I spoke with Russell, the owner/operator of Silver Empire publishing (and a friend), and he agreed that if the cover still hasn’t been made in time, we can go with a limited edition cover for a Silver-Empire-store-only release, until we get the real cover for a full release.
So, one way or another, Wedding Flowers Will Do For a Funeral will come out on April 7th.
We live in interesting times.
I got word from the publisher that the cover isn’t finished yet, so they’re pushing the publication date back to April 7th.
One of the great problems in the modern world where distribution is (by historical standards) extremely cheap is discovery: it’s very hard to sift through all that is available in order to find things one wants. Russell Newquist, owner of Silver Empire Publishing (who has published several of my novels and will soon publish Wedding Flowers Will Do for a Funeral) has been wracking his brain trying to come up with a solution to it, and he’s hit on a partial one: he’s launching a book club for the modern era.
Book clubs, back in the day, sometimes worked and often didn’t because of technological limitations. In the modern age of ebooks and print-on-demand, the technological limitations which pitted the interests of the people running the book club against the interests of the people in the book club are gone. Book clubs can now be win-win.
Unlike Amazon, who ten seconds of looking at their website will prove doesn’t care about books, Russell is passionate about books. In his youth, he used to spend so much time in his local bookstore they jokingly offered to lend him a cot to save him the trouble of going home at night. One of his big goals is to make sure that the book club will enable readers to find books that they would enjoy reading.
Here is their press release:
Huntsville, AL March 1, 2020 — Today, Silver Empire, publisher of heroic, wondrous, adventure fiction, launches its new Book Club service. Fans of fantasy, science fiction, and other genre fiction will now be able to save money on ebooks, paperbacks, or hardcovers of their choice through our new subscription service.
“We wanted to give our fans a way to get all of our latest stuff easily and at the best possible price,” Russell Newquist, Co-founder and Publisher at Silver Empire confirmed.
Subscriptions come in the forms of monthly or annual credit allotments. Monthly plans provide a monthly allotment of credits suitable to purchase a book in the user’s preferred format – ebook, paperback, or hardcover. However, credits can be used interchangeably on alternate formats and they never expire.
Silver Empire found that Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited service fails to provide many readers with books they actually want to read. Furthermore, it means that readers are only renting books rather than owning their favorites. Most of all, it had no options for those readers who still prefer the feel of an actual book in their hands.
Subscription services are live now and can be purchased here. Early subscribers will be able to score notable savings on hardcover subscription plans through March 31.
If you’re interested, you can find at more at https://silverempire.org/book-club/.
In the golden age of mystery writing there was the idea that a murder mystery was a game between the author and the reader. The author would give all of the clues necessary and would win if the reader couldn’t guess the solution before the detective reveals it; the reader would win if he guessed first.
The idea was all over the place at the time. For example, you can see aspects of this in Fr. Ronald Knox’s 10 Commandments of Detective Fiction. Most of the rules ensure that the necessary evidence is actually given to the reader.
Fair play is a great idea, and makes for good books. The only problem is that it—mostly—doesn’t actually work for its intended purpose.
The problem with “fair play” in murder mysteries, as a game, is that there are usually too many degrees of freedom. Ambiguity can be resolved in too many ways. For example, it is possible that the murderer managed to pretend to come into the room he was already in, but then it was also possible someone in the séance circle holding hands with the victim could have let go and stabbed the victim before he could cry out. Neither is probable and neither is impossible. Which is more likely? The reader is not really solving the problem, but instead reading the mind of the author.
This sort of ambiguity comes up a lot because ambiguity is the heart of mystery. If there’s only one interpretation, there’s nothing to detect, or at least there’s no value in the detective being brilliant. More than that, there is always ambiguity so long as there is a next page—it is always possible that the next page will contain new evidence which changes the meaning of evidence which showed up before.
On the flip side, if sufficient evidence to obtain a criminal conviction is given prior to the suspects gathering in the accusing parlor, the game will be too easy. If there is insufficient evidence for a conviction, the solution will be unsatisfying. It seems like there should be a happy medium, but there isn’t. The most common attempt is for the detective to withhold from the reader some conclusive peace of evidence and only present it when the formal accusation is made. This does not solve the problem, though, because it is almost always the case that a different piece of conclusive evidence could be given for at least one other suspect. In short, if there is any point in guessing, there will always be more than one reasonable guess.
Fair play doesn’t really work for its intended purpose, but it does make for good book.
There are two main reasons for this. The first is that fair play unites the reader with the detective. The second is that fair play forces the writer to make the mystery mysterious because it is clever.
When the author hides clues from the reader, it means that the reader doesn’t know why the detective does what he does. The detective, himself, becomes a mystery. In this case the reader is united, not to the detective, but to the Watson. (To some degree this explains the original Watson, who was, in theory, the author of the stories and hence they were from his perspective.) On the plus side, this multiplies the mysteries. The downside is that it makes the detective an unsympathetic character, in the strict sense that the reader cannot sympathize with him.
Interestingly, Sherlock Holmes was originally meant to be an unsympathetic character in the other sense—aloof, unapproachable, eccentric in the extreme. It did not last; Holmes was humanized, over time. Part of this was that there were often sub-mysteries which Holmes would explain, allowing us to get close to the detective.
The other aspect of fair play—that it forces the writer to write good mysteries—is also important to a good novel. A mystery in which the mystery is maintained only by withholding clues is, generally, a very simple mystery. If there is nothing much for the detective to think about, the solution will not be very satisfying when it is finally offered.
Another effect fair play has on plot construction is that it forces the author to be careful with the rate at which clues are given, and the circumstances which produced them. If the author has to reveal what the clue is when the reader has time to think about it, it being unreasonable for the culprit to have left the clue will stand out more.
For these reasons, and probably for others, too, fair play is as important now as it ever was. I think we merely lack the societal explanation which was never really adequate, even in its own day.
Chris Lansdown 
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