Lawrence Block's Blog, page 23
May 7, 2012
Overseas links and eBay listings
I usually repost blog entries here, but not always; when they strike me as of limited interest, I tend to let my Goodreads friends find them on their own. Let me tell you briefly about two such recent posts, and give you links if they strike you as worth a look:
(1) "The international readership my work has gained is one of the great satisfactions of my writing life. My books have been widely translated, and of course many overseas readers are able to enjoy them in English. But they’re not always easy to find..."
I've included links to useful sites in France, Germany, Italy and Spain in Reading LB all around the world
(2) If the foregoing is limited in interest to overseas readers, this one's aimed at collectors. I've listed ten new items—five manuscripts and five books—for sale at eBay, including the original copy-edited manuscript of A Drop of the Hard Stuff. Even if you're not a collector, you might want to check these out for the product descriptions; one item is an unpublished and unproduced screenplay in which a Matthew Scudder short story has its plot adapted for an entirely new character. Links to all ten of these treasures are to be found in New on eBay—5 books and 5 manuscripts
You'll get all these posts by email if you subscribe to my blog, which you can do simply enough by hitting the FOLLOW button at the top left of any of its pages. And a quick reminder—anyone anywhere can get on my newsletter list by sending an email to lawbloc@gmail.com with Goodreads in the subject line.
LB
(1) "The international readership my work has gained is one of the great satisfactions of my writing life. My books have been widely translated, and of course many overseas readers are able to enjoy them in English. But they’re not always easy to find..."
I've included links to useful sites in France, Germany, Italy and Spain in Reading LB all around the world
(2) If the foregoing is limited in interest to overseas readers, this one's aimed at collectors. I've listed ten new items—five manuscripts and five books—for sale at eBay, including the original copy-edited manuscript of A Drop of the Hard Stuff. Even if you're not a collector, you might want to check these out for the product descriptions; one item is an unpublished and unproduced screenplay in which a Matthew Scudder short story has its plot adapted for an entirely new character. Links to all ten of these treasures are to be found in New on eBay—5 books and 5 manuscripts
You'll get all these posts by email if you subscribe to my blog, which you can do simply enough by hitting the FOLLOW button at the top left of any of its pages. And a quick reminder—anyone anywhere can get on my newsletter list by sending an email to lawbloc@gmail.com with Goodreads in the subject line.
LB
April 30, 2012
Free, and worth every penny
To: My friends on Goodreads, and anyone else who's interested...
I get out an email newsletter at irregular intervals. Sometimes it repeats stuff I've covered in the blog, sometimes not. It's free, of course, as well it might be.
If you'd like to be on the list, just send an email to lawbloc@gmail.com, and put "Goodreads" in the subject line.
If you try it and find it tedious or burdensome, there's always an Unsubscribe link at the bottom; click it and that's the end of it.
LB
I get out an email newsletter at irregular intervals. Sometimes it repeats stuff I've covered in the blog, sometimes not. It's free, of course, as well it might be.
If you'd like to be on the list, just send an email to lawbloc@gmail.com, and put "Goodreads" in the subject line.
If you try it and find it tedious or burdensome, there's always an Unsubscribe link at the bottom; click it and that's the end of it.
LB
April 29, 2012
Self-publishing back in the day...
A few weeks ago I was looking over the eBook of The Liar’s Bible. I came across a piece I wrote in the early 1980s, "Getting By on a Writer’s Income." When I posted it on my blog, it got touted and tweeted and reposted to a fare-thee-well. If my site had sustained any more hits it would have wound up punch-drunk.
Then a week or two later I wrote a new blog post and called it "All Changed, Changed Utterly," about the revolution in self-publishing. It drew an even stronger reception than "Getting By", careening around the blogosphere, gladhanding its way through the social media, and going—well, if not viral, then at the very least bacterial.
So I had another look at The Liar’s Bible, and found a piece I hadn’t even glanced at since I wrote it in 1986. It appeared the following year in the 1987 Writers Yearbook, and should give you an idea of the very different process that self-publishing was a quarter of a century ago:
ARE YOU SURE ALFRED KNOPF STARTED THIS WAY?
It was a Monday, the 20th of January, 1986, and the country was celebrating Martin Luther King’s birthday, but on Estero Boulevard ij Fort Myers Beach, Florida, it was just another day on which my books were not arriving from the manufacturer. When the Ryder van began backing into our driveway, a little after noon, though, I decided it was altogether fitting and proper that the day be observed as a national holiday.
“The books are here!” I cried. And rushed out to greet the driver.
There were 107 cartons of the little darlings. My daughter Jill was visiting, and she joined me and Lynne to form a sort of box brigade, shuttling the cartons from the back of the truck up a flight of stairs and into what a previous owner had thought was the house’s fourth bedroom, but which was clearly intended to be a stockroom and shipping room.
Twenty-five years earlier I'd been writing soft-core sex novels under a pen name. I had a publisher who wanted to give me more work than I could handle, and a friend introduced me to a fellow he thought might be able to subcontract some of the books from me. The friend’s friend was delighted with the opportunity. He had a wife and infant daughter, and had been forced to shelve his dream of writing; he was then making ends meet by unloading trucks in a warehouse.
Now, a quarter of a century later, I was unloading trucks in a driveway.
“I dunno,” I said to Lynne. “Are you sure Alfred Knopf started this way?”
#
For many self-publishers, the alternative is no publication at all. Writers turn to self-publishing when they’ve been unable to interest commercial publishers in their work.
My own circumstances were somewhat different. By the time I was thinking of writing Write for Your Life, I had published more than 30 books with commercial firms. Two were instructional books for writers, Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print (Writer’s Digest Books) and Telling Lies for Fun and Profit (Arbor House). Both books had sold well and remained in print, and with both publishers I enjoyed an excellent personal and professional relationship. I had every reason to anticipate that a book version of my seminar for writers would be welcomed by either of the two.
It seemed to me, though, that self-publishing would serve me better. I had several reasons to think this.
First of all, I had cause to believe that I could merchandise the book very effectively myself. The book struck me as an ideal mail-order item. Whether or not I published it myself, I would want to sell it at my seminars and through the mails.
I knew how to do this, and I knew that I enjoyed this sort of thing, because I was already in the mail-order business, having already sold more than 2,000 copies of my cassette Affirmations for Writers. Even before that, I’d bought up remainder stocks of a couple of my out-of-print novels and peddled them through the mails. The mail-order business is more efficient when you can offer more items to your customer, and the book I wanted to write was wholly compatible with the products I was already selling.
If I let someone else publish Write for Your Life, I couldn’t sell it effectively by mail. I could at best buy copies from my publisher at a 50% discount, and you need a larger margin than that to come out ahead in mail order. (Ideally, your total cost on your product, including your mailing expenses, should be no more than a third of your price, and it’s best if you can keep it down to a fourth. Otherwise you don’t have a sufficient cushion to promote your product effectively.)
I would probably lose store sales by self-publishing my book, but I decided store sales were secondary. Besides, if the book did well, I figured it would be easy enough somewhere down the line to get a commercial book distributor to take it on. First things first; my primary market was reachable through mail order, and self-publishing looked to be the best way to go after that market.
But that was just one reason. Time was a strong second reason. I hadn’t written the book yet, but I already knew one thing. I wanted copies in a hurry.
The sooner I had books, the sooner I could start selling them. More to the point, the sooner I sold them, the sooner they could start selling the seminar. One of my chief motives in writing the book lay in the fact that I had trouble explaining to people what the seminar was and wasn’t. I wanted to write the book so that it would put people in a position to decide whether or not the seminar was something they could use.
I also wanted to make the book available to graduates, so that they could take the seminar home with them. And I wanted to make the material accessible to the overwhelming majority of writers who would never have the chance to take the seminar. All of these factors made me want books as soon as possible. I certainly didn’t want to wait a year or more, and I had to expect at least that much waiting time with a commercial publisher.
I wanted books in time for the seminar season in the spring of ’86. I wasn’t going to be able to start writing the book until August of ’85. A glance at the calendar provided a powerful argument indeed for self-publishing.
Finally, and perhaps most important, I wanted to do it because I wanted to do it.
Most of the writers I’ve known have had fantasies of self-publishing. Here was a chance to fulfill that fantasy, and with a book that seemed to lend itself to that treatment. I had learned a lot and had a lot of fun making my affirmations tape.
And I’d enjoyed selling it, too.
One of the processes in the seminar consists of coming up with actions one can take to add to one’s bank of experiences. A way I could add to my own bank of experiences was by publishing my own book, and I couldn’t wait to get started.
#
As a first step, I read The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing, by Tom and Marilyn Ross. Then I very nearly decided to say to hell with the whole thing.
The book is excellent, let me say, and I recommend it wholeheartedly, and without reservation. It tells you exactly how to contend with the entire business of publishing your own work, from writing and product development through the whole process of book production, and on to advertising and promotion and distribution. It’s all there, and it’s presented clearly and concisely.
And it almost scared me off.
It was the material on getting the book produced that intimidated me. The authors explained just how to deal with typesetters and printers, how to get bids from various firms, how to make decisions about paper and page size and type. The more I read, the more I felt incapable of handling all of that. It sounded impossibly complex.
A week or so after I read the book, I was having lunch with a friend named Richard, a sales rep for a major trade publisher. I talked about my desire to publish Write for Your Life myself and my concern about my ability to handle the production adequately.
“It seems to me,” I said, “that there ought to be people who handle that whole process for you.”
“There are,” he said. “I know a lot of guys who work in the production departments of publishing houses. They do all of this every day for their employers, and they handle book production for self-publishers on a freelance spare-time basis.”
“Could you recommend one?”
“I could recommend several,” he said, and did.
I called only one of them. It was, after all, the third week in July already, and we were moving from New York to Florida on the 25th of the month. So a couple of days after my lunch with Richard, I sat down to lunch with a fellow I’ll call Lou. I told him what I wanted to do, and he said he’d be delighted to help me do it.
“The book’s not written yet,” I said. “I’ll be able to start work on it around the first of the month, as soon as we’re settled in our new home. I know what I want to say in it and I don’t think it should take more than a month, two months at the outside, so I can have the manuscript to you by the end of September.”
In that case, he said, I could probably have books in February...
There's a whole lot more to the story. I've added a new page to my blog site, called A Few Words For Writers, and you'll find the rest there...
Then a week or two later I wrote a new blog post and called it "All Changed, Changed Utterly," about the revolution in self-publishing. It drew an even stronger reception than "Getting By", careening around the blogosphere, gladhanding its way through the social media, and going—well, if not viral, then at the very least bacterial.
So I had another look at The Liar’s Bible, and found a piece I hadn’t even glanced at since I wrote it in 1986. It appeared the following year in the 1987 Writers Yearbook, and should give you an idea of the very different process that self-publishing was a quarter of a century ago:
ARE YOU SURE ALFRED KNOPF STARTED THIS WAY?
It was a Monday, the 20th of January, 1986, and the country was celebrating Martin Luther King’s birthday, but on Estero Boulevard ij Fort Myers Beach, Florida, it was just another day on which my books were not arriving from the manufacturer. When the Ryder van began backing into our driveway, a little after noon, though, I decided it was altogether fitting and proper that the day be observed as a national holiday.
“The books are here!” I cried. And rushed out to greet the driver.
There were 107 cartons of the little darlings. My daughter Jill was visiting, and she joined me and Lynne to form a sort of box brigade, shuttling the cartons from the back of the truck up a flight of stairs and into what a previous owner had thought was the house’s fourth bedroom, but which was clearly intended to be a stockroom and shipping room.Twenty-five years earlier I'd been writing soft-core sex novels under a pen name. I had a publisher who wanted to give me more work than I could handle, and a friend introduced me to a fellow he thought might be able to subcontract some of the books from me. The friend’s friend was delighted with the opportunity. He had a wife and infant daughter, and had been forced to shelve his dream of writing; he was then making ends meet by unloading trucks in a warehouse.
Now, a quarter of a century later, I was unloading trucks in a driveway.
“I dunno,” I said to Lynne. “Are you sure Alfred Knopf started this way?”
#
For many self-publishers, the alternative is no publication at all. Writers turn to self-publishing when they’ve been unable to interest commercial publishers in their work.
My own circumstances were somewhat different. By the time I was thinking of writing Write for Your Life, I had published more than 30 books with commercial firms. Two were instructional books for writers, Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print (Writer’s Digest Books) and Telling Lies for Fun and Profit (Arbor House). Both books had sold well and remained in print, and with both publishers I enjoyed an excellent personal and professional relationship. I had every reason to anticipate that a book version of my seminar for writers would be welcomed by either of the two.
It seemed to me, though, that self-publishing would serve me better. I had several reasons to think this.
First of all, I had cause to believe that I could merchandise the book very effectively myself. The book struck me as an ideal mail-order item. Whether or not I published it myself, I would want to sell it at my seminars and through the mails.
I knew how to do this, and I knew that I enjoyed this sort of thing, because I was already in the mail-order business, having already sold more than 2,000 copies of my cassette Affirmations for Writers. Even before that, I’d bought up remainder stocks of a couple of my out-of-print novels and peddled them through the mails. The mail-order business is more efficient when you can offer more items to your customer, and the book I wanted to write was wholly compatible with the products I was already selling.
If I let someone else publish Write for Your Life, I couldn’t sell it effectively by mail. I could at best buy copies from my publisher at a 50% discount, and you need a larger margin than that to come out ahead in mail order. (Ideally, your total cost on your product, including your mailing expenses, should be no more than a third of your price, and it’s best if you can keep it down to a fourth. Otherwise you don’t have a sufficient cushion to promote your product effectively.)
I would probably lose store sales by self-publishing my book, but I decided store sales were secondary. Besides, if the book did well, I figured it would be easy enough somewhere down the line to get a commercial book distributor to take it on. First things first; my primary market was reachable through mail order, and self-publishing looked to be the best way to go after that market.
But that was just one reason. Time was a strong second reason. I hadn’t written the book yet, but I already knew one thing. I wanted copies in a hurry.
The sooner I had books, the sooner I could start selling them. More to the point, the sooner I sold them, the sooner they could start selling the seminar. One of my chief motives in writing the book lay in the fact that I had trouble explaining to people what the seminar was and wasn’t. I wanted to write the book so that it would put people in a position to decide whether or not the seminar was something they could use.
I also wanted to make the book available to graduates, so that they could take the seminar home with them. And I wanted to make the material accessible to the overwhelming majority of writers who would never have the chance to take the seminar. All of these factors made me want books as soon as possible. I certainly didn’t want to wait a year or more, and I had to expect at least that much waiting time with a commercial publisher.
I wanted books in time for the seminar season in the spring of ’86. I wasn’t going to be able to start writing the book until August of ’85. A glance at the calendar provided a powerful argument indeed for self-publishing.
Finally, and perhaps most important, I wanted to do it because I wanted to do it.
Most of the writers I’ve known have had fantasies of self-publishing. Here was a chance to fulfill that fantasy, and with a book that seemed to lend itself to that treatment. I had learned a lot and had a lot of fun making my affirmations tape.
And I’d enjoyed selling it, too.
One of the processes in the seminar consists of coming up with actions one can take to add to one’s bank of experiences. A way I could add to my own bank of experiences was by publishing my own book, and I couldn’t wait to get started.
#
As a first step, I read The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing, by Tom and Marilyn Ross. Then I very nearly decided to say to hell with the whole thing.
The book is excellent, let me say, and I recommend it wholeheartedly, and without reservation. It tells you exactly how to contend with the entire business of publishing your own work, from writing and product development through the whole process of book production, and on to advertising and promotion and distribution. It’s all there, and it’s presented clearly and concisely.
And it almost scared me off.
It was the material on getting the book produced that intimidated me. The authors explained just how to deal with typesetters and printers, how to get bids from various firms, how to make decisions about paper and page size and type. The more I read, the more I felt incapable of handling all of that. It sounded impossibly complex.
A week or so after I read the book, I was having lunch with a friend named Richard, a sales rep for a major trade publisher. I talked about my desire to publish Write for Your Life myself and my concern about my ability to handle the production adequately.
“It seems to me,” I said, “that there ought to be people who handle that whole process for you.”
“There are,” he said. “I know a lot of guys who work in the production departments of publishing houses. They do all of this every day for their employers, and they handle book production for self-publishers on a freelance spare-time basis.”
“Could you recommend one?”
“I could recommend several,” he said, and did.
I called only one of them. It was, after all, the third week in July already, and we were moving from New York to Florida on the 25th of the month. So a couple of days after my lunch with Richard, I sat down to lunch with a fellow I’ll call Lou. I told him what I wanted to do, and he said he’d be delighted to help me do it.
“The book’s not written yet,” I said. “I’ll be able to start work on it around the first of the month, as soon as we’re settled in our new home. I know what I want to say in it and I don’t think it should take more than a month, two months at the outside, so I can have the manuscript to you by the end of September.”
In that case, he said, I could probably have books in February...
There's a whole lot more to the story. I've added a new page to my blog site, called A Few Words For Writers, and you'll find the rest there...
April 27, 2012
Do you move your ears when you read?
No, of course you don't. But what I'm getting at, albeit circuitously, is that I always thought of reading as an activity one performs with one's eyes. I've since learned that doesn't have to be the case. Plenty of us get as much or more pleasure out of a book by reading it with our ears.
I, alas, am not geared that way. I absorb verbal information far more effectively through my eyes than my ears. When I try to listen to an audiobook, my attention flags and my mind wanders. If I'm driving, it's a distraction. If I'm safe at home, it's a nuisance.
And yet I'm a huge fan of audiobooks as a medium. I know people who never found reading enjoyable until they discovered audio; it opened the entire world of fiction to them. And I know others, lifelong readers, who've found that listening to the narration of a fine vocal artist adds a whole new dimension to a novel.
So I'm all for it. I want my books to be read. I don't care if they reach you through your eyes or your ears or the soles of your feet. If they're a source of pleasure for you, I'm delighted.
Over the years I've narrated a number of my own books. I welcomed the opportunity, and enjoyed the work, but much of it was back in the bad old days of abridged audio. That's what my publishers—Penguin, Harper Audio—wanted to publish. I always felt abridgements were an abomination, and there came a time when I insisted on a clause in my book contracts enjoining the publisher from bringing out or licensing an abridgement.
It hasn't taken long, I'm happy to say, for unabridged audiobooks to become the industry's standard. A remarkable number of my books have been given voice by some of the most accomplished narrators in the game, and three of the medium's leading audio publishers—Recorded Books, AudioGo, and Dreamscape—have kept things moving. If you want to own a physical copy of an audiobook, in cassette or CD form, you can check the publishers' websites, where audiobook rental is often an alternative to outright purchase.
Increasingly, however, the audiobook market seems to be moving to downloads; rather than pay for a physical book, you can simply download an MP3 file for play on the device of your choice. Audible is the leader in this area, and the links that follow are all to the Audible website, where all of the following titles are presently available. They have various special promotions, including this one, which gives you a free audiobook and a free trial membership.
Here are the Audible links. The 10-book Bernie Rhodenbarr series is complete, but you'll notice several gaps in the Matthew Scudder saga, and both Keller and Chip Harrison are missing a book each. Tell you what—if you make it all the way to the end of the list, I'll tell you the story about the recording session that soured me on abridged audio forever.
(Oh, sure, you could scroll down and skip the list and go straight to the Extremely Amusing Anecdote. But when you look in the mirror, is that the kind of person you want looking back at you? The kind that would skip the list? No, I didn't think so...)
Click here to read the rest on LB's Blog
I, alas, am not geared that way. I absorb verbal information far more effectively through my eyes than my ears. When I try to listen to an audiobook, my attention flags and my mind wanders. If I'm driving, it's a distraction. If I'm safe at home, it's a nuisance.
And yet I'm a huge fan of audiobooks as a medium. I know people who never found reading enjoyable until they discovered audio; it opened the entire world of fiction to them. And I know others, lifelong readers, who've found that listening to the narration of a fine vocal artist adds a whole new dimension to a novel.
So I'm all for it. I want my books to be read. I don't care if they reach you through your eyes or your ears or the soles of your feet. If they're a source of pleasure for you, I'm delighted.
Over the years I've narrated a number of my own books. I welcomed the opportunity, and enjoyed the work, but much of it was back in the bad old days of abridged audio. That's what my publishers—Penguin, Harper Audio—wanted to publish. I always felt abridgements were an abomination, and there came a time when I insisted on a clause in my book contracts enjoining the publisher from bringing out or licensing an abridgement.
It hasn't taken long, I'm happy to say, for unabridged audiobooks to become the industry's standard. A remarkable number of my books have been given voice by some of the most accomplished narrators in the game, and three of the medium's leading audio publishers—Recorded Books, AudioGo, and Dreamscape—have kept things moving. If you want to own a physical copy of an audiobook, in cassette or CD form, you can check the publishers' websites, where audiobook rental is often an alternative to outright purchase.
Increasingly, however, the audiobook market seems to be moving to downloads; rather than pay for a physical book, you can simply download an MP3 file for play on the device of your choice. Audible is the leader in this area, and the links that follow are all to the Audible website, where all of the following titles are presently available. They have various special promotions, including this one, which gives you a free audiobook and a free trial membership.
Here are the Audible links. The 10-book Bernie Rhodenbarr series is complete, but you'll notice several gaps in the Matthew Scudder saga, and both Keller and Chip Harrison are missing a book each. Tell you what—if you make it all the way to the end of the list, I'll tell you the story about the recording session that soured me on abridged audio forever.
(Oh, sure, you could scroll down and skip the list and go straight to the Extremely Amusing Anecdote. But when you look in the mirror, is that the kind of person you want looking back at you? The kind that would skip the list? No, I didn't think so...)
Click here to read the rest on LB's Blog
April 22, 2012
All changed, changed utterly...
All these things happened in the space of a week or so:
1. My friend Pat reported that the POD paperback of the book he'd co-authored with my friend Dick had gone on sale quietly at Amazon, with a score of copies sold in the first several days. (The eBook has already been selling for a month or so.)
The book is Bitter Medicine: What I've Learned and Teach about Malpractice Lawsuits (And How to Avoid Them), and I've been peripherally involved with it since Dick showed me some chapters he'd written several years ago. Dick is Richard Kessler, a retired surgeon and professor of medicine, with extensive service as an expert witness in malpractice lawsuits. Pat is Patrick Trese, also retired after a distinguished career as an Emmy-winning writer and producer at NBC News; in the course of it he'd also written and published a couple of books. I've known them both for thirty years or so, and they've known each other for about as long, and the partnership turned out to be a good fit. They put in a lot of hours over a couple of years, and wound up with a solid professional manuscript that told important stories in an accessible manner.
But nobody was interested. A couple of agents agreed to look at the manuscript, kept it forever, and then returned it. A publisher, in an uncharacteristic moment of candor, said essentially that every retired doctor wants to write a book, and many of them do, and nobody cares.
And then Pat had a revelation. Neither of the book's authors was in it for wealth or glory. Dick had had a very important and useful tale to tell, and Pat had found a way to tell it clearly and forcefully, and what they both wanted was for it to be read. And Pat knew a couple of people who'd embraced the revolution of eBooks and self-publishing, and figured why not?
Pat's work on Bitter Medicine is done, but he's keeping busy. His first book, Penguins Have Square Eyes, grew out of his experiences as a TV reporter in Antarctica; it came out in 1962, and now fifty years later he's tweaking it for self-publication. And he's hard at work on the revision of a big thriller he's had in the works for as long as I've known him. Some agents have seen versions of it over the years, and encouraged him, but this this time he plans to publish it himself.
2. My agent told me about a new client he'd just signed, a romance writer. She'd published several books with a commercial publisher, and then they dropped her. So she started publishing herself in eBooks, and in a little over a year she was making eight or ten times what she'd been earning in the past. She'd tried handling her own foreign rights, but it took too much time and she didn't really know what she was doing, so she needed someone to represent her overseas, and negotiate other sub rights.
Now that she was doing so well, she said, publishers had come around, telling her how much they could do for her. "I tell them I already know what they can do for me," she said. "They already did it."
3. A few years ago I led a seminar at Listowel Writers Week, in Ireland's County Kerry. There were ten or a dozen participants, but I've forgotten everything about all but one of them. She was a young Englishwoman whose stories just sprang off the page at you. And she was a demon for work, too, with a trunk full of unsold novels.
Click here to read the rest...
1. My friend Pat reported that the POD paperback of the book he'd co-authored with my friend Dick had gone on sale quietly at Amazon, with a score of copies sold in the first several days. (The eBook has already been selling for a month or so.)
The book is Bitter Medicine: What I've Learned and Teach about Malpractice Lawsuits (And How to Avoid Them), and I've been peripherally involved with it since Dick showed me some chapters he'd written several years ago. Dick is Richard Kessler, a retired surgeon and professor of medicine, with extensive service as an expert witness in malpractice lawsuits. Pat is Patrick Trese, also retired after a distinguished career as an Emmy-winning writer and producer at NBC News; in the course of it he'd also written and published a couple of books. I've known them both for thirty years or so, and they've known each other for about as long, and the partnership turned out to be a good fit. They put in a lot of hours over a couple of years, and wound up with a solid professional manuscript that told important stories in an accessible manner.
But nobody was interested. A couple of agents agreed to look at the manuscript, kept it forever, and then returned it. A publisher, in an uncharacteristic moment of candor, said essentially that every retired doctor wants to write a book, and many of them do, and nobody cares.
And then Pat had a revelation. Neither of the book's authors was in it for wealth or glory. Dick had had a very important and useful tale to tell, and Pat had found a way to tell it clearly and forcefully, and what they both wanted was for it to be read. And Pat knew a couple of people who'd embraced the revolution of eBooks and self-publishing, and figured why not?
Pat's work on Bitter Medicine is done, but he's keeping busy. His first book, Penguins Have Square Eyes, grew out of his experiences as a TV reporter in Antarctica; it came out in 1962, and now fifty years later he's tweaking it for self-publication. And he's hard at work on the revision of a big thriller he's had in the works for as long as I've known him. Some agents have seen versions of it over the years, and encouraged him, but this this time he plans to publish it himself.
2. My agent told me about a new client he'd just signed, a romance writer. She'd published several books with a commercial publisher, and then they dropped her. So she started publishing herself in eBooks, and in a little over a year she was making eight or ten times what she'd been earning in the past. She'd tried handling her own foreign rights, but it took too much time and she didn't really know what she was doing, so she needed someone to represent her overseas, and negotiate other sub rights.
Now that she was doing so well, she said, publishers had come around, telling her how much they could do for her. "I tell them I already know what they can do for me," she said. "They already did it."
3. A few years ago I led a seminar at Listowel Writers Week, in Ireland's County Kerry. There were ten or a dozen participants, but I've forgotten everything about all but one of them. She was a young Englishwoman whose stories just sprang off the page at you. And she was a demon for work, too, with a trunk full of unsold novels.
Click here to read the rest...
April 19, 2012
News Flash: All-Purpose Monkey Gets Off with Jill Emerson
Well, kind of. Here's a taste of Elizabeth A. White's amazing review of Getting Off, just posted on her blog, Musings of an All-Purpose Monkey:
"...Sounds straightforward enough, right? Well this is Lawrence Block we’re talking about, folks, so there’s more to it than that. Don’t worry, Kit doesn’t blossom overnight into Sandra Dee. Block does, however, use Kit’s dawning awareness of a life beyond impersonal sex and nomadic homicide to explore the dark connection between love and hate, as well as the question of whether one can ever truly overcome traumatic events which leave an imprint on them during formative years.
"Now, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out for the more delicate flowers that the book is subtitled 'A Novel of Sex & Violence' for a reason. There is a copious amount of both to be found amongst the pages of Getting Off, including sex of the sapphic variety. So, if detailed descriptions of sex bother you this is definitely not a book with which you’ll be comfortable. If, however, you appreciate strong female characters, wickedly dark humor and bold storytelling, you should definitely consider Getting Off with Lawrence Block."
Read the rest on Jill Emerson's Page
And before I forget...
The new trade paperback editions of three Matthew Scudder novels, Stab in the Dark, A Walk Among the Tombstones, and A Long Line of Dead Men, just arrived today from our printer, and we're already filling orders. Can we ship a set to you? We have signed copies at LB's Bookstore. For international orders, get in touch with these great booksellers.
"...Sounds straightforward enough, right? Well this is Lawrence Block we’re talking about, folks, so there’s more to it than that. Don’t worry, Kit doesn’t blossom overnight into Sandra Dee. Block does, however, use Kit’s dawning awareness of a life beyond impersonal sex and nomadic homicide to explore the dark connection between love and hate, as well as the question of whether one can ever truly overcome traumatic events which leave an imprint on them during formative years.
"Now, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out for the more delicate flowers that the book is subtitled 'A Novel of Sex & Violence' for a reason. There is a copious amount of both to be found amongst the pages of Getting Off, including sex of the sapphic variety. So, if detailed descriptions of sex bother you this is definitely not a book with which you’ll be comfortable. If, however, you appreciate strong female characters, wickedly dark humor and bold storytelling, you should definitely consider Getting Off with Lawrence Block."Read the rest on Jill Emerson's Page
And before I forget...
The new trade paperback editions of three Matthew Scudder novels, Stab in the Dark, A Walk Among the Tombstones, and A Long Line of Dead Men, just arrived today from our printer, and we're already filling orders. Can we ship a set to you? We have signed copies at LB's Bookstore. For international orders, get in touch with these great booksellers.
April 17, 2012
Short & Sweet—
I've just made some changes to my blog page, About LB's Fiction. That's the one with the full list of everything that's in print and/or eVailable, with series listed in order, and with live links to everything.
HarperCollins made some big waves when they put The Sins of the Father on special at 99¢, and dropped the price of all my other titles to $3.99. The response has been remarkable. I don't know how long the new price policy will last, but while it does I wanted to make it easy for you to find the bargains. So I've annotated the page accordingly. LB's Fiction. (So-called in spite of the fact that there are some non-fiction titles there as well.)
BTW, I re-post most of my blog entries here on Goodreads, but sometimes I forget. If you want to make sure you don't miss anything, may I encourage to (a) click on one of the links and visit my blog and (b) click the FOLLOW button? Then just enter your email and you're in. (And if it becomes tedious, click the UNFOLLOW button and you're out again.
HarperCollins made some big waves when they put The Sins of the Father on special at 99¢, and dropped the price of all my other titles to $3.99. The response has been remarkable. I don't know how long the new price policy will last, but while it does I wanted to make it easy for you to find the bargains. So I've annotated the page accordingly. LB's Fiction. (So-called in spite of the fact that there are some non-fiction titles there as well.)
BTW, I re-post most of my blog entries here on Goodreads, but sometimes I forget. If you want to make sure you don't miss anything, may I encourage to (a) click on one of the links and visit my blog and (b) click the FOLLOW button? Then just enter your email and you're in. (And if it becomes tedious, click the UNFOLLOW button and you're out again.
April 15, 2012
Robert B. Parker: we like the way it sounds
Not long after Bob Parker's untimely death, Otto Penzler invited me to contribute to a Festschrift in his honor. (That's a German word, and it means a sort of tribute album in the form of critical essays.) It was not a request I felt I could deny, and I wrote a piece; the book, In Pursuit of Spenser, was recently published by Ben Bella Books, and boasts contributions by a distinguished array of crime writers, including one by Parker himself.
Here's what I wrote:
Interviewer: Why do you think your work is so popular?
Robert B. Parker: I dunno. I think people just like the way it sounds.
That’s a wonderfully quotable exchange, and I wish I could be sure I was quoting it correctly. I wasn’t there when these words were spoken. It was passed on to me second- or third-hand, but what I heard rang a bell, and I can still hear the echo.
Because I believe he got it right. Why is everything Bob Parker wrote so popular? I think we just like the way it sounds.
#
Ruth Cavin was a great editor who left us too soon, although not before she’d lived ninety-two years. She stressed the great importance of the writer’s voice. It was, Ruth said, as unique as a thumbprint, and the chief factor in the success or failure of a piece of writing. And it was inherent in the writer. You couldn’t learn it. You couldn’t do a hell of a lot to develop it, or refine it. What you had to do was find it, which was task enough.
And what you found might or might not be worth the effort.
#
We think of voice more in connection with the performing arts. An actor has a voice, and it amounts to something rather more than pitch and register and tone; it’s what makes us listen intently or puts us to sleep.
“I could listen to him read the phone book,” we say with admiration.
A musician has a voice. The touch of a particular set of fingers on the keys of a piano, the notes that come out of the bell of a horn—they are individual, and sometimes unmistakably so. You might, if you practice enough, and if you’re talented to begin with, play the same sounds Louis Armstrong played. But they won’t sound the same.
A singer has a voice. One can almost say that a singer is a voice, that anything learned—phrasing, breath control—merely allow the true voice to be heard.
A story, if I may. An aspiring singer went to audition for a great vocal coach. While the last notes died out, the coach sat for a few moments in silence. Then he strode to the window and threw it open, motioning to the singer to join him.
“Listen,” he said. “Do you hear the crow?”
“Yes.”
“Caw caw caw. You hear him?”
“I do.”
“The crow,” the old man said, “thinks his song is beautiful.”
...Click here to read the rest
Here's what I wrote:
Interviewer: Why do you think your work is so popular?
Robert B. Parker: I dunno. I think people just like the way it sounds.
That’s a wonderfully quotable exchange, and I wish I could be sure I was quoting it correctly. I wasn’t there when these words were spoken. It was passed on to me second- or third-hand, but what I heard rang a bell, and I can still hear the echo.
Because I believe he got it right. Why is everything Bob Parker wrote so popular? I think we just like the way it sounds.
#
Ruth Cavin was a great editor who left us too soon, although not before she’d lived ninety-two years. She stressed the great importance of the writer’s voice. It was, Ruth said, as unique as a thumbprint, and the chief factor in the success or failure of a piece of writing. And it was inherent in the writer. You couldn’t learn it. You couldn’t do a hell of a lot to develop it, or refine it. What you had to do was find it, which was task enough.
And what you found might or might not be worth the effort.
#
We think of voice more in connection with the performing arts. An actor has a voice, and it amounts to something rather more than pitch and register and tone; it’s what makes us listen intently or puts us to sleep.
“I could listen to him read the phone book,” we say with admiration.
A musician has a voice. The touch of a particular set of fingers on the keys of a piano, the notes that come out of the bell of a horn—they are individual, and sometimes unmistakably so. You might, if you practice enough, and if you’re talented to begin with, play the same sounds Louis Armstrong played. But they won’t sound the same.
A singer has a voice. One can almost say that a singer is a voice, that anything learned—phrasing, breath control—merely allow the true voice to be heard.
A story, if I may. An aspiring singer went to audition for a great vocal coach. While the last notes died out, the coach sat for a few moments in silence. Then he strode to the window and threw it open, motioning to the singer to join him.
“Listen,” he said. “Do you hear the crow?”
“Yes.”
“Caw caw caw. You hear him?”
“I do.”
“The crow,” the old man said, “thinks his song is beautiful.”
...Click here to read the rest
April 13, 2012
It's Matt Scudder and he's back in print!
In a sense, he’s never been out of print. Mulholland’s hardcover edition of A Drop of the Hard Stuff is still selling well, and their trade paperback just joined it in the stores a month ago. HarperCollins have the rights to thirteen of the Scudder backlist novels and have kept them all in print (although, with fewer backlist titles in stores these days, they’re not always easy to find.)
But three of the Scudder novels, A Stab in the Dark, A Walk Among the Tombstones, and A Long Line of Dead Men, have been out of print for a while now. I managed to regain the rights, and earlier this year self-published them all as eBook editions.
But “print” sort of implies paper and ink, doesn’t it?
You know, that's just what I was going to say. While I trust I’ve established my street cred as an eBook enthusiast, that doesn’t mean I’m eager for printed books to disappear—or for my books to cease to exist in that form. When I self-published The Night and the Music last fall, I was able to bring out a trade paperback edition close upon the heels of the eBook; both, I’m pleased to report, have enjoyed a very gratifying reception.
And now it’s my pleasure to offer the three books as trade paperbacks, in the same format as The Night and the Music. The same great team at Telemachus Press readied the books for production, and the good people at Lightning Source saw to the printing and binding, and here’s how they look:
Any questions? Ah, I see a few hands raised:
Will the books be in stores?
Not in brick-and-mortar stores. Online booksellers—Amazon and Barnes & Noble—will be able to supply them. And a handful of the leading mystery specialty booksellers are carrying the new books—and all of their copies are signed.
I was just about to ask how to get signed copies.
Great—go right ahead and ask.
Uh, how do I get signed copies?
You can order them online from LB’s Bookstore. They’re $16.99 apiece plus $5 shipping. But if you buy the three-book set, they’re yours for $54.99 postpaid. (That’s $49.99 plus $5, for a net savings to you of $10.98.)
Oh, I want a set! But I’m in school here in Toronto, and my sister’s back home in Taiwan, and my cousin’s in Sao Paulo, and my best friend’s in Stuttgart, and we’d all like to buy signed copies. And you only ship to U.S. addresses!
I know, but don’t despair. These fine stores have signed copies, and will cheerfully ship them anywhere in the world:
Murder by the Book
3210 Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard
Portland, OR 97214
(503) 232-9995
Mysterious Bookshop
58 Warren Street
New York, NY 10007
(800) 352-2840
Mystery on Main Street
119 Main Street
Brattleboro, VT 05301
(802) 258-2211
The Poisoned Pen
4014 N Goldwater Blvd #101
Scottsdale AZ 85251
(888) 560-9919
Seattle Mystery Bookshop
117 Cherry St
Seattle, WA 98104-2205
(206) 587-5737
Any more questions?
I love the new covers, and they'll look great on the shelf next to The Night and the Music. Any chance the rest of the series will be available in the same format?
Wouldn't that be nice? Right now it's not an option, but if things change I'll be quick to carpe the old diem and hurry them into production.
Will you let us know if that happens?
Count on it. Meanwhile, just click on LB's Bookstore and grab yourself a set of three. (And if you missed The Night and the Music, or someone swiped your copy, it's right on the same page.)
LB
But three of the Scudder novels, A Stab in the Dark, A Walk Among the Tombstones, and A Long Line of Dead Men, have been out of print for a while now. I managed to regain the rights, and earlier this year self-published them all as eBook editions.
But “print” sort of implies paper and ink, doesn’t it?
You know, that's just what I was going to say. While I trust I’ve established my street cred as an eBook enthusiast, that doesn’t mean I’m eager for printed books to disappear—or for my books to cease to exist in that form. When I self-published The Night and the Music last fall, I was able to bring out a trade paperback edition close upon the heels of the eBook; both, I’m pleased to report, have enjoyed a very gratifying reception.
And now it’s my pleasure to offer the three books as trade paperbacks, in the same format as The Night and the Music. The same great team at Telemachus Press readied the books for production, and the good people at Lightning Source saw to the printing and binding, and here’s how they look:
Any questions? Ah, I see a few hands raised:
Will the books be in stores?
Not in brick-and-mortar stores. Online booksellers—Amazon and Barnes & Noble—will be able to supply them. And a handful of the leading mystery specialty booksellers are carrying the new books—and all of their copies are signed.
I was just about to ask how to get signed copies.
Great—go right ahead and ask.
Uh, how do I get signed copies?
You can order them online from LB’s Bookstore. They’re $16.99 apiece plus $5 shipping. But if you buy the three-book set, they’re yours for $54.99 postpaid. (That’s $49.99 plus $5, for a net savings to you of $10.98.)
Oh, I want a set! But I’m in school here in Toronto, and my sister’s back home in Taiwan, and my cousin’s in Sao Paulo, and my best friend’s in Stuttgart, and we’d all like to buy signed copies. And you only ship to U.S. addresses!
I know, but don’t despair. These fine stores have signed copies, and will cheerfully ship them anywhere in the world:
Murder by the Book
3210 Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard
Portland, OR 97214
(503) 232-9995
Mysterious Bookshop
58 Warren Street
New York, NY 10007
(800) 352-2840
Mystery on Main Street
119 Main Street
Brattleboro, VT 05301
(802) 258-2211
The Poisoned Pen
4014 N Goldwater Blvd #101
Scottsdale AZ 85251
(888) 560-9919
Seattle Mystery Bookshop
117 Cherry St
Seattle, WA 98104-2205
(206) 587-5737
Any more questions?
I love the new covers, and they'll look great on the shelf next to The Night and the Music. Any chance the rest of the series will be available in the same format?
Wouldn't that be nice? Right now it's not an option, but if things change I'll be quick to carpe the old diem and hurry them into production.
Will you let us know if that happens?
Count on it. Meanwhile, just click on LB's Bookstore and grab yourself a set of three. (And if you missed The Night and the Music, or someone swiped your copy, it's right on the same page.)
LB
April 10, 2012
Matthew Scudder - 99¢!
Yes, you read that right. And no, it's not a trick. The Sins of the Fathers, first volume in the Matthew Scudder series, is now available at Kindle, Nook, Kobo and Apple for 99¢.
(By the time you read this, the same low price should be in effect for Sony Reader, but the link I'm posting here now still reflects the $7.99 price.)
HarperCollins publishes The Sins of the Fathers, and had the eBook pegged at $7.99, the same price they get for the mass-market paperback. Now they've slashed the price in the hope that a taste of Mr. Scudder will leave you wanting more.
And, because they're genuinely nice people (and clever devils in the bargain) they've made it easy for you to indulge a hankering for Scudder. The Sins of the Fathers is 99¢—and they've cut the price of all the rest of the Scudder books to $3.99.
Ah, I see a hand raised, and I seem to recognize the gentleman attached to it. I do believe it's Ron Popeil. Ron, did you want to say something?
"But wait—there's more!"
And indeed there is. Along with all those Scudder books, HarperCollins also publishes all ten Bernie Rhodenbarr mysteries (starting with Burglars Can't Be Choosers), all eight Evan Tanner adventures (starting with The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep), all four Keller novels (starting with Hit Man), three books for writers (Telling Lies For Fun & Profit, Spider Spin Me a Web, and Write For Your Life), a couple of short story collections (including the mega-volume Enough Rope), my big New York novel (Small Town) and a memoir (Step By Step).
Every last one of them is on special for $3.99.
They won't stay that way forever. I know the 99¢ price on Sins is good for at least two weeks, and possibly for as long as a month. And I know the other books will stay at $3.99 for at least a month, but after that I think they'll go up a dollar.
I don't think I need to say more. The prices speak for themselves, and I'd rather get this to you ASAP than fine-tune it.
Enjoy!
LB
