Hey, There's A Dead Guy in the Living Room

What do you know?

PJ Nunn

I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last several weeks interviewing, hiring and training new publicists. None of those tasks top my list of favorite things to do, but it has reminded me of something. I sometimes forget how much I know and what that knowledge is worth.

Now, before you think how arrogant that might sound, I’ll explain, because it’s probably true of all of us. After all, it’s what we know that makes us who we are. What we know makes us able to do what we do. And sometimes what we don’t know can really hurt us.

Take book promotion. Most of the promotional material I see focuses on the latest book. That seems logical, right? But is it effective? Not all by itself. At least not as effective as it could be. First, you need to find a way to make the potential reader/buyer care enough to want to know about that book.

Ask any journalist – are they more likely to pay attention to a press release that says: "Author Jane Doe’s standalone romantic suspense novel is a tale of suspense and paranormal activity in a small town. In it, a woman finds a new home, then is puzzled by strange noises and events in the house. The tension increases when a neighbor is found dead from poisoning. Her investigation leads her to question the character of some of the people she has met, and whether one of them might be a killer."

Or:

"Award-winning author Jane Doe, of Small Town, Texas knows how to confront her fears. While doing research for her latest novel, This Book, released this month from Some Publishers, Doe tagged along with a group from Paranormal Investigations Unlimited as they investigated supernatural activity at a local farmhouse. There, she says, she learned how to separate spooky from pooky."

Texas Author Releases New Suspense Novel, or:

Suburban Mom Goes Ghostbusting

Note that both approaches are true, but one focuses on the book and the other makes use of peripheral facts. Kind of like the difference between focusing on the cooked turkey, or one of the many actions and ingredients that helped bring it to completion.

Karna Small Bodman is one of our more active clients, but our pitches for her rarely begin with her book. Rather they use some facet of her experience and the topics that were used in writing, and the soon to be released Gambit. Some form of: "Look what Karna Small Bodman learned while working at the White House. Oh, and incidentally, she wrote a novel."

We wouldn’t get very far with "Elaine Viets Releases Another Mystery," either, but we got a lot of attention with "Hotel Maids Need More Respect—And Getter Tips, Says Mystery Author" and "Shopping Can Be Hazardous to Your Health."

So think about it as you promote your own work. What do you know that someone else might want to know? What did you do while researching your novel that might be of interest? What kind of problems can you solve or questions can you answer? Those are the things that help your press release stand out and get attention. Not just "another author wrote another book."

Till next time.

Self-publishing and the greengrocers' apostrophe

Sharon Wheeler

Another week, another half-dozen or so requests to review self-published books. I sometimes reckon I spend more time trying to work out whether a publisher is kosher or not than I do editing the damn site!

I've documented on this blog before why RTE has stopped reviewing almost all self-published books. Clearly the people sending me these emails don't stop to look at our 'about' section, which outlines our review policy.

Last time I blogged about self-publishing, someone emailed me privately and said it would be interesting to hear a reviewer's take on what are the most common mistakes in self-published books. So here goes, bearing in mind I'm a reviewer and not a book editor.

The over-riding problem is lack of editing. Many writers seem to take it as a personal insult that someone thinks their work needs rewriting. Those of us who've worked in the print industry feel like saying: "Welcome to the real world!" We all need editors. We all have to rewrite. We all make howlers. Good editors can bludgeon through the undergrowth and help you reveal a perfect rose at the centre. Your best mate or your reading group (most of whom probably write duff poetry!) aren't usually an adequate substitute for a professional editor.

Ironically, almost every self-published book I've read has had the germ of a good plot in there. But sadly it would take sniffer dogs and two army regiments to root it out in most cases! Most depressing was someone recently who boasted how she'd published herself because more than a dozen editors had suggested she altered the ending of the book. Um, do we detect a pattern here?

That inability to murder their darling, so to speak, is the mark of a self-published writer. If you don't get edited, there's no one to tell you you're being self-indulgent and no, really, we can live without the kitchen sink in the book. This category includes the person who refuses to listen to professional advice about the ending to the book, or it might include the 'this is my agenda and it's going in, like it or not' brigade. I read a very intriguing self-published book a couple of years back which was set in Malta. The author was clearly besotted by the country, and was determined that we should share his enthusiasm and shouldn't miss out on any tiny detail of the geography or history or culture of the island. In an experienced editor's hands, that book would been a good 'un. Instead, it had stacks of unrealised potential.

In that rush to share everything with you, self-published writers ignore the fact that good storytelling needs polishing until it shines. A first draft is just that. So clunky and clumsy writing is generally the norm in these books. The writer is so desperate to tell you their story that they perpetrate the dreaded information dumps (often in horribly stilted dialogue) or they provide you with those pages of tedious exposition (yes, often horribly stilted as well!) that you really could live without.

If no one checks your prose before it's slapped through the printing process, there are bound to be proof-reading errors. One book I read a while back showed a worryingly laissez-faire attitude to apostrophes. As my students will testify, I'm a stickler for learning the difference between its and it's. And really it's not difficult. I feel like loaning out my friend Lorraine, who got so infuriated by what Lynne Truss calls the greengrocers' apostrophe (apple's, orange's …) during a visit to Haworth, the home of the Bronte sisters, that she licked her forefinger and marched up the main street erasing the rogue apostrophes on the blackboards outside shops. I can still picture to this day those little damp spots in her path!

I've read three decent crime novels that I'd classify as self-published – Gene Stratton's Fit For Fate, Josh Lanyon's The Hell You Say and Marcus Barr's Haggard Hawk. And you know, all three of those authors have something in common – they really are writers! Gene is a genealogist and has written extensively in that field. Josh was already published until the company went under, taking his first two books with it. And Marcus is a TV scriptwriter.  When I asked his PR person why the heck he'd self-published, she said he didn't have an agent. That was apparently swiftly remedied after the book appeared, and I understand TV are now sniffing round after the series.

These are the exceptions to the rule. And what I find most depressing of all is people boasting that they've had a book self-published. Self-publishing does not make you a writer. It most cases it demeans all the hard work done by authors who have written and re-written and realised that writing is a hard slog and that success doesn't come overnight.

A small celebration

While America was enjoying its annual celebration of its ancestors’ safe arrival on those shores (that’s what Thanksgiving is, isn’t it?) we at Crème de la Crime had our own little cause to raise a glass. It was a cava rather than champagne moment, but one of those every week would do very nicely, thank you.

We’ve had an offer for unabridged audio rights in another of our titles, Hard Time by Maureen Carter. It’s the fourth to go down that road; the others are Adrian Magson’s No Sleep for the Dead and No Tears for the Lost, and The Crimson Cavalier by Mary Andrea Clarke.

That last one could present us with a slightly odd situation: as well as on tape and CD, Mary’s book will be available as a download, to anyone in the world with internet access - so since the print version it isn’t out in the USA till the middle of next year, it may be possible to listen to it before you can read it!

We’re celebrating a little more heartily this time because it’s a different audio publisher, one whose list has a slightly different slant. More options, more opportunities: always a good thing.

Unabridged audio rights take our books to a whole new audience, which is brilliant, but if I’m honest makes me a tad fearful for the future of the printed book. Oddly enough, developments like Kindle don’t worry me nearly as much; reading from a screen is still reading, and it’s hard to do anything else at the same time, so those of us for who (whom? I’m never quite sure…) the feel and smell of a new book, or even an old one, feeds the senses will keep the printed version alive for a long time to come.

But tapes and CDs and downloads… I’ve done it myself; I’ve listened to audio books in the car, or when there’s a stack of envelopes to stuff, or the weekly pile of ironing to tackle. As our lives become ever fuller and busier, there lies the real threat to printed books: a format which allows other activities to take place at the same time. And maybe that’s not really a threat at all.

As long as the printed version comes first and the audio companies have to buy the rights, everybody wins. We dedicated readers can still read; people with no time to read, or health issues which prevent them from enjoying printed pages, don’t have to miss out.

The main market for unabridged audio publishers is traditionally libraries - which, of course, are a great market for crime fiction in any format, since dedicated fans like a constantly replenished supply. An unabridged novel can amount to a dozen or more CDs, doesn’t come cheap and takes up storage space.

But download a book on to your IPod or MP3, and it goes where you go. (Sorry - I don’t mean to sound like a commercial; this stuff is all new and exciting to me.) Modern life has lots of little stretches of time available to be filled in more than one way at a time: the gym, the car, the train journey, the walk to the local shop to buy milk or a newspaper.

Hey, isn’t technology wonderful? I belong to a time when you sat in a chair to read a book, and going for a walk or a drive, even with an errand or activity at the end of it, was simply a matter of moving your legs, and maybe having a conversation if somebody was beside you.

But once I figure out how to use an IPod, I can join a brave new world...

KUM-BA-YA and all that jazz

Happy belated (American) Thanksgiving.

I'm stealing a page from Abby's book (heh-heh, some writer-speak there) and listing the things for which I'm thankful:

I'm thankful for my agent, Michael Bourret, who is both enthusiastic and (I know y'all will find this hard to believe) optimistic.

I'm thankful that my books are still being published. I'm thankful that STRANGLE A LOAF OF ITALIAN BREAD, the 4th mystery in my Ellie Bernstein/Lt. Peter Miller diet club series, will come out from Five Star, especially since the [publishing] world seems to have gone loony-tunes, dropping excellent authors who, in my humble - and not so humble -opinion don't deserve to be dropped.

I'm thankful that some of those excellent authors submit their manuscripts to Five Star, and that my boss, John Helfers, gives them to me to edit. What a gift! Just 3 examples: Gabriella Anderson, Earl Merkel and Kate Flora.

I'm thankful that I can submit my work electronically - without cashing a royalty check so that I can pay for postage - and that I can email my friends on a daily basis.

I'm thankful that my husband, Gordon Aalborg, has signed the contracts for two books: THE HORSE TAMER'S CHALLENGE, a western romance, and DINING WITH DEVILS, a suspense/thriller that takes place in Tasmania (bet you couldn't guess that from the title, eh?)

I'm also thankful that Gordon understands and empathizes when it comes down to the wire on my deadlines. I walk around with the book in my head 24/7 and he "gets it."

I'm thankful that I have Gordon to do a final edit on my books. He's the best free-lance editor in the biz. He's much more "critical" than I am, and his authors love him to pieces for it (just ask them). So do I.

I'm thankful Gordon doesn't complain about the dust bunnies who tend to hold conventions and serenade me with "Kum-Ba-Ya" (my lord) and "One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall." But here's a word of warning to the bunnies. Their fun will end as soon as I write The End on the manuscript that, for some reason I can't fathom, my editor likes to call STRANGLE.

The bunnies' fun will end ... honest it will...

Well, to be honest, it will end as soon as I finish writing STRANGLE A LOAF OF ITALIAN BREAD and the final draft of my second Mary Ellen Dennis history-mystery-romance, JENNY, now looking for a home.

Oh, and as soon as I write a few more chapters of my next crime fiction novel, GYPSY ROSE LIEBERMAN.

I hear the bunnies singing "Whistle While You Work."

Over and Out,
Deni, whistling

Downer, Dude

Jeff Cohen

Much was made last week about the latest in a series of studies that purports to show reading is declining among young people. The world is coming to an end, the sky is falling, the war's never going to end, the planet is fifteen minutes from consuming itself, and while we're at it, kids aren't reading anymore.

Apparently, all those Harry Potter books were being used for doorstops. Who knew there were that many doors?

What was interesting to me about the studies is that they indicate that young children, from pre-school up to let's say the sixth grade, are reading more than they used to, and then suddenly there's a decline in interest. Culture mavens the world over blame the usual suspects: TV, video games, graphic novels (apparently the words in comic books don't count as "reading"; I guess one just absorbs them through osmosis), iPods, movies (not "films" or "cinema"), and lazy parents.

I have another theory.

As the father of two rapidly developing teenagers--one of whom is currently trying to convince colleges to please take about $30,000 from his parents every year for four years--and a writer with some interest in storytelling and reading habits, I have been monitoring the books my children are assigned to read in school.

Man, what a depressing lot.

Since she entered high school in September 2006, my daughter has been required to read (and this is a partial list) Of Mice and Men, The Scarlet Letter, Hiroshima, The Diary of Anne Frank and to top it all off, a segment of Moby-Friggin'-Dick (they don't teach the whole book anymore; none of the teachers understand it).

My son, meanwhile, has been concentrating on Hamlet, Cry the Beloved Country, Macbeth, A Raisin in the Sun and The Great Gatsby.

Not a smile in the bunch. Now, I'm not trying to debate the merits of any of these classic titles, not for a moment. I think each and every one of them is an example of a writer much better than I'll ever be, telling a story that needs to be told in an artful, relevant, brilliant fashion.

But the cumulative effect has to be enormous. Holy mackerel: after that line-up, is it any wonder kids want to give up reading? That maybe they associate books with being sad? My daughter cried for a whole evening when they led the horse away to the glue factory in Animal Farm. It's a wonder she didn't swear off the printed word altogether after what happened to George and Lennie.

Again, all great books. All worthy of reading, and worthy of study. All with something that can touch a student for life, that can inspire.

But all in a row? There can't be one upbeat book in the mix?

Let's recap here: students from age three (when they're likely being read to) to, let's say, nine or ten, when the books are apt to have stories that turn out happily, with characters who are probably likable, and with the strong possibility of a laugh or two along the way--THOSE kids are reading MORE. Once they hit the "real" literature, given the curricula being offered in most schools, they start reading LESS. Hmmm...

Regular readers here will know what's coming next, but I have to say it: Writers who make us laugh get no respect. Yeah, the school system will sneak in Mark Twain (inevitably, Huckleberry Finn, to dare someone to try and ban it), as if he were the beginning, middle and end of humor in fiction. Twain is terrific, but he's not all there is.

No James Thurber. No S.J. Perelman. No Jean Shepherd. No P.G. Wodehouse, Terry Southern, Saki, Douglas Adams or GK Chesterton. I'm not crazy about it, but what about A Confederacy of Dunces? Where are Carl Hiassen and Elmore Leonard? To a whole generation of readers, "comic novel" is a confusing term--shouldn't it be "graphic novel?"

If I knew before I cracked the cover of every book I picked up that I'd be emotionally devastated at the end, would I continue reading? I honestly don't know. But I can say with some certainty that a decline in enthusiasm for reading among teens and young adults is not a compete surprise to me.

Giving Thanks

I've missed Thanksgiving by a couple of days, but the sentiment still stands, so here are a few things I'm grateful for this season:

I'm grateful...

For the pleasure of discovering that the submission you lugged home is actually good.

For my Sony e-Reader that makes "lugging home" submissions more of a metaphor than it used to be.

For long weekends that let me catch up on my backlog (well, some of my backlog).

For publicists who go above and beyond to help my authors reach their audience.

For authors who not only accept, but actually LIKE editing.

For authors who barely need editing (but still let me do it).

For publishers who bring us the quirky, niche-y, non-mainstream books that ensure every reader can find something he or she loves.

For the massive mainstream bestsellers that let big publishers take a chance on the quirky and niche'y.

For agents who know the market and their editors, so that when they tell me, "I have a project you're going to love," I know I will.

For agents who know that the strongest way to advocate for their authors is not with rudeness and hostility, but with reason and calmness.

and finally...

For the writers, who keep tilting at windmills despite rejection, despite silence, despite shrinking advances and marketing budgets, despite audiences distracted by a million different media--and who make it possible for me to have the best job in the world.  Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

This time of year, I sell lots of "classics" to mystery newbies. I started thinking about books everyone should have in their basic library...

THE COMPLETE SHERLOCK HOLMES, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (duh!)

THE BIG SLEEP, Raymond Chandler, no better prose on the planet.

THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD, Agatha Christie, no better ending around, plus the opening breakfast scene is one of the funniest in all of mystery-dom (just thinking about the "Mongoose Rampant" makes me laugh).

AN UNSUITABLE JOB FOR A WOMAN, P.D. James - groundbreaking in about a million different ways.

DEADLOCK, Sara Paretsky, also groundbreaking and a rippin’ good read to boot

THE BLESSING WAY, Tony Hillerman, he is sublime.

HEAVEN’S PRISONERS, James Lee Burke. Also sublime. Also moving, beautifully written, etc. etc.

THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR, Josephine Tey. I know everyone else likes THE DAUGHTER OF TIME but for my money there are few better sheer storytellers than Tey and this one is a corker.

THE HOURS OF THE VIRGIN, Loren D. Estleman. If anyone writes like Chandler today, it’s Estleman. This is my very favorite.

THUS WAS ADONIS MURDERED, Sarah Caudwell, because everyone can use a good laugh courtesy of a smart woman. Plus this offers endless pleasure to the re-reader.

THE LAST COYOTE, Michael Connelly, because it’s my favorite even if it’s not the first in the series. And speaking of great narrative AND a classic character.

A DARK ADAPTED EYE, Ruth Rendell, because you don’t even know what the CRIME is until about 20 pages from the end. This woman can write.

With those 12 titles you are guaranteed years of re-reading pleasure and fresh discovery each time. And yesterday, black Friday, I hand sold books by David Housewright, Chris Grabenstein, Sarah Stewart Taylor, Louise Penny and David Ellis, among others - and I also sold a complete, two volume set of Sherlock Holmes.

And this week’s top 10 entry for this year...

THE CONJURER, Cordelia Frances Biddle, St. Martin’s Minotaur, $23.95.

I admit it, I picked this book up for it’s gorgeous cover, but there’s so much more inside. Biddle is a writer of great complexity and surprising darkness. She paints a picture of 1842 Philadelphia, using as her focal point the innocent Martha Beale, whose father has vanished and who is presumed dead. Martha is completely believable as a denizen of 1842; she’s never anachronistically out of period in her behavior. This is a wonderful recreation of the time with many plot threads that are neatly tied up by the end of the novel. The way this woman writes makes me think of two other very gifted historical authors, Kate Ross and Bruce Alexander. Even better, it makes me remember in December what I enjoyed about this book back in February.

Why I'll still be here in 2099 and beyond!

Sharon Wheeler

I was filling in a form this week to gain access to other university libraries, and our librarian pointed out that the pass expires in 2099. He has insisted that I return in person to renew it!

I promised him that wouldn't be a problem, as I shall live to be at least 352 in any case, as I have so many books in my TBR mountain and I'm not going anywhere 'til they all get read!

Which is why I rarely re-read a book. It always seems like wasted time going back over old ground when there are so many new novels out where waiting for me to find them. And on occasions where I've loved a book unreservedly and wondered about reading it again, I've been too nervous to go back just in case it doesn't stand up to my memories. I'm not sure, either, that much crime fiction stands up to re-reading. Once you know whodunit, the shock factor has generally gone.

Aside from the so-called classics, which I've had to re-read for school and university exams over the years, I can probably name you all the books I've ever read twice – Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, Patricia Highsmith's Ripley books and John Morgan Wilson's Benjamin Justice novels.

There was a good reason for re-reading the latter, aside from it being a damn good series, as I was presenting a paper on Wilson at a conference. And ta-da . . . please allow me to do what I never thought I'd ever do, and engage in some BSP! Questions of Identity in Detective Fiction, published by Cambridge Scholars Press, is now out, featuring my chapter on Wilson. Have a look here if you're interested, and it's available through Amazon. Mine's the sample chapter if you're interested! And while I'm on the subject, The Journalistic Imagination, which I co-edited with Richard Keeble, is also out (no crime fiction link, though!) No idea why the paperback, which is displaying the correct cover, is showing as unavailable. The mysteries of Amazon, no doubt . . .

Anyway, where was I? Highsmith I've re-read several times for the understated writing and the way you can't quite help rooting for Ripley when it looks like his ever-so-civilised life in rural France is about to be disturbed again.

The Sparrow, which is over the border into science fiction, a genre that doesn't usually grab me, is probably one of my favourite all-time books. I read it originally with a great deal of reluctance. I was stuck at home with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and a friend turned up on my doorstep with about a dozen books, dumped them on the sofa and said: "Read those and tell me you don't like science fiction or fantasy!"

My two great finds from the pile were Emma Bull's marvellous War for the Oaks (which I've never re-read) and The Sparrow, which I have – and which earned me lots of brownie points from my reading group who loved it as much as I did.

Sadly I lost all those points in one fell swoop a few months later by choosing Jamie O'Neill's turgid At Swim Two Boys, known by us now as At Swim No Thumbs (we show our verdict on a book with thumbs up/down/sideways).  Only one person out of the ten finished it – and it wasn't me. I've never had the nerve to ask him if he'd consider re-reading it!

An idea touched with genius?

Long, long ago, when I was a young, naïve and terminally hopeful writer, I used to wonder, in the slightly crabby way of young, naïve and terminally hopeful writers, why editors couldn’t be bothered to write a page or two explaining exactly why they didn’t want to pay money for my peerless prose.

As I grew older, wiser, more realistic, (but probably even more crabby) and conscious of the difference between unsigned rejection slips and personal letters from those same editors, it became clearer: they hardly have time to encourage the ones with potential, much less spell out the truth to the ones who work to convince themselves that J K Rowling’s 26 rejections are the tip of the iceberg for most wannabes.

And when I went into publishing, I quickly discovered that in terms of priority, reading manuscripts comes a long way behind meeting a production schedule. As a result, a lot of publishers have decided it’s no longer productive to accumulate a slush pile; they only accept manuscripts that have already passed muster with a literary agent. And agents have even fewer staff than publishers used to have in the days when they read submissions as a matter of course; many of them no longer regard working to develop an author’s potential as a productive use of their time.

But I try to remember my origins. Since we specialise in debut authors, and all authors are debut authors when they get their first contract, most of the submissions we receive are from inexperienced writers who positively thirst for a few lines suggesting ways they can improve. So we decided right from the start that putting out a helping hand should be something we did.

So unlike just about every other publisher in my orbit, Creme de la Crime offers feedback.

For a fee. A modest fee, but a fee. We’re in business. Time is money. My reader’s remit is to keep reading each submission till she’s sure it’s a non-starter; sometimes a first paragraph has seven typos, nine redundant apostrophes and a 72-word sentence with no commas, or the cover sheet shows the finished novel is twice the length our guidelines specify, so that’s as far as she gets. But if that non-starter asks for feedback, she has to read the whole thing, and rightly expects to be paid accordingly. I’m amazed, or maybe I’m not, by how many requests for feedback we get - and no one has yet complained about the fee. In fact, I'm seriously thinking about an increase.

Despite the proliferation of classes, college courses, writers’ groups and weekend workshops, writing is essentially a solitary occupation. Trusting your nearest and dearest to give an honest opinion is not the best idea; chances are they don’t really know what to look for anyway. Pass your work around a workshop group of ten people and you’ll get ten different views. So when the crunch comes, you have to trust your own judgement.

So a lot of writers ache for feedback from a truthful, informed source - and where better to look for it than a publisher? Maybe charging a fee for it will prove to be yet another idea touched with genius from Crème de la Crime which other people copy.

But that’s a whole other posting…

Everything in MODERATE-TION

QUIBBLES & BITS

To the left is a photo of me on an agent-editor panel with Meredith Bernstein. I said something funny. Meredith laughed. So did the audience. Laughter is good.

Repeat: Laughter is good.

Last week I talked about my favourite conference, Left Coast Crime.

So I thought I'd continue the conference theme.

Recently on DorothyL, the discussion revolved around good/bad panel moderators. It was 11 whole months since the last discussion about good/bad moderators, but since it was only 7 months since "Is sex really necessary in mysteries?" and 5 months since "Do you judge a book by its cover?" and 3 months since the rather heated discussion on "blurb whores," and since all those subjects were cropping up again, I paid more attention to the good/bad moderator posts.

Skipping the obvious...
A moderator should keep the discussion moving.
A moderator should know his/her panelists.
A moderator should make sure that one panelist doesn't hog the mic.
Etcetera...

I think there's really only one hard and fast rule: KEEP THE AUDIENCE IN THE ROOM!

When I moderate, I ask my panelists to send me a "secret" - something the general public, maybe even friends, don't know. That way I can introduce my panelists with the following:
"One of my panelists danced naked in a fountain."
"One of my panelists was in a movie with John Travolta."
"One of my panelists won first place in a transvestite fashion show, and I'll let you guess who did what at the end of the hour."

Would you leave the room if that's how I started my panel?

When I don't have time to read my panelists' books, like maybe I have a, you know, deadline, I go to the authors' websites, where (hopefully) their books are touted, maybe even summarized...with excerpts. No website? I Google, I Amazon, I go to the publisher's site, and as a last resort I ask the author.

I do NOT:
Copy bios from the program book.
Talk about myself and my books.
Give my panelists the questions ahead of time.

That last one I learned the hard way. I was moderating a "Pets in Mysteries" panel (you DO know I have pets in my mysteries, don't you?) I had prepared my panelists via email, and with a sinking heart I saw that the last panelist on my left had a stack of index cards in front of her. I asked my first question. She read her answer from 3 index cards. From the corner of my eye I saw a few people leave the room...

Then it got worse.

She looked up from her index cards and said, "My cat died last month."

Her lower lip quivered. Her eyes filled with tears, and---

All I can say is that I challenge ANY moderator to interrupt a panelist who is talking about her dead cat. Actually, she was talking about her dead cat when her dead cat was a live cat, as sobs erupted from her mouth, snot ran from her nose, and tears waterfalled (or is that waterfell?) down her face.

No, the audience wasn't mesmerized. Yes, they left the room in what is commonly referred to as droves.

The Humor Panel is my favorite panel to be on - and moderate. All a moderator has to do is ask one question. The panelists feed off each other, quip after quip after quip.

Best of all, humor panelists have good timing and know when to pause for a laugh.

And if the panel ever lags, I can always sing my own rendition of "Where is my agent?" to the tune of "Where is love?" (from the musical Oliver).

In fact, I'm waiting for someone to ask me to do just that.

Over and Out,
Deni

Reality: What a Concept!

Jeff Cohen

One of my most prized possessions (well, in the top 20, anyway) came in the mail after I did a telephone interview with Gene Roddenberry in the late 1980s. (For those who don't know, Mr. Roddenberry was the creator and executive producer of Star Trek.) It was a certificate on fake parchment, which I later had framed in a fake frame I got at a local dollar store when they were still called "Woolworth's."

In honor of my being such a fine interviewer (uh-huh), it proclaimed me an "honorary flight deck officer" on the Starship U.S.S. Enterprise, which was lovely until I got to wondering if the flight deck officers were the ones in the red shirts who were killed off in the first five minutes of each episode. But it's the thought that counts.

Beneath the proclamation was Roddenberry's signature, which was a very nice touch. Beneath that was another signature, which really put the cherry on top of the sundae (I hate cherries, by the way).

It read: "Captain James T. Kirk."

Mind you, this was not printed: it was a signature, from all appearances hand-written. And that is why it is such a prized possession: How many people can say they have a proclamation hand-signed by a fictional character?

I'm not the first person to notice that society has some difficulty differentiating between the real and the fictional. I started to notice this when Alan Alda, then the star of M*A*S*H on television, was asked to address the graduating class of New York University's medical school, which apparently couldn't tell a real doctor from an actor who played a doctor.

(Remember the ad with the guy who came out and said, "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on television?" That wasn't Alda, either.)

Not long after, Veronica Hamel, who played a sexy lawyer on Hill Street Blues, addressed the graduating class of one of the law schools in Southern California, proving that people were just as confused on the West Coast as the East.

It was one thing when five-year-olds couldn't separate George Reeves from Superman. But now, adults were having a hard time figuring out that the people they saw on screen and in their living rooms were, ya know, actors. That's a little scary.

Next thing you knew, an actor was President of the United States. And a number of years after that, people thought Martin Sheen was President of the United States because he played one on television. There are those who would argue that we'd be better off, but I think that's missing the point.

Keep this in mind: if the Writers Guild of America strike continues as long as many in the industry believe it will, you will be inundated shortly by slews of "reality" shows on television. Do you think any of those are real? There's a question to keep you up nights!

I wrote a novel based on this premise once, and it's the only one that hasn't been published (or scheduled for publication) yet. Kinda makes you wonder.

P.S. Shout-out to Mariano Rivera: Come home, Mo. Sure, they've dissed you, but which fans are going to love you more than we do?

Ugly

We're all adults here.  We're all professionals, minding our manners, recognizing who's buttering our respective slices of bread.  But publishing is a business that grows more and more like sausage-making every day: you might like the end result, but it's best not to see it made.

In some ways, our books are like children--the author delivers the baby to me, and I adopt it.  We have joint custody, and both of us love it.  (I'm ignoring my awkward shift from a sausage metaphor to a baby metaphor, and refuse to consider what that might say about me.)  But...I've adopted twenty babies in the last year, and I don't love them all equally.  And for that matter, how much I love them isn't necessarily reflected in the attention I give them.

Promotion from a publishing house depends on a lot of factors: how many books we need to sell to break even, what titles share the publishing month, and where the author is in his/her career, among others.  If you're a debut author who got a $5000 advance for your mystery, you're probably not going to see much more than a group ad in a smaller or regional magazine, plus whatever online opportunities the house offers. You may also get galleys to send out, and your editor or publicist may do mailings of their own.

What you're not going to get: an ad in the Times. A book tour. A tv commercial. It's frustrating to see other books, maybe even less critically respected books, get all the bells and whistles.  But them's the breaks.  And calling your agent or editor repeatedly to ask for more isn't going to help.  If you have great ideas that you can implement yourself, great--but if you're calling to say, "Why not me?", you're going to wear out your welcome.

It's not fair, maybe it's not smart, but it's the ugly truth.

Christmas Stuff

Christmas STUFF

Robin Agnew

I’m a retailer so my fondness for Christmas should be extreme, but it just isn’t. Instead of selling lots of books we just sell more "stuff". I will also confess that for a retailer Christmas is perhaps the most nerve wracking time of the year, stuff or no stuff. I won’t say it’s make it or break it - we’re often busier in July & August than we are in December - it’s just that the expectations are so high.

Sure , it usually starts out great - the day after Thanksgiving is busy, but books are a last minute item and people wait until the last couple of weeks to buy them. So we usually have a week or two where it’s not just quiet, it’s actually slower than usual, and then we get hit. Now I’ve been doing this for 15 years and I should be used to it, but the holiday season still requires a nice jar of TUMS.

"Stuff" we’re selling is all mystery related, so it’s at least unique. We sell puzzles and mystery dinner party games and we also sell mugs handpainted by a cool lady in Indiana (with skulls on them, no less); book marks with little skull beads, and pins with Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie book covers. But the stuff doesn’t preclude the truly desperate and clueless, which helps to make Christmas exhausting. I mean the guys who come in once a year and tell me their wife (or mother or girlfriend) likes mysteries. When asked what kind, they’ll say, "Oh, Agatha Christie and Patricia Cornwell". In terms of recommendations, that’s a toughie. And I needn’t point out that men shopping on Christmas Eve are merely suckers waiting to be plucked. Actually we try and give the best recommendations we can - else why would these people return to shop with us?

One of our tools is our "Top 10" list - we have a list of our favorite books, hopefully extremely varied, on display all of December so we can easily sell one of those to the confused customer. And as a bonus these are books we’ve especially enjoyed and want to sell. Still, I’m not looking forward to the Friday after Thanksgiving and the jar of TUMS. I’m looking forward to Christmas day when the store is closed and the dust has settled. Will it or won’t it be a great holiday season? Stay tuned....

Oh, and here’s my first "Top 10" entry (these are alphabetical). More to come next week.

Megan Abbott is a truly original voice in mystery fiction. This noir novel is set in 50's Hollywood, and exposes a very seamy side of the movie business. We follow slick PR man Gil "Hop" Hopkins through the novel as he unravels the secret of starlet Jean Spangler’s disappearance. No-one is free of corruption in this book; everyone is touched by it, and I think one of the more interesting things about this novel (along with the lovely prose) are the various reactions of the characters to both the corruption and the glamour that surrounds them. Brilliantly taking the tiny shreds of a true story (there was a Jean Spangler, and she really did disappear) Abbott takes the pieces and makes her own delirious, almost hallucinogenic reality, along the way filling in the dreamy details of the 50's.

The Song is You

, Megan Abbott, Simon & Schuster, $23.00.

Thanks

PJ Nunn

I don't know how it got to be November so soon and can hardly believe it's Thanksgiving next week. But so it is. And like countless others, I'm preparing to make the family pilgrimage to my parents' house to nosh turkey and trimmings with siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles and other assorted relatives. I've already been updated on clashes that are likely and given my menu assignments. Hotel reservations are made (because I refuse to sleep on a living room hide-a-bed) and the holiday cycle begins.

Despite minor annoyances that are inevitable, it really is my favorite time of year. I hear even the weather is getting cooler, no doubt in cooperation with my expectations. But what does any of that have to do with book promotion? Nothing. And everything.

Let's face it, with so many books coming out every month, it's harder than ever for a new author to rise above the rest. One thing that rarely fails to get positive attention is an author that remembers to say "thank you."

So as you go into the Thanksgiving holiday, take time to:

• Send a thank you note to store event coordinators, librarians, radio hosts, etc. who've done something for you recently
• Send a gift or card to your editor, publicist, or anyone else at your publisher who's been especially helpful this year
• Do something special for family and friends who've gone above and beyond to support your writing career
• Send Thanksgiving e-cards to those on your mailing list and other friends who've enjoyed your writing

And above all, do something to thank yourself for all your hard work. You deserve it!

Till next time,

Knowing what you write

Sharon Wheeler

So d'you reckon writers should write what they know or know what they write? I think I'll plump for the latter, thanks. Otherwise Shakespeare's entire canon would have consisted of a variation on a theme of a working class boy from Stratford poaching deer and then legging it off to London to make his fortune.

Not that there's anything wrong in the least with writing what you know. Dick Francis has made a career out of the horse racing world – and what he didn't know, he sent his late wife Mary off to research! Elaine Flinn, an antiques expert, brings her knowledge into her Molly Doyle series. And Cornelia Read, who's obviously had what you might call an unconventional life, uses that to great effect in the wonderful A Field of Darkness.

As a journalist, I immerse myself in a subject if I'm writing a feature. So you'd expect novelists to do the same. And it must be an occupational hazard, once you have a book out, waiting for people to wave their arms and pick holes in the research. Bit like those anoraks who delight in spotting anomalies in films.

I admit I'm fairly unforgiving about errors in stories. Of course they happen and I've perpetrated my fair share in print. But the ones where you know the writer could and should have researched them make me twitch.

There was the author who based the vital plot twist on someone being able to jump off a train that had just left a station. Snag was, I'd commuted on that particular line for ten years and knew damn well the slam-door trains were long gone. Once you were on the train, you were there 'til the next station when the conductor released the door mechanism. An email to the train operator's press office confirmed this fact within ten minutes, and my rather uncharitable thought was that if I could check it, so could the writer.

Not a major error, of course, and guaranteed not to be spotted by 98% of readers who wouldn't have travelled on that line. And no doubt the author assumed she was right. But minor errors make me wonder if there are others there which I haven't spotted . . .

Getting people to read over your work if you've ventured into an unfamiliar area would seem sensible.  There have been several occasions with American writers setting books in the UK where I was left squawking in disbelief by some of the errors (shopkeepers selling candy bars, British people in small towns using 'gotten' or 'is all' in dialogue, hummingbirds frequenting the Lake District . . .) You'd have thought getting a Brit to look over the manuscript might have been a cunning plan. No doubt American fans can provide similar examples of howlers from UK writers.

There are times when a writer has gone to the other extreme and presented the reader with the fruits of their research in an indigestible chunk. I always enjoy coming out of a book with the feeling of "ooh, I didn't know that!" But information dumps feel like you're being hit over the head with a copy of War and Peace while the author dances round chanting: "Look, look, aren't I clever!"

So if it's all the same to you, I'll go for a balance and expect the author to know what they write. And to writers who can't be bothered to do their research, go and write fantasy instead . . .

Walking the tightrope

One of the most annoying things that’s ever been said to me, in any context whatsoever, was this: ‘I suppose what you do is a bit like a business, isn’t it?’

I took several deep breaths, counted to ten and walked away. The misguided speaker was someone I couldn’t afford to offend. Someone with a government salary going into the bank and clearly no concept of how the real world works.

The real world in the case of a small publishing company is a precarious balancing act. Like every business in the world, we have to balance expenditure against income, keeping the outgoings as low as possible without compromising on standards.

When you’re as small as we are, marketing is less a matter of spending money, more a case of imagination, ingenuity and sheer hard graft; so our main costs are editing, design and printing.

And the greatest of these is printing.

So at this time of year the big questions revolve around print runs, and who does the job for us.

For the first thirteen books we cultivated a good relationship with a printer based a couple of hours away; their quality was wonderful, and we didn’t encounter a single problem - until their business model changed, and all of a sudden they stopped being the cheapest option for the kind of work we wanted. So we had to cast the net around.

I receive e-mails every week from India and China, offering prices which on the face of it look pretty attractive. But I don’t speak any variety of Indian or Chinese, and judging by the e-mails they don’t speak English. Not a problem these days, when effectively what they’re printing is a photograph of the words - but what happens when something goes wrong?

More e-mails arrive from companies based in Germany, Spain and Eastern Europe. Their prices are rarely as low as those from what’s euphemistically known as ‘the developing world’, but they often have agents in the UK, so communication is less of a problem.

But I find myself asking the same question: what happens when something goes wrong?

We’ve encountered two fairly major production glitches this year, both easily sorted when our new UK-based printer simply sent a van to the distributors’ warehouse and collected the faulty stock. Less easy when the warehouse is in London and the printer’s in Mumbai. Or even Hamburg, or Krakow.

But the bottom line has to be, how much will it cost us? I’ve watched eyebrows shoot into hairlines when publishers point out how much they really make per copy sold; a few naïve authors of my acquaintance (Dead Guy company definitely excepted) can’t get past the idea that since they get ten percent of cover price, the publisher must get the other ninety. Believe me, that is not the case! Chain bookshop discounts mean we’re lucky to make as much as the author - and that’s only on the copies we actually sell. The ones that sit unsold in the warehouse quickly start costing us money.

Which brings me neatly to another balancing act: how many copies to print. As in any production process, economies of scale rule; the more we print, the lower the cost per copy. We need to print enough to ensure the income from them will cover all the other costs as well - but we have to be realistic about the number we think we can sell; half the print run left in the warehouse means the unit cost is doubled. (New technology short print run companies would have you believe you can get as few as a dozen for a peanuts unit price. If that’s the case, I haven’t yet found the printer who does it, and besides, we may not be in J K Rowling’s league, but we do think in four figures.)

When I was a kid my sense of balance was so poor I never learned to ride a bike. The past couple of weeks have felt a lot like riding one across a tightrope.

Left Coast is the Right Cost

No, that's not a typo. I didn't mean to say "Left Coast is the Right Coast." Read on...

Left Coast Crime is my favourite conference. It's more laid-back than, say, Bouchercon. And best of all, it's a true FAN conference, and I'm into fans :-)

At last year's LCC I met - for the first time - the incredibly talented Marshall Karp, the infinitely hugable Robert Fate, and the charming (and funny) Troy Cook. Following the conference, I moderated a book club discussion on Robert Fate's BABY SHARK, I free-lance edited Troy's ONE MINUTE ASSASSIN, and I'm "mentoring" Marshall Karp's daughter Sarah (when she has time to write; she's a busy bee).

This year's LCC is in Denver...my old 'hood. I plan to be there with bells on. And probably some other clothes, too.

LCC/Denver is scheduled for March 6-9, 2008 at the Adam's Mark Hotel, and it's shaping up to be a phenomenal event! Programs include an optional ski day in Breckinridge on Wednesday, March 5th, an LCC Party Bus that will tour some of Denver's more famous crime sites, a surveillance exercise --- tracking your favorite authors --- on the 16th Street Mall, a Forensics track on Saturday, March 8th, the Alferd E. Packer (Colorado's notorious cannibal) Memorial Banquet, a Hawaiian fashion contest, and an optional trip to Estes Park the following Monday (March 10th) to see and dine at The Stanley Hotel, where Stephen King wrote part of THE SHINING.

LCC/Denver will even feature a Celebrity Chef: my friend, author Joanne Pence.

You can see a current list of registrants and find out more information by going to the website. Registration is $165. That low registration rate is set to increase on November 16th. So why not register now and spend the money you save on something really useful like more time in the bar OR as partial payment for one of the nifty trips planned before or after the conference? Or, hey, you can even buy Jeff Cohen's SOME LIKE IT HOT BUTTERED, which is only $6.99...and still have lots of money left over for the bar.

Below are some photos I snapped at LCC/Seattle. Rick (Mofina) and Steve (Brewer) and Chris Goff (to the right of Rochelle) will all be at LCC/Denver. So will Jeff Cohen, but he didn't like the photo I shot of him (at Malice), so I'm not posting it because I don't want to piss him off because I hope he'll give me an author's quote for STRANGLE A LOAF OF ITALIAN BREAD, which is due to be turned in to my publisher December 1...therefore, I'll now say over and out, Deni (who can't post photos for beans).

Overkill

Jeff Cohen

I am sick to death of Bee Movie, and I haven't even seen it.

Jerry Seinfeld's epic animated tale of a bee who falls in love with Renee Zellweger (oooooooookay... ) is, by all accounts, an amusing, visually exciting, nicely crafted piece of work. I'm sure that if I were to go to a theatre and check it out, I'd find at least parts of it very enjoyable.

But it's unlikely now, because holy mackerel, am I tired of hearing about this film.

Seinfeld, who co-wrote and stars (well, his voice stars) in this movie, started promoting the thing a full year before it arrived in a multiplex near you. There he was, on November 6, 2006, talking about Bee Movie to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, with the film's logo already in place, describing the exciting process of creating the voice track.

It's been a year since then, and he's never stopped.

You can find Seinfeld on your TV, doing trailers for the sound system at your movie theatre (in his bee guise), appearing on commercials for Hewlett-Packard (and talking about bees), probably selling you waffles at the supermarket. You get the feeling that if it were possible, he'd be coming door-to-door, telling people about his feshtunkineh movie until each and every one of us would have an irrational aversion to honey.

I can certainly empathize.

In the course of trying to get the word out about Some Like It Hot-Buttered, I feel like I've been mentioning the book, its premise and just generally how you should go out and buy one to the point that I'm getting tired of hearing about it.

Now, I know I'm not Jerry Seinfeld. I can tell by checking my driver's license, my crumbling home and my even more crumbling bank account. And he and I have different goals: He's letting people know he's back with a new ambitious project, and I'm letting people know I exist. But even as the scale of our endeavors are vastly different, and the methods we use reflect that fact, the basic concept remains the same--tell everybody about your work until the whole world (or in my case, something the size of a medium-sized town) knows about it.

I can't show up on NBC every 20 minutes with "Hot-Buttered Juniors" that seem to last longer (and are often funnier than) the programs during which they appear. Jon Stewart wouldn't have invited me onto his show even before striking writers (solidarity!) forced him to stop having one. Hewlett-Packard, strikingly, has not phoned with an offer. I can't even get that Dell stoner guy (remember him?) on the phone.

But I do get the feeling that time I post a message on DorothyL that there's the same sort of eye-rolling, sigh-inducing feeling in at least some people's reactions. I can't imagine that regular readers of DEAD GUY aren't at least a little tired of hearing about Elliot Freed and his travails (yes, operator, that's "travails"). At a few of the stores where I've showed up for signings (NOT the ones I blogged about a couple of weeks ago), I've gotten the distinct impression that people were doing their best to train their gazes away from the guy behind the card table with his microwave popcorn, in the sincere hope that if they didn't look at me, I wouldn't be there. There were times I shared that hope.

Just for a sense of perspective: I know most of that isn't true. I know that I'm barely a blip on the radar screen for the mystery community in general, and not noticeable enough to reach that level of irritation. But as an author, you do have to wonder: If every time a potential reader sees your name, it's a blatant plug for your book, are you doing yourself (or the book) any good?

A question for better minds than mine, I'm sure.

P.S. I'm all for labor, and on the side of every working guy who's trying to protect his job or better his position, but the Broadway stagehands couldn't have waited ONE MORE DAY to go on strike, just not the afternoon of my daughter's 15th birthday, when we had tickets for Avenue Q? One stinkin' day would have crippled them?

In Which I Have My Doubts

My homework for this weekend is to read one of the crash manuscripts I currently have on my desk, and prepare my revision letter for the authors so they can get started on the next draft.  That in itself is nothing new, but although I've done countless revision letters, this is going to be a new experience for me.  The manuscript is being published on our Threshold list for politically conservative books, and I...am not politically conservative.

In some ways, this shouldn't be any different from the other edits I do--after all, I'm not a private eye, a Regency baroness, or a werewolf, and I edit novels featuring those characters all the time.  (Hmm...if I combined all three, I might have the book equivalent of a perfect storm.  Or was The Perfect Storm the book equivalent of the perfect storm?)  But will I be able to put aside my own politics in order to be the most effective reader of this manuscript?

At heart, this is the dilemma that every editor faces when he or she sits down to a new manuscript.  Where does one draw the line between bringing out the best in a book and imposing your own voice on the material?  How best can I respect the author's voice without abdicating my responsibility as an editor?  Normally I do that by putting myself in the place of the reader--if something is unclear to me, presumably it will be to the customer who picks up the book in a store.  I'm struggling a bit to get into the mindset of the reader for this book, though; because the book is essentially an argument about conservative policy, I'm having trouble gauging how closely the average reader would agree with the author's position beforehand.

So, in the end, I think I have to approach this just as I would the P.I.s and duchesses and werewolves--accept the tenets of the world the author has built, and ensure that everything else is internally consistent.  Off to sharpen my pencils...

Scheduling an Event

I spent lots of my day last Thursday turning authors down who wanted to come to the store for signings for various reasons. It’s a part of my job I really hate, and I was talked into one event against my better judgement. Authors are nice people by and large, and I hate to turn them down, but sometimes it makes no sense for an author with no local connection or no following of any kind to come all the way to my store for an event, that I will in turn need to spend time & money promoting. It doesn’t work out for either party.

One ultimately satisfactory conversation was with an author from another part of the country who has three books out BUT they’re all in hardcover. I had to tell him my interest was only for a stock signing, for which I would probably only be ordering 4 or 5 books. He realized it wasn’t worth 5 driving hours of HIS time for this kind of event. But he wasn’t hostile or defensive, (good tip, authors) he was pleasant, and we got to chatting about the Love is Murder Conference in Chicago in February, which he is going to. We agreed if we could maybe convince a few of the Love is Murder participants to come along with him, it might be a good idea. So we agreed to chat again. We’ll see if this works or not but I always prefer more than one author at a time unless they are very well known.

Another conversation was with a PR person at a major publisher, someone who sets up events with us frequently. We have several on the books already for January & March & he was wanting to add another, something I was reluctant to do as it’s a first timer. I wanted to pair this person up with a better known author who is coming to town the next week. For one thing there is such a thing as "event overload" - Ann Arbor is a draw for lots of authors, and scheduling more than one event every two weeks is sometimes a mistake. However the better known author is doing an off site signing, not a store one, so I agreed to host the newbie - mostly to stay in the good graces of the PR person at the publisher, who has sent us lots of good events. It could tank, but we’ll see.

I know for a new author it’s kind of a chicken-and-the-egg thing, because how can you get your name out there if no-one will host an event for you? My advice is to stick to your local stores at first; to go to conferences; and to check with far flung stores two or three books into your series. Let word of mouth and a good product do the rest for you, because, let’s face it, if you don’t have a good book to sell there’s just no point in all the other stuff.

And finally I’ll finish up with a "good event" story - we launched a very local product last week, DETROIT NOIR, and invited 5 or 6 contributors to come. We ordered a cake - always a sales incentive, I’ve found! - and people started to trickle and then rush in, and more contributors (9 in all) turned up than we had expected. It was a sell out and an ideal one, because since it was an anthology, a sale for one was a sale for all. A win-win. All the participants were happy and went home with a good impression of the store and a good feeling about the sales potential for their joint effort. Book events are tricky and it’s nice when they work out. Oh, and did I mention I was wearing my "lucky" shirt? It never hurts.

Author Kathryn Lilley discusses literary lessons learned while “birthing” a new mystery series

PJ Nunn

Since Kathy's new novel came out just over a month ago, I thought it would be nice to hear a newly published author's take on book promotion:

DYING TO BE THIN, a Fat City Mystery, has been available in bookstores and online vendors for a little more than a month. The literary launch has been a fantastic experience.  As a newly published writer (I’ve actually been published many times before this series, but always under a pseudonym), here are a few lessons that I have drawn from the experience:

Readers are wonderful

I get an enormous rush when I meet someone at a book signing who has already read the book, and loves it. I’ve also been getting some great emails from readers through my web site. I keep them all in a special file. Feedback from readers is what makes it all worthwhile!

Of course, not all the feedback that I get is wonderful. I’m thinking of one woman in particular. She showed up at my book signing, having already read DYING TO BE THIN. She claimed that she “loved” the book, but then she proceeded to insult me for about five minutes, claiming that my book “isn’t anything like Shakespeare, of course…” She spent another ten minutes explaining why it isn’t a “serious” work, letting me know that a “real” book wouldn’t contain so much sex, violence and comedy.

I looked at her and said, “Well, you know, the Bard put a bit of sex, violence, and comedy in his work.”

She looked at me, startled, and said, “But your book has that too.”

Um, right.

It’s important to play up your assets

I appeared at one downtown LA bookstore for a signing, and even before I got set up, copies of DYING TO BE THIN were flying off the table. I was amazed that so many of the buyers were men, who I haven’t considered my primary audience.

I commented on this fact to the bookseller, who smiled knowingly and said, “Yes, any time an attractive female signs here, the men line up.”

You have to understand that this bookstore is set in a location where the men are surrounded mostly by buttoned-down, female attorneys and cops. Any woman in a V-neck is evidently the equivalent of eye candy.

It was the best signing I’ve had so far, in terms of sheer volume. Now, I’m not saying I’m proud of the reason I sold a lot of books that day.

But the next time I sign there, I’m wearing something cut to the navel. And a sparkling belly button ring.

What goes around…doesn’t always come back

Some writers who constantly solicit you to attend their author events never show up at your events. But hey, no biggie. Sometimes it’s a dog-eat-writer world out there.

Amazon numbers will drive you batty

I simply cannot figure out how Amazon comes up with their rankings. My numbers bounce all over the place, and I gather that’s par for the course for many authors. I’ve given up looking at them, except when I get an email from someone congratulating me that my Amazon numbers are “on fire.” But when I look at the numbers, they look low to me (which on Amazon, means high). Sigh. If someone has a clue how that whole thing works, please email me through my web site, www.kathrynlilley.com. Thank you very much.

The show must go on

I had a signing scheduled for a Saturday, but woke up that morning feeling sick, and getting sicker by the minute. But I was determined not to pull a last-minute cancellation.

Twenty minutes before the signing was supposed to start, I was sitting in the car with my husband, projectile vomiting into a plastic bag. I made an emergency call to a friend of mine to appear at the table with me, in case I had to make a sudden dash to the ladies room.

The appearance went off flawlessly. I had a surge of adrenaline that magically suspended the illness for precisely one hour. The instant I got back into the car after the signing, I resumed vomiting, and continued do so, all the way to Urgent Care.

The Internet can really mess you up

My web site, www.kathrynlilley.com, was “down” for the greater part of a week, due to some strange gremlin that infected the cyber layer of the atmosphere.  My poor beleaguered webmaster tried to explain the whole thing to me. But I hear technical jargon the way a dog hears reproachful instructions; it’s all “Blah, blah, blah.”

Anyway, if the web site is down when you try to navigate to it, keep trying. I’m just hoping that the god of cyberspace will stop throwing thunderbolts.

Having a publicist is wonderful

In addition to being on a very tight publication schedule, I hold down a full-time “day job” as an editor. I have zero time to be pounding on doors, setting up appearances, signings, etc. I could not live without the assistance of my publicist, PJ Nunn, and her incredible staff. All I have to do for these events is show up. Breakthrough Promotions, you guys rock!

Six writers you damn well should have heard of!

Sharon Wheeler

One thing that depresses me loads is when you see the same authors – and often distinctly average ones at that – being talked up on the discussion lists, generally because they happen to be list members or because someone has met them at a convention and wants to gush that they spoke to A Real-Life Writer.

And then there are the writers where you can't understand why everyone else isn't raving about them. Everyone's got their own 'why the hell isn't Joe Bloggs famous' or 'what on earth happened to …?' list. I could name you a stack of writers who are criminally under-rated and who seem to have fallen off the face of the earth – Jack Dickson, Denise Danks, Karen Kijewski and Pat O'Keeffe spring to mind.

For what it's worth, then, here are six authors who appear to be alive, well and still writing but who in my fallible opinion don't get the attention they deserve. And if you check them out, you'll find they're all class acts. In no particular order. . .

Stuart Pawson
His police procedural series, set in a fictional town in Yorkshire, is an absolute delight all through. The books, featuring DI Charlie Priest, are like eating chocolate with chilli in. You’re loving the smooth taste until all of a sudden there's a distinct bite there. Pawson is witty and a polished storyteller, but perhaps his greatest attraction is the world he's built around Charlie, with larger-than-life colleagues and small-town life.

Susan Kelly
Kelly's police procedural series also takes place in a small town – but this one's real (Newbury in Berkshire) It features a hero who has enough personal baggage to be interesting, but not so much that it's same old, same old. Det Supt Gregory Summers is approaching 50 and shacked up with his 20-something daughter-in-law following the death of his son. Kelly never over-does the private life angst, but provides us with well-rounded and believable characters. She tells a damn good story and plots very neatly.

Josh Lanyon
Hands up all you straights who have read Josh's books? Bet there's not that many of you – and you're missing out big-time. The stories feature Adrien English, a bookseller in Los Angeles, who has a talent for finding trouble and has a rather confusing relationship with a way back in the closet cop. The first two books in the series were published by Gay Men's Press in the UK. When the publishers went under, Lanyon had to self-publish the third, The Hell You Say, with iUniverse, which is absolutely scandalous when you look at some of the dross that's coming out of mainstream publishers.

Maureen Carter
This choice will please my blogmate Lynne Patrick, but she knows very well that I only rave about a book if I genuinely enjoy it. Carter's series, featuring feisty Birmingham cop Bev Morriss, has crackly dialogue, nails the atmosphere of the UK's second city, and brisk and fluent storytelling. It'd work like a dream on TV, but jumps off the pages as it is. Bev's no glossy heroine, but Carter makes you care about her.

Martin O'Brien
Read O'Brien's police procedural series, set in France, and you'll believe you're driving down country lanes, the smell of lavender all around, and with an appetising lunch waiting for you at a village bistro. The hero's a rugby player-turned-cop with his own way of doing things, but the maverick angle doesn't overpower the story. And O'Brien's dry humour helps the story along.

Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
If you like Reginald Hill, you'll adore Harrod-Eagles, who writes witty police procedurals with a dark underbelly. She's obviously got a cult following, but her books rarely get mentioned, which is a crying shame, as they're full of ebullient language and a likeable main character in the shape of DI Bill Slider. I particularly love her little cameo characters as well as the interplay between Slider and his sidekick DS Jim Atherton. But under the surface humour there's always some unsettling for Slider, both privately and professionally.

By the time you've read this blog, I'll have thought of another dozen writers I could easily have mentioned. And you're all probably sighing and rolling your eyes and muttering: "Damn woman's got no taste. Why didn't she mention …?"

There's no such thing as an accident...

Do you ever get the feeling someone up there is trying to tell you something?

This time yesterday I was in an armchair with my foot wrapped in a frozen gel-pack and propped on a stool. Sitting at the computer to type was not an option, partly because I couldn’t walk the twenty yards or so between house and office but also because it was too blankety-blank painful.

It was OK as long as I didn’t move it, so I could read. And think.

I sort of believe there’s a point to everything that happens, though sometimes it’s hard to see it. This time, though, it’s clear: I was being told to take some time to read and think.

So I did. Two partial manuscripts have been on my desk for a couple of weeks; a few days ago my reader handed me a third which had made it through her stringent selection process.

And when I’d read, I sat awhile and thought, partly about the manuscripts, but mainly about why I came into this business in the first place. I’m occasionally asked to give talks about what I do, and my closing line is something like I spend time reading great crime novels - so you can too. Which is true, of course; I read everything that goes out under the Crème de la Crime imprint at least twice, and a lot of the stuff that never gets that far. But maybe it’s not quite as true as it used to be.

Running any business, and publishing is very much a business, involves a large element of routine. We publish a book a month for half the year, which may not sound like a lot, but could be more books per permanent staff member than some much larger companies. And in a tiny one, the managing editor is also the filing clerk, coffee maker and pretty well everything else that doesn’t involve a special skill. Which makes for variety in the working day, but has the effect of pushing anything that doesn’t have a deadline to the end of the line.

Most of the jobs involved in getting a book to print have a deadline. Reading manuscripts doesn’t. Writers, I’ve found, are endlessly patient.

So the last couple of days have taken me back to the roots, in a manner of speaking. It’s easy to get caught up in the routine, which can sometimes feel like a carousel without a stop button. I sympathise entirely with Abby, suddenly finding herself beset with projects which all need to be done yesterday. One reason for publishing for only half the year is to build in time to think, and read, and consider the next step - but somehow the routine becomes a way of life, and we have to make a huge effort to ensure it works out as we intended.

Or maybe somebody up there intervenes, creates a glitch in our attention or a wrinkle in the carpet, which results in a crocked ankle and enforced reading and thinking time. And a reminder of what it’s really about.

It’s less painful today and I can walk a little way, but I better not take any risks. Besides, another manuscript arrived in yesterday’s mail.

QUEEN OF SCREAMS makes noise!

QUIBBLES & BITS

Someone named Uncle Creepy (I kid you not) said the following: "Eileen Dietz. Don't know the name? I bet you know the face all too well. In fact, I'd wager that she at one time or another contributed to you having some really sleepless nights."

Eileen Dietz is my sister. She lives in Hollywood and she was the girl behind that nasty subliminal Captain Howdy visage from The Exorcist, and she also did a lot of the...er, naughty...bits for Linda Blair, too.

Eileen's latest movie is called The Queen of Screams. It's about a small group of teenagers who are trapped in a deserted movie theater and stalked by a crazed B-movie actress out to kill.

My sister Eileen calls it: Whatever Happened to Baby Jane meets Sunset Boulevard meets Carrie.

The trailer went live a few days ago, and it looks like fun. You can check it out by clicking this link.

Speaking of Halloween, which we weren't but it's a good segue, my star athlete, 6 year-old granddaughter Marley chose her own costume: a Cinderella ballgown. It had hoops underneath the skirt and lacing on the front (bodice) and a scoop-neckline and even a bit of fake fur.

It was chilly outside. So underneath the ballgown, Marley wore a white turtleneck shirt. "Cinderella 2007," she said.

Over and Out,
Deni

There's Nothing About It That Isn't Awful

Jeffrey Cohen

In a flood of anger and sadness, I wrote this post in June, but refrained from posting it for personal reasons. Since Etta's birthday was last Friday, I decided this was the time.

Nothing that follows is about publishing. For those disappointed by that, I'll be back next week, and Deni will be here tomorrow. I apologize.

Etta Sanders died June 5th.

Those are incredibly hard words to type. I first met Etta just about 21 years ago, in the loft she and her husband shared in Lower Manhattan. I was intimidated.

She was my (then-future) wife's closet friend, someone whose opinion of me would make a very strong impression on Jessica, and I wanted that impression to be a good one. So at that dinner--in celebration of Jessica's birthday, no less, just a few weeks after we'd met--I did all I could to impress Etta. I even ate lobster, which is about as major a sacrifice as I can make (all things from the sea are not on my menu).

We left later that evening to hear some "experimental" music played by a friend of theirs. To me, it was the equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard for an hour, but I smiled, and when the "music" was over, out of the earshot of the musicians, Etta asked what I thought. I hesitated. But my (then-future) wife looked at me and said, "it's okay to tell the truth."

"In my opinion," I said, "the emperor has no clothes." I braced myself.

But Etta just smiled and nodded. "It's not for everybody," she said.

She was a large part of my life for the next 20 years. And I grew to appreciate her warmth, her determination, her strong moral sense, and her sense of humor. I remember once, early on, when she and I began to banter about... something, and my wife walked over and asked what was going on. "We're riffing," Etta said. It was perfect.

There was no nod toward convention in her life as I knew it. She lived the life that was right for her, and anyone who believed otherwise wasn't really paying attention. Living over a business near City Hall in Manhattan, in a building not originally intended for residential use (but zoned properly, I should note), she and her husband lived as they saw fit, and did very nicely at it.

Etta did some freelancing in local papers, and occasionally asked for help or advice, and I was impressed with how quickly she got up to speed. By the end, she was writing important pieces about the downtown living experience, particularly in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

And those attacks, almost six years later, did her in.

The loft is less than five blocks from the site of the World Trade Center towers, and on that awful day, with no telephone communication into the city, we were more than concerned. Etta, her husband and their twin two-year-old sons were much too close. We later found out they had left the apartment and gotten out of Lower Manhattan.

But then, the city and the federal government, just a few days after the attacks, urged people to return to their normal lives. The danger had passed, they said. The head of the Environmental Protection Agency said so. The mayor said so. There was nothing to fear. Come home, they said. Live your lives, they said. Otherwise, the terrorists win.

So Etta and her family came home. An air purifier was provided, and that ran in the loft for some time. That was the only concession. New Yorkers are tough. They were anxious to prove that they couldn't be driven out of their own city. So they came home. After all, they knew the air was okay.

And life went on. The boys grew, becoming the extraordinary children you'd expect from extraordinary parents. Etta wrote about the residents of Lower Manhattan coming back to a devastated area. We went to the loft every once in a while, and they came to visit us in New Jersey as often. We always went to the loft for Thanksgiving, a tradition at which I, after 20 years of attendance, am still considered "the new guy."

Then Etta began to cough. And had trouble catching her breath. And the doctors kept telling her it was one thing, or another, but that she shouldn't worry. It wasn't life-threatening.

By the time it was diagnosed, her lung cancer was in Stage 4. There is no Stage 5.

Throughout, there was something more than a brave face exhibited. The face was downright cheerful. Yes, there were times when the chemo made her too tired to participate, even once at Thanksgiving, but optimism was the rule of the day. And new drug therapies seemed to make near-miraculous progress. It bought her a year and a half that she might not have had otherwise.

Until a couple of months ago, when the drugs stopped working and the tumors, which had been shrinking, began to grow again. The end came very, very fast. We'd just seen Etta over Memorial Day weekend, and she was certainly slowed, and stunned by the quick turnaround, but still cheerful.

She leaves behind a husband and two nine-year-old boys.

Forget the politics of people who would try to capitalize on the tragedy of the 9/11 attacks. Forget about the callousness of those who would appear on television saying everything was safe when they knew it wasn't. Forget, if you can, about the emergency personnel who weren't given proper ventilators by the administration hailing them as the true heroes.

But remember that two small boys don't have their mother now, and won't ever again. If that doesn't make you angry, as it does me, then one of us has it wrong.

There's nothing about this story that isn't awful.

Uh-oh.

I've had a leisurely fall, editorially speaking--my publishing calendar was pretty empty for September and October, so I was mostly reviewing copy, covers, publicity, that sort of thing.  Like the grasshopper amid the ants, I was blithely sniffing through my submissions without a care in the world--I didn't have new manuscripts coming in until November.

Hey, it's November!  Why didn't anyone tell me?

Our lovely managing editor came by to point out that I was a bit late in getting some of my material in to her, including a revised manuscript that had come in ages ago.  Oops...but that's OK, I'll get right on it.  After all, I don't have too much else on the pl--

What's that?  Another author just submitted her manuscript early?  Oh, well, that's great!  I'll read that right after I line-edit the first one.

The what's coming in?  Oh, right, that manuscript we just bought but are publishing next June, that's already a crash?  And it has to go to production by the end of the month or we miss our print deadline?  No problem.  It's probably pretty clean--I'll look at it as soon as I line-edit the first book and write a revision letter for the second one.

Early what?  That super-crash manuscript that wasn't coming in until mid-December is coming in now?  And we want to publish it in April?  Hey, it's all good.  I just have to line-edit Book 1, do the revision letter for Book 2, and get Book 3 into production in...er, the next two weeks.

You want me to edit what?  Oh, that new book we just acquired that we're dropping into the fall schedule?  Great, love to.  Oh, so in addition to reading and editing that manuscript, we're already late on art, cover copy and our catalog page?  No problem...

In lieu of form letters for queries, I may just start sending a link to this blog.  For anyone who finds this message, please send a sharpened #2.5 pencil and a pitcher of dirty martinis to the 13th floor of the S&S building.

Loren Estleman & Book Launch Parties

When we first opened our doors many years ago we were so green it's almost embarrassing to remember.  We had, in our fog, actually heard of Loren Estleman, and when one of our customers brought him by to meet us it was a great experience for us and light dawned - we should invite him in for a book signing!  (Duh!)  This was 15 years ago so Estleman wasn't quite as well known & regarded as he is now (though he is still underrated, in my opinion) so our first event went fine.  It wasn't great but it drew enough people not to be embarrassing.  15 years later, he's an SRO author for us, with people driving here from as far away as Cincinnati to get their books signed.  One man - a long time customer and in general exceedingly lovely person - brings a shopping bag full of books that sometimes Loren himself hasn't seen, like ARCs from Japan.  I'm not sure where he gets them!

Now this is an example of, I guess I'd call it, synchonicity.  Estleman's books, of course, are about Detroit; being in Ann Arbor, we're 45 minutes from Detroit.  This is handy.  He has been growing in stature and just plain writing ability in the years we've known him - younger guys that come to the store now are a bit in awe of him.  But even handier for us, he's truly a nice guy who had made himself available for countelss events and book festivals, always turning up (it's true, often just on the dot, enough to give anxious me a near heart attack every time), and always being gracious, charming, and even better, interesting.  I can call him on the phone and he'll answer & set up an event on the spot.  I guess I'd call him low maintenance in the nicest possible way.  He'll sign books with anyone & seems to enjoy it so we've had some odd pairings over the years - Alan Gordon, Denise Swanson - but they've always worked out.

Today we're launching a book at the store called DETROIT NOIR, an anthology of stories about Detroit, and the latest in the excellent Akashic series.  Estleman is of course the featured contiributor, and he'll be at the store with everyone else today, hopefully enjoying the crowd and the noise and a piece of cake.  This is an especially sweet event for us as several of the contributors are ex-Borders employees - as is my husband.  Several of the Borders managers have been invited, and I'm assuming if they're not too exhausted from dealing with Caroline Kennedy on Thursday night, they''ll come.  It's the perfect example of the value of a niche market.  It's an anthology, but thanks to Loren Estleman, synchonicity, and great word of mouth, it should be a packed house.

It's nice not to be so green anymore, and even nicer to have a long lasting relationship with such a wonderful person and writer.  It makes selling books more than worthwhile.

Oh, and this book also prompted another first for me - a woman called earlier in the week wanting to know how many pages were in the book - she wanted to know if it was worth her $15 investment!  She decided it probably was - we'll see if she turns up today or not.

What makes a publicist say, “Yes!”

PJ Nunn

There are a lot of "no's" in this business. More said by others than by me, but still. It can get a little heavy some days. So when there's something that makes me say, "Yes!" it's a good thing and makes for good days.

Here are a few things that are guaranteed to make me smile:

• Getting a late afternoon phone call from a TV producer we've been calling for months who says he's ready to talk dates
• Getting a "thank you" from a bookseller who was delighted with the author signing we arranged and inviting the author back with the next book
• Clients who regularly keep us updated with their schedules
• Clients who make sure we have a high res head shot and occasional event snapshots
• Clients who email us periodically with ideas for little known hooks we can use
• Feedback from clients and markets about recent events with suggestions of how to make them even better
• Getting contacted by an author who says one of our clients recommended they call
• Clients who communicate clearly what they'd like
• Getting a print review we've been waiting for and it's good
• After countless press releases, getting a request for a review copy and interview from a national publication
• When a client is unhappy about something we did or didn't get done, knowing he/she came to us to talk about it instead of complaining to everyone else
• Scheduling any event that we know our client really wants - that one really makes my day!
• Chocolate

I'm sure there are lots of other things. In general I love what I do even knowing that a big part of my job is taking rejection so my clients don't have to. And this week has pretty much been a "Yes" week. California has been rough, particularly in the southern parts. I'm grateful none of our clients or friends suffered irreparable losses in the fires. We've had some minor difficulties with mail not getting to stores, ARCs not getting to reviewers (or being really slow) and low attendance at signing events in SoCal, but nothing major. Vicki Delany is the only author we have actively touring through SoCal at the moment so I'd love it if any of you can arrange to stop in one of the stores on her tour and see her!

On the up side for the week, I had a followup visit with my cardiologist on Monday. She's generally happy with my blood pressure levels (imagine having high blood pressure in this line of work!), made slight adjustments to my meds and suggested I diet more. Hmph! Still after the roller coaster I was on early in the summer, I'm thankful to be so much better!

I'm still plugging away at the gym with Dwayne, my personal trainer. Scary isn't he? But good for me. Yet I digress.

Other "Yes" things this week - I got some long-awaited ARCs and finished copies of client books that I really needed as requests for them were starting to pile up. I've got 2 new employees who are working out nicely.

I learned that a friend - Cheryl Nason - has started a new literary blog for the Dallas/Ft. Worth area called Dallas Book Diva and will be doing audio interviews. She regularly does on air interviews for Time Warner Cable and I've heard the Dallas Morning News will also be plugging the blog. Check it out - we're helping her schedule authors for audio interviews so you'll see and hear plenty of our clients in coming months I hope! Look for Chris Grabenstein, Donna Andrews and Helen Barer in the next month.

Probably the high point of the week was a request that came in today from More Magazine for a review copy of State of the Onion (Berkeley, Jan 2008) and possibly an interview with Julie Hyzy. Nothing confirmed as yet, but I'm ever hopeful! And then again, the week's not over yet.

Till next time!

Invasion of the WASPs

Sharon Wheeler

I don’t read a lot of short stories – I'm one of those plebs who reckons they hurtle to a halt either totally implausibly or far too neatly just as the story is starting to look juicy. And I'm getting increasingly tired of ploughing through an anthology and then discovering half the stories have appeared somewhere else.

In fact, reading some of those anthologies is a bit like Groundhog Day – it seems to be the usual suspects contributing. And almost without exception they're WASP men. The one that really took the biscuit for me a while back was Men From Boys – and yep, all the contributors were male. Even though the book included a number of my favourite writers (Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Reginald Hill and Mark Billingham) I was particularly bugged by the decision of editor John Harvey (another author I admire) not to include stories by women.

I checked back on RTE where I ended the review thus: "… you can now see why lesbian and women writers end up being forced to band together in their own anthologies if mainstream publishers are excluding them from collections such as MEN FROM BOYS. If you don't agree with the exclusionist line, here or elsewhere, don't buy the book."

An email conversation I had earlier in the week sparked all this off again. I reviewed Akashic Press's Twin Cities Noir for RTE and enjoyed it – with some reservations. And yep, those were more or less related to the make-up of the contributing writers.

I'm a fan of Akashic's Noir anthologies (based to date on US, UK and Irish cities), and theirs are about the only short story collections I will go out of my way to read. But in the latest review I queried why, across the anthologies, there seem to be hardly any stories from black and gay writers.

Johanna Ingalls, managing editor for Akashic, emailed me to thank me for the review, and to very politely take issue with some of my comments. With her permission, I'm quoting what she said:

"One point I would love to add (I don't know if you post comments) is in response to your question about black & gay authors. Twin Cities Noir may not be the best in the series to prove this, but we are very careful to try & reflect the various cities' diversities ... So, if the city has a big black population, Asian, hispanic, etc ... we work hard with the editors to ensure that these populations are represented. We don't always succeed perfectly, but if you look at the series overall you will find numerous black authors, and absolutely gay & lesbian authors (some may not be evident as just because they're gay doesn't always mean there will be gay content in the story). Akashic has a specific focus on African-American and African Diaspora authors, and we also have a great track record of publishing gay authors (we've won a few Lambdas, etc.), so we work hard both in general and specifically within the noir series to give voice to these authors.

"I honestly don't know the ethnic diversity of the Twin Cities, and maybe the collection should have been less white in this case, but I did want to let you know at least that this is something we strive so hard to address with each city/editor."

I happen to know that one of the writers included in Twin Cities Noir is a lesbian, although her story didn't involve gay characters. I'm not into quotas, before anyone gets the wrong idea. And I'm sure not all black or gay writers want to write short stories. They might not want to identify themselves as GLBT either (although the photos accompanying the biogs in the back identify black authors).

Kudos to Akashic for being aware that there is a diversity issue and for attempting to do something about it. Elsewhere, most of the short story anthologies I've reviewed over the past few years don't reflect what's happening across the genre – it seems to be the same names, usually men, doing the rounds.

Gay crime fiction has been a strong part of the market for the best part of 20 years. I've blogged before about the fairly depressing fact that most of what we see in that side of the genre now is lightweight 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy' cute gym bunnies, or self-published work that needs a damn good edit to fulfil its promise. So does that mean there aren't enough noir gay writers around, or are they being excluded from the short story party?

And whichever way you look at it, there are nowhere near enough black writers in crime fiction. Off the top of my head I can think of Mike Phillips and Dreda Say Mitchell in the UK and Walter Mosley, Gary Phillips, Valerie Wilson Wesley, Eleanor Taylor Bland, Charlotte Carter and Paula L Woods in the US.

So I reckon it's significant that the only time I can remember seeing any of those writers in an anthology was in Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African-American Writers (edited by Eleanor Taylor Bland). So we're back where we started – a restricted anthology. But this time I can't help thinking it was a way of giving under-represented writers a voice?

So is this cock-up or conspiracy theory? Are a lot of the anthologies simply the old boys' network scratching each other's backs? Or aren't the black and gay writers coming up with the goods?