Yesterday the mail brought my print proof of my book SEVEN ANGELS.
And it looks so good.
I posted some video on Instagram and other social media to mark the occasion, so cruise over there if you want to see it in motion. But the photos here give you a pretty good idea.
The book comes out around June 1 from our imprint, Constellate Publishing.
I’m spending a couple of days reading through the book, looking for any issues, but Jill Blocker and I have pretty thoroughly gone over the book in the past few months. So no unpleasant surprises so far.
I grew up in the 1960s and `1970s – ha! I bet you thought I was a youngster, huh? – and TV was a huge part of our lives. Obviously. This was during a period when weekly episodic TV series had long seasons of many episodes, certainly by today’s standards.
I mean, “Star Trek” had 79 episodes over only three seasons (and some of those episodes were outright losers that I’m sure somebody is nostalgic about now) and “Trek” looked like a piker compared to many TV series: “Gunsmoke,” which ran for 20 seasons, aired 39 episodes in each of its first few seasons, although those were admittedly half-hour episodes. Yesterday I noticed that “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” also had 39 episodes some seasons.
That reinforcing of the idea that vintage TV series aired a boatload of episodes back in the day compares and contrasts to today, when it’s a shock when any new series runs more than 10 or 12 episodes per season. The excellent “The Pitt” is the exception with 15 episodes per season. (“The Pitt” is also the exception compared to many current series in that the seasons air only a year or less apart.)
Enter “3 Body Problem,” the terrifically entertaining Netflix adaptation of the science fiction bestseller (and Chinese TV adaptation). Yesterday news broke that the second season of the series would consist of only six episodes compared to eight from the first season. Forbes wrote that the third season is supposed to be even shorter. This as people note that author Cixin Liu’s three novels get longer with each book.
Oh, and also, it’s been two years since the first season.
Add to that the apparent circumstance that there’s no telling when the second season of the great series “Pluribus” will be produced or seen.
I don’t necessarily want to return to the days of 39 or even 22 episodes, the latter still a common number among some network series.
But I wouldn’t mind if other series followed the schedule of “The Pitt” and gave us a few more episodes in a slightly more timely manner.
Here’s another in a series about the authors who so kindly read my new novel SEVEN ANGELS – out from Constellate Publishing in June.
Ken Jaworowski and I haven’t met but I feel like I know him, not only from his writing but also from interviewing him a couple of times for articles for the Daily Yonder. I was delighted to be able to read and review his novels SMALL TOWN SINS and WHAT ABOUT THE BODIES for those articles and had some illuminating interviews with Ken.
He was kind enough to read SEVEN ANGELS and, as a writer who writes masterfully about small towns and crime, give me the blurb above.
Ken’s work is thrilling and fascinating for how he writes about everyday people who are having the worst day of their life.
I’ve mentioned GHOST SHOW, my unpublished novel set in 1948, a few times on social media. I wrote the book between writing SEVEN ANGELS and THAT OCTOBER and I never expected it to be published. Why? Well, for one thing, it’s set in 1948, in the Midwestern town of Middletown, where THAT OCTOBER takes place (in 1984) and it’s about a family from Seven Angels, Tennessee, and their experiences in the big city.
It’s got a serial killer, a real ghost who’s haunting a theater, a sprawling family story with infidelity, abuse and coming of age as well as President Harry Truman and a traveling ghost show, or spook show, a live-action magic and mystery production that involves several members of the family.
It’s also more than 108,000 words long.
As it turns out, we might publish GHOST SHOW later this year through Constellate Publishing.
So I’m editing GHOST SHOW, a book I haven’t looked at in three or four years, and I’m thinking two things:
I like this story, which is very loosely based on the youthful adventures of my parents and my mom’s family before she was my mom. (Very loosely!)
And I’m thinking … man, 108,000 is a lot of words.
I’ll repeat this explanation before we get close to actual publication, but in answer to what is a ghost show, here’s an article I wrote for CrimeReads four years ago about what the heck ghost shows were.
I’ve got my hands on the blurbs from some of the authors who’ve read my crime novel SEVEN ANGELS – which we at Constellate Publishing will publish on or about June 1 – and I’m gonna share them here and on social media occasionally.
Julia Dahl is one of the coolest and most talented people I know. She’s a journalist and professor and editor and an amazing writer. I became a fan after I read her novel THE MISSING HOURS way back in 2021. It’s a spellbinding book about how a young woman’s life can change dramatically after one night.
At some point after that, she let me read a screenplay she wrote and I’ll tell you that it is a story and set of characters that cry out to be adapted as a streaming series.
I got to meet Julia at Bouchercon in Nashville in 2024 and she’s just as delightful in person as she is online.
Julia reading an advance copy of SEVEN ANGELS and giving me a blurb for the book means so much to me. She’s just aces.
My morning began with a rejection but ended up with signing a short story contract, all threaded through writing some totally separate piece of work.
Man, every day is a little game of expectations versus reality for all of us, but that’s especially evident for writers.
The rejection email, as these things go, was from an editor and fiction outlet I haven’t tried before. It was direct and to the point but also gracious, saying a couple of nice things about the story I’d submitted and they’d rejected. Much better than a form rejection – I got one of those just a while back – and even thanked me for my support of them on social media, which will absolutely continue.
This rejection stung, man. It was for a story I wrote for an earlier anthology call for submissions and honestly, I really like this story. It’s not my typical crime-wimey story. It was, dare I say it, hearfelt.
But I’ll submit it again somewhere and I’m sure I’ll submit something else to the humane editor who rejected this particular story this particular morning,
So i got back to work. I’m close, very close, to finishing a 5,000-word short story to sub to an anthology/collection that I really want to be included in. I’ve got a few more words to write.
Then I signed a contract for the anthology you see above, DAYDREAM BELIEVER: CRIME STORIES INSPIRED BY THE MUSIC OF THE MONKEES. The anthology comes out this fall and has some wonderful writers in it and I’m happy that editors Shelley and Larry chose my story to include.
Then I got back to working on that 5,000-worder. And I wrote this.
(I’m thinking about having a snack later, if you need that much insight into my day,)
All of this could be filed under the life in a day of a writer. Or maybe managing expectations. Or dealing with rejections and successes.
To writers and other people: Push on. The only way out is through.
It’s been two years now since Calletano Cisneros died. A lot of people won’t know who he was, but he made a big impression on me. I interviewed him for our fourth true crime book, COLD CASE MUNCIE, which was published by History Press in 2023.
For those of you who don’t know, longtime writing collaborator Douglas Walker and I wrote about cold cases – unsolved murders – in the area of Muncie, Indiana for a few decades for The Star Press newspaper. This entailed going over old cases, some of them dating back decades and some of more recent vintage, and reviewing the facts, looking at old files and articles and often interviewing police investigators, prosecutors, coroners and, most importantly, surviving family members. Cold cases have an impact on all of those people but especially, of course, on surviving family members.
Sebastian Cisneros – that’s him in the upper right photo of the book cover above – was killed in April 2009 in Muncie, which is marred by dozens of unsolved murders. Sebastian Cisneros was killed outside his house on Ribble Avenue in Muncie.
We wrote about the case at the time and wrote about it as a chapter of the Cold Case Muncie book because it was a compelling story, made all the more so because I interviewed his father, 75-year-old Calletano Cisneros. When we spoke via long distance – he lived in Texas – he volunteered something that I hadn’t known when I called him: He himself had killed a man in a bar fight when he was 17 and had spent 10 years in prison before he was released by the governor. He’d lived with that past for a half-century and had, in the past several years, lived with the murder of his own son.
Calletano Cisneros told me he wanted justice for his son and wanted his son’s killer to be tried and sentenced to prison just as he had been more than 50 years earlier.
“I did my time. I’d like to see the same justice done in my son’s case.”
Calletano Cisneros didn’t live to see justice for his son. He died in January 2024.
Cold cases are cases that often don’t see justice done.
You can read about the Sebatian Cisneros case in our third true crime book:
When my friend Jill Blocker and I started talking about publishing my crime novel SEVEN ANGELS through the Constellate Publishing imprint, I knew how I wanted the cover to look:
Like the covers of novels by Robert B. Parker, a grandmaster of crime and mystery writing and one of my greatest influences.
I would never compare myself favorably to Parker, whose books about Spenser and Hawk, Sunny Randall, Jesse Stone and other heroes protecting people and confronting crime are still my favorite novels. (Perhaps tied with Dennie Lehane’s Patrick and Angie books.)
But I was thinking about Parker when I wrote SEVEN ANGELS in 2019. Like Parker’s protagonists at times, Gloria Shepherd isn’t so much a detective as a bulldozer. I always thrilled at Spenser and his inclination to push the bad guys until they crack and make a mistake or overplay their hand.
Part of what appealed to me about Parker’s characters’ direct approach is that it was reflected in the best covers of his books: Spare and vivid imagery that matched the spare and relentless push to resolution of Parker’s characters.
There’s a scene in SEVEN ANGELS when Gloria, the coroner of Crockett County, Tennessee, pushes into the private office of a local corrupt businessman and confronts him and the Russian trafficker he’s working with. I was channeling Spenser the day I wrote that, for sure. Not sure if I was successful, but that’s what I was aiming for.
I told Jill what I wanted and she designed a cover that I loved immediately. This cover above will be modified some and authors’ blurbs will be added before SEVEN ANGELS is published this spring.
I can’t match Parker at his peak. Never will. But I can pay tribute to him.
Curious about Constellate Publishing, our company that’ll publish SEVEN ANGELS?
Last year I did an interview with the wonderful Gabby Sandefer for the Muncie Public Library’s Pages and Partners podcast. We talked about my years in newspapers and my other writing, including my novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS.
This is sad news. Not nearly as sad or despairing as much of what we see in the news in recent years, but sad nonetheless.
The mass market paperback is dead.
This might not surprise some of you who react, “Yeah, I know, I haven’t seen one in a bookstore in a while,” or “What is a mass market paperback?” For those young enough that they don”t remember the mass market paperback, I’m fearful you’re reading this past your bedtime.
Publishers Weekly likely broke the news to most of us who remember mass market paperbacks – I’m going to refer to them as just paperbacks pretty soon now, for expediency’s sake – in a December article that noted that the ReaderLink company said it would no longer distribute mass market paperbacks. The format’s share of the market had dropped dramatically over the past couple of decades as larger-format paperbacks, sometimes referred to as trade paperbacks, and ebooks had usurped the market that had been dominated for many decades by mass market paperbacks.
Paperbacks had been the format of choice for much of the 20th century. They were less expensive than hardbacks but more cheaply made and thus less durable. But they had an ease of use, a convenience and an aura that were hugely appealing to most of us who were buying books in the last few decades of the past century. In 1966, the Beatles released a single, “Paperback Writer,” that ironically but lovingly paid tribute to the format. You didn’t hear the Beatles singing about their desire to be a hardcover writer, did you? No you did not.
As many know, paperbacks – measuring about 4 inches by 7 inches, just the size to fit in a pocket so you could always have a book at hand – were introduced before mid-century but might have become the hottest book trend ever in the 1940s and 1950s, continuing that hot streak into the 1960s and 1970s.
Paperbacks went to our workplaces, where they were handy to read on our lunch hour. They went on our commutes, where they occupied many a train and bus rider. They went to school and war in backpacks and pockets. They went everywhere, in part because of their convenient size and in part because they were so incredibly inexpensive to buy. I just looked at one of my oldest and most rare paperbacks this morning, a copy of Harlan Elliison’s “Rockabilly” from 1961. The cover price was 35 cents.
The vast majority of paperbacks I bought in the late 1960s and 1970s were priced at 65 cents, 75 cents, 95 cents. Paperbacks I bought into the 1990s were still only a few dollars, inexpensive compared to hardcovers and large-format trade paperbacks that, in my buying experience, were confined to scholarly or pop-culture works about movies, TV shows and comic books. At least that’s what still fills my bookshelves. I recently noted my copy of “The Marx Brothers at the Movies,” a 1975 Berkley trade paperback of a 1968 hardcover original, cost me just $3.95.
I have hundreds of books. Some are of recent vintage but the majority date from the 1960s to the 1990s. Among people my age, that’s probably not uncommon. Paperbacks entertained and informed us. Some of my favorites are early Stephen King novels and short story collections, the work of Robert A Heinlein and Ray Bradbury and Dean Koontz.
And I wasn’t alone. Publishers Weekly says 387 million mass market paperbacks were sold in 1979, compared to 82 million hardcovers and 59 million trade paperbacks. The 1975 movie tie-in of Peter Benchley’s “Jaws” sold 11 million copies in its first six months
Publishers Weekly notes that the paperback began losing its share of the market with the growing popularity of trade paperbacks and ebooks, the latter of which boomed in the early 2000s. And of course the shrinking number of bookstores – a trend which has, happily, reversed course – further eroded paperback sales.
Folks who’ve read this site before know I’m a fan of bookstores, especially used bookstores, and they’ll forever be a place to find books in all formats, including the once-beloved paperback, also known as the mass market paperback.
That’s where you’ll find me, looking to recapture a little of a past that’s quickly disappearing.
keithroysdon 