Author Archive: Eric San Juan

Happy Birthday to my coauthor, Jim McDevitt

When Jim McDevitt and I started writing about the works of Alfred Hitchcock way back in 2006, yeah, we talked about it becoming a book and people reading it and all the usual daydreaming. I’m not sure we imagined it would actually happen, though, or that it would do well enough to earn a paperback edition, or that we’d do 50 something episodes of a podcast based on the book, and that the podcast would get many hundreds of listeners, or a host of other things. But we did. Two beer-drinking baseball fans decided to do something silly like write a book. It worked out. And that’s cool. So with all that mind, happy birthday to you, Jim. I’m proud to share a book spine…
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A Year of Hitchcock coming to paperback

Wasn’t sure when I could safely announce this, but since our publisher has done so I guess that means I can do so, too. This fall, A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks with the Master of Suspense, is coming to paperback! Our publisher, Scarecrow Press, is listing it on their website with an October 28 release date and, most exciting of all, a $19.95 price point. That’s a damn nice price, and one likely to be even nicer once it hits online retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Even better, our editor informs us this edition will be targeting bookstores — which means a wider market than the largely academic readership at which the hardcover edition was aimed. Both my co-author, Jim McDevitt, and…
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Thinking about doing some self-publishing, part 2

Yesterday I posted about self-publishing a local history book. Niche works like that are ideal candidates for self-publishing. An author with the will and skill can more effectively reach his or her target audience than a publisher, even a specialty publisher, and be more financially successful with it in the process. Yet that’s not what prompted me to start yesterday’s post, so let me pick up where I left off: I’m thinking of self-publishing some fiction. A short story collection or three. Digitally. My thought is, why not? These days print outlets for short fiction are few and far between. Most are already digital, and many are fly-by-night. Short story collections are generally only viable for established authors. While I’ll have a second book out…
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Thinking about doing some self-publishing, part 1

The world of self-publishing, especially in the digital realm, is an exciting one. Not for what it currently is, but for what it could be. There are some established authors who are doing well in self-publishing. So good, in fact, they hope to get the publishing rights back to some of their traditionally published books because they can make more money doing it on their own. Other established authors are getting together to do the same. In theory there is a very exciting future ahead for self-publishing, ebooks in particular. I say “in theory” because I also have some strong reservations about the self-publishing boom, but that’s a discussion for another time. Right now I just want to talk about my own foray into that…
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