earlemerson.com

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.

“Filled with firefighting lore and techniques that inform and enrich the plot and characters . . . Earl Emerson deserves to be acknowledged as a unique and gifted writer . . . he is a master with his own narrative style.” The Bloomsbury Review

“Visceral action, quick repartee, and gritty firehouse detail . . . a solid entry for readers partial to a mix of rough-stuff and offbeat ambiance.” Kirkus Reviews

“A gripping mix of tensions and humor . . . stunningly handled by an expert storyteller.” Publisher’s Weekly.

“Earl Emerson laces firefighting lore—the danger, the grisly humor—with corruption, elusive identities and haunting images. He paints characters and images that stay with you after you put down the book.” Chicago Sun-Times

It’s quite an undertaking to move a print book to the web. First you have to scan the book and get it into a digital file. This always entails lots of mistakes and miscues from the scanning program, although not as many as I’d feared. Then the digital file must be cleaned up and formatted, paragraphs, page numbers deleted, etcetera. I downloaded the print file to a Word format because that was what my Fujitsu scansnap 1500 allowed me to do. Then, because my principal word processor is WordPerfect and because WordPerfect allows one to see the formatting codes in a way Word does not, I formatted the book using WordPerfect, proofread it and had my wife proofread it in WP. We then translated it back to Word and uploaded it to Amazon. After Amazon turned it into a digital book, we downloaded their digital file back onto my home computer, opened it with word and read it for mistakes with the  Kindle Fire previewer. Obviously, the second e-book conversion book is going to be a lot easier. There are undoubtedly mistakes we haven’t seen, but I’m counting on alert readers to bring those to my attention.

What astonished me and my wife both was the number of errors and typos we found in the paperback. Originally, I scanned a paperback copy, which should have been identical to the hardcover, except it wasn’t. All the proofreading we’d done twenty years ago on the line-edited version, the copy-edited version, and then on the galley proofs from the printer had gone for naught. We would always hand in tons of corrections to the printers but never really looked at the books after they were printed. We had to trust that our corrections made it into the final product. We figured alert readers would tell us about any remaining typos. And, every once in a while somebody would mention one. Never in our wildest dreams did we imagine the printed book was the minefield of typos and just plain editorial sloppiness that it was. I believe part of this was because the paperback had originally been sold to Penguin Books and I think they got a marked-up editorial copy instead of the clean final product. Plus, they never sent me any galleys to proof. Reprint houses were never too concerned with quality. It wasn’t until I began publishing with Ballantine that we saw all the extra proof readers and the care that can and does go into a quality product.

One thing I’ve learned from all this office-type work is that I’m not built for an office. Sitting at a keyboard daydreaming all day or honing my own sentences and thoughts into a readable novel is one thing, office work is another. I don’t know how people do it. It drives my blood pressure through the roof.

I’ve priced Black Hearts and Slow Dancing at $4.99. I’m not sure if that price will hold. I’ve also made it available for lending, so that if you purchase it, you can loan it to a friend who has a Kindle. It will also be available at the Amazon lending library for ninety days.

See any mistakes or typos, shoot me an e-mail on my contact page, please.