Earlier this week, I dropped a brick on my foot. Not an actual brick, but something roughly the size and shape of a brick. It hurt like hell, and my foot immediately got a nasty bruise and started swelling. My husband leapt into action, helping me to the bed and...
As a reader, I don’t pay blurbs much heed. Never have. A couple of years ago, though, a voracious reader I know told me that she bought a book because it had a Michael Connelly blurb on the cover, which caused me to reconsider the marketing value of blurbs. Rightly or...
I’m not exactly sure how to describe WATCHING YOU by Michael Robotham because for me, it was several books in one. Part procedural, part psychological thriller, part noir, and all engrossing, readable wonderfulness. This is the seventh entry in Robotham’s Joe...
It’s been quite a week! It started a week ago Thursday, when I arrived at Sleuthfest in Orlando. Sleuthfest is the annual writers’ conference hosted by the Florida Chapter of Mystery Writers of America. It always draws a fantastic group, because the organizers do a...
Marketing books and “author brands” (read: authors themselves) really can be a tricky business. You have a platform, and you have fans, which means people pay attention to what you say. You are, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the size of your...
It’s an eternal question. And by one reader I don’t mean a librarian or book reviewer or bookseller or Stephen King or Michael Connelly. I mean one ordinary, run-of-the-mill, casual reader. Now, before I start, let me acknowledge that this question will never be...
Update, February 10, 2014: I’ve just changed the first sentence of the post below, because I was informed–and rightly so–that a word I used could (easily) be construed as racist. I should have been (much) more careful about my word choice. I would...
I confess: I love a good, juicy legal thriller, particularly one set in the American south. It goes back to TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, I imagine. Few reading experiences can compare with getting knee-deep into a case with a lawyer and his staff, following along with them...
Just for kicks, every couple of weeks I plug “book marketing news” into the Google News machine to see what pops out…it’s always interesting, and often more than a little perplexing. This week, most of the stories are coming out of presentations at the Digital Book...
