Testing the Market

Pat Browning is a refugee from California, where she was a travel agent, legal secretary and award-winning reporter, but not all at once. Now retired and dodging tornadoes in her native Oklahoma, she’s writing her second mystery starring – surprise! – a small-town reporter.

Blogs, podcasts, book trailers, Web sites, talk radio – so many shiny toys to keep a writer from writing. Promotion, who needs it? Every author, that’s who. If you’ve written a book, crank up the promotion wagon and get the show on the road.

With my first mystery, Full Circle, I did it the traditional way and learned everything the hard way. Now I’m at it again, only this time I’m promoting a mystery that isn’t finished. It’s called test marketing.

At a workshop in Northern California a few years ago, literary agents Michael Larsen and Elizabeth Pomada critiqued first-page submissions. One of their handouts was titled “15 Ways to Test-Market Your Book to Guarantee Its Success.” I didn’t have a book to test market at the time but I kept that handout and I’m ready to give it a try.

The 15 ways are much too detailed for a blog, but I’m looking at No. 6.

You can test-market the manuscript for a novel or a proposal for a nonfiction book. Once you finish your proposal, use the Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soul recipe for making sure your work is 100%: Send it to 40 readers. Have them grade your humor, your anecdotes and your work as a whole on a scale of one to ten. The more specific you are in the feedback you want, the more helpful your readers will be.

Get feedback from your networks before submitting or publishing your book. If you are a speaker, make every audience a focus group for your book. Whether you’ve sold your book to a publisher or not, as soon as you integrate your initial feedback into your finished manuscript, print it single spaced, back to back and have it bound in small quantities. Call it “A Special Limited Edition.”

Sell copies at your talks and offer those who give you feedback on it an autographed book and an acknowledgment in the published edition. Keep adding changes before you reprint, and keep reprinting until your audiences run out of suggestions. The primary object of this edition isn’t to make money but to get feedback on the manuscript. After you’ve received all of the feedback you can get, reread the manuscript to see if you can find changes worth making. Then integrate the changes into the manuscript.

I’m starting small, and on the Internet. By the time you read this I’ll have a do-it-yourself Web site up and walking, with the first three chapters of my work-in-progress, a mystery I’m calling Solstice. I’m soliciting comments and suggestions. The URL is www.prairiegal.net.

Warning: It’s a cozy or amateur sleuth mystery — no steamy sex scenes, very little blood on the floor. Constructive criticism will be welcome. Destructive comments – do I need to tell you what will happen to those?

And moving right along … I’ve hit a small pothole on my road to Web site building, but at the very least, Chapter 1 will be there, with an e-mail link back to me so you can tell how why you really, really love it, or hate it. With luck, all three chapters will be up. If not, I hope you’ll keep checking back.

Meantime, take a look at the Larsen-Pomada Web site at www.larsen-pomada.com. You’ll find a lot of good tips for writers, including the famous 15 Ways to Test-market Your Book to Guarantee Its Success.

Bowing out now, with a big THANK YOU to Evelyn David for inviting me to the party.

Pat Browning

Adventures in Nature

Full Disclosure: I’m not an outdoor girl. My idea of camping is a hotel without room service. And yet, I’ve just returned from one of the best vacations I’ve ever had…and me and nature mixed it up.

The husband and I headed off to Bar Harbor a week ago. Let’s just say that the loooooong car ride did not bode well for an anniversary celebration. But a good night’s sleep and some pancakes with native wild blueberries, made me believe that the husband could live another day. Bar Harbor is a quaint village by a restless ocean. It’s got a library to die for…and Acadia National Park.

I’ve been to parks before – but they’ve always been little preserves of nature in the midst of concrete (think Central Park). But this was acres of lush foliage, filled with incredible contrasts from a sandy beach to a soaring peak. We hiked about five miles through the park, and while I won’t try to convince you that I scaled Mt. Everest in sandals, I’d like to think I held my own with Mother Nature. Frankly, I wanted a brass band to play when I used the outhouse provided for hikers, but I suspect that I don’t get to be called Nature Girl until I really get back to nature, if you catch my drift. All that hiking stirs up an appetite so we ended our trek at the Jordan Pond House – with scrumptious popovers and fish chowder.

Alas, our time in Bar Harbor was way too brief, but we’re already planning a return trip. We next headed to Prince Edward Island, across a nine-mile bridge. There we found clean air, rolling green farmland, and lighthouses that dot the rocky shores of the cool crisp waters. But though I’d never been to PEI before, I felt immediately at home, thanks to the delightful series by Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables. Exactly one hundred years ago, we were first introduced to the fictional PEI town of Avonlea and the red-haired orphan Anne (with an “e,” as she insisted) Shirley stole into our hearts.

Of course, there is a commercial side to this native heroine. Tourism is as big a crop as the native potatoes and strawberries grown here. In Charlottetown Centre, there is an Anne Shirley shop, where a saleswoman dressed in a period costume, also sported a tongue stud. There are Anne Shirley chocolates, Anne Shirley soda (red, because Anne declares, “I love bright red drinks, don’t you? They taste twice as good as any other color.”), and Anne Shirley dolls, books, and DVDs.

I bought a new copy of the book from the tongue-studded Anne, and reveled once again in the never-out-of-date story of the little girl with the “vivid imagination,” who roamed the natural paradise of Prince Edward Island. I’m not quite ready for my Girl Scout nature badge, but my stay in nature sparked my own “vivid imagination.” How about murder in a national park?? But the amateur sleuth stays in a quaint Bed and Breakfast with indoor plumbing??

Evelyn David

Reentry is a…

…well, if I have to spell it out…

Anyway, I’m back from San Francisco, the City by the Bay, and my favorite next to my hometown, New York. The trip was fun-filled, exercise-filled, food-filled. We are ful-filled, as a result. The first part of the trip was work, if you consider talking about yourself and your books work. (I don’t.) A piece of advice: if you live in the Bay Area and can get yourself to San Mateo, run, don’t walk, to the M Is for Mystery bookstore on Third Avenue. I was fortunate enough to have been invited to do a signing/reading there (a shout out to my two new friends, Judi, the Millbrae librarian and Kevin, a fellow East Coaster now West Coaster) and was amazed by their stock, their staff, and all of the extras they offer. I got a lovely M Is for Mystery baseball hat which I sported around San Francisco while I was there. The store is owned by a charming man named Ed Kaufman and he is a mystery aficionado. Anything that you might want, he has. He has the most impressive collection of signed first editions (including Extracurricular Activities!) I’ve ever seen and I was fortunate to pick up a copy of Lisa Lutz’s second book, Curse of the Spellmans (more on that later).

Since I was traveling with two teenage girls, most of our trip was spent shopping and eating, although we did manage to get in some culture while we were there, hitting the DeYoung museum. The DeYoung is a nice, manageable museum in terms of size and boasts a tower from which you can take in a panoramic view of San Francisco. It’s not high enough to be scary for those of us who fear heights, but it is high enough to get a bird’s eye view of this fabulous city. But I still wouldn’t get too close to the glass. I did that at Coit Tower and managed to bang my forehead right into the protective plexiglass, alarming the other Tower-goers and forcing my two teen companions to disavow any knowledge of me as a person.

We also made a trip to the Palace of Fine Arts, a spectacular structure, in my opinion. There is a hands-on science museum on the grounds called The Exploratorium, and any fears that I had that this would skew young and not be interesting to the teens were soon squashed. While they ran around the museum taking in all of the experiments (including one which challenges your sense of convention by having you drink from a toilet that has been configured into a water fountain), I sat on a bench and people watched, which is probably one of my favorite hobbies. The parade of Bermuda shorts paired with sandals and socks was just too spectacular to miss.

Our afternoons were spent refueling (the girls) and reading (me). (I wore them out, what with my insistence that we climb every hill in the city.) While I was traveling, I started reading The Spellman Files, Lisa Lutz’s first novel about a family of San Francisco private investigators, which couldn’t have been a better pick, not only because it was set in the city I was visiting but because it was one of the most entertaining reads I have consumed in a while. If you have a chance, get yourself a copy (now in paperback). This is not your ordinary family—one of the family members begins her P.I. career at the tender age of six—nor is it your run-in-the-mill story or plot. I promise you that you will be entertained. I started the second book, the aforementioned Curse of the Spellmans, during the trip as well and enjoyed it equally, if not a bit more because I had gotten acquainted with the characters already.

The best part of the trip was reconnecting with two old friends (shout out to Rose and Chris!) who attended the book signing, shuttled me around San Francisco and Sausalito, and made my trip very special. I can’t begin to tell you both how much I appreciate your support.

So back to reentry…it’s tough (I’ve cleaned up my act a little bit…but the old profane Maggie will return soon). I still have jet lag four days after arriving home, I can’t find my phone charger, my suitcase is still open in my bedroom filled with dirty clothes, and I’m way behind on work. Was it worth it? Without a doubt.

Maggie Barbieri

Writers Critique Groups

Some writers hate them and others swear by them. I’m in the latter group. I was first introduced to critique groups back when I was writing my first book that was published, Two Ways West. I couldn’t find a critique group where I lived, but my sister found one and took my manuscript chapter by chapter. Because I wasn’t there, they were merciless. But I was glad they were. Author Francine Rivers was a part of that group.

I didn’t have a clue what point-of-view meant and when they told my sister I had point-of-view problems I told her I only knew what it meant to have a point-of-view. They managed to get across to her and then to me about POV.

When we moved to where we live now, I discovered a notice in the paper for a writers’ critique group and I could hardly wait. I’ve belonged to that group ever since. It changed over time, as well as the people who attend. In the beginning, there were so many people we didn’t always get to read. But if you missed, then you were first the next time.

From time to time, the group grew smaller, always to those most committed to making their writing better. For a long while, we had a wonderful leader named Willma Gore. She taught me so much about every aspect of writing. She eventually left us too, and moved on. Now she’s busy teaching writing in Sedona AZ and still selling articles. Over 80, she just returned from what she says is her last book tour–but I don’t believe it.

Now, our group consists of the very woman who actually started the group before I was a part of it, a young school teacher writing children’s books, a retired rancher who is also writing a children’s book, and various others who show up from time to time.

I feel it’s imperative to run my book by the group. It’s amazing what suggestions they each come up with. I don’t always agree, but they make me think and make some kind of change. Once I’ve read the whole book through, since I’m two books ahead, I can take the time to do this, I’ll send it off to my good friend, Willma, for a final edit.

After that I’ll go through it one last time and send it off to my publishers–and you can be sure the editor there will also find things to change. By that time, unless it destroys the plot or is illogical, I don’t argue. I’m ready to move onto my next project.

For me, having a critique group to run my novels by has been invaluable.

Marilyn
http://fictionforyou.com

Summer Vacation Angst

When I was a kid the first school assignment each fall was to write about my summer vacation. The only problem was my family didn’t go on summer vacations, not as a rule. We didn’t have the extra money and it just wasn’t something my parents were accustomed to doing. I come from a long line of people who work forty to sixty hours a week and the only vacations they took involved baling hay or the odd hunting/fishing trip. My summer vacation essays were short and generally avoided the assigned topic as much as possible.

Last year I combined three library events in Missouri with my vacation. My brother and I played tourist in the St. Louis area and despite the heat, had a great time. We went in the Arch and viewed the exhibits. My brother actually took the tram/elevator up to the top. I confess, I’m not crazy about heights or small cramped spaces. We were there the week after the tram had gotten stuck and riders had been stranded for a few hours. Just the thought of that was enough to keep me on the ground. I was perfectly happy sitting on a bench, reading, and waiting for my brother to return with photographs.

I’ve been thinking about where I want to go this year during my time off from my day job. Usually I just stay home and catch up on all the things I never get to during the rest of the year. You know – painting, cleaning out closets, cleaning out gutters, well, just cleaning in general. Nothing too exciting.

In July of 2001, my brother and I took a big trip. We flew to North Carolina, rented a car and spent a week on the Outer Banks. We saw all there was to see and then some – the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kitty Hawk, Ocracoke Island and the Blackbeard Museum, the reenactment play of the Missing Colony of Roanoke, and the beach at Nags Head. A nervous flyer, it was my brother’s first and probably last airplane flight. We came home sunburned and happy, then less than six weeks later planes were crashed into buildings and life in the United States – especially travel – changed forever.

This year I don’t have a new book to promote (yet), so I won’t be planning my vacation around libraries and bookstores. If gas prices don’t hit $5 a gallon before the end of the month, I may drive to Branson, Missouri for a few days. Branson is a country music boomtown and home of the Silver Dollar City theme park. It’s a fun place if you don’t mind the heat and the summer crowds. I figure I can last about two days, maybe three, before I’m dying to come home.

I don’t know – it wouldn’t take much to talk me into staying home in the first place, investing in some new patio furniture, and reading a few dozen mysteries. Might even work on the next Evelyn David book! Okay, I’d probably have to do some painting and yard work too.

What about you? What was your best summer vacation? I promise you don’t have to write an essay about it if you don’t want to. There will be no grades assigned.

The Southern Half of Evelyn David

True Crime

Jeff Markowitz has written two mysteries for Five Star, A Minor Case of Murder (released in 2006) and It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Murder (coming from Five Star in 2009). He will join Evelyn David, Jack Getze and David Handler on the panel, Laugh or I’ll Kill You: Humorous Mysteries at the New York City Public Library on July 15. Jeff’s website can be found at www.publishedauthors.net/jeffmarkowitz. Jeff blogs at www.xanga.com/doahsdeer.

When my mother read my first book I could tell that something was troubling her. Finally, she just had to ask. “Did you intend it,” she asked, “to be funny?” You see, it troubled my mom that I had written a funny mystery. Mysteries aren’t supposed to be funny, she told me.

I didn’t set out to write a “humorous mystery” in the sense of identifying “humorous mysteries” as the subgenre I intended to inhabit. But I did set out to write a mystery that reflected my own worldview, and apparently, some of you find that worldview funny. (Of course, to put this gently, some of you are deeply disturbed).

So now I write humorous mysteries. And people expect me to be funny when I talk about writing. I have until July 15 to figure out what’s so funny. Or to lower people’s expectations.

Sometimes, when I’m having trouble coming up with a plot for my next mystery, I think I’d like to write true crime. And I know just the story. Long before I ever considered becoming a writer of murder mysteries, my wife and I would make a trip every winter to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. It was an annual pilgrimage, a week of cross-country skiing in and around the Jackson Ski Touring Foundation. Every trip was memorable, but only one trip was memorable for murder.

It was the winter of 1985. Driving north, we caught the tail-end of a news item on the car radio, nothing unusual, something about an open murder investigation. And then we arrived at this very small inn, one that we had not stayed in before, just outside of Jackson. The place had perhaps a dozen guest rooms, so, even at capacity it wouldn’t be busy, and yet, when we checked into the inn, things seemed especially subdued. But the snow was outstanding.

It was the kind of place where you would step outside, wax your skis and ski right from the door of the lodge. We spent the first day deep in the back-country. But when we returned to the inn, we noticed a news crew finishing up at the front. And that night, the inn was nearly deserted. If I hadn’t known better, I would have said we were the only guests.

But the conditions were outstanding. The next day, we took a long ski tour on the East Pasture Loop, and, returning to the inn from a different direction, we were confronted by yellow crime scene tape.

It took a few hours to piece together the story, but, apparently, several days before we arrived, someone had murdered the innkeeper and his wife, setting the bodies ablaze. My own wife was understandably anxious.

But the ski conditions were outstanding. I didn’t want to leave. “They’re not killing guests,” I told my wife, as I pushed furniture up against the door.
But we did leave, cutting short our vacation in the White Mountains and heading for Cape Cod, the beach beautiful in the dead of winter, ice floating on the water.

And that was really all I knew about the story until I stumbled upon a website recently. Apparently, in January of 1985, several days after the murders in New Hampshire, the remains of two charred bodies were found in a burned-out barn in Alachua County, Florida. Although there was evidence connecting the dead bodies in Florida to the dead bodies in New Hampshire, it took eighteen months to make a positive identification. The bodies in Florida were eventually identified as the daughter of the innkeepers and her ne’er-do-well boyfriend. A lengthy suicide note explained that they had killed the young woman’s parents because they didn’t approve of her boyfriend. Then they took their own lives so that they “could be together forever in death.”

I was right. They weren’t killing guests. This was no random act of violence. It was a crime of passion committed by a disturbed family member. I am tempted, even now, to tell my wife I told you so. But she is a passionate woman. I worry about disturbing her. It’s probably safer just to use it in a story.

Jeff Markowitz

Pollyanna Grows Up

I was flipping through the channels the other day and there it was. A movie that my kids wouldn’t be caught dead watching, but which I am perfectly content, nay happy, to rewatch on an endless loop. It’s not Hitchcock, Scorsese, or Coppola. It’s pure, unadulterated, treacly sweet Disney: Pollyanna starring Hayley Mills.

While it was the American debut of Ms. Mills, the movie also starred old Hollywood favorites like Academy Award winners Jane Wyman and Karl Malden, and the ever-brilliant Agnes Moorhead.

Watching this movie is like eating a grilled cheese sandwich, followed by chocolate pudding served in an old, blue custard cup. It’s visual comfort food that takes me back to a quieter, gentler time – even if in my heart of hearts, I know that period in my life wasn’t ever quite as calm or as kind as I remember.

There’s a sweetness and simplicity to the Pollyanna story. A poor orphan girl comes to live with her rich, cold aunt, and with innocent goodness transforms a whole town. Pollyanna doesn’t need years of therapy having lost both her parents at an early age. She isn’t haunted by demons or bitter about being forced to live in an attic by an uncaring guardian. When she falls and is paralyzed, her hair is immaculate. When the doctor picks her up to take her to Baltimore for delicate spine surgery – there are no backboards to immobilize her body, just Doc Chilton tenderly carrying her in his arms to the train station. Little Jimmy Watson is adopted by old man Pendergast (bravo to the incomparable Adolphe Menjou), and there’s no home inspection by social workers. For that matter, Pollyanna at 12, still wears pigtails, has no body piercings, and her greatest joy is to win a doll in a carnival game. It’s not even an American Girl or Bratz doll.

There is, thankfully, no gritty realism in this movie. Maybe it’s a cop-out, but Pollyanna is the perfect antidote, at times, to my troubled world vision. It’s refreshing to believe that we should always look for the good in our fellow man. It’s comforting to think that sheer decency can make an enormous impact. It’s heartening to believe in the power of an individual to effect change.

Carolyn Hart has explained that she likes to write traditional mysteries because “the good guys always win.” Me too. I can’t control much in this world. But just like in Harrington, the “Glad Town,” in the universe I help create of Mac Sullivan, Rachel Brenner, and the Irish wolfhound Whiskey, the good guys always win.

Evelyn David

On a Wing and a Prayer

“I don’t know what to do.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“What can I do?”

How many of us have said these same things when we have heard that someone is walking a bumpy road or enduring a trial? The answer is simple. For number 1: pray. For number 2: say a prayer. For number 3: same as number 2. It’s that simple.

And you can always do the tuna casserole if you have to keep your hands busy. That works pretty well, too.

Life is alternately hard and easy. It is a series of ebbs and flows. Sometimes, you are riding a wave of good fortune and mild seas while at other times, you are adrift, navigating bumpy waters, hanging on for dear life. Sometimes it’s other people who are in the midst of bad times. But one thing is for sure, we will all experience some kind of hardship and we all need each other to see us through. Cherish the good times and reach out in the bad. Because by reaching out—by saying “I need you, I need your prayers”—you will be allowing others to do what they can to see you through the rough times. Accept it graciously because without the ability to receive, nobody will ever feel the joy of giving.

I had a couple of years of bumpy seas myself. The first thing that was done for me, en masse, was a prayer service at my church. Very simple, very plain—just a darkened church with some votive candles, my favorite songs, some prayers from the heart—but the room was filled to the brim with people I knew, some I didn’t, and some just acquaintances. The word had gone out: one of us needs help. And everyone responded. I didn’t need anything else.

The group was diverse in every way possible: by age, by faith, by economic status, by hometown. But it was one thing that they could all do, to say, as a group: “We’re here; we love you; we’ll help you get through this. We are doing something.”

And if you have ever felt the power of someone, or everyone, sharing your collective burden, you know that it is a comfort. Together, despite our many differences, we came together to pray.

Prayer is a funny thing: some people embrace it, while others eschew it. I feel that prayer is a way to put positive energy into the world and to me, there’s nothing negative about that. When we pray—and I don’t care to which God or higher power you pray or we’re talking about—we focus on a power or energy that is beyond us. And if it centers us and takes us out of ourselves and into a different space, it’s all good.

One of us needed help today. So five of us gathered at a critical hour in this person’s life, when she would submit to a test that would tell her if what the doctors thought they saw on another, more general test, was indeed cancer. As we held hands and offered prayers between the silent spaces, I felt a power pass between us, an energy. And as the tears flowed from her best friend onto the individual hands of each woman, we acknowledged that we are here. We are doing something. We are praying.

Maggie

Time to Celebrate (for a few short moments)

I typed The End on my latest Deputy Tempe Crabtree mystery. Of course now I have to do the most important part and that is editing. I’ll wait a couple of days to get started with that.

One thing many readers don’t realize, it’ll be about two years before this one is in print.

The next offering in this series is called Kindred Spirits from Mundania Press. It will be out in September. The following September I expect the following Tempe book to make it’s debut, Dispel the Mist.

While writing, every author is busy planning how they will market each book. Like most everyone else, I have events going on all the time.

The places I’m going this month are listeed on the website. What that doesn’t tell you is for the park gig on the Fourth of July, it not only means hauling my books, but also an EZ-up (tent without sides, 2 tables and 2 chairs) probably half way through the park–and that depends upon how easily we find a parking spot near te park.

The West Coast Author Premier is a bit easier becauase all I have to haul is my books and handouts for my presentation. (Of course I must remember to print them out.) My presentation is at 10:30 a.m., which is good, then I’ll be all done.

The first night in Ventura we’re staying in a haunted room in a Bed and Breakfast at our request, the second night in my youngest daughter’s brand new home. Will blog about both.

For the writers’ group, of course I have handouts.

With a schedule like this, sometimes it difficult to find a time to breathe, much less write.

This is what I’m doing for the books I already have–and I’m also working on the schedule for the new book due in September.

Slight confession, I love it, just wish I were younger.

Marilyn
http://fictionforyou.com

The Movie or the Book?

I’ve always been one to read the book before seeing the movie or television series spinoff; thus I’m usually disappointed in the movie. There have been exceptions of course. A good actor or actress can tip the scales.

My top ten for where the movie or television series was better than the book:
1. Jaws – the cast, the visuals, the music. That was some movie!
2. Lonesome Dove – loved the movie, never made it all the way through the book.
3. To Kill a Mockingbird – the movie was beyond wonderful; the book was merely fantastic. Okay so I love both but I’ve seen the movie more times than I’ve read the book.
4. The Client (the movie was one of Susan Sarandon’s best roles. Loved the banter between her and Tommy Lee Jones) – The book was good but I didn’t care for the television series
5. A Time for Killing – (the movie was better than the book.) The book was one of my least favorite of John Grisham’s list. I didn’t care for The Firm in either the book or movie version.
6. The Awakening Land (loved the miniseries although Conrad Richter novels are very good)
7. The Hunt for Red October – excellent movie, good book
8. Silence of the Lambs – Jodie Foster is and always will be “Clarice.”
9. The Shining (although that’s a close call, Jack Nicholson makes the movie stand out.)
10. The Godfather – the cast was perfect.

My top ten for where the book was far better than the movie or tv series:
1. Patriot Games – the plot in the book was much more exciting
2. The Kathy Reich novels – I just can’t get into the Bones tv series
3. Jeffery Deaver’s Bone Collector series – the books are excellent, the movies are exciting, but not nearly as interesting as the books.
4. In Cold Blood – the book was much scarier than the movie. The book Helter Skelter was also scarier than the mini-series.
5. The Little House On the Prairie books – when the tv series aired I couldn’t get over the fact that Mary wasn’t blind. Even at ten or eleven I was comparing the show to the books and finding the show lacking.
6. Da Vinci Code – I know some people don’t like the book but I enjoyed reading it – the movie not so much. Tom Hanks seemed totally miscast.
7. Contact – I had such high hopes for the Jodie Foster movie and was so disappointed.
8. Cold Mountain – the book was much better than the movie.
9. Jurassic Park – I liked the intricacies of the book’s plot best, but I have to admit the movie was exciting. I’ll call that one a toss-up.
10. The Stand – couldn’t make it all the way through the mini-series. The book was very good.

If you’ve seen the movie and read the book, which do you prefer? Do you think it makes a difference if you read the book before seeing the movie?

I’ve always hoped for a movie or tv series from Nevada Barr’s books. I can’t understand why some producer doesn’t see the potential.

Do you have a favorite book you’d like to see made into a movie or tv series? Of course my first choice is Murder Off the Books. My co-author and I would love to see “Mac and Rachel” on the small screen every week. We’re just not sure who we’d want to play “Whiskey.” Suggestions?

Evelyn David