One Man: Tank Man

The Massive FUTUREPROOF Book Give Away

It has recently come to my attention that I have 35 so-called “author copies” of my novel, futureproof, just sitting in a box at my agent’s office. So I thought to myself, “Why don’t you sign all those copies and send them out to readers?” Fairly obvious thing to do, I guess.

But here’s the catch: I don’t want to send these books to just anyone. I want to send them to the people “pop” sociologist Malcolm Gladwell refers to as “mavens” and “connectors.”  My novel is doing well three months out of the gate, but there is still a very large, untapped audience out there who don’t even know it exists. Alas, this is the plight of nearly every author. It is one thing to find a willing publisher, quite another to find the audience for your book once it’s actually unleashed upon the world. There are so many different choices for today’s entertainment consumer, it’s no surprise that there would be a struggle for any writer or musician or filmmaker to find all the people who would be truly interested in what he/she has to say. And artists cannot rely upon them to find us. There is just too much obliterating the senses to expect the miracle of overnight success.

So that’s where YOU come in, you mavens and connectors out there. I am looking for SEVEN (7) people to whom I will send five (5) copies of futureproof apiece. One copy will be for you to keep, the other four will be for you to give to other mavens and connectors. (For more in-depth description of just what, exactly, a maven and a connector are/do, you can look at Gladwell’s The Tipping Point wikipedia page, the next best thing to actually reading his incredible book). The overall hope for this futureproof give away is that 35 influential readers will get their hands on these books and spread an epidemic of futureproof fever. Every book has an audience, and this is my push to really find the audience who has been (unknowingly) waiting for a copy of this book to fall into their hands.

So…think you fit the bill? Can you help me find the readers who would really connect with my novel? If so, if you want to be one of the LUCKY SEVEN who has five copies of futureproof mailed directly to your door, email me at NFRANKDANIELS AT GMAIL DOT COM, or just leave a comment under this post. I’d like to have all 35 books mailed out by early next week, so contact me asap.

Oh, and for a good idea of what people are saying about futureproof, take a look at my Myspace page, right column. And thanks in advance for throwing your weight behind me.

Craig from Craigslist Talks To Me About Finding a Job Through The Site He Founded

Funny how connections are made. When I was in Nashville a few weeks ago, desperately trying to find a job, I, like many other job seekers in metropolitan areas, turned to craigslist.org for help. But instead I was greeted with a litany of scams. Frustrated, I Twittered something to the effect of “Is there one motherfucking real job offered on craigslist or is it all bullshit?” Thats when THE Craig (I’d say the most well-known Craig on earth aside from maybe Jenny Craig?) contacted me about rotting out these scammers trying to take hungry job-seekers for what little they have left.

I was impressed. I mean, this guy personally took it upon himself to try to make craigslist better for one single person. That, my friends, is customer service. So I asked Craig if he’d grant me a short interview. He agreed. And from thence forth N. Frank Daniels’ faith in mankind was at least temporarily restored. Here’s the interview:

Me: Craigslist is one of the most popular and well-known web-sites on the
planet. It is a place where people can buy and sell items, where one can
look for dates, but in these difficult economic times it is probably most
depended upon as a place where job-seekers turn to look for work. As with
any site as highly trafficked as craigslist, it is also seen as a mecca
for scammers and spammers. Can you give me a brief run-down as to what you do to try to cut down on these sorts of activities on the site?
 
Craig: I don’t think we’re seen as “mecca” for bad guys, since they learn that
we’re really good at helping cops locate bad guys. However, our first
line of defense is our use community, which flags away most of the bad
stuff. Over time, we’ll get even smarter about dealing with this.

Me: You’ve told me in previous emails that you put in 15 hour days personally trying to rid the site of as many of these scammers and spammers as you can. What is the process you use to try to rid the site of these manipulators? Do you find that this is an ever-increasing problem now that websites such as CNN and others are publishing stories of individuals looking for work on craigslist, thereby increasing the visibility even more?
 
Craig: Every day, I work around eight am to eleven pm irregularly, taking the hours off I need to get errands done, to relax, maybe see friends. for the
most part the bad stuff is brought to me attention using a variety of
tools including email and internal software tools. It’s not really
increasing; there are only so many bad guys out there.
 
Me: Any advice for us job-hunters as to how we can smell out these fraudulent job offers?
 
Craig: We have a lot of good advice at:

http://www.craigslist.org/about/scams

Me: Do you take pride in the fact that craigslist is playing such a major role in giving desperate job seekers a glimmer of hope in finding work? Does
this increased visibility on the help wanted section of craigslist change
the over-all vision you have for the site?
 
Craig: I feel really good about that for a moment, then it’s back to work, in
part, wondering how we can help more. No vision, just, how do we do
better?

Thanks for taking the time, Craig. Again, I appreciate your help with this. Just the fact that you have taken the initiative to personally answer my emails says volumes about you as a buinessman and a person.

THE Most Amazing, Inspiring 6 Mins. I Have Witnessed In Years

The woman above singing into an old hairbrush has completely changed the way I look at everything. Now, look, I know I am no stranger to hyperbole, but the performance this woman gave two days ago on the British show “Britain’s Got Talent” is nothing short of incredible.

Susan Boyle is her name. She lives alone with a cat, has never married, has never even been kissed, and be honest, she looks like the most easily ignorable person you’ve ever met.

But watch this fucking video. Watch the way the three judges, including Simon Cowell, completely disregard her, how the entire audience laughs at her, and then how she literally moves them to tears.

I don’t like showtunes. I HATE American Idol. I generally hate musicals. But she sings the song from Les Miserables “I Dreamed A Dream” and it FLOORED me. I was literally crying, so fucking enraptured. Read the lyrics:

I dreamed a dream in time gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living
I dreamed that love would never die
I dreamed that God would be forgiving
Then I was young and unafraid
And dreams were made and used and wasted
There was no ransom to be paid
No song unsung, no wine untasted

But the tigers come at night
With their voices soft as thunder
As they tear your hope apart
And they turn your dream to shame

And still I dream he’ll come to me
That we will live the years together
But there are dreams that cannot be
And there are storms we cannot weather

I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I’m living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.”

She tells Simon that she has not made it as a singer because “I’ve never been given the chance before.” The words to the song testify to what kind of life this 47 year old woman might have lived. Now, because of one chance, one MOMENT, she is inspiring millions.

I’m just…so thankful for every minute of this life. And the beauty and inspiration that can come from places you would have never thought to look.

P.S. Watch Simon Cowell’s look of bliss at 4:04 in the video. His chin is in his hands and he literally sighs. Just incredible.

Even When Damned, You press On

In L.A., city of ‘Angels’, without focus or goal. Despite the drawn blinds still trying to ignore the sun pushing through the window.

I’m going home to Nashville tomorrow. I’m going home.

“Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam. We’ve all been there.”

My face looks like Rudolph got punched in it. The cold, the sun, the sick. The red marks they all leave behind.

“Life was something you dominated if you were any good.” ~Fitgerald, The Crack Up

“He: I could have been someone
She: Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you
He: I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Cant make it all alone
Ive built my dreams around you”

So the time approaches. I will get in that chair, hold that book in my hand, read those words on the page, make eye contact with that one and then that one, shake that hand, bend in half but not break, get on that plane, file off, find the field behind the office building. All I ever was was this.

And of course Amy. There was always Amy.

Reading at Book Soup in West Hollywood at 7 p.m. I’ll be as un-drunk as possible. Or not.

Radio Interview, Facebook, Twitter

I did an interview for Atlanta’s AM 1690 (The Voice of the Arts) the day before my February 1oth reading. You can hear a streaming mp3 of the interview here.

Oh, and I’m on Facebook now (and actually log in every now and then).

Twitter, too.

 

Hit me up. Its buckets o’ laughs.

Meeting the Fans, Seeing the Fam

 

I did my first readings for futureproof’s Harper Perennial release on subsequent Tuesdays, February 10 and 17. The first reading was in Atlanta at the Highland Inn Ballroom. It was hosted by my home bookstore, Atlanta’s own a cappella books. No, I dont technically live in ATL anymore, but a cappella has always had a place close to my heart. They were founded in 1989 by Frank Reiss in Little 5 Points and I remember going into the store frequently fucked up out of my mind on any combination of intoxicants, longing for the financial ability to buy out the whole store. While I still dont have the financial or spacial ability to own all of the books a cappella stocks and sells to the more discriminating of the reading public, I have since found in them what I consider to be the true greatness of independent book stores. The back of their t-shirt says it best:

I had done a reading once before with a capella last spring when i was out promoting the anthology I co-edited, Santi: Lives of Modern Saints. At the time I was in a very, very dark place, and was pretty much a walking disaster. The night before the reading I had drunkenly tripped over the leg of a chair in my apartment and went flying head-first into the carpet. But the funny part was that I didnt just fall—I tripped, fell, and apparently went sliding face-first across the entire length of the living room, literally giving myself a wondrous case of rug-burn straight down my forehead and nose. Trivia: the author pic of me on the back cover of futureproof was actually taken later the next day. The photographer, Rachel Bradley, was also the illustrator for Santi, and was in town for the readings. I had to submit the author pic into Harper and was already late doing it and so after Rachel snapped the shots she then had to photoshop the hell out of the resulting picture so that I didnt look like i was suffering from leprosy.

Anyway, at the reading that night last April, I drank almost an entire fifth of bourbon, the effects of which did not fully hit me until after I’d finished reading. But I wasnt in the clear as far as narrowly avoiding making a complete ass of myself. We went to a bar down the street from the book store and I climbed up on a two foot high wall before just as quickly falling on my face yet again for the second time in two days. It was just fucking marvelous.

 

This time would be different though. I had a much better overall view of life this go-round and therefore kept my pre-reading alcohol intake to a bare minimum of five jack and cokes. That might sound like a lot to some of you but I’ve found that that amount is just right in taking the edge off, and (mostly) killing stage fright. My brother and sister-in-law/long-suffering publicist Nicole drove me downtown for the reading. We jammed to some massive Daft Punk beats and then descended the stairs to the ballroom. Music was blasting, courtesy of improv art-rockers Schwarzcommando. There were what looked to me to be an assload of people there, a few of them friends from high school who I hadnt seen in years. But the coolest thing was that sitting on couches around the joint were clusters of people immersed in the din of the band jamming on the stage—and, with drink in one hand—were all reading copies of my book. I would give fucking anything to have a picture of that sight. It was an incredible feeling for me. Plus how often can you go to a club and have a band blasting the doors off the place while people sit around reading?

 

I was introduced by Frank from a cappella, then walked onto the blue-lit stage, my own drink in hand, and read from Transmission 12 (Tripping In A Field Full of Daisies). Then I answered questions. About the life of an addict (sucks); about going from self-published to ‘traditionally’ published (exciting); about what the opposite of ‘futureproof’ is (I believe the answer settled upon was ‘future-full’). People lined up to have their books signed. Can’t express here what that felt like, seeing that. Talking to people excited to read my writing. A dream.

Next was Nashville. Nashville was a strange little possibility in that I technically live there, yet the press response there was far lower than it had been in Atlanta, where I have done four different interviews for newspaper and radio.  

In Nashville I hadnt done one. But I knew Davis-Kidd book store was behind me. They had a massive poster of futureproof right by the front door. They had smaller cardboard stands around the tables trumpeting the reading. But in all honesty I was more excited about the four days I was going to be spending with my kids, who I hadnt seen since November due to my moving all around the fucking country trying to stay out of the cold. My kids and I had a great time together. Wrestling and jumping on hotel beds. Walking. Talking. Its incredible how the most seemingly mundane things can have such importance and significance once you havent had them in a long while. I take nothing for granted anymore. NOTHING.

And when I saw my wife the night of the reading for the first time in months, I was immediately overwhelmed with emotion. I didnt know how to talk or what to say. I just loved her. She held my hand. I tried not to cry. She told me the fingerholds were still there, that the grooves were still mine. I just wanted to stay in those moments and for the most part I did.

I dont know what happens next.

Tour Dates

 

Tuesday, February 10 (this Tuesday), 2009

Highland Inn Ballroom

644 N. Highland Ave. N.E.
Atlanta  GA  30306

7 p.m.

 

Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2009

Davis-Kidd Booksellers
2121 Green Hills Village Drive, The Mall at Green Hills
Nashville, TN 37215

7 p.m.

 

Monday, March 9, 2009

w/ Jerry Stahl (Permanent Midnight, Painkillers)

Book Soup
8818 Sunset Blvd.
W. Hollywood CA 90069

7 p.m.

 

Alone In the Dark

“Remembering is only a new form of suffering.”  ~Baudelaire

“It is a pity fairy tales cannot consist solely of beginnings.” ~Camus

The Publishing Paradigm Has Officially Shifted

My novel, futureproof, was published this Tuesday by Harper Perennial. It took me five years, countless revisions, a learned-on-the-fly marketing savvy, and finally a self-published version of this novel before I was ultimately successful in obtaining a Big Publishing book deal.  Just this week, both Time Magazine and the New York Times have posted articles highlighting the growing visibility and viability of self-publishing. While self-publishing has long been considered nothing more than a vanity endeavor undertaken by no-talent would-be writers with no other means of seeing their work in print, the time is fast approaching, and indeed has already arrived, when this way of looking at an ever-growing market is not only a prehistoric fallacy, but also a potentially fatal oversight by the publishing industry at large.

 

While futureproof is being trumpeted as a self-published success that found a big enough audience to warrant a chance for a larger audience, the truth is that my experience of living this authors’ dream is far from isolated. I’m not the first writer to have found his way into mainstream publishing by using the self-publishing route. But more important than that, I will not be the last; not by a long-shot. In fact, it would be more than safe to say that as the entire publishing industry is shaken to its core by the current shitty economic climate, a completely new publishing paradigm is taking root. Just as the music industry has seen a similar seismic occurrence, publishing has not been immune to the shifting sands that are inevitable as a society mutates in concurrence with the technologies of the day.

 

Harper, and specifically its paperback imprint Harper Perennial, have strived to stay ahead of the curve in this new publishing environment. Writers like Tony O’Neill (Down and Out On Murder Mile) and Lance Reynald (Pop Salvation) have either already been picked up and published by Perennial or are slated to be published within the next year (and both are writers who I struggled alongside to find the ever-elusive publishing contract). But these are only the writers with whom I am personally acquainted.

 

CONTINUE READING….

 

Harper has extensively begun mining the infinite and continually expanding universe of self-published books that are dotting different corners of the internet with ever-growing regularity. Writers such as Brunonia Barry, an author at Harper’s William Morrow imprint (The Lace Reader), Kevin Sampsell (The Suitcase), and Justin Taylor (Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever) also had big online platforms, which ultimately played the lynchpin in Harper’s decision to acquire them. This web presence would not have been possible even a decade ago, let alone the existence of such easily accessible means to self-publishing technology.   

 

Think about this: every year more and more books are being published by those who are discovering the ease and merit of self-publishing. Ten years ago my own self-publishing venture would never have had a chance to gestate, let alone find itself a fully formed book that could be bought by anyone on any corner of the globe. If one wanted to self-publish, there would have to be exorbitant costs expended by any wanna-be writer. You would go to a printer and pay him up front for the cost of materials to cover the cost of printing and binding a specific number of copies of a book. You would receive, in numerous boxes, however many copies of the book that you could afford to print, which would then be stored in your garage or basement until you found a way to coerce people into buying copies of your baby. More often than not the books you scraped together the money to print would end up moldy and forgotten—the ditched pet project of an author who, like his last foray into the world of model trains, turned out to be just another fad that had to be discarded in favor of more realistic pursuits.

 

But not anymore.

 

No matter how shitty your writing is, ANYBODY can write and publish a book, paying out little to nothing up front. How this is possible is that the technology has caught up with the demand of would-be writers. The term “print on demand” means just what it sounds like. You electronically submit a pdf of your personal dream project and all that remains is a dedication to finding an audience for your book. This potential audience has never been easier to connect with. Yes, I carried copies of my self-published book around in the trunk of my car, but the great majority of my book sales came from people buying it off of Amazon and other electronically-connected book sellers. The books were only printed when a reader ordered a copy. Gone was the need for warehouse space. Gone was the risk of monies expended on materials needed to actually print the book. Supply and demand were one and the same.

 

This is the new paradigm to which publishers around the world are struggling to adapt. Those publishers that stay ahead of the curve are the ones that will flourish. Those that refuse to adapt or simply cannot figure out how to are going to wither and die on the vine.

 

Never have the keys to the gates of publishing been placed directly in the hands of readers. If you write a book and do the legwork to get your writing in front of readers (and most importantly have a decent writing ability), the chances are higher than ever that a publisher like Harper Perennial is going to take notice. You are the great democratizers now. You are who determines what you want to read, in a more direct manner than ever before. So get out there and start reading and promoting those books that you find have merit. And if you are currently in pursuit of The Dream yourself, check out the resources out there specifically designed to make the reality more of a possibility. I’ll get you started: Self Publishing Review is a great site containing numerous tips and tricks to getting your writing noticed, and all written by writers who have themselves achieved success in this exploding market.

 

Talk soon.

~Frank