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The post yesterday about the Dark & Stormy Nights contest reminded me of one of my favorite bad opening lines — it’s from a self-published novel by R.J. Carrie-Reddington entitled "Six Days of the Pigs."

Midway between dawn and sunrise the Tuesday morning air, heavy with
nature’s fog, reeked with the acrid odor of pig feces as the skinny white man
stood at the edge of the front porch, listening to Addie cry.

There’s a good reason why this book was self-published. 

My "hot button" post yesterday has generated a lot of comments… but I didn’t want two interesting responses to get lost amidst all the discussion about fanfic.

Here’s an excerpt of what  PK the Bookeemonster had to say about the influence of crime fiction blogs:

But if blogs went away, I would continue to enjoy books without the
"insider knowledge." And that is a part of it, the insiders versus the
outsiders, and as you stated, there is another dark side to blogging
which is the power the more popular ones have similar to the cliques in
high school all over again: if you’re not in, you’re out. Ken Bruen is
an excellent example. I’ve tried his books and they don’t click with
me; that’s just me and my taste but they’re equally valid as those who
do like his stuff. There is a strong undercurrent in the mystery world
promoting the "coolness" of noir, dark novels which is great but it
shouldn’t come at the expense of any other subgenre. The phenomenon of
blogging is bringing mystery lovers together but also separating us
into niches of us and them.

Author/editor Michael Bracken discussed, among other things,  the unfairness of lumping all POD publishers as vanity presses, particularly as it applies to the issue of the MWA restricting active membership to"published authors. Here’s an excerpt:

There must also be an effort to make clear distinctions between
legitimate small presses and self-publishing operations. Unfortunately,
this is difficult to do. For quite some time–and still in the minds of
some–any book printed using print-on-demand technology was
automatically presumed to be less than legitimate. The growing number
of legitimate publishers using PoD technology is changing that
perception.

A similar situation applies to on-line and electronic publishers.
The low cost of becoming an electronic publisher means every Joe,
Frank, and Reynolds can be a publisher without any knowledge of
publishing. The few legitimate and legitimately "professional"
electronic markets are difficult to separate from the non-professional.

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In my chats with mystery writers this weekend at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, a few "hot button" topics came up…mainly because I was tackling them on my blog and they wanted to thank me for bringing them into the open. I asked them why, if they share my views, they don’t say so publicly. The answer across the board was the same: fear. They’re afraid of getting lots of angry emails, losing sales, and awkward encounters with fans at signings and conventions.

Anyway, here are some of the hot-button topics that emerged in our conversations:

1) Self-Published Authors: There seems to be a strong consensus among published mystery writers that the MWA has gone astray and that  serious efforts should be made to restrict membership to published authors only. "We’re Turning into the ‘Mystery People of America,’" lamented one novelist. Another said "Being a member of the MWA used to mean something…now it doesn’t." Still another feared the MWA was becoming a clone of Sisters in Crime, which she said "should be called ‘PublishAmerica in Crime.’" Many of the authors were hesitant about publicly expressing their view that MWA should become a strictly professional organization because , as one said, "I don’t want to deal with all of the controversy it’s going to create. I don’t want people hating me." But that same person would gladly, and quickly, vote yes for such reforms.

I agree with the view that the MWA should restrict its membership to published authors and produced screenwriters only. That said, I think the view of Sisters in Crime that one author expressed is unfair and way, way too harsh. I think SiC is a fine organization that does a great job, offering tremendous support to aspiring writers and hosting interesting seminars and conferences (as well as producing  an informative newsletter that, in many ways, is better than the MWA’s). The success of SiC, in my mind, is evidence that there’s really no need for  no need for MWA to expand to include self-published and aspiring authors among their ranks.

2) The LA Times Book Review: Most agreed it’s a snooze that doesn’t do a very good job covering crime fiction in a city that’s so associated culturally with the genre in both literature and film.  When I brought up Eugen Weber, the most frequent response was "who is that?" Which tells you all you need to know about how relevant his views are in the field.

3)  Fanfiction:   It creeps out most of the authors I spoke to (a few, it should be noted, have no problem with it and knew of several novelists who got their start writing fanfiction). They’re all struck by the double standard — it’s okay for fanfic writers to steal your work, but if they see something similar to one of their stories in your book they’ll threaten to sue (or write very nasty letters). They said if the fans truly respected the author and his work, they should ask for permission before disseminating fanfiction (it’s not the writing that bothered them, it was the "publishing" of it on the Internet). The authors I spoke to said they don’t complain about fanfic or publicly forbid it because they are terrified of the blacklash, of getting deluged with hate mail. Instead, they close their eyes and pretend it doesn’t exist.

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