The Short and Pointless Life of David Springfield (2012-2014).
Last weekend, one of my friends from my childhood who became, like her father, a schoolteacher, sent me a message on Facebook. She had a question. She was on Amazon, looking for my novel ASIAN HAZE, and she found something interesting. There was a book published in 2012, with the same title, but written by someone named David Springfield. What was that all about?
I had been outed. Well, sort of . . .
ASIAN HAZE has an interesting publication history. I had been trying to get it published for several years by mainstream publishing houses, trying to find an agent to shop the book to these same publishers. No luck. Finally, in the spring of 2012, I decided to self-publish the book on Amazon. I did it as cheaply as possible, which explains the rather bland cover:
Yes, David Springfield was yours truly. When I told people that I had published the book, I made no secret of that. Why the pseudonym? A couple of reasons. One, I have always been shy, not wanting a lot of attention on myself. Two, I thought the name "David Springfield" looked better than "DeWayne Twitchell" did on a book cover. Where did the name come from? Well, David was because I liked the name. Springfield came from this guy (a native of Australia, a country that plays another part in this tale, as you will soon discover), who you might remember from the 1980s. You know, the dude who played the doctor on the soap opera, and wished he had Jessie’s girl:
Didn’t help with sales.
I don’t know how many actual copies of that edition are still out there, but if you have one, you might want to hang on to it. Could become a collector’s item. I don’t even have a copy of it anymore.
A year later, I saw an ad from a publishing house in Indiana called Trafford Publishing. They looked at the manuscript, and agreed to let me self-publish it through them. But, still not able to afford anything fancy, it was published as an e-book only, no actual book one could open and turn the pages available this time. This was the cover for that edition:
Still under the pseudonym but with a more lively cover, this edition did about as well as the self-published Amazon edition. Which is to say, not very well. I don’t know how many were sold, but my royalties were probably enough to only buy a Digiorno’s Pizza and maybe a bag of chips. And I’m being serious.
The major problem in both cases was lack of promotion. I could only do so much myself and, if I wanted Trafford to promote it like it should have been, I would have had to pay more money to them than I could afford. So, ASIAN HAZE remained in near anonymous limbo.
Jump ahead to September of 2014. I had just started a new job in Paducah, KY, in the midst of a six-week training period, when I saw an ad on Facebook from Lang Publishing in New Zealand. The ad was looking for writers to publish, and I e-mailed a copy of the ASIAN HAZE manuscript to the company’s head, a very nice man, who I’ve never met but have corresponded with via e-mail over the last nine months or so and in the process of that time has helped change my life, named Roger Lang. Two weeks or so after I had sent the manuscript, on Friday, September 26, 2014, I received the following e-mail from Roger:
Hi DeWayne:
I am delighted to read through your work. I will prepare a contract for publishing proposal and send to you next week.
Very best,
Roger Lang
Now, what was really cool about this, besides from the fact that it was being “published” and not “self-published,” was the fact that the last part of the novel is set in Australia. I have never been there in my life. Nor, for that matter, have I been to the area in western New York State where Randall Arthur makes his home. All I know of the land Down Under is from books, magazine articles, television, movies, and music. I was worried that maybe I didn’t capture the feeling of Australia as well as someone who had been there, or lived there. But now I had a guy from New Zealand (which, for those of you who I hope remember your geography from school, is just southeast of Australia) who liked the book enough to want to publish it through his company. So, I figured, I must have got it right. Or right enough.
Early this year, Roger e-mailed me the cover his design people came up with:
When I first saw this, I wasn’t sure what to think. I mean, there is no scene in the book with a guy standing on the edge of a dock, looking into the heavy fog (or, haze, if you will) for something, maybe a boat to pick him up, maybe for a message in a bottle like the Police sang about all those years ago, maybe for some sort of lake monster. Who knows? But, the more I looked at it and thought about it, I realized of course that the cover was meant to project atmosphere, not a literal scene from the story itself. The cover was designed by Blair McLean, someone else who I’ve never met. Truth be told, I don’t even know if Blair is male or female. But he or she did a great job and they should be proud. I certainly am. And I’ve been asked who the guy is in the picture. I have no idea. But I’d like to meet him someday. I wonder if he knew when that picture was being taken of him on the edge of the dock, looking into the haze, that it was going to be for a book cover of a novel written by some unknown, middle-aged, balding, American dude from Illinois?
So now, here I am, June of 2015, a novel published for sale on the web and who knows wherever else, a book that went so high on the Kobo e-book site a few weeks ago (top 200 in the Mystery and Suspense category, and top 3 in the Mystery and Suspense, International category) that I thought I was hallucinating seeing the rankings. It’s dropped since then, but it’s still respectable (#88 in Mystery and Suspense, International and #2406 in Mystery and Suspense, as I write this). And hopefully, we can have another surge or two on Kobo, and on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and wherever else I can. I’ve signed books for friends, signed three copies that are now in local libraries, been told by people who’ve read it how much they loved the book, and been told that I was on someone’s “summer reading list.” (My friend, Lisa, the schoolteacher I mentioned here at the beginning.) Hopefully, this is just the beginning of the wild ride. Usually, I don’t like wild rides (roller coasters, for example), but this one I will gladly go along for.
Oh yeah, one more thing. I’ve changed my thinking:
“DeWayne Twitchell” looks much better on a book cover than “David Springfield.” He is certainly more successful, so far.
