By Joseph Mastroianni
So you wanna write a book? Listen up. It’s a cookie stroll. Notice I didn’t say cake walk. I learned that much. All you need do is, have no passion for writing, not follow the silly rules of creative writing, and most important, not give a flea turd about making money. How? Write a book accidentally, I did. A kindness-enhanced person (that means a nice guy - gotta watch those eponyms) even called it a masterpiece. A few others even paid money to read it!
My journey coincidentally began with an accident. One rush hour day I tried to walk across 3rd avenue in New York, a huge mistake. The flathead who hit me wasn’t insured. Neither was I, making my head even flatter. Lost my house, my truck, my dog, and my wife, all in one lucky stroke of fate. Come to think of it, I could have written a Country Western song. I spent the next eleven years rehabilitating and ─ whining. Oh yeah, started writing about every terrible thing that happened to me since my sister stole my lollipop when I was three. Put it all down on paper.
I then made the mistake of allowing a close friend, who is a passionate writer, read those six hundred pages of woe. He convinced me it could make a good novel. I complained the writing was too personal and painful to go public with. No problem he said, write it as fiction. There are some pitfalls, he said. Whether you’re writing truth or fiction doesn’t make much difference. What ever you write must ring true. Some people won’t believe the truth, or will believe a lie, depending on how it’s written.
There it was, an on-the-job training course in the making. I’d failed high school English twice, but my English teacher was also the football coach, and I could run like hell (mostly for my life). Not being able to string two sentences together proved to be a huge obstacle when attempting to tell the story on paper. The first edit was fairly simple. My friend marked the original with so much red, when I rid the manuscript of it, it was immediately reduced to four hundred pages. The rest of the editing was interesting. I got invited to join a writing group all of them published writers, and editors. That’s where I learned, the real job of editors is to make the story their own and totally unrecognizable as your work.
After being urged countless times not to begin sentences with the words “but” or “and”, I learned to say, that’s how the character talks. That also worked for my use of profanity, clichés, eponyms, and other flaws in my writing. Didn’t help much with the narrating though.
Here’s something I didn’t count on. The book is about a glorious piece of music written by Johan Sebastian Bach, and how it impacts the life of the protagonist. Bach wasn’t famous in his time, and to my dismay, nobody knew why he’d composed it, which placed me in the realm of writing historical fiction. That’s when I learned facts had to be perfect, but the gaps could be created. Boy, that’s writing fun at its best. Bach is considered one of the world’s greatest composers, had two wives, thirteen kids, and a lot of empty space from birth to death. Adding Bach to the book provided an opportunity to have some experts check the accuracy of my work. Fortunately, a professor of music theory happed to love how I filled that vacuum. He gave the book credibility, a great review, and an endorsement for acquiring an editor to have a look. The good luck didn’t last long before I learned about book publishers. The book had taken on a new meaning for me. It was never about money I was working on an art piece.
Before negotiations ever began we were at cross purposes. The publisher didn’t want to hear about art (they think bottom line). They didn’t like my font selection and type size. I wanted to use a font produced from a foundry still in existence from Bach’s time, which had been modernized, and large enough to read without glasses. They said it would increase the cost. They rejected my conceptual cover. It didn’t meet the highly technical blueprint designed specifically to make a books jump out at a potential buyer. I had written the book telling protagonist’s story, and the life of Bach in alternating chapters, they thought it distracting. That was the deal breaker. To be truthful, the publisher was on the mark for his purpose, but to achieve my artistic goal, there was little choice but to self-publish (an education all to its own).
Publish on Demand (P.O.D.) was the rage. There are some legitimate companies, and they will produce just one copy if you want, but it became readily apparent the book wasn’t what was important. It was the dough up front. That left me two choices: publish it or burn it.
The tasks of obtaining an ISBN, final editing and proofing, printing, distributing, promoting, event scheduling - the whole doughnut were my responsibility, physically and fiscally. It was easy from there. I added the costs, factored in the books I’d give away as gifts, and came up with a thousand copies. If I sold four hundred books, I could give away the remainder, and come out even. I found a good printing company, decided to go offset instead of digital, arranged for storage, distribution, and shipping, and printed a thousand copies.
The entire trip was quite a cool and interesting experience. A piece of cake and a walk in the park!
My advice? Go blindly and naively through the process, and you may well end up with a book people actually buy. Make sure to print one more copy than you can sell to family and friends. I absolutely guarantee someone will eventually buy it. But, as for me, I need to sell another hundred books or so to chalk up a financially successful project. I’ve already been rewarded many times over for my folly. Sold one yesterday. Only three hundred ninety-nine to go. Wanna buy a book?
Joseph C. Mastroianni author of Chaconne the Novel, is a former military officer and helicopter pilot. He studied in Spain for almost four years, and the classical guitar is now his avocation. His favorite composer is Johann Sebastian Bach. Presently on staff with the Santa Barbara Daily Sound, Joseph writes a weekly column, the Devils Advocate. The DA and his uniformed sources, which are fictional characters, discuss and spoof local, national, and international issues of the day. He is also contributing editor to Fly Fishing New England, writing about the history of fly fishing. ..Joseph is also known for his work in behalf of the performing arts, and has a dedication to help public libraries, especially his home town library in Woburn Massachusetts.
Chaconne is a tale of two lives intertwined across hundreds of years through music, adversity, and passion. Santa Barbara author Joseph Mastroianni artfully weaves a narrative of fictional protagonist Milo Damiani and Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach, and the tie that ultimately binds them: Bach’s “Chaconne,” widely considered the greatest musical composition of all time.
Chaconne is available in eBook format at the DPPstore 24/7/365 for $16.99.
