Jeez

Well, which way is the publishing world turning? Old or new?

Tennis Day

Spent a few nice hours today at the Sony Ericsson. I always like to go on Monday and watch the qualies. You can stand right next to the court and watch matches, or watch the big names practicing, or sometimes like today you can see a world class player sitting in the stands right in front of you eating chocolate and joking with her friends.

Ebook Publishing

Got to pass on this post on ebook publishing. Full of hard facts and a great place to start in educating yourself about the process.

You can go here to watch an intersting video on one wildly successful epub author.

Going to work on putting a few more books up on Amazon and B&N.

When I was a college student back in the 60's I made a connection with a sandal maker down from St. Pete in Sarasota. He made this cool hippie sandals that everyone liked. But not everyone had a car, or knew where to find this guy. So I'd peddle his sandals. I'd go around to interested buyers and draw an outline of their foot on a sheet of paper and take it to my cobbler friend.

He'd charge me 10 bucks and I'd sell them for 12, still a bargain at the time. It felt good to have a side business, sort of like my paper route, or working for my dad in construction as I'd done before college.

In fact, from the age of 8, I'd never not had a job. I wouldn't call myself a hustler, but I was always looking for a way to get a few extra nickels and dimes flowing in.

This ebook thing seems to be rooted in the same sensibility. I love my publisher and respect the old school methods. They've been incredibly loyal and supportive and creative in shaping my career. But if I can put some books out there on my own that my publisher has not expressed interest in, or are years/decades out of date, I owe it to the books themselves to give them a longer life.

And the nickels and dimes aren't bad either.

And here's the King of Epub information, Joe Konrath, being funny. You want to know more about ebook publication stuff, check out Joe's blog.

Twitter

Follow me on Twitter: @jameswhall

Dead Last--the new Thorn novel--the Cover

Got a version of the new cover of the next Thorn novel that'll appear in November, around Thanksgiving. Thorn gets involved with an obituary writer for the Miami Herald, (she's an old flame) and through her Thorn becomes way too involved with a TV crime show being shot in Miami. TV stars, writers and directors can be very dark and twisted.

The cover is an early draft and will probably change a bit, but I'm guessing it'll stay close to this. I like it. A little less dark and noirish than recent covers.

Got opinions? I can still pass on feedback to the publishers before all this gets set in stone.

New Book--OVER EXPOSURE

Okay, here we go. My adventures in ebook publishing begin.

I've been writing and publishing noirish short stories for years. I'm not a prolific short story writer, but I do enjoy the process very much. I decided to test the ebook publishing waters with a collection of seven stories, including "The Catch" which won an Edgar Award for short stories a few years ago.

So maybe for some of my hungry fans, this book will hold you over till November when DEAD LAST comes out.

More on DEAD LAST later. (It's a Thorn novel.)

But I wanted to start with a quick blog post about OVER EXPOSURE which I'm selling through Amazon for 2.99. I might be raising that price soon, but for the time being, I wanted to set the price as low as possible to see what kind of response I can get.

I'm also planning on putting my four books of poetry up soon.

It struck me lately that ebook publishing actually insures that these books which are out of print and very hard to find will have a longer life than they would have had in the old print format. Strange to think that cyberspace is better at preserving literary work than the ink and paper format we've always know.

I'm also the proud owner of an iPad 2 and will be reviewing my experiences with it as the weeks go on.

Another piece of news! I'm going to be with St. Martin's Press for at least another two books. I'll be getting to work on the new Thorn as soon as I finish copy-editing the manuscript for DEAD LAST.

Pretty exciting time.

Publishing, Perishing and Flourishing

Now that I've finally finished new Thorn novel, Dead Last, and also finished the book on bestsellers I've been working on for years, I'm going to be spending a bit more time updating the blog...between working and researching on the new book proposal (a secret project).

Here are some fairly gloomy numbers about publishing in general and the impact of ebooks.

But as my friend Otto Penzler likes to say, book people are like farmers. If they aren't complaining about too little rain, they're complaining about too much rain.

Maybe so, but this feels like a hundred year flood to me.

The upheaval in the music business which from my point of view started with Napster and evolved into the very successful business model of iTunes, might be a good predictor for what's happening with the book business. I'm not sure what the fall out has been for musicians with the migration from CDs to digital formats. Probably it's a mixed bag. Some musicians benefit, some don't.

The same already seems to be happening in the book business with certain writers capitalizing on the radical changes, and other writers being left behind. The whole world of ebook publishing has a Wild West feel to it these days. No one's exactly sure what the rules are and how to game this brand new system.



The writer as hustler, the writer as entrepreneur. Not exactly a new concept. Most writers have to keep one eye on the marketplace. Even Franzenesque writers who lock themselves away from the world do so at their own peril.

One of the things I like most about my Kindle is that I can read a free sample of a novel, two or three chapters. Like listening to a few bars of a song on iTunes. Actually, I find that three chapters gives me a lot more to go on than the ten or fifteen seconds of music on iTunes. I make fewer mistakes in choosing novels from the three chapter samples than I do with songs. There's lots of stuff on my iPod that I wind up deleting.

Here's a little bit on the Bestseller List and its importance to the book industry.

And here's a very interesting blog post on the new ebook bestseller list in the NYTimes.

21st Wedding Anniversary Dinner

Got married 21 very happy years ago tonight.

Had one very tasty sandal to celebrate. It's what those Tarahumara Indians wear when they run a few hundred miles in the Copper Canyons. Seems very appropriate to eat my huarache in honor of our long enduring romance.

Here's a guy who put the ache in huaraches:



Just finished a wonderful book on running and the Tarahumaras, called Born to Run.

I'm not ready to start barefoot running quite yet, but I learned a lot about a lot of things aside from running in this book. Great characters, great stories, great information about human evolution and the role that running played in shaping our physiological and cultural destiny.

Crumley

"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."

Good old Crumley. The line, of course, is from The Last Good Kiss.

I'm not sure why I was thinking of Jim today, but I couldn't get him out of my head. I'm reaching the end of my 17th novel. A tough one, a different one, one that's stretched me way beyond my comfort zone. And then Jim popped into my mind. The easy way he had with writing. Not that it was easy for him. It wasn't any easier for him than anybody else. He set himself a high bar and kept jumping over it and over it and over it. But he never complained about it, about how hard it was, what a pain it could be. He didn't complain about much of anything, except ex-wives.

I spent a year hanging around him when we worked together in El Paso. We had some uproarious times. Some evening in Juarez that are etched in my brain forever. Even the evenings I can't remember a damn thing about except me and Jim pissing in a trough that ran under the bar at the Kentucky Club. The trough ran out to the street, and into the gutter. It was a very useful trough. Kept the drinkers drinking, and saved the owners from having to furnish a real bathroom.

Jim and I carried a mattress on top of my car one night. It was to be Jim's mattress for the year he was teaching at the U. We'd roped it down to the roof and we drove from one side of El Paso to the other and when we arrived (not completely sober or straight) we realized the mattress had blown off somewhere along our route. No sweat. We retraced our steps and found it halfway along the way. Tire tracks, lots of them, marked that mattress and dented it permanently. No sweat. Jim used that mattress all year.

He had some trouble with his back that year. But every time he complained about it, we started laughing again. That damn mattress. It must've been run over a hundred times before we found it. Pain that turns to pleasure. Pleasure that turns to pain. Good old Jim. Man, I forgot for a while how much I loved that guy.

Noir

Here's a new collection of noir stories from Otto Penzler. I have a story in it. Read a review of the book here.