A Writer's Life

Davis Wins SFWA Presidency

International Association of Media Tie-in Writers member Russell Davis won the Presidency of the Science Fiction Writers of America in a landslide victory. This is very good news...and gives him the mandate he needs to make a lot of over-due changes.

No Romance for Plagiarist And Her Publisher

The Charlotte Observer reports that Penguin/Putnam has dropped romance author Cassie Edwards due to, and this is a phrase I have never heard before, "irreconcilable editorial differences." The differences have to do with Edwards' lifting text from other people's books and claiming it as her own, a practice brought to light in meticulous detail by the blog Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Novels.

In a phone interview in January, the author told The Associated Press that she indeed "takes" material from other works, but said she didn't know she was supposed to credit her sources. She then asked her husband to get on the phone. Charles Edwards said the author got only "ideas" from other books and did not "lift passages."

You Can't Tell a Book By It's Cover

SLEEPING DOGS by Ed Gorman proves the old adage that you can't tell a book by it's cover. He has been stuck with the ugliest St. Martin's cover since my book, BEYOND THE BEYOND. It's a damn shame, because his book deserves more thoughtful packaging-- a LOT more. It's a biting, fast-moving, darkly funny mystery set inside a Senatorial campaign. The hero is Dev Conrad, a political consultant who knows how to play the game and is growing increasingly uncomfortable with the lies, hypocrisy, and self-delusion inherent in his job.

Ed not only gives us an inside look at the dark side of campaigning, he also offers a good puzzle, too, where the "bad guys" are fully fleshed-out characters who aren't that much different than the "good guys." And after countless books about tortured cops, PIs and forensic scientists...not to mention an endless number of amateur sleuths...Dev Conrad is a fresh, unconventional protagonist. The timing for this book couldn't be better...but, based on the cover treatment, I fear the publisher isn't in a position to take advantage of the opportunity.

As an aside, I am awed by Ed's versatility...he writes westerns, whodunits, thrillers, procedurals and now political novels...all with equal skill. I wish I was that flexible.

Statistics Everywhere

There were lots of interesting statistics in Publishers Weekly today relating to retailing and Print-On-Demand.

According to a Bowker study, the Mystery Genre is what Americans read most, accounting for 17% of all books sold. Science Fiction accounts for 5.5%, General Fiction snags 3%, and Horror scares up 2%.  The same study also found that chain bookstores account for 33% of booksales while the Internet sells 21%.

A study by the Association of American Publishers found that total industry sales rose 3.2% in 2007 to $25 billion. The largest gain is among adult hardcovers, which are up 7.8%. The "largest overall gains in the year came from the smallest segments." They note that ebook sales jumped 23.6% and audio books rose 19.8%.

PW editor Sara Nelson notes in her column that Amazon accounts for slightly more than 10% of online sales. She doesn't seem  particularly worried about the company strongarming POD presses to use Booksurge, their POD service. She observes that big publishers use POD "only sparingly," that there remain many other venues of POD sales, and that lawyers she has contacted don't see the grounds for an anti-trust suit.

And in a news brief, Lightning Source has partnered with On Demand Books, the company that makes the Espresso Book Machine that prints novels for readers on the spot. So far, there are a grand total of seven machines in operation...not exactly a major force in book retailing.

Bookbuying by the Numbers

Publishers Weekly reports today that online booksellers account for 30.5% of book sales, chain book stores 32.5%, discount stores (like Wal-Mart and Costco) 13.5%, independant booksellers 8.7% , grocery stores 3.7% and author/publisher websites 1.8%.  The article states that combined internet sales (32.3%) could overtake big chain bookstore sales soon...but it seems to me that they still have a ways to go to eclipse the share claimed overall by brick-and-mortar sales (which now account for 67.7% of sales).

Projected Share of Consumer Book Purchase in 2008 (source Publisher's Weekly, Fairfield Research, Greyhound Books)

Online bookstores: 30.5%

Chain bookstores: 32.5%

Discount Stores: 13.5%

Used Sales and Stores: 9.3%

Independent bookstores: 8.7%

Grocery/Spec/Newsstands 3.7%

Author/Publisher/Web: 1.8%

RESOLUTION

I read an ARC of Robert B. Parker's RESOLUTION and I really enjoyed it....but less so than APPALOOSA, which  is the best Parker book since DOUBLE PLAY. Parker's books are so short and so similar, and feel so much like contemporary westerns anyway (particularly the Spenser novel POTSHOT and all the Jesse Stones), that I felt like I'd read it before. Actually, RESOLUTION feels more like a sequel to STRANGER IN PARADISE, the latest Jesse Stone, than it does to APPALOOSA. Lawman-for-hire Virgil Cole is essentially Jesse Stone, right down to the philandering wife/girlfriend he can't let go of, but somehow it plays a lot better in the wild west than it does in present-day Massachusetts. The book, which comes out in June, left the door wide open for a sequel and I'm looking forward to it.

Book Lust

I went a little crazy at the Paperback Collectors Show & Sale today...the books were so cheap and the selection was huge. My buying binge included a bunch of Ashley Carter (aka Harry Whittington) books as well as:
TRAIL OF A TRAMP by Nick Quarry (Marvin Albert)
NICE GUYS FINISH DEAD by Albert Conroy (Marvin Albert)
THE ROAD'S END by Albert Conroy
COCOTTE by Theodore Pratt
TROPICAL DISTURBANCE by Theodore Pratt
GET SMART! By William Johnston
THE MOONLIGHT WAR by Clifton Adams
THE GRABHORN BOUNTY by Clifton Adams
LAST DAYS OF WOLF GARNETT by Clifton Adams
DESIRE IN THE DUST by Harry Whittington
CALL ME KILLER by Harry Whittington
JOURNEY INTO TERROR by Peter Rabe
CORNERED by James McKimmey
CASE OF THE PETTICOAT MURDER, CASE OF THE BEAUTIFUL BODY, CASE OF THE BRAZEN BEAUTY, MORGUE FOR VENUS, and COME NIGHT, COME EVIL by Jonathan Craig (based on Bill Crider's enthusiastic blog posts about the author recently)
TRAGO by Frank Bonham
EYE OF THE HUNTER by Frank Bonham
KISS HER GOODBYE y Wade Miller
GOAT ISLAND by William Fuller
I LIKE'EM TOUGH by Curt Cannon (aka Ed McBain)
NO SCORE by Chip Harrison (Lawrence Block)
STRONGARM by Dan J. Marlowe
DEATH DEEP DOWN by Dan J. Marlowe
13 FRENCH STREET by Gil Brewer
ASSIGNMENT CARLOTTA CORTEZ by Edward S. Aarons (who, I discovered today, wrote some TV tie-ins based on THE DEFENDERS).

I think, all told, I spent about $70. A perfect day.

Outside the Comfort Zone

My brother Tod writes today about the fun he's having writing the BURN NOTICE books...and what he's learning about himself as a writer along the way:

I must say that writing this sort of comic noir is pretty damn fun to do. I've got two more to write after this one, each with a substantially longer deadline, thank god, and I've really had to teach myself that I don't need to have an unreliable narrator facing some sort of mortal pain in every line, like many of my stories and novels previously have had, and that it's okay to just have fun, line by line, day by day, writing for the entertainment of it all. I've been asked by a lot of people why I decided to do these books and my answer has been the same each time: It seemed like it would be pretty cool. It seemed like I'd reach about 50,000 more readers than I usually do. It seemed like a great way to learn, again, how to write something completely out of my comfort zone, to challenge myself in new and interesting ways.

I knew he'd like it. It will be interesting to see how he feels a year from now after he's written two of these books and is well into his third.

Tod asked me the other day how I kept up the pace.  That's when I realized that I've written 17 novels since 2003, 15 of which have been published, one that's coming in July, and one that I'm in the midst of now.

I didn't really have answer for him. I like to write, for one thing. And I live in fear...writing is how I pay the bills and if I am not writing, I start worrying about ending up boiling hamburgers at McDonalds while my wife sells her body on Sunset.

That's not to say I don't feel the pressure, but lately it has eased up a bit. Since I dropped the DIAGNOSIS MURDER books, I'm not writing a new book every 90 days any more...and, at the moment, I'm not running a TV series or jetting back and forth to Europe every two weeks either. So writing this latest book hasn't been quite the same kind of juggling act, though I am certainly feeling my deadline approaching in eight weeks.

And I am eager to write something which, as Tod says, takes me outside of my comfort zone.

"The Past Tense" novel in the DIAGNOSIS MURDER series was like that -- I set the book in the 1960s (I'd never written anything that was "present day") and wrote Mark Sloan from first-person instead of third person.  It was scary and tough and I was certain I would fail. But it turned out to be the best-reviewed book in the series and one of the few times a paperback original TV tie-in got noticed in the mainstream press. I'm very proud of it. I also tried a little narrative-trick in the DIAGNOSIS MURDER novel "The Double Life" that was scary, and I like to think that I pulled it off. Whether I did or not, it gave me a thrill just trying it and powered me through whatever exhaustion I was feeling at the time.

The first MONK was also a challenge for me -- writing in first person from a woman's point-of-view. It worked, too. But now I have done that for seven books and am comfortable with it. I need to shake myself up again. I don't know what that new writing challenge will be, but hopefully 2008 will be the year I take it on.

The PW Variation

Mark Sarvas,  who runs the excellent L.A.-centric lit-blog The Elegant Variation, has his first novel HARRY, REVISED coming out in May and it has earned a glowing review from Publishers Weekly, which can't help commenting:

[...] though there may be legions of writers spurned by his blog just willing Sarvas to fail, this is a self-assured, comic and satisfying story.

It will be interesting to see how the Los Angeles Times reviews his book.

Finding Religion

The MWA anthology BLUE RELIGION, edited by Michael Connelly, scored a rave review from Publisher's Weekly:

The Mystery Writers of America presents a high-quality anthology of 19 original stories that explore a wide range of police experiences, from newcomer Polly Nelson's superb tale set in 1864 Kansas, "Burying Mr. Henry," to editor Connelly's powerful and grim Harry Bosch investigation into a young disabled boy's death, "Father's Day." The sordid mean streets, depicted in Persia Walker's "Such a Lucky, Pretty Girl," are nicely balanced with the lighter touches of Jon Breen's "Serial Killer," a darkly comic tale in which two police detectives recount one of their cases to a community college writing class. TV writer Paul Guyot contributes one of the volume's strongest selections, "What a Wonderful World," about a cop's obsessive search for the killer of a hot dog vendor. This is one of those rare themed anthologies that can be enjoyed at one sitting.

I was chairperson of the MWA committee that selected half of the stories for the book, so I'm very happy about the review. And I am doubly pleased to see my friend Paul Guyot's story singled out for praise.