Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 42

Market your books?

Molly Malone was a fish monger who marketed her cockles and mussels through streets wide and narrow, but should authors become book mongers? Molly was probably a lot better at selling her wares than authors are at selling their books. We’re good at writing. Most of us hate the rest and aren’t that motivated to do it. That leads to marketing gurus taking advantage of us.

Various gurus make a lot of money doing just that. (I could name names so authors could avoid them, but that wouldn’t be nice, ...

Op-Ed Pages #17: My fear…

Except for those uncaring citizens who aren’t up on the news, or who only watch Fox to reaffirm their crazy adoration of Trump and belief in conspiracies, most of us in the US, even around the world, recognize that Il Duce is a liar, cheat, pervert, and criminal. It doesn’t take his ex-fixer Cohen or Watergate journalist Woodward to tell us that. We have plenty of evidence by now that he should never have been president, that he’s the worst US president ever, and that the rest of the world will ...

Crosswords and cross words…

While you don’t need a writer to be a fan, crosswords seem a natural pastime for authors. Give me a spare half-hour, and I’ll try to breeze through one. I often get through Monday’s NY Times’s crosswords in less than that, using a pen, and take slightly more time with Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s, using a pencil. If I don’t finish one, I just toss it. There’s always another one.

I often receive books of crosswords as gifts. The intention is good—people who know me know I’m a fan. One of these conta...

My writing obsession…

My character Esther Brookstone becomes obsessed with finding things: a missing painting in Rembrandt’s Angel and St. John the Divine’s tomb in Son of Thunder. In the third book of the series, Death on the Danube (coming soon!), she does more traditional sleuthing, helping new hubby, Bastiann van Coevorden, find an assassin. This Miss Marple-like woman and her Hercule Poirot-like husband are on their honeymoon! I’ve become obsessed with telling readers about her adventures (although George Langst...

Op-Ed Pages #16: Caught between two laws in a deadly vise…

Kentucky, a state with a long tradition of continuing to fight the Civil War into the 21st century like many southern states, has two laws most people there, or most anywhere else, could imagine clashing: the “Stand Your Ground” law and the “No-Knock Warrants” law. They clashed in a deadly fashion in the case of Breonna Taylor, putting her in a deadly vise and providing a strong indictment against systemic racism and the NRA with its wrong interpretations of the Second Amendment.

I can understan...

September 11, 2001…we should never forget…

Carlos, this day when you perished at the hands of radical Muslim fanatics will never be forgotten. We miss you!

Bookends…

Bookend commercials and a day’s bookend storms…bad; Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bookends”…good. Bookends for books are on the endangered species list. The reason? Ebooks.

Many older readers and others prefer print. Like me, they like to browse in bookstores, libraries, and online; the first two are usually for print books. But, unlike me, they don’t take advantage of the convenience of ebooks: they’ve saved my sagging bookshelves. Bookends are needed to put some order into bookshelves, but they’re no...

Review of Karen Baugh Menuhin’s “Heathcliff Lennox Mysteries”…

“Heathcliff Lennox Mysteries.” Karen Baugh Menuhin, author. I continue to report on my binge-reading (I’m binge-writing too, and the manuscripts are piling up—more on that elsewhere in these pages). Most mystery series I’ve OD’d on are more or less modern-day, although the books are often “evergreen” (2019 or earlier, but as fresh and entertaining as the day they were written). Others, whether evergreen or not, are purposely set in earlier times—early 20th or 19th century (T. E. Kinsey’s “Lady H...

Authors and social issues…

I know I’ve probably made some readers of this blog furious with me after reading some of my recent op-eds. Maybe some are even boycotting my books. Others, though, might like that the author who wrote them has enough courage to discuss social issues, both in his books and in those op-eds? I’ll never refrain from speaking my mind just because gurus tell me that I must do so if I want to sell more books. To hell with that!

Authors are often scared of taking a stand on social issues. If they’re tr...

Op-Ed Pages #15: Call a social worker!

“Defund the police!” Let’s analyze this statement. There are a lot of people who see a few rotten apples and think the whole barrel is bad—they hate all the police. They feed off stereotypes. The same thinking that leads to KKK-type tropes about blacks and Hispanics being thieves, rapists, and murderers (out current president uses those and repeats them over and over again), that same thinking the other side employs to see cops—“pigs” as they call them—as Nazi Stormtroopers doing the bidding of ...