Tag Archives: publishing

The Casual Vacancy Cover aka JK Rowling’s Adult Novel

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Pic credit: Little, Brown Book Group

My first thought when seeing this cover was: that’s it? and the second thought was: someone probably got paid a lot of money to design that cover. The article that I swiped this from had some funny reactions from people about the cover:

“Nice of them to let one of JK Rowling’s kids design her new cover on MS Paint, grumbled @meandmybigmouth”

Bwahahahahaha.

Wait until the book comes out. I have a feeling that people are gonna rip that to shreds too!

Source: The Guardian

Irish Writers Setting Their Books Abroad

I read this Irish Times article a few days ago about how Irish writers are not setting their books in…Ireland. Odd. I’m a big fan of the Irish setting. Books set in or around the Troubles is even better (Adrian McKinty). I mean, any book that is set in Dublin or Galway, I automatically buy it. It saddens me to discover that *some* Irish writers don’t care to set their books in Ireland. John Connolly is quoted as saying:

“As a young writer,” Connolly wrote in his essay contribution to 2011’s Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century, “I could think of few subjects with which I wanted to engage less than the nature of Irishness, or the Irish situation . . . Had I set my first novel, Every Dead Thing (1999), in Dublin, it would have become, by default, an Irish novel, not a crime novel.

And what is wrong with that? Apparently everything:

Continue reading →

The Commercialization of Scandinavian Writers

Washington Post: “The Leopard” is a bloated, near-total disaster. ”

The Washington Post review of The Leopard written by Jo Nesbø, is the eighth book in the Harry Hole series, written by Patrick Anderson (a review I don’t agree with) highlights a problem I see coming with the commercialization of Scandinavian writers for U.S. audiences. Just to quickly pick on the review: I read the review and thought it quite harsh and incorrect. For starters, his dismissive tone or remarks about the “pointless memories of people’s childhoods” ignores a key aspect to the pathos that is Harry Hole. A man who is beset with demons and who uses alcohol to chase them away. His past is a significant part of his character development and that to me is not “pointless.”

Moving on. Admittedly, I have enjoyed other books in the Harry Hole series more but The Leopard was not a near total disaster but then that is my opinion of course. Was it the best in the series? Probably not. Patrick Anderson is welcome to his opinion and I don’t dispute many of his claims of how far afield Jo Nesbo’s plots have strayed from the rest of his other titles. Reading the criticism in the review does bring to mind a fear that I have in that Scandinavian writers will probably lose much of what made them different and respected in the first place if they are to succeed in a U.S. market. I say that with scant evidence to back it up and am only going by what I perceive and I am no industry insider. I am just a reader with an opinion. Continue reading →

Bad Language in Crime Fiction

There seems to be/or has been an increasing pressure, steadily building, on writers to avoid using bad language in their mystery novels. How do you feel about that? This is seen more in the U.S. than abroad. Readers are pushing against bad language and are penalizing writers with one star reviews on Amazon (who takes those reviews seriously anyway?). I’m not sure if the complaint is about the use of bad language period or the excessive use of bad language in crime fiction.

At any rate, readers have felt the need to complain about it to the writer, to the publisher, to whoever. Editors are responding to it, too, which is troublesome to me, because these folks aren’t representative of me and vice versa. I will direct you to read reviewer Sunita’s conference notes from her attendance at Bouchercon this year where authors voiced their frustrations about this very thing. Continue reading →