Month: October 2005

All You Can Eat

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My Brother Tod reports on the hilarity and despair of this year’s Las Vegas Book Festival.

The festival itself was held at the Las Vegas Library, which is located Billy
Goat Gruff style just under a freeway overpass. It’s a nice library, actually,
and there seemed to be lots of people hanging around the place. Unfortunately, a
great many of the people milling about were there for the box of free Top Ramen
left out front and the handsome corners and nooks where, if you’re a junkie,
you’re allowed to fix without incident. What the homeless folks could have been
doing instead was hearing a bunch of notable authors talking about books. Aside
from your favorite frumpy Jew, the festival also included Rob Roberge, Steve Almond, Jeremy
Schaap, Neil Pollack, Chris Epting, Glenn Gaslin, Steve
Erickson, Francois
Camoin, another guy named Francois whose name escapes me, Joe Queenan, James McManus, Geoff Schumacher and many, many others
(including poets!). Alas.

New Hope for the Dead

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If BookExpo is where new books and dreams are born, then the Chicago International
Remainder & Overstock Book Exposition (CIROBE). is where
they go to die. Bookseller Robert Gray talks on his blog about the big sales expo for
remainder, overstock, and damaged books that’s coming up this week:

I’ll think, as I always do, about the rampant optimism of BookExpo in the spring,
when all is new and every book on the list has the potential to sell through.
"We’re very excited about our fall list," they say. And they should
say that. They should be excited. Every book is a gem at BookExpo, every
book a winner in waiting.

Well, maybe not every book.

Still, nobody expects a book to die needlessly. And yet they do, every day, die ugly
deaths and pass through to the underworld, Hades, or, in modern English, The
Bargain Table.

Maybe it’s not a cattle drive at this stage, after all. Maybe it’s a boat trip across
the River Styx.

Charon, the old man who ferries the dead to the underworld.

CIROBE, the show that ferries dead books to bargain book world.

Gee, what a clever idea. Why hasn’t anybody done this before?

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Publishers Lunch reports that PD Martin has sold his novel BODY COUNT to Mira Books and that the rights are being shopped worldwide. It’s the first in a series about an FBI profiler with psychic abilities who is chasing a serial killer.  I suppose this could strike you as a clever idea for a book…if you haven’t seen MISSING, MEDIUM, THE DEAD ZONE or any of the other psychics-who-solve-crimes shows on television. Haven’t there also been, like, 178 movies with the same premise? Maybe his next book can be about a private eye with a sociopathic sidekick and an irascible friend-on-the-force.

The Dan Brown Effect

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The impact of THE DAVINCI CODE is still being felt…now Publishers Lunch reports there’s yet another book trying to cash in on the formula.

Jennifer Carrell’s INTERRED WITH THEIR BONES, a treasure hunt whose clues are
codes and puzzles found in the writings of Shakespeare, to Mitch Hoffman at
Dutton, by Noah Lukeman of Lukeman Literary Management (world).

I think I’m going to write a thriller where the clues are codes and puzzles found in reruns of old 60s sitcoms like GILLIGAN’S ISLAND and MR. ED.  I’ll call it… THE TV GUIDE.

Writing Scams

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My friend author Joe Konrath has an excellent post today on writing scams. He discusses Fee-Charging Agents, Writing Contests, Paid Anthologies, Vanity Presses, and POD Publishers, among other things. It should be required reading for all  aspiring authors. Here’s a sample of his wise counsel:

PAID ANTHOLOGIES: Here’s another quick scam. You submit a poem, and it gets
accepted into an upcoming poetry collection. You get excited, tell all your
friends and family, and then get a letter in the mail saying that you can
purchase the anthology at $40.

Naturally you buy a copy, and so does Mom, and so does Aunt Grace and your
best friend Phil. When you get the anthology, you see it is 700 pages long, and
your wonderful poem is crammed on a page with seven others.

Do the numbers. If there are 3000 poems in the book, and each writer in the
anthology bought at least one copy, the publisher made $120,000.

Poetry.com was infamous for this scam. They’d also invite writers to awards
ceremonies, at staggering costs to the gullible writer, to receive a worthelss
award along with 1000 other ‘winners’.

Please pass the link to his post along to any struggling writers you know…they should print out his article and keep it handy. It will help avoid the temptation to pay an agent to read their books, pay to publish their book with iUniverse  or pay to enter one of those Writers Digest contests…

 

All it takes is two hours a day and you, too, can be a bestselling thriller writer

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Anyone who thinks being a bestselling author is  hard work hasn’t met Stuart Woods, who told BookStandard about a typical writing day.

Stuart Woods may be the perfect picture of the
gentleman-artist. Since publishing his first novel, Chiefs, in 1981, he has managed to create three
commercially successful franchises—one starring Holly Barker, one Stone
Barrington and one Will Lee—while spending healthy amounts of time flying his
single-engine Jetprop plane between his three homes, sailing yachts and enjoying
the life of a “born-again bachelor.”

TBS: You’ve written 33 books. How do you manage to be so prolific?

SW: It takes a certain amount of discipline.
Once I know the events that are going to take place in a chapter, I can write
the chapter quickly—usually in an hour or less.

TBS: What’s a typical workday like for you?

SW: I write generally between 10 and 12 in the morning. And I
don’t work everyday.

TBS: Do you ever get
your series mixed up?

SW: If I’ve been away
from the book for a while, I’ll sometimes have to read a few chapters to get
back into it and remind myself where I was. But for the most part, I have a gift
for keeping the plot in my mind—I don’t even re-read it when I’m finished with
it, I send it straight to my editor.

TBS:
You don’t re-read your work all?

SW: I write
a chapter at a sitting, then the next day I re-read it and make small
corrections and I go on from there.

Things Getting Ugly for Uglytown

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Publishers Weekly reports today that Uglytown, the LA-based small press that turns out some of the best-looking books I’ve ever seen, is temporarily suspending operations until Spring 2006, when they will release HUNG OUT TO DIE by Brett Battles.  The "hiatus" is blamed, in part, on the bankruptcy of
Bookpeople/Words Distribution.

[Tom] Fassbender  said
UglyTown has been plagued by cash-flow problems after the Words bankruptcy in
2004 and the house’s switch to PGW for distribution.

"It’s been hard on smaller publishers," said Fassbender about the soft market
conditions. "We’re slowing down our plans. Bookstores are just not ordering
titles in the quantities we expected." Fassbender said he was pursuing a number
of financing possibilities for the press. Founded in 1998, UglyTown has
published about 14 books.

I’m truly sorry to hear about this. The guys at Uglytown love the mystery genre and it shows in the fine product they put out (including works by acclaimed authors like Victor Gischler, Gary Phillips, Nathan Walpow and Sean Doolittle). Here’s hoping that Uglytown comes back stronger than ever.

The Strange Sisters

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I love and collect old pulp novels by Harry Whittington and, in my search for them, I stumbled onto this marvelous site full of hilariously lurid  lesbian paperback covers from the 50s and 60s. Here’s just a sampling from the hundreds of vintage book covers  (click on the images for a larger picture):XherragingneedsWakingnightmare_1

XnakedarcherXmanamongwomen_1Xpassionfruit

Publication is Like Death

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Elizabeth Royte writes in today’s NY Times about the misery of getting, and being, published.

For any writer, the publication of a book, labored over for years, is an
exciting event. But excitement is a fleeting emotion, and the business of
publicizing the book, so that it sells and the author can earn out his advance,
quickly displaces any initial euphoria. The writer then embarks on a tortured
journey toward acceptance of the fact, several months after publication, that
his book isn’t going to vault him into the empyrean of fame, or even improve his
life. At the intersection of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief and
Stendhal’s stages of love, the contemporary author trudges along a predictable
path that can only be described, in hindsight, as self-induced misery.

Roald Dahl Would Be So Pleased

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There’s nothing more complimentary to an author than fanfic…or so I am told by fanficcers. I can only imagine how flattered Roald Dahl would be by this Willy Wonka fanfic:

Mr
Salt and Mr Wonka had only been standing like that, caught in a
mutual stare, for a couple of seconds. It only felt like much longer
for both of them, and someone was bound to end it.

Willy did. “P…” he mouthed quite inaudibly, “p…” and then
helplessly slid to his knees before Mr Salt, embracing him like that.
Quite the picture of Hamlet in his renaissance bob and velvet coat he
tried to rest his chin against Mr Salt’s groin, which put his head
in a rather awkward angle due to the brim of his top hat being in the
way.

(Thanks to Brad for the link)