A magazine issue, an anthology, and a couple of collections make for a pile of editing. |
James A. Hearn and Michael Bracken at the 2019 Shamus Awards Banquet in Dallas. |
A magazine issue, an anthology, and a couple of collections make for a pile of editing. |
James A. Hearn and Michael Bracken at the 2019 Shamus Awards Banquet in Dallas. |
The past two years have been a rollercoaster for many of us, with wave after wave of COVID-19 variants impacting our lives in so many ways. For the past two years, my year-end reviews have suggested that “rolling with it”—accepting whatever opportunities come my way and making the best of them—was the best approach to my writing and editing career, and I’ve done essentially that.
I haven’t, however, just waited for opportunities to fall into my lap, though some certainly have; I have also pitched new projects and used the end of some projects to spur me into creating replacements.
As my writing productivity decreased, my editing responsibilities increased, so this year I’m dividing my year-end review into two parts.
WRITING
After rising in 2020, my writing productivity plummeted in 2021. I completed only six short stories—the shortest 1,600 words and the longest 5,800—for a grand total of 25,600 words. All were crime fiction, and three were private eye stories. One was a story I started writing 19 years earlier.
ACCEPTED AND PUBLISHED
Even though productivity was low, I placed 30 original and reprint stories, including two collaborations with Sandra Murphy. This comes mostly from having been productive in previous years and the stories finally finding homes.
Thirty-four original and reprinted stories, including a collaboration with James A. Hearn, appeared in anthologies, periodicals, and webzines, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Barb Goffman Presents, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Weekly, Bullets and Other Hurting Things, Close to the Bone, Crimeucopia: We’re All Animals Under the Skin, Cupid’s Day, Guns + Tacos, House of Erotica/Andrews UK Limited, Horror for the Throne, Jukes & Tonks, Learning My Lesson, Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir, vol. 2, Modern Mayhem, Mystery Weekly, Only The Good Die Young, P.I. Tales Double Features, Pulp Modern Flash, Punk Noir Magazine, The Mysterious Bookshop Presents The Best Mystery Stories of the Year, The Great Filling Station Holdup, Tough, Unnerving, and Vautrin.
Five editors are represented multiple times. Linda Landrigan published two stories in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Barb Goffman reprinted two in Barb Goffman Presents and Black Cat Weekly, and Josh Pachter published two in Only the Good Die Young and The Great Filling Station Holdup. Four stories appeared in projects I edited or co-edited, but the most stories were published by the unnamed editor at True Renditions LLC who reprinted two stories in Learning My Lesson and six in Cupid’s Day.
Though some of the stories accepted this year were published this year, not all were. So, I have stories forthcoming in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Groovy Gumshoes, Malice Domestic 16: Mystery Most Diabolical, Mystery Tribune, Prohibition Peepers, and Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine.
RECOGNIZED
My story “Blest Be the Tie That Binds” (Black Cat Mystery Magazine #6) was reprinted in The Mysterious Bookshop Presents The Best Mystery Stories of the Year (known in the UK as Best Crime Stories of the Year). It was also named an Other Distinguished story in The Best American Mystery and Suspense.
Both “The Ladies of Wednesday Tea” (Bullets and Other Hurting Things) and “Sonny’s Encore” (Black Cat Mystery Magazine #9) made Robert Lopresti’s “best mystery story […] read this week” at Little Big Crimes.
REJECTIONS
I’d like to say that rejections kept me humble this year, but my wife might argue otherwise.
I received 22 rejections, and I’ll repeat something I’ve said before: Any year in which acceptances exceed rejections is a good year.
EDITING
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, editing is occupying more of my time than ever before.
Last year saw the release of three issues of Black Cat Mystery Magazine, and I joined Black Cat Weekly as an Associate Editor responsible for acquiring and editing one story each week. Additionally, I edited Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir, vol. 2, co-edited (with Gary Phillips) Jukes & Tonks, and co-edited (with Trey R. Barker) season three of Guns + Tacos.
In addition to continuing work on the periodicals, I worked on several anthologies and other projects that will publish in 2022 and 2023.
Outside the mystery world, I edited six issues of Texas Gardener, a bi-monthly consumer magazine, and 52 issues of Seeds, an electronic newsletter for gardeners that, incidentally, published two short stories. I also continued my part-time position as marketing director for a professional orchestra, creating, editing, and managing a variety of advertising, marketing, and promotional materials for print, radio, television, and social media.
With the editing projects, I had the honor of directly or indirectly shepherding 76 short stories and novellas through to publication.
RECOGNIZED
This year, several stories from projects published in 2020 were honored:
John M. Floyd received a Shamus Award for “Mustang Sally” (Black Cat Mystery Magazine #7) and Gordon Linzner’s story “Show and Zeller” (BCMM #7) was nominated for a Shamus.
Alan Orloff received a Thriller Award for “Rent Due” (Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir, vol 1. [Down & Out Books]) and Andrew Welsh-Huggins’s story “The Mailman” (MF 1) was nominated for a Thriller.
My story “Blest Be the Tie That Binds” (Black Cat Mystery Magazine #6) was reprinted in The Mysterious Bookshop Presents The Best Mystery Stories of the Year and was named an Other Distinguished story in The Best American Mystery and Suspense.
Andrew Welsh-Huggins’s “The Whole Story” (Black Cat Mystery Magazine #7) made Robert Lopresti’s “best mystery story […] read this week” at Little Big Crimes.
I had the honor of publishing several kick-ass stories in 2021, and I have my fingers crossed that many of them will be similarly recognized during the 2022 awards season.
LOOKING AHEAD
Having multiple editing projects, all with firm deadlines, requires more structure to my creative life than writing does, so I’ll likely not be able to “roll with it” this coming year. Even so, I’ll remain flexible, take advantage of opportunities as they arise, create new opportunities when I can, and try to increase my writing output.
I hope all of you had a good 2021 and that 2022 is even better.
January 1 was release day for Guns + Tacos compilation volumes 5 & 6. Vol. 5 includes novellas by Dave Zeltserman, Stacy Woodson, and David Hendrickson; vol. 6 includes novellas by Hugh Lessig, Neil Plakcy, and Andrew Welsh-Huggins. Each novella is available as a stand-alone ebook, but the compilation volumes are ideal if you missed the novellas when they were first released. Additionally, subscribers to the series receive, with vol. 6, a BONUS short story that I wrote.
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Michael Bracken, Dream Killer |
BCMM’s most recent submission window ran September 1 through September 30. Over the course of the month I received 264 submissions, and I responded in one way or another—rejection, hold for second read, and/or acceptance—September 5–October 26.
Of the 264 submissions, three were withdrawn before I could read them, and I accepted eight stories upon first reading. Of those eight, two were stories I had previously read when they were submitted to, but were not appropriate for, an anthology I edited.
From the balance, I held 59 for a second read and, of those, ultimately accepted 32, for a total of 40 acceptances. That’s a 15% overall acceptance rate.
But that also means I rejected 221 submissions. If you’re gnashing your teeth right now, I can safely presume yours was one of those stories.
SPACE CONSTRAINTS
Despite my best intentions, I did not read every word of every submission. Before I explain some of the reasons for rejection, let me note that all of the stories I held for a second reading, and many that I did not, were publishable as is or with minimal editorial work.
So, why did so many stories fail to make the cut? The most obvious is limited space. My goal was to fill two and a half issues, which, depending on story lengths, requires approximately 25 stories. By accepting 40, I filled approximately four issues. I won’t know exactly how many issues I filled until I have time to organize everything and schedule the stories for specific issues.
REASONS FOR REJECTION
Other editors have suggested that once submission volume reaches a certain point, they no longer look for reasons to accept stories, but instead look for reasons to reject. I found myself doing the same.
Because this was an open submission period, I read stories representing all sub-genres of crime fiction. So, I didn’t see any clear subject-matter trends, such as an abundance of stories with theatrical settings, the way I did when reading submissions for the cozy issue. What I did find were three things that weighed heavily against writers:
1. Not starting the story in the right place. Several stories began too soon or provided too much back story before anything of significance happened.
2. Bad dialog. Several stories began well enough, but the first patch of dialog kicked me out of the story.
3. Weird formatting. As I mentioned in my April 6, 2021, post, previous experience has proven that a writer unfamiliar with the fundamentals of Microsoft Word is going to be difficult to work with. In the past, I’ve been willing to suffer the pain of working with such an author, but this time I was not. Bad formatting led to rejection, even for otherwise fine stories.
RANDOM NOTES
The most stories submitted by a single author: Six.
The most stories accepted from a single author: Two—a pair of stories by a female author and another pair by a male author.
Accepted stories written by two authors in collaboration: One.
Accepted stories translated from another language into English: One.
Five accepted stories came from authors with addresses in Canada, two came from authors with addresses in the Netherlands, and the rest came from authors with US mailing addresses.
Twelve stories were written or co-written by female authors. The rest were written by male authors or authors whose bylines were not gender-specific.
I wish I had time to delve deeper into the data to determine, for example, how the ratio of male/female acceptances correlates to the ratio of male/female submissions and how the ratio of accepted stories from non-US residents correlates to the number of submissions from non-U.S. residents.
Alas, I don’t.
SUMMARY
With a 15% acceptance rate, the odds are clearly stacked against any one particular submission, so your goal as a writer is to improve your odds. If you’re submitting to Black Cat Mystery Magazine or to any project I edit, you can improve your odds considerably by doing the following:
1. Read, understand, and follow the guidelines. Though I have seen many submissions from writers who didn’t follow guidelines, this, thankfully, was not a significant issue during this submission window.
2. Learn how to properly use Microsoft Word. Seriously. A writer not knowing how to use Microsoft Word is like a carpenter not knowing how to use a hammer.
3. Don’t dawdle. Get your reader into the story as quickly as possible.
4. Master dialog. Bad dialog is a story killer.
And then let me see your stories the next time Black Cat Mystery Magazine has an open submission window. I look forward to reading them.
Our friend Josh Pachter has appeared in these pages before. He won the 2020 Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Golden Derringer Award for Lifetime Achievement. In addition to writing and translating, he edited The Great Filling Station Holdup: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Jimmy Buffett (Down & Out Books), The Beat of Black Wings: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Joni Mitchell (Untreed Reads), and The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe (Mysterious Press). He co-edited Amsterdam Noir (Akashic Books) and The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (Wildside Press).
You can find Josh at www.JoshPachter.com
— Velma
- A Note about Remainders
- As kids, we sometimes saw comics or paperbacks with the upper half of the covers ripped off. Those were ‘remainders’, a publisher’s overstock. Likewise, bargain book tables at Barnes & Noble and Walmart are likely remainders too, excess copies deeply discounted by publishing houses. In extreme cases, publishers will ‘pulp’ books, grinding them to powder to be recycled into… books.
by Josh Pachter
In the Olden Days, BigFive Press would agree to publish your book. Their marketing geniuses would do the math and decide on a first printing of X copies. In principle, those copies would all sell, and BigFive would go to a second printing—and then a third, and so on ad infinitum, until you were wealthy enough to buy a little cottage on the Sussex Downs, where you could keep bees and lord it over your serfs.
In practice, though, what was much more likely to happen was that BigFive would wind up with unsold copies of your baby. Those copies took up valuable warehouse space, and if BigFive later needed that space for newer books, they would “remainder” the remaining copies of yours.
That meant that they would sell your leftovers to Wal-Mart or one of the other big-box retailers for pennies on the dollar, and Wal-Mart (or whoever) would dump them into a big bin—the dreaded remainder bin—priced higher than what they paid for them but way lower than the original retail price.
So, for example, let’s say I opened a vein and poured onto the page my magnum opus, Gone Girl With the Wind in the Willows. BigFive would slap a retail price of $20 on it and print five thousand copies. Only three thousand of those copies would sell: two thousand to liberries (remember liberries?) and a thousand to my mother, who would give them away as Christmas presents.
That meant that BigFive would be stuck with two thousand copies of a book they couldn’t sell. Those copies would sit in the warehouse for a while, until BigFive needed the shelf space for the eighth novel James Patterson “wrote” that month. At that point, they’d dump their remaining stock of GGWTWITW onto Wal-Mart for, say fifty cents a copy, and Wal-Mart would mark them up to two bucks apiece and toss them in the bin.
A win-win situation, right? BigFive got rid of some books they didn’t want to continue to warehouse, Wal-Mart cleared a three-hundred-percent profit on every copy they sold, and the customer got a $20 book for a tenth of its retail price.
Wait a second, that’s actually a win-win-win: everybody wins!
Well, almost everybody. The one loser would be me, since instead of earning a royalty of two bucks a copy (ten percent of the retail price), I’d only get a measly five cents a copy (ten percent of BigFive's remainder price)—and then I’d have to give fifteen percent of that to my agent, leaving me four and a quarter cents a copy for a book that ought to have earned me forty times that amount.
So I guess we’d have to call Remainderama a win-win-win-lose situation, with the author the one and only loser.
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Those Sayers of the Sleuth who know me—or know of me—were perhaps surprised a couple of years ago when, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I suddenly began editing anthologies.
Since 2018, in fact, I've done eight of them for six different publishers with
more on the way:
My emergence as an anthologist wasn’t exactly “out of the blue,” though. Forty years ago, I was living in Amsterdam, and I edited half a dozen anthologies for a midsized Dutch publisher, Loeb Uitgevers. Loeb marketed four of them—Top Crime, Top Science Fiction, Top Fantasy and Top Horror—internationally at the Frankfort Book Fair, and various combinations of the four titles sold to an assortment of publishers in Europe and the Americas. Heyne Verlag in Germany, for example, did all four books in mass-market paperback editions (TSF in three volumes and TF in two volumes.) Top Crime, Top Science Fiction, and Top Fantasy were published in England by J.M. Dent & Sons in hardcover and paperback, and Top Crime had a US hardcover edition from St. Martin's Press (with one of the worst cover designs I have ever seen in my life, featuring a silhouette of a gun without a trigger — and what did that say about the twenty-five stories in the book?!).
But I digress. A couple of years later, I was living in what was then still West Germany and teaching for the University of Maryland's European Division on American military bases. One day, I got a snail-mail letter from J.M. Dent, notifying me they were about to remainder the last thousand copies of the hardcover edition of Top Science Fiction to W.H. Smith & Sons for something like a quarter apiece—and, as a courtesy to me, they were offering me the opportunity to buy some at that price.
I remember that I was in my kitchen with this letter literally in my hand, trying to decide whether to buy twenty-five copies or fifty to give away as Christmas presents, when my phone rang. On the line was the director of the UMED textbook office: another instructor wanted to use my anthology as the text for a course in the literature of science fiction, but he wasn’t sure where to find copies and wanted to know if I could help.
“As it happens,” I said, “I own all remaining copies of the book, and I'd be happy to sell you as many as you need.”
The caller was hesitant, because (he said) he usually bought texts in enough bulk that the publisher was willing to offer him a discount.”
“How much of a discount,” I asked, “do you usually get?”
Twenty-five percent off the retail price, he said.
“And how many copies do you want to buy?”
A hundred, he told me.
“Well,” I said, “I can give you a twenty-five-percent discount, but I’ll need you to take two hundred copies.”
And I’ll be damned: he agreed!
I hung up and immediately called Dent in London. “I got your letter,” I said, “and I want to buy some copies of Top Science Fiction at the remainder price.”
How many did I want?
“I’ll take all of them.”
There was a long pause at the other end of the line. Finally, the voice asked if I realized how many copies that was.
“Yes, I read the letter,” I said. “I’ll take them all.”
Another pause. Did I realize how much storage space I’d need for a thousand hardcovers?
“Yes,” I said, “I do. I’ll take them all.”
An even longer pause. Did I realize how much the shipping charge for a thousand hardcovers would be?
“If you sell the lot to W.H. Smith,” I said, “you’ll comp them the shipping, so I expect you won’t charge me for it, either.”
And that’s the way we ultimately worked it. I bought a thousand books for two hundred and fifty dollars including shipping, having pre-sold two hundred of them to UMED for something like three thousand dollars plus shipping, making me the only person I’ve ever heard of who actually made money off a remaindered book.
There’s a little more to the story.
Over the next couple of years, UMED reordered Top Science Fiction several times … and, each time, I told them the price had gone up. By the time I moved back to the US in 1991, I’d gotten them to buy almost all of my thousand hardcovers—and I’d also picked up the entire remaindered stock of the paperback edition.
I shipped the last of the hardbacks and several hundred of the paperbacks to the US, and I still have some of each in the attic—including one box of paperbacks that’s moved from Germany to New York to Ohio to Maryland to Iowa to Virginia over the last thirty-one years and is still factory sealed.
It’s a pretty cool anthology: twenty-five excellent stories by twenty-five of the greatest science-fiction writers alive in the early 1980s—Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Harry Harrison, Ursula K. LeGuin, Anne McCaffrey, Robert Silverberg, A.E. Van Vogt, Connie Willis, Gene Wolfe, more than a dozen others—each story selected and introduced by its author as their favorite of the stories they’d written up to that point in their careers.
Anybody wanna buy a copy? I make you good price, my friend!
I may have mentioned, once or three hundred times, that until I retired I was a government information librarian. One of my hobbies back then was collecting interesting government titles. Now you get to benefit from my dedicated time-killing.
All of these are real and I include links to prove it. Some of these titles no doubt made sense when they were published. Some make sense now if you look them from the right point of view. Some – like the terrorism one – are just a garbled mess. And some are artifacts of one of the most tragic impulses that can occur to a government author – the desire to be clever or “hip.”
Dullness is your friend, Mr. Bureaucrat. Embrace it. If you are putting an exclamation point in a government title, you are on the wrong track.
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Joseph Pittman |
Joseph Pittman is a friend from about the time we opened bookstore in Austin, called Mysteries and More. I was writing a column for Mystery Scene magazine called Southwest Scenes. I had also started going to Mystery Cons in order to meet authors, agents, booksellers, editors, publishers in person, because I used their information for my column.
Joe Pittman was one of the big name editors I telephoned on a regular basis. He would tell me which books were ready for release. Joe was always helpful, giving me reliable info and we usually spent a few extra minutes chitchatting. We finally met in person in St Louis, MO when Bob Randisi put together and hosted a PWA CON, the first ever conference for private eye writers.
I knew Joe had left publishing because he wanted to write and write he does. He's published more than a few books. We reconnected on FB a couple of years ago. Then, a little over a year ago, Joe and his husband Steve adopted Shadow. And Shadow, a black lab youngster, soon learned to type on Daddy Joe's computer. Shadow began a diary. Talked about settling into a new home with a nice back yard to play in and how he's learned new words and how to play with other families, making friends with other dogs. And especially learning about love. Daddy Joe compiled Shadow's diaries into a book, and Daddy Steve did the cover artwork. It's a small but very entertaining and charming book for all animal lovers. I highly recommend it.
— Jan Grape
Joseph Pittman is the author of over 40 novels in various genres under his own name and pen name Adam Carpenter. He has written comic crime, noir, small-town sweetness, intrigue, and erotica. His current series features private detective Jimmy McSwain. | Shadow is a beautiful 2-year-old Black Lab / Greyhound mix who has lots to say. His first book, The Shadow Diaries, has just been published. Funny, poignant, insightful, it’s a full-year in the life of a rescue dog. Follow him on Instagram at theshadowdiariesbook. |