Good News-Bad News

 by Thomas Kies

The good news first. It was officially announced this week that I am now working with a new publisher.  I’m thrilled to be working with Level Best Books who has agreed to publish two of my novels, Exit Signs and Murder Point, and a third book that I’m currently working on. 

Exit Signs was written as crime noir and takes place in a cold and snowy winter in upstate New York, in particular Buffalo, the Finger Lakes, and the Adirondack Mountains.  Neophyte detective Jamie Barefoot is assigned to investigate a two-million-dollar life insurance claim.  The problem for the insurance company?  There’s no corpse.  But Jamie does find government fraud, corporate intrigue, hit men, and seduction along the way. 

Murder Point is a Geneva Chase mystery that takes place primarily on the coast of North Carolina on a barrier island. She’s on the trail of artwork stolen from the Isabel Gardner Museum, a heist from over thirty years ago where none of the paintings have ever surfaced.  While investigating, she’s caught in a hurricane and one by one, people are being murdered. 

According to their website: Founded in 2003, Level Best Books is the publisher of crime fiction novels and short story anthologies. Well-regarded by readers and reviewers, stories published by Level Best have won the Agatha, Anthony, Macavity, Derringer, and Robert L. Fish Award for Best First Short Story presented at the Edgar® banquet. Level Best short stories have also been recognized as Best and Distinguished Mystery Stories by the editors of the Best American Mystery Stories series.

Level Best Books is a traditional, royalty-paying publisher with world-wide distribution and in-house marketing support. Headquartered outside of Washington, DC in the historic city of Frederick, Maryland, Level Best also has offices in Boston, Massachusetts and London, England.

I am so proud to now be known as a "Bestie". 

So, that’s the good news.  There have been some stories this week that haven’t been so good for the written word. The New York Times reported this week that the mass market paperbacks that I grew up with are the latest dinosaur to go extinct.  

At one time, they were ubiquitous.  You could find them everywhere, drug stores, supermarkets, airports, train stations. But you would rarely find them in libraries because they were cheaply made with thin paper and bindings that were glued, meaning that, under the right circumstances, the books would simply fall or pull apart. 

But because they were inexpensive and small that made them successful.  I recall getting my reading fix by plunking down sixty cents for a copy of the latest James Bond novel, or a mystery by John D. McDonald, or Stephen King. And the covers of those paperbacks were usually illustrated by a woman in distress or taking off some article of clothing. 

They were small enough to easily fit into your backpack or the pocket of your jacket.  So you could sneak a copy of Valley of the Dolls into your Junior High School without being detected.

Why are they going the way of the passenger pigeon?  Consumers aren’t buying them as often.  They’re buying e-books or the trade paperbacks.  “We follow the consumer,” said Dennis Abboud, the chief executive of ReaderLink. “In the case of mass markets, the consumer spoke. They were just done with it.”

And then there was the story about the Washington Post laying off 300 journalists, which includes trashing their sports section and their book reviews.  Not to sound snarky, but the owner, Jeff Bezos, managed to find the money to bankroll the “documentary” called Melania.  Including production and marketing, he spent nearly $70 million with $28 million going directly to Melania.  

According to some reports, he spent between $45 million and $55 million on his wedding in Venice last year. I guess my invitation must have gotten lost in the mail. 

Is it possible he's pivoting his attention to his Blue Origin space company, working on those NASA lunar contracts? Currying favor with government decision makers, perhaps?

All in all, I'm putting that behind me this afternoon and I’m going to raise my glass to Level Best Books.  I’m looking forward to working with them.  But I’ll also grieve for the mass market paperbacks and, once again, mourn the slow death of newspapers. 

Vanishing Book Reviews

by Charlotte Hinger

The mother of all book reviews is the New York Times. The lucky author whose book is reviewed by this prestigious publication will see sales leap. We should all be this fortunate. The other "best" places to be reviewed are Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, and Booklist.

Kirkus Reviews gives a prize of $50,000 to the best fiction book, the best non-fiction, and young reader's literature. Wow!

But here's the rub when it comes to reviews. Library Journal gets more than 60,000 requests a year. So does Booklist. That's 5000 a month, 1200 a week, 250 books a day. Kirkus Reviews receives 200 submissions per day.

My Recent historical novel, Mary's Place, did not get reviewed by any of these publications. Previously, two of my mysteries received starred reviews from Kirkus, and all of my other historical novels had been received by at least one of the magazines.

I was disappointed. Dumb me, I had not realized how much the publishing world had changed. Review sections are much smaller. Magazines are thinner because of the price of paper and because of the decrease in advertising revenue.

All of the places which grant reviews have guidelines. Following guidelines is crucial. One of the most constant "rules" is to submit a book about four months ahead of publication.

Here are the guidelines from Kirkus Reviews:

The following guidelines are intended to help publishers get the right titles into the right hands at the right time so they can receive consideration.

WHEN TO SUBMIT Kirkus will consider titles that are submitted as digital galleys or e-books at least 4-5 months before publication date. As soon as a book is reviewed—usually 2-3 months before its publication date—the publisher is notified of the review rundate.

WHAT TO SUBMIT We consider all new adult hardcover or original trade-paperback fiction, general-audience nonfiction, and children’s and teen books. Editors make individual judgments about coverage based on merit or potential interest.

Kirkus does not review books in the categories listed below in its traditional program. (Kirkus Indie does not put genre or publication date limits on submissions; see more information about that program here.)

—already published books
—reprints of books that Kirkus has previously reviewed
—self-published titles
—print-on-demand titles
—poetry (except children’s and teen)
—cookbooks
—crafting books
—guidebooks, including travel guides
—personal finance
—textbooks
—specialized technical or professional works
—any work intended primarily for an academic audience
—reference books
—instruction or how-to manuals
—screenplays or other dramatic scripts
—computer and technology handbooks
—books of regional interest

Fortunately, there are oodles of websites created by book bloggers who might give your book the attention it deserves.

Fried Chicken

 by Charlotte Hinger

 I found this really great cartoon in The New Yorker. It was perfect for my Type M post. I really wanted to use it. It featured this chicken and the ridiculous efforts a certain social media company  (you can bet it will remain nameless) uses to win users to their network

I can't use it. People who know what they are doing (not me) say that nothing will get one sued faster than copying images without permission. What's really sad is after many years I have mastered the knock of inserting pictures into blogs. Some of my friends mastered the art at the very beginning. They just went plink with their index finger and voila--witty entries appeared that were illustrated.

The cartoon was so applicable to what's on my mind: marketing. I can't use the cartoon, but I can tell you what it was about. A guy is walking down a hotel corridor carrying a chicken, knocking on each door, telling each occupant that he would like like for them to join his professional network.

I thought it was hilarious because it summed up the sheer looniness of much of today's marketing efforts. The number of books being published every year is astronomical. Far too many for the market to absorb. The industry counts as a book a work that has an International Standard Book Number. No doubt there are many more that do not have this number. 

The whole purpose of marketing is to get a book into the hands of persons who might want to read it. One of the surest ways to do this is to win an award given to writers in that genre. I always read the Edgar winners and the finalists. I read the winners of Western Writers of America Spur Award. I read the Pulitzer prize winners for fiction and some of the finalists. There are many other contests that interest me.

Another sure way to focus attention on a book is through reviews. Unfortunately, the publications with the most influence (New York Times, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and BookList) receive so many books in a week that it's difficult to make the cut. The New York Times receives about 1000 books a week. Of course, there's a substanial increase in sales of a title when it's featured. 

Sadly, with the winnowing of small town or regional newspapers there are fewer publications that try to call attention to local authors or novels that have something to say about issues in that locale. 

Marketing is an important part of the business. I've always thought those of us who have had the good fortune to be traditionally published have a duty to our publishers to do our best to sell our books. 

There's always someone waiting in the wings who would be tickled plumb to death to take our place!

 

Dystopian News and Focusing on Writing

 By Thomas Kies

I’m an unabashed news junkie.  My career for over thirty years was in newspapers and magazines so being a news geek just comes naturally.  I love the physical feel of a newspaper and we get our local paper delivered here twice a week (we really don’t have enough going on here for more editions than that), the News and Observer out of Raleigh every day except for Saturday, and the Sunday New York Times.  Additionally, I subscribe to the online versions of the Washington Post and my old newspaper, the Norwalk Hour. 

Put that together with all of the other free news websites available and I’m down a rabbit hole instead of writing. 

It is so darned easy to get distracted.  Just in a single Op-Ed section of a Sunday New York Times, there were pieces about how different countries were being affected by climate change, how the new covid variant was raging through the country, and how the divisive nature of our political and cultural landscape is slowly leading up to more violence and the possible end of our democracy.

If those aren’t the ingredients for a dystopian novel, I don’t know what is.  How on earth can anyone concentrate on writing a mystery with so many crazy things happening all at once?

I do a number of things to give myself direction.  I’m very lucky that I live on a barrier island here on the coast of North Carolina, so when I want to clear my head, I’ll take a ten-minute walk to the beach.  Usually, by the time I’ve gotten back home, I can sit down and hit the keyboard.

If I get stalled, I’ll bribe myself.  I’m a coffee addict so before I top off my latest cup of caffeine, I’ll force myself to write at least another couple of paragraphs. 

If I get frustrated with my progress, I’ll get up from my desk and wander around the house, thinking of dialogue.  Sometimes I use it, sometimes I don’t. But it gets the creative juices flowing.

Here’s a question.  Do all writers hear voices in their heads?

For me, starting a new book is the absolute hardest because you’re creating a new plotline, new characters, and new locations.  Everything is being made up of whole cloth. 

Right now, I’m about eighty pages into my new project and yesterday, I went back to the first few chapters to smooth out the rough edges and polish the prose. That was fun!  This afternoon I’ll do another few chapters.

Hopefully, by the time I get back to where I left off, I’ll have hit that place when the story starts to write itself.  It’s where the characters take on a life of their own and you know where the book is going.

Right now, however, I don’t even know who the bad guy is.  Bu that really is part of the fun, isn’t it?