Current Affairs

Run Screaming from the POD People

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Novelist Joe Konrath has an excellent post today explaining the financial reasons why paying to have your book "published" by POD vanity press is a really, really bad idea.

Let’s do the math. You’ve got to give the bookstore a 40% discount.
So you’ll sell them the books for $11.40 each. That leaves you with a
$5.70 profit per book. Not bad. But out of that comes the Happy Press
Package fee, the printing cost, shipping the book to bookstores, and
the effort to just get the bookstores to carry you (an effort that
traditionally published authors don’t have to make.)

Also figure in a 50% return rate.

If
you get 1000 books into stores, and sell 500, you’ll make $2850.
Subtract the $5700 (the cost of printing 1000 books at the 70%
discount) and subtract the package cost ($5000 for all the set up fees.)

You’ve only lost $4900, selling 500 books.

If you sell 2000 (which means you’ll have to ship 4000) your total cost would be:

$5000 set-up package
$22800 book printing costs
minus $11400 profit

Which means you’re losing $16400.

What a deal!

You’ll Never Go Wrong with Harry

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I’ve never read a bad book by Harry Whittington. Ed Gorman posted an appreciation of Whittington’s A NIGHT FOR SCREAMING on his blog today.

You want twists and turns? You want to be knocked out of your seat not
three but four times in about the last forty pages? You want to change
your politics and take up with a chick with Hooters and run away to the
sunny beaches of Indiana and hold yur breath for six days? Well, this
slender little novel with one of the truly classic cover paintings will
make you do all those crazy things and more. I promise.

This is an example of taking a familiar set-up and turning it into
a novel you’ve never read before. I’m in the process of outlining it
now. I want to see how he did it.

What I find fascinating about this post isn’t the rave for Whittington — Ed has done that before and he’ll do it again. It’s the idea that Ed, the acclaimed author of countless mysteries, westerns and thrillers of his own, is outlining Harry’s novel for himself.

It just goes to prove that a true professional writer knows there is always more to learn about their craft — and that the best way to do it  is to never stop reading, appreciating, and studying what other writers have done.

How Long Until This Story Shows Up On One of the Three CSIs?

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A  dominatrix is being prosecuted for dismembering a client and disposing of his body — rather than report to police that he’d died of a heart attack while tied to the medieval rack in her suburban condo.  The only problem is, the police don’t have a body or any DNA evidence to prove their case. 

…in her opening statement, the woman’s lawyer said the man never visited
Barbara Asher’s makeshift dungeon and that police made up the story and bullied
Asher into confessing.

"No body, no blood, no DNA evidence," defense attorney Stephanie Page said.
"Barbara Asher is here because of a theory."

Asher, who went by the name Mistress Lauren M, has pleaded innocent to
charges of manslaughter and dismemberment in the death of Michael Lord, a
retired telephone company worker from North Hampton, N.H

(Thanks to Patrick Hynes for the heads-up)

What Happens When the Mystery is a Mystery to the People Writing the Mystery

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The Fox show REUNION was supposed to be murder mystery that spanned decades in a single season.  But the show was cancelled in November, leaving the show’s handful of fans wondering whodunit. The problem is, the writers of the show didn’t know whodunit either. Zap2it reports:

When FOX lowered the boom on
"Reunion" in late November, the show’s creator says there was no way to
resolve the show short of a full season because of how "intricately
plotted" it was.  It was so intricately plotted, in fact, that the question of who committed the murder at the show’s center was still up in the air.

That, at least, is the word from FOX Entertainment president Peter Ligouri, who on Tuesday (Jan. 17) addressed the show’s early demise with reporters at the Television Critics Association press tour.

"’Reunion’ was particularly cumbersome in terms of trying to provide an ending for
the audience," Ligouri says of the show, in which each episode represented a year in the life of six friends, one of whom ends up dead. "How [creator Jon Harmon Feldman] was laying out the show to gap those additional 14, 15, 16 years was an incredibly complex path. There were a number of options, and he didn’t make a definitive! decision on which option he was going to go with as to who the killer was, and there was just no way to accelerate that time."

Feldman himself hinted at that in a statement following the show’s cancellation, saying that solving
the mystery of who killed Samantha (Alexa Davalos) was "partially reliant on characters we haven’t yet met — and events we haven’t seen."

Ligouri says the network and the show’s team talked about several ways to go with the killer’s identity, but "the best guess was at that particular time that it was going to be Sam’s daughter," whom she gave up for adoption early in the series. The why of the murder remains a mystery.

Especially to the show’s writers, which may be why the series didn’t work. If the show’s writers didn’t even know whodunit or why, then what were they writing about? If the clues led nowhere, how did they expect the story to actually payoff in the end? Is it any surprise viewers didn’t get hooked by the mystery since it, um, actually didn’t exist?

(Thanks to Bill Rabkin for the heads-up!)

Ten Pages a Day or Die

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Author Nancy Martin talks about the importance of making deadlines in the book biz.

Sure, I had excuses when I was late. Death in the family. Moving
twice in twelve months. Sick kids. Husband’s midlife crisis. The dog
didn’t eat my homework, she died in a slow, messy, heart-breaking way.
And did I mention I broke a tooth, had a lump in my breast and
developed shingles all in the same month last year?!?

But publishing waits for no woman’s mammogram.

I know how she feels. Even with two broken arms and a TV series to write/produce, I worried about delivering my book on time  — but some how met my deadline.  The problem is, I’ve made it  impossible for myself to ever miss a deadline. What excuse could possibily top two broken arms?

They’ve Lost Their Tongues

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The critics on the web who called for editor Steve Wasserman to step down at the LA Times Book Review have been strangely quiet since David Ulin took over in October. So far, the review is every bit as dull, forgetable and irrelevant as it was under Wasserman (though, thankfully, Eugen Weber has yet to reappear on the pages). But you’d never know it reading the blogs that were the most critical of Wasserman, particularly  The Elegant Variation, which used to run a weekly, detailed critique of the book review section.  The critique has been missing ever since Wasserman stepped down.

Are the former critics of the LATBR just giving Ulin time to find his footing? Or do their personal relationships with him prevent them from being critical? Or have they just stopped caring?  Or was it really all about Wasserman?

I wonder if Ulin is still burning off articles/reviews commissioned before he took over — because I have yet to see any significant changes at the LATBR besides the section getting thinner and thinner. If there is an overhaul coming, I hope it happens soon. It would be nice to have a lively, provocative, and interesting book review section.

A Rawboned Novel of Primitive Love!

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Over the weekend, novelist Bill Crider scanned the delightfully lurid covers of nearly 200 of his vintage paperbacks, many of them by Harry Whittington (under a variety of names).  I don’t know what I like more, the illustrations or come-ons like these:

"He used two women to feed his brute cravings."

"The sultry story of pagan revelries, lonely men, and a native girl."

"Her luscious body was used as a man trap"

"Faceless, he might be a devil or saint…but he had the lusts of a man."