Today I’m going to be giving away two Advanced Reader Copies of The Shadow Tracer. This giveaway is for the US and Canada. (Later on I’ll have giveaways for other countries, don’t worry.)
It will take place at around 1 p.m. Eastern Time. To win one of the ARCS, you’ll need to comment on my Facebook Author Page:
Many thanks to my mom, who scanned the page above. It’s from the Los Angeles Times Summer Reading Guide.
Look closely. The Shadow Tracer is on the Times’ list of thrillers and mysteries, and that pleases me no end. Now look more closely. There’s the image of my book cover, immediately next to a Carl Hiaasen novel, which has a picture of a monkey in a pirate hat. A bad monkey. And thus is my life complete.
Bucket list: Done.
When do you give up on a book? What makes you roll your eyes and stop reading? Have you ever thrown a book across the room?
Tell me what drives you to abandon a book. Is it mediocre writing? A meandering plot? No discernable plot? Strident politics? Sexism? Racism? Cardboard characters? Characters who act endlessly, ridiculously stupid? An ending that dribbles to nothing?
I’ve abandoned books for all those reasons. I’ve grumbled and snarled and pitched novels against the wall.
How about you?
(Yes, I am cribbing this topic shamelessly from Chuck Wendig’s blog at Terribleminds.)
Before one of my novels is published, I receive all kinds of things from the publisher: copy edits, page proofs, requests that I get a new author photo, demands that I kill off a character, jacket copy, Facebook friend requests, muffins, coordinates for the drone strike on vicious reviewers… the usual. One of the last things I receive is a photo of the complete book jacket, laid out as it looks before being wrapped around the novel.
As seen (significantly downsized) above, here’s the complete jacket for The Shadow Tracer. I couldn’t find anything amiss. I hope you can’t either.
I’ve just returned from Ft. Lauderdale, where I spent a busy weekend at the Broward Public Library Foundation Literary Feast. I was delighted that one of this blog’s regular contributors, Rich Klinzman, attended the afternoon panels and brought his family and didn’t heckle me, not once. He also attended the closing reception.
The featured speaker at the reception was Dave Barry. Rich snapped this photo, because I was laughing too hard to hold a camera.
And then, to my shock and delight, Rich got Mr. Barry to sign his new novel, Insane City. When Rich handed the book to me, this is what I saw:
And that’s why I have the best readers around.
Susan asks: “How do you get a cat to stop scratching the new carpet?”
You tear the carpet out.
emgee51 asks: “What do you think of the royals, especially Camilla?”
Living in the UK, I’ve come to understand that Britons like having a constitutional monarch as their head of state. This hasn’t stopped Britain from being a thoroughly modern country with a democratically elected parliament. And I have grown to appreciate The Queen’s great sense of duty to the nation. As an American, of course, I kind of prefer the “and to the Republic for which it stands” theory of government.
Camilla, from what I’ve seen, has adopted a low-key public role and hasn’t put a foot wrong.
And on that note I’ll end this discussion of my host country’s royal family, before I say something that’ll get me in trouble.
Dana Becker asks: “What’s the best thriller/mystery that you’ve read?”
Now this is a question that can get me in even bigger trouble than asking my opinion about the British royal family. I’m a thriller/mystery writer. I know hundreds of other thriller/mystery writers. I hang out with them. I like them. I like their books. I love many of their books. Why should I mess up a good thing by picking a favorite?
In other words, this question is impossible for me to answer. I love too many thrillers and mysteries to narrow them down to a single “best.”
That said, I can name a few that, when I was a baby writer, inspired me to try my hand at the genre. A is for Alibi, Sue Grafton. Get Shorty, Elmore Leonard. Stormy Weather, Carl Hiaasen. A Stained White Radiance, James Lee Burke.
That’s a taster menu. I hope it’ll satisfy you.
It’s the 110th birthday of Foyles Bookshop, one of London’s great bookstores. I’ve been lucky enough to spend half an evening wandering its aisles, and even luckier to have helped launch Books to Die For at the store last autumn. Here’s an excerpt from the Foyles Manifesto: 110 Years and Counting.
We are the bookshop that’s played host to George Bernard Shaw and Charlie Chaplin, Bertrand Russell and Enid Blyton. We are the bookshop from which Elizabeth Taylor stole and Nelson Mandela shopped. We are the bookshop that used copies of Mein Kampf to protect our walls during the Blitz.
Here’s to the next 110 years.
(Photo: Me and my buddy Nancy Freund Fraser, looking dreamy after getting lost for an hour in Foyles.)
I’ve posted bad book covers, and lousy book covers, and the worst book covers, but I’ve finally seen a cover that’s too much for me to post here. To give you an idea why, let me quote from the description of this “laugh-till-you-cry health care handbook” on Amazon: “Enjoy Pap parties. Meet the Chlamydia Clown. Win a free kitten with your physical!”
If you want to get an eyeful, it’s here:
But remember, it can’t be unseen.
(Thanks to Rich K for the link.)
In Salon, Adam Mansbach writes about going on the road to promote his books: Hell is my own book tour.
A lot can go wrong on a book tour. For instance – stop me if I’m getting too technical here – nobody shows up to the reading. [...]
This, however, is not even close to the worst thing than can happen. Far, far worse is when one to four people show up, speckling the 30 folding chairs the bookstore has arranged before the microphone and podium like survivors of some horrible plague.
Now, Adam Mansbach is not only a very funny writer but the author of the No. 1 New York Times bestseller Go the F*** to Sleep. So I don’t feel sorry for him. But I am laughing with recognition. I’ve done book tours in the USA, England, Wales, Scotland, Germany, Singapore, Holland, and Guernsey, which is kinda-sorta part of Britain except it’s rock off the coast of France and ruled by Norman Law. I’ve had amazing experiences on tour, and am immensely grateful that (a) I have publishers, who (b) want me to travel widely, promoting my work.
That said, I have had some… interesting experiences at book tour events.
Two minutes before speaking at one bookstore, the owner alerted me that one of their regulars had seated himself front and center, and that I should be prepared for him to say something “inappropriate.” But not to worry: they had “procedures in place to deal with him.” In any case, he didn’t cross the bookstore’s line. He just interrupted my reading to hold my new novel in the air and tell me: “Not your best.”
At another event, a man asked my husband if I was mentally unstable. He wanted to be a famous novelist but had heard that you had to be crazy, and wanted to know if that was true.
At another, a woman asked if I was sleeping with Stephen King. No, I said — and added that my husband was sitting directly behind her.
In New York City, during one reading a young man in the front row seemed nervous and intense, almost twitchy. He stared at me relentlessly as I spoke. This was around the time I’d received some, let’s call them, unfortunate emails from a reader in New York state, and as I spoke, I started wondering if the front row dude was the emailer. I mentally noted where the men and women from my publisher were sitting, hoping they could help tackle the guy if he approached me asking for money, or sex, or getting aggressive because I’d previously rejected his requests for money and sex. And when I finished talking, the guy did come up to me. Oh no, here we go, I thought. And he said: “I’m so glad I stopped in the store on a whim. I’ve been studying for the bar exam and have been completely stressed out, but sitting here listening to an author talk about books has been just the thing to take my mind off it.” It wasn’t the emailer at all. Just a poor, twitchy, near-crazed law student. Aww.
In Guernsey, at a book festival in February, the festival hotel turned off the heat at 7 a.m. and didn’t turn it back on till 5 p.m. Near freezing, a bunch of us caught a taxi into the center of town and ended up huddling for warmth in one of the few shops that was open: Ann Summers Lingerie.
Never a dull moment, this life.
For your enjoyment and edification: art work — from both amateur and professional designers — that will probably get you to judge books by their covers.
I want to see the cricket-bunny-pig fight the Yeti.
In March, I’m delighted to say, I’ll be taking part in the Broward Public Library Foundation Literary Feast in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
The Literary Feast, “a well-known community event that has brought more than 365 authors to Broward County since it began in 1988, will once again celebrate books and authors at a series of events from March 15-18, 2013. Last year, the Broward Public Library Foundation raised more than $130,000 at Literary Feast to support both children’s and adult literacy programs and services for Broward County Library.”
Other authors who are coming this year include Ace Atkins, Tess Gerritsen, and Dave Barry.
If you’re in the area and want to support a great cause, check it out:
My publishers have given my novels some amazing covers. But not all authors are so fortunate. Have a look at some particularly bad ones. And let’s take a vote. Which one of the covers below do you think is worse?
This one, which says that hope is a thermonuclear cloud of destruction:
Or this one, which gives new meaning to Chuck Connors’ wooden acting:
Let me clear a few things up.
1. China Lake is not a travel book.
2. The German edition of The Dirty Secrets Club is Die Beichte — “The Confession.” It’s pronounced “Dee Bye-shtuh.” Not Die Bitch.
3. My current novel is not titled Rancid River. To the person shocked I would call my novel something so ridiculous: I didn’t.
Yesterday a reader wrote to me that she’d just finished Ransom River. It’s always great to hear that people enjoy my books. But I had to laugh at this reader’s message: “Great ending. I wish I didn’t read it right after I read chapter 1.”
Generally I can’t stand spoilers. I don’t want to know how a story ends until I get there. My family, on the whole, can’t stand them either. At our house, we used to have a Giving-Away-the-Ending Jar. (It was next to the Stale Joke Jar, which the kids made for their parents.) But I know a number of people who deliberately read the last page of a book before reading the rest. And some recent psychological research suggests that in general, spoilers don’t spoil the enjoyment of a story.
So tell me: Do you read the ending before the rest of a book? Do you want to know how a movie ends before you sit down to watch it?
