Crime Fiction Dossier

BookExpo America

BookExpo America (BEA) is the largest publishing event in the country, an annual gathering of thousands of authors, booksellers, librarians and publishing pros. I'm not entirely sure what they all do once they get together, as I've never been before. This year's convention is in Washington, D.C., though, so I'll be there.

I'll be participating on a panel that should be very interesting:

State of The Thriller
Friday, May, 19 @ 2:30PM

"Featuring industry participants from author to bookseller, thriller specialists will dissect the industry’s hottest selling genre. Panelists will attempt to answer where the Thriller genre is headed, which authors are emerging, why thrillers dominate bestseller lists and what we might expect in the near future."

Participants:

• David Morrell - Author [Moderator]
• James Patterson - Author
• David J. Montgomery - Critic, Chicago Sun Times
• Margaret O'Neil Marbury, Executive Editor, MiraBooks
• Simon Lipskar, agent, Writerer's House
• Dan Conaway, Executive Editor, Putnam

If you're wondering what I'm doing on there... Well, I am, too! But at least this is a topic that I can speak intelligently about.

So if you're going to be at BEA, please try to stop by the panel. It should be a good one. And definitely find me to say hello.

Blurb: Lee Goldberg's "The Man With the Iron-On Badge"

"Combining humor and suspense together in a mystery novel is no easy feat, and few writers can accomplish it with the skill of Lee Goldberg. The Man With the Iron-On Badge is an affectionate ode to the classic Private Eye novel, told with wit and grit, and a touch of panache." -Crime Fiction Dossier

VA Festival Redux

Following up on my previous post about the Virginia Festival of the Book, I have a couple more things to add.

First off, the Daily Progress, Charlottesville's local newspaper, covered the festival, including an article on my Publishing Day panel. (Hat tip to Ron Hogan for the link.) The reporter wisely quoted the only interesting thing I said during the entire panel, so kudos to her.

The other thing is that several authors have written to ask whether or not I think the Festival would be worthwhile for them to attend. I think that it would be useful for a variety of reasons:

1) The Festival has writers and readers from all different fields and genres, so you have a chance to interact with people who may not ordinarily read crime.

2) There is a large crime presence at the conference (with several dedicated panels), so there's a lot of readers from our genre. Most of the writers seemed to be getting a good number of fans in their signing lines, and the bookseller on location had a good selection. So it appeared that folks were doing business.

3) The conference is free and is almost exclusively fans/readers, not writers and aspiring writers. So you can talk to people who might actually buy books. (Just to prove this point...  the whole time I was there, nobody came up and asked me to review their book. The only book I was given was by one of my panelists. This is much different from, say, Bouchercon, where I'm inundated.)

So, bottom line, if the organizers invite you to participate, I would strongly consider accepting.

For those of you who are fans and readers, I would definitely urge you to attend the Festival if you ever have the opportunity. It's a great chance to meet some of your favorite authors, and best of all, it's free!

Panel suggestion?

I need one more panel idea for ThrillerFest. If you have a suggestion for a topic that you'd be interested in hearing thriller writers discuss, please pass it along.

The conference is shaping up to be very exciting. There's the Jack Reacher trial (starring Lee Child), the mock autopsy (led by Tess Gerritsen), spotlight talks with Douglas Preston, RL Stine, Sandra Brown, John Lescroart and Brad Meltzer, a slew of exciting panels featuring top thriller writers, Special Ops demonstrations led by real pros from the covert world, writing workshops led by bestselling authors, and more!

If that sounds interesting to you, you should consider attending. There's still time to sign-up. And even if you can't attend, you can still send me a panel suggestion.

Blurb: Adam Fawer's "Improbable"

"Adam Fawer's debut novel is a fast-paced and intriguing thriller that explores the possibilities of probabilities with a science-flavored plot that delivers plenty of action. This guy is going places -- you can count on it!" -Crime Fiction Dossier

Virginia Festival of the Book

I spent the weekend down in Charlottesville at the Virginia Festival of the Book. Although I only live about 2 hours north of there, I'd never made it down for the festival before. This year they invited me to participate, and I was glad I did. It's a fun and interesting conference with a wide diversity of both authors and readers, which made for an intriguing mix of people.

I moderated two panels that were part of the Crime Wave program. As I've mentioned before, I generally prefer to participate on panels rather than moderate them -- I'd much rather just sit there and spout my opinions than do the hard work of running the show -- but I've gotten a rep as being a good moderator, so that's what I usually get asked to do.

Both of the panels I moderated had a terrific line-up of authors, which certainly made my job a lot easier. It's always fun to moderate a panel when the participants are gregarious and interesting and willing to loosen up a little and enjoy themselves (while still giving serious and interesting responses).

The two panels were:

Keeping Up Appearances: Cozy Mysteries
with Nancy Martin, Laura Durham, Susan McBride, Emyl Jenkins and Ellen Byerrum

Pressing Charges: Crime Wave Panel
with Paula L. Woods, Pat MacEnulty, Michele Martinez and Karin Slaughter

The turn-out for both panels was quite good, and the audiences seemed to really enjoy the talks. I got some great feedback from people who attended, including author Joseph Kanon who was at the Cozy Panel. I'd never met him before, so I didn't spot him in the audience, but we spoke afterwards and he said he had a lot of fun.

The other panel I was on was one I did as a participant, as part of the Publishing Day program:

Who’s Reading and How?
with Ron Hogan (Beatrice.com), David Kipen (NEA), me, Gene Schwartz (ForeWord Magazine) and moderator Carol Fitzgerald (Bookreporter.com).

I thought that panel was interesting for the most part, but I didn't feel like I had a lot to contribute. The topic probably would have benefited from a little bit of fine-tuning, although I'm not sure what the programmers were going for. It seemed to me a little too amorphous to really sink our teeth into.

The best part of these conferences is always meeting the interesting people in attendance, and I had some great conversations about books, publishing and writing. The line-up at the conference was truly a distinguished one. (I had dinner one night with a group of writers whose combined book sales who probably circle the globe.)

I'm not going to start dropping names, but I do want to mention that I had the chance to hang out with Digby Diehl, legendary critic from Playboy Magazine, and the inaugural editor of the L.A. Times Book Review. Digby was one of the people who first inspired me to become a critic, so it was an honor to meet him. He's a fascinating and very friendly man.

One of the things that I heard repeated several times by various authors is how well their books are doing overseas, and how much attention crime fiction is getting internationally. It really has become a global market, which is very encouraging for writers. It was also the consensus that the U.S. is the only place where we have this hang-up about genre fiction not being "literary," while elsewhere it's commonly accepted that it is.

In addition to the authors, there were also a great many fans in attendance; most of the audience, in fact was composed of readers. It was really inspiring to see so many people who love books and love to read. Unlike most of the mystery conferences (like Bouchercon), this one wasn't dominated by aspiring writers, so it was fun to get a different perspective from people.

I hope to be back next year!

Blurb: Dave Case's "Out of Cabrini"

"Reminiscent of the brilliant work of George Pelecanos, Out of Cabrini is a compelling story of cops on the job and criminal life in the inner city. Dave Case writes with the authenticity that only a veteran cop can bring to the page. This is one of the year's outstanding debuts." -Crime Fiction Dossier

Blurb: Lee Child's "The Hard Way"

"The Hard Way is the best book yet from one of today's top thriller writers. Put a pot of coffee on before you start reading it, 'cause this one's going to keep you up all night." -Crime Fiction Dossier

Introducing the Blurb Machine

The publishing industry is consumed with blurbs, those little quotes you see on the covers of books from Famous Authors, newspapers or magazines. I don't know to what they extent they influence consumers, but at least they look pretty on the jacket.

My reviews get blurbed fairly often, but that seems like such a roundabout way of doing it. Why not, I asked myself, just give the blurb directly and cut out the middle man?

Thus, the creation of the Crime Fiction Dossier Blurb Machine (patent pending). Every couple days, or whenever I can get the machine fired up, I'll be offering a blurb for a mystery or thriller novel.

If you're an author, publicist or publisher and you'd like to use one of these blurbs, please feel free to do so. The concept is slightly tongue-in-cheek, but the blurbs are sincere.

Profitable publishing after all?

Random House (a division of multinational media giant Bertelsmann AG), the world's largest publishing company, announced today its financials for 2005. Their operating profit was $202 million (an increase of 18% over 2004) on revenues of $2.21 billion (a 1.6% increase).

This robust performance was led in part by increased sales of John Grisham's The Broker and Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.

A profit margin of 9% is quite respectable, about equal to what you'd typically see in other industries, including software, telecom and oil.

So why, with numbers like that, is publishing believed to be such a poor industry?

You've got me.