KHAN!!!!!! Wait, I mean Con

Star Trek Inspirational Posters found here.

Sure I don't live in Manhattan anymore, even if I'm darned close, and sure it's really Tuesday at this moment, but I've always been broad-minded about My Town Mondays.

This weekend was the 3rd Annual NY Comic-Con (vention). I've been to all three and it's ballooned in size and scope every year. While things keep improving, other problems of scale arise and need tweaking. After such a short run, that this is already the second largest event after Comic Con Int'l in San Diego shows that the East Coast was hungry for its own local venue. Sensible, too, since so much of the publishing is in NYC.

Sorry for the delay in posting, but Blogger's been more evil and obstreperous handling pictures than usual, which is really saying something. The order and shape will have to stay what it is (click to enlarge) and I'll notate around the edges. Yuck.

Above- The Javitz Center indeed has a soaring atrium and many kinds of other merchandise, like this case of figurines, are on display besides comics books and graphic novels. There's statuary; toys in both vinyl and plush; clothing and thematic accessories; non-picture books; lots of original artwork; games on boards, cards, and video; and exhibits from not only from 2-D producers but studios like Disney and Nickelodeon and SciFi who screened piles of related previews and trailers. Don't forget the funnel cakes.


The 2 top pics in the group above show the main problem in this year's show. The mob scene between cement walls is not the exhibition hall, which was, for the first time, a room large enough to walk in wide aisles without getting poked by horns and light sabers all the time. (Yay!) However, the downstairs hall where the panels were presented, including popular media previews, had no flow and inadequate capacity. A set of escalators leads to and from it from above, and the pic with the shiny tile floor is THE LINE FOR THE ESCALATOR simply to get into the mob! I didn't see a single panel, because of the schooling crowds that blockaded every inch of floor space. The media shows should be in a large, open access amphitheater set-up. On the biggest day, Saturday, it was disappointing not to get to attend any of the discussions or presentations. However, last year the capacity was lean enough they sold out of tickets, and lots of traveling attendeed couldn't even get in. So this is improvement. Also above is the quintessential comic dealer set-up, boxes with issues in plastic sleeves for browsing. There are fewer of these type of booths than you'd imagine, fewer than the first years. I think. It's more about the splashy spectacle now.

The last of this chunk above is a truly sad sight to educate any writer. WARNING: RANT FOLLOWS. See that tiny table on the blue carpet in the image's center? The one with a few books that's slapped against the back of another, much grander booth? Whoever the publisher, they set up a space with signing slots in this lousy spot, and the dispirited author was spending his hour just sitting there, slouched so far back you can't see him in my picture. I almost went back at least to examine his book out of pity, but frankly, there was plenty of traffic (as you can see) walking that row if he'd come out from behind the table! Stopped waiting for people to approach him! The place incites sensory overload, but... Meet the other exhibitors in your row. Most people working in the field are also fans. They may buy a book, send people your way, or at least help you pass the time in bonhomie. Meet attendees! Ask them how the day's going, what they've seen so far that's cool, whether it's their first con, etc. Regular people like having interest shown in them, just like authors do : ) And they may even buy your book or tell a friend who will. It takes energy to be outgoing, but at an event like this (especially if your slot's only a hour or so), enthusiasm teems in the candy-colored oxygen supply. Don't just mope and liquify, feeling bad about your admittedly horrible placement and pathetic display. Time's a wastin' while potential readers flit by. If you wrote the book, you're part of the product and more potentially compelling than any long table, pleated draping, banner, or vertical shelving unit!

The scene has echoes of Mardi Gras and elaborate tailgating parties. You'll notice lots and lots of costumed people and become inured to them. This year (also a yay), security was way less draconian about the 'weapons' people had with them. How you gonna make Gandalf give up his staff? Some of the outfits are very professional, some are more home-grown, but cosplayers and civvies are all cavorting together. Even the non-costumed tend to wear gear that proclaims their superheroic or thematic allegiances. It's a colorful, good-natured scene, polite and pleasant despite the apparently horrible and martial characters that populate it. Most of the costumed are not only happy, but positively eager, to have their pictures taken. Above left, the X-Men Women had just finished taking pictures with the excited girl CatWoman, if that's how to phrase it. Bad news for all the scantily costumed: Next year's con is in early Feb. again, and the coat check issues were myriad during the last winter event.

Of course, no convention's complete without Stormtroopers. Trust me on this. Half of this pair, once the helmet was off, was revealed to be a 30-ish woman with a chestnut bob and granny glasses who would've looked right at home behind any circulation desk. Cons Rock!

Speaking of Poetry

Remainder image from here.

As we've recently been discussing poetry, haikus specifically, I was inspired to post this to which I was recently introduced via John Scalzi's blog. The poet is the prolific and witty Clive James, and more of his poetry's here. If you're not familiar with the concept of remaindered books, a definition of these publisher's sad clowns is here. If you are familiar, just sit back in the ample schadenfreude he casts and enjoy.

The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book --
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seeminly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys
The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.

Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler's War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyart with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,
Is there with Pertwee's Promenades and Pierrots--
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor's Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
"My boobs will give everyone hours of fun".

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error--
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.

Clive James

That Minotaur Wasn't So Scary

Image from Payton's Dungeon.

Actually, the Beast-in-chief wore a blazer and stylish spectacles. At the MWA NYC monthy chapter meeting this week, I got to converse with writers I know, sit with our own WoM Elaine, and learn some things about St. Martin's Minotaur, part of the Macmillan/St. Martin's mystery fiction behemoth. Their imprint alone puts out about 120 books per year. Andrew Martin (no relation to the saint, but horned god of Minotaur) was there to speak to us, as was executive editor Kelley Ragland, and some other folks who handle editing, administration, publicity (Jessica was sitting next to me), and library sales were scattered around the tables. I didn't hear all the full names often enough to remember with my sieve-like recall. So, forgive me, because I stink as a schmooze hound, and I wasn't avidly collecting cards and networking. I just felt like carousing and soaking up the info with the chicken gravy.

I can accurately report that the Minotaur folks seemed enthusiastic about their work and even more pleasantly, they seem to care a lot about the quality of the manuscripts, cited like a mantra as the sine qua non of getting published. Conveniently, and unlike Providence, it's one part of the process and industry the writer has control over. I also heard the (shocking) advice not to overstretch your marketing efforts online if they're getting in the way of your writing, and that they're willing to see authors build over several books. Immediate blockbusters are not required, though always welcome, of course. All nice to hear, and especially nice for the Minotaur authors present. Given that March 31st has come and gone without a congratulatory phone call, I think I probably did not win the First Crime Novel Contest that Minotaur and MWA co-sponsored this year. So, I'm not in that happy company yet.

Did you get the call? You can tell us. We could seriously rename ourselves the Women of Discretion and also of Mystery, but only after Discretion first. Spill.

The Minotaur guests also didn't much like the talk of "trends" and find it counterproductive to chase them. For what it's worth, if you're an espionage author or foreign author selling U.S. rights, perhaps you're in luck trend-wise. But those categories don't apply to me, so I'd best keep grinding out what I can. It was funny when a writer asked how Minotaur handles touring schedules etc. for their authors with other full-time jobs. The reply was that people have to work out individually what activities will be possible for them, but Minotaur would never decline a good manuscript because an author couldn't tour, and besides, almost all their authors still have day jobs. Welcome to the glamor of crime writing.

They're experimenting with various avenues of online marketing, like many publishers, but it's not clear which strategies are working and the double-investment in traditional approaches as well as the new creates in-house expense and confusion as well as potential. One such new initiative is Moments In Crime, a rotating blog from their huge roster of authors. Andrew Martin said that post-Kindle, e-books did double in sales last year, but that means from tiny number to twice a tiny number. However, audiobooks began like that, too, and have grown to a substantive piece of business today. On the acquisitions side, they deal almost exclusively with agented authors, and it's difficult for a self-published title, even with good sales numbers, to find its way to one of their editors.

If you're an MWA member, in a few days, you'll be able log in and hear the entire Past Meeting as a podcast, but I think those are the high points. If you have other questions about a particular topic of publishing interest I skipped, feel free to ask in the comments. I'll try to remember what was said or make up something that sounds plausible.

Speaking of day jobs: Today, I'm sewing table linens and planning menus and gardening and cleaning for houseguests. Call me Innkeeper. Meanwhile, Elaine is busy, busy with editing deadlines. Laura's manning her trade show booth this weekend. Nan has her own viper's nest of complications to wrestle before Malice Domestic, so I can only hope Terrie and Lois are beaming with pacific contentment somewhere. But I have my doubts. Now that spring is really starting to sproing, it's hauling tail like a lead-footed trucker on white crosses. Hope you're enjoying the breeze in your sails!

Update: In other publishing news, Harper Collins will publish you, but not for money exactly, and retailers can't return surplus. (WSJ article via Roger L. Simon's blog.) But perhaps you'll receive total consciousness on your deathbed, which would be nice.

Don't Care What. Who Do You Write For?

From the amazing Branded in the 80s blog, the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. I hope blogger Shawn will be my peep.


Elaine posted this week about the ever-shifting definitions within genres. As I see it, shelving arrangements are as much fashion as fact, and I know writers who have to check 2 or 3 sections to find themselves. But the purpose of knowing your market as a writer is to help you explain it to agents and editors and readers, to help you hit the bullseye of your story goal better. And I find keeping up with the slapdash scorecards of Hot and Not subgenres only make me confused and dispirited.

When I use the term story goal, I don't mean anything tremendously formal, just the way you'd like readers to feel at the end. Should they love/hate the protagonist, be pleasantly spent from the thrill ride or the laughs, feel like they've just left a bowling alley full of entertaining regulars, have a brooding sense of tragic reality or of difficult justice done? I think once you're far enough in a manuscript, you ought to know what overall effect you hope to achieve, so your editing passes can refine and amplify it. But who is it you're trying to affect?

The category I'm finding most persistently useful as a career-oriented fiction writer is target readership. Who are my people and who else do they read? If I capture that, the publishing types can encode it into whatever slot for the catalog, because by the time I start calling myself "fill-in-the-blank-lit" in a query, that label may be so February. Laura recently posted about finding unusual new ways to reach potential readers. Knowing who readers are means you can better locate them outside the bookstore and library, and better understand how certain agents or publishing approaches may help you reach them. Addressing the crucial question of readership, however, means addressing one of the most common and infuriating assumptions I hear again and again from other aspirants.

Aspiring Writer's Conceit #1: I am writing for all ages, both and mixed genders, all strata of society and anarchy, a tale that translated into every language on the planet can bring enjoyment and enrichment to any intelligent, sentient being of any species currently known or unknown.

Oh sure, we can't assemble five people to agree on the proper preparation and condiments for a hot dog, but I'll say Amen to your lofty claim if you'll do the same for me. Okay, now may we at least admit that establishing our inevitable, global readership requires a beachhead? First, the readers of Ed McBain's police procedurals, for example, then the world.

For my latest project, I've confessed my peeps (with visual evidence) in this post. When I'm standing near people in a line or on the subway, the clothes they're wearing and the media or products they're carrying or discussing tell me whether they're my potential readers. Some of these folks (sadly) enjoy less of the printed prose for leisure than other media. No matter, I still think they're awesome, so I have a comic book and will have a web comic as a portal to my created world. I hope it may lead some of the more prose-phobic to try out a novel of mine someday as well as adding facets and bonus content for those finding the book first. My target readers are probably 18-54, significantly male though I'm not (tricky), and geeks of some niche who like modern technology, games, mysterious histories, and having their brains tickled. They enjoy the absurd and fantastic as a way to play with real-world dilemmas and existential concepts. Robots versus ancient ghosts in an Apocalypse with banana peels.

So, are your peeps buying recyclables or scrapbooking, volunteering at animal shelters or attending concerts, watching Judge Judy or reading biographies in the bathtub? Are they of a certain age or gender? Do they read 2 hardcovers a month or 4 paperbacks a week? Who are their current favorite authors? I'm going on a limb as an unproven quantity here, and welcome any feedback from authors farther down their professional paths. I've spent a lot of time imagining my protagonists and plot, but I believe it's also important to spend time imagining what their consumers might be like. Who are they and what do they value in their reading experience? Then, it'll be more obvious to the many people a writer like me must convince between invention and publication how my final manuscript will delight that readership as well as myself.

BFP: Acknowledgments and Dedications

In this case, the F is for Blatant Friend Promotion, rather than Self, dagnabbit.

The Good Liar is a recently-released international thriller of romance and espionage by a writing group buddy of mine, Laura Caldwell. (Hmmm, Laura C.'s are good omens!) In my entirely biased opinion, having been lucky enough to read/crit as she wrote it, this one's a yummy read with snappy characters in exotic locales. That said, I must admit that the writing of hers I've enjoyed most recently is in the acknowledgments.

To explain: Not long ago, while doing the weekly errands, my sister-in-law was able to pull a Laura Caldwell title off the rack of their neighborhood drugstore, and show my 8 and 6 year-old nieces my name in the front while explaining why it was there. This led my oldest niece to surprise me later by asking how many authors I've helped, and whether I can get her a publishing deal for her picture books, and whether I'll be eligible for the Caldecott. I'm afraid I had to let her down a little, but it was neat to get the stamp of legitimacy as a publishing professional, though I've never been published (yet). Even if my own name's not on TGL's spine, it's in there, and has the potential to sneak insidiously into tote bags and onto nightstands across the nation. Feel free to buy and share multiple copies to aid my subliminal infiltration campaign.

"I know I've seen that name somewhere before...Don't bother with the manuscript. Just fax over a contract. The fat one." I imagine it'll work something like that.

Yesterday, WoM's own Laura C. discussed being in the acknowledgments of her sister-in-law's non-fiction book on weddings, which led me to think more about the subject of front matter.

Acknowledgments are a tip-of-the-hat from an author, and I've been warmly flattered (buttered?) to think someone found my comments useful. Some acknowledgment sections are sprawling and widely inclusive, while some are hardly there at all. I think they have to remain somewhat fluid based on what and whom one goes through in the research and publishing. But dedications, it seems to me, get decided and stone-cut a lot earlier.

So, have you been thrilled or dismayed to find yourself in an acknowledgment or dedication? Has your credit hit the cutting room floor? Whether you're already in print or not, do you know how your next dedication will read? Confess in the comments.

Short Stuff Sticker Shock

Allow me to hie to my fainting couch like Madame Recamier.

If hardcover prices don't already make you a little woozy in your weejuns, here's the latest wrinkle in softies, courtesy of my local drug store.

As I'm enviously prone to do, I was browsing the widely available, ergo widely read, book and magazine titles at a major chain. I spied a new (to me) title by a bestselling author of whom I am a sincere admirer, if less ardent in recent years. I noticed it wasn't very thick when I picked it up, but I don't always mind a quick read. I browsed the back cover. Still fine. I flipped inside for a peek at a random page in the thick of things (my preference over first or last pages). The text was HUGE, relatively speaking. It was at least 12 point font, but I'm betting more like 13 or 14. For weak-eyed readers, this will be welcome, but it wasn't stickered as one of those easy-to-read versions. Given the thickness of the book, I found myself curious, and started counting rows and words.

Keeping in mind that standard manuscript format is 250 words/page and that's how we typically estimate finished lengths in pages for agents and editors, etc, here's what I found in my admittedly non-comprehensive riffling and counting:

This title's pages were 25 lines long. Pretty standard, check.
The lengths of margin-to-margin lines ranged from 6 words to just one I counted with 11, and the majority come in at more like 7 words.
This got me to a generous average of 175 words/page on full pages.
There were 275 numbered pages.
This calculates to slightly over 48,000 words.

Now, that's an unrealistic maximum, because this book has LOTS of shorter pages due to pithy chunks of dialogue and the half-page chapter beginnings and partial-page chapter endings. As I recall it now (and forgot to note specifically, drat!), there were more than twenty chapters and some almost blank and numbered back pages. I think it's no grinchiness to say the book is, in fact, much closer to 40,000 words, about half of what I expect in a small paperback, and is still priced at the standard $6.99 mass market price.

I've since checked online, and the hardcover of this comes in at 176 pages, so the word/page count in that edition probably comes closer to the standard 250/page, but what do you think about buying a non-illustrated, series hardcover of that length for the $17.95 list?

I believe readers can and will judge whether they think it's worth it. I'm not calling anyone out, but let no one tell you the long-form short story or novella's a dead form. You just can't call it that openly, and you need a reader base so hungry for content that they won't squeal at half-servings.

Is this a trend? Do you know others besides the title I saw?

Do Editors Still Edit?

Later this month, the guest speaker at my local Sisters in Crime chapter meeting will be an editor from Simon and Schuster. Among the things he’ll discuss will be, “Do editors edit anymore?” How do I know? Because that’s what the announcement postcard says in boldfaced, italicized, and slightly larger type.

The Sisters in Crime general discussion list recently inaugurated an offering called Mentor Monday. A wonderful idea, it features a different publishing professional (published author, editor, agent, librarian) answering list members’ questions every Monday. This week's guest, an author, was asked, “We keep hearing that editors don’t edit anymore. What has been your experience?”

Whether or not editors still edit has become a hot question the past several years. The problem is, the people posed the question usually aren’t the best ones to answer it. Writers generally go by their personal experience, which is usually with the same editor for a number of years, and editors tend to go by what they themselves do. The best person to ask would be someone who deals with a variety of editors from a variety of publishing houses.

As a freelance copyeditor, I can tell you, in no uncertain terms, that the answer to whether or not editors still edit is an unequivocal, um, yes and no. The fact is, some editors edit and some don’t. Some publishers require their editors to edit and others don’t. And among the editors who edit and the houses that encourage it, the amount of editing that’s done varies.

First let’s clarify the type of editing we’re discussing. Editors such as the guest speaker at my upcoming chapter meeting do developmental editing. Here, the editor helps the writer produce the final draft of a manuscript. The editor will point out problems with the plot and pacing and characters. He or she will recommend where material should be added to fill out descriptions or improve explanations, where text could be deleted to tighten things up, how paragraphs or sections could be shifted to increase tension or flow. These editors almost always work in-house.

Copyeditors do everything else, including copy (mechanical) editing and line (stylistic) editing. Some also do substantive (structural) editing. (For descriptions, click here.) These editors generally work on a freelance or contract basis.

Over the years, I’ve worked for every type of publisher in terms of the amount of editing expected. One full-time employer felt that once it acquired a manuscript, it had the right to totally rework it, no matter what the author wanted or how much the author objected. Another felt the writer’s words were sacred and didn’t even allow commas to be inserted without the author’s approval. Most fell in between these two extremes.

As a freelance copyeditor, I do work for a number of different publishers, a few on a regular basis. Some of these clients want me to plow in and fix everything necessary, while others want me to merely point out the problems and recommend the corrections. Again, most fall in between, but they still vary in how heavily they want me to edit and in the amount of leeway they give me.

I’ve also noticed that the quality of the manuscripts from one publisher can vary depending on who the in-house editor is. At one company, some of the editors can be superb, obviously working closely with their authors to craft near-to-perfect final drafts, while other editors there seem to barely look at their manuscripts. Needless to say, I lunge for manuscripts edited by the first kind of editor and sometimes find my schedule suddenly packed when offered a project handled by the second kind. I’ve had some manuscripts from editors like the latter that I pretty much ended up having to rewrite.

But if my experience doesn’t convince you, bring up the subject at the next gathering of published authors you attend. Guaranteed, some will complain of too much editor intrusion, others will lament the lack of editing they've received, and others will say their experiences have been just fine.

Super Linky Tuesday

No doubt about it. Those Martians have a sense of humor. c. Barcroft Media. Don't sue, please.


You may be celebrating the NY Football Giants victory (some of us are in mourning), or following the bucks and throws of the political rodeo, or indulging in some Fat Tuesday gluttony, and here we have the perfect accompaniment of smokin' hot links:

1) Great, more competition. Striking screenwriters go back to their novels.

2) Not NaNoWriMo. Work-for-sale. Jeff Vandermeer explains how he wrote a publishable MS in two months.

3) Rachel Donadio muses in the NYT Sunday Book Review about why, despite technological improvements, publishing still takes so darn long.

4) For debut mystery author Rosemary Harris of the blog Jungle Red, Super Tuesday can only mean her book launch party at Partners & Crime tonight. As per above, it took Ro 22 months to see Pushing Up Daisies in print. Congrats!

5) Wacky kicker courtesy of the "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks.
"Chicken", anyone?

It's a Business, After All

Clare’s short-but-sweet post this past Monday elicited some very interesting comments, a few of which I’ve heard in various forms over the years from almost every writer I’ve known. Being a writer myself as well as an editor, I understand both sides of the issue—what my writer friends feel, believe, and wish and the reality.

The reality is that publishing is a business. It would be wonderful if the publishers could take leaps of faith and sign all the manuscripts their editors took a shine to. It would be fantastic if they didn’t need to be concerned with authors being new or having poor track records, being good writers technically or not, having more than one book in them or not, being marketable or not. It would be great if the bookstores could just stock every book ever published, whether or not its predecessors did well, whether or not the store’s customers indicated an interest in the author or the subject or not. These things would be ideal. But they wouldn’t be good business.

Just like other companies, publishers are in business to make a profit. They find their niche, they hire skilled employees, and they work to get their share of the market. If they repeatedly publish books that don’t sell enough to cover the company’s operating costs, they soon go out of business. And books, even the tiniest ones, cost a small fortune to publish. They’re composed of just paper and ink, but a ton of people work on them—not merely the author and editor, but a copyeditor, proofreader, indexer, book designer, compositor (typesetter), cover designer, printer, binder, cover copy writer, catalog copy writer, publicist, salespeople, special salespeople, subsidiary rights people, and all their various supervisors and assistants. And this list, which isn’t inclusive to begin with, doesn’t include the people who don’t directly work on the books but keep the publishing house running, such as the accounting personnel and IT people. Every publisher occasionally takes a chance on a “special” project, but no publisher can afford doing this too often.

The same is true at the bookstore level. To make enough money to cover their operating expenses and turn some kind of profit, bookstores need to sell what their customers want. If they fill their shelves with books that most people have never heard of and don’t offer enough copies of the books that people specifically come in for, it’s a problem. Such a bookstore would soon find its customers going down the street to a store that does have the books they want.

This is why it’s so important that authors be willing and able to help publicize their books. It’s also why it helps to have a previous book that sold well. It’s a sad fact that the publishers put most of their budgets behind the books that seem to need it the least—the books by the authors who already have big followings, recognizable names, or some sort of platform. But look at it this way: If you had a business, would you rather commit your hard-earned finances to the product that most of your advisers agree has an excellent chance of bringing a good return or to the one that, if lucky, will bring a small return?

Sometimes I feel jaded looking at publishing like this. I, too, have dreams of selling a million copies, chatting with Oprah, and becoming a mainstay on the New York Times Best-Seller List. I know I’m not a favorite at functions attended by writers where this subject comes up. Worse, because of the realities of publishing, many writers see the publisher-author relationship as adversarial. Since I’m an editor, I’m an enemy.

But that’s silly. Publishers want to find new writers. They need to replenish their stables. And the bookstores want fresh voices to draw new readers. After all, it’s just good business.

What's in a name?

I want to talk about titles. But first, an announcement.

Well, it's done. My new thriller. Sent to the publisher two days ahead of my February 1 deadline.

I'm relieved, happy and quite disoriented. My last push to get the manuscript ready meant total immersion this last couple weeks. Except for that pesky day job and a few completely necessary parties, I put everything else on hold -- answered no email, didn't update any web pages, returned only essential phone calls, even rescheduled some theater tickets!

I've been living in West Virginia in 1976 for so long that my day-to-day reality in present-day New York City seems less real to me than my setting and characters.

One of the events I did take time for was a dinner for the new national board of the MWA on which my husband Larry Light will be serving as Treasurer. I was sitting with one of my favorite authors of all time and one of my favorite people, Lee Child. I told him that I was racing a deadline and was worried about making it. He asked my current word count and my target, did a quick calculation, then told me not to worry. "You'll make it," he said confidently.

And if Lee Child thinks you can do it, by god you can!

But at a hotel bar for drinks later that evening, we were sitting with a bunch of authors talking about books, our own and others. I told them I was nearly finished with my manuscript. Then they wanted to know the title...

Here's the deal. The new novel was based on a short story I published in EQMM in December 2006. I had turned in the story under the title, "Murder at the Ass End of Nowhere." The 'ass end of nowhere' being a phrase used frequently to describe the small town I grew up in, or, if you were in the town, the rural parts of the county that were even, if possible, more remote.

Now, Ellery Queen doesn't do ass, so the story was published under the title, "Murder at the Butt End of Nowhere," which is, in my mind, a little less punchy and a little less vernacular, but still ok. I was just happy to see it in print.

But as I expanded the story and wrote the novel, the issue of what to call it was always on my mind. Should I go back to my original title? Or find something new?

I explained my predicament to a bar full of more-or-less inebriated authors -- with dozens of thrillers, traditional mysteries, cozies, humorous who-done-its and noir titles among them.

One cute but pushy gent insisted that "Ass End of Nowhere" was the bomb. He was like Beavis and Butthead -- "She said 'ass' -- heh, heh, heh, heh."

A small, less vocal contingent rooted for butt. "Butt End of Nowhere" was bruted about.

A mild-mannered woman said no to ass, but liked my next suggestion, which was "I Shot the Sheriff" -- a song title which figures in the plot.

The merits of using the Bob Marley/Eric Clapton classic as a book title were hotly debated.

There was no clear victor. But I loved the debate and the ideas.

Last weekend as I was putting the final touches on the draft, I found myself adding a new first chapter -- sort of a prologue. It's brief but gutsy. It really takes the whole thing up a notch. And the first words of that chapter suddenly seemed to me to be perfect as the title.

"It Started With Sex."

Look for it at a bookstore near you -- in about a year. If the publisher likes it.

Wish me luck.

Who Hates Sophomores?

Shuh! No fair! As if!

Gawker explains how a debut author's first book's can affect how and where B & N stocks the second.

Key concept: secret algorithms
<twiddles magic fingers>

Saluting Bookstores

I have no idea where she came from originally. Fab salute, though!

Upon reading the sad news of the closing of another local bookshop, JB Dickey, owner of Seattle Mystery Bookshop, jotted a note to the newspaper asking why it seemed so difficult to get publicity for local bookstore successes. I read this from the Seattle Times site (snips mine):

...When we moved our shop, the Seattle Mystery Bookshop, over the Memorial Day weekend in 2005, we sent out a press release saying how here was a story about a small, independent bookshop that was doing so well that it could move to a larger space after 15 years, and no one in the local press paid any attention. Two and a half years later, business is terrific; 2007 was our best year yet, a 6.5 percent increase in sales over 2006...

If you want to know how independent booksellers really are doing, come ask us. Reacting to the closing of one bookshop by saying it is another death-knell of an industry simply isn't fair or correct and can be counterproductive. It can also mislead customers and drive more into the hands of the corporate Big Boxes, encouraging the difficulties that small independents face. Why not do a story about how some independents are doing fine because of their customers who want to support small businesses? Isn't there a story in that?...

JB has more background and more insight at the bookstore's blog, and it's also worth reading if you like charting how little online happenings suddenly swirl over their banks.

So, are there local bookstores near you doing it right, and what do you like about them? Let's celebrate!

What Do You Write?

Over at the BookEnds Blog today, Jessica posted about respect--and the lack thereof--for the romance genre. This comes just after a long discussion on Dorothy-L (or at least I think it was on Dorothy-L--I belong to too many lists, obviously!) about the choices editors and agents make to call something "suspense" or "thriller" vs. "mystery" because mysteries don't sell as well.

But whether they sell or not, people respect mysteries. You don't see people in the mystery aisle at the bookstore who dart out of the aisle once they realize someone's seen them, or turn their back so they won't be recognized. These are things you see when you breeze through/by the romance section.

My current work in progress is a romantic suspense novel. I call it my "smut book" around the house. Not out of a lack of respect, but because the romance is the hardest part for me to write. I can plot the mystery, I can research the international laws and procedures, I can even walk around the house muttering lines of dialogue until they sound natural, but I can't manipulate the romance. The characters have control over that. Referring to the book the way I do is a constant reminder to me not to let my focus on that area of the story slip.

And yet, I do find it harder to tell people I am writing romantic suspense than I did to say I was working on a mystery. Which is ridiculous, given that more than 50% of mass market paperback sales are romance, and that a good portion of the bestseller's list is romance.

So let me tell you an awful secret: not only do I write romance, I read it. Now, I don't read historical romance. I did when I was twelve and thirteen, but after that, my taste for history was too factual--I liked hard history, not historical fiction. Besides, historical romances were the embarrassing one with the bodice-ripper covers.

But romantic suspense, and the new "mystery romance" genre are among my favorite kinds of books to read. Dorchester Publishing's "Making It" line of mystery romances, for example, are perfect beach reading. Lighter, more humorous, more romantic than traditional mysteries, they have enough suspense to keep me intrigued, but not enough to make me nauseous with fear, the way some of my favorite thriller writers do. (I don't like roller coasters--but I do like thrills and chills while my feet are firmly planted!) I just bought Gemma Halliday's latest, Undercover in High Heels, from Amazon, and it occurs to me I don't know where they shelve "mystery romances" at my local Borders. I'll have to take a look.

Because shelving is what it's all about. I know a number of men who read Iris Johansen, who's shelved in the Mystery & Thriller aisle, but who's always written--in my opinion--romantic suspense. Ditto Elizabeth Lowell and Tami Hoag. But offer these men a Sandra Brown book and they'll look at you in horror, though Brown is no less adept at the thriller side of the coin than Lowell or Hoag. And her books, like theirs, consistently hit the bestseller lists. It's just that she's shelved in the romance section.

So I'm going to add something to Elaine's "complete" for my 2008 phrase. I'm going for "complete disclosure." My name is Laura, and I write romantic suspense.

More Stuff we Fancy

Yet another round of Favorite Things in response to Travis Erwin's and Clare2e's challenge...

***
Agents who ask for our manuscript pages
Friends whose eyes tear up in all the right places
Sons who fix laptops and daughters who ken
These folks climb high on our list of top ten.

Spouses who get why we're hunched over keyboards
Winking their eyes when we mention the mortgage
Stories that come without outline or tears
These cause our voices to ring out in cheers.

When the plot thins
When the drive dies
When we're feeling had…
When turned down by agents for pitches too dry
Just give us a pen and pad.

Cobwebs that don’t show when we dim the lighting
Old Trader Joe's for meals while we're writing
Web-wired cafes and keys that don’t stick
These all restore when our brains are too thick.

Deer in the side yard who forgo a nibble
Guests who don’t quibble when we forget dinner
Dreams that inspire a great turning point
These set us right when our world’s out of joint.

When the plot thins
When the drive dies
When we're feeling had…
When turned down by agents for pitches too dry
Just give us a pen and pad.

Have the happiest of holidays...may your ink flow fair.
-Lois

Great Bathsheba's Bra, Are We Suddenly Cool?

Whether or not we misanthropic, ink-stained wretches are actually cool, HCC's covers always are. Someday...

If you haven't been following along, the board of Mystery Writers of America has officially tightened its ranks of accepted publishers, and MWA has followed through similarly in the nomination guidelines for the Edgar awards. As a result, editor Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime is not eligible to win for his own novel Songs of Innocence (excerpt at link if you're curious) published by Hard Case under his alias, um, Richard Aleas.

The issue becomes heated precisely because Charles is a very good writer as well as editor, not one of the craptastic dreckmeisters that MWA is trying to shake loose. Mystery fans, a category including most mystery authors, are grateful for the development of Hard Case Crime as a wonderful new venue for hard-boiled fiction. Through it, Ardai's been involved with not only his own work, but reprinting older, forgotten titles and putting out great yet-unseen grimness from masters (some Grand) of the field. To have someone so well-respected shut out of Edgar consideration in the process of ostensibly raising the quality and the legitimacy of the award process is the definition of unintended consequences, but here we are.

If you'd like the essential details, I'd recommend Sarah Weinman's blog post including substantive comments and counterpoints by MWA board member Lee Goldberg and Charles Ardai himself. They stake out their positions clearly, so you may decide where your philosophy leads.

However, this simmering situation reached an entirely new level when I, in my vapid fashion, turned to Page Six, the famous gossip column of the New York Post and found their lengthy blurb on the subject (look for The Case of the Conflicted Imprint) with all the writerly names in customary bold-face and Charles Ardai's picture. Are mystery writers fascinatingly cool now? Can't be. At least I hope not. I can't keep up.

Name Game Wednesday: Gobble, Gobble Edition

As we all look forward to the friendly family feasting (or even fistfighting) to come, I'm reams behind in NaNo progress. So, here's a diverting and pithy look at that place in a book where the fewest words can create the most trouble: the title.

Would Joseph Heller's book have read the same as Catch-18? Read how his plans were foiled by fate, and other interesting tales from Gary Dexter who has the the stories behind the titles. Bonus shocker: the utterly prosaic original title of The Postman Always Rings Twice.

In cases of less-celebrated books, is it the titles that doomed them, or simply that the same judgment used in selecting the title is evident throughout the whole? I present for your condiseration the tragically unappetizing choice in the image above, today declared a winner among losers. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Phil Kloer has more entries.

Good eating, everyone!

P.S. I'm thankful for all of you.

Means of Production

[update: for those of you--unlike me--who can read text on screens for long periods, Amazon introduces the Kindle]

If you've been following the posts and comments, you've seen the various prognostications on the future of publishing. A person could go on forever on the topic...so I will.



In the world of mystery writing, there are both fan organizations and conferences and writer organizations and conferences. [image via Malice Domestic.]

Recently, one of the largest fan conferences, Malice Domestic, changed the rules regarding participation in its panels, insisting that panelists be "traditionally published." This, along with a new list of approved publishers from the Mystery Writers of America (being published by an approved publisher is necessary for "active" status in MWA), has created quite a to-do in the mystery writing world, bringing to light as it does questions of the relative validity of various routes to publication.

Before I talk about the finished product, that lovely book we tuck into our bags, keep on the nightstand, flip through in the tub, before I ruminate on how it appears, and how we get it into our hot little hands, I want to back up a few steps.

Back when I was in college, I had a typewriter. It was the old kind, the kind with the long "legs" beneath the numbers, which would get stuck if you typed too fast. My mother had the fancy version, the IBM Selectric with the rolling ball that could "remember" a whole paragraph of text. (I was never sure what you were supposed to do with that paragraph of text it remembered, but I wasn't very technically inclined at the time.) I wrote everything by hand. I would cut papers into bits and reorganize them, pasting them into the appropriate order before typing them, or, if I were running particularly late, pasting them together once they had already been typed, then photocopying the finished product.

And although I wrote my 119,000 word fantasy novel by hand, I would never have considered attempting such at thing before 1986, when I got my first computer. Just the knowledge that I can edit the text once it's in there is incredibly freeing.

The switch from typewriter to computer is a change in the means of production. The product still looks the same -- black print on 8.5" x 11" paper, with one inch margins, etc--but the route is different. And the new route has made the end product much more accessible. Just ask your average editor or agent. Back in the late 80's, when I sent my fantasy novel to a couple places, you could expect to hear back from the agent or publisher (no, you didn't need an agent, not even for the bigger houses) in a reasonable length of time.

So the slushpiles grew. [image via Sean Lindsay's writing demotivators.]

Getting words onto paper became easier. Manuscripts proliferated. Submissions increased geometrically, and publishers began insisting authors get agents. Because while the quantity of submissions they got increased daily, the quality did not. People became more prolific, but not more talented, and people who would never have considered attempting to get a novel published suddenly had dreams of fame and fortune.

You see, once upon a time the act of writing the novel proved, in and of itself, that the writer was dedicated. The very thought of writing, typing, correcting, re-typing...the process was so daunting that no sane person would undertake it.

Nowadays, producing the manuscript is the easy part. So much so, in fact, that a woman I know said in the course of an instant message conversation yesterday: "My brother just finished writing a novel. Now he doesn't know what to do with it." Only the fact that I had to leave the room prevented me from telling her that now he'd done the easy part. Because when it's the first book, writing it is the easy part. At least that was my experience, and the experience of most of the people I know, which is why all of us have one--if not more--manuscripts in boxes under the bed that will never see the light of day.

Later on, it gets harder. There are deadlines and expectations you don't even think about when you first set out to get that first story on paper.

But let's say you do get that first story down, or the second, or the third, and you finally get it to the point where you think you want to get it published. What's next?

I'd say you want to see it in print, but that's not the only route to publication nowadays. For lots of people, particularly in particular genres, eBooks are a major means of publication.

Some possible ways to get published:

• Self-publishing. And by this I mean the most literal form; you take responsibility for everything from printing through distribution.
• Vanity Presses/Subsidy Presses. This is pay to play. You don't have to do the work, you just pay someone else to do it for you. Once upon a time, you still had to do all the distribution and promotion for yourself, but the biggies in the vanity press game these days do that for you.
  
• eBooks. Here I mean publishing through eBook houses, as opposed to the eBooks put out by "traditional" publishing houses as part of print contracts.
• Small Press publishing. Small presses range from those with sterling reps to those run by scam artists. It doesn't always take a lot of research to figure out which end of the spectrum a possible press falls into, but a lot of them fall somewhere in the middle, and you have to be careful with those. It can be just as hard to get a contract with a reputable small press as it is with a big house, but you often have a different relationship with the publishing house.
• Big Publishing Houses. (Some people refer to these as "New York Publishers.")

I'm sure I am leaving something out, but those are the ones that come to mind right now. I've tried to put these in order of some combination of the following factors: how likely you are to make any money at all, how much of the work of publication you'll have to do yourself, and how likely you are to see your book in a bookstore.

Obviously, if you publish via eBook, you're not going to find your book in a bookstore. You may, however, make a fair amount of money, particularly if you are in one of the genres popular with eBook readers, like erotica. And, occasionally, an eBook publisher makes the jump to print, as did Ellora's Cave.

What a lot of people don't realize, however, is that most of the other options listed above also won't get you onto bookstore shelves. Mass market paperbacks, put out by major publishing houses, almost certainly will, though there's no guarantee your book will stay on those shelves very long. Some small presses get their books into chain stores, but most do not. (Please note: there's a big difference between a small press, and a minor imprint of a big publishing house.)

And now we're back to the means of production question.

The vast majority of books produced by anything other than the "big" publishing houses (Random House, HarperCollins, Penguin Putnam, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, etc) are published via Print On Demand technology. That is, they are printed when ordered, not warehoused someplace. (Please note: POD is a technology. Vanity publishers use it, true, but so do legitimate, traditional publishing houses. POD is not synonymous with subsidy publishing.)

Pretty soon, I think POD is the way everything will be published. And every consumer will know it, because they'll go online and order their book (in their choice of format--mass market pb, trade pb, large print, hardcover...) and it will be ready at a kiosk somewhere ten minutes later. Frankly, that's the only method of producing books that makes sense, and the technology is basically available already.

Does that mean people won't be scrambling over one another for contracts with the "biggies" in publishing? Nope. I've talked to enough aspiring authors to know that lots of people believe the level of competition will go down, but I have to disagree.

Let me just grab Clare's futurist cap and put it on over my psychic cap so I can explain.

Under the 90% rule, which states that 90% of everything is crap, most manuscripts never deserve to see the light of day. Given what I've read on agent and editor blogs over the past several years, I'd have to say that formulation is generous. So somehow there has to be a way for the average consumer to decide between the selections in the bookstore kiosk. Do they go with choice A2002 or B1097? Perhaps X53?

Certainly, the availability of excerpts will help. But I think the power of brand loyalty cannot be discounted. I'm already there, though primarily in a negative sense. I don't care how tempting a plotline sounds, I will not buy a book published by certain publishers because they publish nothing but garbage. Does that mean that something put out by, say, Berkley Prime Crime is guaranteed to be good? Nope. But it sure has a better chance of being good than something by...well, I won't name names.

So the more things change in this new future of publishing, the more things will stay the same, at least as I see it.

(When I get my head out of NaNoWriMo, I'll post a bibliography for anyone who likes reading about this kind of stuff and has more time than they need.)

Crime Bake Spice

Lee Child was the Crime Bake guest of honor this past weekend, and it wasn't only his charm that won us. Although thriller-writers didn’t exactly dominate the crowd, his advice transcended genre, and he was generous with it.

The post-banquet mock trial of Jack Reacher was hilarious. In case thrillers don’t constitute the bulk of your reading, Reacher is Lee’s outside-the-mainstream Knight Errant character. We well-fed banqueters tried him for the heinous villain’s murder in Persuaded. Defended by Julia Spencer-Fleming, Lee looked vulnerable at her side. Michele Martinez played the brilliant prosecuting attorney. Nineteen out of twenty-one tables deliberated and confessed to hung juries. It won’t surprise you to learn that the only table that unanimously willed Reacher to hang was the one filled with agents and editors! (All in fun, of course.)

As always, Crime Bake offered opportunities for agent pitches and manuscript critiques. Here’s just a taste of the workshops:

ON SEX SCENES (Elizabeth Benedict)

• Make your sex scenes work like any other.
• Sex should either reveal character or advance the plot.

ON BEGININGS (Hallie Ephron, Joseph Finder, Chuck Hogan, Roberta Isleib)

• Open as late as possible in the story, at the point something grabs the reader.
• Open with normalcy, give us the hero’s voice. Establish what the protagonist needs and depends on...then rip her world apart.
• Win the reader’s alliance with the hero immediately.

ON WRITING BAD GUYS Catherine Cairns, James Benn, David Daniel, Michele Martinez)

• Know the villain’s backstory, but give readers just a taste. Paint her in more than one shade. Give her some redeeming quality.
• Put villains to work; they'll make your hero shine.
• Readers enjoy learning what separates them from villains. Villains commit evil deeds without remorse. Heroes, who may commit similar deeds, feel remorse.

ON CONSTRUCTING CHARACTER (Sarah Weinman, Sarah Graves, John Katzenbach, Julia Spencer-Fleming)

• Know and flesh out your bad guy in the planning stage; start with a hero who has something at stake.
• Make use of quiet moments between action scenes to build character.
• Occasionally use other characters' reactions to reveal a character's attributes.

ON ACTION & SUSPENSE (Jim Fusilli, Mark Arsenault, Lee Child, William Landay, Taylor Smith)

• Build suspense by implying a question and deferring its answer.
• Don’t shy away from melodrama.
• Obscure