October is Mystery Month in Rancho Cucamonga. Not only is the community participating in the Big Read program, having selected The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, but they have other events scheduled to celebrate. Anne Perry is featured this Friday, October 3 in a kickoff event, and one week later on Friday, October 10 there will be a special author panel moderated by Denise Hamilton, author of the Eve Diamond crime novels.
Mark Tavani, a Senior Editor with Ballantine Books, was interviewed on Crime Fiction Dossier recently. He wasn't terribly encouraging, noting the difficulties of midlist author to survive and the Hollywood-style mentality in the publishing industry, but there are gems of wisdom, too. He says, "I guess the most important thing an author can do is, in the beginning of the process, to have a few very frank conversations with your agent and your editor. From those conversations, amass all of the realistic information you can, read between the lines, develop accurate expectations, ask for what you think you can get, let the rest go, and move forward full speed ahead."
Author Clyde Ford is embracing technology is a new fashion to promote his latest murder mystery set in the San Juan Islands and Inside Passage. The former IBM systems engineer built a Web-based application centered on the programs OnScene, Microsoft Virtual Earth and Google Earth, allowing readers to virtually visit the places in the story. Readers "virtually" fly to locations such as Lummi Island near Bellingham, and Eagle Harbor, and can explore further with background on local history and geography, live webcam views and readings by the author and other people.
In a move that could one day affect e-book publishing, record labels, music publishers, songwriters and online music services reached an agreement on how to compensate music creators for online distribution of their content. The agreement is designed to settle how the industry calculates royalty rates for limited downloads and music that is streamed online, including when it is provided by subscription and advertising-supported services. Fans using on-demand music streaming can select the songs they want to hear but do not keep a permanent copy, and providers of such services will pay a royalty of 10.5 percent of revenue after other royalties are calculated.
There are scads of murder-mystery dinner parties, theaters and fundraisers all around the globe each year, but here's a "novel" take: members of the Members of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Harley Owners Group are holding their second annual Ride-to-Read Murder Mystery Ride to benefit the One Book, One Community reading program. The exact route is kept a mystery and riders receive clues to help them guess the identity of the make-believe murderer at the first stop and continuing at designated stops thereafter.
Nintendo just released a new interactive game that falls on the heels of other popular crime-oriented game titles. In "Unsolved Crimes," set in a stylized 1970s New York, the user plays the role of a young rookie detective in the Homicide division who, along with a partner, must solve the mysterious kidnapping of aspiring model Betsy Blake.
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