A brief 'mention in dispatches'

Traveling with Service Animals has snagged a nice little notice in Midwest Living magazine. It may not seem like much—it's not exactly a review—but this small item will catch a lot of eyes.

Midwest Living, one of the mighty Meredith Corporation's many regional magazines, has a circulation of more than 960,000, chiefly in heartland America's small towns and suburbs—dog people country.

Co-author Chris and I are heartened.

"A winner," Booklist says

Booklist, the American Library Association's review organ and one of the top four advance review media in the United States (the others are Library Journal, Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews), is making nice on Traveling with Service Animals in its upcoming Sept. 1 issue. Today we saw the uncorrected proof of the notice. It follows:

"The number of trained service animals (not including therapeutic and emotional-support anmals) has exploded in the U.S. and Canada, and many of these animals' handlers are avid travelers. But how does one approach a vacation with a service animal? In wonderfully practical language, Kisor and Goodier, both of whom use hearing dogs, walk the reader through all forms of travel with their partners. Mainly concerned with travel within North America, the book covers airline travel, long-distance trains, automobile and bus trips, cruises, and what documentation is required and/or advisable. Each chapter discusses the basis, such as how to ticket the service animal, choice of seats, when and how to toilet the animal, and concerns such as passing through TSA checkpoints, travel needs on cruise ships and trains, dealing with Uber and Lyft, and how to address the inevitable meetings with other animals. The final chapter on required and recommended paperwork is extremely thorough. Enlivened throughout with first-hand anecdotes of the authors and other service animal handlers, this long overdue handbook is a winner.—Nancy Bent"

Heartening.

Our first media review

Library Journal's verdict on Traveling with Service Animals: "A highly recommended resource for anyone who travels with a service animal, as well as for anyone who works in transportation, hospitality, or any business with public accommodations."

We won't post the link to it, because Library Journal is a subscription-only review publication for library professionals, and you wouldn't be able to see the entire review. (We can't, either, but when the full review appears, we'll see if we can post it.)

We're heartened.

We're Number One!

Quick, click on this link:

And scroll down a couple of pages.

The University of Illinois Press's fall 2019 catalog is out, and guess what book occupies the coveted No. 1 spot?

Traveling with Service Animals, of course.

Why?

Because dogs.

The actual subject matter may not sound crowd-pleasing in the extreme, but everybody loves dogs, and so we think it's a smart marketing move to lead off a roster of mostly very scholarly books with something that just might send turnstiles clicking in bookstores (if bookstores have turnstiles).

That golden retriever is irresistible, isn't it?

We have hope.

Pub date set

We have a publication date for Traveling with Service Animals!

It will be August 15, 2019, exactly one year from now, says our acquiring editor at the University of Illinois Press. Just in time for the holiday travel season.

At a university press, the production schedule is more leisurely than it is at commercial publishers, who bring books out in eight or nine months—or even less, for hot topical books such as Omarosa's. University presses are exceptionally painstaking, and they want to make sure they get things right.

But the gestation period for a university press book is not quite as long as it is for an elephant. That's 22 months.

Woof.

Orphaned . . . again

Yesterday the unwelcome news came that Five Star Publishing, publisher of my Steve Martinez police procedurals, was shutting down its mystery line and no new titles were being acquired from writers.

Five Star will publish all those whodunits it has contracted for through March 2017, but after that, nothing. The scores of books languishing on its approved-but-yet-to-be-contracted for list will simply be orphaned, returned to their authors’ doorsteps without a goodbye. My novel The Riddle of Billy Gibbs, approved by an acquisitions editor more than nine months ago, is one of these waifs.

Yes, the fifth Steve Martinez novel, Tracking the Beast, will be published as scheduled March 16 and will be available for sale online as well as to libraries.

Five Star did not say why they were dropping the mystery line, but it’s not hard to guess the reason. Their wares are sold primarily to libraries and not marketed in bookstores. Mystery readers are getting older, demand for the genre has dropped in the libraries, and this marginal part of the publishing industry has had to retrench. (Five Star will continue to publish Western and frontier fiction, for which demand seems to remain high.)

It seems unlikely Billy Gibbs can find a home at still another publisher. When the Steve Martinez series was dropped by Tom Doherty/Forge Books, its original publisher, Five Star was happy to take on my new books in the series. It addressed a different market. But a second rescue is unlikely, for publishers expect their new authors to produce more and more over the years—and I’m 75. What’s more, the Steve Martinez well just possibly may have gone dry.

Am I disappointed? Yes. Am I crushed? No. I've been there before in this dog-eat-dog business.

After leaving Forge, I asked for the rights back to my first three Martinez novels and republished them as ebooks on Kindle and Nook, and produced an Amazon CreateSpace paperback omnibus edition called Porcupine County as well as three large-print books of Season’s Revenge, A Venture into Murder, and Cache of Corpses.

Unless a miracle drops from the heavens, I’ll do the same with The Riddle of Billy Gibbs. Look for it about Nov. 1 from CreateSpace, just in time for the holiday season.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking about a children's book or two featuring a hearing dog for the deaf named Trooper. That seems to have interesting possibilities.

Letters

Some days are better than others, especially when an email praising an old book—something that does not often happen—arrives. Yesterday the following came in from Oklahoma City:

"This brief note brings you a word of thanks for sharing your cross country flying adventure in Flight of the Gin Fizz.

"I first read the book in 1999 when as a new pilot I was grounded throughout a harsh winter in the upper mid-west. Again the following year, I borrowed it once more from the local library and soothed my winter-imprisoned aviation soul.  This past summer, I came across a copy being sold by one of the aviation booksellers at Oshkosh.  I immediately snatched it up, and have again traveled with you in your beautiful C-150.

"Thank you, Henry, for documenting the great joy that comes only from flying, and for sharing your wonderful journey. May one ask, do you still have the Gin Fizz?

"Here's wishing you tailwinds!

"With appreciation,

"Scott Dorsey"

My Cessna 150, named Gin Fizz in honor of Cal Rodgers' Vin Fiz, the first airplane to fly across the United States in 1911, was sold in 2009 after I had a heart attack, but there's still a photograph of her on my office wall.

What's in a color?

Letter from a reader:

"I recently found a copy of Zephyr (perfect condition, with the original cover) in a small book shop here on the Central Coast of California.  The bottom portion of the book was buried, so I could only see the title, but the color told me exactly what it would be about.  No, I an not a “foamer” or an FRN, just somebody who never lost my boyhood love of trains, and who recognized that particular shade of yellow. 

"I really think I was born about 50 years too late, and would have loved to travel when the great name trains took Americans on trips where the journey was just as big as the destination.  Unfortunately, I don’t get to travel by train much, but your book has made me want to take a train trip soon and go somewhere just to see what’s there out the window.  

"Thank you for a great read, and thank you for being such a great observer of things and people.  I am sorry that I didn’t know your work before, but I will be sure to look for your other books in the future."

Cheers, and Happy (T)Rails,

Fred Potthast, Cayucos, California

Truth to tell, I never thought about the color used on the cover of the original 1994 hardcover of Zephyr. My editor at Times Books, Paul Golob, said it was chosen by the art department because yellow stands out sharply on tables of new issues at bookstores. Mr. Potthast's letter sent me a-Googling, and it turns out that that particular "Armour Yellow" was used on both Union Pacific R.R. and Southern Pacific Ry. passenger streamliners in the 1950s and 1960s, and is well known to railfans. The UP still uses that shade on all its freight locomotives today.

By the way, Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America, now in a third edition updated as an e-book in 2012, is my best-selling ebook. Railroad books are never blockbuster best sellers, but there's still a devoted audience for them.

AUGUST 13: Mr. Potthast sends this reply: "To me it looked like UP Yellow, but not freshly shopped.  It looks sun-faded and covered with dust and diesel smoke, like the SD40 helpers that sit in the San Luis Obispo rail yard waiting to push freights up the Cuesta Grade.  Because you mentioned it, I looked up the SP yellow color on the interweb (Wikipedia—Santa Fe Southern Pacific Merger), and yes, I guess maybe the color does look more like the yellow on the SPSF "Kodachrome" merger paint scheme.  Regardless, the color choice for the dust cover may not have been intended to mimic either of those, but it sure seemed that way to me."

Mention in Blogspatches

For some reason my old books have been getting a few new electrons on the Internet. The other day a Dutch journalist who had written about the Dutch translation of my 1994 book Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America posted the old article on his blog.

Google Translate tries hard, but its Dutch-to-English rendering is, well, creative. All the same, it ably captures the spirit of the book. I'm delighted. Thank you, Meneer van Grinsven.

Still another Mention in Dispatches

This time on the demise of the Chicago Sun-Times' book section.

R.I.P. Chicago Sun-Times Books

Yesterday the Chicago Sun-Times, infamous these last few weeks for sacking its entire photography department, did the same to my old stamping ground, the Sunday Show section and its book pages. On July 14 the entertainment stories will be folded into the paper's gaudy Splash! celeb-and-style section, and regular coverage of the literary world will end.

I can't say I was surprised. In fact, I'm amazed that authors and books lasted as long in the city's struggling No. 2 paper as they did. (I'm also amazed that the Sun-Times—now ChicagoSunTimes.com, to reflect its increasing presence on the Web—has managed to survive the ongoing collapse of American daily newspaper journalism as long as it has.)

I feel lucky to have retired from the paper's book editorship in 2006, at the beginning of the disaster. As a working author, however, I don't feel so fortunate at the loss of the Sun-Times book section. Getting a new book reviewed by competent critics anywhere is nigh unto impossible now. Crowdsourcing outlets such as Goodreads.com are all very well, but  their mini-notices often are idiosyncratic and uninformed.

Thank goodness for the struggling New York Times Book Review, thin and anemic as it has become, and for the brave but probably doomed Chicago Tribune Printers Row Journal. I hope they outlast me.

Signings this weekend

Besides the two signings in Evanston, Ill., above, I'm also doing one at 2 p.m. Sunday (May 5) at the famed Centuries & Sleuths Bookstore in Forest Park, Ill. If you're in the area, come on over and learn something about life in the still frozen North.

Mention in Dispatches

Yesterday my old stamping grounds, the Chicago Sun-Times, ran a nice Q&A with me in its Sunday book pages. (Free, but registration required.)

Overnight, the e-book sales of my novels doubled. Conclusion: People are reading the Sun-Times' book pages.

John McPhee on overcoming writer's block

In the April 29 New Yorker, John McPhee, the nonpareil purveyor of "creative nonfiction," as highly literary explanatory journalism is often called, writes a long piece about multiple drafts, copy editing and writer's block, and the best ways to overcome that last. Among his suggestions:

"You are writing, say, about a grizzly bear. No words are forthcoming. For six, seven, ten hours no words have been forthcoming. You are blocked, frustrated, in despair. You are nowhere, and that’s where you’ve been getting. What do you do? You write, ‘Dear Mother.’ And then you tell your mother about the block, the frustration, the ineptitude, the despair. You insist that you are not cut out to do this kind of work. You whine. You whimper. You outline your problem, and you mention that the bear has a fifty-five-inch waist and a neck more than thirty inches around but could run nose-to-nose with Secretariat. You say the bear prefers to lie down and rest. The bear rests fourteen hours a day. And you go on like that as long as you can. And then you go back and delete the ‘Dear Mother’ and all the whimpering and whining, and just keep the bear."

Perfect.

Of dogs and ponies

The beginning of my author "tour" for Hang Fire is quickly coming up. With the help of the Lady Friend, who'll be reading passages from the novel, I'll make my pitch using a digital projector and Keynote, the Mac version of PowerPoint, at these Chicago-area venues:

Saturday, May 4, 2 p.m., Evanston Public Library North Branch, 2026 Central St., Evanston, Ill.

Sunday, May 5, 2 p.m., Centuries & Sleuths Bookstore, 7419 W. Madison, Forest Park, Ill.

Wednesday, May 8, 7 p.m. Evanston Public Library Chicago and Main Branch, 900 Chicago Ave., Evanston, Ill.

The two Evanston appearances are fundraisers sponsored by the Evanston Public Library Friends.

In the works are presentations and signings this summer in a number of venues in western Upper Michigan, where the novels are set.

Kirkus Service lauds 'Hang Fire'

Herewith the Kirkus Service advance review of Hang Fire:

------------------------------

Kirkus Review 5/1/13

This title publishes APRIL 2013

“Implacable Sheriff Steve Martinez investigates a series of musket murders. A confident and engaging whodunit. Kisor's prose is as refreshingly clean and balanced as the hero's investigative style.”

****************************************

HANG FIRE 

Author: Henry Kisor

Review Issue Date: May 1, 2013

Online Publish Date: April 16, 2013

Publisher: Five Star

Pages: 246

Price ( Hardcover ): $25.95

Publication Date: April 19, 2013

ISBN ( Hardcover ): 978-1-4328-2685-7

Category: Fiction

Classification: Mystery

Implacable Sheriff Steve Martinez (Cache of Corpses, 2007, etc.) investigates a series of musket murders. Go figure.

Upper Michigan's Porcupine County hopes to lift its flagging economy with some Revolutionary War re-enactments targeted at summer tourists. The county board has urged Desert Storm–vet Sheriff Martinez, a Lakota Indian raised by a white family, to make sure things run smoothly with the re-enactors. Many of them, known as the Mountain Men, camp out together near the performance site and take method acting to an extreme level, living in character even when there's no audience around. When teacher Gloria Lake, who portrayed a seamstress in the re-enactments, succumbs to a fatal musket shot just below the rib cage, Martinez's role becomes more official. At first, Gloria's colleagues close ranks, offering Martinez no helpful information. After stonewalling in an initial interview, however, her good friend and fellow teacher Sheila Bodey admits that Gloria had also worked among the Mountain Men as a prostitute. Although Martinez's ladylove Ginny Fitzgerald reasonably explains how Gloria's death was most likely an accident, a judgment that becomes the official ruling, his gut tells him it's murder. Over the succeeding months, several more deaths by musket cast a cloud of suspicion over the original verdict and raise Martinez's hackles. Once murder is a given, the pieces of the puzzle fall, one by one, into place.

A confident and engaging whodunit. Kisor's prose is as refreshingly clean and balanced as the hero's investigative style.

----------------------------

I hope it is not ungrateful carping to point out a minor glitch: the re-enactments are not of the Revolutionary War (1775-1783) but the era of Lewis and Clark (1800-1840). Otherwise this lovely notice made my day. Kirkus has not always been kindly toward my books, but for this one the critical snark clearly was stifled.

First copies from the warehouse

The highest point in any author's life is beholding the first finished hardcovers of his latest book. Yesterday two boxes of Hang Fire arrived from the warehouse, well in advance of the April 19 publication date (and the May 10 online on-sale date). Yay!

But the joy is short-lived, because it also brings the realization that soon the truly hard work will begin: Getting out and promoting the book in venue after venue.

Sometime in late April I'll be premiering the dog and pony show at an Evanston location, then in May in Forest Park, Illinois.  Stay tuned for details.

Cataloging 'Hang Fire'

Five Star has readied its March/April online catalog, and here are the pages for Hang Fire.

'Booklist' checks in on 'Hang Fire'

Here's the advance notice on 'Hang Fire' from Booklist, the reviewing arm of the American Library Association. Not too shabby, and a hopeful beginning to the review season.

Advanced Review – Uncorrected Proof   Issue: March 1, 2013

Hang Fire.   Kisor, Henry (Author)   Apr 2013. 246 p. Five Star, hardcover, $25.95. (9781432826857).

Porcupine County in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is glad to have Revolutionary War reenactors for a week. Any outside money in the economically depressed area can’t hurt. But when one of the participants is killed by a shot from an antique muzzle-loader, Sheriff Steve Martinez and his already undermanned staff are obligated to investigate. They conclude that the death was a tragic accident. On the other hand, it turns out that the dead woman’s camp persona was “prostitute,” and she had numerous customers in the camp. Over the next few months, Martinez notices a number of “accidental” deaths involving antique muzzle-loaders in the Upper Midwest. Martinez’s law-enforcement instincts aren’t amenable to coincidence, so he begins his own investigation, quickly discovering that he is both hunter and prey. This is the fourth Steve Martinez mystery from Kisor, former books editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. His series mines the same territory as Bill Crider’s small-town crime series featuring Dan Rhodes, who, like Martinez, is a thoroughly engaging protagonist. In both series, personal rivalries, quirky personalities, and big-fish/small-pond distractions form a fascinating undercarriage for cleverly built mysteries.

— Wes Lukowsky

The last one for a while

. . . the last in my mock street ad campaign for a while, that is. This one, set in the center of Odessa, Ukraine, seems to be is the most striking—and the most improbable. I doubt very much if mystery novels set in Upper Michigan will ever be translated into Ukrainian. Meanwhile you can pre-order the hardcover of Hang Fire now, if you like, at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com.