Robert Rosenwald’s Blog

It’s an interesting experience to trade houses with a friend, especially when his is in southern France. Specifically in the Dordogne–the foie gras, walnut, and truffles capital of France. We got here last Monday, only a day late due to the volcano but were fortunately rerouted to Toulouse from Paris so we ended up closer to our planned destination than originally booked. The next day our friend, writer Laurie R. King, joined us for several days, and on Wednesday we went to the market in Sarlat. We came home with, among many other exquisite items, a couple of duck breasts, some fresh fennel, a bag of dried cepes (porcinis if you prefer the Italian), various sausages, cheeses, wines, and a couple of confit d’oie (goose legs that had been confited). So last night, I decided it was time to cook the duck breasts. I found Janice’s Romertopf and remembered that I haven’t seen mine in quite a while and made a mental note to hunt it down when we get back to Scottsdale. If you’re unaware the Romertopf is a clay pot cooker. You soak it in water for about an hour or so, empty it, throw in your food, put it into a cold oven, turn on the heat and come back in an hour or two and voila–you have dinner. I salted and peppered the duck breasts, reconstituted about an ounce of the cepes, cut up a head of fennel and cubed 4 small white potatoes. Into the Romertopf went the fennel, the mushrooms chopped up, the cubed spuds and them the duck breasts, skin side up, to top it off. Cover on the Romertopf put into the oven and turned heat up to 375-400 (they use centigrade over here and it was around 200) and left it untouched for a little over an hour. Took off the lid, made a few slashes in the skin of the dusk breast, and then turned the broiler on for about 10 minutes to crisp it up. Over the course of the hour’s cooking the Romertopf, into which I had put NO liquid, completely filled up with juices and the fat from the duck. The potatoes, mushrooms, and fennel cooked in these juices were sublime, as my brother-in-law, Gary, would say. The duck breast wasn’t too shabby either. After draining off the liquids and cooling them I am left with about 1/2 cup of duck fat. Gee, I wonder what I should do with that?

Well, I’m back.

I have owned approximately 8 Volvos over the course of my 62 years. I currently own 2 Volvo V70s – a 2000 and a 2004. I was about to trade in the 2000 for a new XC90. Unfortunately the plastic case on my remote for the older car broke (the other plastic case had broken about 3 years ago) so I could no longer attach it to my key chain. As a result of being forced to pay $260 for a new remote (which I don’t need) rather than $10 for a new $2.00 plastic case to house my old remote electronics in (which is all I really need) I have decided to trade in my old Volvo for a Lexus and to never buy a Volvo again. I’m sure someone can justify nickel and diming customers but not to me. It’s a shame. If this is what Ford brought to the table congratulations on losing a loyal customer.

Who cares. Mainly I started it as place where I could bitch about small annoyances that I know I can’t get redressed anywhere without spending a disproportionate amount of time on. But also I was curious about the nature of blogging. Do people just find these things? Do I care whether anyone reads it or not? I don’t think so but maybe. At any rate I have never been one to maintain a journal of any sort and so now, at 62, I guess I’m giving it a shot.

We publish approximately thirty-eight new books per year. Of those roughly thirty-three will be second, third, or fourth novels by authors we originally published. Thus we have around five openings per year for authors new to our list. We have had remarkable success with authors we introduce partly because the media are very forgiving of debut authors. They are always looking for new talent as are the library buyers–our main customer. Among our other main customers are independent booksellers and independent mystery bookstores both of whom do a brisk business in modern first editions. An author can be a virgin only once. So, when we publish an author who previously self-published, we lose all sales to the collector market. What’s more the reviewers will often ignore or be much more critical of a second book, especially from a self-published author. Whether fair or not, the perception is that a self-published author took a shortcut and didn’t go through the full editorial process that any “real” publisher exercises. That editorial process includes substantive editing, copy editing, and proof reading–three very different types of editorial work that every manuscript we publish receives. We receive nearly 1,000 submissions per year and can accept less than one-half of one percent of them. If we have to choose one manuscript between two or three new-to-our-list writers we can’t afford to choose the previously published author. And because it costs us, on average, nearly $50 for every manuscript we evaluate we are unwilling to to look at material from previously self-published authors. Fair? No. Might we miss a great book? Absolutely. We are imperfect. We’ll miss some great material, but we’ll continue to do the best we can. So, my hope in writing this is that at least one person who is thinking of self-publishing as a way to break into the business reads this and thinks about it very carefully before so doing. Is it always wrong to self-publish? No. You may have written The Bridges of Madison County, but then again there may be a reason that no “real” publisher has accepted your manuscript.

My wife, Barbara Peters who is also our senior editor, our daughter, Susan Malling, and I started Poisoned Pen Press ten years ago (yes, this is our tenth anniversary year and we do have a great party at Bouchercon planned) because we were unhappy with the direction we saw the large NY publishers heading. We felt that there were a core number of readers who wanted well-written, well-edited, intelligent mysteries to read. After ten years I feel I can say we were right. And before anyone screams at me about editing mistakes in a couple of recent books, all I can say is that in the course of growing and changing how we do production we made some mistakes. I think we have identified them and have come up with fixes. But we will still err from time to time and when we do we’ll do everything in our power to fix it. Just let us know if you find a typo or other error by dropping an email to production@poisonedpenpress.com

One question I keep hearing is whether we will share information with anyone else re. the people who signup for our enewsletter. NO! NO! NO! Emphatically, no, we will not. We use contact information to send requested materials from us, not from some third party. Just to put this into perspective I get, on average, 500 email messages per day of which 420 are flagged as SPAM by my SPAM blocker. I will NEVER permit our list be used by any anonymous third party for marketing anything to anyone.

Another question that I’ve gotten is along the lines of whether we are a self-publisher. Poisoned Pen Press is an absolutely conventional publishing house. We pay authors advances (albeit they are small) and we pay better royalties than most mainstream publishers. We make no demands for money of any sort from our authors. We edit all manuscripts, we pay for typesetting, we hire illustrators to do cover art, we create ARCs (advance reading copies) which we mail out to all mainstream book reviewers and independent bookstores, we pay for all costs of manufacturing finished books. Our typical print runs are between 3,000 and 3,500 hardcover copies.

To those who are thinking of submitting to us, we work directly with unagented authors as well as agented authors, with no preference given to one over the other. However we are not able to pickup authors who have had their series canceled by other publishers. Our main focus is on introducing new, previously unpublished authors. And for all practical purposes we won’t publish an author who self-published themselves. I’ll be posting an entry on this blog soon to explain why for those who aren’t happy with that policy and think it is arbitrary. Anyone who is is interested in submitting a manuscript to us should go to our website to read our manuscript submission guidelines. They are clear and explain what we are looking for and how we want to receive it.

For the second day in a row I took one of my Volvos into the dealership for routine work. One of the benefits of taking them to the dealer is that they wash the car after doing the service. It seems like every time I go in I get told the car will be done at such and such a time. For the most part they’ve been fairly close as to when the work would be completed. BUT, every time I pay the bill and then they call up for the car to be brought to the front and I wait. And I wait. And after about ten minutes I go back to the cashier and ask again that the car be brought up, and finally it comes. “It was being washed” is invariably the explanation. Now here’s the point. If you say the work will be done in an hour to me that means I can get in the car and drive off in an hour. And if you can’t deliver that then tell me the work will be done in an hour and a quarter.