ProJo Review

We just found this little but great review from the Providence Journal from October.

Mom's Amazon Blog

Click here for mom's blog on Amazon (which has recently been hijacked by the more computer-savvy me).

Product Search

If you do a Google product search, you can see all the crazy places that sell our book online. "Looney Tunes CD store." What??

Last Week In Real Life

Good week in Dirty Water land--the Colin McEnroe show was fun. He's really anti-Joe Lieberman, and not afraid to say so. I kind of wanted to join in that discussion, but I figured I'd better talk about the book as planned.

Then we had our event at Broad Street Books in Middletown. Everyone there bought a book--one woman bought six. Another had come to our Hartford signing but came to Middletown to get more copies! Awesome. After our reading, we had a really good Q & A, too. One guy was an old Brooklyn Dodgers fan, and was aware of the old Hartford National League team from the 1870s.

And today, the book had a serious spike on Amazon! Thanks to all of you. Nice job.

More events coming soon....

This Week In Real Life

We'll be on Colin McEnroe's radio show on WTIC-AM 1080, which you can listen to online if you're not in Connecticut, Tuesday, November 18th at 3:30 PM.

Then we'll be reading and signing books at Broad Street Books in Middletown, CT, Thursday, November 20th, at 7 PM.

Found a brief mention of Dirty Water in the Seattle paper. Thanks, Danielle Dreger-Babbitt.

And also in Washington, we have a page on the Tacoma Library's site (which shows the Booklist review that normally requires a subscription.)

Sales

It's so funny the way I constantly check Amazon to try and figure out how well the book is selling. There are websites which try to explain the true meaning of the sales rank number--it's almost like the way scientists monitor lists of random numbers for decades trying to unlock the pattern. But from what I can tell, the number basically tells you how recently you've sold a book. Every time your number spikes, you've made a sale.

I think.

But there are other things to watch. The list of "people who bought this book also bought" is fun, because the more that list grows, the more books you can be sure you've sold. It was fun to watch that list go from just a couple to now 15 pages worth (6 to a page.) Of course, technically, that could just mean one person bought our book in an order with 90 other books. And the fact that when I click on one of those other books, our book isn't necessarily in their list. Who knows.

But I was very happy to see a new thing on our page today. It said "customers bought these two things together," and showed our book next to the 2009 Red Sox wall calendar. It didn't go so far as to offer a sale price for buying both together, but it did give the option of adding both to your cart at once. You know what this means, though? Why do you buy a wall calendar? As a holiday gift. And people buying our book as a holiday gift is exactly what we're looking for. When you've got a baseball-related book out after the baseball season ends, you've at least got the holidays going for you.

90 Miles

One of the storylines in our novel involves the smuggling of Cuban baseball players. Our book is fiction, but part of the story is inspired by the case of Gus Dominguez. Gus is in jail right now. He was an agent for Cuban players like Yuniesky Betancourt. He was accused, and convicted, of smuggling, transporting and harboring Cuban players.

It's a long, complicated story, and I'll let you do the research on your own, but whether you are for or against what he did, I think we can all agree that this story has been swept under the rug by Major League Baseball.

Jungle Boogie

Today I have a guest blog up on Jungle Red Writers. Check it out, and feel free to leave a comment over there.

I wanted to put some other pics in there, but we couldn't work them in. So I'll post them here. First, my mom when her first book, The Book of Phoebe, came out, at the party her friends threw for her:
Check out those frames! Oh man, my mom's gonna kill me when she sees this up here.

And here's the shot of my sister and I in her memoir, Girls of Tender Age:

Us On (Internet) TV

Check out the podcast of mom and me on Henry Delangelo's internet TV show, "HDTV." It was a fun interview with a fellow Sox fan who like me has lived in both Rhode Island and Fairfield County, CT. I like the way he did the podcast, with pictures shot by me in a slideshow, since we were on the phone, not with him in studio.

Thanks, Henry!

Shrinky Dinks

When I got the book from Amazon, I noted it was shrink-wrapped. What I didn't realize was that they're all shrink-wrapped. Yes, the ones that got shipped to stores, too. I couldn't believe my eyes when I went into the local Barnes & Noble and saw my book for sale on a shelf for the first time...and it could not be opened. (I don't know if you know this, but a key element in the reading of a book is the ability to OPEN IT.)

Of course, I ripped the thing open--and you should, too. If you see it in a store, rip it from its cocoon. I'm the author, I authorize it. Turns out our distributor does art books, which are normally shrink-wrapped and...I'm not even gonna finish this explanation because I've already wasted enough time unwrapping books. But the key is, all printings from now on will come without the dreaded SW.

Oh, and here are some more indy bookstores who we support and who support us (and who have some de-shrink-wrapping to do. Ugh.)

Mystery Loves Company, Baltimore

M is for Mystery, Palo Alto, CA

Clues Unlimited, Tucson, AZ

Mystery Lovers Bookstore, Pittsburgh