Coming Soon To The South Shore

On Friday, February 6th, at 7 PM, we'll both be at Front Street Books in Scituate, Mass., for a reading and signing of Dirty Water.

More info is at their website--you can also order our book online there. Hope to see you on the 6th.

I like how we have this event on that day--it's Truck Day! If you're not familiar with this, "Truck Day" is the day all the Red Sox' equipment is packed up at Fenway Park and sent south to Florida in a huge moving truck, as spring training starts shortly thereafter. It's the type of event that probably makes the local news in most baseball cities--but only rabid fans, like Red Sox fans, will actually go to Fenway to send the truck off personally.

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What a great review we got on Amazon from Mary Whipple, who is listed as one of their "Top 10 Reviewers." Click here.

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For a long time we've had only two customer reviews on our Amazon page, but finally we've got a third, and it's a good one. But we know more than three of you have finished the thing by now, eh? Leave your review on our Amazon page and we'll.....be very grateful. Thanks!

Another Good One

Great review by Paul Steven Stone up at Doug Holder's blog!

Illegal Review?

Check out the review of Dirty Water in Spitball Magazine.

Saturday

This Saturday (Dec. 20th), from 11 AM to 1 PM, mom and I will be signing books at the Bookworm in West Hartford. Hope to see you there.

Also, check out my mom's contribution to this Reader's Digest article.

A Holiday Message From Roy Blount, Jr

I've been talking to booksellers lately who report that times are hard. And local booksellers aren't known for vast reserves of capital, so a serious dip in sales can be devastating. Booksellers don't lose enough money, however, to receive congressional attention. A government bailout isn't in the cards.

We don't want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods. So let's mount a book-buying splurge. Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party. Buy the rest of your Christmas presents, but that's just for starters. Clear out the mysteries, wrap up the histories, beam up the science fiction! Round up the westerns, go crazy for self-help, say yes to the university press books! Get a load of those coffee-table books, fatten up on slim volumes of verse, and take a chance on romance!

There will be birthdays in the next twelve months; books keep well; they're easy to wrap: buy those books now. Buy replacements for any books looking raggedy on your shelves. Stockpile children's books as gifts for friends who look like they may eventually give birth. Hold off on the flat-screen TV and the GPS (they'll be cheaper after Christmas) and buy many, many books. Then tell the grateful booksellers, who by this time will be hanging onto your legs begging you to stay and live with their cat in the stockroom: "Got to move on, folks. Got some books to write now. You see...we're the Authors Guild."

Enjoy the holidays.

Roy Blount Jr.
President
Authors Guild

Kate's Wrapup

Kate's party was a fun time. Hundreds of people came and kept the fairly small bookstore jammed for four hours. Here are some highlights:

We met author Robert Parker--took a picture with him.

David Laurila stopped by. I'd only talked with him online before--he wrote this book, which is a compilation of interviews he's done with people in the Red Sox organization.

Got to meet Hank Philipi Ryan in person. You know her from Jungle Red among other things.

I met a woman who used to live in Danbury, CT, and knew almost the entire cast of characters I knew while I was living there.

We chatted with a woman who is probably the biggest mystery fan in the world. She had things for my mom to sign that we'd never seen before.

Saw Dave Zeltserman again--he was with us when we had our release party at Murder Under Bones.

Our next event will be a signing at the Bookworm in West Hartford, CT, on Saturday, December 20th, from 11-1.

Boston-Area This Friday

We'll be signing at Kate's Mystery Books in Cambridge this Friday night, December 5th. This is Kate's annual holiday party, and will feature lots of authors. We're in the 6:30-7:15 slot. Click here for the full schedule. Directions to Kate's are here.

See you there.

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

New Comment Section Too Scary?

I saw the other day that Blogger came up with a new option for allowing comments--letting you type it right onto the window in a box. I've received plenty of comments since then, but I have also heard of people having trouble. So, if you have tried and can't comment under the new system, e-mail me and let me know. Two2067 at aol dot com. I do have moderation on, so you should at least get the "comment awaiting moderation" notice if you try to comment. So if you haven't commented in the last few days, do a test one and see what happens.

Thanks. Happy Halloween.

(Ooh, new top banner at redsox.com.)

Options

I was thinking, what are the other big national booksellers besides B&N and Borders (and Amazon)? I actually had to look it up. Turns out the next biggest is Books-a-Million. They've got our book, and their on-line "club member" rate is a couple cents cheaper than Amazon's. So, you can choose them, or one of those others, but we hope you'll get it from an independent bookstore like Kate's in Cambridge, Bookworm in West Hartford, Broad Street Books in Middletown, CT, or Murder by the Book if you happen to be in Houston, Texas.

I've had a lot of really cool experiences with putting out my first book, but one I haven't had yet is seeing it for sale in one of the chain stores--B&N shows every New England store having Dirty Water in stock, so I'll have to check out my nearest one tomorrow.