On the run (but not the lam)

By Gayle Carline
Mystery Author and Faux-Maven

For those of you who don't know, maven is a Yiddish word meaning "expert," although my Jewish friends usually wink and tell me it means "know-it-all."

Tomorrow I'm heading down to San Diego to teach at a writer's conference. I used to attend this conference, along with its sister conference in Newport Beach every year. Then a year ago, I was asked to become one of the workshop leaders.

Moi? Teach people about writing? That first year, I was insanely nervous. What do I have to say to anyone about a process that I still feel I'm learning about? I'm happy to report that I did my homework and presented useful information, at least according to the full classrooms and happy people who had kind words for what I put together for them.

These days, I dream up workshop ideas and pass them on to the director, who picks and chooses one or two. For this conference, I'm resurrecting a workshop I did last year, plus adding a new workshop that should be fun. 

The resurrected workshop is on Self-Publishing Savvy. Basically, I do an overview of the author-publisher process and the mindset it requires. My intent with this workshop is for people who think they might want to self-publish but aren't certain. I try not to sugarcoat anything, or scare them away. Hopefully, I just give them the tools to make an informed choice.

The new workshop is called Storytelling is Murder, She Wrote. It's going to be a participation workshop, where I show an episode of a TV mystery and we dissect it, to see what makes it work and what we can apply as writers. I know what you're all thinking, but I'm not going to use that TV show. I'm using an episode of Poirot, for a few reasons. One is that Agatha Christie is a gold standard in mysteries. Another is that the PBS production of Poirot lends itself to a discussion of branding beyond just the storyline. It's a 50-minute show and we have 90 minutes to talk about it. I hope we can get it all done.

One of the things I really like about these conferences is that they offer a little something for everyone in their 90-minute workshops. You can learn about the craft of writing, either fiction or non-fiction. You can get ideas for the business side, from writing a good pitch, to how to find an agent, to what self-publishing looks like. As far as industry professionals, the conference directors try very hard to make certain that the agents and publishers are reputable AND are actively seeking clients.  

In the meantime, if you'll excuse me, I need to review my notes and make certain I'm prepared for the weekend. Oh, yeah - and I have to pack!

Blurbing the Great Dame

A guest post by Timothy Hallinan.

In October of 1920, the New York publishing company John Lane issued a mystery novel called The Mysterious Affair at Styles, for which the author was paid the princessly sum of 25 pounds by her British publisher, which released the English edition in 1921.

The book received good reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, with special attention going to the detective who solves the crime, a bravely-mustached Belgian named Hercule Poirot. Even the most enthusiastic reviewer, however, had no way of knowing that this little mystery was the beginning of the most successful literary career in history. In the 91 years since The Mysterious Affair at Styles, books with Agatha Christie's name on the spine have sold – how many copies?

Come on, guess.

Guess higher.

Guess how many she sells, on the average, every day.

If you guessed THREE BILLION COPIES, you guessed low. It's four billion. Which comes down to an average of 12,042 copies every day, 365 days a year, for 91 years. Dame Agatha Christie is the only writer in the world to outsell Chairman Mao.

So, when a modern-day publisher decides to put out a new complete works of the Great Dame, whom do they ask for a blurb?

Me, apparently. Despite the fact that she sells more books before lunch than I sell in six months, Harper publishing turned to me for the blurb that will give Dame Agatha a little sales bump.

So, on the back cover of the new Harper edition of One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, you'll find these deathless words:

All great characters are capable of entertaining us again and again,
but only the very greatest are new every time we read them.
Hercule Poirot is a member of this very exclusive club.
– Timothy Hallinan

So, there. I've given her my blessing. I have to admit that the logic of getting Timothy Hallinan to blurb Agatha Christie is a little on the fuzzy side. It's sort of like Tom Cruise asking Rob Schneider for an autograph. But I'm honored, and I hope, in whatever literary limbo Dame Agatha presently inhabits, she's not shaking her head and clucking disapproval.

Actually, I think it's much more likely she's saying, “Who?”

By the way, the book is crackerjack. I predict great things for its author.


Timothy Hallinan is the Edgar and Macavity-nominated author of the Poke Rafferty Bangkok thrillers, the latest of which, The Queen of Patpong, has received multiple award nominations. He's also the author of a series of six mysteries set in Los Angeles in the 1990s featuring Simeon Grist. The series, which began with The Four Last Things, is available in e-book. Hallinan also writes a series of original comic thriller e-books about a burglar, Junior Bender, who moonlights as a private eye for crooks. The series opens with Crashed, now available for Kindle.