Jennifer Crusie | Argh Ink | Blog

We need another tagline.

I know, I KNOW, we tried to do this one on our own, but it’s not working.

Here’s the deal: We’re working on the merchandising (yes, FINALLY) and we’re at the Cranky Agnes stuff. This is not about Agnes and the Hitman, this is the merchandising that would have been done to promote Agnes’s column and her first book, Mob Food in Agnes and the Hitman.

So not promoting a novel here. You are now IN the book and Agnes is looking at you saying, “I need a tagline for the merchandising to sell my column and my Mob Food book.”

With me so far?

In the book, there are two promotional items that Agnes has in her kitchen because the publisher always sends you one to show you what they look like. I still have my Fast Women coffee cup. It’s fab. Where was I? Right.

Agnes has a white apron with her logo (the face) on it. From the book:

Agnes took a white apron off a hook by the door and put it on–it said Cranky Agnes’s Mob Food on it under a drawing of Agnes in her glasses–and tore open a package of sausages.

And there’s a promo mug:

The coffeemaker beeped and Shane took a mug from a hook under the cabinet–it had the Cranky Agnes logo, too–and poured out a cup.

But instead of just the logo, Mollie and Mara who are working on the designs right now would also like a tagline for Agnes’s column and/or for the Mob Food book. The columns, as I’m writing them now, argh, are a low rent approach to food in general. Here’s Agnes talking about FoodTV:

There are people who can make everything those chefs make, they live for the recipes on FoodTV. They have springform pans and apple corers and microplane graters. You are not that person because if you were, you’d be spitting on this column. Then there are the people who can make most things and will carefully select the recipes they watch based on their own abilities. You are not that person, either. Then there are the people who drool at the TV thinking, God, that looks so good, I’m going to make that, and end up with half a jar of capers in their fridges and the other half in a recipe that goes down their garbage disposals. You are that person. I am that person. Most of America is that person. Food TV is like porn; we dial it up even though we’re pretty sure we can’t do that, in fact we’re pretty sure we don’t want to do that, but it sure is fun to watch. And then sometimes, in the heat of watching, we try to do that. It’s usually not pretty.

Or from another column:

Another way to increase your chances of surviving is whole wheat pasta. It tastes a little different, but again, when was the last time you said, “Oh, good, pasta!” and meant a plate of naked noodles? Pasta is almost always the delivery system for the sauce (I’m ignoring fresh noodles here because, come on, you’re not making fresh noodles because if you were, you wouldn’t be reading my column, you’d be out milking the goat) and the sauce is almost always tangy (tomatoes and basil and garlic and onions and peppers, oh my) or creamy (alfredo, parmesan, the blond heart attack on a plate). You’ll adapt to the whole wheat in no time and up your fiber consumption considerably. Try whole wheat tortillas, too; they actually taste better. Whole wheat pancakes, on the other hand, are like those people in the synthetic shoes who tell you leather is a sin: you want to like them but they smell odd and you just end up avoiding them so the ingredients sit on your pantry shelf and age while you feel guilty. High fiber does not have to mean “tastes like a wet dog.” Any food that has a gram of fiber for every fifty calories is high fiber so check to make sure. Those manufacturers will slap whole wheat on anything, but the fiber/calorie ration does not lie.

And she ends every recipe with “Eat.” As in:

5. Season with salt and pepper to taste (less is more because you can always add more at the table).
6. Toss with the hot pasta. Top with cheese if you want.
7. Eat.

So that’s the kind of column you’re selling. What would be a good tagline (very short, very pithy, has to fit on a mug or apron) for Agnes? Or what would be a good tagline for the Mob Food cookbook (she wrote it with Joey, it’s part cookbook, part memoir, part Joey and Agnes hanging out)?

The contest ends when we get a tagline or taglines we like. Because did I mention they’re working on the merchandising right now? As they’re trying to finish by the end of the week? And they won’t let me see any of it because as soon as I get any jpgs, I post them here. As Bob always says, I’d last ten seconds in covert ops. So I don’t get to see the designs until they’re done which is until we have taglines. It’s an emergency. I’m dying of curiousity here.

Oh, and if we pick your tagline, you get an Agnes ARC and one of the merchandise items we make using your line.

Thank you. I know this tagline stuff is getting old. It’s because I’ve got three books coming out in the space of four months (Coffee At Luke’s, the Gilmore Girls book, is out and I still haven’t see it) so we’re in a PR perfect storm at the moment. I’ll do a real post soon. I found most of the DLD cover designs, too, if you want a walk down Memory Lane. And I have some deep thoughts I need to share. Plus, I think Bob’s coming to visit, and that’s usually good for a post. I swear, it won’t always be “Give me a tagline.” Really.

Off to drive to the store. I get really good ideas when I drive.

We got our author copies in the mail and the cover is so beautiful, I can’t believe it. Just fabulous. (I’m going to blog about the hell we went through to get it next week.)

Oh, you’d like to see it, too?

Mollie’s giving away fifty copies. No lie.

Here’s the deal: If you have a blog that’s been active at least six months (that’s active, folks, not in existence) and you would like to review The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes on that blog, please enter below. Mollie will choose fifty people from the first 100 entries and send a copy of the real book (not the butt ugly ARC) with this gorgeous cover that says “A Novel,” right there on it. In exchange, all we ask is that you review the book. You don’t have to give it a good review if you don’t like it, but you do have to talk about it. And if you let us know, we’ll link back to your review from the UMF site.

Okay, I misunderstood Mollie. To enter the contest you have to go to: www.unfortunatemissfortunes.com. ARGH. And the fields were screwed up, but now they’re fine, so hit the link and go over there and enter and you’ll be fine. Really. Sorry. This is the first time we’ve tried this.

You’re going to love this cover.

I’ve talked on here before about how important covers are, and what makes a good cover design, but not much about our actual cover choices. Agnes was an interesting cover journey because we got all good covers, beautifully designed, but until the end, they just weren’t . . . right.

The first one was beautiful:

However, when we analyzed it closely, it didn’t work.

It must catch the eye across a bookstore.
Oh, yeah. You could see this sucker from across the street.

It must be pick-up-able when the reader gets close.
Nothing there. The graphic is gorgeous, and that might be enough to pick it up, but I didn’t like it because it was so plain when you got up close, nothing there to make it crunchy.

It must capture the mood and the content of the story.
This was the deal-breaker. I might have closed my eyes to the lack of detail since it’s such a strong graphic, but this really isn’t Agnes and the Hitman. There’s no quirk here, no comedy-with-violence, no sass or any sense of a strong woman or the relationships in the book. It was a complete miss on the most important part: It didn’t represent the book.

The thing that’s interesting about this cover, I think, is that it’s a beautiful cover. It was just designed by somebody who didn’t understand the book, and I think that’s the place the majority of covers go south. Art departments can’t read every book they design for, but they have to have a grasp of what they’re selling with that cover, not just do something pretty or striking. The cover has to sell the book for what it is.

So great cover, just not for our book.

The second one used the Agnes logo that Mara Lubell designed and we all loved, but Barnes and Noble didn’t like it so back to the drawing board. I have no idea what that one looked like, but in retrospect, B&N must have been right because this is what they sent us next, in two flavors, pink . . .

and white . . .

Bob screamed when he saw the pink, so we buried that one in the back yard. We liked everything about the white version and they did a final with better bullet holes, except the new bullet holes looked like daisies, so we sent them back again. We didn’t want to lose the holes because they were going to be diecut so the red tablecloth cover boards of the actual book beneath would show through:

So we ditched the pink and got new bullet holes and got this one:

And everybody approved so we have a great cover:

It must catch the eye across a bookstore.
Readers will cross the room because of the face. Even newborn babies respond to faces.

It must be pick-up-able when the reader gets close.
Up close, they’ll see the little flamingos and the die-cut bullet holes (how much do I love the diecut bullet holes? THIS MUCH) and pick it up.

It must capture the mood and the content of the story.
It really communicates the quirky off-center comedy and violence vibe of the book. And Mara’s Agnes logo IS Agnes, she just nailed that character.

I think we have a winner.

Somebody in the comments to the website post asked to see the B&B post again. I’m not sure if it’ll make any sense outside of the whole HWSW blog, but I’m swamped here with websites and novels and Bob sending e-mails about this damn island that he wants in the next book, so if this will count as a blog post, I’m good with it. It’s from Oct. 12, 2006. And it’s all too true.

So last night we stayed in a B&B, which was lovely, but a B&B is probably not the best place to put us because, not unnaturally, the proprietors want to know when we’ll arrive and when we’ll eat breakfast, and writers on tour don’t know those things. There’s a reason we’re booked into hotels with twenty-four hour room service. Planes arrive when they want to, traffic goes bad, and we work strange hours. We get there when we get there, we wake up when we wake up, and we eat when we’re hungry and we can find food. So the B&B experience, while fabulous for vacationers who love history, is not for writers who are on the tenth month of Living the Dream and are, as a result, a little testy. Well, one of us is. As Bob said last night when we got out of the car, “You be charming.”

We were standing in front of the Victorian B&B, and Bob looked up and down the deserted street—it was seven o’clock on a Wednesday night and there wasn’t a soul anywhere—and said, “My Cousin Vinnie.”

I said, “Oh, yeah, you blend.”

Then we went up to the doors which were beautiful, tiny square panes of glass in massive gorgeous wood, and met the proprietress, who said she hadn’t known when we’d be getting in and so she’d just run out to the grocery and then run back—she was breathless—and her husband had just gotten on the treadmill—we could hear the treadmill—because she hadn’t known when we were arriving, and then she looked at me as if I was supposed to explain (hotels never ask you to explain, they just say, “Give me your credit card, thank you”) and I said, “I’m sorry, we didn’t know, either,” because there was the plane and then I was supposed to pick up my new car which did not come in, which was made even more annoying because Bob had said in New York, “It won’t come in, they never come in when they say they will,” and I’d said, “But the salesman swore to me it would be in for this trip” and Bob had looked at me like “You poor, trusting dimwit,” and then it didn’t come in, and of course he didn’t say a word, but he didn’t have to, plus it’s a five hour drive from Cincinnati to Cleveland but Bob drove it in three, so even if I’d told her when, it would have been wrong . . .

Where was I?

Right. I did not need to hear, “We didn’t know when you’d be in,” on top of the new car debacle, so when she said she needed to know what time we wanted breakfast, I said, “Oh, don’t bother, we’ll just go to Denny’s whenever we wake up.”

Okay, wrong answer, I realize that now, she had probably run out to the store for breakfast stuff, but you know, I didn’t know when we’d be up and if she wanted people who were going to eat on a schedule, she shouldn’t have said, “Sure, send in the writers.” So she sort of gasped, and I would have said I was sorry but I was in so deep by then, that I just smiled apologetically. Well, what are you going to do?

Then she took us upstairs and showed Bob his room at the front of the hall, and there was a Roy Rogers bedspread and a teddy bear on the bed. I looked at Bob’s face and bit my lip. You should have been there. Then she took me to the back of the hall and said, “This is your room,” and she looked back at Bob, standing innocently at the other end, and pulled out a screen with lace panels and put it across the hall and said, “And this will keep him out.” Bob looked at the screen and it fell over. I said, “Really, he’s a perfect gentleman,” and she picked up the screen and set it up, and said, “I’ll have my husband bolt it to the wall.” It must have been the way he looked at the bear. Bob shook his head, and the screen fell over again, and I opened the door to my room and saw a huge white stuffed rabbit sitting on the bed and thought about saying, “I really don’t need the screen, if I put the stuffed rabbit in front of the door, he’ll run away screaming into the night,” but I’d already been so rude about breakfast, that I just shut up because I could tell she was already fed up with both of us. Well, I would have been, too. It’s a hellish job running a B&B, and then you get two jerks like us in there who just want a bed and wireless internet and have no interest in history or stuffed animals or breakfast, and it probably just makes you want to weep. But the important thing was that Kym aka romancyclist had already been there and left a HUGE bag of M&M peanuts on the bed next to the rabbit, so I got my M&Ms, closer be damned.

Then she gave us keys and we went to dinner at the restaurant next door which was very good and our waitress was excellent, and we talked about the end of Agnes, and then we went back to our rooms and I powered up the laptop to go online because the B&B had wireless internet (see, it’s a very good B&B). Except I couldn’t get online. And I had this sudden vision of Bob with the bear in one hand and his Glock in the other, backing that poor proprietress into one of the needlepoint samplers on the wall, saying, “Wireless internet or the bear gets it,” so I went down to see, and the bastard had it in his room, so I got online in there. No, that is not a euphemism. Then I told him thank you very much and that I was going back to my room and to forget about trying anything later because I had my screen, and then I went back and worked on Agnes, and the room really was lovely and very peaceful, and I had an excellent night’s sleep.

The next morning, we went to Denny’s as planned and had breakfast and Bob had told me to take my key because we had to go back to the B&B to meet Kym there, so when we got back and found Kym, I took the key back in and scared the proprietress into fits because she thought we’d left and she’d already cleaned our rooms. I said, “No, no, it’s fine, I’m just bringing back the key, and I’m so sorry we’ve been so horrible, really, it’s all right, I swear, we’ll never come back.” Then I went out to the car to meet Bob and Kym.

Bob: Did you give her the key?

Jenny: Yes. And I apologized for how awful we were and I told her she didn’t have to worry because we were never coming back.

Bob: You told her WHAT?

Jenny: I told her we were never . . . oh. Probably the wrong thing to say, huh?

Bob: To somebody running a B&B, YES.

Jenny: I was trying to make her feel better.

Bob: Okay, for the rest of the day, I’LL be charming.

Jenny: What will I be?

Bob: Quiet.

Then we went to the Medina Country Club and met the nicest people at lunch, and Debbie introduced us for our talk and read my bio and all the way through it, Bob kept looking at me saying, “Really?” Really, you married your college sweetheart? Yes, Bob, I was married. Really, you have a masters in writing? Yes, Bob, in business and technical writing. Really, you have an MFA? Yes, Bob, from Ohio State. Then Debbie read his bio and I knew all of it. He said, “See, I don’t keep any secrets from you.” I said, “She got it off my website, Bob.” And then we gave a talk that neither one of us can remember although of course we remember the things we did wrong, the post mortems are always fun, but the people were so lovely they applauded anyway. And then we did a cable TV interview with Tina who was terrific although I don’t remember much of the interview except for the part where Bob pushed me too far and I hit him with a copy of Don’t Look Down, so all of you in the Cleveland cable area, be sure to look for that one. Afterwards, Bob said, “You do that one more time, I’m going to hit you back,” which is fair, although I don’t think it would play well, so I’m going to stop smacking him. I suggested they cut that out of the final show, but somebody at the station said she thought it was charming, so evidently my charm has returned, although Bob and the lady at the B&B would probably like a vote on that call.

And my cold is better although I’m still blowing my nose at regular intervals, and we’re in Columbus where I gave Bob the wrong directions and landed us in rush hour traffic, and he never said a cross word to me which just goes to show you that he really is the perfect gentleman. Which is good because this hotel has no screens. But I did not tell the guy at the desk that we’re never coming back so, all in all, I think we’re ahead of the game.

Living the Dream, folks. It never ends.

Bob and I are getting the content together for the Agnes website, and Mollie sent us a list of things she thought should go on it, your basic website line-up:

Home Page
About the Book
Bios
Event Schedule/Book Tour
Related Sites
Purchase Links

Those are all good and necessary, of course, but they struck me as Things We Want People To Know, rather than Things People Want To Know. I run into that all the time when I’m critiquing stories and editing my own work: People write the things the reader needs to know to understand something instead of just telling the story. And it’s a complete waste of time because readers read for story, not to gather information so they can understand something somebody else is invested in.

So I started thinking about what I want to know about a book. The basic premise sure, the story blurb. But I also want to know who’s in it, and I want to know where it’s set, and I want to read a chunk of it before I plunk down my hard-earned cash. So the “Book” section has to be more than the blurb, I need cast dossiers on there and something about the setting and the first chapter for sure. And a lot of people are doing reading groups now, so questions that pinpoint some of the things we did in the book might give even more info, so definitely a Reader’s Guide.

Home Page
The Story (Blurb)
The Cast
The Setting
Chapter One
Reader’s Guide

Then I thought about the things beyond the book that people have asked us–basically the story they want the website to tell–and tried to see if there was a pattern there. If we had a nickel for every time somebody asked us, “How do you collaborate?” and we explained, and their eyes glazed over . . . People do seem to want to know how two people who get along as badly as we do manage to write books together, they just don’t want to hear about Track Changes and labeling the Master Document, and why it’s a bad idea to put “Hey” in the subject line of every freaking e-mail even though after three years he’s still doing it.

So I thought that once the story in the book was set up, the story of the book should come next. A page talking about how we collaborated, sure, we did that for DLD and we can expand on that, pull some things from the old HWSW blog. And then I found the e-mails from the first night we brainstormed the book and the earliest brainstormed synopsis we did six months later. That seemed to make sense: First tell people how we collaborate, then show them a little bit of it (there are literally thousands of e-mails and hundreds of pages of notes, so just a little bit). And then there’s the editing process; we talked about the things we had to cut on Don’t Look Down, and people would say, “Yes, but could we see that?” and of course by then whatever we’d deleted was long gone, but we still have most of the stuff from Agnes, so maybe if we put some of the outtakes up there for people who have read the book, they can see what we cut and get more book. And then maybe stick the reviews at the end of that to show how it all came out. So that’s:

Collaborating
Early Agnes
Outtakes
Reviews

And I do think there should be Good Things on a website, too. Like the gorgeous downloads for wallpaper and avatars Mollie and Mara did for The Unfortuante Miss Fortunes site, although Agnes’s would probably run more toward flamingos and bullet holes. And people who’ve read the Cranky Agnes columns excerpted in the sections headers have asked to read the entire column, alhough of course all I wrote was the excerpts, so I could write those (ARGH) as extras. And there should be contests. And a place where people can leave comments. So:

Cranky Agnes
Downloads
Contests
Comments

And then there’s the business part of the site:

Event Schedule/Tour
Bios
Related Sites
Purchase Links
Contact Info

So for the past several days, we’ve been assembling all of that. I’ve still got several columns to write and a lot of recipes to test, but the website content is now at 42,000 words. Which brings me to my question:

When does a website just get to be too much? This is a book site, not an author site, it’s just for Agnes and the Hitman. We want it to be a good time, and Mollie and Mara will make sure it’s beautiful and easy to navigate, but at what point do you look at the content and say, “That’s too much, I’m not even going to click on any of the links”?

And since I have you here, what in the above list would you cut? Is there anything you’d add?

I’ve never planned a website like this before–my author website just sort of grew–and I like the idea of “Here’s the book, here’s the process, here’s something for you, here’s the business info,” but 42, 000 words is . . . well, half a novel by the time I’m done with the other Cranky Agnes columns.

So what do you think? What’s the perfect website for a book? Can there be too much content? What annoys you? (I was going to do one of those quizes, like “Which Character in Agnes and the Hitman are you?” and then realized I’d completely lost my grip and stopped.)

Help. Before Mollie gets a look at all of this content and strangles me, what do you want and need on a book website?