***20/05/2013 UPDATE***

Hi again!

First off, thanks to everyone who has commented, tweeted, shared and participated in this conversation; it’s been very encouraging to see how much we all want to make NetGalley even better! I just saw this NG Tumbler post and think it’s worthwhile sharing as well: http://netgalley.tumblr.com/wellness. They’re running a Wellness Pledge programme to help users improve their profiles and usability of the site, with the aim being to get a badge posted to your profile showing publishers that you’re committed to being “NetGalley Healthy”! Here’s the page for the pledge: https://www.smartsheet.com/b/publish?EQBCT=4ca06851f92c4ded943c5816b387caa4

I hope that further helps!

Caroline

***17/05/2013 POST***

So first off, I want to say how much I utterly love NetGalley; it’s an amazing tool for everyone involved and strikes up conversations about books prior to publication in a, largely, hassle-free manner.

But after working with it for the last month, I thought I’d put together a few, hopefully, handy tips and some advice. The aim is that this will help reviewers, bloggers, librarians, booksellers and everyone else who uses NG, understand what we, as publishers, would love to see in requests. If this helps us approve more requests, and gives you an insight into what we’re looking for, then I’ll be very happy! Thusly:

Profiles

When I was first applying for my publishing internship way back when I was still in college, my cover letter was all about how much I loved books, and thus this naturally meant I was made for the world of publishing. That is, until it was pointed out to me by my lovely publishing mentor that it’s a given to all involved with books that we’re voracious readers who absolutely love everything bookish. It doesn’t mean it’s not important that you love reading, but to us, what’s more important is what you’re going to do after you read our books. Ideally I’d love to see the following in your profile:

• Links to your blog/website/online forums where you talk books
• Your bio as a reviewer/bookseller/librarian (from here on, NG user as I don’t want to leave anyone out!) is really important:

1. how long have you been active whether reviewing, book club recommending, or as a bookseller, librarian etc;
2. where have you reviewed in the past
3. where do you think you’ll be sending this review
4. who will you be talking to about the book ie fellow students/bloggers/librarians/booksellers/customers

• If possible, include direct links to some sample reviews or blogs/school library sites
• If you’re a librarian, and registered with the American Library Association, please try and register your membership number with the NG site so you have the official ALA logo beside your name. That makes a big difference! I’m not sure how you do this, and am happy to be guided, and can include a how-to here if needed.
• For bloggers/reviewers, we absolute love to see your stats: the most useful and helpful basic site statistics are:

1. dated eg as of 17 May 2013 I have xyz followers…
2. if you have a newsletter subscription, tell us how many subscribers you have
3. Page views per day (average)
4. Unique visitors per month

• But don’t just tell us about your site, especially if you don’t have one! If you use Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads etc and will be talking about the requested book on these sites, you can still tell us how many followers, friends, interactions you have.

Requesting

• Whenever we put a title on NG, we send out the respective group email: to the Robot Army, the Chemistry Set or the Witness Protection Programme. We always urge NG users to get requests in early, and I can’t stress that enough: there are often hundreds of requests and we cannot match that amount for each book so do get your request in as soon as possible
• With that, please make sure you do have time to read the books you’re requesting, and that more importantly you download them as soon as possible: our books are generally only available for 4 weeks on NetGalley so if you’ve been approved, please do download the title

Posting Reviews

When you’re sending in your review, there are a few things that would really make my job easier…and also make me love you even more!

• Please include the date the review was published especially if it’s a forthcoming review
• If you run your own blog, or contribute to one, send us the link which the review will appear on, but also don’t forget to include the link for your Goodreads account, your Amazon reviews, twitter or basically anywhere else the review will appear. This not only makes it easier for me to remember how amazing you are, but also to help promote you and your work: if we’re not already connected on Twitter, I’ll tweet your review and link to you. We want you to get as much out of your work as we can.

Possible Reasons for Declining

First off, none of us like declining people…it makes us sad, really. We love our books, and so look forward to people reading them and sending back informed reviews, whatever way they may go. It’s the nature of the game that not all books are going to satisfy all readers, and we’re never going to decline you because you didn’t like our last book or anything silly. But it is a business, and we do need to make sure we don’t potentially undermine any book’s worth by sending out copies to everyone without seeing a value in it. So, to avoid you and I both feeling terrible, please bear in mind:

• If your profile has no link to a blog, or any discernible outlet, but you maintain you’re a reviewer, it definitely lowers your approval chances
• A profile with little info at all will also lower approval rates
• If you provide a link to a website but there haven’t been any recent posts, or it doesn’t have any book reviews, that will look odd. If there’s a reason for this (you’ve been caught up in something else and are looking to get back to bloggging, for example, let us know that – add it to your bio)
• No bio at all: unless you’re an extremely high-profile person or known to us personally, this is always worrying

I think that covers everything; if you think of anything you’d like clarification on or want to run past me/us, please comment below. I’d really love to hear from NG users as well, especially on what we could be doing to help you: this is a site that we’ll all get as much out of as we put in, so let’s start talking about how we could all do better and help each other out!

Happy Friday, everyone!

Caroline

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As you all know, Exhibit A is a sister imprint of the science fiction & fantasy crowd, Angry Robot. We happen to think they’re great but some would say we’re biased…not so much now with the fantastic news that Angry Robot has been shortlisted for Best Publisher at this year’s Locus Awards!

Not only that but Madeline Ashby has been shortlisted for Best First Novel with vN  (with sequel iD due for July release) and Aliette de Bodard is nominated for Best Short Story and Best Novella!

The competition in all of the categories is fierce, and the entire awards list highlights some of the amazing work being done in the SF & F genres today, and our congratulations go to the Angry Robot team, Madeline and all of the other finalists.

Locus Online has the full list.

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I’m not sure if I’m more honoured to be one of the launch titles for Exhibit A or to have been able to hijack the home page like this but let me tell you, it’s pretty nerve-wracking. The only conditions were to lock up after I finished and leave the place as I found it. Maybe they were too trusting. What’s this? A tub of dried scorpions? Looks like Emlyn Rees has left his lunchbox behind.

But it’s looking none too shabby here. If you click on the main menu above you’ll find a host of great names under ‘Authors.’ Please check out their books – there are some really diverse and radical crime fiction titles there and some names I’m sure you’ll be hearing a lot more from in the very near future.

Meantime, my stand alone thriller Scare Me has found its way into bookshops and is available to buy online and I’ve already heard from a lot of people who pre-ordered and are now getting stuck into it. Two of them read late into the morning and finished in one sitting. I can’t think of better feedback to receive.

It should be available in all good ebook formats and as an audio book very soon. And check out this competition to win a signed copy.

We’re still excited by the movie rights deal for Scare Me and, as Wentworth Miller dives into the adaptation for Hollywood studio Relativity Media, I hope to keep you updated about any developments in that quarter.

Exhibit A will be posting bulletins here plus the Scare Me website is now live at www.richard-parker.com, so there will be more news there. I’d love you to swing by. The carpets have only just been laid, however, so if you wouldn’t mind taking off your shoes I’d be really grateful.

Richard Parker

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We’re delighted to announce that, in a deal brokered by The Gotham Group and ICM Partners, major Hollywood studio Relativity Media has acquired the film rights to Richard Parker’s brilliant psychological thriller Scare Me and has signed Prison Break actor Wentworth Miller to adapt the novel for screen.

Miller’s debut screenplay Stoker, starring Nicole Kidman and directed by Chan-wook Park, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was subsequently released to wide critical acclaim.

Scare Me tells the story of a wealthy businessman who receives a phone call in the middle of the night asking him, ‘When did you last google yourself?’ He discovers a website with photos of the inside of his own home, along with six other houses he’s never seen before, inside one of which a gruesome murder has already taken place.

Author Richard Parker said, “Relativity is the perfect home for this project and Wentworth Miller has the sort of dark sensibility that makes him the perfect screenwriter to adapt it.”

Exhibit A acquired dramatic rights to Scare Me as part of a two book deal with Richard Parker last year. Scare Me will be published in the UK and US in paperback and eBook this May.

 

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WISHING ALL OUR AUTHORS & FRIENDS & SUPPORTERS

OUT THERE IN BOOK LAND

 

 

 A BLOODY GOOD HOLIDAY

SEE YOU ALL

IN 2013

FOR THE LAUNCH OF EXHIBIT A

***

 

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Exhibit A?

Exhibit A – it’s that bagged up, significant piece of evidence that when presented becomes a physical representation of a dark sequence of events.

In the fictional world of the thriller novel and movie, is it possible for one object to convey an entire story?  It has to be the sign of a great one if a single outwardly harmless article can evoke it.

To celebrate the name of Angry Robot’s new crime imprint, see how many of these ten objects will jog your memory.

Each represents a famous thriller.

First one’s easy.

Let’s take them out of their bags…

 

Exhibit A: a bottle of nice Chianti.

 

 

 

 

 

Exhibit B: A dentist’s drill.

 

 

 

 

 

Exhibit C: a large collection of air fresheners.

 

 

 

 

 

Exhibit D: a bulletin board.

 

 

 

 

 

Exhibit E: a cooked rabbit.

 

 

 

 

 

Exhibit F: a scarlet fish

 

 

 

 

 

Exhibit G: a shower curtain.

 

 

 

 

 

Exhibit H: a banjo.

 

 

 

 

 

Exhibit I: a hypodermic of adrenaline.

 

 

 

 

 

Exhibit J: an oxygen mask.

 

 

 

 

 

For the answers…scroll down…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Answers:

 

A: Silence Of The Lambs

B: Marathon Man

C: Seven

D: The Usual Suspects

E: Fatal Attraction

G: Psycho

H: Deliverance

I: Pulp Fiction

J: Blue Velvet

Exhibit F was obviously a red herring.

Now check out the rest of the Exhibit A site – for all your criminal needs…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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One of the current crop of industry buzz phrases we’re actually keen on here at Exhibit A is “demystifying the publishing process” – which, when put through the Exhibit A office dejargonatifiernator machine, translates into plain English as explaining how publishing really works.

“Dejargonatifiernator machine”, being operated by Exhibit A’s

Linguistics & Semiotics Technician, Dave.

 

The reason we’re so keen on demystification is because it helps writers target the right kind of agent, publisher, or self-publishing platform, for their work, and it also encourages them to have realistic expectations about how their careers might develop, and can also help them develop strategies and tactics to further their chances of success.

And this is good news for readers too, of course, because it increases the possibility of new writers either finding smart ways to market themselves, or finding publishers who’ll champion their work – all of which ups the chances of readers discovering, and hopefully falling in love with, a whole bunch of books that might otherwise never have properly seen the light of day.

Demystifying the publishing process is good for everyone, in other words.

Which is why here at Exhibit A, we’ve decided to start hosting a series of Couch Quizzes. Brief, informative and irreverent by nature, the idea is ask  some of the more innovative, revolutionary and downright influential characters working in publishing today to sit with us awhile and chat, and hopefully thereby knock down some walls and shed a little light on what’s really going on inside the ever-changing world of publishing.

First up, we’re pleased to welcome Über-agent Jonny Geller, joint CEO of London Literary & Talent Agency Curtis Brown, and Managing Director of its Books division. Jonny represents fiction and non-fiction and his clients include the likes of  John le Carré, Nelson Mandela, David Mitchell, Monica Ali and Howard Jacobson.

And so, without further a do, here’s Jonny…

 

 

 

 

 

Q:  What one tip would you give an aspiring writer?

A:  Aspire to say something new and not something that is simply better than what is out there.

Q:  If you hadn’t become a literary agent, what do you think you would have ended up being?

A:  A film producer.

Q:  What would you say sets Curtis Brown apart from the competition?

A:  We look after every aspect of a writer’s life – books, film, presenting, branding.

Q:  What’s your favourite part of the publishing process?

A:  Discovery. Either a new novelist or a new book by an author I admire.

Q:  You have said on a number of occasions that the author/publisher financial relationship needs to be reinvented. What’s your ideal vision for this?

A:  A combination of things – some old model advance/royalties; some joint ventures and collaborations; some self publishing that becomes monetized later; some transparent sharing of resources with major brands.

Q:  Major-league publishing sometimes seems to be a mix of unexpected big new thing ,followed by a year-plus of copycatting till the craze is dead. A good or bad thing?

A:  An inevitability and it won’t change. The phenomena always come from the unexpected and what follows makes commercial sense.

Q:  Of the many book chains and stores that have sadly vanished from the high street, which do you miss the most?

A:  Ottakars. It had the feel of an independent with the range of a chain and was locally minded.

Q:  What’s the best film adaptation of a novel that you’ve seen?

A:  Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. (Biased, I know, as I represent the author, but I was blown away by this version.) To be balanced, I’ll say Dr Zhivago too, which seems to be better than the novel.

Q:  Which fictional character would you most like to go out with for a beer?

A:  Falstaff.

Q:  Where’s the best place to read a book?

A:  The bath.

Q:  Have you ever had an in depth conversation with someone about a book which you have, in fact, not read?

A:  Sure.

Q:  Did you get caught?

A:  No.

Q:  Literary or commercial?

A:  I see no difference.

Q:  Bitter or lager?

A:  Whiskey.

Q:  Do you think J. K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy might have been a bit more fun if it had included cameo appearances from Dobby and Hagrid?

A:  No.

Q: Do you think the same could be said of Fifty Shades of Grey?

A:  No.

Q:  If you had a sock puppet, what would it be called?

A:  Fake

 

Thanks, Jonny!

So there you have it. Feeling demystified? We certainly are.

Until next time, then, folks. But do let us know if there’s anyone you’d like us to feature in this series, and we’ll try to pin them down.

 

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Settings and the lessons of history

by Dan O’Shea

Say Chicago to someone, and then say the 1968 riots, and you’re going to hear about the Democratic National Convention. Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies and The Whole World Is Watching. Great political theater, sure. A seminal moment in the whole 1960s counterculture, in the anti-war movement. But it’s not what I remember. Nobody died, nothing burned.

I was nine years old in 1968. Say 1968 and riots to me and here’s what I remember. I remember the days following Martin Luther King’s assassination. I remember watching Chicago burn on the news, watching my grandparents’ neighborhood burn.

 

 

It was only three months before the convention that most of the west side went up in flames. 11 people were killed – all black, all shot by the police. Hundreds more were injured, thousands arrested. In a 27 block stretch running west to east between Roosevelt Road and Madison Street, more than 200 buildings were burned to the ground. The city sent in more than 10,000 cops. The state deployed more than 6,000 National Guardsmen. President Johnson deployed 5,000 regular army troops. Funny the parts of history that get ignored.

That’s why, for me, history is a part of, maybe the most important part of, a setting. That’s why I wrote Pillar of Fire for Chuck Wendig’s Terribleminds. A story that delves not just into the history of Chicago, but also into the history of the characters from my debut novel, Penance.

Penance is set in Chicago. For some writers, setting is an afterthought, but for me, setting matters. As a geographic location, Chicago certainly has its points of interest. There’s the lake, there’s the architecture, there’s the feudal and still often racial nature of its neighborhoods. There’s the politics – maybe the last real big-city democratic machine still in operation, with all the attendant corruption.

But setting begins with history.

The architecture? Chicago is one of the world’s most interesting architectural towns because, just as the ideas and technology that made the steel-framed skyscraper a possibility germinated, a huge swath of this city – including most of the central business district – burned to the ground. This gave visionaries like Jenney, Root, Burnham and Sullivan a blank canvass to explore the new art of soaring steel at a time when most other cities were fully built. In New York or Boston, they could only envision a building. In Chicago, they could envision a skyline.

Chicago’s raw youth and explosive growth are also the foundation of the story of its politics and its racial unease. In 1840, Chicago was only four years old and its population numbered less than 5,000. By 1890, Chicago’s population had exploded to nearly 1.1 million – it had increased to more than 250 times its original size in just fifty years and was now the second largest city in the United States.

Unlike the cities on the east coast, which traced their histories back to the Revolution and before, this sprawling new metropolis had no establishment, no central locus of power, no families or ethnic groups well enough entrenched to make or shape the rules. Where New York had its financiers and Boston had its Brahmans, Chicago had a vacuum. Where those eastern cities saw their populations explode with the rising tide of immigration, those immigrants arrived in metropolises with established orders, established rulers.

Immigrants poured into Chicago in huge numbers – the Irish, the Germans, the Poles, the Czechs, the Ukrainians. In 1900, there were more Poles in Chicago than in any city in the world outside Warsaw, and more Czechs than in any city outside Prague and Vienna. The Germans and the Irish each accounted for nearly a fifth of the city’s population. And the ethnic groups tended to stick together. The Germans on the northwest side in Jefferson Park. Many of the Irish on the south side in Bridgeport. The Poles along Milwaukee Avenue. The Czechs and the Ukrainians – the Bohunks as my ancestors would have called them – on the near west side.

These immigrants arrived not as servants to an established elite, but to a political and commercial vacuum, a free-for-all where the only limit to power was what you could take – and what you could keep. Chicago’s official motto is Urbs in Horto – City in a Garden, but its operating principal has always been Ubi est mea est – Where’s mine? Bare-knuckle politics were nothing new in the U.S., but the brand played in Chicago was particularly brutal – and often overtly racial. And it was a brand of politics at which the Irish excelled.

In the early 1900s an explosive new element was added to the mix of white ethnic groups already slugging it out for power – the blacks. The early 1900s saw the Great Migration – the influx of blacks from the rural south to the industrial north, where they hoped to escape the discrimination, disenfranchisement and violence of the Jim Crow south. Their hopes were not well met. Much of the black population was shoehorned into a long, narrow strip of dilapidated housing on the south side centered on State Street that came to be known as The Black Belt – an area that bordered the fiercely defensive and often virulently racist Irish enclave of Bridgeport.

In 1919, a young black man name Eugene Williams was swimming in Lake Michigan and got too close to an area of beach considered “white.”  White beach goers started throwing stones at Williams, and he drowned. When blacks near the scene went to the cop on the local beat and called for an arrest, a black man was arrested instead. Already simmering racial tensions exploded into violence.

A white mob threatened to burn down Provident Hospital, where most of the patients were black. Scores of fires were set in the Black Belt and, when the fire department tried to respond, they found the streets leading into the area strung with cables, blocking their access. The mayor’s office would later report word of a plot to burn the entire Black Belt to the ground and the residents out of town. During the rioting, 38 people were killed – 23 blacks and 15 whites. Hundreds of blacks and almost no whites were arrested. Trains leaving Chicago for the south were crammed with black families fleeing violence. In the aftermath, unionized white workers threatened to strike at the stockyards – one of the city’s major employers and one of the few places where blacks held decent jobs – if black employees were allowed to return to their jobs. The blacks were largely nonunion workers, many who had been brought in by management as strike breakers during earlier labor disputes. Black employment at the stockyard plummeted.

An official inquiry found that Irish social clubs from Bridgeport were responsible for much of the violence – including the Hamburg Athletic Club, of which a 17-year-old Richard J. Daley, who would go on to found Chicago’s famous political dynasty, was a member.

And that’s why I wrote The Old Rules, for Shots e-zine.

I’ve got another story out there that offers some background into my novel and its characters – Wonderful Country  for Shotgun Honey. And there are more to stories to come. You can keep up with all of them at the Penance page on my blog.

The almost cliché quote from George Santayana says that those who fail to learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them. I say that writers who fail to learn the lessons of their setting’s history miss out on the best stories.

Dan O’Shea’s novel, Penance: a Chicago thriller, will be published by Exhibit A in the UK and US in 2013.

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CAN YOU TOP THIS CRIMINALLY GOOD LIST???

 

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Thanks to all the brilliant mini robots hiding inside my computer, I’ve been able to “Googlelate” (Google Translate) a fine article about Exhibit A, which just appeared on the brilliant Crime Zone website in the Netherlands.

Much like our own esteemed organ, Crime Zone is a quality site. Contained in its glossy and welcoming virtual folds are many interviews, reviews and insights into the European, UK and US crime scene. We recommend it heartily to you all.

Crime Zone‘s talented and knowledgeable editor, Sander Verheijen, as well as being brilliantly fluent in his mother tongue of Dutch, speaks fluent English. In fact, at this year’s Theakston’s Crime Festival in Harrogate, he even corrected me about the spelling of that most splendidly unusual of British beers, Old Peculier.

And, as you’ll see from this photo, Sander is clearly not a man to be messed with.

Which is why, before we reveal the “Googleated” copy of CrimeZone‘s Exhibit A interview in all its dubious glory for you all to enjoy, we must first apologise to Sander and stress that, if left “un-Googleated”, his prose would be as perfect and peachy as a Pulitzer Prize-winning poem.

But now let’s cut to that interview. Let’s “Googleate”, y’all…

 

Interview from Crime Zone, as translated by Google Translate:

EXHIBIT A
Besides writing goes Emlyns involvement in the thriller genre much further. He is in fact an editor at a publishingExhibit A new thriller.

Emlyn: “I am working on setting up a list of new, interesting thriller writers. We do twelve titles per year, per month. It is a dream come true. In the week that I met Jo, I was with several parties to define as crime fiction editor to work. I am now a 25-year-old editor, trapped in the body of a forty, haha. I have the enthusiasm of a puppy. But it is sometimes quite difficult, though. Then I think, how many thriller writers out there now in the vicinity of Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs … I mean that was a good book. And it is hard, because I knew a writer. I think I must give a manuscript a chance, even though I know after ten pages that will not be. But I will probably still outgrow. ”

How he combines reading and evaluating manuscripts with his own writing?

Emlyn: “I love to read crime and now I can do that with any other reason.Discovering new talent. In that respect I am like a kid in a candy store!Yes, I write again next, but I did when I was twenty-five, had a fulltime job, a girlfriend and still had the stupid things you did at that age do. And then I could write a book. I do not play golf. The hours which others devote golf or other hobbies, I am writing. That is my hobby. ”

Still Chased appeared not to Exhibit A.

Emlyn: “No, I have a great publisher (James Gurbutt, ed.) In his fiction fund I am currently the only thriller writer. Next year my second thriller featuring Danny Shanklin, Wanted. ”

In the Netherlands, published in April by publishing The Haunted Fountain.When I showed him the book, he tells me that the Dutch cover is much cooler than the original English cover. I tell him Emlyn by the publisher in a sentence is called with Jason Bourne and Die Hard.

Emlyn: “I love Die Hard! I did recently with my daughter watching. It has been sworn in, but fortunately not much. The concept of it is brilliant. The film is even better than you think. I am so happy with the comparison. “He looks again at the cover and highlights smiling at the teaser for the fans of Die Hard and Bourne. ”Yes well, but I would still put behind them: but better than that.”

 

Oh, and for anyone (no, really?) wondering who that cool guy is with all the girls waving behind him at the top of this article, look no further: it’s Malcolm McLaren speaking “Double Dutch”, of course.

 

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