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At the World Mystery Convention several years ago, also known as Bouchercon, I crashed a party given by St. Martin’s Press. The doors were open and it was a large hall, filled with St. Martin’s authors and other writers, like me, who were accompanied by one or more St. Martin’s authors.

In those days, and probably still today, St. Martin’s had an A-tier route for their top mystery and suspense writers. These very few writers were bestsellers or close to it, and all made a good living writing books. There were also hundreds of St. Martin’s authors writing mysteries for what I call the “Pulp Mill Division.” These writers wrote mostly for libraries and other smaller markets. Writers in the pulp mill could expect anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 advance against royalties for their books. In most cases, the advances I knew about were closer to $5,000, and many were less. Now if your book hit the bestseller lists, which virtually none of the books in this section of St. Martin’s did, you would earn out your advance and you would start getting royalty checks every six months. But most of the pulp mill authors received their advances happily and then went on to write another book, knowing they were never going to collect any royalties on any of their titles, even though it often took as long as a year to write a book. Five thousand dollars for a year’s work is not very much. In fact, one might argue it’s slave labor. Why did these authors suffer under such a regime?

Because every one of them thought they were going to make it into the A-tier one day. How many of those authors in that room that day made it from the pulp mill to the A-tier? My guess is, none.

So, what you had, essentially, was a room full of authors, none of whom were making a living writing books. In fact, none of them were even coming close, even though many had loyal followings, dedicated mystery readers. The mystery bookstore phenomenon was going strong at the time and there were sales to be had there. Most of the titles went on to sell to a paperback house, generating more revenue for St. Martin’s and sometimes a little more for the author.

In a candid moment probably influenced by too many martinis, the editor-in-chief at St. Martin’s stood up and gave a speech. He said a lot of things, but this is the only part I remember, because it shocked the hell out of me but seemed to shock no one else in the room. He said the genre authors in the room had generated more money for St. Martin’s than all their bestselling writers put together, that the St. Martin’s engine was actually fueled by the people in that room, and not by the writers that were hitting the bestseller lists — startling news, since a bestselling book generates one hell of a lot of revenue for a publisher, as well as for the author. This told me that everybody in the room was being taken advantage of.  Not one of the authors in that room was able to quit his or her day job to write full time.  Everybody there could have been paid more money. The publisher was making a fortune off them. The editor-in-chief admitted it. In a just, sane world there would have been a riot and the editor-in-chief might have needed bodyguards to get out of the room.

Everybody who wants to be a writer wants to make a living at it.  In that room the only people making a living off the craft of writing were the publishers, editors, and agents: the non-writers.

On another note, book five, the last book in the Mac Fontana series, is now on Kindle. You can find it here.

The first four Mac Fontana novels are now on Kindle. Number five, the last one, will be showing up shortly. If you read them a long time ago, they’re a hoot to read again, and if you’ve never read one, The New York Times listed the first one, Black Hearts and Slow Dancing as one of their ten best mysteries for that year. After re-reading these, I’m not sure why I ever stopped writing the series. Enjoy.

read excerpt or purchase here

read excerpt or purchase here.

read excerpt or purchase here.

read excerpt or purchase here.

These are only available on Kindle right now. People smarter than I am know how to Read the rest of this entry »

When you start a series and the series lasts long enough you’re going to have to make some decisions about time, time handled in the series and time handled in real life. Do you age the main character at the same rate you’re aging. Faster? Slower? Or not at all?
When I started Cape Disappointment it had been well over ten years since I’d written a novel in the Thomas Black series and I had more than age to consider. Thomas was in his mid or early thirties when I left him in Catfish Café. If I’d allowed him to age at the same rate as I had, he would have been closing in on fifty at the beginning of Cape Disappointment. He and Kathy  would have been married for ten or fifteen years instead of something under eighteen months. What would have made it even worse was that I would have uneventfully skipped at least ten productive years of their lives.
I decided to keep him the same age. Plenty of other fictional detectives have remained the same age. People are writing Sherlock Holmes stories now as if he were still alive.
A problem with not aging Thomas Black was that while he wasn’t going to age, at least not by much, the world around him has gone through considerable changes since I last wrote about him.
When I introduced Thomas Black in 1985 a cell phone was a large, cumbersome piece of equipment very few people had. The Internet as we know it was a dream. Today, modern investigators do much of their work, sometimes all of their work, on computers. Back then, nobody had ever heard of taking a photograph with a telephone. The thought of accessing the largest information data bank on the planet with your phone wasn’t even talked about. In Monica’s Sister, my latest and to date unreleased novel, Thomas uses his phone to take surreptitious photographs of just about everybody he interviews in the course of his investigation. These photographs turn out to have real meaning later in the book. Taking photos with a phone the size of two thumbs would have been Sci Fi in 1985.
People have changed, too. In the beginning Thomas Black drove a blue, Ford pickup, changed to a red Ford pickup by a careless artist for the original cover for The Rainy City. Editors and art directors in New York were actually impressed that Black drove a pickup. They thought it quaint, outdoorsy. These days the best-selling vehicle in the country is a Ford pickup.
Just a reminder. The Mac Fontana series is coming in e-book format. Black Hearts and Slow Dancing is now available in Kindle, other formats and titles by this summer.
Another note. In reading through the Fontana novels I’ve decided if I ever did another one, I would freeze the books in 1987, the year the first one was written. No cell phones. No home computers. No greenhouse gasses, or no worrying about them. And no five-hundred-channel television cable hookups. There is something soothing about the past.

Buy or read an excerpt here.

There are a lot of theories for how to write novels. One says to write what you believe the masses want, even if you have to pander. Another says to write the most high-falutin stuff you can imagine, hoping to attract the art crowd. Another says to look at what is at the top of the bestseller lists and copy it, maybe put your own spin on it, but use the template.

I never believed in any of those theories. My attitude has always been to write the type of book I wanted to read, the type I did, in fact, spend my time reading. This is easier said than Read the rest of this entry »

The above phrase might mean something to you if you’ve already read Black Hearts and Slow Dancing. If not, it’s now available on Amazon for Kindle readers. Black Hearts and Slow Dancing is the first in the Mac Fontana mystery series and we’re quickly placing all five of them on Kindle, other e-reader formats to follow by at least this summer.
I’m quite pleased to get the Fontana books back into circulation. They were slowly allowed to go out of print by the original publisher, Morrow/Avon, after I left them in 2000 to purse stand-alone thrillers with another publisher. It was exciting to go back to the Fontana books and proofread, both exciting and curious. More about that later. I’d forgotten all the great reviews those books had achieved. Here is a sampling:

Black Hearts and Slow Dancing was named as one of the ten best mystery/thrillers of the year by The New York Times the year it came out.

“Quite simply, Earl Emerson is the best there is.” Mystery News

“Earl Emerson is quickly becoming one of the best mystery writers around.” San Pedro News-Pilot

“A first-rate thriller. . . one of the most distinctive writers among the new wave of crime novelists. . . Emerson writes crisp, no-nonsense prose, and he makes superb use of his firefighting background.” Booklist

Click here To read first three chapters or buy Black Hearts and Slow Dancing for Kindle.

Read the rest of this entry »

A branch in our yard during the big freeze last month. We were without power for three days.

I was asked recently in an e-mail if any of the events in my novel, Deception Pass, were inspired by real life. One day about a year before I wrote the book, I was leisurely paging through the Sunday Seattle Times when I came across a unique article apropos of nothing, which told a strange story of a quadruple murder in a cabin in an orchard back in the 1930’s. The crime had never been solved. I filed it away for future reference and, with slight alterations, it became the genesis of Deception Pass. A lot of ideas come in the newspaper. Others come from the crumpled papers under my desk. (I write with a word processor — WordPefect — so there aren’t really any crumpled papers under my desk.) The point is, failed projects frequently turn out to have silver linings.
For instance, one of my favorite characters in the Thomas Black novels is a seedy detective who sometimes joins forces with Thomas. His name is Elmer Slezak but he likes people to call him ‘Snake.’ He generally evokes a favorable response in readers. One reader told me he was the spitting image of her uncle. Another asked why I didn’t write about him instead of Thomas Black. Elmer is a rewrite of a character named Boden Kill who had his own book at one time. The book did not succeed and never sold, but out of it came Elmer. It was almost worth the eight (wasted) months I spent on that book.
Recently I wrote in this blog that I was round-filing Order 17, a manuscript I had been working on for quite some time. The good news is there are characters and situations in that discarded manuscript which will undoubtedly turn up in future novels, perhaps the Thomas Black series, perhaps elsewhere. When they do turn up, my suspicion is that they will be matured and fully-fleshed in a way they never would have been had they remained in the castoff manuscript, just as Elmer Slezak is the fully realized Boden Kill and not the half-baked original.

I appreciate all the comments on my previous post. Here are some more thoughts on publishing in today’s technological and business climate. With permission, I am reproducing an e-mail exchange with Mark W. As always, your comments are welcome. I’m learning a lot from you readers.

Hi Earl,
I’ve been a huge fan of yours since you signed my Fat Tuesday hardback at
the old Tower Books by Seattle Center in 1987. Since then I have bought
every hardback of yours within a week of publication, many times through
Seattle Mystery Bookshop. Thus my concern.

Bookstores have always held a piece of my heart since I read my first
Hardy Boy book. It pains me to see the demise of so many new bookstores
caused by the Kindle, Nook etc. Very soon Amazon will have a monopoly on
the book business. Many don’t seem to care, but I do.

The bottom line is that as much as I love your books, Cape Disappointment
being your best, I will never purchase, nor read your book in e-book form.
I wouldn’t be able to place it next to your other books on my shelf, I
wouldn’t be able to hold it, nor would I be able to have you sign your
book. I’m trying not to get on my large soap box.

You explained your frustration with the publishing houses convincingly.
Hopefully the publishers will figure out that they need to streamline the
process and make it more attractive to authors to use them to sell the
book.

Just a note: I read Cape Disappointment while camping at my father-in laws
property along the Methow River at Carlton. I was suprised to see the
picture on your web page. Also, like the Blacks my wife and I spent 5 days
of our honeymoon at the Sandpiper Resort in 1993. We go back often with
our kids.

Thank you for the many hours of reading pleasure.

Your fan,
Mark W., Puyallup

—————————————————————————————————

Mark,

Thanks for the long and well-considered note. Your points are all well
taken. I haven’t made any decisions about the publishing of my next book
yet, just thinking out loud. A lot of this depends on what the New York
publishers say, if anything. Given the state of the industry and the mindset
of mainstream publishers these days, I am not hopeful. Most of those
publishers have black hoods over their heads and don’t even know it. Most of
their writers are in the same place. In publishing, we’re where bridle
makers were in 1910. The old mantra, “adapt, migrate or die,” takes on new
meaning in these times.
I understand the love of paper books, the feel of them, the utility, the
history. I love books, too. I don’t collect them, at least not too many of
them, but Read the rest of this entry »

I recently received an email from Kate P., asking when my latest Thomas Black would be out. Fear not, when my next book is published, I will announce it prominently on this website. I will scream it to the heavens.
The bad news? It’s going to be a while.
Let me explain. Most manuscripts take anywhere from nine months to eighteen months from date of submission to publication date. I have yet to turn in Monica’s Sister. In fact, I’ve yet to complete it, although it should be done in thirty days or so, depending. At that point I will submit it electronically to my agent, who will read it and make a pronouncement of some sort:  She likes it; she doesn’t like it; it needs some work; it’s just fine. Then, together, we will decide where to submit it. According to my last contract with them, Ballantine Books has right of first refusal, so they will obviously get the first look.
After the book lands at a publisher and a contract is signed, the editor will begin work. This editor will — within months, never weeks  — do what is called a line edit. I will then receive his or her edit and go over the changes and suggested changes. Then another editor, the copy editor, will do the same and I’ll go through the same dance a second time. Later, we get the page proofs from the printer and we read and correct them, mostly for typos. Somewhere along the line the publisher holds one of their quarterly meetings, where the book is presented and the sales force gets their take on it. A cover is commissioned and approved. Somebody writes cover copy. More meetings.
With traditional publishing, all of this takes months.
If we can’t find a deal we like with a traditional publisher, and I rate the chances of that high to awfully high right now, I’ll go electronic from the getgo and the book will be out on Kindle and Nook, etcetera, within a few months.
If anybody has a pricing structure for a new e-book, or ideas about pricing, I would love to hear it. If we go e-book, I’m determined to keep it below ten dollars, but I’m also seriously considering not violating the five dollar barrier. What would you pay for a Kindle version, or Nook, of the latest Thomas Black? I would like to hear your thoughts on this. Please use the comment section so others can see your views.

This reminds me of a critique I got on Amazon for my last book, Cape Disappointment. Somebody wrote that the Kindle price on the book was too high. They more or less implied that I, the author, was greedy. Note to the uninitiated: when dealing with legacy publishers in New York, the author has no say over the price of his or her books, not in any format. The author receives a percentage of the cover price, but the cover price of all editions is dictated by the publisher. This is not true when an author publishes in e-book format and skips the legacy publishing world altogether, a more common occurrence these days than ever before, but one that I haven’t yet pursued.

It's hard not to love this place. Mount Rainier in July. It was even more spectacular than it looks here.

I remember years ago reading a story about one of my then favorite writers, John D. MacDonald, who wrote over seventy gritty thrillers with titles such as The Brass Cupcake and  A Bullet for Cinderella. He also penned a series about a character named Travis McGee where he used a color in every title; Nightmare in Pink, Pale Gray for Guilt, The Long Lavender Look. Wonderful titles. Wonderful books, too, though some of the language and attitudes seem dated when read now. Not his fault. He didn’t have a time machine. He wrote the first three Travis McGee books quickly and they were put out within months of each other. The thinking was that if one was to start a series, it was good to get some product out there right away and get the readers hooked.
Oh, yes. People get hooked on a series. Once a reader finds some characters they don’t mind spending time with, they want to return. Familiarity breeds . . . well, familiarity. The majority of mystery authors write at least one series. The mystery format is perfect for the notion since the framework of a mystery doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for exploration of the main characters. That means in a series, the main character or characters can be developed in a more leisurely pace over the course of several books.
My first three Thomas Black titles came out within a year and a half of each other. This wasn’t by design, but by accident. I wrote The Rainy City and by the time it was purchased, I’d already completed Poverty Bay and was well into Nervous Laughter. The Black series got a fair amount of free publicity and thus was launched as gracefully as possible. I believe it was the first really popular Seattle PI series in quite a while. The Seattle Times gave the series a boost with several articles about Black and about me. With the fourth title, Fat Tuesday, Adams News Service, a local and now defunct distribution company, turned the Black series in regional bestsellers. At the time, I didn’t truly appreciate how lucky this was for me.
Then, in 1999, using my background as a Seattle firefighter, (retired in 2010 after 32 years) I moved on to other things and wrote a series of thrillers centered around firefighters. . The time gap between Catfish Café and Cape Disappointment, numbers eleven and twelve in the Thomas Black series, was just over ten years. During that span I received many requests for more Thomas Blacks.  Disappointingly, there were even people who refused to read the fire thrillers. “I’m waiting for another Black,” they would tell me. So, I was always going to write another Black. It was just a matter of when.
We’re in a depression, arguably the greatest depression of our lifetimes. My stepfather lived through the first depression in the thirties and I believe this one has already been as unkind to him as that one was.
During the depression in the thirties, genre fiction got a toehold in the American psyche. Mysteries were particularly popular. I don’t think this was an accident. Mysteries have several things going for them that serve the populace in times of stress, not the least of which is that they tend to order a disordered universe. They put things into perspective. After all, they center around death and death is usually worse than anything we’re going through in our own lives. Also, in most mysteries, good wins out. Justice is forthcoming. When you can’t have it in life, you grab it in fiction. I had long thought if and when this country was plunged into another depression, it would be time to write mysteries.
So, as a writer and as an avid reader of other people’s work, I find myself gravitating towards mysteries again. And towards a series. Thus, I’m hard at work finishing up Thomas Black #13.

“The trouble with quotes on the internet is that it’s difficult to determine whether or not they are genuine.”
– Abraham Lincoln

One of the best days of the year was spent hiking up at Sunrise on Mount Rainier. The wildflowers were prolific and awesome and the day simply splendid.

I’m currently finishing up the polish on a Thomas Black. I have no publisher lined up and no real plans as to which publishers I will approach when the time comes to market the thing.
I’m putting the finishing touches on Thomas Black # 13 and enjoying the process very much. For the most part, I find I enjoy writing a book as much as I enjoy reading a book. True, the process of writing, for me, is tortuous at best. I have friends who write a book straight through, cleaning and polishing as they go along, so that when they get to the final chapter, the book is nearly finished, maybe a week of polishing and then it gets sent to their agent. Oddly enough, one friend who writes this way claims he hates the actual writing. I love the actual writing, though it is a long and winding road. Others dash off a book in thirty days. I could dash off a book in thirty days, but you wouldn’t want to read it.
A good book, for me, is a book that has a certain balance between the language, the use of English, and the storyline. In other words, the craft counts. Good craft doesn’t always show, but it makes a huge difference in the end product. Every reader doesn’t feel that way and certainly, as stated earlier, neither does every writer, but I do.
I don’t know any other way to do it. I try to write the kinds of books I would like to read. I’ve known writers who write for an imaginary reader, some imaginary reader they’ve locked into their minds as “the typical reader,” but I simply don’t know who that person is and more often than not, neither do they. The best writers, I think, write for themselves. If their taste is catholic enough, and they are not too weird to bring empathy to themselves, others gravitate towards their writing, too. I know who I am, what I like and what I’ll read, so I work to that. Given those parameters, I’m amazed and sometimes puzzled by who my readers turn out to be. Most are women. But then, most readers of novels in this country are women. By and large, men’s brains have gravitated to sports, TV, video games and other pursuits. On the other hand,  a lot of couples  read my books. That is good.  I rarely read the same books my wife does and vice versa.
I write my books straight through, polishing as I go, and then I go back and start from the beginning, do the whole thing again, rewriting endlessly. I don’t stop until I can’t make it any better. For me, that takes a long time and a lot of rewrites, many, many drafts. I am not a good first-draft writer. If you saw the first drafts of anything I’ve written you would agree. But I do have the tenacity to continue with rewrites until I get it more or less right. A writer friend once asked me why I put myself through all that agony. She dashed her books off rather quickly, got them published to reasonable acclaim, and thought I was wasting a lot of time. Maybe so. She reads my books, or claims to. I cannot get through hers.
A mystery writer friend and I were talking once about popular fiction and I mentioned a very popular mystery writer, someone who’s still working and asked if he’d ever read her. “I read a paragraph once,” he said, as if that was all that needed to be said.
“Why only a paragraph?” I asked.
“Because I wasn’t interested in reading a whole book by somebody who was capable of writing that paragraph.” I’ve never forgotten his words, probably because in some measure, I feel the same way —  and fear the same criticism.
Needless to say, for this man, the writing itself was part of the pleasure in reading. Ironically, the writer he was criticizing is still going great guns while he has long ceased to be published. Perhaps this is related to their writing styles, or lack of same. I think maybe not. A lot goes into making somebody a bestseller, not the least of which is some consistent good luck, which he never had and she encountered in spades.
I like to read people who, among other things, write sentences I wish I had written. If I can read an entire book without finding one of these, it’s likely I won’t come back to that author. It is possible to write a really good book without any quotable lines, but rare, I suspect. One person who does a pretty damn good job of it is Michael Connelly. His prose is practiced, polished, and deceptively simple.
So, once again, I continue to write draft after draft, let the paint dry, go back and look at it the next day or the next week, and rewrite it once again. One thing I have going for me now is I’m no longer working for the Seattle Fire Department, having retired last September. So I’m working six days a week and am rarely tired, cranky or sleepy while working. The books should come faster and easier. So far this one is.

Next: why a Thomas Black now? And why the big gap in time?