Odds and Ends
I spent yesterday at the San Diego Comic Con, where I talked shop with writer/producer Bill Freiberger and the terrific novelists of International Association of Media Tie-in Writers, like Max Allan Collins, Scribe Award winner James Rollins (pictured witih me on the left) and my old friend and Scribe Award winner Bob Greenberger, who was an editor at Starlog back when I was writing for the magazine in the 1980s. I think it's been 20 years since I've seen him. Afterwards, I grabbed an early dinner at a faux Irish pub with TV writer/producer Phoef Sutton and my brother Tod. We had a great time sharing anecdotes about our experiences in TV and publishing. I really have to get out more with other writers because it always reinvigorates me.
This morning I received the latest issue of the Mystery Readers Journal, which is chockful of articles, including one from me, about Los Angeles as a setting for mysteries. Other contributes include Gregg Hurwitz, Kris Neri, and Wendy Hornsby.
I decided to spend some of my Kindle royaltes from The Walk and My Gun Has Bullets on — what else? — a Kindle.
It should arrive next week in time for me to take it on the plane to Owensboro for the International Mystery Writers Festival, where I will be moderating a panel with my friends Sue Grafton and MONK writer/producer David Breckman.
Scribe Award Winners Announced
The 2009 Scribe Awards were handed out a ceremony and panel at Comic Con in San Diego on Friday. Participants included James Rollins, Max Allan Collins, Tod Goldberg, Matt Forbeck and Keith R.A. DeCandido, who was honored as this year's Grandmaster for excellence in the field. The winning books are marked with asterisks.
GENERAL FICTION
BEST NOVEL—ORIGINAL
**CSI: HEADHUNTER by Greg Cox
BURN NOTICE: THE FIX by Tod Goldberg
CRIMINAL MINDS: FINISHING SCHOOL by Max Allan Collins
BEST NOVEL—ADAPTED
**INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL by James Rollins
DEATH DEFYING ACTS by Greg Cox
THE TUDORS: KING TAKES QUEEN by Elizabeth Massie
THE WACKNESS by Dale C. Phillips
THE X FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE by Max Allan Collins
SPECULATIVE FICTION
BEST NOVEL—ORIGINAL
**STAR TREK TEROK NOR: DAY OF THE VIPERS by James Swallow
GHOST WHISPERER: REVENGE by Doranna Durgin
RAVENLOFT: THE COVENANT, HEAVEN'S BONES by Samantha Henderson
STARGATE SG-1: HYDRA by Holly Scott20& Jaime Duncan
BEST NOVEL—ADAPTED
**HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY by Bob Greenberger
THE MUTANT CHRONICLES by Matt Forbeck
STAR WARS—THE CLONE WARS: WILD SPACE by Karen Miller
UNDERWORLD: RISE OF THE LYCANS by Greg Cox
YOUNG ADULT—ALL GENRES
BEST NOVEL—ORIGINAL
**PRIMEVAL: SHADOW OF THE JAGUAR by Steven Savile
DR. WHO: THE EYELESS by Lance Parkin
DISNEY CLUB PENGUIN: STOWAWAY! ADVENTURES AT SEA by Tracey West
BEST NOVEL—ADAPTED
**JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH 3D by Tracey West
IRON MAN: THE JUNIOR NOVEL by Stephen D. Sullivan
THE DARK KNIGHT: THE JUNIOR NOVEL by Stacia Deutsch and Rhody Cohon
THE GRANDMASTER AWARD
KEITH R.A. DeCANDIDO
(Pictured above: Max Allan Collins, Matt Forbeck, James Rollins, Stacia Deutsch, Tod Goldberg, Keith R.A. DeCandido, Robert Greenberger and Nathan Long)
You Can Be a Kindle Millionaire, Part 7
Can you tell a book by its cover?
The original, St. Martin's Press cover for my 1997 novel BEYOND THE BEYOND was horrible. It was a giant penis bursting out of a TV set against a piss-yellow background. I'm not kidding. You can see it here. I know for a fact that it killed sales. I was sent on a national book tour and everywhere I went, the booksellers said "we can't stick that book in our window, there's a penis on the cover!"
So when I did the Kindle edition, I asked my talented and wildly creative sister Linda Woods, a professional artist and author (Journal Revolution: Rise Up & Create! Art Journals, Personal Manifestos and Other Artistic Insurrections), to design a new cover in the same style as the one she designed for the Kindle edition of my first book, My Gun Has Bullets (which also had a horrible St. Martin's cover when it was first published). BEYOND THE BEYOND is a sequel to MY GUN HAS BULLETS, so I thought some consistency was a good idea. Isn't that what branding is all about?
But while the Kindle sales for MY GUN HAS BULLETS have been brisk, the sales for Beyond the Beyond are flat. The culprit? I think it was the cover…again. It mayhave looked too much like the cover for My Gun Has Bullets and might have been confusing people into thinking it was the same book.
So Linda has tweaked the cover for me. It's the one on the right. It will be interesting to see if a new cover makes a difference…
Then again, maybe it's the book that sucks!
You Can Become a Kindle Millionaire, Part 6
Here are my Amazon Kindle sales figures and royalties for July as of today at 5:49 pm. All the titles are priced at $1.99, except for THREE WAYS TO DIE, which sells for 99 cents (Click on the image for a larger view):
I sold 444 copies of THE WALK and 54 copies of THREE WAYS TO DIE in June. If sales continue as they are, I'll fall a little short of those numbers this month (and far short of the Kindle sales enjoyed by Joe Konrath and John August, the authors who inspired me to do this). Even so, it's found money for an out-of-print book and a collection of three, previously-published stories.
Encouraged by even those small numbers, and with nothing at all to lose, I added Kindle editions of my out-of-print novels MY GUN HAS BULLETS on 7/14 and BEYOND THE BEYOND on 7/17. It's too soon for me to draw any conclusions about how they are selling.
Good News
I have no AC and no hot water at home today…but at least I have no shortage of good news.
My editor just told me that MR. MONK AND THE DIRTY COP was in the top ten bestselling hardcover mysteries at Barnes & Noble last week. So I guess I can afford all the workers in the house today.
And I've just learned that my 2008 movie FAST TRACK: NO LIMITS, which has been broadcast, screened or released on DVD everywhere in the world but here, is finally coming out on DVD in the U.S. in October. The trailer has had 275,000+ hits on YouTube, so I guess there's an audience for it.
A Chat in Lori’s Cafe
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.
This and That
For the last month, I've been home alone with the dog while my wife and daughter were visiting the in-laws in France. On Monday, a day before my family was set to return, our water heater cracked and flooded several rooms in our house. I spent much of Monday and Tuesday dealing with the plumbers, insurance adjusters, and disaster-cleanup people. My weary family came home Tuesday to a bunch of a torn-open walls, half-a-dozen fans going, and no hot water. For the last few days, we have been dividing our time between our house and a nearby hotel, where we have been showering. Insurance is covering most of the clean-up and repairs (and the hotel, of course), but it has still been an enormous inconvenience. We'll have hot water on Tuesday…but today we uncovered more water damage today, so the disaster crew opened up more walls and more fans were brought in.
In the midst of all this, I had two pitch meetings last week…one face-to-face (a pilot pitch), and one over Skype to studios overseas (a feature pitch). I don't know how the pitch here turned out, but the overseas pitch was a home-run. It's for an international action movie, a co-production between a European studio and a Chinese studio. The movie will be shot in Europe and China. We closed my deal on Friday and I've spent the last few days plotting the story in detail for another meeting this week…when I could get the greenlight to write the script. It's all happening very fast…and I like it that way. It reminds me of network television.
In the midst of all this, I've had to temporarily set aside my MONK book, which I must get back to next week as well, no matter what happens with the movie script. But I am over 100 pages into it, so I'm feeling pretty secure that there won't be a problem meeting my deadline. Afterall, I wrote MR. MONK IN OUTER SPACE while I was writing, producing, and shooting FAST TRACK: NO LIMITS in Germany…and I completed DIAGNOSIS MURDER: THE WAKING NIGHTMARE while I was writing & producing the TV series MISSING…with two broken arms. The truth is, I do my best work under pressure.