Current Affairs

A Horror in Horror

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Open Casket Press

Book Editing Terror!

Author Stant Litore is warning horror writers to be wary of publisher/editor Anthony Giangregorio and his much-maligned Open Casket Press. Litore alleges that Griangregorio goes far beyond traditional book editing, massively rewriting manuscripts and then publishing the altered works without the consent of the authors. Griangregorio has been known to change the gender of characters and add rape scenes. This outrageously over-the-top editing and rewriting amounts to what Litore calls “a crime against intellectual property.” I don’t know if I’d go that far, but it’s certainly unprofessional, unethical and inept. Another blogger, Cussedness Corner, warns authors away from Giangregorio as well by offering a horrifying, line-by-line analysis of Open Casket’s terrible author contract.

Jonathan Winters on Writing Humor

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00000048Jonathan Winters died today at age 87. My parents used to play all of his comedy records for us when we were kids. Those records made me laugh so hard I had trouble breathing. Jump forward to 1997. I was a novelist and TV writer by then and I was invited to be a guest speaker at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference… on a panel on writing humor with Jonathan Winters and Fannie Flagg. I was honored…and absolutely terrified. What the hell was a nobody like me doing on the same stage as a legend like Winters? But he was incredibly gracious and hilariously funny…and that night is one of the most treasured memories of my career. Here's a recording of that hour-long panel.  Although it's a video, there's only a still photo to look at. The audio track is the panel. The picture here, and in the video, is of my mother Jan Curran and Winters at the conference. Somewhere out there is a picture of me with Winters and Flagg, but I haven't been able to dig it up.

 

Jonathan Winters at Santa Barbara Writers Conference from lee goldberg on Vimeo.

Easily Fooled

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The Los Angeles Times reports that a jury today convicted the notorious fraud Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter of murder. He's a guy who went around claiming to be a Rockefeller, a bond trader, and a Hollywood producer (he even claimed to be TV writer/producer Christopher Crowe, who is a real person). His frauds weren't very sophisticated, particularly if you happen to have a computer and an internet connection. But I know how easy it is for some people to be fooled.

Recently, I was a guest at a writer's conference and one of my fellow speakers/panelists was a guy who claimed to have written for scores of acclaimed network TV shows and a big upcoming movie. Based on his experience, he'd been invited to speak at writer's conferences, seminars, and libraries from coast to coast, including some nice paid gigs in Hawaii and Mexico. I'd never heard of him…and the instant I met him, I knew something was off.

For one thing, I knew one of the writers of the big, upcoming movie he claimed to have worked on…and I knew writer/producers on most of the shows he said he wrote for…and when I mentioned their names, he was evasive or said he came on the various projects before or after my friends were there. I might have bought that, screenwriting is a pretty nomadic business, but everything he said on his panels and in his talks about writing scripts and working on episodic series wasn't just wrong, it was inane. Even in our personal conversations, he said some pretty stupid stuff about the business. 

So I looked him up on IMDb. No credits. I googled his name, with the titles of the series he said he worked on, to see what came up… and the results I got all came from his website and the conferences he'd spoken at. Now my B.S. meter was in the red zone.

So I contacted my friends on the shows that he said he worked on. Not one of them had ever heard of him. 

So I called the Writers Guild of America's credits department and asked for his credits. They told me he wasn't a member and had no writing credits.

Clearly, the guy was fraud. And not a very sophisticated one either if a mere google search could unmask him. 

Now that the Guild was alerted to the guy, they investigated the issue in more depth, and sent him a strong cease-and-desist letter. 

What I don't get is how so many conferences, libraries, and seminars could have invited this guy to speak, and paid his way to tropical locales, without doing even the most basic check of his credentials. In this day and age, if a guy says he wrote for some of the most acclaimed shows on TV, you should be able to easily confirm it with a simple Google search.  And if you can't, that should be a big, fat, red freaking flag.

I alerted the conference organizers about this guy's fraud, and they said they'd always suspected something was off about him, but he seemed very knowledgeable and was so likeable that they let it go. They won't make that mistake again.

But it's not the conferences, libraries and seminars that booked him that I feel bad for…it's all the attendees over the years who paid to get this guy's bone-headed advice on writing for TV and movies. They're the ones who got taken. 

Coming Next Fall to a TV Near You

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It's the time of year when networks start ordering pilots for proposed TV series for next year's fall schedule. The Hollywood Reporter has a wrap-up of what's been ordered so far. It looks like this is the first pilot season in years that doesn't include a "re-imagining" of an old TV show. Thank God. But there are plenty of adaptations of movies in the works (About a Boy, Bad Teacher, Beverly Hills Cop, etc.) and quite a few based on books.

Here are some of the more unusual concepts being considered…

The Returned
Logline: What happens when the people you have mourned and buried suddenly appear on your doorstep as if not a day's gone by? The lives of the people of Aurora are forever changed when their deceased loved ones return.
Cast:
Team: W/EP Aaron Zelman (Criminal Minds)
Studio: ABC Studios, Brillstein Entertainment, Plan B

The Ordained
Logline: The son of a Kennedy-esque family leaves the priesthood and becomes a lawyer to prevent his politician sister from being assassinated.
Cast:
Team: W/EP Lisa Takeuchi Cullen; EP Frank Marshall, Larry Shuman, A.B. Fischer; co-EP Robert Zotnowski
Studio: CBS Television Studios

Delirium
Logline: Based on best-selling trilogy about a world where love is deemed illegal and is able to be eradicated with a special procedure. With 95 days to go until her scheduled treatment, Lena Holoway does the unthinkable: she falls in love.
Cast:
Team: W/EP: Karyn Usher (Prison Break, Bones); EP Peter Chernin, Katherine Pope
Studio: 20th Television, Chernin Entertainment

The List
Logline: When members of the Federal Witness Security Program start getting killed, U.S. Marshal Dan Shaker leads the hunt for the person who stole “the list” – a file with the identities of every member of the program.
Cast:
Team: W/EP: Paul Zbyszewski (Lost, Hawaii Five-0, Daybreak); EP Ruben Fleischer (Gangster Squad)
Studio: 20th Television

Girlfriend in a Coma
Logline: After almost two decades, a 34-year-old woman wakes up from a coma to find out she has a 17-year-old daughter from a pregnancy she was unaware of when her life was put on hold.  (Single)
Cast:
Team: EP/W: Liz Brixius (Nurse Jackie); EP Dick Wolf, Danielle Gelber
Studio: Universal Television, Wolf Films
Format: Single-camera

Bloodline
Logline: A contemporary pulp thriller that revolves around an orphaned young girl named Bird Benson, who because of an accident of birth is caught in the struggle between two warring families of mercenaries and killers. Mentored by a Chinese man, Bird has to accept the quest to find and defeat her mother in mortal combat if she is to ever lead a normal life.
Cast:
Team: W/EP David Granziano (Awake, Terra Nova), EP/D Peter Berg, EP Sarah Aubrey
Studio: Universal, Film 44

 

Sleazy Rights Grab

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The Authors Guild reports that magazine publisher Conde Nast (Bon Appétit, GQ, The New Yorker, Self, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Wired, among others,) is attempting to screw freelancer writers out of a significant chunk of the TV & movie rights to their articles. Movies such as Saturday Night Live and Hurt Locker began as magazine articles. 

[They] would slice writers' share of potential film and television income to freelance works appearing in its magazines by more than 50%. Its new boilerplate contract — introduced last year — would give the company a free, exclusive 12-month right to option dramatic and multimedia rights. Under the contract, Condé Nast could choose to extend that option by up to 24 months for a modest sum. Should Condé Nast exercise the option, the writer would, under boilerplate terms, be paid just 1% of the film or tv production budget. Negotiated film and tv agreements typically pay the author 2.5% or more of the production budget. […] Christine Haughney of the New York Times writes about the contract and dispute today in an article that quotes Jan Constantine, the Authors Guild's general counsel.

 

Authors Behaving Badly

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Oh my, author RJ Ellory can't resist promoting himself under fake names. Now he's been banned from Wikipedia after logging on under false identities to delete links to news stories about his outrageous "sock puppetry" on Amazon. The Telegraph reports:

Officials made the decision afterfinding that he had tried to delete stories from the profile as well as links to Telegraph.co.uk, and had breached its "self promotion" rules.

[…]Ellory took to this Wikipedia page to amend the wording of a “controversy paragraph” and the newspaper links which he says gave “completely the wrong bias on this issue […] there is a significant matter of misrepresentation in the press regarding the extent to which I had manufactured 'reviews' on amazon [sic].”

This is clearly a guy with a huge ego (or is it raging insecurity?) who is so intent on praising himself that he doesn't realize how self-destructive his actions are, that all he succeeds in doing is making himself look desperate and pathetic.

Jack Klugman, RIP

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Sad to learn that Jack Klugman died today. I had the pleasure of working with him twice on episodes of DIAGNOSIS MURDER. I spent hours talking to him during the course of those shoots…and he was very candid about what a prick he was to the writers on QUINCY. He said: “Be glad you’re working with me now and not back then!” When we cast him, he was just glad to be working…since his problem with his voice had really cut down on the number of acting jobs coming his way. Here are the opening scenes of the DIAGNOSIS MURDER episode “Voices Carry,” which guest stars Jack Klugman. I think it was one of the best episodes of our show. 

 

A Ballsy Scam

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I stumbled on this post from Writer Beware very late…but wow, what a ballsy and inept scam. A fake PR firm, the Albee Agency, advertised itself with fake endorsements from non-existent novelists and even a few real authors…and actually thought they could get away with it. Victoria Strauss caught'em. 

Now, these are all authors I'd never heard of before. Maybe their books never got published, or went out of print, or something. Maybe my Google-fu was just not up to par. But wait–here's an author I do know: Chuck Wendig (if you're not familiar with his blog, you should get to know it). Wow, Chuck really had a great experience with Albee, didn't he?

However, I have a suspicious mind. So I dropped Chuck a line, asking if he'd indeed hired The Albee Agency to do PR for him. His response:

WTF? Who is the Albee Agency? They have a testimonial from me on their main page that I never made. thealbeeagency.com (@victoriastrauss)

[…]So….fake testimonials. Nonexistent authors; authors quoted without permission. There are no gray areas here: The Albee Agency is engaging in fraudulent behavior. This just emphasizes–as if y'all didn't already know–that writers need to watch out for scams.

The bigger point, though, is that even without the fake testimonials, there is plenty to beware of here. If Albee were absolutely, scrupulously honest about the authors it has worked with, it would still be offering services of dubious value for too much money, with no assurance of professional expertise.

And that, my friends, is a much bigger danger these days than an outright, bona-fide scam.

The Mail I Get

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Today it's not my mail, but some that my friend author Joel Goldman received from a self-published author of erotic novels. She offered to swap reviews with him. He decided to play dumb, though he had a pretty good idea where this was going. He asked her:

Are we talking about reading each other’s books before we review them or just posting reviews of them?

And she replied:

Whatever suits you.

I checked out your work and it looks fine and properly formatted. If you want me to read and review it i’ll do it with five stars.

Similarly if you want me to post or reword your review I’ll do that too. What I’m after is a five star review on Amazon with as little work and as quickly as possible. I’m not asking you to read [title of book], I guess you have better things to do.

My first chapter is up there (on line), so you can judge the writing, I can post you a review to submit or reword or a synopsis to save you time.

Joel politely declined. This exchange would be funny if this sort of "review swapping" wasn't so common, especially among newbie authors. Just check out forums like Kindleboards and you'll see for yourself. 

What's really sad isn't how they are devaluing reviews, or how low their literary standards are ("it looks fine and is properly formatted") but that they don't see what's wrong with what they are doing, or how badly leaving rave reviews for books they haven't read (and are probably shit) reflects on their reputations, both as authors and as reviewers.

They simply don't care.

All that matters to them is garnering praise, even if its entirely fake and undeserved. They are so desperate for acclaim, success and respect that they have forgotten all those things have to be earned…and how good it feels when it is. 

And that's a feeling you'll never get from reviews by people who've never actually read your book…or, in the case of John Locke, from people you pay to buy your book and rave about it.

You're not just fooling customers, you're fooling yourself, and that might be the most hurtful swindle of all.

 

Imprints for Success

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0383 Lee Goldberg ecover King City_14 (1)For a while now, the editors at New York publishing companies have been warning authors who are thinking of jumping ship to one of Amazon Publishing's imprints that not only won't their books be in brick-and-mortar stores, but they also won't make nearly as much money. 

"You'll disappear," they say. "Your career will be over. Nobody will be able to find your books anymore."

While it's true that you won't see many Amazon-imprint books at your local Barnes & Noble or at airport bookstores….so what? Ebooks are outselling prints books today. And while your ego may take a hit not seeing your book on a store shelf, your wallet won't. Unless you're an A-lister like Lee Child, Janet Evanovich, James Patterson, or Michael Connelly, etc., you will sell a lot more books and make a lot more money with Amazon than with a "legacy" publisher.

I know many authors, formerly with NY publishers, who are now with one of Amazon's imprints…and earning more than they ever did before. I'm one of them. KING CITY has already made me more money in the last 90 days than my last two MONK novels combined.

But I am not alone. Today Amazon Publishing exec Jeff Belle sent a letter to agents telling them what we Amazon authors already knew…that the imprints are a huge success. He also punctured the big lie, which I have heard repeated many times, that Barry Eisler made a costly mistake walking away from a $500,000, two-book St. Martin's contract in favor of working with Amazon. Belle said, in part:

We are especially focused on increasing the audience for our authors. The Detachment, by Barry Eisler, published last September by Thomas & Mercer, has sold over three times the copies of any of Barry’s previous New York Times bestselling books. New York Times bestselling author Connie Brockway joined Montlake Romance as our launch author, and The Other Guy’s Bride has also gone on to sell more than three times the copies of her other recent titles. These authors, along with Amazon Publishing, are helping to redefine what it means to be a bestseller. We’re extremely proud of the results so far.

We are as determined as ever to make sure that Amazon Publishing authors reach a huge audience. In particular, we will continue to heavily market and promote them to our 180 million customers around the world, through online and offline advertising, our websites, through email, and on millions of Kindle and non-Kindle devices. Based in large part on our long experience as a bookseller, we are confident that this expansive marketing and promotional support will continue to yield strong sales results for our authors.

It's not just the sales that are attractive to authors… it's the talented, friendly and enthusiastic editors, who give authors an enormous say in how their books are packaged and marketed…it's the astonishing effectiveness of their promotional campaigns…and its the far more generous royalties, paid swiftly, and accompanied by clear, easy to understand royalty reports. Amazon Publishing treats authors like partners. And they publish great books.

Is it any wonder Amazon Publishing and their authors are doing so well?