Current Affairs

Giddy Up!

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Pulp Serenade, one of my favorite blogs, is going to host a marathon of reviews of classic, Gold Medal westerns.  Today, they offered a peek at the books they are going to be featuring (most of which I own but have only read a few):

Stretch Dawson by W.R. Burnett (1950)
The Desperado by Clifton Adams (1950)
A Noose for the Desperado by Clifton Adams (1951)
Red Runs the River by William Heuman (1952)
The Man from Riondo by Dudley Dean (1954)
Some Must Die by Gil Brewer (1954)
The Name’s Buchanan by Jonas Ward (1956)
Home is the Outlaw by Lewis B. Patten (1958)
Wyoming Jones by Richard Telfair (1958)
Day of the Gun by Richard Telfair (1958)
Buchanan on the Prod by Jonas Ward (1960)
Gunswift by T.V. Olsen (1960)
Texas Fever by Donald Hamilton (1960)
Yellowleg by A.S. Fleischman (1960)
Desert Stake-Out by Harry Whittington (1961)
Lawman by Clay Randall (1964)
High Gun by Clay Randall (1965)
The Rare Breed by Theodore Sturgeon (1966)
Iron Men and Silver Stars edited by Donald Hamilton (1967)
The Lawmen edited by Bill Pronizni and Martin H. Greenberg (1984)
The Railroaders edited by Bill Pronizni and Martin H. Greenberg (1986)
Wolf Moon by Ed Gorman (1993)
The Sharpshooter by Ed Gorman (1994)

Tie-In Synergy

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Heat-wave-richard_castle

The Los Angeles Times has an interesting piece on the shrewd way that Hyperion has handled publication and cross-promotion of their CASTLE tie-in novels. They said, in part:

Publisher Hyperion, which had success with similar projects connected to sister company ABC’s soaps “One Life to Live” and ” All My Children,” decided to bypass a traditional TV tie-in and instead go with a Richard Castle-authored book after seeing the greenlit pilot. Castle’s name alone appears on the books, without any nod to a real-life scribe. “The main character’s a writer! How perfect is that?” says Gretchen Young, an executive editor at Hyperion and its editorial director for ABC Synergy.

[…] The show plays with fiction and reality: On it, Castle has talked about his upcoming publication commitments with his agent (yes, Hyperion will be publishing two more) and played poker with real-life mystery writers James Patterson and Stephen J. Cannell, who died in late September.

In an upcoming episode, “Heat Wave” — a novel written by a fictional television character — has been optioned by Hollywood. “It gets very meta in the show,” Marlowe admits, laughing.

And in person. As part of Hyperion’s release last year of “Heat Wave,” Fillion appeared as Castle at two Southern California bookstores.

It’s not a new idea. The MURDER SHE WROTE books are written by Jessica Fletcher & Donald Bain, and she was a mystery novelist, too. But the producers didn’t integrate the tie-ins into the TV series as cleverly as the CASTLE folks have (or at all, if memory serves). But now that HEAT WAVE has become a bestseller, you can expect more TV tie-ins to follow their example…

!@#$ My Brother Says

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My brother Tod and author Ross Angelella have create BeforetheWWW, a new Twitter feed/blog that they are hoping will become next big, bestselling book and a bad CBS sitcom. The schtick is tweets from the past, like these:

  • Sacagawea never pronounces her name the same way twice, which is annoying, but Lewis thinks it's cute. #ThingsClarkReallyThoughtAboutLewis 8 days ago
  • Next time we go looking for the Northwest Passage, I'm leaving this pussy Lewis at home. #ThingsClarkReallyThoughtAboutLewis 8 days ago
  • Listen, I'm going to stick with my pager and keep it clipped to my belt. This cell phone thing is just a passing fad. But you do you. 8 days ago
  • Adios, matronly VHS. Hello, sexy LaserDisc. 8 days ago
  • I am so excited to see Howard the Duck when it premieres. This film is going to give Big Trouble in little China a run for its money. 8 days ago
  • This Bonkers! is the best chewable rectangular-shaped candy with a fruity outside and an even fruitier filling inside. Just like Elton John. 8 days ago
  • Hanging out by grassy knoll, waiting for the prez to roll-up. Clocktower says he's running late. #ThisClassFieldTripSucks 8 days ago
  • My buddy Ernest Hemingway wants me to show him how to shoot, so we're gonna drink a few and cap some shit. 8 days ago
  • Man, Jerry Brown has fucked up this state. His political career in California is over. 8 days ago
  • This talking snake is making a lot of sense. 8 days ago

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    The Name is Book, E Book.

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    The Ian Fleming Estate has realized what so many other published authors already know — that if you own the digital rights to your backlist, it makes more financial sense to publish the ebooks yourself.  So the estate is publishing the digital versions of the Bond novels themselves, cutting out Penguin, which still has the entire series in print. The London Telegraph says that this move could be the beginning of a wave of established authors choosing to self-publish the digital versions of their highly successful franchises.

    The books industry could lose out on millions of pounds because publishers have failed to sign up the digital rights to authors, who are expected to bypass traditional publishing houses in favour of Amazon or Google.

    Industry insiders suggested that blockbusting authors including JK Rowling, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie would be looking at the deal closely.

    The digital versions of the 007 books will be published by Ian Fleming Publications, which administers the rights to the Bond books.

    […]There are many authors still working that have not signed away the digital rights to their books, allowing them to cut out their traditional publisher if they chose to. Agents said they had grown increasingly irritated by the low royalty rates offered by publishers for digital rights.

    This development doesn’t surprise me at all, especially in light of the sobering news from Publishers Weekly this week about the plunge in “paper” sales and the incredible surge in digital in September.

    As sales in the traditional trade segments plunged in September, e-book sales jumped 158.1%, according to the monthly sales estimates released by the Association of American Publishers. Sales for the 14 publishers that reported e-book sales hit $39.9 million in the month, and were up 188.4% in the first nine months of the year to $304.6 million. In contrast, sales in the three adult trade segments, adult hardcover, trade paperback and mass market paperback, all fell by more than double digits with the adult hardcover segment experiencing the biggest decline with sales down 40.4% at the 17 publisher who reported sales to the AAP of $180.3 million. The only other segment to post a significant sales gain in September was downloadable audio with sales from the nine reporting companies up 73.7%, to $7.7 million. Sales of audio CDs fell 42.6%, to $11.6 million, in the month at the 22 reporting companies.

    Established authors with a large back-list, whether the titles are in print or not, could see significant increases in their revenues putting the digital versions of those books out themselves. And the news is getting around. Look for a surge in 2011 of established authors self-publishing the digital versions of their backlists.

    This has agents scrambling for an approach on how to get a share of this potential income. I’ve already heard that some agents are talking about inserting clauses in their new agency agreements with authors that grant them commissions on the digital self-publication of any books for which they negotiated the original print deals. It will be interesting to see how that goes over.

    My Brothers Are Selling TV Shows

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    Carl Beverly and Sarah Timberman, the producers of JUSTIFIED, have sold a TV series pilot to FX based on my brother Tod Goldberg's short story Mitzvah. Crime writer Joel Goldman is often mistaken for my brother, so I suppose it's only fitting that those same producers just sold CBS a TV series pilot based on Joel's short story Knife Fight. Now if either pilot goes to series, I am expecting my brothers to play the nepotism card and insist that I be brought on staff.

     

    Hollywood on a Book Binge

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    The Wrap reports that studios are buying lots of books these days by first-time authors, though not all of them are necessarily newbies when it comes to writing. For instance, Paramount snapped up Hank Steinberg's yet-to-be-published novel OUT OF RANGE, the first in a tw0-book series. While Steinberg may be new to publishing, he's hardly new to Hollywood — he was the creator of the long-running CBS series WITHOUT A TRACE. Even so, it's interesting to see Hollywood chasing books at a time when everyone seems to be wondering what the future of publishing is going to look like.

    Walla Walla Octopus

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    PB060133 The big story gripping my mother's hometown of  Walla Walla Washington this past weekend was the controversy over a mural on the front of Inland Octopus, a toy store on Main Street. What amused me was a letter-to-the-editor from David Castleman of Dayton, WA slamming the mural's supporters. He wrote, in part:

    "Those good folks who applaud the tawdriness adorning Inland Octopus are the folks who eat at McDonald's and ship at WalMart. They applaud the tawdry, the ill-conceived and the ill-produced. The painter's ostensible deity is Warhol, his priests the Simpsons, his bible the comic strips for domestic imbecility. His admirers pick their noses at stop signs and relieve the expiscations upon their skirts and trousers." 

    I have to admit that I had to look up expiscation in the dictionary. 

    Hitchcockian

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    Remaindered00001
    Media critic Bill Peschel had some great things to say about REMAINDERED on his blog today, singling out the performances of Sebrina Siegel and Todd Reynolds for praise. 

    “Remaindered” is a tight 20-minute tale of a writer, Kevin Dangler (played by Eric Altheide), whose first novel was the peak of his career and his second was, in the words of the book’s best review, “a 778-page suicide note for a once-promising writing career.” Dangler is reduced to traveling to backwater towns, flogging his third book with signings in grocery stores.

    There, he meets Megan, the town librarian with a passion for first editions and those who write them. She’s played by Sebrina Siegel, who gets a lot of mileage out of a black bra and a line like “read to me.”

    Needless to say, their meeting doesn’t end well, but I won’t say more. It’s a neat mystery short-story, complete with a twist ending that loops back to the beginning, and in-jokes mystery fans will appreciate, including a “Monk” reference.

    My favorite performances were by Siegel, who played the librarian with the right mix of fannish admiration and seduction, and Todd Reynolds as the detective. He had a small role, but he made it memorable (it didn’t hurt that he was given some very sharp lines).

    If someone ever decides to retool Alfred Hitchcock’s old TV show, “Remaindered” would fit in nicely. It reminded me of one of the mystery story’s great pleasures: of following a tightly plotted tale with unexpected plot twists and a satisfying conclusion. It’s difficult to pull off, but I’m happy to say that Lee succeeded.

    Thanks so much, Bill!