Tag Archive: Jim McDevitt

Inspiring readers is awesome

Jim McDevitt, my co-author on A Year of Hitchcock, occasionally posts to the Hitchcock Wiki’s message board. One of the other posters there is now taking a journey through Hitchcock’s career just as we did. Even better, he is using our book as a guide. How great is that? It’s wonderfully gratifying to know that your work is being read, used and enjoyed by someone. It’s even BETTER to know that you’ve inspired them to take the same journey. Check out his viewing and reading experience in this thread.

The book is HERE

After having a really bad day, yesterday I came home to a nice surprise. A box with my copies of A Year of Hitchcock. It was just the kind of boost I needed after a terrible day. I can’t tell you how happy I am with the production quality of this book. The folks at Scarecrow Press and their parent company, Rowman & Littlefield, did a spectacular job. This is top work by any measure. Thumbing through it and seeing my words presented so nicely … well, I felt very proud. This whole project, which my co-author Jim and I have lived with for over three years now, now feels real. Real in a very tangible way. And that makes all the work we did,…
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Will I get a copy of the book next week?

A Year of Hitchcock

On April 28, A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks with the Master of Suspense, the book I co-authored with Jim McDevitt, comes out. I have not yet seen a copy of it (though apparently it has been in the hands of at least one reviewer). Will I get a copy of it next week, prior to publication? I do not know. I also ordered a copy from Amazon – yes, I ordered a copy of my own book. Wouldn’t you? I’d like to get my copy so I can stick it on the shelf and pretend it serves as some degree of closure or something. It’s been very hard to throw myself fully into new projects when there remain niggling little things to do on…
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The really BORING part of having a book published

Counting down the weeks to the released of the book I co-authored with Jim McDevitt, A Year of Hitchcock, you’d think I’d be giddy with excitement. I mean, it’s just three weeks or so away, right? Any day now I might get my comp copy in the mail. How exciting! But the truth is, as I mention in How I Got Published, your obligation to your work does not end when the writing is over. When not working on other projects (such as my comic anthology), I’ve spent the better part of my personal working time the last week or so drafting and mailing letters to local libraries and book stores, calling to get the proper contact information, working on press releases, and other painfully…
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