Writing

New Criteria for MWA Membership

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Last month, the board of the Mystery Writers of America adopted the recommendations of the membership committee (of which I am a member) to revise the criteria for active status membership for professional authors. The changes/additions to the current criteria  are:

1) An author of books must have received a minimum advance of $1,000, royalties of $1,000, or a combination of advances and royalties in at least that amount.

2) The initial print run for the author’s work of fiction or non-fiction must be at least 500 copies.

3)  That an author of short stories must have received a cumulative amount of $200, with only payments of $25 or more counting toward the total. Scholarly articles or chapters of non-fiction books will be treated like short stories, for purposes of Active Category qualification.

4)  That a playwright or an author of screenplays or teleplays must have received a minimum payment commensurate with the standards and practices of the Writers’ Guild (film/TV) or Dramatists Guild (stage plays), and that the work must have been produced.

UPDATE (7-14-07): The Romance Writers of America  have just  adopted new membership criteria that are very similar to the MWA’s.

UPDATE: You can find more details about the criteria for active MWA membership here.

Getting Tough II

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I’ve had lots of emails from people asking me what the new requirements are for publishers to be recognized by the Mystery Writers of America. They will be posted soon, but here are a some of the new additions/changes:

1. If you are a writer seeking Active Status membership, your publisher must have been in business for at least two years, except for new imprints by an established publisher.

2. Your publisher, within the past five years, may not have charged a fee to consider, read, submit, or comment on manuscripts; nor may the publisher, or any of the executives or editors under its employ, have offered you or any other authors self-publishing services, literary representation, paid editorial services, or paid promotional services.

3. Your publisher, if also an author, must publish at least five other authors per year, none of whom may be an employee of the company, a business partner, or a relative of the publisher.

4. Your publisher must not be engaged in the practice of wrongfully withholding or delaying the payment of royalties to authors. 

Saturday at the Festival

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Tod_and_laura_lippman It was a beautiful day for book-browsing, book-buying, and schmoozing at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.  I vowed not to buy any books, so of course I bought so many I had to make three trips back to the car. Among my signed book purchases: YOU SUCK by Christopher Moore, KIDNAPPED by Jan Burke, KISS HER GOODBYE by Robert Gregory Browne, LOS ANGELES NOIR,  and THE DAYS IN THE HILLS by Chris_and_leeJane Smiley. I chatted with lots of authors, including Joseph Wambaugh, T. Jefferson Parker, Cara Black, Laura Lippman  (that’s her on the left with my brother Tod), Jan Burke, Jerrilyn Farmer, Steve Cannell, Denise Hamilton, Terry Erdman (author of the "Official MONK Episode Guide") Kevin Roderick, Barney Rosenzweig, Ron Hogan, Eric Lax, Brett Battles, Robert Gregory Browne, and I stalked Daniel Woodrell some more. Laura Lippman admitted to me that when she met Woodrell on Saturday, she turned into a complete "fangirl" and couldn’t speak (my brother Tod, who witnessed the encounter, confirms her account). I saw Mike Farrell Mike wandering around — the way he looks now, he could play Jimmy Carter in a TV movie. Sean Penn was roaming around, too. I spoke to an actor who has played villains in lots of TV shows, including some of mine, but I couldn’t remember his name. I saw Phil Rosenthal, creator of EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND, standing in line at the Green Room buffet behind a guy who won the Nobel Prize and a Los Angeles Times Book Award last night.  Tod thought it was tacky of the Nobel guy to mention his prize in his Book0102068384000 Award acceptance speech. If I won the Nobel Prize, I’d find a way to bring it up in every conversation, even in the drive-thru line at McDonalds ("Of course I’d like to supersize that Quarter Pounder meal…I won the Nobel freakin’ Prize"). I ended my day with a signing at the Mystery Bookstore booth with Christopher Moore, who shared with me some of his Hollywood misadventures. Tomorrow I head back to Germany for three months to shoot FAST TRACK…

Namedropping

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Todwoodrellleee_3 Last night was the kick-off to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. The festivities began at the Mystery Bookstore party in Westwood, where I caught up with Craig Johnson, Reed Coleman, Gary Phillips, Denise Hamilton, Chris Grabenstein,Victor Gischler, Sean Doolittle, Jason Starr, Gregg Hurwitz, Chris Rice, Mark Haskell Smith, David Corbett and Teresa Schwegel to name a few. Then it was on to the Book Awards and the after-party, where I ate lots of shrimp and yakked with Lee Lankford, Dick Lochte, Aimee Liu, Tom Nolan, Les Klinger and Aimee Bender, among others. But the highlight of the night for me was finally meeting Book Prize nominee Daniel Woodrell. I have been an admirer and penpal of his for years, but this was the first-time we met face-to-face. Galleycat’s Ron Hogan was kind enough to take a picture of my brother Tod, Woodrell, and me. Today I’m signing at the Mystery Bookstore booth with Steve Cannell and Christopher Moore, another long-time penpal of mine who I have never met. More on that later…

Getting Tough

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This morning the board of Mystery Writers of America, on which I serve, approved tough new guidelines for approving publishers (and, by extension, accepting books published by them for Edgar consideration and their authors for active membership). These rigorous new standards are the result of a lot of hard work by the membership committee, on which I also serve. I will be posting a link to these new standards soon, but I can say that they will result in an immediate end to the "case by case list of approved publishers." A publisher either meets our standards for professionalism… or they don’t. It’s that simple.

These changes were long overdue and I believe will do our industry and our membership a service by alerting authors to thinly disguised vanity presses, companies with a history of unprofessional conduct and/or serious conflicts-of-interest…and denying those companies the legitimacy of our implied endorsement. As any reader of this blog knows, this is a subject that I am passionate about.

But I want to stress that these new standards will in no way change the current membership status of any writers who became members as a result of being published by a company that falls off the list.

Edgar Winners

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BEST NOVEL

The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

BEST FIRST NOVEL BY AN AMERICAN AUTHOR

The Faithful Spy by Alex Berenson (Random House)

BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL

Snakeskin Shamisen by Naomi Hirahara (Bantam Dell Publishing – Delta Books)

BEST FACT CRIME

Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer by James L. Swanson
(HarperCollins – William Morrow)

BEST CRITICAL/BIOGRAPHICAL

The Science of Sherlock Holmes: From Baskerville Hall to the Valley of Fear
by E.J. Wagner (John Wiley & Sons)

BEST SHORT STORY

"The Home Front" – Death Do Us Part by Charles Ardai
(Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown and Company)

BEST JUVENILE

Room One: A Mystery or Two by Andrew Clements (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers)

BEST YOUNG ADULT

Buried by Robin Merrow MacCready (Penguin YR – Dutton Children’s Books)

BEST PLAY

Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure by Steven Dietz (Arizona Theatre Company)

BEST TELEVISION EPISODE TELEPLAY

Life on Mars – Episode 1, Teleplay by Matthew Graham (BBC America)

BEST TELEVISION FEATURE/MINI-SERIES TELEPLAY

The Wire, Season 4, Teleplays by Ed Burns, Kia Corthron, Dennis Lehane, David Mills, Eric Overmyer, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, David Simon & William F. Zorzi (Home Box Office)

BEST MOTION PICTURE SCREENPLAY

The Departed, Screenplay by William Monahan (Warner Bros. Pictures)

I’ve Sold 150 Million Copies of My Books

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Saharabk Okay, maybe I haven’t. But according to Clive Cussler, the number doesn’t matter anyway.

Cussler is on the witness stand here in L.A. in a clash of lawsuits over the failure of the movie SAHARA, based on one of his Dirk Pitt novels. He claims the movie-makers breached a contract that gave him total control over the script.  Based on accounts I’ve read of the producer’s testimony, it seems to me that he’s right.

The producers claim he fraudulently inflated the number of books he sold to get more money out of them for the movie rights. Based on Cussler’s testimony, reported today in the L.A. Times, it seems to me that they are probably right, too.

On Friday, Cussler offered myriad explanations for his accounting of the "Sahara" numbers. Asked if he pulled the numbers out of thin air, Cussler said, "Pretty much." He added: "I honestly thought I probably did sell 100 million books. That doesn’t seem out of the ordinary to me."

[…]Cussler previously testified in a deposition that his agent admonished him in the late 1990s never to say how many books he sold because the amount was not known. Instead, Cussler said, he was advised to use the phrase "books in print."

Asked why he continued to use the 100 million estimate anyway, Cussler testified on Friday, "I slipped up…. I forgot."

[…]In June 1999, Cussler described his frustration with the entertainment industry in a handwritten letter. "Over a hundred million books sold worldwide now, and still Hollywood doesn’t get it," he wrote.

In August 2000, Cussler’s website stated that he had sold more than 100 million books. The number was updated to 125 million in April 2003. That same month, Cussler said on a "Sahara" promotional video, "They tell me now they’ve sold over 130 million."

The remark "meant nothing," Cussler testified Friday.

The actual sales of his books from 1973-2000, according to an audit by a forensic accountant, is about 42 million copes. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a pretty impressive number of books. You’d think Cussler would have been happy trumping that figure…without having to inflate it to 130 million. Then again, according to Cussler, it means nothing. If that’s so, why does he keep jacking up the number?

The reporting on the trial over the last few weeks has been fascinating and informative reading. We’re learning just how much people unapologetically and blatantly lie to each other in the movie business (as if we didn’t know already). We were also treated to a line-by-line dissection of the movie’s budget, right down to how much was spent on bribes.

As far as I’m concerned, both parties are at fault here. The only winners are the public, who are being treated to a trial that’s a lot more entertaining than SAHARA was.

The Executioners

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Sb114 I just discovered the Mack Bolan/Executioner site (thanks to Ben Boulden). The best thing about it is the complete list of the 343 MACK BOLAN titles (not counting the 114 SuperBolans and 89 Stony Man titles) and the names of the ghostwriters who actually wrote the books.  Twenty-some years ago, when I was writing the .357 VIGILANTE books, I was approached to write an EXECUTIONER. They sent me a huge packet of material and I spoke to several authors about their experiences writing the books (I think I spoke to Raymond Obstfeld and Mike Newton), but after giving it some thought, I declined the offer. I ran into Mike last year at Boucheron (or was it Thrillerfest?) and it was great to catch up with him again. I wonder what ever happened to Raymond Obstfeld who, as I recall, was an English professor at some Southern California college (he also wrote the DIAMONDBACK westerns for Pinnacle, along with my buddy Paul Bishop).

Looking at this list of Bolan writers makes me appreciate even more how prolific Robert Randisi is …as "J.R. Roberts," he’s written the 312 GUNSMITH titles all by himself. And that’s not counting his many, many other books.

Columbus Sets Sail with Riordan

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HARRY POTTER director Chris Columbus has found his next movie project — mystery writer Rick Riordan’s first children’s fantasy novel THE LIGHTNING THIEF. Columbus will direct and produce the movie. No word yet on who the screenwriter is. Rick is probably best known among mystery fans for his terrific Tres Navarre PI series.

Elaine Viets Update

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Great news — Elaine Viets is on her way home today, only a week since suffering a stroke. I told you she’s a fighter! Here’s the latest update from her friends Kris Montee and Barbara Parker:

Nobody thought this would happen so soon, but if you know Elaine you know she wasn’t going to sit still for this for long.  When Barbara asked her where she was going, she said "Home, then I-Hop."

[…] She’ll need home nurses for a while, but Elaine Viets is definitely on her way back. Elaine is very tired, but there are no signs of paralysis, and physical therapy is scheduled to begin Monday.

[…] Elaine’s her main concern — and she has expressed this herself — hooray! — is that her new Dead End Job mystery, pub. date May 1, will fall flat without her being available to promote it.  (She was scheduled to tour for it, but that’s out of course). So, instead of buying food or sending flowers, we’d recommend that everyone contact his or her local independent bookseller and order two copies of MURDER WITH RESERVATIONS, and encourage everyone they know to do the same.  The best present in the world for Elaine would be a spot on the NYTimes bestseller list.