Mysterious Matters: Mystery Publishing Demystified

Please Don't Do This to Your Book Jackets

I try to keep it positive here on Mysterious Matters, except for the occasional potshots at writers and books who can well weather any small bits of criticism from my pen. However, today I am here to take to task publishers who make terrible mistakes on their book jackets, and jacket designers who should know better.

Look at these two covers. One is a book by David Mark, who is absolutely one of my favorite among the newer crime novelists, and whose books I've gushed about here before. The other is by Scandinavian crime writer Arne Dahl, whom I haven't read yet (though this book is in my pile):

What do these cover designs have in common?  Both look as if they have been remaindered, due to those slashes through the type.

When you buy former best-sellers at a great price, often in Barnes & Noble but now increasingly on Amazon, you will usually see what is called a "remainder mark" somewhere at the top or bottom of the book. The remainder mark is usually made with permanent ink, often in red or black. Often it is a slash mark, though sometimes it is a large dot. The remainder mark indicates that the book has been remaindered--in other words, too many copies have been printed to justify the ultimate level of sales.

There is no shame in being remaindered, as it happens to many great writers. The more copies of a book you print, the better your unit cost, and the higher your profit if you sell out your print run--so publishers have bizarre incentives to produce more books than they think they can sell. When the warehouse gets cleaned out, Barnes & Noble (or other outlets like Edward R. Hamilton) get the books at insanely low prices, sometimes paying only a few cents per pound. (Yes, remainders can be sold by the pound.) These books then get shipped out to off-price outlets and other unexpected places. I bought a terrific Joyce Carol Oates book for $3 at a local Staples, a Robert Harris book for $1 at a dollar store, and a Mary Higgins Clark at Barnes & Noble for (I think) $4.98.

So, even though there's no shame in being remaindered, I wouldn't say you necessarily want to advertise that fact; and you CERTAINLY do not want people looking at a book jacket to think the book is so bad that someone has slashed through it. This kind of slashing is happening as part of jacket design way too much lately, so I hereby use my bully pulpit to say: PLEASE STOP.

However, for every rule there's an exception. Here are two versions of the jacket/cover for Renee Knight's Disclaimer, which I read about a year ago and loved.

 

The original U.S. hardcover's on the left. I thought this was a particularly effective use of the strikethrough technique, because it's clear that was what the book designer intended. Placing the words "A novel" within the redacted material was a design coup, so all due props go to the jacket designer, Milan Bozic.  The softcover version on the right has a good tagline, with a generically spooky image, but it doesn't grab me as much as the jacket on the left. Both covers are wrecked by reference to that goddamned Gone Girl, of which I am sick unto death, but I can't blame the publisher for trying to sell some books. 

By the way, when I finished Disclaimer in bed one night, I turned to my wife and said, "Wow."  Check it out if it seems like your kind of book, and if you're sick to death of Gone Girl, too, don't let the comparison put you off.

 

 

I Still Exist + Random Thoughts

Greetings, and apologies for the long time between blog entries. Where does the time go?

I think I have been a bit depressed lately. 2015 was a very good year for my company. So far, 2016 hasn't been great. I had three books on the spring list, and none of them have hit. It's hard for me not to take this personally, since I have to advocate to get them to the contract stage, and then I edit them with my own red pencil (so to speak). So far, there's been very little traction. One of my favorites, and (objectively speaking) the best of the three, missed reviews in a couple of the key journals. I can't even tell you how painful that is.  I want to grab people by the collar and shake them, but their jobs aren't easy.  It's just the biz, folks. We have good seasons and bad seasons, and one of the benefits of working for this smaller press is that the owners are devoted to keeping it going over the long haul, meaning they ride out the ebbs and flows instead of panicking about shareholders, firing everyone in sight, and cancelling contracts.

Unfortunately, this only makes me feel worse about not having delivered good- or excellent-sellers. Maybe things will pick up later this year. It does happen; I believe Anita Diamant's The Red Tent was basically ignored for the first year after its publication, and then became a massive best-seller. Hope springs eternal.

In other news, you may be interested to know that I and the two other senior editors here have made the decision to reject, instantly, any manuscript that comes to us with the word GIRL in the title. This is an irrational business, and while I do pride myself on being a rational person, it's time to take a stand. GONE GIRL was 2012; GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO was 2008. It's time for us to move on and stop trying to clone past successes by treating readers like idiots who think the word GIRL in a title signifies a fabulous, can't-put-it-down, amazingly perfect book with an amazing perfectly ending that you just can't believe!!!  Over lunch we decided that, just as the media made a decision not to cover Paris Hilton back in her heyday, we are drawing a similar line in the sand with GIRLS. Maybe that means we won't get the next best-seller. Fine. 

I'm having trouble getting excited about any submissions these days. Everything seems so blah. I keep thinking, "This sounds stupid," or "This has been done a million times," "You've got to be kidding me," and "You're serious--you're really submitting this to me, with a typo in the first line?"  This too shall pass. One of my colleagues thinks people/agents who would have submitted to us in the past are just bypassing us straight for the vanity-publishing route. Who can blame them, with Amazon implying that they (the writers) will make millions by doing so--as long as they invest in Amazon marketing campaigns?

Speaking of which--Amazon has now imposed a 4% annual fee on all sales through our distributor, to cover its "marketing costs." Next step: We sign over the deeds to all of our houses, plus the lives of our first-born, to feed the Amazonian beast.

I was going to review a few recent books (not mysteries), but I think I'll save that for next time. 

Yours in mysteriousness,

Agatho

 

 

My 2016 Reading List

Dear Readers,

It's been a while since I posted. Not much to say lately. Slow manuscript season and I haven't read anything stellar that I need to recommend. 

I'm reminded that "good" bloggers find a way to blog whether they want to or not, and I think I've gone way too long between posts. So, herewith the books on my reading stand, to be read in no particular order in 2016.

If anyone has read any of these books and has anything non-spoiler-y to say, please hit the Comment button and tell me what you think.

 

VIXEN, by Bill Pronzini

I'm a longtime fan of the Nameless series. I believe this book was published in much shorter form as Femme Fatale a number of years ago. It's next on my list.

 

 

 

 

 

SERPENTS IN THE COLD, by Thomas D. O'Malley and Douglas Graham Purdy

Saw this one in a bookstore and it spoke to me. I think the setting is 1950s Boston, and a serial killer is loose. I don't usually go for serial killer books, but I do like the Boston area and its rich history. We shall see.

 

 

 

 

 

THE ONE I LEFT BEHIND, by Jennifer McMahon

Mrs. Agatho is a big fan of McMahon's and has been on me for a while to read one of her books. I don't know what to expect because Mrs. A. won't say anything about a book to me until I'm done reading it. I think this falls into the category of "women's suspense fiction," whatever that means... 

 

 

 

 

 

THE WATER KNIFE, by Paolo Bacigalupi

I like a good dystopian novel (loved William Gibson's THE PERIPHERAL, which I read in 2015), and this one looks intriguing. It's a big book--what I call a "winter book" to be savored when the weather outside is frightful. 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BAZAAR OF BAD DREAMS, by Stephen King

I like short stories (though I'd never publish a short-story collection - ack! impossible to publish successfully unless the writer already has millions of fans who will buy anything s/he writes), and in many ways I think King is a better short-story writer than he is a novelist. I know I'll find at least a few stories in this collection that I'll love.

 

 

 

 

THE DEVIL'S DETECTIVE, by Simon Kurt Unsworth

This promises to be something different--a detective story set in hell. So many ways for this to be fantastic--and so many ways for it to fail miserably. Only time will tell...

 

 

 

 

 

Happy new year to all, from Mysterious Matters.

 

Agatho's Picks: The Best of New Noir

Even though I don't publish a lot of hardboiled/noir, I consider myself a noir-kinda guy. I have been fortunate to read some stellar new noir books, about which I must now gush here on Mysterious Matters. Of these writers, two are hitting their stride very nicely, having set high standards and continuing to meet and exceed them. One writer is an old favorite, and one is a newbie (at least to me).

I have to begin with THE DEVIL'S SHARE, by Wallace Stroby, the latest book in his Crissa Stone series. This is the fourth in the series. Crissa Stone is absolutely my favorite Honorable Thief. I get a bit giddy when reading Stroby's books because I marvel at his writing. He's the tightest writer in the business. You never -- and I do mean NEVER -- encounter a sentence or paragraph that seems irrelevant or unnecessary. Characters are drawn with deft, tight strokes. The plot plays out inexorably, as you sit there with your teeth gritted, hoping that what you THINK is going to happen DOESN'T happen, while knowing that it very well MIGHT and praying that there's some outcome other than what appears to be inevitable. There is a sort of open secret in the business that journalists have an easier time getting an agent/publisher than other folks, and there's a reason for that: They know how to write. That said, I think Stroby is without a doubt the best of the current crop of journalist-turned-mystery-writers. I usually save books by favorite authors for plane trips or vacations, but I can't do that with Stroby. As soon as the new one arrives, I have to rush to finish what I'm reading so that I can get to Crissa's lastest adventure as soon as possible. You don't have to read these books in order, but it's not a bad idea, and you really should read all of them, if you can: Cold Shot to the Heart, Kings of Midnight, Shoot the Woman First (which is one of the best books of the decade), and now The Devil's Share.

Another writer hitting his stride is Englishman David Mark, whose Aector McEvoy series is set in gritty Hull in northern England. McEvoy is a gentle giant married to a Traveler (gypsy), Roisin, whom he saved from a horrible situation and with whom he now has two children. There are two key reasons to read Mark. First, the writing is stellar. I usually hate using the word "poetic" to describe prose, because that description turns some readers off ... they imagine overly florid language, or tortured metaphors, or pretentious wordplay. Mark's writing is poetic in that it is so incredibly vivid. It casts a sort of spell, and I find my jaw agape with marvel over the way this man crafts a sentence, paragraph, page, chapter. Second, Mark is a superb plotter. Every book in this series has a terrific plot with excellent surprises. McEvoy made his debut in The Dark Winter, which was followed by Original Skin, Sorrow Bound, and now TAKING PITY. You don't have to read them in order, but doing so is not a bad idea. I greatly like the supporting cast, too--they feel like real people, not the usual secondary players who are walking stereotypes. Be warned that there is some dark stuff in these books, so you have to have the stomach for hard noir--but the darkness is balanced by the light in McEvoy and in the relationships among the characters.

Ken Bruen, an Irishman whose books are as much about being Irish as they are mystery stories, is a longtime favorite. He and Stroby are the only two modern writers whose books I read in one sitting. GREEN HELL is the latest installment in the long-running Jack Taylor series, which also boasts earlier entries like Cross, Priest, Headstone, and London Boulevard. Jack Taylor is like the Timex of old: He takes a licking and keeps on ticking. By this point he's been maimed so many times, I'm surprised he can still get out of bed in the morning. And yet he does--and I'm glad of it. In every Jack Taylor book, I'm stopped dead in my tracks by a sentence, an observation, a line--something I'll never forget. Green Hell sees the introduction of a new character, Emerald, who is not unlike Lisbeth Salander from Steig Larsson's books. I sense that Emerald has been introduced to bring new direction to the series, and she's worth watching. I think Bruen is probably a like-him-or-not proposition. I'm firmly on the like side ... and I particularly enjoy Bruen's own enjoyment of, and celebration of, the genre within the pages of his books. If you don't mind seeing the brutal side of Galway and can handle lovely, likable characters getting murdered in horrific ways in every single book, then give Bruen a try.

Also know as Martin Hill Ortiz, Martin Hill came onto my radar only recently. His NEVER KILL A FRIEND is the first in what looks to be a new series starring Detective Shelley Krieg of the Washington, DC Metro Force. Shelley is a 6-foot-4 Black woman who finds herself taking the side of a likely criminal over the side of her colleagues on the force. I think it's always tricky when someone outside of the culture attempts to write a Black man or woman, but Hill has pulled this off with style and respect. His heroine isn't perfect, but she's doing the best she can in a world that is getting increasingly topsy-turvy and she doesn't know whom to trust any more. In the background is Washington, DC, itself, a hardboiled world of drug dealers and homeless living alongside middle-class Black people who are trying to make lives for themselves and their children in the nation's capital. The pace is breakneck and I particularly liked the supporting cast, especially the career criminal "AZ," who becomes an unlikely ally for Shelley. Hill is one to watch and this is a splendid debut.

Readers, PLEASE go out there and support these writers. If your library doesn't have them on the shelves, please request these books from the librarian. We need some fresh blood getting bookstore space AND places on best-seller lists. And I would love to see all of these books having AT LEAST 100 reviews on Amazon and Goodreads within 6 months. When you read and love these books - and you will - tell a friend, blog, tweet, do whatever it takes to spread the word. 

 

 

Exploring B&N; The Supernatural Enhancements

I was feeling despair during a recent trip to Barnes & Noble. 

First, I was upset that I was being made to pay full price for a hardcover. Barnes & Noble: I want to support you. I really do. And I ended up buying the book I wanted. But when I got home, I checked Amazon -- and the price was $10 lower. Yes, a full $10.  I work in publishing, for God's sake -- I'm not a rich man. That 10 bucks means something to me. I have a vested interest in this business, and I want bookstores to stay in business and thrive. Couldn't you have given me a token 10% off or something? You need to figure something out. You really do.

Before Borders went out of business, I used to call it the "Mary Higgins Clark Store." Variety was generally pretty poor, and no matter where you looked, you saw books by Mary Higgins Clark. The B&N I visited was approaching that model -- the same authors everywhere you looked: near the front door, on the end caps, on the first floor, on the second floor, even on shelves under misleading signs. This particular store was the Gillian Flynn store -- the books were EVERYWHERE.  I'm a fan, and I'm delighted by what GONE GIRL did for the business, but surely SOME of that shelf space could have been devoted to OTHER books by OTHER writers?

What depressed me even more was seeing the same old tired writers featured and displayed everywhere. I jotted down a list of them, which I won't reproduce here. My list has 18 names on it. Anyone could probably figure out who they are. One's a factory, one writes the same book over and over again, one writes thrillers with cardboard characters, one churns out a supernatural book every year, blah blah blah. I can't blame agents and publishers in general for feeling despair when this is the sort of stuff that we are pushing at people. It's like watching an episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, where people are force-fed mediocrity and made to love it, or lemmings line up to buy something truly mediocre just because they recognize the name.

Where are the fresh voices, I asked myself, as I prowled every corner of that store. They were few and far between.

But then I found them -- in an unexpected place: young adult publishing. Wow. What a vibrant section, with books published the way adult trade fiction used to be published. That fact gives me hope -- today's young adult readers will turn into tomorrow's older adult readers, which means more opportunity for some new names on the best-seller list. I wish I knew more about this market but alas, YA is just not my area of expertise. Still, I had a lot of fun browsing that section of the store, until I came across a book with yes, you guessed it, James Patterson's name on it. My wife threatened to force-feed me a Xanax.

But then I found what I was looking for... that fresh book that I had to have. It is Edgar Cantero's The Supernatural Enhancements. It's not just that the cover is beyond fantastic. It's a book that takes chances, a strange mixture of epistolary novel, dream journal, screenplay. It starts out as a haunted-house book told by a millennial and morphs into a DaVinci Code-style thriller about secret societies, cryptography, and ancient secrets. Truthfully, it's far from perfect. The writer is quite young, and it shows; but there are moments when the writing sings and I see what Edgar Cantero can become. At times the book feels like a collection of the author's hobbies, and I lost count of the number of threads that are introduced and get lost, never to be seen again.

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, though. I want to shake the hand of the agent who took this on and the editor who bought it, as well as the artist/typographer who designed the interior and the illustrator who designed the book jacket. The book was shelved with a bunch of new entries by old timers who haven't turned out an original work in years, which made The Supernatural Enhancements seem even more fresh and intriguing in comparison. It's not for everyone, and I like that about it. It doesn't use the same old tired formulas, but rather mixes things up and makes them spooky and intriguing. This is the kind of publishing I want to do -- and think that I do -- and I just wish I could do more for all of these books than I have the power to do.

[Speaking of old tired formulas -- I read flap copy on a bunch of the books on the publisher-paid table at B&N. Three of them-- of about 20-- told me in the first paragraph about the male protagonist and his recently dead wife or kid.  How many times are we going to publish that character, with that same boring backstory.  Ack! Aargh! Xanax, please.]  

In the meantime, though, do check out The Supernatural Enhancements and see if it is for you.

Rebecca: Could It Get Published Today?

 

Note: There are spoilers in this post.

Aaargh. My wife did it to me again. She has a penchant for deciding to read a classic (or older) work and leaving it on her nightstand. I see it there and tell myself, "I'll read just the first few pages," and before I know it, I've read the whole thing while my own book languishes (and Mrs. Agatho smugly comments on her excellent taste in fiction).

Last week Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca showed up on that nightstand. A rather large book, I thought, turning it over in my hands. Nice cover art. Let's just see what comes after that whole "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" thingy.... I finished it last night. As I often do when I've finished an older book, I ask myself, "Could this book have been published today?" And I think the answer is likely No.

There are a few "problems" (note use of scare quotes) in the book that would make it a very tough sell today. Specifically:

1. The first two chapters (only about 12 printed pages) are heavily descriptive. Truthfully, it's tough to get through them, but I was determined to plow on. Those first pages are probably the equivalent of say 25 manuscript pages. I think agents and editors would read those pages and think, "Ack! Too much" - and that would be the end of that. Things move much more quickly after page 12 (though the pacing does suffer from problems for much of the first half of the book); but today's publishing climate isn't patient. Every day agents make decisions based on the first 5-10 pages of a book. If there are any agents out there who'd read past page 5 of Rebecca without tossing it into the recycle bin, please raise your hands.

2. The narrator is really problematic. I see what du Maurier was doing. She wanted to contrast the new Mrs. de Winter -- mousy, insecure, more than a little pathetic, and rather annoyingly stubborn and obstinate -- with the first, dead Mrs. de Winter. I'm not a big find of narrators without names; I usually find the device pretentious, but here it works. Our narrator can never be as much of a presence as Rebecca; Rebecca's is the only woman's name that matters. du Maurier starts off on a sure footing here; we come to like our narrator, whose shyness masks a keen ability to observe (the scenes with Mrs. van Hopper are hilarious). She's a little mewling, but she's also 21 years old, so one expects some immaturity. But by the time she gets to Manderley, she's basically a lap dog and a whiner. I was annoyed time and again when people extend the hand of friendship to her, only to have her slap it away. She wants to be mistress of Manderley, but she won't do anything to step into the role. 

But this isn't just a matter of personal taste. I don't think today's readers (editors, agents) would think modern/contemporary women would like or be able to relate to the heroine. While she's not with a certain ironic humor, she's not the strong, independent woman we like to see in our sleuths or heroines. She's an observer, not an actor.

3. This book is quite a bit longer than it should be. It's overwritten, with page after page that doesn't add to plot or character. The only people who can write books this long are authors who already have best-sellers under their belts. I can see the rejection letters (emails) now: "The core of the story is good, and there are some good plot twists, but there's just too much weighing it down. Best of luck with it."

Now let me offer a few thoughts from a reader's point of view, not a publisher's. The three points of dismissal above have the horrible result of utterly annihilating this book's many accomplishments. Specifically:

*This must be one of the very earliest novels to look closely at narcissistic personality disorder. Because that was Rebecca in a nutshell: a classic narcissist. And the way that du Maurier moves Rebecca so slowly and tantalizingly from a worshipped goddess to a vicious nymphomaniac is extremely skillful. I can't think of any portrait of a narcissist that is more effective. And du Maurier does all of this in retrospect, with a dead woman.

*du Maurier also does an excellent job with the unreliable narrator. I wish I could put a finger on exactly how the narrator's neurosis would be classified. Mrs. de Winter is forever extrapolating into the future, envisioning how scenarios will play out. She builds grand short stories in her mind, often with more than a bit of paranoia. She can't really seem to form attachments, except to Max, whom she worships: Perhaps she suffers from borderline disorder? (On a side note, I have always appreciated a good unreliable narrator, but I'm often surprised by how much readers hate them.)

*This book is expertly plotted. du Maurier provides the hints required by fair play, but there are at least four major plot twists that make the reader gasp. (Compare that to ONE in Gone Girl or A Kiss Before Dying). Writers really should study this book to see how a simple plot can be woven into a great mystery.

I'll close with just a few random thoughts. First, on more than one occasion I found myself disconcerted by the writing. I don't think I've ever read a book where I swung between thinking "Wow" and thinking "Ugh." If you read it, you'll see that the author occasionally gets into a mode where she spits out 50 or 60 simple sentences in a row. Once you notice it, you can't un-notice it. It put me off, that's for sure. I have to think du Maurier had a reason for doing this, because clearly she was capable of much, much better. I wonder...

Also, I'd been completely unaware that du Maurier faced serious allegations of plagarism with this book (and other works, too). From the little I read, it sounds like the allegations may have a strong basis. However, one could accuse Shakespeare of plagiarism, too, of course.

Finally, and I should have mentioned this earlier -- everything I said about the book not being publishable today is wrong. Why? Because du Maurier had strong family, society, and publishing contacts. Many people today with much less talent than du Maurier get published for exactly that reason.

 

 

Appreciations: Final Approach, Hounds

I've been getting some email asking me to do more book reviews.  What stops me from doing them is I feel that once I start, I would be unable to stop.  Mysterious Matters isn't meant to be a review site per se, but I do realize that I can further my mission of making the world aware of fabulous small-press/independent publisher books by reviewing some of the best of them.  So, I'm thinking, for the next few weeks, I'll blog about such titles.

 

FINAL APPROACH
Rachel Brady

Poisoned Pen Press

A debut I quite enjoyed was Rachel Brady's Final Approach.  Certainly the skydiving theme is one that I haven't seen explored before, and it is always pleasant to enter a new milieu and learn something about it and the characters who inhabit it.  (And lest anyone believe that skydivers are any less fanatical than, say, rock climbers or bungee jumpers, Final Approach will prove you wrong.)  One problem I often find in debut novels is pacing; they can be slow to start or burdened in the early chapters by backstory.  Final Approach takes off like a shot and features a likable heroine, Emily Locke, who lost her husband and child to a mysterious accident four years earlier.  She's recruited by a disgraced former detective, now a P.I., for her help in another missing-child case.  The plot moves along nicely, and the dialogue is enjoyable; Emily trades barbs with her best friend, Jeannie, while finding several possible love interests not only in the P.I. but also in a  - yes - cowboy.  Of course we know that people can't just drop their lives and fly to Houston to skydive and help solve the disappearances of children, but somehow Brady makes it all work.  I thoroughly enjoyed the book and have the recently published sequel, Dead Lift, on my TBR pile. 

 

 

HOUND

Vincent McCaffrey

Small Beer Press

A very different book is Vincent McCaffrey's Hound, one of those P.D. James-type mystery-cum-literary fiction books.  By that I mean, the writing is so assured, and the observations so crystalline, that it really did not need to be a "mystery" to work. Yet I'm glad the book is positioned as a mystery, because that gives it a much larger potential market and readership, which it so richly deserves.

     Our hero is Henry Sullivan, a Boston bookseller.  The mystery comes in as he searches for the killer of an old girlfriend.  There's a lot of thought put into the book business in Hound; Sullivan bewails what's become of the book business, in which the ghostwritten books of airheaded Hollywood celebs reach the heights of the bestseller lists while quality books by writers who toil in obscurity find themselves remaindered and pulped, or not even reviewed.  But Sullivan's not just an effete, bookish type; he knows how to hold his own, which makes him a thinking man's hero with just the right amount of macho.  One might see Hound as the male version of Diane Satterfield's The Thirteenth Tale - but Hound is the better book.  Both McCaffrey's and Satterfield's protagonists are intense bibliophiles, but while Satterfield's is mopey and sometimes unsympathetic, McCaffrey's is more balanced and functional.  The pace of Hound is slower than one would want in a traditional "mystery," but somehow that doesn't matter--I'm reminded of another book that made me feel this way, Ashna Graves' Death Pans Out.  Hound's tone is nostalgic and sometimes sad, but this is a great read for book lovers, and indeed for all of us who look back to the "good old days" when life seemed simpler and where the fantasy reigned supreme that "merit" was the only criterion for publication (or any other type of success).  My only fear is that the "book" theme will peg the book as for "book lovers" only; the book deserves a wider readership than that (and a better cover, too).