Robert Rosenwald’s Blog

Well, I’m back.

I have owned approximately 8 Volvos over the course of my 62 years. I currently own 2 Volvo V70s - a 2000 and a 2004. I was about to trade in the 2000 for a new XC90. Unfortunately the plastic case on my remote for the older car broke (the other plastic case had broken about 3 years ago) so I could no longer attach it to my key chain. As a result of being forced to pay $260 for a new remote (which I don’t need) rather than $10 for a new $2.00 plastic case to house my old remote electronics in (which is all I really need) I have decided to trade in my old Volvo for a Lexus and to never buy a Volvo again. I’m sure someone can justify nickel and diming customers but not to me. It’s a shame. If this is what Ford brought to the table congratulations on losing a loyal customer.

Many years ago, before I met Barbara and got involved in mysteries and publishing I did many, many things. I used to refer to myself as “a jack of all trades and master of most.” In case you haven’t figured it out, I’m a Gemini that also has Gemini rising - a double Gemini, in other words. At any rate I love to cook. It has been a lifelong passion (I started when I was eight years old) and I’m pretty good at it. So I made the classic mistake of thinking that because I love to cook I’d love to be a restaurant owner and for a year I was the owner of Moe’s Ribs in Santa Fe. We served good barbecue but BIG MISTAKE. Owning and operating a restaurant is a very different thing than cooking. Regardless, I still think that good barbecue is about the best food in the world. And when I mention barbecue I mean PIG. When a Texan says barbecue he means beef. Now a barbecued brisket of beef can be damn tasty, but it ain’t what I consider to be barbecue. Every state in the South has what it considers the best barbecue. My daughters insist that Tennessee barbecue is the king. I, having eaten at Arthur Bryants in Kansas City when Arthur was alive, contend that Kansas City leads the way, though KC sauces can sometimes be a little sweet. So I took a little walk around the web and came up with a few places that anyone who’s a vegetarian should avoid but you, gentle reader, might enjoy. An excellent essay on Tennessee barbecue and an interesting discussion of Carolina barbecue. There’s a great deal written about Kansas City barbecue. And South Carolina and Georgia barbecues are represented at the above links. And just in case you’re wondering how I got to this subject, I smoked a very well-seasoned pork butt earlier today, made a Carolina style sauce and am finishing the butt by braising it in a slow oven as I write. Tonight we’re going to have a pig pick (pulled pork) for dinner. Sorry you can’t be here.

Who cares. Mainly I started it as place where I could bitch about small annoyances that I know I can’t get redressed anywhere without spending a disproportionate amount of time on. But also I was curious about the nature of blogging. Do people just find these things? Do I care whether anyone reads it or not? I don’t think so but maybe. At any rate I have never been one to maintain a journal of any sort and so now, at 62, I guess I’m giving it a shot.

We publish approximately thirty-eight new books per year. Of those roughly thirty-three will be second, third, or fourth novels by authors we originally published. Thus we have around five openings per year for authors new to our list. We have had remarkable success with authors we introduce partly because the media are very forgiving of debut authors. They are always looking for new talent as are the library buyers–our main customer. Among our other main customers are independent booksellers and independent mystery bookstores both of whom do a brisk business in modern first editions. An author can be a virgin only once. So, when we publish an author who previously self-published, we lose all sales to the collector market. What’s more the reviewers will often ignore or be much more critical of a second book, especially from a self-published author. Whether fair or not, the perception is that a self-published author took a shortcut and didn’t go through the full editorial process that any “real” publisher exercises. That editorial process includes substantive editing, copy editing, and proof reading–three very different types of editorial work that every manuscript we publish receives. We receive nearly 1,000 submissions per year and can accept less than one-half of one percent of them. If we have to choose one manuscript between two or three new-to-our-list writers we can’t afford to choose the previously published author. And because it costs us, on average, nearly $50 for every manuscript we evaluate we are unwilling to to look at material from previously self-published authors. Fair? No. Might we miss a great book? Absolutely. We are imperfect. We’ll miss some great material, but we’ll continue to do the best we can. So, my hope in writing this is that at least one person who is thinking of self-publishing as a way to break into the business reads this and thinks about it very carefully before so doing. Is it always wrong to self-publish? No. You may have written The Bridges of Madison County, but then again there may be a reason that no “real” publisher has accepted your manuscript.

My wife, Barbara Peters who is also our senior editor, our daughter, Susan Malling, and I started Poisoned Pen Press ten years ago (yes, this is our tenth anniversary year and we do have a great party at Bouchercon planned) because we were unhappy with the direction we saw the large NY publishers heading. We felt that there were a core number of readers who wanted well-written, well-edited, intelligent mysteries to read. After ten years I feel I can say we were right. And before anyone screams at me about editing mistakes in a couple of recent books, all I can say is that in the course of growing and changing how we do production we made some mistakes. I think we have identified them and have come up with fixes. But we will still err from time to time and when we do we’ll do everything in our power to fix it. Just let us know if you find a typo or other error by dropping an email to production@poisonedpenpress.com

One question I keep hearing is whether we will share information with anyone else re. the people who signup for our enewsletter. NO! NO! NO! Emphatically, no, we will not. We use contact information to send requested materials from us, not from some third party. Just to put this into perspective I get, on average, 500 email messages per day of which 420 are flagged as SPAM by my SPAM blocker. I will NEVER permit our list be used by any anonymous third party for marketing anything to anyone.

Another question that I’ve gotten is along the lines of whether we are a self-publisher. Poisoned Pen Press is an absolutely conventional publishing house. We pay authors advances (albeit they are small) and we pay better royalties than most mainstream publishers. We make no demands for money of any sort from our authors. We edit all manuscripts, we pay for typesetting, we hire illustrators to do cover art, we create ARCs (advance reading copies) which we mail out to all mainstream book reviewers and independent bookstores, we pay for all costs of manufacturing finished books. Our typical print runs are between 3,000 and 3,500 hardcover copies.

To those who are thinking of submitting to us, we work directly with unagented authors as well as agented authors, with no preference given to one over the other. However we are not able to pickup authors who have had their series canceled by other publishers. Our main focus is on introducing new, previously unpublished authors. And for all practical purposes we won’t publish an author who self-published themselves. I’ll be posting an entry on this blog soon to explain why for those who aren’t happy with that policy and think it is arbitrary. Anyone who is is interested in submitting a manuscript to us should go to our website to read our manuscript submission guidelines. They are clear and explain what we are looking for and how we want to receive it.

For the second day in a row I took one of my Volvos into the dealership for routine work. One of the benefits of taking them to the dealer is that they wash the car after doing the service. It seems like every time I go in I get told the car will be done at such and such a time. For the most part they’ve been fairly close as to when the work would be completed. BUT, every time I pay the bill and then they call up for the car to be brought to the front and I wait. And I wait. And after about ten minutes I go back to the cashier and ask again that the car be brought up, and finally it comes. “It was being washed” is invariably the explanation. Now here’s the point. If you say the work will be done in an hour to me that means I can get in the car and drive off in an hour. And if you can’t deliver that then tell me the work will be done in an hour and a quarter.