Lee Goldberg

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.

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.

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.