Konrath recently had this guest post on his blog by an author named Guido Henkel who has self-published a series of old-timey horror novels that aren't selling. He made a bunch of changes...and they still aren't selling. So he's been forced to conclude that the market for this kind of book just isn't there, and he needs to write more-contemporary horror if he wants his books to sell.
And I think that's something important for would-be writers to keep in mind: When it comes to selling books, genre still matters. Probably the two best-selling come-from-nowhere self-published authors these days are Amanda Hocking and H.P. Mallory. Guess what they write? ROMANCE. Romance, of course! Romance, oh, romance, that most commercial of genres! (Fucking romance, if you're me.)
But I still think Henkel is in a better position than he would be had the Jason Dark books simply been rejected and never been published, or had been published by a small press and then not sold. He can move on to another type of book without anyone telling him they won't publish him because his last book sold so poorly. He acknowledges that writing the series made him a better writer, and he's being published in Fangoria now, so his career is definitely moving forward. I think eventually he will hit on something that resonates with readers--and once he develops a fan base, he'll have ten additional books to sell people.
Done!
OK, the new cover(s) has been uploaded to CreateSpace. Oddly enough, I can't upload it here--look over there or just take my word that it's basically the same cover, except that the portal is larger, hopefully looming somewhat menacingly.
So I'll have to order proofs again and go through that whole rigmarole, which is fine, and then I'll have to convince Google Books and Amazon's Search Inside the Book feature to use the new cover, which will probably be kind of a pain. But THEN I'll really, REALLY be done!
It's always something!
I'm redoing the covers for the hard copies, and since I was changing the cover anyway, I decided to tighten up the jacket copy a little. Since I put the jacket copy in the e-book descriptions as well, I looked them over to make sure they were consistent.
Well, guess what's full of typos? Not the jacket copy--that I checked and re-checked. But when I decided to put it into the e-book descriptions, I just typed down what was on the jacket, because it's hard to pull text from a picture file. And I didn't check it. And it's all screwed up.
Ai-yi-yi. Of course that's what got sent out to reviewers. Of course.
Wrapping things up
I don't know why this is, but I seem to work best doing one thing at a time--if my focus is fractured, I have a hard time actually accomplishing anything. So while I've gotten some editing done on Trust, I haven't been nearly as productive as I know I could be, and I think a big part of it is that I keep having to do stuff for Trang.
But at this point? I may tweak the new cover a little, but I like it enough that I told that artist (who did get back to me) that I wouldn't be using his images after all--I'm going to use the new cover on the paperbacks. That's not because I think my work is prettier than his (it's not), but I think the portal is a distinctive visual that can be used on other covers in the series as well as in advertisements. I also think the description and the formatting issues have been largely put to rest.
So basically, once I finish everything with the cover and drop the price, Trang will be REALLY done. I've got some more decent marketing ideas, but the thing is, at this point, I think the best thing I could do for Trang is to finish Trust. There is tremendous reluctance to read the first book of a series when the other books haven't been written, because a lot of authors crump out after the first one and don't ever finish the series (there are review bloggers who refuse to read books from unfinished series for this very reason). And if I have more than one book, I can do things like hook readers in with freebies or get the books into a less-populated category.
I tend to get wrapped up in the DO MORE NOW MORE MORE NOW NOW!!! mentality, but looking at things objectively, I think if I spend money advertising Trang now without a second book out, that's going to be money that could be more effectively spent after Trust is released. One of Joe Konrath's mantras is, "self-publishing is forever"--it's not like traditional publishing, where you have to sell sell sell in the first six weeks or you're screwed. I can let Trang sit, and it's not going to hurt anything.
So I think what I need to do now is 1. put Trang to bed, and 2. take a break! I've been dedicating an awful lot of my waking hours and head space to this, to the detriment of some other things I also enjoy, and I'm beginning to resent spending so much time in front of the computer. I think a short vacay is in order, and then I'll (hopefully) be all over Trust.
Why you DIY (or at least DO YOUR HOMEWORK)
OK, I know I bitch and moan, and I just figured out how to edit an ePUB file (did you know they're really zipped files? Wonders never cease) in order to add cover art to the Nook version, only to have B&N reject the final product as being The Wrong Sort of ePUB file. (Snobs.) So, it's not like this process is without its little frustrations.
But then I read this WSJ article about how this one digital publisher is going to resurrect backlist books via electronic and print-on-demand publishing, and it makes this all worthwhile. For one thing, the authors are getting a 50% royalty on the e-books, which, yes, is twice the industry standard, but it's also less than 70% you can get by doing it yourself.
Thing number two is that the books are really expensive. The e-book of Midnight Guardians is fricking $14.99, but don't worry! That's still waaaay less than the POD paperback, which is $23.08.
Holy freaking Moses! I'll just point out that the book is 210 pages long, which is not long, and $23 for a 210-page paperback is just ridiculous. This is, in fact, the big criticism that used to be leveled against POD publishing--the resulting book is so expensive that you price yourself out of any market. Nowadays there's no need for the book to be that expensive--Trang is 370 pages, $14.99, and I do make a decent royalty off that (on Amazon, anyway).
And it's not like there aren't plenty of other published authors who have self-published their backlists profitably and are eager to tell you how.
Oh, and the digital publisher releasing those costly books? Made a million dollars (on 420 titles, so we're not talking Amanda Hocking levels of sales success here) between May and December--but still hasn't turned a profit.
I realize that it is normal to pay for convenience. Don't want to thrash around like I have, trying to create cover art? Pay someone to do it for you! Want someone else to deal with the formatting headaches? Hire someone! Pay someone to do your social media and videos, if you feel that's key to sales. I could totally see ponying up for all that if you really don't want to stretch. But I don't ever see giving up all control over pricing and 50% of your revenues (AFTER the publisher recoups their costs) when you're not getting any advantage from a distribution standpoint. Midnight Guardians isn't in Wal-Mart or Target--it's on Amazon, just like everybody else.
ETA: In other words, to quote Konrath, "[I]f you’re going to be one of these two animals, don’t be the frog. Better to be the monkey."
Climbing up that learning curve
OK, you know how when I was trying to figure out how to put a table of contents in an e-book, and it turned out that it was easy to do--as long as you downloaded the right software and got comfortable editing HTML?
Well, tonight I decided to tackle including the front cover art. And, gee, yes it is easy, assuming you download Mobipocket Creator and get comfortable creating a MOBI file. Of course, that only takes care of the Kindle. Smashwords claims that if you just add an image to that Word file they insist on, you'll be set--I guess we'll see once they finish processing it, but if that's true, they get ease-of-use points for both the embedded cover art and the table of contents. [ETA: It's true! Point to Smashwords!] Nobody seems to know how to do it for the Nook.
Seriously, if anyone is ever wondering why not all e-books have all the bells and whistles, it's because IT'S A PAIN IN THE ASS. Actually uploading your book file is relatively easy (deceptively easy in Amazon's case, because it turns out that the Word-to-Kindle conversion is far from perfect), but the rest of it? Let's just say that, while I am comfortable using software, I never had any ambitions to actually go mucking around in its guts. And yet, here I am. I guess this is growth.
P.S. Oh, and allow me to roll my eyes, because the cover won't show up in Amazon's preview tool. Again, it works with Mobipocket, so I can only hope it works with a Kindle.
This might be the cover
I know I keep changing my mind about the cover, but I think this one might be it. It certainly works well as a thumbnail. At 5 1/2 by 8 inches, the portal is blurry--but I think that actually works with the book, especially since Saturn and Titan are pixelated. It's a bit like someone was trying to take a picture of this thing, but it can't quite be captured by a camera.....
Hm
I haven't heard back yet from that artist (I swear, he'll get back to me in, like October 2012 and will be really snippy that I didn't wait), and I've been having thoughts about doing the cover myself again, since I don't have to draw people. Basically I had the idea of modifying the current placeholder art so that the portal is more dominant and mysterious, and then carrying that over to the other titles so that the portals are always there, lurking. (Yes, in the story the portals are completely invisible, but I figure if you can't take artistic license with your own work, when can you?)
I dunno, I like that artist's work, but there's a real question about how long you wait for someone. If it was just the e-books, I could redo the covers every day from now until doomsday, and it wouldn't make any difference. But for the paperbacks, there's a cost--you have to order new proofs, and there's an extra fee for changing the cover for a book that out on Expanded Distribution.
I also downloaded a couple of title fonts, only to come here and realize that the current lettering works really well in a thumbnail. So maybe I should leave that be.
Oh, and if you're feeling like I need to get a grip about that review, I was just looking at blogs (didn't find anything mind-blowing this time), and this one woman actually solicited so-so reviews about her book! She literally wrote, If you read Book A or Book B, and they just weren't your cup of tea, could you please go over to Amazon and leave a review about how they left you cold! Apparently the feeling is that if all your reviews are fantastic, it's just your buddies helping you out. And obviously getting that review made me rethink how I positioned the book (and alerted me to some formatting issues), so I should be thankful for it. I still don't see asking people to please come trash my book, however--I'm not made of stone.
Arghghgh....
Yeah, I'm editing--actually, I think I'm edited out for the day. You know, considering that not much happens in Trang (I know, I should let that go), you would think that I wouldn't have such a buttload of exposition to try to cram into Trust. Striking the right balance is a bitch--I feel like the story's constantly being interrupted to deliver background on this person or that event.
I'm trimming and consolidating what I can, but I'm concerned because I'm obviously very close to the material, and my beta readers (who haven't gotten Trust yet) have also read Trang, so all of our judgment is somewhat suspect. I'm going to drop in on a writing group in the area later this month--if I think they'll be helpful, I'll give them the first two chapters and see if they have the slightest notion what's going on.
Redirecting...redirecting...redirecting
In addition to rethinking my approach to Trang's cover art, I realized that I should change the book description as well. When I first revised the book description, I not only made it longer (including the jacket copy, an author bio, and a word count for the e-versions), I made it wacky--I was trying to push those comedy! and! adventure! buttons.
This was the wacky version:
Trang is an exciting science fiction tale of aliens, prophecies and inexplicable "scientific" phenomena! Follow the adventures of Philippe Trang, the first human diplomat to travel to an alien station! Watch him try valiantly to keep everyone from killing each other (not to mention him), with mixed success! A delightful blend of comedy, action and really, really bad language, Trang is sure to appeal to to fans of Lois McMasters Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga and Charles Stross’ Laundry Files novels--at least those fans who can tolerate really, really bad language.
This is the current version:
Diplomat Philippe Trang has problems--lots of problems. Haunted by a recent mission on Earth that went very wrong, Trang is the first human diplomat assigned to a mysterious alien station. He quickly realizes that not everyone on Earth would like to see his mission succeed—and the several alien species on the station have some odd and nefarious agendas of their own. As he tries desperately to keep everyone from killing each other (not to mention him), strange forces threaten to destroy his very mind.... This intensely character-driven novel features a blend of drama, tragedy, comedy, and action reminiscent of the works of Joss Whedon or Charles Stross’ Laundry Files novels--plus some really, really bad language.
So, I'm hoping that helps the book find the right audience--people who find character-driven science-fiction stories interesting. I mention Whedon not just because I prostrate myself at his feet, but because he gets the "not much happens" complaint too (that is an issue many people seem to have with the original Firefly pilot). That baffles me, but there it is.
Certain genres are almost always character-driven--romance, for example. We all know what's going to happen in a romance, the interesting bit is how it affects the characters as it unfolds. But sci-fi these days is plot driven--that's why you have "rules" like kill someone in the first 10 pages.
Honestly, this is what dismays me about contemporary mainstream publishing in general and science fiction in particular--the narrowing effect it is having on literature. Ray Bradbury, who was justly celebrated in his day for being an incredible writer, did not produce plot-driven science fiction. His science fiction was literary--it was just so beautifully written that it really didn't matter what it was about. And there was room in the market for someone like that. Now there isn't. Think about that: If Ray Bradbury sent The Martian Chronicles to an agent nowadays as an unknown writer, he probably would get the same "Loved it! Can't touch it!" response I got.
How sad is that?
Hopefully now self-publishing will re-expand the possibilities. As an author, I still face the challenge of finding readers who will accept character-driven science fiction. But I'll say that I'm more hopeful of doing that than I am of finding a commercial publishing house that will!
Feast or famine
I started poking around self-publishing blogs again tonight, and apparently the Internet read my earlier post and got embarrassed, because I've hit three good ones.
They are:
Write to Publish, which is written by a woman whose husband is a novelist. He self-publishes, they run a small press, and they have experience with big publishing houses as well, so she's got a very good sense of the industry, how it works, and how it's changing. (But if you read her post on Barnes & Noble's on-line operations and go, "Oh my stars!!!" please read the comments--new business lines always lose money initially.)
Publetariat is an aggregate blog that takes posts from a lot of other blogs. It's nice because a lot of blogs by people selling services to self-publishing writers are 10% good info and 90% "Buy my crap!" and it looks like Publetariat does a pretty good job of screening out that less-useful 90%.
Adventures in ePublishing is written by a newbie self-published sci-fi writer who LOVES data. He loves to collect it, he loves to analyze it, and he loves to share it so much he has a running tally of his expenses as a sidebar on his blog. (Yes, I do realize that I may have to marry him. Assuming that's legal, because it's possible that we were separated at birth.)
And I'm going to add a blog that I've known about for a while: The Shatzkin Files. Shatzkin is a consultant, so it should not shock you that his blog is geared to the people who might actually hire him, i.e. high-ranking publishing executives. As a result, the blog can be too insider-y, which is why I haven't recommended him before now, but he does have some very interesting things to say. (Barnes & Noble should totally hire him.)
Rah-rah Amanda Hocking!
So, Amanda Hocking proved prophetic and landed her own $2 million advance with a major publishing house.
The funny bit? Everyone is asking her, "Why?" Her publishing house is hoping this proves traditional publishing is not dead. I think those two things demonstrate the tenuous position traditional publishing finds itself in nowadays.
Of course, with a $2 million advance in pocket, Amanda Hocking is not Joe Blow Random Author. She is a star. Between the money and the PR, you can bet your ass her publishing house will bust their ass for her. And if they don't, or things somehow don't work out? Uh, gee, I think she'll be fine--she can go back to making $1 million a year self-publishing, or at this point, she could invest her $3 million, retire, and live off the income (as long as she doesn't invest it in Barnes & Noble).
So, Amanda Hocking is doing great, which is wonderful--she seems like a very pleasant and grounded young lady, and I confess to being tickled pink by her success. Self-publishing now has its own Tinkerbell, assuming you don't think making $1 million a year writing books is amazing enough (which certain people clearly don't).
But I'll say it again: This isn't what's important about contemporary self-publishing. I am more excited about it's potential effect on the mass of writers--not the occasional best-seller, but the many more people who chug away in relative obscurity. Those people can pay their bills on time now. That's really exciting.
Feeling barfy
Bleargh.... I had shrimp in the freezer and then we had a power outage and then I started to defrost it and changed my mind and then I defrosted it again and let it sit in the fridge for a couple of days and then I cooked it.
And then--surprise!--I was rather ill the night before last.
And then, because my stupidity knows no bounds, I decided last night to have a couple of vodka lemon drops. That was Not A Good Idea. I'm lucky my GI tract hasn't decamped completely.
All of which is to say that, while I have gotten more editing done on Trust, it's not going to happen today. (And then I have real life interfering for a bit--gah.) In hopes of accomplishing something constructive despite having gotten no sleep, I've been reading through some self-publishing blogs. While that's given me some more places I could promote Trang, I can't say that any of them have been exciting enough that I want to link to them and tell you to go read them. Part of it is that contemporary self-publishing is, you know, really, really contemporary--two years ago, it was not nearly so viable. So for most people, they don't have that much to say: Price the book cheap, fret about the cover, market. Lather, rinse, repeat. Not a lot that's startling and original or even particularly in-depth this time.
Although it does sound like I should start hanging around KindleBoards.
That's interesting!
I'm reading through M. Louisa Locke's blog, and she points out something that not only had I given literally no thought to, but that it hadn't even occurred to me to give any thought to: Increasing your book's exposure on Amazon by getting into a less-populated category.
I list Trang as "adventure science fiction," and of the nearly 14,000 Kindle science-fiction books listed on Amazon, almost 7,000 are adventure science fiction. Oh. The only other genre sub-category is "high tech science fiction." I may be doubting that Trang is really adventure science fiction, but I know for damned sure it isn't high tech. (And yes, it is absurd to have only two sub-categories--by these standards, the works of Philip K. Dick are adventure sci-fi.)
The other two science fiction sub-categories are more about how the books are packaged: "anthologies" and "series." Series! Trang is part of a series, and there are only 150 books in that sub-category. So, I think once Trust is in the bag, I will get both books on that list, too.
ETA: She also has a great series of posts on how to edit your own work that begins here.
Getting faster
So, you see that I've changed the cover for Trang again--this is basically placeholder art until I find an artist (I'd really like to use the same artist for the entire series to give it a unified look). As a result, I didn't change the cover of the hard copy, just the e-book for now. At this point, it takes surprisingly little time to toss something together--that was true of the layout, too. It's easy to get discouraged the first time you do something and it takes forEVER, but if you keep at it, you do get better.
Gah
So, I was like, Why don't I fix that pesky table of contents issue? That shouldn't take too long....
TWELVE HOURS LATER
OK, so it didn't take twelve hours, but it took a lot longer than it should have. What really took the time was just figuring out how the hell to do it--really and truly, and I say this as somebody who wasted a great deal of time trying to do it some other way, the only way is to download an HTML editor and take it from there. You need what are called anchor tags. If you download NVU like I did, it's super-easy, and the anchor tags are represented by cute little cartoon anchors. If you try doing it some other way (and really, the coding is no harder than what I use in this blog, so you should be able to), Kindle won't convert the code into an actual link. Instead, it will just leave the code there, because I'm sure readers are dying to learn about The Amazing Adventures of Href.
To complicate matters and increase author stress, neither Kindle nor Nook will show a working link in the preview. With Nook, you can download the final ePub version and check that, but with Kindle I have no freaking idea if the links in the table of contents work or not. They work in HTML. That much I know.
I just skipped Smashwords this time around because they want you to upload Word documents, and I have NO idea what would come out the other end if I did that. (ETA: Score one for Smashwords! They automatically create a linkable table of contents if your chapter heads begin with the word "chapter," as mine do. Definitely a good idea!)
In terms of things that took about as long as I thought they would, I downloaded some stock photos I can use to cobble together a new cover. I did hear back from that artist--he's going to think it over and get back to me reasonably soon. The thing is, one of the blogs agreed to review the book, and Norwescon is coming up, which hopefully will drive some traffic to Trang, so I think it's worth it to throw something together just for the e-books in case getting real cover art takes longer.
And although I didn't get any actual editing done on Trust, I woke up this morning with a great idea for the opening paragraphs just complete in my head. I love when that happens.
Nothing like 14 hours of sleep to improve productivity
Yesterday was a family day, and since my particular family includes young children, I didn't really catch up on sleep. But today with the ringer off things were greatly improved. I tend to need more sleep than the average person, but even for me, when I'm topping 12 hours in stretch, it means I haven't been getting enough.
Not shockingly, I got quite a bit done. I edited the first chapter, although I'm going to go back and take another crack at the very first few paragraphs--I want to up the tension there. I also turned the first chapter into the first two chapters--the problem with writing Book 2 is that you want to include enough background that people who haven't read Book 1 aren't completely lost, but you don't want to bore the crap out of those who have read Book 1. Initially I just crammed a hell of a lot of exposition into Chapter 1 (especially into that first scene that I axed), but now I'm dividing and conquering--Philippe and Shanti are Chapter 1, the general situation among the aliens is Chapter 2.
Since I did nothing productive today
Oh, and I do mean NOTHING productive. I didn't even do any of my bullshit chores. I went shopping. For stuff I didn't really need. It was that sort of day.
(I blame it on sleep deprivation. Between the cats and some extra caffeine I probably should have skipped and some asshole stalker-esque telemarketers who don't understand what the federal Do Not Call list is all about, I've been short on sleep all week. It tells you something about the toll inadequate sleep takes on mental functioning that it took until today for me to realize that I should turn off the ringer on my phone.)
So instead, I'm going to disclose a writer's secret. I learned this from the master, William Shakespeare himself, when I ghosted a Cliff Notes ripoff of Romeo and Juliet. The secret is: If you want to make something look better, surround it with total crap.
Look at Romeo and Juliet from an adult perspective. They're FOURTEEN YEARS OLD. They've known each other for all of SIXTY SECONDS. Is this love going to last? A-HA-HA-HA-HA no.
How do you get the audience to ignore what they KNOW about fourteen-year-old "love" and become emotionally invested in this relationship that would be over by next Tuesday in the real world?
The answer: Surround it by really shitty forms of "love." Dear God, look at Juliet's family. They are horrible. She DIES (or so they think), and they can't dig up any semblance of sincerity. Romeo and Juliet is a fairly terrifying play if you look at the other kinds of "love" on display--superficial, phony, self-serving...it's a nightmare. Compared to the emotional cripples that surround them, Romeo and Juliet are perfection--they're at least striving for something noble. It's touching. (And it's VERY Will Shakespeare, since the plays he took Romeo and Juliet from are mainly about dumb kids dumbly thinking that they are in love and dumbly disobeying their parents and dumbly dying, just like you will if you are dumb enough to disobey your parents. Stupid kids. Get off my lawn!)
Does this strategy always work? Um, is everybody William Shakespeare? No, they are not. There's any number of extremely tiresome stories centered around horrible people where the author strives in vain to make the main character engaging by surrounding them by people who are more horrible and more horrible still to the point of being simple cartoons of vice. Natural Born Killers springs to mind. Sudden Impact tried to use this tactic to sell a serial killer who blows men's genitals off with a gun not just as a sympathetic character but also as a love interest. This technique was the creative drain Deadwood was circling around before it was canceled: Al was bad, but we were supposed to like Al, so Tolliver was worse, and Wolcott was a compulsive murderer, and George Heart was even worse than that, and had the show gone on for another season I can only assume Beelzebub himself would have made an appearance, eating babies' brains right out of their skulls.
So, clearly, to use this strategy successfully, you gotta recognize its limitations: Shakespeare wasn't trying to sell us on a serial killer (as, I repeat, a love interest), he was just trying to sell us on a teen romance. And you know, don't do it over and over and over again--I don't care how good your actors and dialog and production values are, people will notice.
Gee, mister, are you gonna make me a star?
There is someone on a certain Web site who I am not going to respond to there because I think they are probably a troll. If not a troll, then they are either naive about traditional publishing to the point of delusion or are someone who works in it and is cynical and manipulative to the extreme. They are making the "Don't you wish you were Tinkerbell?" argument, and they keep adding names: There's Fawn and Iridessa and Rosetta and Silvermist--don't you wish you were them?
Let's put aside the fact that there is probably NO best-selling author who was earning as much money as Amanda Hocking is at this point in her career--a career that, for the record, is all of 11 months old. (ETA: OK, I looked it up: Apparently one woman got a $2 million advance for a first novel--that was a record. Hocking is estimated to have earned at least $1 million by this point. So, yes, one made more. Were there two?) (EATA: And now Amanda Hocking has a $2 million advance and is ahead again.) There are are probably in this country more people who have made a million dollars by buying lottery tickets than there are people who have made a million dollars by writing fiction.
Don't you wish you were them?
Obviously what you should do is to stop working at your stupid job and plow every last dollar into lottery tickets. It's really that simple.
I did some editing!
Ha! Not a total loser! I didn't do much, but then again, I always start slow. It's the actual getting started that is the important thing.
Just some background on Trust: Right now, I'm working on the opening chapter, which is like what in journalism is called the lede, which is the first sentence of your story. (Publishing and journalism people always deliberately misspell the terms of the trade: graf, lede, etc. I think it's because it makes the words stand out more to the copy editors and proofreaders if, say, the instructions "cut graf" are accidentally left in the final copy.) The lede is the! most! important! line of your story, because in most cases, that's all the reader reads. If you're writing a feature--or by extension, a novel--the lede should have a hook, a not-misspelled piece of jargon that means "something that will make that lazy reader want to read the whole damn thing you just worked so hard on." Features/novels need hooks because there's no pressing reason for the reader to read them--they are something the reader chooses to spend time on, so you need to show the reader that it's worth doing.
So opening chapters are supposed to bring the drama, which makes them hard to write. I used to just leave ledes until the end, but that's less doable when you're writing a novel, so I wrote the first chapter and now I'm beating the hell out of it.
I previously beat the hell out of this entire book, cutting probably about 30,000 words and adding 40,000 more. Why? Well, let me tell you: When I wrote the book, I was like, THIS needs to be INTERESTING! It needs to have ADVENTURE! And DRAMA! So I tried really hard to put all this adventure and drama into it, and the result was a really dull book.
Really!
I know that sounds counterintuitive, but it was true. And the reason was all that adventure and drama wasn't connected to the main plot. I had extraneous characters! I had events that were very dramatic and then never impacted anything later in the book! I had it all! And I didn't need nearly so much!
(You see this in bad action movies all the time. Got nothing to do and nowhere to go, plot-wise? Blow something up, and then have a female character take her top off and show us her titties for 20 minutes or so, and then show Steven Seagal gouging out Tommy Lee Jones' eye in slow motion, over and over again. And I just sit there, thinking, Why? Why was I born? It certainly wasn't to watch this.)
What I needed to do in Trust was to get to the main plot faster. And then, once I was there, I needed to focus on it. This was another problem with the scattershot-action approach: I was neglecting the things that mattered. Things that actually were important to the plot and the book were not being fully developed, because I was too distracted by the nonsense.
Once I focused the book, I went back to my first chapter, and chopped out the first scene completely. Why? Well, I know now what I need to do in that first chapter to set up the rest of the book. The current first scene isn't necessarily more "dramatic" than the old first scene, but it's going to pay off. Trust is no longer an amalgam of unrelated, purposeless action: It's a novel. I'm sure the "not much happens" crowd will like it less, but I like it much better now.