Double Nickels

[doublenickelsbook]

Hey fellow superfans, looongtime lurker, first time poster. I'm a writer. (Troy McClure voice..) You may remember me from "Torn and Frayed," a story I wrote a hundred years ago about the making of Pleased to Meet Me.

I hate doing anything self-promotional--and I definitely got Kathy's blessing first--but I just wanted to let you all know about my novel Double Nickels. It's a love story and a coming of age story and the main character, in a wild coincidence I assure you, is an aimless teenage boy who loves the Replacements. The music in the story serves kinda like a Greek chorus, and there are several very heartfelt and significant references to 'em in the book that I think other Mats fans will understand.

Speaking of Mats fans, here is what the truly awesome Bob Mehr said about it: 

"A post-punk coming-of-age story, Double Nickels is a work of hardscrabble poetry. Ari Surdoval delivers a book that’s far more than just a chronicle of youthful ennui; rather, it’s a finely etched portrait of those consigned to the narrow margins of society. A powerfully rendered and captivating debut." – Bob Mehr, author of the New York Times best seller Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements.

And here is what Jaan Uhelszki from Creem said about it:

“An astonishing debut—part coming-of-age story, part harrowing mystery that keeps you on the edge of your seat with pacing as electrifying and rapid-fire as a Ramones song. Double Nickels is an impossible-to-put-down hero’s journey through the wasteland of the mid-eighties.” —Jaan Uhelszki, writer producer of Boy Howdy: The Story of Creem Magazine, founding editor, Creem.

And here is the back cover blurb:

Hey ho let go.
Lost in the hard days of nothing at summer’s end, while his mother sinks into addiction and mental illness, Tim is an aimless teenage boy caught between the trauma of his past and the emptiness of his future. But late one night at the Stop and Shop, a chance meeting with Cara, a tough young outsider determined to outrun her own pain and loss, sparks a flicker of hope. Will they be able to transcend the crushing limits placed on them in late 1980s rural America?

If you wanted to check it out, there are free samples up on Amazon. The book comes right up if you search under my name, Ari Surdoval. The Kindle sample is longer than the paperback sample. But, if the end of the world has got you on a budget--trust me, I understand--and you really wanna read it, email me at doublenickelsbook at the google mails, and I can send you a pdf or a file for whichever e-reader thing you like. There is also an Instagram page for it, (at) doublenickelsbook. And there is a Double Nickels Book playlist on Spotify as well.

Thank you all so much for sitting through my infomercial. If anybody winds up reading it, I would love to know what you think. Getting e-mail is like the highlight of my day. (And if you think it stinks, that's ok too. I mean, some people don't even like Asking Me Lies, you know?)

No backs,

Ari

[raccoon]

Sold! Thanks for letting us know!

[Hagbard]

Sounds great! I’ll definitely look into giving this a read, time and money permitting.

[con]

Welcome to the forum, Ari—and congrats! Would you say your book is “Young Adult” literature? Love the premise. And the cover art. Is it self-published? What is that experience like? Thx for sharing your news—hope it makes a splash.

[doublenickelsbook]

Thank you so much, Con!

The main characters in the story are teenagers and younger, but it is not YA. There are some tough scenes in the book. Tough but common, though. It's also full of what some might call language.

The cover art is done by this amazing designer in Nashville named Keith Brogdon of Thinking Out Loud Design. Great designer, great guy, great drummer (he played in Bare Jr.). Check out all the cool stuff he has done at www.thinkingoutlouddesign.com.

And it is self-published. I went back and forth about it and got all admonished by some friends for not going through the traditional publishing route. But that involves the two things that I am most pathologically terrible at: Having a boss and waiting around. I like being independent. And I figure if I am going to sell 30 copies, I might as well do it with a little dignity. 

The experience of being an independent author--which is very new to me; like weeks new, so what do I know?--has been incredible and exciting and fun and nerve-wracking and a little confusing and a little frustrating. I very much recommend it. The resources for writers now are unbelievable. KDP, which is the Amazon publishing platform, has been great. Really easy to use and ridiculously fast, with great print quality and royalty rates. I am also using IngramSpark, because it's important for me to get the book into independent bookstores and libraries. That has not been as fast or as easy to use--mostly because I screwed up the ISBN for it. Their customer service has been great at helping me unmake my mistakes, but the process has been slower than with Amazon, and it's not yet published through them. Any day now hopefully. To learn about self-publishing, I listened to a podcast by Joanna Penn called The Creative Penn. She has a website and tons of books on self-publishing that were really helpful. https://www.thecreativepenn.com  

Self-publishing is like running a marathon that ends at the starting line of another marathon, but it is cool. And the fact that this story that I wrote in April to keep from going stir crazy is now out there and available is still kind of mind-blowing to me. I look at the Amazon page and think like, woah weird.

But the response to it has been so beyond what I ever could have possibly anticipated. I had been living with the story in my head for a long time and I was kinda scared to put it out there, honestly. Like terrified, actually. So to now hear what people are saying about it, and to get those kinda quotes about it, and to have people tell me how it affected them and how deeply they felt the characters is really humbling and surreal and moving. (When Bob Mehr sent me that quote I told him that if I sold one copy to somebody I didn't know that was gonna be why.)

Coming up with some of the (barf) marketing for it has been okay. Doing the Instagram, www.instagram.com/doublenickelsbook, has been unexpectedly kinda fun, if you wanna follow it. I'm just kinda winging it. And I like the Spotify playlist, called Double Nickels Book Soundtrack (

And I like being able to tell people here about it, because I really have been looking at this forum forever. And I really have loved that band since I was 12. But I told Kathy when I wrote to her that I was reluctant to post about it, cause it felt spammy and I didn't want people here--who are really nice--to feel like they couldn't be honest or blunt if they discussed it at all. So no being nice please haha. Anyhoo, thank you for asking and thanks everybody for any interest at all and such a warm welcome. 

Here's a link to the listing with the free Amazon samples. www.amazon.com/Double-Nickels-Ari-Surdoval/dp/1735482323/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=ari+surdoval&qid=1599407859&sr=8-1

And if anybody here really wants to read it but can't afford it, just go to www.doublenickelsbook.com and e-mail me.

[mudbacktodirt]

Sounds really interesting. I'll have to give it a closer look. I hope everything goes well going forward.

[con]

Sept 6, 2020 10:54:39 GMT -5 doublenickelsbook said:

Thank you so much, Con!

The main characters in the story are teenagers and younger, but it is not YA. There are some tough scenes in the book. Tough but common, though. It's also full of what some might call language.

The cover art is done by this amazing designer in Nashville named Keith Brogdon of Thinking Out Loud Design. Great designer, great guy, great drummer (he played in Bare Jr.). Check out all the cool stuff he has done at www.thinkingoutlouddesign.com.

And it is self-published. I went back and forth about it and got all admonished by some friends for not going through the traditional publishing route. But that involves the two things that I am most pathologically terrible at: Having a boss and waiting around. I like being independent. And I figure if I am going to sell 30 copies, I might as well do it with a little dignity. 

The experience of being an independent author--which is very new to me; like weeks new, so what do I know?--has been incredible and exciting and fun and nerve-wracking and a little confusing and a little frustrating. I very much recommend it. The resources for writers now are unbelievable. KDP, which is the Amazon publishing platform, has been great. Really easy to use and ridiculously fast, with great print quality and royalty rates. I am also using IngramSpark, because it's important for me to get the book into independent bookstores and libraries. That has not been as fast or as easy to use--mostly because I screwed up the ISBN for it. Their customer service has been great at helping me unmake my mistakes, but the process has been slower than with Amazon, and it's not yet published through them. Any day now hopefully. To learn about self-publishing, I listened to a podcast by Joanna Penn called The Creative Penn. She has a website and tons of books on self-publishing that were really helpful. https://www.thecreativepenn.com  

Self-publishing is like running a marathon that ends at the starting line of another marathon, but it is cool. And the fact that this story that I wrote in April to keep from going stir crazy is now out there and available is still kind of mind-blowing to me. I look at the Amazon page and think like, woah weird.

But the response to it has been so beyond what I ever could have possibly anticipated. I had been living with the story in my head for a long time and I was kinda scared to put it out there, honestly. Like terrified, actually. So to now hear what people are saying about it, and to get those kinda quotes about it, and to have people tell me how it affected them and how deeply they felt the characters is really humbling and surreal and moving. (When Bob Mehr sent me that quote I told him that if I sold one copy to somebody I didn't know that was gonna be why.)

Coming up with some of the (barf) marketing for it has been okay. Doing the Instagram, www.instagram.com/doublenickelsbook, has been unexpectedly kinda fun, if you wanna follow it. I'm just kinda winging it. And I like the Spotify playlist, called Double Nickels Book Soundtrack (

And I like being able to tell people here about it, because I really have been looking at this forum forever. And I really have loved that band since I was 12. But I told Kathy when I wrote to her that I was reluctant to post about it, cause it felt spammy and I didn't want people here--who are really nice--to feel like they couldn't be honest or blunt if they discussed it at all. So no being nice please haha. Anyhoo, thank you for asking and thanks everybody for any interest at all and such a warm welcome. 

Here's a link to the listing with the free Amazon samples. www.amazon.com/Double-Nickels-Ari-Surdoval/dp/1735482323/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=ari+surdoval&qid=1599407859&sr=8-1

And if anybody here really wants to read it but can't afford it, just go to www.doublenickelsbook.com and e-mail me.

Ari, thx for elaborating on all that! And for the info on Joanna Penn. A couple more questions (if you don’t mind): did you work with an editor? And, now that you’re officially a fiction writer, what’s next? 

[doublenickelsbook]

No, no I don't mind at all--thank you for asking even.

I didn't work with an editor. I just did it all myself. But even having edited other writers and done copyediting in the past, and going through it over and over, I was still finding little typos up to the very last minute, and clunky wording and stuff like that. Sometimes it is good to have another set of eyes on it, because it is so easy to overlook little things. But editors aren't always right, and when you feel dependent on them, it is easy to second guess your own vision of it. When you do it all yourself, you really come to know the work and the story. There's a picture on the Instagram page of the author proof copy with a pink plume of post-its on all the pages with edits in it. Some of those are typos, and some of those are a deeper understanding of a character or scene that made the book better. It's a huge, painstaking process, but I am glad I edited it myself.

And now that I am officially a fiction writer, I guess it's poverty, obscurity and death from here out. Though I would like to take a tip from my artistic inspirations and get a house with a basement. That seems really nice.

Really, though, the biggest challenge now is getting people to know about it. I'm just kinda pounding the e-mail pavement with it, and a lot of publications--even, uh, "alternative" or "independent" publications--won't review a book that isn't traditionally published. The reader reviews have been unbelievable, though, so maybe as more of those come in, hopefully that will help. I have straightened stuff out with IngramSpark, the company that publishes it for independent bookstores, libraries and all non-Amazon outlets, so it should be available pretty much everywhere. I have heard from three people in the past week who said they read it in one sitting, which is surreal. So I think people like it, it's just a matter of getting word out about it.

If you have any notion to write and put your work out, I say just go for it. Nobody is watching, nobody cares, just do it for yourself, just to do it. All the tools are there, and a lot of them are free or very low cost. There are worse ways to burn the daylight, that's for sure.

[con]

Sept 11, 2020 8:42:46 GMT -5 doublenickelsbook said:

No, no I don't mind at all--thank you for asking even.

I didn't work with an editor. I just did it all myself. But even having edited other writers and done copyediting in the past, and going through it over and over, I was still finding little typos up to the very last minute, and clunky wording and stuff like that. Sometimes it is good to have another set of eyes on it, because it is so easy to overlook little things. But editors aren't always right, and when you feel dependent on them, it is easy to second guess your own vision of it. When you do it all yourself, you really come to know the work and the story. There's a picture on the Instagram page of the author proof copy with a pink plume of post-its on all the pages with edits in it. Some of those are typos, and some of those are a deeper understanding of a character or scene that made the book better. It's a huge, painstaking process, but I am glad I edited it myself.

And now that I am officially a fiction writer, I guess it's poverty, obscurity and death from here out. Though I would like to take a tip from my artistic inspirations and get a house with a basement. That seems really nice.

Really, though, the biggest challenge now is getting people to know about it. I'm just kinda pounding the e-mail pavement with it, and a lot of publications--even, uh, "alternative" or "independent" publications--won't review a book that isn't traditionally published. The reader reviews have been unbelievable, though, so maybe as more of those come in, hopefully that will help. I have straightened stuff out with IngramSpark, the company that publishes it for independent bookstores, libraries and all non-Amazon outlets, so it should be available pretty much everywhere. I have heard from three people in the past week who said they read it in one sitting, which is surreal. So I think people like it, it's just a matter of getting word out about it.

If you have any notion to write and put your work out, I say just go for it. Nobody is watching, nobody cares, just do it for yourself, just to do it. All the tools are there, and a lot of them are free or very low cost. There are worse ways to burn the daylight, that's for sure.

Lol “poverty, obscurity and death.” Well, you’re in good company on that route. Thx for sharing all that. Gotta be validating to hear people are loving it. Congrats, again. Keep us posted on what unfolds! Look forward to reading this after I get thru this Whittaker Chambers bio/doorstop...

[mudbacktodirt]

You've got 6 great reviews on Amazon and that's a start. Just ordered myself a copy and am looking forward to it.

[doublenickelsbook]

Thank you! Let me know what you think!

[mudbacktodirt]

I went to Amazon. I don't have Amazon Prime though so I didn't buy directly through Amazon. They had some sellers with the book available. But, I actually got it slightly cheaper ($14.06 w/free shipping) through eBay. The seller said they had 10 copies available. I'm not sure how distribution works behind the scenes for these things.

It should arrive in about 10 days. I'm looking forward to it. Did you really write the whole thing in April? That would be quite the writing spree.

Another question would be what the word count was. I think it's 184 pages. But, I don't know how many words that works out to be (like if you started out in MS Word - you know how many pages that works out to be in 8.5 x 11 pages but not in book-size 5 x 8 pages). I'm just kind of curious.

[doublenickelsbook]

Hey MBTD! That's really interesting. I guess the seller must have ordered copies as a wholesaler through IngramSpark, at the wholesale discount, and then they're selling for a little less than the Amazon listing on eBay. 

The business end of self-publishing is interesting and a little counterintuitive. Amazon's KDP is the easiest platform to use and gives the best royalties by far. But independent bookstores will not go near anything published by Amazon, understandably. So to get them in everywhere except Amazon, you have to go through a company like IngramSpark. Ingram is cool, but it is more complicated than Amazon, the rates are lower, and it is a different business. As you'd probably expect in the current moment, the majority of sales so far have been on Amazon. I love bookstores though, and I sincerely hope they come roaring back. I'm just patiently waiting for an independent bookstore to actually stock it so I can support them lol....

And yup, I got on a bit of tear with it in the blind panic of the early shutdown. I had the storyline all blocked out, but as for the actual writing of the novel, it was pretty much all in April, and a little bit in May. I forced myself to write at least 1,000 words per day, hell or high water, but usually wrote 2,000 or so. The book was 54,000 words, and after I edited it, about 50,000 words. I wanted the story to be really, really taut. I felt very guided by the Elmore Leonard rules for writing and I am very indebted to Natalie Goldberg's book Writing Down the Bones, which talks about writing as a daily practice. Those are the two sources I would recommend to anybody who wants to write. 

I can't give you a great page count in Word, because I pulled this trick on myself when writing it. I copped the Jesus' Son (by Denis Johnson) font and wrote it double spaced, in bold, in 14 pt type. I did it to keep myself from quitting. I'd get discouraged and say, I can't quit now, it's 80 pages long! When it was probably like 10 hahaha. It worked though, and it kept me plugging along. I was like, it is gonna be 400 pages long! But then, when I formatted and typeset it in Vellum for 5 x 8.25, it was 184. That felt like a good length for it, but people keep telling me they read it in one sitting. So I either wrote it too short or too good--let me know which! Or neither haha.

Thanks again for getting it!

[mudbacktodirt]

I liked that one of the reviewers referenced Denis Johnson and Sam Shepard in their review. That makes me think it will be right up my alley.

It's great you got those blurbs from Bob Mehr and Jaan U (forgot how to spell her name but do remember her from a Lester Bangs biography I read . . . I think so anyway).

Do you know of any online forums that are pretty good for reading and/or writing? I'm not on Facebook or other commonly used social media forms so I may have tied my own hands in that regard. I might have other questions about the process you went through. They're just not coming to me at the moment.

[mudbacktodirt]

I got an e-mail from the online book seller saying the book was arriving today. I checked my mail and it's not here yet. It's OK though.

I'm pretty busy at the moment and it's one of four books waiting to be read by me (maybe more coming after the gift cards I got for my birthday yesterday). But, I'll stick it at the top of the pile when I get it - hopefully tomorrow. I just might not get started on it until the weekend at the earliest though.

[doublenickelsbook]

That's great! Thank you so much!

[mudbacktodirt]

It has arrived:



Bob Dylan's Infidels is also new around here and is helping the book with orientation on its first day.

[doublenickelsbook]

Oh cool!

[mudbacktodirt]

I'm enjoying it so far. I tried to start it last night but kept getting interrupted by phone calls, text messages, etc. I really wanted to get through the first 30 pages or so uninterrupted. I got on track now though with some time to read continuously.

It reminds me a bit of Willy Vlautin's books (with characters in difficult situations outside their control). It also reminds me of a couple of books by James Welch I recently read (Winter in the Blood and The Death of Jim Loney). Those are centered largely on Native Americans but they have some similarities in that they drop you into a certain community like your book does. I like the musical references weaved in as well.

I'm hoping to do some more reading later today. I'm on page 54 right now and I'm enjoying it.

[mudbacktodirt]

Through page 121 now and still enjoying it. Might get back to it later today or tonight.