At Last I'm a REAL Writer

The paperbacks of Shock and Awe have arrived on my doorstep.

Nice. Shiny. And with a kind blurb from thriller master James Barrington (for which I am grateful).

You can't see it in the pics here, but the glossy gold title on the front is embossed. I spent the morning running my fingertips across the raised letters as if there might be messages in Braille lurking there.

It's a childhood fixation, I admit. But real writers to me were people who wrote books you could go out and buy--and in the benighted part of California where I grew up, there weren't any stores where you could wander in and buy hardback novels. (Not that I could have afforded any.)

And there they are: Paperbacks.

I suppose a lot of what I do is to please the ten-year-old lurking inside me. (Sad, but true.) Now if they'd just put me on a rack in a supermarket, I'd really have arrived.

Shock in Stock...But Amazon US has something against MNW

Will Atkins informs me that when the Pan Macmillan web store shows a title as "out of stock," this means that the number of copies has shrunk below some threshold. He's had them reduce this threshold, and, poof! I'm back in stock. There's still about 50 copies somewhere in the Pan Mac warehouse.

Which brings me back to my original question: What is up with Amazon US? They let people buy copies for months (though as far as I know they never delivered any. And then they dropped the title from their "available" list. They still don't list my book as available for sale except as a used book. Yet their representative tells me the book "ought to be listed as available." Indeed it ought.

The most recent communication from Amazon US informed me that "We have received a few of these items from distributors, but have not yet received them from the publisher. We appreciate your patience with this issue."

Well, now at least I know the problem isn't that Macmillan is out of copies.

Meanwhile, Amazon Canada, bless them, still lists Shock and Awe as available, and what's more, available for CDN$15.72, which is a good price even with the US dollar somewhere underwater. At the moment they list it as "Only 1 left in stock--order soon (more on the way). "

I'm wagering that Amazon Canada receives more copies before Amazon US manages to cover their orders from September. Does anybody have a phone number for Jeff Bezos?

(Update: I've just learned that Amazon US is apparently doing the same thing with other MNW books. LC Tyler's The Herring-Seller's Apprentice is still listed as "available," those who pre-ordered it have been informed that it won't be shipped until mid-to-late January. Faye L. Booth's Cover the Mirrors can still be added to your shopping cart, but there is a note saying that the book is "Temporarily Unavailable".

Peter Anthony's A Town Called Immaculate is listed as though there's no issues, but I have a sneaking suspicion that if you ordered it from Amazon US, you might find that you'd wait a month and then receive a notice informing you that delivery would be delayed...If anyone has ordered Peter's book from Amazon US, let me know how it all progresses!)

(And furthermore: While you can pick up a copy of Cover the Mirrors from Amazon Canada for CDN$15.72, Amazon Canada lists The Herring Seller's Apprentice, which was published a month before Cover the Mirrors, as "not yet published."

Truly, the ways of Amazon surpasseth human understanding.)

Three Cheers for Upper Hutt!!!

Some time back Tim Stretton wised me up to the usefulness of Google Alerts: Just drop in the search terms and Google will send you e-mail whenever something new turns up. You'll never have to Google yourself (which, as we all know, can give you hair on your palms) again. So I put my name and "Shock and Awe" together in an alert, and ego-surfed no more.

My latest Alert is the most interesting to date: It's my card catalogue entry for the Upper Hutt City Library in Upper Hutt, New Zealand. It had been ages since I'd seen a catalogue card; sort of made me nostalgic for my misspent youth:

Shock and awe/David Isaak
by Isaak, David
Basingstoke : Macmillan New Writing, 2007.

Subjects

• Nuclear terrorism -- Fiction.
• Intelligence officers -- United States -- Fiction
• Undercover operations -- Fiction
• Suspense fiction

I also learn that it is presently checked out (though due back on December 12), and that there are five requests pending for it.

I've been to New Zealand a few times and love the place (though Wellington didn't used to be a good place to find yourself on a Wednesday night)--but I've never been to Upper Hutt. I regret this gap in my travels, as I now realize that folks in Upper Hutt are the most discerning and intelligent of their countrymen (and women), and you can bet the next time I visit NZ, Upper Hutt will be on my itinerary.

And Now (drum roll), the Paperback Cover

Will showed me the concept for the paperback cover of Shock and Awe a while back, although it wasn't necessarily finalized. The cover seems to have fed through to Amazon, however, so I guess I'm free to post it here:




























Will, being the meticulous editor he is, thought this might need to be fiddled a bit, since, as those who've read the book may remember, the ship in question was a large tramp freighter rather than a naval vessel. But if there's such a thing as poetic license, I'd argue book-cover license extends even further.

And I've got to admit it's striking, and a great pair-up with the previous cover. Blue and orange are complementary, and in some of the Golden Dawn rituals these complementary colors are viewed side-by-side, and then the eyes are closed and the colors reverse in the retinal memory and a door into Yetzirah, the World of Formation, opens. So I'd suggest that everyone needs both the paperback and hardback; as occult ritual it comes cheap, doesn't require virgins or the slaughtering of goats (which can be pretty messy in your average home) and is far easier to learn than, say, scrying in shiny japanned black tea trays. So I'd advise you to buy both.

(nb. This works with blue and yellow, too, but, sadly, I can't recommend any books issued in dual blue and yellow versions. Guess you're stuck with this one.)

Grumpy Old Bookman Reviews Me

Or rather he reviews Shock and Awe. Not that any of us writers would take reviews of our books personally, right? We've got good distance between ourselves and our books, don't we?

Grumpy's original article on Macmillan New Writing --one of the most-cited articles in the history of the blogosphere (naturally excluding anything about Princess Di or Britney Spears)--was a critical factor in deciding me to submit my manuscript to the imprint in the first place, so I'm jazzed that he understands my disillusioned book. Getting Michael Allen to describe my book as "deeply cynical" is a bit like getting the Pope to describe me as "deeply Catholic." At the moment I'm a pretty happy fella.

What Would You Do If You Were Me? Part I

(Or rather, if you were I? which sounds incredibly awkward. Or, were you I? which is stilted to the point of being bad imitation Shakespeare. Who We Would Be Were You I and other collected poems, by Jonas J. Scribbler.)

So, to put it into Americanese, What Wouldja Do If You Was Me?

No wisecracks, please. No plastic-surgery jibes, no suggestions that I take the cloth, no observations about the eternal rest that can be achieved in a warm bath with the assistance of a sharp blade twisted under the veins in the wrist. Or at the minimum, keep them to yourself and anybody else in the room with you as you read this. Please don't share your merriment. ;-} (Don't you loathe smileys?)

Hey, I never intended to become a thriller writer. I haven’t read many thrillers, and most of them I’ve read were experiences I could easily have lived without. I adore Graham Greene and John Le Carre, of course, and some of Lee Child is exhilarating (if nothing else to see how many sentence fragments can be squeezed into a paragraph without being distracting. Plenty. Many frags. All over the place. Lots. All you need to accomplish Lee Child’s purpose. And then some.) But I’ve probably read less in the thriller genre than in any category apart from romance.

But the topics I needed to grapple with in Shock and Awe only amounted to a story in a thriller framework. So I wrote it that way. And now it turns out I’m a Thriller Writer.

No, really. I’m now a dues-paying member of the International Thriller Writers with my own page, right next to Susan Isaacs in the list (whom, as it turns out I have read, starting way way back with her funny novel Compromising Positions--hi, Susie!). And I’m now a member of the UK-based Crime Writers Association. (And they're a good bunch; they quite justifiably shortlisted Brian McGilloway’s Borderlands on a very short list for best debut novel, which shows damned good taste.) Crime Writer? Thriller Writer? I’m okay with it.

I have any number of things I want to write that fit into the thriller genre in some approximate fashion, though it's the kind of approximate that might result in a starfish on top of your Christmas tree. But Thriller Hotel isn’t an address I mind checking into. These days, I consider being allowed to sleep indoors with the humans to be a big step up in life. (Though the fellow who led me to my room said I could call him Procrustes. Name seems familiar somehow…Did he used to be on TV?)

It’s not that I can’t write thrillers (I hope). It’s not that I dislike writing thrillers. It’s just that I already have these other non-thriller books lying about the house, and they don’t fit with the persona/brand/expectations of a book by that "David Isaak" guy. They aren’t a logical follow-on to Shock and Awe. They’re the sort of thing someone might take as a debut novel…but I’m no longer a debutante. (Male form “debutant”, but no one has ever used that word outside of the dictionary.) I’m not a deb any more. I’m a—well, what the hell do you call me after my coming-out party plus forty-five seconds of mad passion in the back of a Ford Cortina? (That was rhetorical. Don’t answer that question or I’ll punch your lights out.)

So, here’s the question for y’all: If I have these books Macmillan won’t want because they don’t fit my brand (and because I’d have to be an even bigger nutcase than I already am to want them to publish them under my name), what do I do with them? Forget them? Sell them for firewood? Publish them in a small way under a pen name? (I’ve already had an editor at a small press ring my doorbell about one of them.) Try and get a new agent and create a parallel career (which Roger Morris has done with resounding success as RN Morris)? And, if I’m going to go back to agent-seeking, should I look for an agent in the UK or in the US? (And are you aware that most UK agents have adopted a policy of charging 15% for UK residents, but 20% for us wogs? [The wogs start at Calais, or so I’ve been told.])

More on this dilemma (Trilemma? Quadrilemma?) soon.

I’m sure you’re just a-quiver with anticipation. Us thriller writers know how to build the suspense, don't we?

More Pics of Books on Shelves (and other stuff)

The redoubtable Roger Morris just e-mailed me this picture from the Borders at Charing Cross. (Well, I don't think he probably e-mailed it from there. Probably he took the picture at Borders but e-mailed it from somewhere else. You writers are so picky.)


Roger said that it was face-out and a fair pile, both of which seem like a good thing. At least, if the pile shrinks over time...

Another friend--not a writer (and not much of a reader, either, when you get down to it) claims to have seen it at Gatwick when connecting from Geneva to the US. I guess this is feasible--I seem to remember a Waterstones there.

Over on another site, someone referred to these sorts of pictures as "writer's porn". Okay, I'm willing to admit it--it's gratuitous, it appeals to prurient interests, and has no obvious redeeming social value. To those of us who write, it still looks nice.

It occurs to me that it's LC Tyler's pub date for The Herring-Seller's Apprentice, a book I'm looking forward to reading. Best of luck to Len and MNW on the launch.

(Yes, prurient--in the sense of arousing an immoderate desire. I wouldn't go so far as to label it an unwholesome desire, but immoderate? Sure.)

If You Happen to be Passing Through Sligo...

Brian McGilloway was kind enough to drop me a note telling me he found several copies of Shock and Awe sitting in the Just Published section of Keohane's Books in Sligo. I never expected to hear my book was on the shelves in Ireland--the Irish, of course, being the real owners of the English language--so I'm jazzed to an embarrassing degree.

I'm hoping the fact that Shock and Awe's epigraph is from WB Yeats (we had to pay his estate for four lines of verse, which made more sense back when the title was Smite the Waters, but it was money well-spent anyhow) will give me some street cred with the locals. Yo, Willy Butler--howzit hangin', dawg?

Speaking of Mr McGilloway, his debut novel Borderlands (which was selected by The Times as a Best Summer Read, and I sure can't argue with them) seems to have continued doing good business. A few months ago, it sold to the Japanese publisher Hayakawa, which is one of the top Asian publishers of American and European novels. Best of all, though, it has even broken through the walls of Fortress New York, becoming the first MNW title to be onsold to an American publisher. Thomas Dunne Books, a well-known imprint of St Martin's Press, has not only bought Borderlands for hardback publication next year, but has also bought the hardback rights to his follow-on Gallows Lane (which is planned for MNW publication in April 2008). There are plans for both to come out in US paperbacks as well.

I'd like to pretend my interest in this topic is entirely selfless, but the truth is I'm hoping Brian has blown a big enough hole in the North American defences that some of the rest of us can sneak through the breach behind him. Little Rock, Arkansas, here we come...

The Mysteries of Amazon

Matt Curran has been musing (with only the tiniest touch of asperity) on why The Secret War has been absent from Amazon US for so long, and why, now that the book is there the synopsis is attenuated; and finally, he’s been wondering where the thing is published, as it is still listed as Macmillan New Writing.

Helpful as always, I can say with certainty that I haven’t a clue on the first two questions he poses. (There. Glad to be of service.) On the third matter—where the heck is this published?—I can engage in some meagerly informed speculation. People getting MNW books over here from Amazon US seem to be getting the same UK editions; the books seem to be shipped across the Atlantic to one of Amazon’s US warehouses. (Hence the “Usually ships within 4 to 7 weeks” estimate. Even my plumber’s estimates have a narrower range than that.)

But staring at the Amazon US and UK pages for Shock and Awe and The Secret War, I found other puzzles, as my book is now available from both sources as well. I’d been advising folks to order from Amazon UK, as it was available there first, the shipping time was shorter and the prices were about the same. But on close examination, given current exchange rates and the complication of shipping charges, I began to wonder.

Let’s take a look from the US buyer’s perspective, starting with Matt’s book. Amazon UK charges £2.99 to ship a book to North America, plus a £3.99 handling charge, resulting, at today’s exchange rate of £1 = $2.02, in a jaw-dropping shipping charge of £6.98 = $14.10. Amazon UK gives (or, to those speaking British English, who insist that a corporate entity is plural, ‘Amazon UK give’) a discount of £3.90 off the cover price of £12.99 for a price of £9.09, which in our wimpy US currency at the moment amounts to a price of $18.36. Add all that up, and for a US buyer, The Secret War from Amazon UK will cost £16.07= $32.46 delivered. (And probably get you on a Homeland Security watchlist, too. I mean, the title does sound a bit suspicious, doesn’t it?)

Ordering from Amazon US, the charges are somewhat simpler…at first. The book is priced at $26.27, which is very close to the cover price of £12.99, and the shipping is $3.99. Maybe. If you’re one of those obsessive sorts who reads footnotes, the shipping changes include the warning that *Books with listed availabilities of more than 3 weeks may incur an additional shipping fee of $1.99 per item. (Why this should be so is baffling. It seems like we’re being punished enough already by having to wait.) So, a US buyer ordering The Secret War from Amazon US will pay as little as $30.26 or as much as $32.25, depending on aspects formed between Mercury (communication and writing) and any planets you have in Gemini (which governs publishing), and on what was served in the Amazon cafeteria at lunch.

In other words, at the moment, depending on currency fluctuations, The Secret War costs pretty much the same for us Yanks whether we order from Amazon UK or Amazon US. Economists call this situation arbitrage. Other folks I know refer to this situation as ‘you can’t win.’

One would suspect that a similar arrangement would prevail for Shock and Awe. One would be wrong.

Amazon UK is selling Shock and Awe for £10.49 (£4.50 off the cover price of £14.99). That’s $21.19 to us colonials. Add the $14.10 shipping charges, and we’re up to a delivered total of $35.29.

Worth every penny, of course. But Amazon US is selling it for $20.04 (a savings of $10.32 off the cover price of $30.36—exchange rates do strange things). Add in the standard shipping of $3.99, and you’re up to $24.03. Or, with the mystical maybe-you-pay-it-and-maybe-you-don’t $1.99 surcharge, a total of $26.02.

Mathematics has never been my best subject, but even I can tell that $35.29 is a bit more than $24.03 (or maybe $26.02). Like $11.26 more (or maybe $9.27). So, without offering to give financial advice or holding myself out as a chartered accountant, I think I can state with confidence that Amazon US now offers the better deal on Shock and Awe for those living in the US. For now. That could change at any minute.

And, you might have to wait longer than when ordering from Amazon UK. Then again, you might not. Amazon UK has delivered MNW books to me within 10 days, but has on occasion taken up to nine weeks. Roll them dice!

One final note. I have mixed feelings about Amazon. I like the fact that I can order any book from them, and am not limited to what happens to be on the shelves of a local bookstore. And I like the fact that they can be used as a sort of free database. Amazon has done great things.

On the other hand, I’d rather pick up my books from a bookstore. Bookstores are the temples of our art. Many bookstores complain they can’t keep up with Amazon’s deep discounts, but Amazon’s pricing isn’t a favorable as it looks: once you include the shipping costs, Amazon’s delivered prices often aren’t that different from the cover price, and are sometimes more than you would pay in a bookstore.

Anyway, my sincere thanks to everyone who has bought Shock and Awe, from whatever source, despite the fact that the NYMEX market in January heating oil futures looks like a model of price stability in comparison. It's like a typical airline flight these days: every passenger has paid a different price. (Contact me if you want little baggies of free peanuts or pretzels.)

Okay, Now I Can Relax....

I just returned home from a long and rather chaotic trip, driving down to Huntington Beach straight-through from Reno. To add to what should have been a nine-hour drive, I decided to take the scenic route by hopping onto Highway 120, which crosses the Sierras. Scenic indeed, but a thirteen-hour drive in all.

Diligent (okay, compulsive) soul that I am, I stumbled into the house and checked my e-mail. To my delight, the redoubtable Roger Morris had sent pictures of Shock and Awe in it's natural habitat. Here it is perched in Goldsboro Books (signed copies, I might add--DHL works wonders).



Sharp-eyed readers will note that it is in the company of Michael Stephen Fuchs' latest tome, Pandora's Sisters.

Here it is in Waterstones Oxford Street, though it has abandoned Mr Fuchs in favor of John Irving.



Roger also saw it in Foyles, though he had to make them drag a copy from the back (and they apparently insisted that it was entitled Smite the Waters--c'mon, who'd give a book a crazy title like that?) Borders suggested it might be on one of their shelving trolleys. In other words, London bookshops work about like US bookshops.

But no matter. I've seen it on the shelves (unless Roger has done some very crafty Photoshop work. He is in advertising in his spare time, you know...) But it's good enough to fool me, so I'm off to bed.

Thanks, Roger.

As If You Hadn't Heard Enough From Me Already

The estimable Steven North (no relation, insofar as I know, to the enigmatic character in Brian Martin's novel), has published an interview with me in the newish but rapidly expanding Pan Macmillan interview archive.

I do go on, don't I?

Return of the Black Bat

There's one exciting event of publication day I didn't mention. By coincidence, publication day brought a ringing of the doorbell and two boxes of well-wrapped, ultracushioned copies of Shock and Awe from Goldsboro Books. David Headley has been kind enough to send them to me to be signed and sent back. (Don't hesitate to drop through, even if you don't want a signed copy. He'll sell you unsigned copies, too.)

It was gratifying, seeing the books carefully packed, as though they were Faberge eggs, or bottles of nitroglycerin. Between those, and my authors copies, and another dozen I ordered from Macmillan, I'm up to my snoot in Shock and Awe.

(Yes, that is a baby tyrannosaur keeping watch over the flock of books. A cement tyrannosaur, though decoratively painted. Pamela collects unusual eggs, and that one certainly qualifies as unusual. It also weighs an effing ton.)

So, I've been having my own private signing. And, in the course of this I noticed something odd. The Macmillan New Writing logo is an open book viewed from an oblique angle, with the viewer at the lower left-hand corner. In the early days--from Brian Martin's North to Jonathan Drapes' Never Admit to Beige--the book was black. Although a sensible person would have seen it to be a book, my initial reaction was that it was a bat. On closer inspection, though, it seemed to be a male boat-tailed grackle facing right, in threat posture, and with his tail spread wide.

Then suddenly, with Matt Curran's Secret War, the logo turned white, with little outlines to make certain you could tell it was a book. And so it stayed through eight more novels, until Shock and Awe, when suddenly the Black Bat logo returned.

And what does this portend? Is it a message of some sort? Did the Grackle lobby pull strings? Was it unintentional?

You puzzle it out. I'm going back to the living room to join the dinosaur in gloating over the books.

Later on Pub Day

Now here's a curiosity for you, though I discovered it too late to fully enjoy it: a site called BookkooB. It compares prices for a book between different online retailers (yawn), but for lovers of trivia, coincidence, or synchronicity (pick one depending on your philosophic orientation) it also tells you what books are being published on a particular date.

Unfortunately, it isn't archival, and the entries appear to be writ in water. As far as I can tell, tomorrow we will no longer be able to access information about September 7th, 2007. So I hasten to inform you that 66 books were published in the UK on the 7th. In addition to the most important book--Shock and Awe, that is--this was also the pub date for:

The Pan paperback version of North by Brian Martin (congrats, Brian--I always liked that book)

The Late Hector Kipling by David Thewlis (yes, that David Thewlis)

The Gruffalo's Child by Julia Donaldson (yes, that Gruffalo)

The Boss's Wife for a Week by Anne McAllister (you guessed it, Harlequin Mills & Boon)

The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology (no author listed--maybe God wrote it?)

You can look forward easily enough by using the little calendars on the sidebar, so you can see who shares pub dates with LC Tyler (The Herring Seller's Apprentice), Faye L. Booth (Cover the Mirrors), or Peter Anthony (A Town Called Immaculate). Three months seems to be the limit, though; I don't find Alis Hawkins (January) or Aliya Whitely (February--is she prolific, or what?) in the opening months of 2008. Yet.

Meanwhile, a friend has received the following e-mail from Amazon UK:

Dear Customer,

We wanted to give you an update on the status of your order. We are sorry to report that the following items have been delayed:

David Isaak (Author) "Shock and Awe" [Hardcover]

Estimated arrival date: 15/10/07 - 31/10/07

We are sorry for any inconvenience this causes.

If I recall, something like this happened to Eliza Graham back in June. One can only hope that the astonishingly heavy orders caught them off guard. Yeah...that must be it.

And apparently the short supply is bidding up the price--although the Amazon UK website insists the book is "in stock", the price has jumped from £9.89 to £10.49. I guess I'd better hang on to my copies. Guess there's a run on the market.

Hey, Look--It Seems to be September 7th...

There is something mythic about the date of publication, and you actually come to believe that on this one particular morning you will wake up to the phone ringing off the hook and your publisher will be so excited that they will have hired the Blue Angels precision flying team to buzz your squalid little hovel, which you will be moving out of as soon as sales of the book really take off.

Anne Lamott,
Bird by Bird

With Ms. Lamott, as well as a number of published acquaintances, to disabuse me of wild notions, I didn't have overamped expectations for today. So far, though, it's been a pleasant time. Had a nice note from editor Will Atkins, some e-mails from friends and relatives, and, best of all, the first sighting ("in the wild" as he put it) of Shock and Awe.

Eagle-eyed Tim Stretton spotted it--two copies--in a Waterstones in Chichester. (He says there may have been a third, as there was a gap between me and John Irving.)

I've never been to Chichester. My travels to the UK have encompassed London and Oxford and London and Salisbury and London and London and London and London--sort of like the Monty Python Spam menu. But I'm now convinced that Chichester is a vastly civilized place, with cultivated tastes. (Plus, glancing through Wikipedia, I see that one of the Chichester city fathers was the first man to be killed by being hit by a locomotive. Now there's glory for you.)

If any of you spot my book on the shelves in the bookstores you haunt, let me know. Of necessity I'm living vicariously here.

Ooops, gotta run! I think the Blue Angels are flying over...

A Simple Question or Two

Okay, I’m familiar, from watching friends’ books get published, with the fact you can often buy “used” copies on Amazon even before the book is formally available. I assume these are usually review copies the reviewers have dumped on the market.

I haven’t tried working out the economics of this. Do reviewers make the majority of their income from selling their review copies? Perhaps someone can enlighten me on this. (Perhaps my pal David Thayer, who receives review copies by the cartload.)

In any case, I’m not puzzled that Shock and Awe, which is now available on Amazon (subtle hint), should be accompanied by a bunch of offers to buy copies from other sources, in mint conditions, at lower prices. But why would anyone be offering to sell on Amazon for above Amazon’s price? Amazon is selling the book for £9.89. Two people want to sell it for about £8.90—so far so good. But the rest of the offers are all around £11.99. What’s the point of that? Are there people who go onto Amazon but refuse to buy books from Amazon but still buy books through Amazon? Is there a special Executive Edition of the book out there that plays a tune when you open it?

A little over a week ago, Faye Booth updated the ever-expanding list of online retailers handling her forthcoming Cover the Mirrors (subtle hint). She raised an eyebrow at the fact the book was being handled by Computer Manuals.

Being a nosey parker (which I discovered from reading Edward Charles’ In the Shadow of Lady Jane, actually means being a nosey gamekeeper—who knew?), I checked to see if Computer Manuals was also handling Shock and Awe, or if they’d somehow decided that Cover the Mirrors was a new programming language.

Indeed, when I searched on Isaak, I found that they were selling my book (three cheers for them!). There it was, listed right between Russian Space Suits: Soviet/Russian Space-Suit History by Isaak Abramov and A. Ingemar Skoog, and The Compleat Angler by Isaak Walton. Shock and Awe: £10.94. Computer Manuals seems to sell a complete range of fiction, including self-published novels from the United States.

But someone called Computer Manuals is listed twice on Amazon as wanting to sell copies for £11.99…

Is this a shell game? A tax dodge? A system by which terrorist communicate commands to their distant cells?

The book business is really odd.

It's Alive! My Creature...Lives!

Woo-hoo! (Dancing round the room.) They're beautiful! (Holding book on high, gazing up at it.) Stunning! Fantastic! And, mine, all mine! It's my-- (Dances backwards over cliff and falls into river of fire...) --Pre-c-i-o-u-s-s-s-s-s-s!


Sorry, sorry. Don't you hate those Gollum moments?

Actually, the books came about midday, and I posted two of them off to folks who may write reviews. Since then I've just admired them. From various angles. In various lighting schemes. Haven't really had the courage to read any of it yet, though I did glance through to see if anything was obviously printed upside down, or if sections of The Da Vinci Code had insinuated themselves. (So far, everything right-side up, and no DVC.) And I read the paired epigraphs, which are pretty damn good. (But, then, those two are from the Book of Exodus and WB Yeats, respectively. Reliable sources.)

The visual impact of the cover doesn't really come across in photos. From the start, both Will and Sophie have used the word "stunning," and I can't come up with a better one. The cover art is peculiarly luminescent, and I once again thank heavens that I wasn't put in charge of design, or we'd have something far more pedestrian.

What is so bizarre is the blatant multiplicity of it all. I mean, sure--I knew in principle that they intended to print more than one copy. But seeing a stack of them, even a modest stack, brings it all home. This is a book. One that might be picked up and read--oh please pray god--by total strangers. Not to mention how nicely it sits atop the whole MNW pile...

Shock and Awe is fatter than I expected. (Why am I surprised? I do have a tendency to go on and on.) Indeed, I might have been alarmed were it not for the fact that I was preceded by Annabel Dore's The Great North Road, which is a regular Moby Dick of a book.

And there I am, atop the stack of Macmillan New Writing books. Not there for long, of course, as LC Tyler and then Faye L Booth will be piled on top of me soon. But, still, what a stack. (Sorry if your book doesn't show to better advantage. Shiny little guys, aren't they?)

I'm #23 in the line-up. Which, according to the late-Victorian numerologist Cheiro, is "A very fortunate number. It indicates success, help from superiors and protection from those in high places. A most fortunate number in dealing with future events." (LC Tyler and Faye Booth, take note: 24 and 25 are pretty spiffy numbers, too.)

Okay. Sweet. But I'm avoiding confusion by not paying attention to the Wikipedia entry on the topic. Or to the Jim Carrey movie, which I haven't seen. So please don't disabuse me of my wild romantic notions. For the moment, I'm pretty happy.

Coming Soon to an Airport Near You

Editor Will Atkins has sent me an e-mail with some wonderful news. It seems that they've decided to follow up next month's MNW publication of Shock and Awe with a Pan paperback edition come September 2008. They're talking about an "A Format" paperback, which, if my mm to inches conversion is right, means mass-market paperback, and I couldn't be more thrilled.

Now, it isn't just the possibility of more readers that makes this exciting for me. It's that, in my twisted view of the universe, paperbacks have a certain credibility that hardbacks lack. I know that's crazy, and that many writers who started out in paperback originals fought their way upstream for years to achieve hardback publication. And I know critics are loath to review anything but hardbacks, and certainly don't give even a glance to mass-market paper. But still...

When I was a kid growing up in Redlands, California, the Orange Capital of the World, real bookstores were a great rarity. The single store in my home town sold nothing but paperbacks, and not many of those. The racks at Sage's, the largest grocery store, provided serious competition. So there were, in my limited worldview, two kinds of books: Library Books, which had hard covers, and Real Books, which came in paperback for something less than a dollar. I read both voraciously, but the exciting stuff was all happening in the paperback racks.

The other thing that has me jazzed is the Pan imprint, which was the UK paperback imprint of my pre-adolescent idol, Ian Fleming (who replaced my previous idol, Edgar Allan Poe. Fickle, ain't I?) Macmillan, of course, was Fleming's hardback publisher.

I bought my Bond from Signet, but every so often, one way or another (usually in a comic-book store in LA, where people traded such things), us Yanks caught a glimpse of the gorgeously lurid Pan covers (see left), compared them with our Signet covers (see right) and felt a bit left out. (Okay, the US edition features black lingerie, too. If you have a magnifying glass.)

Soon I hit smug and snotty-nosed puberty and decided Ian Fleming wasn't the greatest writer who ever lived after all, since Sartre and Camus and JMG Le Clezio were vying for that honor. (Though my taste was later vindicated when Sartre announced, to the everlasting horror of the French intelligensia, that he was a Fleming fan. Ha! Take that! [Then again, they like Jerry Lewis over there, too...])

Over the years, I've ended up with a lot of Pan paperbacks on my shelves, most of them (the books, not the shelves) snagged in airports. Some--the Tom Sharpe novels, for example, which are virtually unobtainable in the US--are treasured possessions. (I make animal sounds in the back of my throat when visitors pick them up and thumb through them. At least until said visitors start giggling. Then I forgive them.)

My point (I had one, it was here beside me just moments ago) is that I know, as a Serious Novelist, that hardback publication is what matters. And those MNW hardbacks, sewn in signatures with the ribbon bookmarks and all, are Library Books of the first order. And I'm pretty damn pleased about them.

But I'd be less than frank if I didn't admit that there's a ten-year-old inside me that's thrilled to distraction by the paperback. Now that's a real book. And as I walk around, I'm humming Paperback Writer...

'Cause I'm jazzed. As they say Across the Water, chuffed. Or, as they say here in California, I'm like, totally, whoa--!

One More Month...

I happened to glance at the calendar on the way to bed and noticed that it's now August 7th. Very early on August 7th, but the 7th nonetheless. Therefore just one month away from the pub date of Shock and Awe--and I'm now so savvy about matters literary that I no longer think a 'pub date' is meeting someone in a bar for a pint of John Courage.

For those who haven't been through the process before, I've got to tell you that the lead-up to publication is rather odd. There's all sorts of hurry and consultation in the editing and copyediting phase, and the book gets sent off to printing in a bit of a rush...

But then? Well, not all that much goes on while the book is at the printers. There's some discussion of publicity plans, etc., but without printed matter in hand, not much really happens. Somewhere out there ink drums are being loaded and presses are spinning, I'm sure, but from this end it feels as though the message has already been stuffed into the bottle, corked up, and flung beyond the line of crashing surf. By now it has drifted so far you aren't sure if you see the glint of sun on glass or on the water. Too late to change the font. Too late to change that unfortunate 'which' clause. Too late to change your mind, your address, your name.

Too Late the Phalarope. (Sorry, couldn't resist.) Voyager drifts toward Jupiter, and we can only hope the attitude jets fire properly when we pass into orbit.

Not that passing into orbit will probably amount to much either. Okay, the pub date for the recent Harry Potter was a major event, but I've been around a few others, and little happens that doesn't happen on any other day. Sure, a week or two prior to pub date some of the reviewers sell their Advance Review Copies on Amazon, so you can buy used copies of the book before it's even been published, but on pub date itself all that usually occurs is that some copies may be put out on the shelves. Or not. Sometimes Barnes & Noble doesn't get around to unpacking the shipment.

Show business isn't like this. Even in amateur theatre productions, there is a steady build-up of activity until--ta-da!--Opening Night! Or unknown artists coming up to their first little gallery show are dashing about helping hang paintings or type out obscure captions and attributions, or at least assisting in cutting huge bricks of cheese into cubes and spearing them onto toothpicks.

Or think of all the silly turmoil and rush leading up to a college graduation, culminating in that march across the stage to shake the hand of the Dean. (Of course, after you get off the stage you discover that your diploma folder is empty because you still owe $63.42 in unpaid library fines, but until that point it's a rather excellent build-up.)

Writing just doesn't work like that. Don Marquis, of Archy and Mehitabel fame, was (among his many other accomplishments) a poet. He noted, "Publishing a book of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for an echo."

It's even odder when said publication is taking place in another country. It becomes rather theoretical, like when your lover is on a long trip: Hmm, 10:30 here, they're 14 hours ahead, so I guess she arrived in Bangkok an hour ago...probably in a taxi by now...do you suppose it's sunny or raining?

On average I suppose a novel makes more noise than a book of verse, but even then it couldn't amount to more than a handful of rose petals. At best.

Still, if you happen to be in these parts a month from now, drive by my house. I'll be out front by the cactus, with my good ear cupped in the direction of Arizona, listening intently.

What I Did With My Summer Vacation by David I

The visit to London was marvelous. The consulting business side of things went well (though I doubt any readers will want to hear about it), and everything connected with MNW was great fun. It was also exhilarating to see copies of MNW books on the shelves at bookstores, just as though they were, well, any other novels.

On Tuesday after my meetings, I got together with Jonathan Drapes and his ultracool partner Catherine/Katherine at a pub and we sat out under an umbrella and watched a full-up Bengali-style monsoonal downpour slap South Kensington silly. Jonathan, as most of your know, is the author of the hilarious Never Admit to Beige. (I don’t generally admit to beige, but I do admit to owning two copies of the book so I can loan the paperback out. It’s the kind of book that makes people snort whatever they’re drinking out their nostrils, and that’s bad for the pages.) Most people with a real talent for comedy have a mean streak in them, but Jonathan doesn't; he's one of the most affable folks I’ve met (as is C/Katherine, for that matter).

Wednesday I had lunch with Will and Sophie. It was wonderful to put faces to the names. I knew a little about Sophie from Mike Barnard’s book, but Will I knew only through his excellent editing. Both of them were, as I’d been warned, disarmingly smart and and pleasant. The status update is that nothing has really changed--between title changes and the problem of UK/US orthography, and various proofing matters, Shock and Awe is running a bit behind where we’d expected it to be at this point—but the release date is still the same, Sept 7, which is all that matters. We kicked around publicity plans, but I can’t say I contributed anything useful, apart from Jonathan and Catherine’s suggestion that having a fatwa issued against me, ala Salman Rushdie, might get me some free press. (Or maybe knighted. I always wanted to be a knight. Did Rushdie get any kind of armor or anything?)

Will also took me through the display at the new British Library. Handwritten originals from Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Lewis Carroll, not to mention scrawled song lyrics from Lennon and McCartney, the score to Beethoven’s Ninth, plus the effing Magna effing Carta, if you can believe that; and then we adjourned for a chat about MNW, books, and writing in general.

That evening I attended a reading and book signing at the Muswell Hill Bookstore, east of East Finchley. (Would that be East East Finchley? Far East Finchley? I’m not sure.) Roger Morris of Taking Comfort and A Gentle Axe fame was signing Axe, and, serendipitously, Andrew Martin (whose crime novels I’d been advised to read by a good friend) was reading and signing his two most recent books. So I bought a UK copy of Axe for fun (though I neglected to have Roger sign it) as well as Andrew’s pair, and also had Emma Darwin, who just happened to be in the audience, inscribe a copy of her Mathematics of Love. A pretty good haul--plus I added in a copy of Satan Wants Me, by Robert Irwin (author of the extraordinarly peculiar lit-fic novel The Limits of Vision) . Then it was around the corner to a pub with Roger, his smart and lovely wife Rachel, and a few of his fascinating work pals. Great people.

The next day, on the advice of Jonathan, Will, Sophie, Roger, and random strangers on the street, I dropped through Goldsboro Books to say hello to David Headley, who seems to know everyone in the book world and who dropped everything to chat with me about books, and politics, and more books. He also forced two marvelous books upon me and wouldn’t let me pay for them. Wonderful shop. Wonderful guy. I then had another talk with Roger at a Soho pub during lunch time.

I also managed to do some business, see some friends, and drop through the Natural History Museum and the Tate Modern (though not the Tate British. So, plenty of Max Ernst—my favorite painter—and Francis Bacon, but no Burne-Jones or Rosetti this time round).

The only peculiar thing is that everybody I met was so damned nice and hospitable. In movies and novels, this is a clue that something is seriously wrong, and that a major conspiracy or mad scientific experiment is about to be revealed. (The fact that all the women were attractive also shouts Hollywood.)

It worries me. But at least until the time all of you I visited pull off your masks and are revealed as aliens bent on galactic domination, I’d like to say how much I enjoyed meeting you.

And, to those of you I've not yet met, don't think you're off the hook.

I've Got Proof!

Well, actually, proofs, in the plural.

What an odd thing to see one's words all typeset. They look rather unfamiliar. Especially when I see "kerb" where I wrote "curb." ("Kerb" is something I'd never written prior to thirteen words ago.)

It all looks so official that I fear if there are mistakes I will take them as authoritative...