This Crazy Writing Life: When Publishing Throws You A Curve Ball—Again—And The Scammers Circle Above

By Steven Womack

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We plan; God laughs.

In last month’s episode of This Crazy Writing Life, I told you the long, epic saga of a novel that my writing partner, Wayne McDaniel, and I wrote nearly a decade ago; a book called Pearson Place. The novel is based on/inspired by a true-life fact: Pearson Place is real.

Located in Queens, it’s a four-story warehouse that takes up an entire city block. This massive warehouse in the middle of one of Queens’s most industrial areas is the repository of every piece of evidence collected in every investigation of every crime by the New York City Police Department going back decades.

The stuff in there gobsmacks the imagination. Every illegal drug ever synthesized or grown; every weapon you could ever imagine using in a crime, ranging from the most modern high-tech anti-tank weapons to medieval maces and lances… Stolen electronics, illegal pornography. High profile crimes like evidence from the Central Park Jogger case. If it’s evidence associated with a crime, it wound up in Pearson Place.

In 1992, Donald Trump’s then-girlfriend Marla Maples’s publicist stole over two hundred pairs of Marla’s very expensive heels and had sex with them. He was charged with theft, found guilty, and his conviction overturned in 1994. He was retried and found guilty again in 1999. Needless to say, Marla—by then Mrs. Donald Trump—didn’t wanted the abused shoes back and they’re still in an evidence locker at Pearson Place. Wayne’s seen them and described them as icky.

Or as Wayne referred to them in the manuscript to Pearson Place: Mrs. Trump’s Humped Pumps…

Anyway, Pearson Place is the story of a single mother who’s an NYPD cop with a special needs toddler. She’s broke, desperate, looking for any way to make an extra buck. She takes on extra shifts guarding Pearson Place. Then she discovers she’s terminally ill. Even more desperate now to leave a legacy for her kid, she decides to pull off the heist of the century by ripping off the NYPD warehouse she’s supposed to be guarding.

Chaos ensues…

Last month, I described how after years of passes, rejections, and radio silence in response to our queries, we found an editor at an established prestigious house who loved the book and wanted to buy it. Everything’s done by committee, though, and there was one holdout on the acquisition team. She tried everything, including having Wayne and me do a rewrite, before finally giving up.

This took just over a year to resolve itself.

Frustrated beyond belief, Wayne and I decided to serialize the novel on Substack. We broke the manuscript up into digestible hunks, created a Substack account, and were writing supplemental material to go with it.

Then, out of nowhere (as happens so often in publishing), I got an email from a very successful writer and close friend whom I’ve known for decades, literally since she published her first novel in 1987. She read my column, said the book sounded interesting. Were we sure we wanted to go the Substack route?

It may be the only route left, I answered.

Let me talk to my editor, she said. Maybe she’ll take a look at it.

A couple of days later, an email from my friend’s editor landed in my inbox. She would love to read Pearson Place. Send it on.

So the Substack project is, for the time being, on hold.  I’ve been in this business too long to be anything but cautiously hopeful. But this book’s going to see the light of day, one way or another, even if—as Major Kong said in Dr. Strangelove—it harelips everybody on Bear Creek.

There are two publishing life lessons to be taken away here: 1) in publishing, you never know when the next curve ball’s gonna come at you, and sometimes it’s a good curveball; and 2) more than anything else, publishing is a people business.

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Speaking of people, there’s some real bad guys out there these days. Take Sherry J. Valentine, for instance. She sent me the following email on January 27th:

Hi Steven,

Blood Plot is deliciously dangerous, the kind of thriller that blurs the line between ambition and obsession until the distinction disappears entirely.

The premise alone is irresistible: a critically praised novelist no one reads decides to give audiences exactly what they crave, only to discover that authenticity has a terrifying cost. Watching Michael Schiftmann cross from observation into participation, and then into addiction, creates a chilling psychological descent that feels both satirical and deeply unsettling. It’s smart, twisted, and disturbingly plausible.

At Book and Banter Book Club, our readers are drawn to suspense that interrogates creativity, morality, and fame, stories that ask uncomfortable questions about what success demands and how far someone might go to achieve it. Blood Plot is exactly the kind of novel that sparks intense discussion, ethical debate, and “just one more chapter” nights.

We’d love to feature Blood Plot as an upcoming spotlight read, purchasing copies for our members and centering a full month of conversation around its themes and characters. A spotlight feature includes:

• A dedicated month-long focus, exploring Michael’s transformation, the cost of ambition, and the novel’s sharp commentary on the publishing world
• Organic reader buzz, with reactions, quotes, and insights shared across our club discussions and social spaces
• Author discovery, introducing readers to your broader body of work and award-winning career

Book and Banter exists to turn bold thrillers into shared experiences, stories readers don’t just finish, but dissect, debate, and recommend.

If you’re open to collaborating, we’d love to talk about bringing Blood Plot to our readers and giving it the thoughtful spotlight it deserves.

Warm regards,
Book and Banter Book Club

Now what, you might ask, is so objectionable about such a flattering email and an offer to help promote a book that, God knows, could use every little bit of help it can get?

Well, friends, let me tell you…

It’s a scam, a complete AI-generated con designed to lure unsuspecting, desperate-for-attention writers (which includes all of us) into a scheme to separate us from as much cash as possible. Once you’ve been around a while and have found enough of these missives in your inbox (I get them several times a week), you begin to develop your very own Spidey sense. The flattering text about my novel is clearly AI-generated. No one really writes like that, even if they’re real and really do love your stuff. There’s something about it that’s too slick, like a TV preacher or something.

And the emails are always from some generic mass-market server. In Ms. Valentine’s case, the incoming came from a Gmail box.

To make this even slicker and more insidious, there actually is an organization of readers and book clubs that share and discuss their favorite reads. Only it’s not the Book and Banter Book Club; it’s the Books and Banter Book Club.

Pretty clever, huh? Almost got that one past me.

A couple of Google searches revealed all this. Plus, I searched for Sherry J. Valentine and while there are lots of Sherry J. Valentines out there, not one of them had any association with the fake Book and Banter Book Club or the real Books and Banter Book Club. There’s also no mention of her on the real book club’s website.

So what’s the takeaway here? As I mentioned in the very first episode of This Crazy Writing Life nearly two years ago, writers have been prey for centuries. In our desperate longing for validation, affirmation, and the inevitable fame and fortune we all deserve, we’re often blind to those whose motives may not be as noble as ours. From the Famous Writers School of the Sixties and Seventies to the contemporary companies who will “publish” your novel and distribute it for a mere thirty-five grand, writers are seen by many as sheep to be sheared.

How do we protect ourselves? As Matty Walker said in Larry Kasdan’s magnificent Body Heat: Knowledge is power. Read the trades, scour the websites, especially SFWA’s fabulous website Writer Beware. It highlights specific scammers and con artists, exposing them by name.

And always remember the adage that’s as true in life as well as publishing: if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. A little dose of cynicism never hurt anybody.

That’s enough for now. As always, thanks for playing along. See you next month.

Oh, and Ms. Valentine? Just for S&Gs, I answered her email.

So far, crickets…

This Crazy Writing Life: Requiescat in pace—In Memory Of The Mass-Market Paperback

By Steven Womack

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Jim Milliot and Sophia Stewart’s December 12th article in Publisher’s Weekly isn’t actually an article.

It’s an obituary.

ReaderLink—the largest distributor of books to non-trade channel booksellers in North America—just announced that they would stop distributing mass-market paperbacks at the end of 2025. The mass-market paperback—once the single most popular reading format in the world—has been dying for over a quarter-century. ReaderLink’s decision is, to fall back on a perfectly valid cliché, the final nail in the coffin.

An eighty-six-year long ride is over.

The mass-market paperback had its roots in the Great Depression, when a huge demographic could barely afford food and rent, let alone luxuries like books. Publishers would do anything to sell more books, so in 1935 a British publisher named Allen Lane created Penguin Books in the U.K. and with it, the universal format (4.25” x 6.87”) that could be mass produced cheaply and distributed across a wide variety of markets and outlets. The first American paperback book publisher—Pocket Books—released its first book, Wuthering Heights, in 1939.

Not only were mass-market paperbacks affordable, they weren’t limited to sales in bookstores. In time, newsstands, drug stores, grocery stores, gift shops, airports, Big Box stores like Walmart, gas stations—anywhere you could put a cheap wire rack—became outlets.

The mass-market paperback also created what became known in publishing as the “midlist,” which enabled authors who probably wouldn’t make it in hardcover to gain an audience and earn a living. Several generations of writers thrived and became famous thanks to the mass-market paperback. Louis L’Amour wrote more than 130 books in his long career; all but four of them were mass-market paperbacks. Someone once told me that John D. MacDonald calculated the size of his advances for the Travis McGee novels on the first print run of his mass-market paperback.

Is that a true story? Who knows, but it’s a great story.

Mass-market paperbacks also outsold the hell out of hardcovers. In the PW article, Milliot and Stewart cited the figures for Jacqueline Susann’s 1966 blockbuster hit, Valley of the Dolls. Upon its release, Susann’s potboiler sold 300,000 hardcovers that year, which is certainly nothing to be ashamed of.

Then Bantam released the paperback in 1967 and it sold 4,000,000 copies in the first week. It went on to double that number in its first year. The mass-market paperback lifted the fortunes of publishers beyond the Big Five. The mass-market paperback played a huge role in making independent powerhouse Kensington Publishing as successful as it’s been. Milliot and Stewart cited Kensington CEO Steve Zacharius’s statement that the mass-market paperback was the foundation of Kensington’s success. Kensington’s best-selling author of all time is Fern Michaels; the bulk of her 42 million sales were mass-market paperbacks.

All genres benefited from the format, especially the most popular commercial genres like romance, mystery and crime fiction, and science fiction. In my own career, the mass-market paperback made me a nice living for nearly a decade. My first three book deals with St. Martin’s Press were hardcover and the sales were never that impressive. But once I launched my Music City Murders series, featuring private detective Harry James Denton, with Ballantine Books, my mass-market numbers built what career I had. I published six books in that series and every one of them was either nominated or won a major mystery award (including both an Edgar and Shamus Award). It all worked beautifully…

Until it didn’t anymore.

What happened?

I can only relate a personal experience here. In 1996, I signed a two-book contract with Ballantine Books (I had only taken single contracts before because, candidly, the money was pretty terrible and I didn’t want to get locked in). I’d been nominated for an Edgar twice, won it once, and had also been multiply nominated for the Shamus and short-listed for the Anthony. My editor at Ballantine said if I’d take a two-book deal, he'd move me into lead title and the second book in the contract would go hard/soft.

I took the offer. The first book in the deal was Murder Manual, published in 1998. After several Shamus nominations, I was thrilled to finally win one with that book. I began working on the second book in the deal when suddenly my editor seemed to go into an extended period of radio silence.

Finally, I reached out to him and told him how excited I was to finally see Harry James Denton in hardcover. When would I see a cover comp?

Long, awkward, silence…

“About that, Steve,” he said. “We’ve done an extensive audit on the sales of Murder Manual, and we thought the numbers were going to be impressive. Then, out of nowhere, we started getting a ton of returns. Your sell-through ultimately was so low we’ve cancelled the hardcover.”

He explained to me that through the late 90s, there were roughly 1100 companies across the country that were independent distributors; that is, they were small, often family-owned companies that served a specific local market. Most books were sold through those companies.

In the last few years, though, there had been a wave of acquisitions (with Nashville’s own Ingram Books being one of the most active at gobbling up smaller companies), changes in tax laws, and especially bankruptcies, which decimated that market. And while companies were either being acquired or working their way through bankruptcy courts, hundreds of thousands of mass-market paperbacks sat gathering dust, cheap paper fading to yellow, in hundreds of warehouses across the country.

When the companies were acquired or released from bankruptcy, hundreds of thousands of mass-market paperbacks—their covers ripped off and sent back to the publisher as returns—were shredded and pulped.

Milliot and Stewart backed up what my editor told me over twenty-five years ago. They quoted a study done by the Book Industry Study Group that revealed mass market sales in 1996 fell 3.3% from the previous year. The downward slope continued through the early 2000s, through the introduction of the eBook in 2006, until 2011, when eBook sales and mass market sales were roughly equal. Unfortunately, that parity of numbers disguised the fact that mass-market paperback sales were down by $500 million that year, while eBook sales had grown by $1 billion.

To deploy another effective cliché, it was death by a thousand cuts.

And now it’s dead. They’ll surely be a few mass-market paperbacks around for a few more years, but as a cultural force in society, as a huge segment of the publishing industry, it’s over.

The mass-market paperback democratized literature in America; it turned us into a nation of readers. When America went to war in December 1941, publishers stepped up with special format mass-market paperbacks in what were known as the “Armed Services Edition.” I have several of those in my collection, including Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent and several GI paperbacks my uncle carried across Europe and through the Battle of the Bulge. These old treasures are frail now, their cheap, high-acid content paper yellowed and brittle, their bindings cracked and flaking.

But they were carried by hundreds of thousands of soldiers through a world war and all those GIs found escape and comfort in them. And hopefully, they developed a love of reading that they carried with them through the rest of their lives.

It’s sad to see the mass-market paperback sunset. But as I’ve learned the hard way over many orbits around the sun, all good things must come to an end.

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Another valuable life lesson is that when one door closes, another opens. Over the next few months, we’re going to go on an adventure together by way of this column.

I have a writing partner in New York City, Wayne McDaniel. He’s a fabulous screenwriter, novelist, documentarian, with an MFA in Film from Columbia University, as well as a helluva great guy. In 2014, we published a novel called Resurrection Bay.

Several years after that, we wrote a novel together called Pearson Place. This project is literally one of the best books I’ve ever been involved in. I’ll have more to say on the book itself next month.

Wayne and I have spent the last few years trying to find a publisher for this novel. We gave it everything we had. We set up a Query Tracker account and queried dozens of agents. Zilch. Nada. As many of you know, getting trad publishing’s attention these days is harder than ever.

Finally, through a connection (which is really how almost everything is done in publishing), we got an editor at a medium-sized-but-prestigious-publisher to take a look at the manuscript.

We were gobsmacked and thrilled when she loved the book. Literally, that’s what she told us. She loved the freakin’ thing. As in many corporate entities, though, all decisions are made by consensus and there was one person on the acquisitions committee who had problems with the book and vetoed it.

Then this editor did something I have literally never seen before in my forty years in publishing; she said if Wayne and I would do a rewrite and address the issues her colleague had, she’d take the book back and try again.

Without hesitation, we did a rewrite.

The editor loved what we did and took it back to committee. Six months and more went by and finally she called us, nearly in tears, and said her colleague wouldn’t budge. We were all heartbroken, but I think she took it harder than we did.

So Wayne and I decided to go a different route. We’re going to serialize the book on Substack. We’ve broken the book out into individual Substack posts/chapters and are writing supplemental material to go with it and just learning how this is done.

It’s a revolutionary way to get books out there, digitized and delivered via the Internet. Nothing like this has ever been done before.

Oh, wait. There was that Dickens fellow who did it with David Copperfield, The Pickwick Papers, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood—among others—over 160 years ago. I guess everything old is new again.

Thanks for playing along. See you next month.