Ficlets

Via the always-invaluable Galleycat, a story of how a writer can do it all right and still not break out: Meet John Shannon, a Los Angeles mystery writer whose books get the sort of critical love any writer would love to have – and whose books you’ll have a hard time finding:

A graying, restless man in his 60s, he’s had inordinately bad luck: A few of his early novels appeared as paperback originals but went out of print. His next books were published in hardcover at Carroll & Graf, under the highly regarded Otto Penzler imprint. But the novels never came out in paperback and the house shut down. Shannon’s new publisher, Pegasus Books, plans to reissue the Liffey series in softcover; his second novel, “The Cracked Earth,” will be out in August. Yet some worry that too much time has been lost.

Truth to tell, this story is more common than the alternate, in which a writer goes into a bookstore and sees a line of paperback versions of his old novels, like old friends, waiting for him there on the shelf. It’s hard to sell a book to a publisher, and when you do it’s hard to keep the book in the public view – and many times things happen to publishers and books that the writers have absolutely no control over.

This is why I make the note in the headline that it helps to get lucky, too. Talent is an excellent thing, to be sure. But the publishing business is a business like anything else, and sometimes it’s good to be in the right place in the right time with the right book.

And how do you do that? I suppose, like Mr. Shannon, you just keep working at it.