I run sometimes on blog topics, maybe I should consider they've done me a favor.

FREE! isn't free, but sometimes it's worth paying for

There was a point in the early days of indie publishing when the FREE! book promo was one of the go-to gimmicks. Tales spread among the author blogs about huge sales tails that would follow a 3-4 day run on the Kindle free lists. These surges would more than pay for the advertising required to spread the word back in the glory days of free in 2010-11.

I released my first novel, The Greatest Show on Dirt, in February 2012. I ran a free promo on Amazon, gave away 5,124 copies in April of that year, and saw a modest sales bump when it returned to regular price. Maybe I missed the window on free, maybe my book wasn't quite the right genre to ride the wave. I wasn't sold on free, but I wasn't ready to completely write it off, either.

In July 2015, I dabbled with free again with my second novel, Nine Bucks a Pound, also a baseball-themed story. According to my records, which I have no reason to doubt, I didn't spend anything on advertising this time. I moved 1,147 units. I sold a handful at regular price afterward. Again I was left wondering whether there was more potential for this. Certainly advertising would have helped generate interest, but would it have meant more paid sales after? And how many free downloads would be required to result in a bona fide sales spike? I could only guess.

The last time I bothered with a free promo was March 2018, when I ran one for my third novel, Sorry I Wasn't What You Needed. This time I spent $78 on a total of three ads, and I saw 3,668 free downloads as a result. Sales spike? Not quite. Depends on your definition of spike. I was disappointed enough that I figured I wouldn't bother with free again.

Yet here I am, giving it one more try. This time I'm giving away The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo, my fourth novel, from Thursday (9/5) through Sunday (9/8). And I'll be honest, free is something of a desperate measure here. This book just hasn't seemed to catch on. It's received some decent reviews (and a couple of lame ones), but not enough overall.

All booked up with books

I like books.

There, I said it. Yeah, crazy that someone who writes books would like to read them too, right?

Books seem to pile up in our house. Every bookshelf we have seems to have more books on it that it was meant to hold. When we moved in back in 2005, I bought two 6-foot tall unfinished pine book cases, stained them, and then filled them with books. When we finished off our basement, they moved down into the library. Yeah, we have a library. What of it?

I have two more bookshelves in my office, another smaller one in the library. A small one in my son's room, a fancy one with a glass door in our bedroom, and ... somehow we still have more books than shelf space.

For several years now I've been meaning to add another big shelf to the library, to eliminate the sideways lying books that block the ones that are properly shelved. It's actually tough to find a solid wood bookshelf these days that doesn't cost a fortune. The store where I bought most of the others is long out of business, and I can't find any others in the area that stock plain wood shelves. So I decided to make my own.

With a little help from my dad, who has all the tools not to mention all the wood-working skills in the family, I constructed something solid that will alleviate our overcrowding problem. At least for the moment. Check back in a year or two.

New books available in old-school format

Exciting news in the world of print books! The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo and Dispatches from a Tourist Trap were both released in paperback format today. So if you don't Kindle and want to read them, you can now order them on Amazon.

I held off on formatting First World Problems for print when I released it last fall, mainly because sales of my other books as paperbacks were so sluggish. But they've picked up quite a bit over the past four months, enough to motivate me to make all five of my books available as both ebooks and paperbacks.

I was also a little hesitant to deal with the conversion process, as I've struggled with formatting for print some in the past. But I have to say this time it was much easier than I'd feared. Maybe I'm learning a thing or two along the way.

Dispatches has been dispatched

Today's the big day for the new book. Dispatches from a Tourist Trap released today on Amazon for the Kindle. Yes!

Here's the link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Q2DRWH4

Only $2.99. A bargain at twice that.

At one time last year I had hoped to release this book at the same time as The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo, the first book in the series. But then the reality of editing and rewriting hit and it became obvious that would only push everything back. I was also hoping that by releasing Book 1 in the fall, there would be a rabid corps of Jason Van Otterloo fans salivating for the second book by now. That hasn't quite happened. This series is more of a slow burner, I guess. We'll get there in time, but for now still building one sale at a time.

I'm in my last week of unemployment before starting my new job next Monday. I've been busy, busy, busy with book stuff over the past few weeks. The top priority was getting Dispatches ready to go, but there's been a lot more going on.

Paperbacks

Yes, I have finally gotten the formatting done to release both The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo and Dispatches from a Tourist Trap in print. I am in the process of getting the covers created. Once those are ready I'll just need to upload my files to Amazon, order proofs, make sure everything came out right, and release. I'm hoping to have them ready for public consumption by the middle of the month.

Reviews

In addition to doing review copy giveaways on Library Thing and Booksprout, I had a very long, detailed review run on a site called The Irresponsible Reader. And I don't know if I really understand the name, because the guy who runs it seems quite responsible, as well as prolific in his reading. He had some nice things to say about The First World Problems of Jason Van Otterloo, and will also be reviewing Dispatches from a Tourist Trap soon.

An Author Q&A

In addition to reviews, The Irresponsible Reader also runs author Q&As. Mine was posted this morning. I've done a few of these in the past, but this one was great because he seemed like he put some serious thought into the questions, instead of simply sending the same handful of questions he asks everyone else.

So, plenty going on here. I keep thinking I'll wake up one day to a short to-do list and have time to lounge on the couch watching TV, but it keeps not happening. And we're down to three days of "vacation," so it's looking less and less likely. Oh, well.