Is there anything to match it? That moment you hold the first copy of the book you’ve toiled, sweated and sometimes even wept over? When you flick through the pages and see words you thought you knew by heart looking new and fresh and somehow better than when they only existed as a pile of manuscript or a Word file on the computer?
Authors, please believe me when I say I get almost as big a buzz from it as you do.
Just one copy of each title is delivered to us here at the office; the rest of the print run goes into our distributors’ warehouse, and we order the quantity we need for review copies and promotion. They arrive a few days later and don’t stay long. But that first copy…
The one that arrived a few days ago isn’t just the first copy of a new title – it’s also our first title of 2009, and it’s a bit special in a lot of ways. I may have mentioned in passing – oh, OK, shamelessly plugged a time or seven – Criminal Tendencies, the collection of short stories we’re publishing to help raise some funds for a cancer charity. This is it, folks; it’s here. Available in the UK from early next month, on special promotion in branches of Waterstone’s, and, we hope, in a lot of other bookshops too. We’re working on that. Very hard indeed. One pound sterling for each copy we sell in the UK will go to the National Hereditary Breast Cancer Helpline. In the USA it’s released in September (but see below) and one US dollar per copy sold will go to the National Breast Cancer Coalition.
It’s crammed with short stories, all of them criminally brilliant, by some of the best and most popular crime writers around: Val McDermid, Reginald Hill, Andrew Taylor and a whole lot more – including Zoë Sharp, who is International Guest of Honour at Mayhem in the Midlands in Omaha, Nebraska, in a few weeks. Thanks to Dufour Editions, who distribute our titles over the water, early copies will be available in the bookroom there, and I’m sure Zoë would be delighted to sign them.
All twenty-six of the contributing authors have given their stories free of fee or royalties, and pretty well everyone, at each stage of the process, has made a similar gesture. Which only served to confirm what I knew anyway – crime writers are warm, generous people. The only small fly in the proverbial ointment (there’s always one, had you noticed?) was a rather mean-spirited letter which appeared in a magazine aimed at aspiring writers; its author demanded to know what we planned to do with the rest of the money people paid us, and came very close to accusing us of profiteering off the back of a couple of deserving charities. The letter didn’t actually name us, but there were circumstances which made it obvious who it was referring to.
I was more angry with the magazine than with the misguided letter-writer; they gave the letter a star rating and a prize, which, to me anyway, implied that its editorial staff supported the view it presented, and therefore knew just as little about the way publishing works. On a similar tack, I’m aware there are people out there who think a 10% royalty for the author means the publisher coolly pockets the other 90% of the cover price and takes long holidays in the Bahamas – but surely those people shouldn’t include suppliers of information to aspiring writers.
Just for the record, and in case anyone of similar mindset happens to dip into Dead Guy this week (not that I’m really worrying about that – our readers are perceptive, well-informed people), we need to sell twice as many copies of Criminal Tendencies as we normally expect from our titles. If we don’t we will actually lose money.
But that’s not going to happen. Crime writers are warm, generous people; the crime readers I’ve met, and that amounts to quite a few over the past six years, are just as caring and agreeable. And of course they enjoy a well-written, neatly-plotted, properly developed crime story.
And Criminal Tendencies contains twenty-six of them.
