You Can Write a DEAD MAN Novel

How would you like to become a PUBLISHED AUTHOR...and win $1000 in cash and prizes?


Now's your chance to win a $500 advance, a $500 Amazon gift card, and a publishing contract to write your own tale in the hugely popular DEAD MAN saga... to be published in early 2013 by Amazon's 47North imprint.

The acclaimed series, co-created by Top Suspense author Lee Goldberg, and written by him and many other authors, including Top Suspense members Joel Goldman, Bill Crider, and Harry Shannon, is published monthly in digital, print and audio editions and distributed worldwide.

To win a publishing contract to become one of the DEAD MAN authors, all you have to do is write a sample chapter and a brief outline of your story, complete the entry form and sign the release...and email the whole package to us at thedeadmanbookcontest@gmail.com by August 1, 2012... or before we receive 500 entries... whichever comes first. Each entry will be judged by a group of current writers of THE DEAD MAN.

WHAT ARE THE RULES?

The contest rules are below. Please read them carefully to make sure that your entry meets all of the eligibility requirements before you submit.

Good luck!

WRITE A “DEAD MAN” NOVEL CONTEST

OFFICIAL RULES

Please read these Official Rules before entering the Write a “Dead Man” Novel Contest (“Contest”). By submitting an entry, entrants (“you” or “your”) acknowledge that you are eligible to enter the Contest and have read and agree to be bound by these Official Rules and our and the judges decisions related to the Contest. We will select one winner who will receive a full, work-for-hire publishing contract to write a 25,000 word novel in “The Dead Man” series of books, commissioned by Adventures in Television Inc. (the “Sponsors”) and published by Amazon Publishing.

1. ELIGIBILITY You are eligible to enter the Contest if you are at least 18 years old at time of entry and a legal resident of one of the following countries: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada (excluding the Province of Québec), China, Denmark, Finland, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Romania, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States (the 50 states and D.C.), or the United Kingdom. You are not eligible to enter the Contest if you are (a) an Amazon employee or independent contractor or an employee or independent contractor of any of Amazon’s affiliates; (b) a family member (spouses, domestic partners, parents, grandparents, siblings, children, and grandchildren) of an Amazon employee or independent contractor; (c) a family member (spouses, domestic partners, parents, grandparents, siblings, children, and grandchildren) of an employee or independent contractor of any of Amazon’s affiliates; (d) an individual living in the same household as Amazon’s employee or independent contractor; (e) an individual living in the same household as an employee or independent contractor of any of Amazon’s affiliates; or (f) a judge involved in the Contest.

2. HOW TO ENTER We must receive your Contest entry between June 1, 2012 at 12:01 a.m. (U.S. Pacific Standard Time) and August 1, 2012 at 11:59 p.m. (U.S. Pacific Standard Time). We will stop accepting Entries after we have received 500 submissions. You must download the entry form and the Release & Non-Disclosure Form from http://thedeadmanbooks.blogspot.com. You must then follow the instructions on the entry form and email to us, at thedeadmanbookcontest@gmail.com, the following attachments (1) a sample chapter of your proposed book in the “The Dead Man” series (“Chapter”) of up to 4,000 words, (2) an outline of your proposed book of up to 1000 words (“Outline”); (3) a signed release and non-disclosure form and (4) the personal information required on the entry form. (1-4 collectively, an “Entry”). We will not accept or review any Entry that does not comply with these Official Rules.

3. ENTRY REQUIREMENTS You must be the only author of your Chapter and Outline. Any Chapter and Outline submitted as an Entry written by two or more authors will not be eligible. Your Chapter and Outline must: (a) be your original creation; (b) be fictional; (c) be in the English language; (d) be of interior black and white text without images; (e) not currently or previously have been the subject of a publishing agreement with any publisher. Additionally, you must submit your Chapter and Outline digitally in Microsoft Word .doc, .docx, .rtf, or .txt format. Any entry that we determine, in our sole discretion, to meet these requirements will be considered a “Valid Entry.” You may be represented by an agent on the condition that you - not your agent - agree to comply with these Official Rules. Our servers and clock will be the official clock for all phases of the Contest. You will not receive any notice that your entry has been received. You will only be contacted if you are the Winner. You may only submit one entry.

4. CONDITIONS OF ENTRY By submitting an Entry, you represent and warrant that your Entry: (a) is your original creation; (b) has not been copied in whole or in part from any other work; (c) has not previously been published as described in Section 3(e) above; (d) does not violate or infringe any copyright, trademark, privacy or publicity right, or other proprietary or intellectual property right of any person or entity; (e) is not defamatory, libelous, obscene, or otherwise illegal; and (f) is your sole and exclusive property. You further represent and warrant that you have complete, worldwide distribution rights in and to your Chapter and Outline.

5. GRANT OF RIGHTS By submitting an Entry and if you are selected as the winner, you grant Adventures in Television the exclusive first publication rights to your Entry. By submitting an Entry, you grant us and our respective affiliates and agents permission to use, without charge, portions of your Chapter and Outline, along with your name and stated reason for writing the submitted Entry (if provided) for any purpose in connection with this Contest. You also grant us the right to edit the formatting and display of your Entry, and to create literary or any other types of effects in respect to your Entry without compensation or approval. In addition, to the extent that any moral rights (for example, the right to attribution and the right to integrity) apply, you waive (and to the extent that these rights may not be waived, agree irrevocably not to assert) your moral rights in your Entry for purposes of this Contest, including, without limitation, our use of excerpts from your Entry in connection with this Contest. You represent that you have received the consent of any person (or parent or legal guardian if such person is a minor) whose real and actual name or likeness is used or featured in any Entry that you submit. If you fail to obtain the consent, your Entry will be disqualified. We have the right at any time during the Contest to request proof of consent, and to disqualify your Entry if you cannot provide the requested documents. Excerpts, along with the your name, city, and state of residence, and portions of your Entry which relate to the submitted Chapter, may be posted on any website owned or operated by us or any of their affiliates (“Our Site”), any other website or other online point of presence on any platform through which any products or services available on or through Our Site are described, syndicated, offered, merchandised, or advertised. Our decision to post an Excerpt or any portion of an Entry on any one of Our Sites does not mean that the selected Entry has been selected as a winning Entry. Furthermore, you acknowledge that your Entry is based on copyrighted characters, concepts, and other creative elements belonging wholly to Adventures in Television Inc. and that “The Dead Man” logo is a registered trademark of Adventures in Television Inc. and that you may not publish, or otherwise publicly disseminate or repurpose your Entry in any media or format, regardless of whether or not you win the contest, without the written consent of Adventures in Television Inc.

6. COLLECTION/USE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION We are collecting personal information primarily to process Entries, to contact you if necessary, or for marketing and other purposes. By participating in this Contest, non-U.S. resident entrants are authorizing the transfer of personal data to the United States for these purposes. By entering the Contest, you agree that we may share your information, in our sole discretion, with third parties that have a need to know the information, such as the judging panel or third parties that we retain to assist in administering the Contest; however, those third parties may only use the information for purposes related to this Contest.

7. GRAND PRIZE If you are selected as the Winner in a category, you will receive a $500 Amazon gift card and a standard work-for-hire publishing contract with Adventures in Television Inc. to write a novella, of no more than 25,000 words, in “The Dead Man” series and to market and distribute your final manuscript as a published book. Upon the full execution of the publishing contract, Adventures in Television will pay the Winner $500.00 USD (in addition to the $500 Amazon gift card). The $500.00 payment is an advance against the royalties to be earned by the Winner under the work-for-hire publishing contract. The approximate retail value (“ARV”) of the publishing contract is $500.00 USD for the advance. You will receive half of the advance on signing the contract, half on delivery of the final manuscript. Adventures in Television will determine the royalty rates to be paid under the work-for-hire publishing contract, which will depend on the format in which the book is published and the projected print run. You may not negotiate the standard work-for-hire publishing contract with Adventures in Television, and you must sign it “as is” upon receipt of the executable contract if you wish to enter into the publishing contract being awarded. The work-for-hire publishing contract will be governed by the laws of the State of California.

8. DISQUALIFICATIONS If your Entry is disqualified for any reason, you will not receive a notice or explanation describing the reason for the disqualification.

9. WINNER NOTIFICATION AND REQUIREMENTS If you are selected as a potential Finalist, we will notify you by phone or e-mail starting on or before Sept 1, 2012. You will be required to sign and return a work-for-hire publishing contract with Adventures in Television, which Adventures in Television will countersign only if you are selected as the Winner. We must receive the signed publishing contract by Oct. 1, 2012. If any documentation is not returned by the specified dates, we may invite an alternate Finalist, chosen by the Adventures in Television judging panel to replace the original Finalist. If notification to the alternate Finalist is returned as undeliverable, we will invite the next eligible alternate Finalist, and so on. Prior to awarding a prize, we may require you to sign additional documents we believe are necessary to confirm your eligibility, to obtain a liability and publicity release, and to award any prize.

10. ADDITIONAL TERMS The Contest and all accompanying materials are © 2012 by Adventures in Television, Inc. All rights reserved. The Contest is void outside the eligible entry jurisdictions and where prohibited by law. You agree that our decisions related to the Contest are final and binding in all matters. We reserve the right, to the maximum extent permitted by law, in our sole discretion, to change these rules or cancel the Contest at any time. We may also modify, terminate or suspend the Contest if any viruses, worms, bugs, unauthorized human intervention, or other causes beyond our control corrupt or impair the administration, security, or fairness of the Contest or submission of Entries. If you use the name or likeness of an individual in your Entry, you agree to be solely responsible for that use. Amazon is not a sponsor of or involved in the judging of this Contest. You agree that we, Amazon and our and their respective parents, affiliates, subsidiaries and advertising and promotion agencies, along with any officers, directors, agents, employees and representatives of any of them (collectively, “Released Parties”), will not be responsible for any action brought by a person whose consent you did not obtain. The Released Parties are not responsible for: (a) any human or other error that may occur in the processing of the Entries; (b) any error, omission, interruption, deletion, defect, delay in operation or transmission, theft or destruction, or unauthorized access to or alteration of Entries; (c) or for technical, network, telephone, computer, hardware or software, malfunctions of any kind, which may occur in connection with this Contest, including, without limitation, any errors or problems related to the administration of the Contest, the processing or judging of Entries, the announcement of the prizes, or the Contest-related materials. Released Parties are also not responsible for: (y) inaccurate transmission of, or failure to receive, any entry information on account of technical problems or traffic congestion on the Internet or at any Web site; and (z) injury or damage to you or any other computer resulting from downloading any materials in connection with the Contest. We reserve the right, in our sole discretion, to disqualify any individual found to be tampering with the entry or voting process, the outcome of the Contest, or the operation of the Contest or Web site; to be acting in violation of these Official Rules; or to be acting in an unsportsmanlike or disruptive manner or with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any other person (including actions by you individual to deliberately damage any website or undermine the legitimate operation of the contest may be a violation of criminal and civil laws, and if such an attempt is made, we reserve the right to seek damages or other relief (including attorneys’ fees) from the person to the fullest extent permitted by law.

11. LIMITATIONS OF LIABILITY The released parties are not responsible for the unauthorized use of any entry (or any portion of any entry) by any third party. you agree (for yourself and your heirs) that the released parties, to the maximum extent permitted by law, are not responsible for any liability, loss, injury, or damage to property or to person. you also agree that we are not responsible for any reasonable attorney’s fees and court costs directly or indirectly related to your participation in the contest, or by reason of your acceptance, possession, use or misuse of the prizes (including any travel or activity related to a prize). nothing in these official rules will limit any released party’s liability for death or personal injury caused by that party's negligence, a breach of these official rules, or fraudulent misrepresentation.

12. GOVERNING LAW/DISPUTES This Contest is governed by the laws of the United States and the State of California. As a condition of participating in this Contest, you agree, to the extent permitted by law, that any and all disputes which cannot be resolved between the parties, and causes of action arising out of or in connection with this Contest, will be resolved individually, without resort to any form of class action, exclusively before a court located in Los Angeles County, California. Further, in any dispute, under no circumstances will you be permitted to obtain awards for, and you hereby waive all rights to claim, punitive, incidental or consequential damages, including attorneys' fees, other than entrant’s actual out-of-pocket expenses (e.g. costs associated with entering) you further waive all rights to have damages multiplied or increased.

13. RIGHTS OF PUBLICITY By participating in the Contest, you consent to the worldwide use of your name, biographical information, photographs, videos or likenesses in any manner and in any medium now in existence or later invented for any purpose in connection with the Contest without additional compensation, notification or permission, except where prohibited by law.

14. SPONSORS’ ADDRESS Adventures in Television, Inc, P.O. Box 8212, Calabasas, CA 91372

Mr. Monk is a Mess

My 14th and second-to-last Monk novel, MR. MONK IS A MESS, was published this week. It's a direct sequel to my earlier book, MR. MONK ON PATROL and it resolves, to some degree, the cliffhanger ending of that book. Here's the story...

No one likes to come home to a mess--least of all Monk and Natalie. But when they return briefly to San Francisco from an extended stay working as cops in New Jersey, Natalie discovers somebody has been sleeping in her bed. But this Goldilocks is not asleep. She's dead.

If that's not bad enough, investigators find marked money from a Federal sting operation stuffed under Natalie's mattress. Now her life is a real mess and she needs Monk's help to clean it up.

But Monk has problems of his own. His brother Ambrose is desperate to find Yuki, his missing lover, but his agoraphobia prevents him from leaving the house. Ambrose needs a man on the outside--and that man is Monk, who is torn, because he's glad to see her go.

As the two investigations begin, and the body count rises, it quickly becomes clear to Monk that Yuki has a dangerous past...and that they are pursuing a ruthless, cold-blooded killer that nobody would ever want to mess with...

It was a lot of fun to write, because the relationships between all of the characters were very much in flux, and it meant that Monk had to approach the world, and his cases, in an entirely new way.  It also made things more challenging, surprising and interesting for me, setting the stage for the final book in the series (well, at least the last one that I've written)

I'll be signing the book June 14-17 at the International Mystery Writers Festival in Owensboro KY, which I will be attending with my fellow Top Suspense authors Max Allan Collins and Libby Fischer Hellmann. I'll  also be signing June 23 at Mysteries to Die For bookstore in Thousand Oaks, CA. I hope if you're near one of those places when I am signing that you'll stop by.

Gav Reads - or Why He Won't

This post on the Gav Reads blog offers a reviewer's perspective on self-published material.

It's by no means an author-bashing piece, but it does lay out six strong reasons for reviewers to be circumspect in their dealings with novels that are offered to them without mediation or provenance.

Authors can be deluded. Self-published authors doubly so. Not only have you compiled your opus without being consciously aware that what you’ve written needs to be redrafted or thrown away as it’s obvious that you’ve not yet mastered the craft of storytelling to an engaging degree. But you’ve got an ego that makes you think that someone else will not see your flaws. The reverse in fact, that we will see your genius and wonder why you haven’t gotten a six-figure publishing deal...

...Now I know this is full of sweeping generalisations and I’m sure there are exceptions to every point raised but if self-publisher writers want to be ‘taken seriously’ by those that have ‘respected opinions’ they are going to keep coming up against the default opinion that the quality of their work isn’t going to be as good as those books that have been through agents, editors, publishing committees, copy editors, book buyers for retailers – most of whom they have needed to get past in order to get published.

It's followed by a lengthy and mostly intelligent debate in the comments section, including this from fellow online reviewer Djibril:

I’m intensely interested in how we’re going to develop filtering and validation mechanisms outside of the world of commercial publishers and professional review venues. It’s a bit chicken and egg: until we do, it’ll be very hard to find the good self-published stuff out there–but until the good self-pubbed stuff can be found and gets a reputation, the incentive to build up such a mechanism isn’t very strong.

Christopher Shevlin says:

Everyone seems to agree that there should be a way to filter self-published stuff. Some people look to reviewers to do that job, but reviewers themselves need to be able to sort the angry, deluded, typo-filled books from the ones they might like.

And this from Deb Kinnard:

I hope you who won’t read self-published are being careful about titles that are published this way after putting out multiple commercially published books. Sometimes there is just no market for a story that’s of equal quality with anything that author has previously sold. Sometimes it’s just the wrong tale at the wrong time, or that publisher has had six different novels release in the past year with exactly that same theme (!) or another such deal-breaker.

It's all here.

Book Covers in the Digital Age

Why does a digital book even need a cover?

"We jump in and out of digital texts with little to no procession. In contrast, every time you set down a physical book, the cover is staring up at you. And every time you pick it back up, you have to go "through" the cover to get to the text. Do that five times and you'll never forget the title or author."

Craig Mod speculates on the future of the ebook cover. Read the rest here.

Mr. Monk and the Happy Ending

My seven year, three episode, fifteen book relationship with Adrian Monk has ended. I've just finished writing my last book in the series, Mr. Monk Gets Even, and I will be sending it to my editor next week after taking one last pass through it (don't despair - the book series may continue with another writer).

My relationship with Monk has been long and wonderful. It began when  “Monk” creator Andy Breckman hired me and William Rabkin to write an episode of the TV series entitled “Mr. Monk Goes to Mexico,” which would end up being the first of three episodes we wrote for the show.

At the time, Bill and I were about to begin writing & producing the Lifetime TV series Missing and I was deep into writing the Diagnosis Murder novels, which were based on the TV series of the same name that we’d also written & executive-produced.

When Andy was approached by NAL about writing Monk novels, he declined the opportunity and recommended that I write them instead.  I took the assignment, which was an insane thing to do, since it would mean writing a new book by night every ninety days, alternating between Monk and Diagnosis Murder, while also running a TV series during the day.

That’s how much I loved Adrian Monk.

I kept up that brutal pace for two years before finally ending the Diagnosis Murder book series after eight novels.

Andy liked my first Monk novel, Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse, so much that he hired Bill and I to adapt it into an episode of the TV show. The episode, entitled “Mr. Monk Can’t See A Thing,” may be the first time in American TV history that a tie-in novel of a TV show has been adapted into an episode of the series….and by the author of the book, no less (if it’s ever been done before, we haven’t found it. And if it has been done, it’s obviously a rare occurrence!)

If it wasn’t for Andy’s enthusiasm and support, I doubt I would have written so many “Monk” novels or had so much fun doing them. He gave me his trust and the creative freedom to make the book series entirely my own, and for that I will always be grateful.

Mr. Monk Gets Even comes out in January...but Mr. Monk is a Mess, the second to last of my Monk novels, comes out in two weeks.

(Below is a trailer I did for a Monk book excerpt that appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)

Introducing One Angry Julius & Other Stories

This collection features the latest story from the multiple award-winning Julius Katz series, One Angry Julius and Eleven Befuddled Jurors, in which a very annoyed Julius finds himself sequestered on a jury and about to miss the gourmet dinner of a lifetime. Also in this collection are five very different types of noir stories that were previously published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Cape Cod Noir and On Dangerous Ground, including the 2012 Thriller Award nominated story, A Hostage Situation. As an added bonus, The first chapter of Dave Zeltserman's upcoming horror novel, Monster: A Novel of Frankenstein has also been included. This collection is available for $2.99 for either kindle or nook.

The Routines of Writing

Writers' Routines is a collection of short pieces detailing, as you'd expect from the name, the working practices and outlooks of various members of the writing profession:

"I was very vulnerable to criticism for many years. I could read a bad review and remember it my whole life. One day, in the early ’90s, my play was opening for the third time in Chicago. This free press paper gave it a terrible, terrible review, saying, “It’s horrible this type of play gets put on and keeps other good writers from getting their play put on.” And I looked at the review and thought, You know what? I wrote a play and he wrote a review and that’s the difference between us. And I was never bothered by it again."

Steve Martin

You can find more right here.

Koenig on True Crime

To coincide with the publication of his novel False Negative by Hard Case Crime, author Joseph Koenig writes on the Titan Books blog about his experiences on True Crime magazines:

Prior to going to work at the magazine I don't believe I had known a single murderer. Soon I was on a first-name basis with too many. They weren't original thinkers. All had the same idea stuck in their head, and it wasn't very different than the one that had landed them in stir. Somebody was going to suffer for their misfortune. The nearest available individual would do.

My murderers were not professionals, but garden variety rape-slayers, socially inept men with problematic IQs, and lacking movie star looks, whose best chances for sex were with a corpse, or with someone about to become one. They were not physically imposing. Yet they had killed, many of them more than once, and their good behavior in the office was not to be assumed. Because I didn't care to defend against murder charges myself, I didn't keep a weapon, not even a sharpened letter opener, in my desk. A paperweight, a snow globe that showed the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building in a blizzard when you shook it, was available for dashing their presumed brains. It never came to that. Close calls aren't worth mentioning.

Read the full story here.

How I Wrote KING CITY

Lee Goldberg here...

I've written over thirty novels, and my process with all of them was pretty much the same. I had an idea, I wrote a bullet-point outline, and I started writing the book, revising my outline along the way (I call them "living outlines," since I usually finish writing them a few days before I complete my manuscripts). But the process of writing KING CITY, my new standalone crime novel that was released today, was entirely different.

KING CITY began as a TV series pitch that I took all over Hollywood four or five years ago. It generated some interest but ultimately didn't lead to anything. So I put it in a drawer and moved on.

But the idea nagged at me anyway and I began to think KING CITY might make a better book than a screenplay. So, between MONK novels three years ago, I wrote 200 pages and a broad-strokes outline for the rest of the book.

I sent the proposal to my agent and began writing my next MONK book. The first place she sent KING CITY to was Penguin/Putnam, my MONK publisher, because she felt certain they'd snap it up. Between DIAGNOSIS MURDER and MONK, I'd written twenty-some novels for them. We knew that they liked me and my work, which had been successful for them, so we didn't think they'd see KING CITY as much of a gamble.

But they passed, surprising us both. My agent felt the rejection was less about me or the book than the way the business had changed. Mid-list authors were being dropped, editors were being fired, and the days of selling book proposals was over. If I wanted to sell KING CITY, I'd have to write the whole book and then shop it around.

I wasn't wild about that idea. If editors who knew me and my work well didn't find the first 200 pages compelling enough to merit an offer, I doubted that reading the whole novel would change their minds. And if these editors, folks I'd worked with for years, weren't willing to gamble on me, why would someone else? Moreover, after years of having contracts before I started writing novels, I was spoiled. The idea of writing a book entirely on spec made me uneasy, especially given my experience with THE WALK and WATCH ME DIE. Both of those books were written "on spec" and, after years bouncing all over New York, were finally published by Five Star, who paid a pittance for them. They got wide acclaim but not wide distribution. From a financial standpoint, they seemed to be a bust. I wasn't willing to go through that again.

So I tabled KING CITY and went back to writing one MONK novel after another.

But then something amazing happened - the ebook market took off, and I started earning tens of thousands of dollars on my out-of-print backlist, like THE WALK. It changed my thinking entirely about the publishing business. About the same time, my TV agent started nagging me to write a spec pilot.

Which got me thinking about KING CITY again.

So, last November, when I was once again between MONK books, I re-read the 200 pages and realized I had the makings of a great spec pilot. I stripped the story down to the bare elements, reordered events, dropped some characters, and rethought everything. Over the holidays, I adapted my unfinished novel into a screenplay. Actually, it ended up being two of them: one-hour pilot and the second episode. I sent both scripts off to my TV agent and began work on my next MONK.

The scripts got me some exciting meetings at studios and networks...but didn't pan out into any options on KING CITY or a series staff job (at least not yet).  But I realized I had more than just two strong scripts - if I put them together, I had a remarkably detailed outline for the book.

So I decided to write it during my next MONK hiatus.

Along the way, I made lots of changes. I liked most of the choices I'd made for the screenplay, which tightened the plot and gave the story more of a narrative drive, but I missed some of the more "novelistic" elements that I'd dropped. So instead of novelizing my screenplay adaptation of a novel, I found myself writing KING CITY all over again... for the third time.

It's been a very unusual experience for me. I feel that KING CITY has improved with each draft, whether in novel or screenplay form. Adapting the original, 200 pages into a script forced me to take a hard look at everything, to sharpen the characters and tighten the plot, stripping away all of the fat in favor of narrative drive.  That relentless and mercilous focus on character and lean story-telling may be great for a script but not so much in a book, where taking the time to establish a sense of place, and to explore the internal thoughts of a character don't slow things down, they enrich the experience. Adapting KING CITY back into a novel again allowed me to see where I might have cut too deep, over-simplified the characters, or moved events along too rapidly.

I finished the first draft two days before I had to begin writing my next MONK novel  and sent it off to some close friends for their comments. They gave me great notes, and by that, I don't mean enthusiastic praise. They told me what worked... and what didn't. I revised the book and submitted it to Amazon's Thomas & Mercer imprint. They immediately grabbed the book and published it in record time - it's out today, only a few months after submission, in digital, print and audio.

I like to think this is the best version yet of KING CITY. But you'll have to be the judge of that...

Whoa. Let's All Just Take a Deep Breath

With The New York Times reporting that best-selling authors are now being told to publish more than one book a year, and a breezy analysis from Forbes which basically says that anyone with a good brand can become a successful author, Libby Fischer Hellman sees cause for concern:

Forbes is basically saying, if you can sell it, you’re a writer.

Well, no. You’re not.

Just because you can write doesn’t mean you should. Writers need to grow their craft. They need to understand point of view. They need to understand suspense. Develop three-dimensional characters. And they need to hone their prose. Strip out dangling participles. Eliminate TV dialogue. Deliver conflict on every page. Just because a writer has finished a manuscript doesn’t mean it’s ready. I know. I wrote four books before I was published.

Which, in a round-about way, brings me back to the NY Times article. There’s an old story in the mystery community about a woman with a full time job who, nonetheless, wrote a novel in a year. Then she decided to go part-time, thinking she could write one in six months. It still took a year. Then she quit her job altogether. It still took a year.

The point is that great novels, whether genre or literary, can take time—whether it’s research, editing, or just figuring out what the story is really about. The pressure of writing more than one book a year isn’t good for any author who cares about their craft. Most of the authors I know are always pushing themselves, trying new things, working to deliver fresh, dynamic stories and characters. The need to crank out more in less time threatens that drive and can lead to works of lesser quality. It’s a self-perpetuating danger which no writer, especially a best-selling author, should have to face.

But they are, mainly because other e-writers are putting out an enormous amount of product. Some writers release e-books at the rate of one a month. I’m sorry, but with a few exceptions, those are not books I am going to rush out and buy. I know they’re not going to be at the same level as a new Daniel Silva or a new Mo Hayder. I don’t care how much “branding” an author does. I can tell within two or three paragraphs whether I’m going to like a book, and that depends on the writer’s mastery of craft. If it’s not there, it’s not for me.

Read the complete post on Libby's blog, Say The Word. Healthy market or surge toward hackery? Some strong feelings on the subject, no doubt. Just remember that while comment is free, courtesy also costs nothing...

Max Allan Collins on Mickey Spillane

Over at BoingBoing.net, our own Max Allan Collins writes about his collaboration with Mickey Spillane:

I grew up reading Mickey Spillane novels and, years later, was lucky enough to get to know the man behind Mike Hammer. Mickey and I did a number of projects together - co-editing anthologies, creating the comic book Mike Danger, plus my documentary, "Mike Hammer's Mickey Spillane" (1999 - available on the Criterion DVD/Blu-ray of the great film noir, Kiss Me Deadly).

About a week before his passing, Mickey called to ask a favor. He was very ill and knew it. He was working on what would be the last Mike Hammer novel, chronologically -- The Goliath Bone, Mike taking on terrorists in post-9/11 Manhattan...

Read the full piece, and an excerpt from the completed novel, here.

Style in Writing

Someone once asked me how to go about achieving a writing style. Like the caterpillar challenged about its coordination in walking, I stumbled as soon as I started thinking about it.

I think the best answer I could offer was that you should try to state the obvious simply, and the style would take care of itself.

In a blog post titled Good Stuff, Lee Goldberg lifts a few sentences from Walter Kirn's novel Up in the Air (source for the George Clooney movie) and expresses a fitting admiration for Kirn's handling of the words.

I genuinely believe that you can flip open a book and read any random sentence and it'll tell you whether time spent with the author will be wasted. It's not an absolute guarantee - I can think of many a literary novel where I've been seduced by style and let down by structure - but as a working principle, it serves me well.

I mean, think about it. How much do you have to hear to know whether a person can sing?