There’s been a lot of web chatter lately about what I’d call the morality of book pricing. The loudest noise, with perhaps the widest ramifications, came last year when the Justice Department accused Apple and the Big Five publishers of conspiring to raise e-book prices. In its war with Amazon for consumer dollars, Apple, according to the Justice Department, had colluded with the publishers to … Continue reading →
As it has for most booklovers, both readers and writers, this week has been a sad one for me. We lost Elmore Leonard at 87 this week, for my money the greatest crime novelist of our time. Beyond his greatness as a writer, Dutch was a good man and a good friend. I had not seen him in a few years, and I certainly would … Continue reading →
Last time I spent most of a lengthy post on John Grisham’s hot new one, The Racketeer and promised a comparison of sorts with Gillian Flynn’s super bestseller, Gone Girl. (If you want to catch up first, please click here.) One of the things these books have in common is the timeless power of good storytelling. Yes, I guess by now we’ve all read about … Continue reading →
Sorry, if you’ve dropped by here at all this year, you’ve found the same damn self-serving post day after day, week after week, month after month. And so you probably concluded that I was either dead or too busy to blog. Fortunately it was the latter. I’ve been putting the finishing touches (always a treacherous trap for me ) to a couple of new crime … Continue reading →
Okay, far be it from me to argue with a classic old saying that apparently goes all the way back to Matthew (5:14-16) in the New Testament: “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all … Continue reading →
Kristine Kathryn Rusch, one of our most prolific and important bloggers on the business of writing and publishing, recently wrote a lengthy 3-part series of posts titled, “Why Writers Disappear.” There is something in it for just about every writer, and it certainly caught my eye, because, after all, I am a writer who, about 40 years ago, disappeared. Kris starts by listing a dozen … Continue reading →
If you’re a writer, you know there may be nothing as pleasing and gratifying as a warm word of approval from someone whose opinion you deeply value. Well, yes, sufficient book sales to allow full-time work on the next book is also pretty cool. I’ve been fortunate enough to experience the former, though not the latter, but what was that line from the incomparable Fran … Continue reading →
Suddenly two weekends ago (8/25-26)… All those contentious words flying around the web for weeks on the subject of book reviews (Too nice? Too nasty? Not worth the trouble?) got trumped. In a sprightly expose in the New York Times with the irresistible title, “The Best Book Reviews Money Can Buy,” David Streitfeld caused a firestorm of comments (331 the last time I looked) by … Continue reading →
So this is the third and last installment of this series… In Part 1 and Part 2 I’ve been asking, are Murder in the Synagogue and Squelched: The Suppression of Murder in the Synagogue irrelevant, ancient history? If not, why not? So how common is what Prentice-Hall did to Murder? As I recount in Squelched, soon after the publication of Murder, I heard directly from … Continue reading →
Last time… I wrote about my books Murder in the Synagogue and Squelched: The Suppression of Murder in the Synagogue and ended by asking what, if anything, their fate 40 years ago might add to the conversation we’re having about the Great Shift in publishing these days. You can catch up with that post here. One of the things people say after reading Squelched is … Continue reading →
Oh, you’ve noticed? Yes, a pretty common observation from those interested in books and publishing these days. But I’ve got a story about the Great Shift that’s a bit unusual and might shed a different light. It was 1970—I know, people still lived in caves back then, but stick with me for a moment—a big year for me with the publication of Murder in the … Continue reading →