Alfred Hitchcock

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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How I got published, part 1 – Introduction

Chances are, if you like to write you’d also like to be read. While you can throw things onto the Internet and be read instantly, it’s not quite the same thing as a publisher saying, “I like your work. I’d like to invest our time and money into it. I’d like to publish your book.” Because let’s be honest with ourselves: Blogging is nice, self-publishing is interesting, but the majority of aspiring writers know being picked up by a legitimate publisher is key to making a career of it. I was fortunate enough to get exactly that response to A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks with the Master of Suspense (Scarecrow Press 2009), a book I co-authored with my friend, Jim McDevitt. How did the…
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My eye is bleeding

(Instead of reading this, you might want to look at pictures or listen to “music” instead.) My left eye is bleeding. Same spot, always. I’ve been dealing with this on and off for months. I think it’s eye strain. I spend too much time in front of a computer monitor. Thing is, how do I not spend time in front of a monitor? My job involves sitting in front of a monitor. Writing involves sitting in front of a monitor. These days, even creating music involves sitting in front of a monitor. Heck, a lot of my goofing off time involves sitting in front of a monitor! Maybe I need glasses. I was supposed to have them in high school, but decided not to get…
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Best deal in town

A Year of Hitchcock

Jim, my co-author on A Year of Hitchcock: 52 Weeks with the Master of Suspense (Scarecrow Press, 2009), tells me that this deal at Borders is the best price so far. Enter promotional code IPL1255 at checkout and you’ll save 25%. We love this book, can’t wait for it to hit the streets, and we hope it does well enough that we can pull the price down on our follow-up (which is underway). Speaking of Hitchcock, the features on this new DVD set are amazing, but be wary of bum discs. Some of them won’t play in many DVD players. That stinks. Tomorrow Jim and I start recording Alfred Hitchcock podcasts. You have been warned.

A Year of Hitchcock

A Year of Hitchcock

So hey, my buddy Jim and I wrote a book. We think it’s pretty good. You ought to buy it. It’s available for preorder at Amazon and a gajillion other retailers, and it officially set for release in April. This isn’t a self-publishing venture. The book is due out in April through Scarecrow Press, a notable publisher of scholarly tomes and the like. So hey, that’s pretty swell. We’re very happy. It’s funny, in the more than two years since we wrote it (we began in January 2006), we’ve come across at least three bloggers who were going to attempt the same thing, i.e. watching every Alfred Hitchcock film in a year and writing about each one. Two of them barely got started before their project…
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