First review

The German (and only edition) of my novel Everything Ends Here got its first critical review, and it’s a good one. These days it’s easy to translate these reviews in the browser, unlike the old days when I’d have to ask my publisher or a good friend of mine who speaks German for a translation. This reviewer had previously reviewed the German editions for Small Crimes, Pariah, and Killer, and he asks why this book hasn’t been published in English, and the answer is an easy one. One of my two publishers, Serpent’s Tail, was bought by Profile Books, and my original publisher and editor who advocated for me are no longer there, and Profile Books moved away from publishing American crime fiction, and my other publisher, Overlook Press, was bought by Abrams Books, and they don’t publish fiction. I originally had 4 books published by Serpent’s Tail, 4 by Overlook Press, 5 by Kensington, 2 by Five Star (which also doesn’t exist), and 3 by other assorted small presses, and by the time I wrote what became Everything Ends Here, I’d become unpublishable with the changes that had happened in the publishing industry. With the pressure Amazon put on the industry, and the death of Borders, publishing became all about numbers, and numbers only. I had the numbers after The Caretaker of Lorne Field, and it looked like I would have the numbers after A Killer’s Essence with a planned 50K print run and co-op deal with B&N, but after Penguin slipped the print date by 3 months and co-op deal was rescinded, the 50K print run became 2.5K, and my publishing career was over, even if I stubbornly refused to acknowledge at the time—and since Peter Mayer, who ran Overlook, was my biggest advocate, he stubbornly published 2 more books (Monster and The Boy Who Killed Demons), even though there was really no chance of breaking through after the disaster with A Killer’s Essence, but he tried. And hence, no English version of Everything Ends Here. Given the shifts in the publishing industry, if I was starting out today, there’s a small chance I’d be able to get Killer published, but certainly not The Caretaker of Lorne Field or Small Crimes or Outsourced, or probably any of my other books. At least I got published when the door was still open.