Mysterious Matters: Mystery Publishing Demystified

Subtlety Gets Us Nowhere

With all that's being written about the Kindle, and the future of publishing, and books vs. electronic products, I thought I should go on record as saying I have no idea how it will all pan out.  I HOPE that more options means more books sold, regardless of format, which would mean more revenue for publishers and more royalties for authors.  I fear, as many do, Amazon's Microsoftian attempt at world domination in this arena, but that's another whole story not worth getting worked up about, at this time.

I use this as a starting off point to talk about a mild fetish of mine, which is that from time to time I just like to feel hardcovers published in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.  First, I just love the paper.  Some of my first printing Charlotte Armstrongs (Lemon in the Basket, Seven Seats to the Moon, The Protege) have paper so thick that the books could survive a nuclear holocaust.  There is just something so satisfying about turning those thick pages.  Ironically, the paper, while thick, feels light, which is a wonderful paradox that makes me a little giddy.*

But what I have been noticing lately is the copy on the front covers of these hardbacks.  Nowadays, we are used to seeing author name, title, "An [insert sleuth name here] Mystery," and perhaps "Author of [fill in previous book title]."  OK, that's all well and good--no complaints.  But I see from some of my favorite books that the publishers went even further, attempting to position the book through extra verbiage on the cover.  Here are a few for instances:

Margaret Millar, VANISH IN AN INSTANT (1952):  The cover says, "Her best novel of murder and suspense since THE IRON GATES."  Now, I find this odd because Millar wrote many terrific books after THE IRON GATES, including DO EVIL IN RETURN, THE CANNIBAL HEART, and ROSE'S LAST SUMMER.  So did the casual bookstore shopper in 1952 think, "Oh, Millar's last few books stunk; I'm glad she's back in the form she was in for THE IRON GATES"?  Anyway, I've gushed about Millar here before, so won't do so again.  The only thing I can think of is that the editor really loved VANISH IN AN INSTANT and was looking for a way to convey that on the cover.

Norah Lofts, THE LITTLE WAX DOLL (1960): The cover says "A tale of modern witchcraft."  A good call on the publisher's part, because Lofts was known for her historical novels,and the publisher probably wanted to signal to readers that they were to expect something different with this title.  (This is a fabulous book, by the way.)  The history here is that it was originally published under Lofts' pseudonym Peter Curtis, then re-issued to take advantage of her fame.  That's all to the good, because this is a sadly overlooked classic.  Doubleday did something similar with Lofts' THE CLAW (1981), saying on the cover that it is "A novel about the ultimate violation" (rape).  Yes, that's truth in advertising, yet I can't say that I think it would really pull in readers and might even turn them off.

Craig Rice, THE RIGHT MURDER (1941): This one has all the basics on the cover, but the spine adds "A witty fast paced mystery," which is a good description.  I wonder if this takes into account the way books were shelved on bookstores in the 40s--or if this was more done in consideration of people who walk through the library stacks in search of something interesting to read.

Margaret Millar, THE FIEND (1964): How's this for additional cover copy: "A suspense novel in which nine adult lives are enmeshed in the horrible threat to a little girl's life."  Wow--an entire plot summary on the front cover of a hardback.  No one does this anymore, do they?

And this, ultimately, is my question:  Should we start doing this again?  People are busy, and a bookstore (especially the mega-outlets) are exercises in sensory overload.  We now have this tendency to make all of our covers look the same, with a strong central image and (when relevant) the author's name in type so huge that it overwhelms everything else.  But the modern book requires the reader to then pick it up, read the flap copy, flip through it--and in an era where people don't even want to read newspapers any more, can we really expect them to read flap copy?

So maybe we SHOULD start doing plot summaries, or positioning statements, on our hardcovers so that people can instantaneously figure out whether or not the book is for them.  That might work better than blurbs from people whom the reader may or may not have heard of; and I really have begun to think that blurbs are wasted real estate because nobody takes them seriously on a hardcover.  (A paperback's a different story.)

Just think about some of the possibilities for covers:

Janet Evanovich, Super Stupid Sixteen - "A novel in which an absolute airhead who can never learn her lesson deals with continued family shenanigans while putting the bad guys out to pasture"

P.D. James, Death of a Self-Important Poet - "Inspector Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard investigates the murder of a narcissistic, sensitive poet who is increasingly getting on people's nerves"

Elizabeth George, What Fools These Mortals Be - "The two biggest snots in the world, Inspector Lynley and his wife, deal with an intricate plot while looking down their noses at that pain in the ass Barbara Havers, who acts like a complete idiot half the time"

*Interesting note about paper: Small press books, due to smaller print runs, often use better paper because we don't qualify for the cheaper paper.  So, our books are often printed on better paper than mass-market paperbacks or even other trade paperbacks.  Ironically, the fact that our paper is better causes some to look askance at us, and to toss out the accusation of "self publishing."

Interns Taking Over the Publishing Biz

Too much going on this week for a "real post" (a certain convention is in full swing), but the following is making the rounds, and rightfully so.  The person who wrote it knows the business.

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2009/10/19/091019sh_shouts_weiner/

What is the solution?  Some would say, "Publish many fewer books, especially in fiction." 

What can readers do?  Ask your library to buy books, and buy only NEW books from bookstores or online booksellers.

What the Hell Does "Well Written" Mean?

So, everyone says that for a book to get agented and published, it has to be "well written."  I'm not sure that is 100% true - we can all think of people who have made the best-seller lists whose books are competently, or borderline-competently written, but not WELL written.

However, I think it's fairly safe to say that if you are an unknown (i.e., non-celebrity, non-politician, non-sportstype, non-CEO), your manuscript has to be well written.  This is one of those terms, I realize, that is bandied about without ever being quite defined.  I suppose we could say it's like pornography - we know it when we see it - but I thought I'd try to come up with a more specific definition.

So, in my opinion, well written means the following:

1.  Properly spelled, grammatically correct, with punctuation in the right place.  This is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for good writing.  I think a lot of us can put up with an occasional typo in a manuscript.  Everyone's human, and God knows that after looking at the same manuscript every day for a year, a writer can be forgiven for a misspelling or a missing comma.  I do think most of us see beyond that.  But multiple errors in the first few pages signal a generally low level of competence and cause us to tune out.  (Case in point, so that I can get down off my high horse - in Meredith Phillips' guest blog from last week, I had several typos in my introduction and conclusion that Meredith herself pointed out to me!  Slightly embarrassing, to say the least.)

2. Good variety in sentence and paragraph structure.  I sometimes see manuscripts that are 300 pages of simple declarative sentences.  That might be OK for children's or YA adult books (though I doubt it), but it won't fly in an adult novel.  Please give me some dependent clauses, some participial phrases, some gerunds or infinitive phrases.  Ask a rhetorical question or two.  Vary sentence style and paragraph length (especially paragraph length!  300 pages of 3-sentence paragraphs makes your book look like it suffers from ADD.  300 pages of multi-page paragraphs makes it look as though you've channeled James Joyce, most likely not on his best day.)

3. Simple, effective description.  I always feel that the best writers evoke a scene, a character, or a characteristic in a minimum of space.  I like a sentence or two of description--and then get on with it.  For more complicated locations or items that are intrinsic to plot, longer description is fine.  I like to see similes, etc., in descriptions--something other than telling me how big the thing is, and what color.  I also feel that, from a reader's viewpoint, a simple sketch lets readers fill in the details and makes the book more absorbing.

4. Sentences that stop you cold.  You might think that a sentence that stops me in my tracks is a bad thing--that it would kill the suspense or slow down the pace.  And yet I find that the books that I acquire always have sentences (usually on every page, or in every chapter) that make me think, "Wow, that was a great sentence."  Margaret Millar had hundreds of these.  I also recently read Sharp Objects, by Gillian Flynn, and there is a woman with the ability to write killer lines.  I think that what informs these killer lines is a sort of authorial perception or intelligence that engages my own--a way of putting an idea or description into writing that would never have occurred to me.  And I am impressed by that.

5. Good dialogue, in the appropriate places.  This is a real problem spot for first-timers.  Oh, the thousands of pages of banal dialogue I have read in my lifetime....  Dialogue should provide important information or reveal character.  It shouldn't be useless banter, a phenomenon I call "mother and daughter syndrome" (hope my wife isn't reading this).  My oldest daughter and my wife talk on the phone at least twice a day, for half an hour, about absolutely nothing.  They seem to enjoy it in life, but in a novel such conversations are useless and even annoying.  Another problem is stiff dialogue that sounds phony, or having all characters speak in the same way, which makes everyone sound the same.  The opposite problem specializes a character's way of speaking to such an extent that s/he sounds like a caricature.

6. A sense of control.  I really want my author to be in charge of the manuscript--in charge of my mind.  By giving myself up to a manuscript, I relinquish control over my time, and I want to make sure I am in the hands of someone who is using my time properly.  Writers who have a sense of control are excellent self-editors.  They can read what they've written and slash entire paragraphs or pages because they see that the cut material doesn't further the story, or develop character, or serve any other purpose.  In other words, a well-written book partakes very little in self-indulgence.  And yet some self-indulgence is to be expected and even encouraged, as these flights of fancy can really capture your imagination and make the author's unique voice stand out.  The best writers know when they can get away with it, and when they can't.

7. An awareness of the novel as story.  I really can't stress this enough.  A well-written manuscript has the reader in mind from page one.  From the outset, the reader thinks, "This is a story I want to read" (and, one hopes, "These are characters I find interesting").  A well-written book parcels out information, knowing that at its core it exists to reveal secrets little by little, rather than in huge chunks of backstory or chapter after chapter of exposition.  Someone who reveals backstory just about perfectly is Louise Ure.  Her books should be required study for how to handle backstory.

8. And, finally, a sense that the author is an interesting person whom I would like to meet.  When I read a really good manuscript, I always feel that I want to meet the author.  Now I may be somewhat disturbed by their vision or find their world view bleaker than my own, but I still want to talk to them, to see what makes them tick.  The same may be true of a cozy writer.  While I can't say that I am a huge fan of that sub-genre, I think an excellent sense of humor is a must in a cozy writer, and I imagine that having dinner with that author would be full of laughs and wry observations.  It's that sort of je ne sais quoi that builds a devoted readership.  The problem is that many of today's authors think that becoming email friends with readers is a substitute for this, when they are two very different phenomena.  I come from an era where I think writers should be slightly apart, slightly admired by their readership, rather than posting thousands of Tweets all over the Internet in a desire to expose themselves as much as possible.  Now, of course, that has been done successfully, and our publicist is always encouraging writers to do exactly these sorts of things, but I have never claimed not to be a man of contradictions.

Why We Persevere

Those who read Mysterious Matters with any regularity know that I am a tiresome and sometime long-winded advocate of small and independent presses.   Independently held publishers have long been a source of innovation and fresh new voices, as well as fabulous books that our corporate cousins find too quirky, or not commercial enough, for their tastes.

I have been hoping to have the voices of other small presses contribute to Mysterious Matters, and I feel fortunate this week to present a guest blog by Meredith Phillips, editor at Perseverance Press.  Even before I began corresponding with Meredith, I felt a debt to Perseverance for publishing the terrific works of Taffy Cannon and Janet LaPierre; now, after reading Meredith's guest blog, I feel even more that she has spoken for so many of our country's independent publishers.

So, without further ado, I am proud to present....

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Why We Persevere

by Meredith Phillips, Editor

Perseverance Press/John Daniel & Co.

 

 

In these days of shrinking readership, book sales, and review space; electronic dominance; consolidation of large publishers; and general economic instability,  why does a tiny company of five people continue to publish “mysteries for the new Golden Age,” as the Perseverance Press slogan defines our mission? Especially when no one is making very much money from this quixotic venture?

 

The answer lies in our love of the traditional mystery and our desire to help keep it alive. Speaking for myself, there is also a component of personal fulfillment: editing is one of my favorite activities and having a red pencil in my hand makes me feel more alive and more like myself. (Okay, I know I’m weird.) I think my publishing partners have similar motivations of self-actualization. So the ultimate answer is, it’s what we do.

 

My old friends John and Susan Daniel have a long background of bookselling, writing, editing, marketing, and publishing for other companies as well as under their own name. I had a one-person mystery publishing company throughout the 1980s, then took a hiatus to freelance edit during the ‘90s. In 1999 we joined forces to publish mysteries by established midlist authors who had been dropped by their large New York companies. Specifically, I wanted to resuscitate beloved characters and settings, which I felt had been murdered by cruel big-publishing bottom-liners (cue Jaws music). It’s criminal, if you ask me. I hated the idea of never again mentally inhabiting Janet LaPierre’s coastal California Port Silva, or Shelley Singer’s Bay Area environs. Since I knew Janet and Shelley from local MWA and Sisters in Crime activities, they were the first authors I called.

 

We were greatly encouraged in 2000 when the third and fourth mysteries we published, Guns and Roses by Taffy Cannon and The Kidnapping of Rosie Dawn by EricWright, won six award nominations between them (for the Agatha and Macavity, and the Edgar, Ellis, Anthony, and Barry), the latter a winner. A year later, Keepers by Janet LaPierre was nominated for the Shamus. But there were no more nominations for the next seven years, though we published many books we’re proud of, most of them still in print. Sales have ranged from abysmal in a couple of cases to well beyond our expectations in others, with many going into multiple printings.

 

We’ve published two writers’ handbooks, by Carolyn Wheat and Kathy Lynn Emerson [at right]. Of course they’ve sold much better than the 40-plus mystery fiction books we’ve put out to date (averaging four a year), since nonfiction always sells more. How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries by Emerson has won an Agatha this year, and is nominated for the Anthony and Macavity to be given at Bouchercon in October.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another award that a Perseverance book won this year is the WILLA Award (named for Willa Cather) from Women Writing the West for Buffalo Bill’s Defunct by Sheila Simonson. This is an example of a new series started by an established author, in which we also specialize. The next book in Simonson’s Latouche County series is out this fall, An Old Chaos [at left]. She’s an example of a writer who had to drop out for ten years, to care for elderly parents, after a successful five-book series for St. Martins in the ‘90s. Ten years is a lifetime in publishing, and the challenge is to remind older readers of her previous books while trying to interest a new generation of mystery consumers.

 

 

 

 

Another writer with a ten-year hiatus is Edgar-winner Wendy Hornsby, who has now added to her prize-winning series about filmmaker Maggie MacGowen with this fall’s In the Guise of Mercy [at right]. Wendy has put together a West Coast book tour to make contact with her old and new fans. This book is more hardboiled than our usual fare, but written with such compassion that any reader will warm to the admittedly noir-ish  material.

 

I think there’s a misconception out there that PP/JD publishes only cozies. In the early years of this decade we did detour into cozies, since that’s what we were mostly offered; one or two even had recipes (gasp!). Although this sort of book certainly has its strong points, it’s not my personal favorite. Ever since I’ve been reading mysteries I’ve liked best the kind of book that’s not too cozy and not too violent. It’s hard to define this middle ground, but the majority of mysteries used to occupy it. However, there seems an increasing push toward both ends of the spectrum, the cozy and the hardboiled, and a thinning out of the middle. Many big-name authors still occupy it (Grafton, Muller, Brett, Paretsky, Lovesey, L. King, Crombie, Barnard, Penny, Pronzini, E. George, Elkins, Spencer-Fleming, Francis, et al.) but the proliferation seems to be in craft/job cozies at one end and explicit, often hyper-violent thrills at the other. Recently, we’ve been publishing more to the middle, even across it. Another increasing subgenre for us is historical mystery; in my opinion this category is a refuge for readers like me who prefer traditionals.

 

An old joke goes: The way to make a small fortune in publishing is to start with a large fortune. We do pay advances to our authors, and my partners and I generally end up with modest profits. The real problem with our bottom line is the number of middlemen who take bites out along the way. By the time a book is in the reader’s hands, it’s gone through several layers of wholesalers, distributors, and retailers. (The way books are shipped back and forth across the country, when you include returns, the people mainly making money from books are UPS, FedEx, and Yellow Freight—in my opinion.) We do need a large distributor for all kinds of reasons, and they take away many headaches in marketing (along with adding others). They represent us to the large wholesalers that bookstores prefer to order through, to bookstores themselves, and even to Amazon.com.

 

The Internet has been both friend and foe. Competition from online booksellers (along with chains) has probably closed many indie mystery bookstores and mom-and-pop businesses. (We love these stores, which have always given us great support, and couldn’t manage without them.) On the other hand, the online merchandisers have made it possible for any buyer to go online and obtain any book with only a few clicks. Furthermore, anyone can go to www.danielpublishing.com/perseverance and view our forthcoming, current, and backlist books, saving us from the ongoing drudgery of print catalogues. (And customers can order directly from us with a discount.) Of course, Amazon’s Kindle and others have made a whole new kind of reading possible. With only a few sales so far through that medium, we’ll have to wait and see how we’re affected by electronic reading of books.

 

One drawback to the latter is the loss of our talented designer/typesetter’s attractive and meticulously crafted design. The book is just “dumped,” so to speak, into the electronic version. We’ve always taken pride in Eric Larson’s distinctive look for each book, but do readers ever notice? Perhaps subconsciously, I like to think.

 

Eric is still in Santa Barbara, where everyone else but me was living when we formed our partnership. John and Susan Daniel have moved to Humboldt County in Northern California, and Susan’s marketing/web assistant to San Francisco. I am in Palo Alto, and our distributor, SCB, is in LA. We cover the state, so to speak, and somehow make it work through daily communication by phone, fax, and of course e-mail—without which we couldn’t keep the company going no matter how hard we persevered!

 

Note: You can reach Meredith Phillips at DandD AT danielpublishing DOT com.