It’s a Tie-in World

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News about the IAMTW’s Scribe Awards has already started to show up around the web. The folks at Galleycat can’t escape tie-ins lately.

All of a sudden, it seems, tie-in books are everywhere. OAKDALE
CONFIDENTIAL, the mystery novel written to tie in with As the World
Turns’ 50th anniversary, spends its third consecutive week on the NYT
bestseller lists. A new organization for tie-in writers has announced its own awards.
And Hyperion, after doing pretty well with THE DIARY OF ELLEN RIMBAUER
(a prequel to the 2002 miniseries RED ROSE) and THE KILLING CLUB (a
mystery written by a character from ONE LIFE TO LIVE) has just released BAD TWIN by "Gary Troup" – a character who died before LOST began airing.

Incidentally, OAKDALE CONFIDENTIAL is written by one of our talented IAMTW members. If you want to find out who that is, you’ll have to read the latest issue of Mystery Scene.

I’m Buying My Wife A Dozen Harlequin Romances

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Author HelenKay Dimon pointed me to this article that claims romance readers have a lot more sex.

Experts agree that readers of romance novels find it easier to “get in the mood” and on average, even have sex with their partners more often. Psychology Today
states that women who read romance novels make love with their partners
74% more often than women who don’t. Why? Because, according to a
scientific study conducted by Harold Leitenberg of the The Journal of Sex Research and Psychological Bulletin,
when women fantasize frequently (as they do when they read romance
novels), they have sex more often, have more fun in bed, and engage in
a wider variety of erotic activities.

I’m told DIAGNOSIS MURDER books have the same effect on women.

Movie Posters as Cover Art

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Bookslut pointed me to an interesting article in The Guardian on movie posters as cover art.

"It’s a no-brainer. You’d be crazy not to do it," says Marcella
Edwards, senior commissioning editor at Penguin Classics. The sales
surges that come with a film or TV tie-in book cover are irrefutable.

[…]The film or TV tie-in cover, which generally lasts for around three
months (the life of the film, and sometimes the DVD), often running
alongside the original paperback design, is an ever-growing trend in
publishing. "It’s happening more and more often," says Edwards.
"Publishers have got wiser. You’d be stupid if you didn’t do it."

[…]Film tie-in covers might be glossy and glittering and force a surge in
sales, but they are truly the Ivana Trumps of the book jacket world.

Mystery Scribes Score TV Deals

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Oxygen has gone shopping for new series at their local mystery bookstore. The network is developing NICKY VELVET, based on the stories by Ed Hoch, and ROBIN HUDSON, based on the books by Sparkle Hayter.  Congratulations to them both!

In other TV news, NBC has officially picked up STUDIO 60, Aaron Sorkin’s new series about the making of a SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE-esque show starring Matthew Perry. The network has already picked up THE BLACK DONNELLYS and KIDNAPPED for next season. HBO has ordered SEXLIFE, a one-hour comedy/drama about relationships in the SEX IN THE CITY mold and Fox is reportedly snagging the hostage drama PRIMARY.  Last season, there were shows about invading aliens on multiple networks, this fall it looks like kidnappers are going to be everywhere…

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I’m a Fraud

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That’s how I feel today. I have spent the whole day working on my latest book and all I’ve managed to write is absolute swill. One whole paragraph of it. Yeah, that’s it. One measly, rotten, pathetic paragraph…one so bad, so inept, no professional writer could possibly have written it (nor would he have spent all DAY doing it).

I don’t often have days like this, but when I do, it’s miserably depressing. I know that the best thing to do would be to just walk away from the computer and do something else, but I can’t. Instead I torture myself by counting how many days I have left until the book is due, how many pages I have to write a week, a day, an hour to make the deadline…and that’s not counting the days I will set the book aside to work on my next script (which should be getting the go-ahead from the studio any day now). So I have to take advantage of every free hour. Which of course, only makes me more anxious and upset at my lack of creativity. When it’s going this bad, I have to keep at it, trying to hit upon that one sentence or image that will break me out of this writing funk. Because it will happen. I know it will. I’m praying it will. Okay, enough screwing around on the blog, avoiding the unavoidable, it’s time to go back to it…

(I know what you’re thinking, "how could he post this after linking to Garrison Keillor’s essay about writers who whine?" I’ll tell you why. Because I’m a FRAUD.)

Can I Send a Publisher My Script?

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I got this email the other day:

I recently wrote a heady sci-fi thriller that has gotten good response
from people, but my manager calls "unmarketable". You see, apparently,
if Hollywood wants a Phillip K. Dick type of story, they go buy a real
Phillip K. Dick story. But, unless the budget is under 10mil, they
won’t touch it without his name on it.   So, I was thinking, since book publishers don’t have "shootable"
constraints, would they ever read scripts with an eye on the author
building them out into novel form? I’d love to make it a novel, if I
thought others would love it to be one.   Would Del Rey read a script? Would they even consider, let alone pay for, a property not in novel form?

I’m not sure your manager is right about your script. If it’s good, people will buy it. If it’s not, they won’t.  My guess is that either he’s lazy or he thinks your script is unmarketable because it isn’t very good.  That aside, the answer to your question is no, a publisher/editor won’t read the script. They buy books, not scripts. They don’t know how
to read a script. And most important of all, they can’t tell from a script if you can write a
book.  You might be able to get way with writing a 100 sample manuscript pages and
an outline of the rest if you have a good literary agent that editors trust.

Stop Whining

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Garrison Keillor is tired of writers who whine about how hard it is to write:

It’s the
purest form of arrogance: Lest you don’t notice what a brilliant artist I am,
let me tell you how I agonize over my work. To which I say: Get a job. Try
teaching eighth-grade English, five classes a day, 35 kids in a class, from
September to June, and then tell us about suffering.

The fact
of the matter is that the people who struggle most with writing are drunks.
They get hammered at night and in the morning their heads are full of pain and
adverbs. Writing is hard for them, but so would golf be, or planting alfalfa,
or assembling parts in a factory.

The
biggest whiners are the writers who get prizes and fellowships for writing
stuff that’s painful to read, and so they accumulate long résumés
and few readers and wind up teaching in universities where they inflict their
gloomy pretensions on the young. Writers who write for a living don’t complain
about the difficulty of it. It does nothing for the reader to know you went
through 14 drafts of a book, so why mention it?

Law & Order Deja Vu

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Okay, so I was watching the teaser for LAW AND ORDER tonight and it goes like this: two cops are driving along. They get a domestic disturbance call. They park in front of a building and — WHAM — a body lands on their windshield. The scene was so familiar that I knew the body was going to land on the car before it happened. I was sure I was watching a rerun…but the TV Guide listed it as a new episode. And, as it turned out, it was new show. So my question is this… am I just imagining that I saw the exact same teaser before or did a LAW & ORDER: SVU also begin the same way this season?

IAMTW Announces The Scribe Awards

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The International Association of Media Tie-In Writers (IAMTW) is dedicated to enhancing the professional and public image
of tie-in writers…to working with the media to review tie-in novels
and publicize their authors…and to providing a forum for tie-in writers to share
information, support one another, and discuss issues relating to our
field (via a monthly e-newsletter, our website, and our active yahoo discussion group).
Our members include authors active in many other professional writer
organizations (MWA, PWA, WGA, SFWA, etc.) and who share their unique
perspectives with their fellow tie-in writers.

It is with great pleasure that the IAMTW announces that we are now accepting submissions for the first annual Scribe Awards, recognizing excellence in the field of media tie-in writing.

The Scribe Awards and How You Can Enter:

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The Name is Poster, Bond Poster

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I’ve got all the Bond movie posters, which I started collecting when I was a kid. I bought most of them from the now-defunct
Cinema Shop in San Francisco and, later, from Hollywood Book & Poster Co. in LA. When I was single, I had them up all over my apartment. But for the last 16 years of marital bliss, the posters have
been relegated to my small office, where I rotate them in, two at-a-time. I
love those posters, many of which feature art by the legendary Robert McGinnis.
Posterwire reports that a NY gallery is hosting an exhibit of Bond posters from mid-May through July. The news of the exhibit coincides with
the release this week of the new trailer and the teaser poster for CASINO ROYALE.