LOS ANGELES, September 4 – Why would I do such a thing?

Why would I drive down Highway 99 in 100 degree weather in a 1970 XR-7 with no functioning A/C?

Because the opportunity presented itself.

Anyone not seeing the allure of such an opportunity will probably by likewise dismayed by much of what I write. I don’t think there’s a lesson to be learned there. Other than, perhaps, the fact that people who are dismayed by much of what I write are likely possessed of a degree of common sense which continues to elude me.

The questing is less, Why drive a 1970 XR-7? Than, Why do such a thing the day after your new novel was released?

Surely there are more productive ways to spend this valuable time?

Indeed, there are.

Topping the list of valuable things I could have done with my time rather than taking said road trip was, I could have been writing.

I’m currently working on the forth Joe Pitt novel, am midway through scripting a six issue mini-series for Marvel, have a one-shot script I am to write for Marvel, and have begun getting serious about notes and research for the novel I will begin after the current Joe Pitt.

And, as noted, THE SHOTGUN RULE has just come out and I need to be doing my bit with readings and such to flog said book.

I could have spent my precious time in any of these endeavors rather than finding out just what kind of damage can be done to a strip of heat-miraged blacktop with a 351 Cleveland 4v.

Yet, I felt no regrets.

Not a single regret.

Not even when I found myself on the shoulder of the highway waiting for a AAA tow truck.

Why?

Alow me.

Now, back and my safely immobile desk, I travel a different highway. The mighty information highway that brings the future, to which the past is prologue. into our very laps.

Whhhssshhhhhhh!

That’s the sound of the future.

Huzzah!

Cruising the mighty digital highway, I make several stops to take stock of how my latest book seems to be faring in the critical and commercial marketplaces.

As confessed before, I do look at Amazon sales ranks for my books. I don’t know exactly how these rankings are calculated, so it’s hard to know how they translate into actual sales.

Let’s investigate together, shall we?

Here’s what Amazon has to say: “As an added service for customers, authors, publishers, artists, labels, and studios, we show how items in our catalog are selling. The lower the number, the higher the sales for that particular item. The calculation is based on Amazon.com sales and is updated each hour to reflect recent and historical sales of every item sold on Amazon.com. We hope you find the Amazon.com Sales Rank interesting!”

I do find them interesting!

Which, I think, is the point. These numbers are more an excellent means for a writer to distract themselves from working than a precision tool for determining how their book is selling.

OK, so we know these rankings are refreshed hourly. This means a sudden jump up or down doesn’t reflect sales data accumulated over the course of a day or week. Which means the number is fairly reflective of what’s happening right now with your book. But the reference to “historical sales” suggests the inclusion of past sales figures being averaged into the algorithm that produces these rankings. And, according to an article by Brent Sampson that attempts to break down the process and translate it into actual sales numbers, that hourly refresh rattle applies only the top 10,000 books. Books with lower sales ranks are refreshed daily or weekly. There’s more, but it’s easier to just read Sampson’s article on Ezine @rticles HERE.

None of which is meant to tear the lid off some kind of Amazon conspiracy or anything of the sort. Just a means of sussing out what these numbers might come to.

The current tally, as of this writing, has THE SHOTGUN RULE at #639. For context, I believe this is the highest any of my books has ever ranked, other than a one-day spike for CAUGHT STEALING after it was recommended for summer reading by Stephen King in a NY Times Review of Books feature. The rest of my books currently have rankings anywhere from close to #80,000 to just over #8,000. However, #639 seems is the high water mark thus far for TSR. The first number I saw was around #850, and it’s dropped to nearly #2000. That’s a variation of about 1400 points in one week.

What’s that mean?

I’m inclined to think it means that sales have surges and ebbed as reviews get published.

What it also means is that the book’s average rank is about #1300.

Morris Rosenthal has a couple graphs on Foner Books that are his attempt to translate Amazon Sales Ranks into numbers of books sold per week/day (HERE). One week of data is a pretty shabby sample, but if Rosenthal’s graphs are correct, it appears TSH has moved somewhere in the vicinity of 100 copies via Amazon in its first week of release. That includes marketplace copies that may be used, or traditionally not-for-sale galleys.

(By the way, for most of my life I was only rarely able to afford new books and would have been screwed for reading material if not for libraries and used book stores and the personal collections of friends. So for the record, while I appreciate all the support I can get from the folks who buy my books, I have no problem with readers who buy used, sell used, borrow, lend, check-out, or otherwise get their hands on or circulate my books. I’d want people to read the damn things. I will admit that I’m a bit less enthusiastic with folks who take a free galley and put a price tag on it, but that’s just me. I mean, the fucking things was FREE. You don’t want it? Fine. GIVE it to someone who does. And that’s that tantrum done.)

OK, so, 100 books in one week out of a single online vendor. That good news?

Fucked if I know.

No clue.

Could be awesome news. Could be a disaster. Or, more likely, I’m wrong about what the numbers mean. Or, most likely, it’s not that big a deal.

Moving on.

B&N.com offers a similar rank. TSR has jumped from a high right about #100 down to its current rank of #2,213. At Books and Tales I found an article by Clea Saal (HERE) that tells me B&N numbers are based on last six month, or since-release, figures. They also only include what Saal reports are “current sellers”. I assume this means back catalogue books go unranked. I do know that none of my other books have a current B&N sales rank. I have no way of translating these numbers into actual sales, but I’d be shocked if they totaled higher than Amazon.

Let’s just call it about another 100 books and walk away.

And, again, no clue if that’s a good thing or a bad.

Color me lost.

And watching how easy it is to get sucked down this particular swirling drain of supposition and anus gazing, is it any real wonder that I chose the road trip in the aging muscle car down the blazing hot San Joaquin Valley?

Sitting at the side of the road, toweling sweat from my face with a balled t-shirt, sucking exhaust from the cars crawling through a Sacramento rush hour, the last thing on my mind was how the fuck my book was selling.

Pure bliss.

Trying to write something I like,

Charlie

Old Milwaukee

Cheers to everyone who stopped by THE SHOTGUN RULE release at The Secret Headquarters. My apologies if I didn’t get to chat with you at the bar. Come next time, and don’t be shy about saying hi once I have a drink in my hand.

Not Over

It’s just starting. THE SHOTGUN RULE tour rolls.

Thursday, September 6

6PM at BORDER’S BOOKS in Westwood, CA

A talk about writing and publishing sponsored by CALIFORNIA LAWYERS FOR THE ARTS
1360 Westwood Blvd
310.475.3444

Saturday, September 8

11AM at BOOK CARNIVAL in Orange, CA

348 S. Tustin Avenue
714-538-3210

2PM at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY BOOKS, with DON WINSLOW and RANDY HICKS, in San Diego, CA

7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd. Suite 302
858/268-4747

Friday, September 14, 2007

7:00 PM at VROMAN’S BOOKSTORE in Pasadena, CA

695 E. Colorado Blvd
626/449-5320

Saturday, September 15

12:00 PM at MYSTERIES TO DIE FOR in Thousand Oaks, CA

2940 Thousand Oaks Blvd.
Phone: 805-374-0084

3:00 PM at THE MYSTERY BOOKSTORE in Westwood, CA

1036 Broxton Avenue
Phone: 310-209-0415

Tuesday, September 18

7:00 PM at THE POISONED PEN in Scottsdale, AZ

4014 N Goldwater Blvd., #101
Phone: 888-560-9919

Wednesday, September 19

7PM at M IS FOR MYSTERY, with ZOE SHARP, in San Mateo, CA

86 East Third Ave.
650/401-8077

Thursday, September 20

7:00 PM at THIRD PLACE BOOKS in Lake Forest Park, WA

17171 Bothell Way NE
Phone : 206/366-3316

Monday, October 1

7:00 PM at PRAIRIE LIGHTS BOOKSTORE in Iowa City, IA

15 S. Dubuque St.
Phone: 319/337-2681

Tuesday, October 2

6:30 PM at MURDER BY THE BOOK in Houston, TX

This will be part of an evening long event, featuring KEN BRUEN among others, known at Noir Night

2342 Bissonnet St.
Phone: 713/524-8597

October 20

SCBA AUTHOR’S FEAST in Los Angeles, CA
Detail TBA

I Like Comics Too

If you do as well, you might check out the folks at Herorealm.com.

What They Think

THE SHOTGUN RULE review from the SF Chronicle:

-Eddie Muller

“It’s good to be back in the saddle after missing a month. I was off
shooting a film based on a short story (”The Grand Inquisitor”) I wrote
for the forthcoming collection “A Hell of a Woman: An Anthology of Female
Noir.”
One of the best things about contributing to an anthology is that it
exposes you to new voices you’ve heard about but haven’t had time to read.
The galleys of “A Hell of a Woman” offered quick shots of two writers I’ve
been meaning to catch up with: Charlie Huston and Zoë Sharp. A dose of
each wasn’t enough. Luckily, both have new novels on the shelves.
Huston’s latest, The Shotgun Rule (Ballantine; 256 pages; $21.95), is a
coming-of-age thriller set in 1983 about a group of suburban Northern
California teenagers (Huston was born in Oakland) who suffer hellish
repercussions when they rip off a local crank lab - although they’d gone
in only to retrieve a stolen bicycle.
As a writer, Huston’s strengths are the brutal efficiency with which he
sets a scene, and the breakneck pace he maintains throughout. The guy is
in such a hurry, he’s abandoned traditional punctuation; dashes precede
all the dialogue (shades of William Gaddis), which makes the words scan
faster on the page.
Although “The Shotgun Rule” is extremely harsh and violent, Huston never
stumbles over the line where the story’s sensation supplants empathy for
his pitiable characters.
Huston himself was 14 years old at the time he sets his story, and it’s a
period he recalls starkly and renders vividly. This is adolescence with
all its youthful promise and exuberance scraped to the bone. It’s an
unflinching and unpleasant, but compelling, depiction of aimless teenage
boys trying to rise to manhood. In Huston’s hands, it’s Greek tragedy on
speed.

In a more escapist vein is Sharp’s Second Shot (St. Martin’s Minotaur;
278
pages; $23.95), featuring her series heroine, Charlie Fox, an ex-Special
Forces soldier turned bodyguard. This British author is coming on fast,
having seen the potential in writing a series of thrillers in the spirit
of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books - military-trained killing machine goes
freelance - only with a woman behind the wheel, firing the big guns,
kicking butt all over the place.
It’s all a bit silly if you stop to think about it, but Sharp smartly
doesn’t give you the chance. She starts with Charlie Fox taking two slugs
in a freezing forest and throws the reader into a yarn in which her
heroine has been hired to protect a woman who’s just won the lottery from
a creepy ex-boyfriend - and help her locate the father she’s never known.
Sharp is getting the Barry Eisler treatment in terms of promotion - St.
Martin’s publicity is more about Sharp’s general studliness with guns and
motorcycles and Mensa membership than it is about her ability to write
believable characters and compelling plots. But Sharp is able to keep both
spinning at a fine clip.
(Coincidentally, Huston and Sharp are touring together, and will be
reading and signing at 7 p.m. Sept. 19 at “M” Is for Mystery, 86 E. Third
Ave., San Mateo.)

I love that Hard Case Crime publisher Charles Ardai has resurrected
Fright
(254 pages; $6.99 paperback) by all-time master of noir suspense Cornell
Woolrich. First published in 1950 under the pseudonym George Hopley, the
novel has been out of print ever since, and its rerelease is a testament
to just how dedicated Ardai is to ferreting out “lost” fiction from the
greats. (Look for a long-forgotten Steve Fisher novel to re-emerge soon.)
“Fright” isn’t in a class with Woolrich’s best, but it’s a reminder of
how
good he was at sustaining feverish terror. He was so good, in fact, that
he can haul a reader right over the most egregiously improbable plot
holes. Not sure that’s high praise, but in Woolrich’s case, it often was
an invaluable skill.
Speaking of Woolrich, today is your last chance to see his pulp-noir
world
brought to life onstage, in Word for Word Performing Arts Company’s
terrific production of “Angel Face” at Project Artaud Theater in San
Francisco. It’s hard to imagine the old pulpmeister getting more
reverential treatment. For tickets, go to www.zspace.org.
Also coming next month from Hard Case Crime: Dead Street, the final novel
from the best-selling American mystery writer of the 20th century, the
late Mickey Spillane. It’s only fitting that after all the laudatory obits
have been written, the Mick still has the last word, cranking out,
seemingly from beyond the grave, one last blast of inimitable pulp. The
manuscript was completed by Spillane devotee Max Allan Collins after
Spillane’s death in July 2006.
The best thing Hard Case is publishing right now? Ardai’s own books,
written under the alias Richard Aleas. Songs of Innocence (256 pages;
$6.99 paperback) is a terrific follow-up to Ardai’s debut, “Little Girl
Lost.” Find out what Ardai’s drinking and buy him one. And I’ll take five
of ‘em, while you’re at it.

While he may have been the best-selling American mystery writer, nobody
is
going to cite Spillane as the best, period. In that regard, my bet is that
Ross Macdonald would garner the most votes, from both writers and readers.
(Lately everyone from Donna Leon to my man Carl Kirkery at the Ha-Ra
saloon have been weighing in on Macdonald’s eminence.) In his 18-book
series of Lew Archer detective novels, Macdonald perfected the genre
popularized by Hammett and mythologized by Chandler.
So it’s a special treat to see in print The Archer Files (Crippen &
Landru; 360 pages; $25 paperback), in which venerable mystery expert (and
Macdonald biographer) Tom Nolan collects all of Macdonald’s short fiction
featuring Archer, as well as some never-published pieces of manuscript
that Nolan calls “case notes.” Working from the personal asides scattered
through the novels, Nolan starts the book with a wonderful biographical
sketch of the fictional detective, writing as if Archer were a real man,
not a work of Macdonald’s imagination.
Savoring Macdonald again, it’s immediately apparent what made him
eventually rise above his mentor Chandler, and leaves him today still
towering above most contemporary writers of detective fiction: humanity.
Working entirely within the confines of the genre, Macdonald used its
tropes like no American author before or since to explore the human
condition.
Excuse me, I’m going to go reread “The Far Side of the Dollar.” Or “The
Chill.” Or “The Galton Case.” Damn, he was good.”

Eddie Muller and John Billheimer will teach a 10-week course, beginning
Sept. 25, titled “The Politics, Passions and Personnel of Film Noir,” for
Stanford’s continuing education department. For more information, go to