Lee Goldberg
New Criteria for MWA Membership
Last month, the board of the Mystery Writers of America adopted the recommendations of the membership committee (of which I am a member) to revise the criteria for active status membership for professional authors. The changes/additions to the current criteria are:
1) An author of books must have received a minimum advance of $1,000, royalties of $1,000, or a combination of advances and royalties in at least that amount.
2) The initial print run for the author’s work of fiction or non-fiction must be at least 500 copies.
3) That an author of short stories must have received a cumulative amount of $200, with only payments of $25 or more counting toward the total. Scholarly articles or chapters of non-fiction books will be treated like short stories, for purposes of Active Category qualification.
4) That a playwright or an author of screenplays or teleplays must have received a minimum payment commensurate with the standards and practices of the Writers’ Guild (film/TV) or Dramatists Guild (stage plays), and that the work must have been produced.
UPDATE (7-14-07): The Romance Writers of America have just adopted new membership criteria that are very similar to the MWA’s.
UPDATE: You can find more details about the criteria for active MWA membership here.
The Numbers Game
I’ve been doing some catching up on my favorite blogs today. There have been some fascinating posts on author blogs over the last few weeks about the writing life. For example, Tess Gerritsen talks from experience about the pros and cons of big print runs…
The larger the print run, the better the chance the book will hit
national bestseller lists. Part of it is just the visual impact of
seeing huge stacks of BIG GAMBLE in a bookstore — customers see those
stacks, assume the book must be important, and are inclined to check it
out. (Seeing only one or two copies of a new novel, conversely, may
make the customer think it must not be a very popular book.) To sell a
lot of books, you have to display a lot of books, just to catch the
customers’ attention. Also, if Borders has taken delivery of 30,000
copies, then their sales force will have an incentive to push that
title even harder and will offer deeper discounts to move the copies.If the simple secret to hitting the bestseller list is just to print
a ton of copies, why doesn’t a publisher do it with every book?Because they’d go out of business fast. That way lies disaster.
Meanwhile, Sandra Scoppettone talks about how good novels aren’t getting published because of the obsession with those numbers and the evaporation of the mid-list. Her musings were prompted by a rejection letter that an author-friend of hers got:
“This
is a fine piece of work, as you no doubt are painfully aware, but I’m
not sure that we could convince the big stores to buy thousands and
thousands of copies. And that is my mandate these days.”It
just makes me feel all warm and cozy. And it definitely makes me want
to sit down in front of my computer and hit those keys. Not that I
intend to write a book that will make those big fat stores buy
thousands and thousands of copies. And that’s just the point.Who
is going to publish the books I write…the books that you write? I know
the mid-list category for fiction is nonexistent but I didn’t think it
was happening in the crime genre.
The editor’s mandate.
Discouraging and depressing. I’ve never sold thousands and thousands
of copies to the chains. Most of us don’t. We all know who does.
Ten, twenty at most. And they’re the people who get major reviews and
big time ads. Over and over again.
And Sandra has had it with the Numbers Game…she’s not going to play anymore. She’s just going to write. Or not.
I know the breakthrough book isn’t going to happen for me. That’s
okay. I had my chance. Now, despite my wishes, which, by the way, are
for the forty year old me, I don’t have any idea if I’ll publish
again. Or write again. I’m inclined to think I’ll write, but that
doesn’t mean I’ll be published. That’s not okay. But there’s not a
damn thing I can do about it.I hope the next book I write
is good. Still, it won’t be the kind of book that’ll make me a
household name or bring in loads of money. That’s okay, too. I want
whatever I write to see the light of day and make back the money I was
paid. At this point in my writing life that’s all that’s important.
On the other side of the coin, John Connolly seems to be one of those authors on the verge of his big breakthrough. He is half-way through his international book tour and it’s catching up with him.
This week marked the halfway point on the tour – 29 days down, 29 more
to go – and the shift from the US to Australia. The first half has been
an interesting experiment in how much travel, etc. a body can take
before it begins to exhibit signs of distress. The answer, it appears,
is roughly 28 days, because meltdown has begun.[…]Too many flights, and too many 16- and 17-hour days. My body is
starting to rebel. I have managed to tear something in my neck hauling
my bags from hotel room to car to check in desk, and from baggage claim
to car to hotel room. I felt it rip the way paper rips. At the moment,
I’m freezing it with spray, but the spray wears off, and at night I
don’t sleep as well as I’d like. I’m not much good for anything after
about nine o’clock, and this weekend had to bow out of meeting some
nice people for a bite to eat in Melbourne. I went to bed instead. I
feel like an old person.
Paris and stuff
I’ve driven in a lot of U.S. cities, and quite a few European ones, but I think if you can drive in Paris, you can probably drive anywhere on earth. It’s dog-eat-dog on the roads there, no rules seem to apply. It’s infuriating, exciting, and exhausting.
Since I was last here five years ago, it seems as though the population has quadrupled and most of them are on motorcycles. There’s less dog shit on the streets though, perhaps because it has never stopped raining. It doesn’t feel like summer here at all.
But Paris is still, well, Paris…a beautiful city and I had a wonderful dinner last night at Lasserre with my wife, actress Alexia Barlier, our international sales exec, and an exec from the French network M6, which will be airing FAST TRACK. I’ve never been to a restaurant quite like it. Very elegant, with five waiters doing what’s ordinarily done by one. They do everything for you but pre-chew your food. In middle of the meal, the ceiling opened up…less like a skylight than SPECTRE’s hidden base in a dormant volcano. It was pretty cool.
My vacation will be ending soon… our director Axel Sand delivers his cut of FAST TRACK on Friday and on Saturday I head Action Concept studios in Cologne to do my cut. I’ve got about five days to work in the editing room…and then it’s off to Lohr to teach the principles of American TV writing & producing with writer/producer Jack Bernstein. Jack and I worked together on DEADLY GAMES, but we’ve also both worked separately on SHE SPIES and MONK. He’s a great writer and a very funny guy, so it should be a lot of fun.
In the mean time, I have been re-reading a book that I’ve optioned, going through it with a highlighter and getting a feel for what the "screen" story will be…I hope to be able to get to work on that script (along with MONK #6: MR. MONK GOES TO GERMANY) while I am awaiting word on whether FAST TRACK will be picked up or not.
Publicists Who Can’t Publicize Themselves
I got this spam email not long ago from Brian Feinblum at Planned Television Arts, a PR firm (the typos are his):
I saw you and your books listed in a directory at this past weekend’s
Book Expo. The only mystery for mystery authors to solve is: How can you secure
effective publicity for your books? I am happy to say we have a solution. Planned Television Arts is the nation’s largest and oldest book promoters. As such we invite you to send info about your most recent or
upcoming book and we can customized a plan that world for you.
If their "customized plan" and PR savvy is anything like their customized emails, it’s a wonder they are still in business. Milton Kahn is another one. I got a spam email from him recently. Here’s the first line:
I would
like to make you aware of my public relations company as I feel I could be a
perfect fit in helping you promote and publicize your current or upcoming book
on a national level.
What a grabber, huh? If that’s his idea of a compelling lead, imagine what he could do for me! My check is in the mail, Milt.
Getting off to See the Wizard
Dorothy rolling in the hay with the Scarecrow? C’mon, we all know they wanted to get naked together. That’s just one of the bizarre, fanfic couplings that Fleshbot has , um, uncovered on LiveJournal.
"D-Dorothy?"
Dorothy looked quickly over her shoulder, but her
own movement against her hand caused to moan loudly again as her eyes
met the Scarecrow’s.Without a conversation, or her needing to persuade him, he came over between her thighs and kissed her thoroughly.
Dorothy
was surprised to feel his cloth mouth feeling rather erotic on her
mouth, making her even more wet than she was before he walked in.She grinded her hips against his straw structure, and even that felt right.
She looked up at him with frustrated eyes, "I want you inside me."
“I Don’t Think We’re in Los Angeles anymore, Toto.”
The New York Times reports that fat is sexy is Mauritania, where women force feed themselves to put on pounds.
A 2001 government survey of 68,000 women found that one in five between ages 15 and 49 had been deliberately overfed. And nearly 70 percent – and even more among teenagers – said they did not regret it.
[…]Other cultures prize corpulent women. But Mauritania may be unique in the lengths it has gone to achieve its vision of female beauty. For decades, the Mauritanian version of a Western teenager’s crash diet was a crash feeding program, designed to create girls obese enough to display family wealth and epitomize the Mauritanian ideal.
Centuries-old poems glorify women immobilized by fat, moving so slowly they seemed to stand still, unable to hoist themselves onto camels without the aid of men’s willing hands…
Belated Congratulations
…to Michael Daniels, one of the students in my "Introduction to TV Writing" class at UCLA Extension, who has landed a job as a staff writer on the CW series ONE TREE HILL. I’m not surprised at all. The goal of the class (a course which is also taught by writer/producers like Matt Witten and William Rabkin) is for the students to complete a beat sheet that they can use to write their TV episodic spec script. But Michael grasped the concepts so quickly, and his first draft beat sheet was so good, that I told him to set aside the class assignments and just go right to script. Writing a script isn’t part of the class, but I thought if he did anything else he’d be wasting his time and money. His script was terrific…and at the end of the session, I advised him to stop taking classes…he was already as good as any professional TV writer I knew. It was time for him to get his work out there in the marketplace. Within a few weeks, his spec script landed an agent at a top agency and he was being sent out on pitches. He didn’t land any freelance gigs…instead, he got right on staff. That accomplishment alone should tell you how good this guy is. I have no doubt that Michael will rise quickly through the ranks and will be running his own show in the not-too-distant future. I just hope he remembers to thank me when he wins his Emmy…