They aren't on your Best of list? Means you haven't read 'em then

The Jugger

The Handle

The Rare Coin Score

The University of Chicago Press is re-issuing the Richard Stark novels. If you write crime fiction, you can't call yourself well-read in the field unless you know these books. In fact, I think I may give prospective clients a written test to make sure they know what jugger, handle, and heeled all mean to Parker.

I love top 10/20/40 lists of novels and books

Lee Child (I think he's a writer?) has his Top 40 books of all time in the Telegraph this weekend.

How he managed to overlook Gone With the Wind, Noble House, or The Thorn Birds is beyond me, so maybe I'll messenger them over to him so he can see what he's clearly been missing.

You'll notice he also didn't list In Cold Blood. I am really surprised by that. I read it a LONG time ago, and it still chills me to the bone.

And, where oh where is The Great Gatsby? (I'm sorry but Tom Clancy AND John Grisham may be fine genre writers indeed, but to mention them and NOT Fitzgerald??)

Adam Eisenberg has another reason to grin!

You'll remember Adam Eisenberg, author of A DIFFERENT SHADE OF BLUE.

He had a lot of fun at one of his recent signings.


I'm delighted but not surprised to see his book on the bestseller list at Seattle Mystery Bookstore!



Aug 2009 Bestsellers

Trade paperback
1 - Adam Eisenberg, A Different Shade of Blue, Behler
2 - Steig Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Vintage
3 - Luis Castillo, Echoes of Time, Tigress

4 - tie
Sheila Simonson, An Old Chaos, Perseverance Press
Barbara Cleverly, Folly Du Jour, Delta
Joshilyn Jackson, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, Grand Central
Tana French, In the Woods, Penguin

8 - tie
Curt Colbert, Seattle Noir, Akashic
David Benioff, City of Thieves, Plume
IJ Parker, Convict's Sword, Penguin
Debra Ginsberg, Grift, Three Rivers
Charles Finch, The September Society, St. Martin's
Michael Buckley, Sisters Grimm: The Fairy-tale Detectives, Amulet

Hot TEA!--updated

Gary Corby gets a spin in the spotlight at Julia Buckley's Mysterious Musings!

And in case you missed seeing this, Gary has a guest post about leaving things OUT of the book over at Pixie Central!

Your invisibility cloak isn't working!

I was tweeting with one my twitter pals the other day and she made the comment:

"After reading some of the comments on querytracker it's like writers somehow assume it's magically shielded from agent eyes"

I was quite struck with that because for all my blather about "the internet is public" sometimes it's VERY hard to remember that.

I fall afoul of it myself. My rather ..ahem.. mordant and sarcastic sense of humor goes over well with clients who are used to me (I hope anyway!) but when I comment on their blogs I need to remember it's not just clients reading those pithy phrases. Their moms are too. Or their kids. Or their spouses. Or just their friends who don't know that "batshit crazy" is what passes for a compliment around here.

I was reminded of this again tonight when, in trolling around the internet, I came across this post about a talk Wendy Loggia, an editor at Delacorte gave at SCBWI about why manuscripts or books are rejected:

It's item #4 that made my hair stand on end:

The writer seems like a difficult person to work with. Wendy always Googles an author’s name before offering a contract. She says she may be prompted to change her mind about signing up an author if they share too much information in their blog, if they tend to blog a lot about how hard writing is, if they blog about being rejected many times, if they publicly bash a book she’s worked on, or if they bash a colleague in the business who is her friend

I keep a close eye on my client's blogs and tweets and Facebook pages, and your agent probably does as well. This is why.

Before you have an agent though, you're on your own, and remember, agents google too.

You're not invisible, no matter what the guy selling the cloak at Platform 9.5 said to you.

Despite the cover and title, I'm buying this book

The reason I'm forking over cold hard cash is the copy in the catalog:

In the spring of 2007, a brilliant computer programmer named Hans Reiser stands accused of murdering his estranged wife, Nina. Despite a mountain of circumstantial evidence against him, he proclaims his innocence. The case takes a twist when Nina's former lover, and Hans's former best friend, Sean Sturgeon, confesses to eight unrelated murders that no one has ever heard of.

At the time of Sturgeon's confession, Stephen Elliott is paralyzed by writer's block, in the thrall of Adderall dependency, and despondent over the state of his romantic life. But he is fascinated by Sturgeon, whose path he has often crossed in San Francisco's S&M scene. What kind of person, he wonders, confesses to a murder he likely did not commit. One answer is, perhaps, a man like Elliott's own father.

So begins a riveting sojourn through a neon landscape of false confessions, self-medication and torturous sex. Set against the backdrop of a nation at war, the declining year of the Silicon Valley tech boom, THE ADDERALL DIARIES is at once a gripping account of a murder trial and a scorching investigation of the self."


And a blurb from Roddy Doyle clinched the sale: "You don't just read THE ADDERALL DIARIES, you fall right into them...It's a brilliant book."


I'm perplexed by the choice of cover and title for this book but that's a topic for another day!

Betsy Lerner!

Did you know Betsy Lerner had a blog?
I didn't.

Now I do!

Something to remember if you "hate queries"

I don't hate query letters.
I don't hate them even a little.

Query letters work just fine and dandy for me. I meet a lot of my clients for the first time in the incoming queries.

I turn down more good, and publishable, stuff than I say yes to.

What that means is anyone who proposes to change to something/anything else has to show me how it will either save time, or create some other efficiency for ME. ME, not you. ME.

The only person who suffers when a query is "bad" is the writer. If anything bad queries make it easy to click "here's your hat, don't let the door bang your keister on the way out" button.

I realize the ways of literary agents are not supremely logical, and can seem arcane, and mysterious. I figure if I talk about how it works, otherwise befuddled writers might be able to craft a query for a book I'd really like to read. Win/win.

But I'm not looking to change the query letter system at all.
It works just fine for me.

If it can be gnawed, you will won't you?

My post earlier today, in which I extolled the virtue of actually telling me what your book was about in the query letter has generated some interesting, if befuddled, comments.

For starters, let us all remember that pages (ie the requested 3-5 pages) are NEVER sent in an attachment. NEVER. If there is an exception to NEVER, the guidelines will say so very very specifically. The default form is to include the pages in the email. When in doubt, include in the body of the email.

Thus, when I rant about "Did you send a couple quick sentences about yourself and then say, here are the first couple pages attached below? Yes? Form rejection"
and you think I mean the pages should be in an attachment, you're focused on the WRONG THING.

This post is about describing your book; the problem is that you've only said a couple quick sentences.

Get it?

What I'm asking for is what I've ALWAYS asked for: more than a cursory "here's my 50,000 word novel about agents who eat queries for breakfast, pages below"

Get it?

The guidelines are not designed to trip you up, fool you, challenge you or make you feel stupid. The guidelines are supposed to help you. Don't over analyze, and don't obsess.

And if you got a form rejection, and you re-read your query and you can't figure out if you didn't describe your book in two paragraphs, well, maybe you should invest some time over at QueryShark.

And, no, I'm NOT caught up on my queries at all. I will tell you when that happens. In fact, I may take out an ad in the damn New York Times and pay for the Empire State Building to be wreathed in pink (for the octopus of course) it will be such a happy day.

Feeling Rejected?

If you've queried me recently (as in after the last time I'd cleared out my incoming query mailbox) and received a form rejection, take a good look at your query letter.

Does it tell me about the book? I don't mean you tell me "it's amazing" or "it's a page turner." I mean, did you tell me who the main character is and what the conflict is or the choices the MC faces?

No? Form rejection.

Did you tell me enough about the book that I could see I might want to read it? In other words did you write a PARAGRAPH about what the book is about?

No? Form rejection


Did you send a couple quick sentences about yourself and then say, here are the first couple pages attached below?

Yes? Form rejection


The good news? If you try again, and I mean you REWRITE that query letter and tell me what the damn book is about and send it again, I'll read it. DO NOT MENTION this is another query.

I make no apology for form rejections if you don't tell me what the book is about and I'm not tolerating any crap about it in the comment column.

I figure I've done my part by telling you there's a problem and identifying the solution.