Mr. Monk and the Flattered Author

by

Ed Gorman has always been an enthusiastic supporter of my books. But it still feels great, and is immensely flattering, whenever I discover that he's enjoyed one of my novels. Today he reviewed my next Monk book, MR. MONK AND THE DIRTY COP, which comes out in July. He said, in part:

Any novel that can make me laugh out loud six or seven times in the first chapter is one I'd recommend without qualification. And good as that first chapter is, MONK AND THE DIRTY COP only gets better partly because of the central idea's ingenuity and partly because of the wit with which it's used.[…]I've enjoyed all the Monk novels. Monk is my all-time favorite comic detective and Lee Goldberg has honored him by writing some of the finest tie-novels ever conceived. These have a richness of incident and backstory and place that give them real depth. And for me MR. MONK AND THE DIRTY COP is the best one yet.

Speaking of Ed,  there's  a great interview with him over at Western Fiction Review that  also include an overview of his many, many books.

Living on TV’s Death Row

by

Writer Josh Friedman, the showrunner of TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONCILES, blogs about his final days on the series…and what it's like to be cancelled. 

Everyone says having your show cancelled is like a death but I've been dead before and at least when you're dead you don't get thrown off the Warner Bros. lot for haunting your old parking space. They probably mean it's like the death of a friend or a family member but that shit only hurts when it's YOUR friend or family member and even then it's mitigated by age, lifestyle and whether that person was a Hollywood friend or a real one and whether that family member left you money.

Losing your show is more like a surprise divorce where you get served papers in the morning and your (ex)wife is fucking Human Target by three in the afternoon using the same time slot your child was conceived in and also where she did that one thing that one time on your birthday.

People say the bright side to losing your show is gaining time to spend with your family but I'm pretty sure that waking up next to your ex-showrunner spouse whom you haven't seen for two and a half years is pretty close to waking up next to that special someone you met the night before at Carlos n' Charlie's in Cancun on Spring Break.

His lengthy post is very funny, bitter, and oh-so-true. I've been in his position, feeling many of the same things that he did, more times than I care to remember…and it never gets any easier or less uncomfortable. 

You Can Become a Kindle Millionaire

by

My friend author Joe Konrath has done extraordinarily well selling some of his unpublished books on the Kindle, making $1250 in royalties this month alone. That's very impressive. And since its free and easy to upload your book to Amazon for sale on the Kindle, I'm sure that Joe's success is very exciting and encouraging news to a lot of aspiring writers out there. But I suspect Joe's success is the exception rather than the rule. That said, he is encouraging others to follow his lead. He writes:

The average advance for a first time novel is still $5000. If Kindle keeps growing in popularity, and the Sony Reader opens up to author submissions like it intends to, I think a motivated writer will be able to make $5000 a year on a well-written e-novel. Or more. All without ever being in print.

[…]Robert W. Walker, has written over forty novels. Most of them are out of print, and the rights have reverted back to him. If he digitized and uploaded his books, and priced them at $1.59 (which earns him 70 cents a download), and sold 500 copies of each per month (I sold 500 of Origin and 780 of The List in May), he'd be making $14,000 a month, or $168,000 a year, on books that Big NY Publishing doesn't want anymore.
Even if he made half, or a third, or a fifth of that, that's decent money on books that he's not doing anything else with. Now, all of us aren't Rob, and we don't have 40 novels on our hard drives, especially 40 novels that were good enough to have once been published in print.
But how long do you think it will be before some unknown author has a Kindle bestseller?

Joe is making a lot of assumptions based on the admirable success of his own Kindle titles. It's a big, big, BIG leap to think, just because his book has done well, that Robert W. Walker (or any other mid-list author) will sell 500 copies…or even 50 copies…of his out-of-print books on the Kindle each month. 

But just for hell of it, I decided to follow Joe's advice and put my out-of-print 2004 novel THE WALK and a short-story collection THREE WAYS TO DIE up on Amazon for sale on the Kindle and see what happens. 

So far, after only a few days on Amazon, sales of those Kindle editions have been brisk. For instance, today THREE WAYS TO DIE was ranked as Amazon's #30 bestselling Kindle short story collection and the 40th top-selling hard-boiled Kindle mystery. 

Pretty impressive, huh? 

And it's paying off in the wallet, too, my friends. I've already raked in ten dollars in royalties. So I spent today at the Bentley dealership checking out the car I'm going to buy at year-end with my Kindle royalties.

I do not mean to belittle Joe's success on the Kindle. It is truly impressive and its a reflection of his considerable promotional skills (as well, I'm sure, of the quality of the books themselves). But do I think the vast majority of published, as well as unpublished, writers can easily achieve the same success he has with Kindle editions? No, I don't.

But I would love to be proved wrong. I'll report back at the end of the month on how my Kindle sales on these two titles are doing.

(Incidentally, several of my MONK and DIAGNOSIS MURDER books are also available on the Kindle. Although the MONK books sell very well in hardcover and paperback, the Kindle sales are miniscule…and keep in mind that my MONK books, unlike those that an unknown writer might put up for sale on the Kindle, benefit from the huge advertising, promotion, and brand awareness that goes along with a hit TV series)

UPDATE 6-11-2209: Joe Konrath has updated his Kindle sales figures and they are pretty impressive. Here's a sample:

On April 8th, I began to upload my own books to Kindle. As of today, June 11, at 11:40am, here is how many copies I've sold, and how much they've earned. 

THE LIST, a technothriller/police procedural novel, is my biggest seller to date, with 1612 copies sold. Since April this has earned $1081.75. I originally priced it at $1.49, and then raised it to $1.89 this month to see if the sales would slow down. The sales sped up instead. 

ORIGIN, a technothriller/horror occult adventure novel, is in second place, with 1096 copies sold and $690.18. As with The List and my other Kindle novels, I upped the price to $1.89. 

SUCKERS is a thriller/comedy/horror novella I wrote with Jeff Strand. It also includes some Konrath and Strand short stories. 449 copies, $306.60.

Joe also talks about some of the lessons he's learned along the way. I'll post the stats from my experiment at the end of the month.

I Want to Grow Crunchberries and Grape Nuts

by

6a00d83451bd4469e201156fc3c286970c-800wi I love this story, reported by the Lowering the Bar blog.  A California judge threw out a lawsuit filed by a woman who claimed that she bought Cap'n Crunch with Crunchberries for years  because she was tricked by deceptive packaging into believing "crunchberries" were real fruit. The judge wrote:

In this case . . . while the challenged packaging contains the word "berries" it does so only in conjunction with the descriptive term "crunch." This Court is not aware of, nor has Plaintiff alleged the existence of, any actual fruit referred to as a "crunchberry." Furthermore, the "Crunchberries" depicted on the [box] are round, crunchy, brightly-colored cereal balls, and the [box] clearly states both that the Product contains "sweetened corn & oat cereal" and that the cereal is "enlarged to show texture." Thus, a reasonable consumer would not be deceived into believing that the Product in the instant case contained a fruit that does not exist. . . . So far as this Court has been made aware, there is no such fruit growing in the wild or occurring naturally in any part of the world.

Does this mean that there's no such thing as Fruit Loops or Grape Nuts?
(Thanks to Melinda Metz for the link)

Writing Guest Shots for Actors

by

Dm-001 My friend Ken Levine has an amusing post — heck, he always has amusing posts — on writing episodes with a particular actor in mind for the key guest-star part. It's a very risky move. 

When Bill Rabkin & I were doing DIAGNOSIS MURDER, Fred Silverman and our star, Dick Van Dyke, always wanted to snag Mary Tyler Moore or Julie Andrews for the show.  And every season, Dick would run into them at a party or something, corner them about doing a guest shot, and they would always assure him that they would love, absolutely love, to do the show.  

So we would write an episode for Mary or Julie and they would always pass, without even reading the script, as we knew they would. They just didn't have the heart to say no to Dick's face, to tell him they had no interest at all in doing an episode of DIAGNOSIS MURDER. So we'd end up with Piper Laurie, Holland Taylor, Kathleen Quinlan, Stephanie Zimbalist or some other actress instead. It was the same when we wrote, at Dick's insistence, our annual guest part for Carl Reiner…who also always passed. We knew they would never do it…but Dick and Fred wouldn't give up. 

We also had to craft episodes for Dick's neighbors, George C. Scott and Rod Steiger, knowing damn well they wouldn't do the show, either. Scott got out of doing the guest shot brilliantly…he told Dick that he wanted to do the part, then asked us for such an outrageous amount of money that it simply wasn't possible. 

That said, we wrote an episode at Dick's behest for his friends Tim Conway and Harvey Korman and, much to our surprise, they actually agreed to play the parts…and were terrific. The funniest part though, never made it on screen. Tim Conway ad-libbed some hilarious stuff during Dick's reveal of the killer at the end of the episode…but the studio nixed it because it killied the drama. What drama? It was a flat-out comedy episode. (Yes, I am still bitter about it after all these years). Dm-002

On the other hand, Bill and I got a lot of press, and mighty big ratings, for our stunt-casting episodes, which we didn't write with particular actors in mind (with the exception of the MANNIX revival, but rather a TV genre — like TV spies, TV doctors, and TV cops. Our TV spy episode — with Robert Vaughn, Robert Culp, Patrick MacNee, and Barbara Bain as "Cinnamon Carter" — was especially memorable for me (and Larry Carroll & David Carren did a fantastic job writing it). 

But Bill and I also stunt cast out of sheer folly, just to amuse ourselves. For no reason whatsoever, we cast an episode only with stars of Garry Marshall sitcoms. For another, we only cast leading actors from different versions/spin-offs of M*A*S*H (we snagged Elliot Gould, Loretta Swit, Sally Kellerman, Chris Norris, Jamie Farr, and William Christopher). Those episodes were so much fun for everyone — the writers, the cast and the crew — and were far less risky than tailoring a role for a specific actor. And the network, the critics and the viewers seemed to like it as much as we did.

Han Solo, PI

by

This clip is all over the net today…and for good reason. It's a riff on the MAGNUM PI main title sequence…only with Harrison Ford as Han Solo. I'm almost ashamed to admit how much I liked this.



UPDATE: This side-by-side comparison between the HAN SOLO PI tribute and the original MAGNUM PI titles shows just how faithful, shot-for-shot, this homage really is.

Check Twitter Before Meetings

by

Twitter-logo Last Tuesday, I had a meeting with a showrunner about filling an open writer/producer position on his new series. I learned yesterday, a week later, that he was going with somebody else. That's no big deal, it happens all the time. But here's the twist… it turns out that an hour before my meeting last week, the showrunner tweeted that he'd just made an offer to a guy I'll call "Producer X" and that he was "crossing his fingers" that the offer would be accepted. So when I had my meeting, the showrunner had already decided to go with someone else…and had announced it to the world…but not to me. He was seeing me as, at best, a back-up in the case the other guy passed…which would be fine, if he hadn't already announced publicly that he really wanted somebody else.

But wait, there's more. Last Wednesday morning, the day after our meeting, the showrunner tweeted that he'd just hired Producer X.  But he didn't get around to telling my agent it was a pass until yesterday…a full week later. He couldn't wait to tell the world his decision…but blew off my agent for a week.

The moral of this story? I'll be checking Twitter before and especially after my meetings…and so will my agent. 

Deep Dudu

by

Let's hope frustrated U.S. writers, producers and actors don't follow Israeli TV star Dudu Topaz's example when it comes to dealing with rejection and bad reviews. The LA Times reports that the once top-rated TV host hired thugs to beat up two network execs who rejected his pitches for new shows and an agent who gave up on his comeback bid.

Topaz is accused of hiring three former security guards involved in the beatings over the last seven months of Shira Margalit, a vice president at Israel's Channel 2 TV; Avi Nir, a Channel 2 director; and talent agent Boaz Ben-Zion in Tel Aviv. Margalit, the most recent victim, was hospitalized a few days last month with a broken nose and fractured bones in her face.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the four suspects, all in custody, were identified through telephone wiretaps, witness testimony and surveillance video.

At least two other media executives were on the entertainer's hit list, police said: a newspaper editor who had turned down his offer to write a regular column and a Channel 2 producer who once worked with Topaz and now produces the unscripted show "Big Brother.[…]He once attacked a TV critic for a scathing review and broke his glasses, famously declaring, "He doesn't understand what he sees anyway."