Books

I’m Done!

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I just this minute finished writing the final draft of MR. MONK AND THE BLUE FLU, my third book in the series, and had to tell somebody (everybody in my house is asleep already). I’m a week ahead of my deadline, so I will probably set the manuscript aside for a day or two and then read it again to make sure everything tracks. Or I may simply turn it in and be done with it.  Regardless, I won’t do anything with it until Monday.

The timing is perfect, because Bill Rabkin and I are about to start writing a freelance script for a hot new TV series (more on that later) and I won’t have to worry about finishing the book, too. I do have to start thinking about my eighth DIAGNOSIS MURDER book, though, which is due in three-and-a-half months…

So tomorrow I’ll do my little book-completion ritual. I’ll put my Murder Book (my binder of notes, outlines, photos, etc. related to the book) in a box in the closet and clean up my office, which tends to go to hell while I’m writing.

Joe Konrath: Anti-Christ?

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Edwardredwin
I got this email from a very successful and critically acclaimed mystery novelist I know (who gave me permission to post this as long as I removed his or her name):

How can you be friends with Joe Konrath? He’s the anti-Christ.  In his own way, he is as bad or worse than Lori Prokop. The advice he gives to aspiring writers is just terrible and, worse, he’s doing everything he can to undermine his fellow professionals. How, you ask? He’s perpetuating the myth that you should devote all or part of your advance to promotion, that you should devote yourself to making sure that the publisher makes money (even if it costs you).  What he’s doing is legitimizing the damaging corporate mindset that authors should pay for their own promotion without any investment or reimbursement from the publisher.  We’re supposed to live off our advances, not kick them back to the publisher for advertising and promotion. Joe’s latest moronic blog post was so infuriating I almost put my fist into my laptop screen. Of course his publisher loves him. But professional writers should fear him. He’s cancer.

After getting this email, I had to scoot right over to Joe’s blog to see what had pissed off my usually low-key buddy so much.  I think this is it:

My writing philosophy is simple: Make money for your publisher.

I do this by not only doing a lot of self-promotion, but by also
considering my audience even before I sit down to write a single word.

This means compromises. This means understanding the system writing
exists in (the publishing business) and weighing it against the many
reasons I wanted to become a writer.

Successful writers seem to understand this balance, and the
trade-offs required. They realize that their books are products as well
as art.

By ‘successful’ I mean that they are making money for their
publisher. You don’t have to be an NYT bestseller to do this. All you
have to do is earn out your advance.

You can earn out your advance by doing a lot of self-promotion, by
working closely with your publisher, by spending a lot of your advance
money on marketing, and by writing good books.

Let me start by saying I really like Joe. I think he’s funny, gracious, multi-talented,  and genuinely interested in helping his fellow writers. We don’t always agree, but that’s okay by me — I don’t always agree with my wife, either, but we still love each other.  Sure, I disagree with Joe from time to time, but that doesn’t diminish my respect for him or how much I enjoy his company.

I’ve always been awed by the incredible time and energy Joe puts into promoting his books. He visited something like 200 booksstores for "drop in" signings  during a promotional tour which, I believe, was paid for by his publisher. He does an amazing job getting his work noticed and I applaud him for it.

That said, I don’t agree with his frequently expressed philosophy that your job as an author is to make money for your publisher and  pump your advance into promotion. It’s nice if you’re in the financial position to do that (it’s what I did with many of my books), but most authors aren’t. They write to support their families and, from a business stand-point, it isn’t cost-effective for them to donate a significant portion of their advances to their publisher.

Joe frequently talks about how important it is to promote your books and assure that each title earns out.  For those not in the biz, "earning out"  simply means that you’ve sold enough books to earn back the advance against royalties that the publisher paid you. That doesn’t mean that once you hit that point you are making tons of  money, it just makes it more likely the publisher will buy your next book.

I agree that authors need to promote themselves and their work…and that you need to earn out if you’re going to survive in this business. But the publishers have a responsibility to do more than merely publish and distribute the book. They also have to advertise and promote. They can’t expect the author to shoulder most of that burden.

Or can they? More and more, it seems, publishers are  expecting authors to use their advances for promotion, pay for their own websites, and send themselves on tour … and if they don’t, they are seen as being "unsupportive" and "difficult to work with." And that is scary, especially with the midlist disappearing and advances shrinking. The advance is supposed to support an author while he works, not act as a replacement for corporate spending on advertising and promotion…it is NOT a replacement for the publisher’s advertising budget.

But if authors like my friend Joe keep advocating that  it’s the author’s responsibility to devote some or all of their advance for promotion, and authors and publishers buy into that thinking, we will see publishers spending less on advertising and promotion and earnings for authors shrinking even more.

I’m NOT saying authors shouldn’t promote their work — God knows, I certainly work hard to promote myself (take this blog, for instance). But I have to admit that Joe’s  "What have you done for your publisher today?" attitude often makes me cringe.  He makes up for it my making me laugh a lot, and with his many keen insights into the biz, so it evens out.

Your thoughts?

UPDATE:  Joe has responded in the comments below and also shares his views on his blog.

Read more

Writers Are Suckers

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You won’t find anybody more gullible, more eager to be scammed, than aspiring writers. Of course, aspiring writers could avoid being taken by simply following one rule: You don’t pay anyone to get published. They pay you. But, apparently, that simple rule is too complex for some wanna-be authors to comprehend. Novelist J. Steven York ponders this problem in a lengthy, excellent post, on his blog:

There is no more gullible, self-delusional, fog-headed being on the
planet than an aspiring writer. So predictable and common are their
delusions that an entire industry of crooks, con-men and scam artists
exists to exploit them, and such a sweet deal it is for them, too. Not
only are most of their scams perfectly legal, their marks are actually grateful to
be scammed! It doesn’t get much better for a predator than that. It’s
like the entire herd of antelope crowding around the lion shouting,
"Eat me! No, eat me!"

It’s so true. Just read some of the mail I get. Just look at the people who’ve applied to Lori Prokop’s Book Millionaire scam, or who still flock to PublishAmerica. One PA author posted this comment on my blog the other day:

To critics of PA read this:
       1) I dont care if PA keeps 100% of my royalties because they risked their money on my book.
       2) I dont care if my books never appear on the shelve of a brick and mortar book store.
       3) I totally understand if PA requires a seven contract because as mentioned before they put up their money for my book,
        When PA accepted my book, it was the happiest day in my life.

How can anyone feel sympathy for someone so deluded? Not so long ago, a woman wrote to me about how excited her daughter was to get a contract for her book from Tate Publishing. What was Tate offering? Pay us $4000 and we will publish your book. When I told her that Tate is a vanity press, and that it wasn’t an "offer," but a sales soliciation, she lamented that her daughter would be crushed because she was so excited that a publisher had accepted her work.  To me, that is the perfect example of  the "scam me please!" mindset of so many aspiring authors. Here’s the reality, as J. Steven York states it:

If you don’t get paid, and I mean up-front, then it isn’t a sale.
People who don’t have money to pay you generally don’t have money
because they aren’t selling books.

You’d think that would be obvious. Well, to many aspiring writers, the obvious is something to ignore. They don’t want to know that they aren’t really being published when their book comes out from Authorhouse. They don’t want to face reality because it will destroy the flimsy fantasy they are living. Or, as York put it:

Most of the writers getting scammed aren’t dumb. They’re nice,
intelligent people who sincerely want to be writers, and have simply
lost their way. Most of them are so invested in whatever flavor of
Kool-aid they’ve swallowed that they not only can’t see the truth, they
don’t want to. Yet most of them are aware, on some level, that
something is wrong. That’s usually why they write me. They have
concerns. They have questions. Just not enough to wake up and look
around. The correspondence, in antelope-terms, usually goes something
like this: "This lion has actually agreed to take me on! Right now,
it’s chewing on my leg. And it’s great! Although, I’m concerned about
the bleeding. And the dismemberment. But really, it’s good! It’s great!
Uh, should there be so much pain? But I’m good!"

It’s sad.

Blog Suicide

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Being too candid on your blog about the happenings in your professional life can have serious personal and financial consequences…which is why I don’t talk much about my current projects (beyond blatant self-promotion). The anecdotes, rants, and observations that I post here are not about people I’m working with today or might work with in the future, much to the relief of my wife, my writing partner and my two agents, all of whom keep a close eye on my blogging.

I have seen too many people I know commit blog suicide by trashing their current employers or co-workers  (studios, networks, producers, editors, publishers, etc) or by revealing a little too much about their own insecurities, ambivalence or creative difficulties regarding whatever projects they are working on.

But you don’t need a blog to get in trouble. You can commit the same sort of career suicide by saying the wrong thing in an interview with a print or broadcast reporter (I’ve learned that lesson, to a smaller degree, the hard way myself on too many occasions).

Today, novelist Jayne Ann Krentz’s literary agent Steve Axelrod tackles this subject in an interesting post on his client’s blog. His post is titled "Why Smart Agents Don’t Blog." Here are some excerpts:

About two
months ago Jayne kindly invited me to contribute to this blog (“Just
something short from an agent’s perspective….”)—and, though I quickly
agreed, I’ve been dragging my feet ever since […]

But every
time I’d start to think about which great story to start with, I would
think of Dave Wirtschafter—and I’d come to a dead halt.

Wirtschafter,
the president of the William Morris Agency, didn’t blog, but about a
year ago, he let himself be interviewed for a long, candid profile in
the New Yorker. It made for great reading—it was the real deal—but his
candor is widely believed to have cost the agency at least two major
stars, Halle Berry and Sarah Michelle Geller, as well as a major
director, etc.

A few months
after the New Yorker profile ran, W Magazine interviewed the
now-retired Sue Mengers (“Hollywood’s first superagent”) and she has
some choice words for Wirtschafter (“Dave Something—Schmuck, I
think….”) but then she goes on to say something I thought was pretty
perceptive: “It’s very tempting for an agent to give interviews. We
want a little credit, so it’s hard to say no. But you should.”

And
I’m starting to believe that what’s true for agents granting interviews
is doubly true for agents blogging. Agents should just say No.

Tie Me Up

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I got this email today from my brother Tod about my buddy James Kosub, worldwide President of the Lee Goldberg Fan Club:

You’ll be happy to know that the man who once lambasted you for writing
tie-ins, is now trying to get a job…writing tie-ins. I fucking love that guy!

I had to check this out for myself. Sure enough, Jim is sniffing around for tie-in work:                         

I sent an email to a gentleman at Black Flame
today, inquiring about possible work on the media tie-ins his imprint
produces… The way I figure it is this: go where the work is… It’ll be a challenge, I’m sure. It’s always easier to work with
wholly original material than with licensed properties, but it’s a
credit and a paycheck, and that’s what matters.                           

This struck me as an odd switcheroo, coming from a man who once described me as follows:

"For a man who makes his living writing television show
pastiches for those who cannot summon the intellectual wherewithal to tackle
original mystery fiction, he’s painfully full of himself…"

I wish Jim the best of luck in his endeavors to become as painfully full of himself as I am.  If you would like to find out more about the tie-in field,  I invite you to visit the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers and browse through their wealth of articles on the subject.

The Book Millionaire Scam

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My brother Tod beat me to the news that Lori Prokop‘s Book Millionaire scam is back… a "reality show" that promises to grant the winner the "lifestyle of being a successfully published author" and  "additional prizes to help achieve the goal of Best Selling and
Celebrity Status."

In other words, Lori will publish the winner through her vanity press ("Bestseller Publishing") and they will get a stack of Lori’s self-published books. Wow. Where can I sign up? And as I predicted, back in April when this scam was first announced, "Book Millionaire" won’t be on any television network…it’s going to be on the web. Videos of the suckers, excuse me, aspiring contestants are up on her site. At least one of them is mortified and wrote to me about it:

I fell for it hook, line and sinker…so of course I sent an email to all my friends to sign up on the site and watch for my audition tape and my really smart lawyer friend found your site and now I want to cry!

Lori Prokop’s scam is so transparent, how could anyone possibly fall for it? So that’s what I asked the lady who sent me the email, and she sent me a lengthy reply. Here are some excerpts:

I was a huge Survivor and Apprentice nut — always wanted
to do one of those shows but did not want to eat bugs or work for Donald
Trump.  I was new in self-publishing at the time I sent in my tape….my passion for this business has become my mission.

I have a circle of amazing friends who are always in the spot light–I thought it would make great television so
thus I believed the concept. I have a friend on the American Inventor Show,  a friend who was
the first person voted off of Survivor and a friend that was on the Today Show…

I have read some best
sellers that I felt where only best sellers because they were marketed correctly and I have read some awesome books that will never be on the best seller because they don’t understand marketing.  So I believed in the concept. Thinking back I was amazed she was also from Wisconsin.

Wisconsin? What difference does that make? Clearly, this aspiring writer wanted to be a celebrity so badly, and was so jealous of her friends who got on TV, that she jumped blindly into this ridiculous scam without bothering to notice that, even if she won, she would get none of the things she was dreaming of. Lori Prokop can’t give anyone  "the lifestyle of a bestselling author" or "celebrity status"…all she can do is offer contestants some of her self-published "get-rich-quick" books, a cheaper rate on leased cars, and tickets to one of her motivational speeches at a Unitarian church.

I have no sympathy whatsoever for the suckers who fell for her scam… they deserve the humiliation and disappointment they are in for. They didn’t think about what they were being offered ("the lifestyle of a bestselling author??"). They didn’t do any research into Lori Prokop or Bestseller Publishing (ten minutes on Google would have been enough). Instead, they gladly deluded themselves because they wanted Lori’s empty promises and outrageous claims to be true…they wanted a short-cut to their dream of being published authors. They have no one to blame but themselves. It’s hucksters like Lori Prokop, who profit on the desperation of aspiring writers, that infuriate me.

UPDATE 4-2-06:  My brother Tod and I aren’t the only bloggers outraged  by huckster Lori Prokop’s Book Millionaire scam. Journalist Richard Cobbett writes:

Is it wrong to hope that people like Lori Prokop wake up one day to find
their intestines crawling with tapeworms?

If she did, she’d try to sell them on the Internet  as "miracle healing tapeworms."

 

Wit, Grit and Panache

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The blurb machine at Crime Fiction Dossier has generated a kudo for THE MAN WITH THE IRON-ON BADGE.

"Combining humor and suspense together
in a mystery novel is no easy feat, and few writers can accomplish it
with the skill of Lee Goldberg. The Man With the Iron-On Badge
is an affectionate ode to the classic Private Eye novel, told with wit
and grit, and a touch of panache." -Crime Fiction Dossier

"Wit, Grit and Panache." Sounds like a great title for a lousy TV series, doesn’t it? I can see it now…

"Jack Wit is a cop who doesn’t play by the rules, a rogue, a rebel, a loose cannon…Samantha Grit is a beautiful, sexy, undercover operative with degrees in psychology, criminology, and kicking ass… Largo Panache is a mysterious stranger, a thief who can steal anything from anyone anywhere… together they fight crime across the globe. They are WIT, GRIT AND PANACHE."

My Multiple Bookgasm

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The friendly folks at Bookgasm, fans of my most recent DIAGNOSIS MURDER novel, like MR. MONK GOES TO THE FIREHOUSE, too. Among their comments:

Based on a character by Andy Breckman, Shalhoub plays Monk perfectly.
But there’s a little something missing in an hour-long show devoted to
both an intricate mystery and the character’s oddness. There usually
isn’t enough time to explore Monk and why he’s doing what he’s doing.
So enter Lee Goldberg and another excellent TV tie-in book, the first in the series, entitled MR. MONK GOES TO THE FIREHOUSE.
A book-length exploration of Monk is just so much more satisfying
because we get to see more of the detective’s odd little world.

Monk’s house is being fumigated so he must temporarily move in with
his long-suffering assistant, Natalie Teeger. The book is written from
her point of view, a clever shift that allows us to be a voyeur on
Monk’s behavior without the constraints that would come from having
Monk explain his own obsessions. Teeger has an adolescent child and
surprisingly, Monk and the child get along well, even though he notes
to the mother that children are “walking cesspools” of disease. The
child is upset because a local firehouse dog has been killed by some
ax-wielding maniac. Monk takes the case.

And from there, the
case gets progressively weirder, as do Monk’s habits. First, another
body is found, then Teeger becomes romantically involved with one of
the firemen, and all the while, Monk is slowly driving his assistant
crazy with incessant demands and whacked-out behavior. But there is
always a method to Monk’s peculiar madness, and the way he solves
crimes and deduces facts throughout the plot is thoroughly
entertaining. He sees more than we do, because he sees things that are
out of place. We might see a mess, but Monk sees a catastrophe, and
because of that vision, he is able to know when things are not only not
right, but downright sinister.

There’s nothing quite like a strong Bookgasm to start your day.

Things not to worry about

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Novelist PJ Parrish offers some very good advice to aspiring writers under the heading "10 Things  You Should Never Worry About." Among my favorites:

7. I’m querying an agent. Should I send my first chapter or my best chapter?
If your first chapter isn’t your best chapter, you’re in deep doo-doo.

8. Who should I dedicate my book to?
Geez…

9. Should I include my picture with my submission?
Only if you’re Brad Pitt or his wife old whatshername.

A Book I’m Going to Be Reading

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Reporter Bill Carter’s new book DESPERATE NETWORKS follows the 2004-2005 season from inside the network ranks. Apparently, leaked copies of the book are already causing controversy in Hollywood. Variety reports that, among the tidbits, the success of DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES sent execs at studios and networks scurrying to find out how they missed the opportunity to snag it:

  • Warner Bros. TV was on track to land the rights to Marc Cherry’s spec spec
    script     for "Desperate Housewives" via Tony
    Krantz    , who had an overall deal at the studio. Unfortunately,
    WBTV execs refused to give Cherry’s reps at Paradigm a packaging fee — so
    Paradigm set up the project at Touchstone.  Carter shows NBC U topper
    Bob Wright launching a fervent investigation to find out why NBC didn’t land
    "Housewives." At one point, Wright even calls Cherry to ask if NBC had ever had
    a shot at the script. (It did. The network passed.)