If you’re thinking of getting any of my books for the holidays, it couldn’t be easier. I’ve got you covered, even for autographed books!
I’ve been recommending this essay for years to every writer I know. And it’s free to read online…
I compiled a list of fun facts about this brilliant mathematician after reading two biographies. The oddest little things stayed with me, and here they are…
“Everyone should have at least one Hollywood experience as a way of learning some crucial life lessons, namely: Don’t get your hopes up; don’t hold your breath; don’t expect the quick fix; and also don’t give up.”
The author of the Encyclopedia Brown mysteries has died.
My father still enjoys telling people how I set up a detective agency in the garage and distributed handwritten business cards to everyone in the neighborhood after reading the Brown books. Some woman on our block asked my father if he would look for her sweater, mistaking him for me, the real detective. The business tanked after one case, when it became obvious that I couldn’t deduce my way out of a paper bag.
I didn’t read Sobol’s “Two-Minute Mysteries” until later, and was astonished to find that he—like Raymond Chandler, Ellery Queen, James Cain, and tons of others, I suppose—reused plots from this older book for his later mysteries.
Years later, I had the chance to interview Sobol by phone when I was working at Scholastic. He was incredibly down to earth. When I asked what he did for fun or exercise, he said most days he was lucky if he got up from his desk and made it to the refrigerator. Then, at the end of the interview, I mentioned in passing that this particular Scholastic magazine would be reprinting one of the Brown mysteries to accompany the Q&A I was writing.
In a line that sort of presaged my own future, Sobol replied, “Am I getting paid for this? I mean, if it’s just a few bucks, no big deal. But if it’s $25, send me the check.”
We’ll all miss him.
It’s true. We’re over the house all the time. For barbecues and stuff.
This is Keith. He makes wood-fired ceramics via his business, Mudstuffing. They’re beautiful; look at the website if you don’t believe me. He makes these nifty little ceramic thingies that hold your damp sponge near your kitchen sink so the sponge doesn’t get so gross. He’s holding one in the photo, with sponge. Here’s a close-up, which links to his etsy site, by the way.
I saw Keith a while back at one of the craft festivals in town (there are a lot of them here, trust me). I bought one of his sponge-things.
A little while later I was asked to be on a panel at a bookstore to talk about children’s books. The panel consisted of a couple of trad-pubbed authors, some aspiring authors, and an editor lady who made her living as a packager. A packager is someone who dreams up a line of books and then tries to sell the whole…package to a publisher.
The weird thing is that everyone on this panel except me was obsessed with upholding or getting a foot in the door of the traditional publishing model. You’d think that the aspiring writers would have dipped their feet in self-pub just to see what it was like, but they had not. They were strongly, painfully, excruciatingly determined to break in traditionally. Anything else just wouldn’t be worth it. To hear how they were going about it, you’d think there was no fun in writing.
They talked about workshopping. About finding writing groups that were still open to new writers. They talked about queries and agents and landing multi-book contracts like one of their number had done. I don’t think any of them smiled all night.
The editor lady disingenuously discussed the pros and cons on the indie/trad “decision” every writer “must” make these days. She warned writers away from the self-pubbed model, saying, “If you don’t mind having 10,000 copies of your book sitting in your garage…”
She was either lying or uninformed. So I stopped listening.
When I had a chance to speak, I told the crowd that I’d gone to one of these craft fairs the other day. I saw all these local artists selling stuff they had made. A small percentage of it was crap; a lot of it was just so freaking good.
Potters make pots, then they sell them. Why can’t I do the same thing as a writer?
Why must I worry endlessly about whether my stuff is good enough?
Why must I ceaselessly seek out feedback from editors in the business?
Why must I revise my book three times at an agent’s behest, only to have that agent drop me with little explanation?
Why must I cajole editors, their publishers, the marketing staff, and six accountants to carry my book and then feel like crap when I didn’t market the book enough to justify the pitiful advance their corporation gave me?
Why, ultimately, must all my validation as an artist come from a business entity larger than myself?
Why can’t I just make my book, story, or novel the way Keith makes his pots, and then just sell it?
Oh, I can.
Yes, Keith worries if his work is good enough. All good artists do. And I’m sure he polices himself with some kind of quality control standards to make sure his work is up to snuff. Beyond that, he makes good stuff and sells it. And the imperfections in his work actually add to its character. I think of that every time I reread one of the cheesy stories Hammett or Cain wrote for the pulps. They’re imperfect as hell, but I love them to death.
Please understand: There’s nothing wrong with a lot of what the writers I met were doing to get their work out. It’s all good. I do some of that stuff myself. Most of my income still comes from the trad-pub model. But sometimes I just wish we’d have fun and make our pots and sell them. Now I can, and I love that.
[Thanks, Keith, for providing the springboard to a rant.]
We’re back from our book signing trip and I wanted to post some of the links so I have them in one place. We only went to two cities to sign our history titles: Washington DC and Williamsburg. While in DC we officially signed at the National Archives, and also signed some stock at the Spy Museum, which has a cool bookstore. In Williamsburg, we were at the visitor’s center bookstore for Colonial Williamsburg.
Something strange happened as we were arriving in DC. We got a call from one of the booksellers at the indie bookstore in our town, Malaprops, saying that someone was trying to reach us from The PBS Newshour to see if we were available to do an interview on the signers of the Declaration of Independence. If we did it, this would be our first TV interview. That’s nerve-wracking on its own, but more so in this case because we had packed light for this trip. So, instead of thinking, “Am I prepared to do a national TV interview on a book I wrote three years ago?” I was really just thinking, “Can I get by wearing just my cargo shorts?” Turns out, I could.
I’m sharing the links with you, but please bear in mind I have not seen these clips. I can’t bear to watch them, for the same reason I never listen to our radio interviews in their entirety—because I fear I will suck. And also, when it comes to the signers, we always get angry comments. Over the years, I have just stopped reading to the comments on these things.
The link to the short version (2+ minutes) of the clip is here.
The link to the longer clip (7+ minutes) is here.
The link to the radio interview with Boston NPR is here. (Taped about a month ago; it aired Fourth of July).
The link to the radio interview with Charlotte NPR is here. (Taped three years ago; it was rebroadcast on Fourth of July).
Lastly, here’s the op-ed article we wrote for the Long Island newspaper, Newsday. (Written two weeks ago, it ran Fourth of July).
At the same time, on the marketing side, we got two unexpected plugs from two online retailers. The mail-order catalog Bas Bleu sent this ad out to its subscribers:
And on the Fourth of July, B&N gave the new book a mention on its Facebook page:
So yeah: the week saw an impressive amount of coverage in three media for our three history titles, two of which are “old” books by normal publishing standards.
It’s gratifying. I don’t know if it resulted in huge sales; I’ll need to check Bookscan later this week. In general, these titles have historically been poorly tracked by Bookscan because they sell best in “non-bookstore” venues that do not report to Bookscan or any of the bestseller lists, i.e., museum gift shops.
My friends and family asked over the weekend why I don’t engage with commenters on the websites of these media companies. Wouldn’t my participation help clear up misperceptions?
Here’s the deal. All of these books were written for a popular audience, with heavy doses of humor (Amazon actually classifies the Kindle versions of the two signer books as “political humor”) because that’s what Quirk, our publisher, does best. But no one seems to get that, apparently. Each of the books has managed to attract an audience of lovers and haters who take them very, very seriously. I’ve gotten letters from clergyman who praise the signer books for making the Founding Fathers seem so human, and I’ve gotten angry emails from people who decry our use of “gutter language.”
As a rule, people can’t play nice when it comes to politics, and these books are always perceived as being about modern-day politics. Consequently, the comments on sites that feature these books usually descend into people labeling each other right-wingers or liberals rather than adding anything interesting to the conversation.
I’m a writer, not a historian, so I get uncomfortable when people think I have some kind of political agenda in writing these books. I had the same agenda any writer has: food.
Every year at this time we go on the road to sign our history books at various historic sites. At the beginning, we started doing this on our own, because we thought it would help us connect with booksellers at “non-bookstores”—typically gift shops at historic sites associated with the Revolutionary War.
The signings went well, and as more historic sites opened accounts with our publisher, Quirk, the publisher started asking us to do more of them. Last year, they actually chipped in for some of the travel. In some years, we drove from our home in NC to Washington, DC, Philly, Boston, and Newport RI. It was exhausting but we thought it was worth it.
I did a post at author M.J. Rose’s website a while back talking about why I thought we were able to sell 100 books a day at some of these places. Book signings sell some books; they’re just not cost-effective. Having the publisher chip in greatly reduces the hit we used to take when we did this on our own. But we can’t fool ourselves and think that because we did a signing in DC that we’re triggering book sales in Nebraska. Doesn’t happen.
It got old fast, guys. Last year, by the end of the fifth day in as many cities, we were fried and vowed not to do it again. But we’re on the road again this year, albeit on a vastly curtailed schedule. July 4th we sign at the National Archives in Washington DC, where the Declaration of Independence is housed. July 6th we sign at the visitor’s center at Colonial Williamsburg. We’ve been working on the road as well. A newspaper in Long Island, Newsday, asked us to contribute an op-ed piece about common misconceptions about U.S. history. The article runs in the paper tomorrow; it’s already posted here.
And while here in DC today, we were asked to do a TV interview with The PBS Newshour. We couldn’t refuse. The interview will run tomorrow night at 6 PM and 10 PM on the East coast. It was so totally last minute that we actually wondered if we should buy better clothes. (I only packed my signature cargo shorts.) But it wasn’t necessary.
I’ll post the video to that interview tomorrow when I find the link…
Denise and I are both children of the 70s and grew up obsessed with the Bicentennial. When people ask why I do these signings, my answer has more to do with this guy than the wisdom of signing books these days. This is me and my brothers in Feb. 1976. (I’m the guy in the middle.) Mom made the outfits…
I was a major geek back then. Besides the Bicentennial, I was into terribly uncool things:
* magic
* Norman Rockwell (probably caused by all the art classes I was taking back then.)
* Tolkien
Probably still am. 1976 was pivotal in two important ways. It was the year the Jim Hutton TV series “Ellery Queen” was running. My friends and I became hooked on the Queen books and I discovered grown-up mysteries and crime novels for the first time. That year saw me also picking up a copy of E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime at a library book sale. That book blew me away. I loved the language and the melding of real-life people in a fictional story. I was only about 11 but I knew I’d just read something special.
That year is forever bound up in those discoveries, and it’s one reason I like the Fourth of July. It reminds me of the kid I was, and one of my major geekiest years ever.
A few years ago Denise and I co-wrote a TV tie-in book, 24: The Official CTU Operations Manual, for Quirk Books. As I remember it, the book was published just as the Writer’s Guild Strike shut down production of that show and many others for one season. The book was DOA, and never picked up steam when the fresh season aired the following year. The publisher moved quickly to liquidate stock, and for a while the price on Amazon was well below the $25 cover price. (Looks like it’s back up.)
Forget that price right now, because you can get one free from me.
I have 8 of these books that I need to get rid of. They’re taking up shelf space in my basement and I’d like to find good homes for them. I’ve slowly been offering copies in giveaways on Goodreads, but I’d prefer to give them to people I know who connect with me via this site.
I can only ship to U.S. addresses. Sorry about that. Quirk’s designers outdid themselves on this thing: the paperback book comes in a sturdy slipcase with a magnetic clip. The result is that the book weighs 3 pounds! Shipping outside the U.S. is prohibitively expensive.
If you want an autographed copy, leave a comment here or connect with me via the entry form on my contact page. The first 8 will get it. Denise and I will both autograph, and I’ll ship as soon as I can.
There are no strings attached here. I’m not asking for reviews or anything. (It’s a work-for-hire book, so I can afford to be cavalier about how well it sells at this late date.) I really just want to clear out the basement.
When I was freelancing years ago for The New York Times, I figured out at one point that they were paying me under 50 cents a word for the twice-monthly columns I wrote. That was not a surprise; most writers know that there’s not much money in freelancing for papers, especially ones like the Times.
But one day my editor called with a weird proposition. They were running short, under-300-word reviews of local restaurants, and he wondered if I could contribute some. I asked about payment. “We used to pay about $50 each,” he said, “but now we have these coupons for pie.”
I have some trouble hearing, so I’m always second-guessing myself and asking people to restate what they just said. My editor explained that a fancy bakery near the newspaper had given them these vouchers and they were using them as a way to thank people.
Or that’s how I took it.
I misheard. Actually, instead of paying with money, they were paying with these coupons because their budget was so meager for this particular section. They needed the reviews just the same; they just couldn’t pay for them.
There’s so much wrong with this picture. I mean, in order to write any decent restaurant review, you still have to eat at the place. So they weren’t even reimbursing reporters for the food they had bought, but instead offering them dessert.
Like any brainless freelancer, I said yes and started working these capsule reviews into my reporting/writing schedule. If anyone asked, I’d say I was writing restaurant reviews for The New York Times. It was true. They didn’t need to know that it was for the New Jersey section of the paper, how short they were, or the terms.
I did a bunch of these reviews. And because I had misheard the editor, believing the pie thing to be a joke or perhaps an extra thank-you, I actually invoiced them $50, plus expenses, for each review. They always paid. But after each one, I’d get a coupon in the mail for a free pie at the fancy bakery. I finally had a stack of these coupons and collected a few hundred dollars before accounting caught on and the editor had to call, embarrassed, to explain the situation.
I redeemed those coupons very infrequently, I must say. The shop was in an inconvenient location and the one time I called to claim a bunch of pies for a party I was attending, the baker-in-chief told me that I could only get two free pies at any one time with those coupons. To make things worse, the pies were a little on the small side. But they were delicious.
It remains one of the strangest ways I’ve ever been paid for my work. And for a little while, perhaps a summer or so, I liked to think of myself as being the hit of parties when I showed up with two boxes of free pie and a story of professional debasement and exploitation to boot.
On the road this weekend with my wife, who is close to wrapping her nonfiction WWII book. We’re visiting a so-called “secret city” in Tennessee—one of three the U.S. government built during WWII to work on various aspects of the atomic bomb. While Denise met with some of her interviewees, I was instructed to snap some photos of the nearby science fair.
I am pleased to be the guest on Robert Swartwood's podcast today. I'm a fan of Robert's work, especially his girl-assassin thriller No Shelter and his shimmering twist on the zombie novel, The Dishonored Dead.
In the podcast, we talk about a bunch of stuff, but mostly my weird brush with fame in the HuffPo incident, my current exasperation with free books, a humorous new video from Random House, and other fun.
The link to the podcast is here.
I hope you will check it out.
Please note: This website uses affiliate links, typically for books or products mentioned on the site. If you click on one of these links and purchase anything, the owner of this site may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you.
