Mystery Writing

Two Jews in Kentucky Part 3

by

It’s been a busy two days in Owensboro at the International Mystery Writers Festival. Yesterday, I did an interview with Fox WTVW about the Festival and my MONK books, did some last minute  tinkering with the Angie Awards script, attended several of the “Live Radio  Theatre” plays, chatted for awhile with actors Gary Sandy (who guest-starred in a DIAGNOSIS MURDER episode that I wrote), Amy Walker, and Firesign Theatre’s Phil Proctor while dining on some fine Moonlite BBQ, and then spent several hours observing my buddy David Breckman shoot his short mystery film “Murder in Kentucky” with local actors and technicians.  All in all, it was a lot of fun.

Tonight, I hosted a dinner presentation honoring Sue Grafton and interviewed her with questions supplied in advance by the audience. She was terrific…funny, informative, and very entertaining. I’ll post pictures from the event as soon as I get my hands on some. Then Sue, her husband, and I attended a live broadcast of the “Live Radio Theatre” plays, which were aired on the local NPR affiliate. Several theatre bigshots from New York flew in for the plays to measure their Broadway and national tour potential. I hear the response was already wildly enthusiatic. 

Tomorrow night, I’m moderating a panel with Sue, authors Will Lavender and Laura Benedict, and then  later that night I’ll be hosting the Angie Awards, where events will include David and Sue being commissioned as Kentucky Colonels by the Kentucky Secretary of State.  My hosting duties actually require a little bit of acting, something I haven’t done much of before, so it should be an interesting experience for me…and, hopefully, an entertaining one for the audience!

Two Jews in Kentucky

by

MONK writer/producer/director David Breckman and I arrived in Owensboro, Kentucky today for the International Mystery Writers Festival. Everybody has treated us wonderfully but I've only been here a few hours and already have an anecdote to share (or, as David said afterward, "as it was happening, I knew I was living an anecdote that I would be telling for years."). After a screening of MONK clips on a giant, outdoor screen, a fan came up to us with his family and asked us to signed his set of MONK dvds.

"I just knew Monk was written by Jews," the fan said.

"Excuse me?" David said.

"Breckman, Goldberg, you're Jews," he said. "Monk is so Jewish.  Jews write the best stuff in Hollywood.  All the greatest entertainment comes  from Jews. Star Trek was created by a Jew.  We just love what you Jews do."

The man obviously meant well and to compliment our work, and he was nervous, so we didn't take offense. David signed the box:  David Breckman, a grateful Jew.

David is a super busy Jew these days.  In addition to his MONK works, he's also got pilots at USA and NBC. He'll also be writing, casting,  shooting and screening a ten minute  mystery between now and Sunday. It will be done entirely with local actors and aspiring film-makers, so it should be a lot of fun. Jews are so talented.

MWA Teams with Writer Beware

by

The Mystery Writers of America announced today that its co-sponsoring Writer Beware. I’m sure it will be no surprise to regular readers of this blog to learn that I spear-headed this effort.  I’m thrilled that we’re able to help support Writer Beware…and I hope it leads to other professional writers organizations following our lead. Here’s an article I wrote for the MWA newsletter about it:

The Mystery Writers of America is joining the fight against writing scams by contributing $1000 towards Writer Beware, a website & blog created by the Science Fiction Writers of America to expose fraudulent publishing practices and educate authors on how to protect themselves from being swindled.

“We are pleased to be able to support the important work that Writer Beware is doing on behalf of all writers, professional and aspiring, by exposing scams aimed at defrauding authors,” said Frankie Bailey, the MWA’s executive vice president.

Writer Beware’s website, which was launched by SFWA in 1998, can be used by20any writer anywhere, regardless of whatever genre, fiction or non-fiction, that they work in…or their professional standing. And Writer Beware blog offers up-to-the-minute information on specific scams and schemes, along with essential advice for writers. They also help authors who have questions about individual agents, publishers, or contests.

“We are not only showing our support and making Writer Beware stronger, but sending a message to scammers that we won’t stand by and let them take advantage of authors,” said Lee Goldberg, the MWA board member who will act as the MWA liaison with Writer Beware.

“It’s vital that organizations like SFWA and MWA team up on these kinds of challenges,” said Russell Davis, President of SFWA. “We can accomplish far more working together than we can working on our own, and I hope other organizations will see this as an invitation to join in these types of group efforts.”

I will be reaching out to the International Thriller Writers and the Romance Writers of America to ask them to join us in supporting Writer Beware and fighting scammers.

UPDATE: Publishers Weekly has picked up the news…which is great. The more word spreads about Writer Beware, the less likely it will be that people will be taken advantage of by scammers.

Busy Week

by

I have been absent from the blog, working hard on my screenplay and my latest Monk novel, because I have a very busy week head of me. On Tuesday, I am leading a seminar on episodic TV writing & producing for representatives of China Central Television…which should be a very interesting experience…and then on Wednesday, I'm heading off to Owensboro, Kentucky with my buddy David Breckman, writer-producer-director of MONK,  to participate in the third annual International Mystery Writers Festival. I'll be moderating several panels, and doing Toastmaster duties, while David will write, producer and direct an original short film with a group of theatre students. Kentucky native Sue Grafton will also be on hand for panels and such. It should be a lot of fun.  

I'm looking forward to the flights to and from Kentucky because it will be my first opportunity to really try out my Kindle. I haven't had any time to read since I got it…

You Can Be a Kindle Millionaire, Part 8

by

The second month of my Kindle experiment has ended and here are the results:
Kindlesales731905

(Click on the image for a larger view).

All told, I made $375 in royalties selling three out-of-print novels at $1.99 each, a short story collection at 99 cents, and an out-of-print, non-fiction reference book for $2.39 .


THE WALK sold 444 copies in June and 373 copies in July. My short story collection THREE WAYS TO DIE sold 54 copies in June and 40 in July. So sales of both titles have dropped in their second month on sale. 

Still, I'm very happy to have sold 817 copies of THE WALK to readers who missed the book the first time around in hardcover. At this rate, it won't be long until I've sold more copies of THE WALK on the Kindle than the book sold in print.

On July 14, I added my novel MY GUN HAS BULLETS to the Kindle Store. It has sold 95 copies in 17 days at $1.99 each, earning me $65 in royalties. On July 17, I added the sequel, BEYOND THE BEYOND, which has only sold 29 copies at the same price, earning me $20. 

Two days ago, I added TELEVISION SERIES REVIVALS. I set the price for that one at $2.39, just to be daring. It has sold 17 copies so far, earning me $14.28.

(All those titles are also available on Scribd and Smashwords, but so far I've earned less than $10 in combined royalties from both sites over the last two months. They can't compete with Amazon and the Kindle).Myguncover1

This month I did slightly better than last month, but I also added three more books to the mix. 

So far, I have earned nearly $700 on out-of-print books that I thought were long past their earning potential for me. That's not a lot of money, but it was enough to buy me a Kindle and leave plenty of money left over to buy books for it (I'm still not earning anywhere near what Joe Konrath and John August, my inspirations in this endeavor, are making with their work…but I am thankful to them both for showing me the way). 

I've said this before, but I don't think the Kindle is the wave of the future for authors or publishing…at least not yet. Not even for self-publishing. There just isn't enough money in it for original works to make a living at it or simply a decent wage.

But not all authors care about making money. Some are in it "for the art" and just to reach people. They are happy giving it away for free…or for next to nothing. Well, let me tell you something, the "free" and $1.99 Kindle books that I have sampled so far have been, for the most part, unspeakably horrendous shit. There's a reason most of these authors can't find publishers for their work. It's stuff so awful you can't even give it away. The Kindle won't change that. The novelty of downloading crap, even when it's free, will pass quickly.

I do think, though, that for authors with out-of-print books sitting in their drawers earning nothing but dust that publishing on the Kindles makes a lot of sense. I don't see the downside. It's found money. And it's fun to watch the royalties and sales click up in real-time (yes, it's a new way to procrastinate!)

I was surprised to discover, once I got my Kindle, that my out-of-print books that I posted myself are better formatted than some of my in-print titles posted by my publishers. I will be talking to my publishers about it.

A Chat in Lori’s Cafe

by

There's a Q&A interview with me up at Lorie Ham's No Name Cafe. While you're there, you can browse interviews with folks like my friends Lee Child and Jan Burke. Here's an excerpt from the interview with me:

Café:
How long have you been writing?

Lee:
When I was ten or eleven, I was already pecking novels out on my Mom's old typewriters. The first one was a futuristic tale about a cop born in an underwater sperm bank. I don't know why the bank was underwater, or how deposits were made, but I thought it was very cool. I followed that up with a series of books about gentleman thief Brian Lockwood, aka "The Perfect Sinner,” a thinly disguised rip-off of Simon Templar, aka "The Saint." I sold these stories for a dime to my friends and even managed to make a dollar or two. In fact, I think my royalties per book were better then than they are now.

Bowen on Bowen

by

Royal_flush My good friend Rhys Bowen has a new book out, ROYAL FLUSH, so I've invited her to talk about it here (and give me a day off):

Thank you so much for inviting me, Lee. We share a lot of background in common.

My first professional experience was with the spoken, rather
than with the written word. Right out of college I was lucky enough to be one
of 30 graduating students chosen from 3000 applicants to join the BBC in
London. And after stints doing everything from playing requests for a
housewives’ morning show to the night shift as announcer on the World Service I
managed to get the assignment I wanted in radio drama. What a medium that was!
No scenery, no glamorous stars to distract the audience, only the spoken word
to convey tension, emotion and sense of place. It is a media of cooperation—a
joint assignment between listener and writer to create a world. As one small
listener once said, “I like radio because the scenery is so nice.”

I agree with her. There is no stage set as wonderful as the
one you create in your imagination, no actor as handsome as the one your mind
assigns to the sexy voice. And as for tension—what could be more scary than the
sound of a door creaking open and then slow footsteps getting closer and
closer…

I started off at the bottom—making the spot sound effects.
Yes, this was the good old days when a lot of the sound effects were made live
on mike. We were a little past the coconuts for horses’ hooves days, but still
we were called upon to invent the strangest sound effects. I once had to come
up with a sound for a guillotine cutting off a head. So what did I do? I ran a
knife down an iron bar and into a cabbage, then dropped the cabbage into a
basket. It sounded so real you could actually hear the bones breaking.

After I’d been in drama for a while I rose to studio manager
and I found that I was coming up with ideas of my own. I wrote a radio play,
and with the bravado of a 22 year old, I walked into the head of drama’s office
and gave it to him. He called me in two days later. He liked it and he was
going to produce it. As easy as that! More radio plays followed, then I tried my
hand at TV drama. New challenges there—how to reveal character in a few words
and actions, how to get characters in and out of a scene, how to mix dialog and
action.Rhys+at+disney+concert,+retouched.JPG

Everything I learned has served me in good stead as a writer
of mystery novels. I am highly aware of the power of words.  I still think of my novels in terms of scenes
rather than chapters. I am still very aware of pacing, when to cut away from a
scene, and I rely on dialog to reveal character, create setting and carry
forward plot. I am a huge proponent of show not tell and I have learned to
involve all five senses to make an era come alive.  I’d love to produce my new Royal Spyness book
as a radio play—it’s called Royal Flush and in it my heroine Lady Georgiana (34th
in line to the throne and penniless) is sent home in disgrace to the Scottish
Castle. I’d have gone to town with the sound effects—the wind whistling down
the corridors and flapping the tapestries and moaning in the chimney—the
footsteps echoing across the great hall, the sounds of a grouse hunt on the
moor… but the rising of a monster from the loch and the sound of someone
falling from a mountain when a rope breaks—they’d be more of a challenge! 

You Can Become a Kindle Millionaire, Part 5

by

Okay, the first month of my Kindle experiment, inspired by the successes of Joe Konrath and John August on the platform, has ended. Here are the results.

From June 1-30, the Kindle edition of my 2004 novel THE WALK sold 444 copies @ $1.89 each, for $302.67 in royalties. As of today, I have sold 37 more copies for a royalty of $24.78 (I also raised the price a dime to $1.99 for the heck of it).

The book was also available on Smashwords, where I sold one copy, and Scribed, where I sold two copies, for combined royalties of about $4. Hoo-hah.

I have since pulled the book from both Smashwords and Scribd so that it's exclusively available on the Kindle. I've done that as part of a promotional effort by Amazon that will roughly coincide with the release Tuesday of the Kindle edition of my new MONK novel, MR. MONK AND THE DIRTY COP (I'll talk more about that in a later post).

I also released a collection of previously published shorts stories that I packaged for the Kindle under the title THREE WAYS TO DIE. I sold 54 copies @ 99 cents, earning a royalty of $18.90. I sold one copy of the collection on Scribd and none on Smashwords. It remains available on all three services. 

The only promotion I have done for these books are posts on this blog, my Facebook page, Twitter, and a few Amazon Kindle forums. 

I haven't spent a dime on this…but I have spent time.

What have I learned? 

Well, there's money to be made from your out-of-print work. Not a lot, but it's found money. THE WALK wasn't earning anything for me anymore and now it is. Pretty soon, it will have earned enough to buy myself a Kindle.

I wouldn't write an original novel for the Kindle. It just doesn't make any financial sense. But if you have an out-of-print novel, and you happen to have the copy-edited manuscript sitting on your hard-drive, it makes more sense to re-publish it for the Kindle than have it brought back in print for free as a POD title through the Authors Guild. You won't get rich doing this…but it also won't cost you anything. In essense, you have absolutely nothing to lose. And if the Kindle edition sells in huge numbers, it might help get your book  back-in-print (though I haven't heard about this ever happening for anyone). On the other hand, it could also limit your agent's efforts to sell other print editions of the book…which is why I haven't posted THE MAN WITH THE IRON-ON BADGE on Kindle, even though it is now out-of-print in hardcover.

I think there's no real money in "self-publishing" original novels to the Kindle if you aren't already an established name (which both Joe Konrath and John August are). You won't sell much, if anything, because you don't have a strong platform from which to promote your work. I'm not famous, but at least I have a little more recognition than your typical, unpublished author…and my Kindle sales so far aren't phenomenal or particularly lucrative. You could argue that THREE WAYS TO DIE is essentally a self-published, original novella…and it has tanked. I've sold 55 copies @ 99 cents each in total across all three web platforms this month for a royalty of less than $20. (Joe has an excellent post about the pros and cons of self-publishing here)

The one big advantage the Kindle platform has for self-publishing is that it's free and puts your book on the best bookselling website on the planet.  And It cuts the predatory, vanity presses with their outrageous fees out of the picture entirely. Good riddance! 

The "publishing" aspect of making your book available for the Kindle is not as easy as it seems at first. My manuscripts looked fine in the "preview" on the publishing page but turned out to be filled with formatting errors when actually seen on the Kindle. It took me a lot of time, and the generous assistance of some Kindle owners, to clean the manuscripts up. 

Smashwords and Scribd are also very easy to publish to…perhaps easier than Amazon…but if my experience (and Joe Konrath's) are any indication, your sales will be pitiful to non-existent. They just aren't in the game yet. Then again, they are free…so it costs you nothing to make your books available there as well. Just don't expect to make any money off of it.

So is this the future of publishing? 

I don't think so…the money just isn't there yet for authors or publishers. That's not to say it won't be in the future if the price-point for the Kindle, and products like it, drops considerably and millions of people buy them. 

Is it the future of self-publishing? 

Perhaps. It certainly has the benefit of being free to the author…at least for now. But actually selling copies will be a huge challenge. And in a broader sense, if there's a deluge of horrendous, self-published crap on the Kindle, it could actually turn readers away from risking money, even a few cents, on authors they aren't already familiar with. 

Right now the Kindle is a novelty, and users are eager for content…they're grabbing whatever they can, especially if it's under a buck or free… but if they get burned too many times by garbage, they'll be a lot more discerning about what they download, even for nothing.

That said, there are some unknown, self-published authors who are making decent money selling books on the Kindle…and I've interviewed a few of them for an article in an upcoming issue of the Novelists Inc newsletter (www.ninc.com). I believe, and so do many of them, that they are the exceptions rather than the rule. I'll share some of their experiences here at a later date.

I'll also report back on how THE WALK continues to fare as a Kindle edition.

Spenser For Hire…Again

by

Robert B. Parker reports on his blog that he's in talks to remake bring back Spenser to TV…again, only this time it will be a remake of the SPENSER FOR HIRE series. Somehow I missed this news, which isn't new. On April 23rd, he wrote:

we are in negotiation for a remake of the SPENSER: FOR HIRE series to be produced by SONY/DREAMWORKS, and shown on TNT. There is often a slip twixt cup and lip in Los Angeles, but so far things are promising.

And in an update on May 29th, he said the project was still alive:

Negotiations continue on the Spenser For Hire front. The mills of Hollywood grind exceeding fine. But I have no reason to think it won't happen in awhile.

Not only that, but Parker reports he's adding a new character to the Spenser mix.

I am currently writing a book with the working title SIXKILL in which a new character joins Spenser's world. Probably be out next year.

I am excited about the remake news. SPENSER FOR HIRE will always be special to me…my first produced TV episode was for that series.

You Can Become a Kindle Millionaire, Part 4

by

N151109 Here's  a quick update on my e-publishing experiments. Following in the e-footsteps of Joe Konrath and John August, I made  THE WALK, my out-of-print 2004 novel, and THREE WAYS TO DIE, a collection of previously published short stories, available as Kindle editions. I subsequently made them available as downloadable PDFs on Scribd as well.

So far, I haven't had nearly the volume of sales that Joe and John have experienced. From June 1 to today, I have sold 371 copies of  THE WALK at $1.40 each (the actual price is $1.89, but Amazon has discounted it), earning myself $236.91. My sales of THREE WAYS TO DIE are flat at 54 copies at 99 cents each, earning me a whopping $18.90. I have sold two copies of THE WALK and one of THREE WAYS TO DIE on Scribd, at the same prices as the Kindle editions, earning me a staggering $2.44 in royalties.

At the request of several of my blog readers, I have gone one step further and have made THE WALK and THREE WAYS TO DIE available on Smashwords, where you can download them in the format of your choice. The price in all formats for THE WALK is $1.89, the same price I set for the Kindle edition on Amazon. 

So, here's where you can buy THE WALK and THREE WAYS TO DIE  in the e-versions of your choice… 

THE WALK on the Kindle 

THE WALK as a PDF at Scribd Three_Ways_to_Die Cover

THE WALK in multiple formats, including Kindle, PDF, and Mobipocket, at Smashwords. (If you use this code KN24A at checkout, you will get 25% off, the same as the Amazon discount)

===========

THREE WAYS TO DIE on the Kindle 

THREE WAYS TO DIE as a PDF at Scribd.

THREE WAYS TO DIE in multiple formats at Smashwords. (I am experimenting with this title by using their "set your own price" feature where you, the reader, decide how much to pay).

I shall report back at the end of the month on how the books are doing on the various sites and in all the various formats.