Bouchercon Briefing

Last week I returned home from Bouchercon, the world mystery convention, having walked a million miles while there—not hyperbole, I assure you. That hotel was designed for long-distance athletes. Anyway, I attended a bunch of panels—that involved sitting, after all—and while I didn't take a lot of notes, I did write some things down. Usually it was something I knew but the author or editor had made their point in an interesting way. At other times, it was information I didn't know (Kathleen Donnelly, this means you). Here are those notes. Everything that follows is a paraphrase. Any mistakes are my own.

Mysti Berry - A short story is about a character with a problem and the consequences of the choices made to solve that problem.

It's a Mystery! (Oops, I failed to note who said this) - Cozy mysteries are books with hope, community, and trust--things that make readers feel good.

Clair Lamb - For books or stories with texting, an older character is more likely to use full sentences and punctuation. A younger character is more likely to use abbreviations and emojis. In regard to abbreviations and emojis, the author should try to ensure the reader can at least mostly follow the conversation. If there are small non-vital bits of a text conversation that a reader might not understand but could quickly move past, having gotten the basic gist of the text, that is okay.

Kathleen Donnelly - Dogs can retain scent memories for years. (She writes mysteries involving a K-9 tracker.)

Otto Penzler - To make characters sound different, vary their cadence and word choice.  

I am sure I must have said brilliant things on my panel, but it was at 8 a.m., so my memory of that hour is a bit foggy. If you were at that panel and I said anything useful, please share it in the comments. Or if you heard words of wisdom at any of the other panels, I would love to hear them. After all, you might have attended a great panel I missed. At conventions, hard choices often must be made.There were times when I would have liked to attend two panels at the same time, but I haven't perfected that skill...yet.

Before I go, I want to give my thanks once again to the Short Mystery Fiction Society, which honored me at the convention with this year's Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer Award, which is the society's lifetime achievement award. SMFS President and fellow SleuthSayer Joe Walker said really nice things about me as I walked onto the stage, but for the life of me, I can't remember what they were. Sigh. If only, like in the panels, I had been taking notes.

Next year in New Orleans! 

 

 

Who knows?

            All sorts of interesting philosophical constructs have emerged from Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, one of the pillars of Quantum Mechanics.  It mandates that an observer can never simultaneously know the exact velocity and position of a subatomic particle, that is, how fast it’s going and where it’s at, both at the same time.  You have to choose.  One or the other.  This is probably the most famous scientific axiom to delineate what we can never know, undermining our abiding belief in science, which is that we can know everything if we just stick to the problem and develop better instruments of measure.

            Einstein worked for decades to prove Heisenberg wrong.  He never did.  After that, physicists stopped trying.  Instead, they built not-knowing into their calculations, yielding formulas that have given us digital computers, smartphones, lasers, electron microscopes, LEDs, MRIs, etc.   

            So not-knowing can yield all sorts of benefits. 

I suffer from a condition I’ve self-diagnosed as infomania.  I’m eager to learn things, so I read obsessively about nearly everything I can get my hands on.  I’ve absorbed a lot of information, but I’m mostly struck by how much I don’t know, and never will.  I’m at peace with this, because there are actually a lot of things I don’t want to know, like the date of my demise, the potential carcinogens in my quarter pounder with cheese, or the political rivalries consuming my local planning and zoning committees. 

            Artists and musicians are well aware of the value of empty spaces between brush strokes and notes.  As are fine writers.  Which gets me to my point.  I think one of the highest forms of literary craft is the unreliable narrator.  A protagonist who is either ignorant of the events surrounding them, or has willfully decided not to be aware, or is simply lying to you, the reader.  This last version takes exquisite management of the narrative to give room for both the chronicler rendering the story and evidence that there’s something fishy in the telling. 

            The art of the unreliable narrator relies on us not really knowing what the hell is going on. 

            Given the difficulty of the effort, there aren’t a lot of good examples, though Humbert Humbert in Lolita comes to mind.  He’s not exactly lying to the reader, though he wants us to accept, even endorse, his elaborate philosophical, intellectual and aesthetic rationalizations for what is ultimately an ugly act of pedophilia.  As his obsession becomes more obvious, we start doubting more and more of his account, so while the story holds its logic, the actual description of events becomes, well, unreliable.

            In the world of mysteries and thrillers, I’d argue one can never rely on anything expressed by Patricia Highsmith’s protagonists.  Humbert-style rationalizations are at the center of every story, though often overwhelmed by outright deceit and sociopathology.  Ripley only wants a world that is the way he wants it to be.  Getting at the empirical truth is the farthest notion from his mind.  And with all the ambiguities and possible interpretations swirling around, the reader will never really know what is true and what isn’t. 

            Another triumph for Werner Heisenberg. 

            I can’t remotely claim to have made a comprehensive study of unreliable narrators (I willfully choose not to know everything about the subject), but for my money, nothing comes close to Gone Girl.  It’s a tour de force.  I feel this way partly because I was completely snowed by each of the book’s unreliable narrators, their stories told so convincingly, with lavish detail and nuance, lies and misdirections at industrial scale. 

            What makes the novel more than a clever hall of mirrors are the characters – their full realization, like Highsmith’s, people you might know, or have the misfortune to encounter in your regular lives.  In this way the crime novel leaks into the horror genre, the kind of horror you could actually experience, with no need for monsters or creatures from the beyond.  Because we recognize that the human mind is capable of almost anything.  Deceiving itself, deceiving others, weaving its own truths, denying, justifying, rationalizing its way into the unspeakable.  

            And unknowable. 

Crime Fiction has a new role: Preventing Patients from getting Healthcare.

Has anyone else noticed it's becoming a thing to write crime fiction about healthcare and present it as fact? People are drawn to crime fiction. It gets their hearts racing. But this crime fiction writing has real victims - patients denied healthcare because of fictitious crime. One recent story that made me ponder this whole strange issue once again is the story of the safe drug consumption sites and the healthcare of addicts.

There has been a push by politicians to shut down supervised drug consumption site by claiming they increase crime in the neighbourhood. One can see this is an effective strategy for closing all supervised drug consumption sites because people worry they could come into their neighbourhood, bringing in a wave of crime. No one wants a crime wave in their neighbourhood, where their children play and grandma and grandpa come to visit. Stories have power and stories of threats to those we love are perhaps the most compelling – they make us act, vote, do anything to protect our loved ones. However, this is fiction, presented as fact.

We have years of data showing that crime doesn't increase around these sites but the latest data from Toronto caught people's attention:

"Toronto police data shows they may have the opposite effect.

Crime types including robberies, bike thefts, break and enters, thefts from motor vehicles, shootings and homicides dropped among neighbourhoods with supervised drug consumption sites between 2018 and 2023, often more than they did in the rest of the city, the data shows....One exception was the crime of assault, which rose by 22 per cent among neighbourhoods with sites, though neighbourhoods without sites saw a rise of 24 per cent“

So, even if these safe consumption sites don't increase crime, why have them in the first place? The answer simple: they are a crucial form of healthcare for addicts and the facts about addiction are concerning.

"More than one in four deaths among young Canadians (in their 20s-30s) between 2019 and 2021 were opioid-related..They found that in three years (between 2019 and 2021) the annual number of opioid-related deaths rose from 3,007 to 6,222. And the number of years of life lost due to opioids increased from 126,115 to 256,336."

This is the other story, a true one, about the young people we know, in the very neighbourhoods many wanted to protect from a fictitious crime wave in the wake of safe drug consumption sites, who are dying in increasing numbers.

Some argue that those young people who die from overdoses were going to die anyway. There is no saving an addict, so why bother?

We should bother because addicts can be saved. The first safe consumption site in North America opened in British Columbia, Canada, in September 2003. With over 4 million visits by users, over 11,000 overdoses reversed, they have had 0 drug overdose deaths. Instead they have many stories, true ones, of success, like Felicella, who spent two decades using drugs and "was one of the first through the door when Insite opened, and he credits it with saving his life. Now married with three kids, he works as a Peer Clinical Advisor for both Vancouver Coastal Health and the BC Centre on Substance Use, and is an in-demand harm reduction public speaker."

These safe consumption sites are healthcare, providing a safe place to do drugs and also the resources to get off drugs and build a life. To have a job, to have children and to help build the community your live in.

This continuing controversy over safe consumption sites is another of the sad tales of healthcare fighting crime fiction. The real victims are patients who can be denied healthcare if these fictional stories are believed and people vote to make them policy. Whether it is safe consumption sites, vaccine safety or a myriad of other issues, healthcare is butting heads with crime fiction. Medicine is faced with constant stories of vaccines that cause death and threats of doctors being jailed or killed in response. One of the latest and weirdest is the crime fiction of babies being murdered by doctors after birth under the name of 'abortion'. These crime stories are made up to make people's blood boil and they create real victims: patients who fail to get the healthcare they need to keep them safe.

As someone who is passionate about healthcare and mystery novels, never did I think the two would meet in such a dangerous way.

The Second (or Third?) Time Around

 

Last Saturday I posted a column here at SleuthSayers about a story of mine that was reprinted several times, in different magazines, books, etc., after its first publication. As a result, during this past week, I received several emails from fellow writers asking me to do a followup post just about reprints. How often do they happen, how much can you earn from them, how and where do you market them, etc.

This request came at a good time, because I had no idea what I was going to write about today. Anyhow, here's my response.

First, there are two kinds of reprint opportunities. One's the four-leaf-clover, blind-luck kind that comes out of the blue, thanks to no action or initiative of your own. These are the best kind of reprints because they're usually more prestigious, result in higher payment, and require no effort on your part. A good example is when/if your story happens to be selected for an annual "best-of" anthology, like The Best Mystery Stories of the Year. Those are seen by a lot of readers, and--in my experience--pay around $500. Your story might also be chosen for reprint by a foreign or specialized publication, one you might not even know about until you've been contacted by that editor or publisher. The pay for those projects is often decent as well. All you have to do is sign a contract allowing them a one-time use of your story and send them a copy of it--and sometimes you don't even have to send a copy, if they already have the issue of the publication (or the book) in which your story originally appeared.

The other kind of reprint opportunity is the one that you find in the wild, on your own. You gather what information you can about the publications that might be receptive to previously published stories, then you study their submission guidelines and submit your story to them along with a cover letter, just as you would when marketing an original story. Then you cross your fingers and wait for a response. If your story's accepted, the payment for this kind of reprint varies all over the place, as you might imagine. But I have occasionally made more money from those than from the original piece. And you can do this over and over, so long as you never relinquish "all rights" to your story. (By the way, here's something that took me a while to learn: you cannot surrender all rights accidentally; it must be done via a contract. So it's not something you have to worry about.)

What are the markets for reprints? They're the same three as for original stories: magazines, anthologies, and collections.

Magazines that feature reprints are few and far between, these days. One is Thema, the New Orleans literary journal that's been around a long time. I've sold them only original mystery stories, but their guidelines say they'll also consider reprints. Another is Crimeucopia, a UK-based anthology-like magazine. All seven of my stories that have appeared there had been previously published, and editor John Connor is kind and professional and easy to work with. Shotgun Honey also accepts reprints, or at least they did four years ago, when I sold them a previously published flash mystery story. The nonpaying but longtime markets Kings River Life Magazine and Mysterical-E also consider reprints.

Anthologies are usually a better bet than magazines for reprints, and they usually say in their guidelines whether reprints are allowed. Anthology editors' opinions vary: some want only original stories, stories no one's ever seen before, but others are happily open to reprints because (they say) those stories are proven quantities that have already been vetted and accepted for publication elsewhere. Be aware that anthologies, like magazines, usually pay less for reprints than for original stories, which is understandable.

The last of the three, a collection of a writer's own work, is a logical place for reprints. The publisher of my short-story collections actually preferred reprints, for the same reasons I mentioned in the previous paragraph. Do make sure, though, that the collection contract states that you will still own the rights to the individual stories. 

NOTE: Another recent reprint market, although it's neither a magazine nor an anthology, is Storia, also known as Storiaverse. Most of what I've sold them are original stories, but they've also published one of my reprints. I'mvnot sure what their payment for reprints is now, or how long it is before they return rights to you for the story, but at one point it was $750 per reprint, and rights would revert to you after ten years.

Here are a few more points/hints/tips about the marketing of reprints, also known as Giving Your Stories a Reborn Identity. 

1. When you see a group of markets presented as they are in places like Publishers and Other Forms of Insanity, try searching those market listings by typing REPRINTS in the "Find" box at the time of the page. This should quickly show you which of those listings will consider reprint submissions. I used to do that often at the Ralan's Webstravaganza website, but alas, they gave up the ghost several years ago.

2. It's usually easier to sell reprints of older stories than those published more recently. Some guidelines even state that they'll only consider stories published more than a certain number of years ago.

3. Try selling your original stories to print publications first. When you later re-market those stories as reprints, they're often easier to sell than stories that originally appeared in online publications.

4. When selling a reprint that has already appeared in more than one place, put in your cover letter that "this story was first published in ABC Magazine." That way you can be truthful without having to say "this story was previously published in ABC Magazine, X Magazine, and Y Magazine." Shouldn't make a difference, but it could.

5. Sometimes a story needs to be tailored a bit before trying to sell it as a reprint. When that happens, it is not enough to just change the title and the setting and the characters' names and some things about the plot and then call it an original story. It's still a reprint. What I do in that case is say in my cover letter something like "a modified version of this story first appeared in XYZ Magazine."

6. Specifically, what I usually say in a cover letter for a reprint is, "This story was originally published in the July 20, 1997 Issue of Dead & Gone Magazine. Since they acquired first rights only, I hope you'll want to use it in a future issue of Here & Now Magazine." Be ready to send a copy of the original contract to the editor if requested, but I have so far never been asked to do that.

So that's it. What are your thoughts, and history, on this subject? If you're a writer of short stores, do you actively seek out reprint opportunities? Have you had any good, or bad, experiences there? What have been some of your best reprint sales, and reprint markets?

In closing, here's something I've mentioned before at this blog--and it's still true. Don't let those stories that you've worked hard on sit idle after publication. When the exclusivity period in your contract runs out--they're rarely longer than six months--get the stories you're proud of back out there and into circulation again. Why not?

Remember, short fiction is 100% recyclable.

Giving It Away for Free, Part II

 

I'll take that with a side of crazy.

Pardon me, dearly beloved, while I rant. I had a weird week that saw me driving to and returning from a long wedding weekend when I shoulda coulda been at Bouchercon. Adding to my exasperation were a couple of weird emails from complete strangers who, on a strength of very slim connections, nevertheless felt compelled to write asking for help with their writing.

Fans of the Joe Show will recall that I have written about the dangers of offering your writing/editing expertise for free to writers who don’t do the requisite work. Since I wrote that post on the topic, I have attempted to change the error of my ways. When a close college friend asked me to read and comment on her nonfiction book proposal, I declined, saying that I didn’t feel comfortable working with friends that way. I referred her to the website reedsy.com, a wonderful organization, which, among other things, allows editorial freelancers to hang out their shingles offering services to authors, most of whom are intending to self publish. My friend did find an editor who had expertise editing titles on the geopolitical subject of her book that I was unqualified to judge. So, in that case, my brush-off was a win-win-win—for my friend, the hired editor, and me.

Years ago, as part of a class my wife and I taught on nonfiction book proposals, I offered to read any resulting proposals the students generated. Only two or three followed through on writing their proposals, and availed themselves of our offer. Which we sorta, kinda predicted. Oddly, the student with the best idea did not contact me until this past spring, a full seven years after the class ended. He offered to pay me to read, since he’d clearly blown through the window of opportunity. But I did not feel good accepting payment since I’d read the work of his classmates at no cost. Before I made a decision, I asked him to send me the first three pages of his proposal.

Holy cow, what a beautiful writer. He had absorbed all the lessons of the class, and applied it to his 19th century true story, and I knew my time would not be wasted. He’s close to submitting to agents, and I’m genuinely looking forward to reading the final draft.

But for every win, there are people like this fellow, who wrote last week. All you need to know before you read his email is that back in 2009 my wife and I traditionally published a book about the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, which has since sold more than 100,000 copies.

Subject: Creating the index for my book

Message: Hello, I am writing a book about the Signers of the Declaration of Independence. Naturally, your book has been a valuable reference. I’m to the point of creating the index and I am flummoxed amount [sic] how to do this. So far I have 380 entries in the index. The book has not been paginated yet, but, thinking ahead, is there an easy way to make the page assignments? BTW, I have a PhD from [REDACTED]. I would greatly appreciate any advice you could give me on this. Thanks.

Excuse me while I pick up the pieces of my skull off the floor, and bind my wounds. I don’t know where to start with this. Now, I’d be the first to admit that our big ol’ book of 56 biographies of the Signers is not a terribly original idea. Indeed, the first books of this type were published in the 1820s, when some of the Signers were still living. But still—who writes the author of a competing work with a manuscript formatting issue, and expects a helpful response?

Imagine writing the following email:

Dear Mr. McCullough:
I greatly enjoyed your book 1776, about Washington’s leadership of the Continental Army during the pivotal year of Independence. In fact, it inspired me to write a similar book on the exact same topic, which is also called 1776! The only trouble is, I am having trouble the setting the margins in my MS Word document, so I cannot transmit the book to my editor. Misery me, lack-a-day-dee! If you can help with this, or make time for a Zoom call to discuss, I’m free on the following days…

Holy freaking bananas.

Then, recently, there was the guy who attended one of my wife’s book events, complimented her on her boots, and thus felt entitled to write asking if we could recommend a) an editor who could read his pandemic year memoir and offer advice, or b) a literary agent who could do the same thing. The kicker: He wasn’t sure the book was ready for submission, but he felt if these fine contacts of ours read the book in its entirety, they would know exactly what do with his manuscript.

As it happens, I knew exactly what he should do with his manuscript, but I was too much of gentleman to spell it out in an email.

I know by now that I should not Engage With Crazy but how else could I come up with columns for you lovely SleuthSayers people?

So, yes, I wrote both of these guys back, politely suggesting they consider hiring editors and indexers via the site I mentioned before. (Reedsy, I’m sorry. I love you, but you’ve become my go-to brush-off suggestion.)

To my Declaration of Independence doppelgänger, I wrote saying he could hire tons of freelancers to work on his projects, including—haha—someone who could run a plagiarism check on the doc before it went out the door. Haven’t heard back, so I don’t know if he appreciated my wit.

As for the Covid memoirist, he wrote back saying he liked the online database I recommended but he was a little annoyed because he could not tell if the freelance editors on offer had decent connections to agents. What good was hiring a freelance editor, he asked, if they can’t refer you to an agent?

Did not respond. I can only afford one brain hemorrhage a week.

* * *

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com