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They used to have the rationale that if they reviewed a book from a small publisher, their readers would get frustrated because they’d walk into Border’s or Barnes & Noble looking for that book and it wouldn’t be available. We’ve dealt with this for years.Īnd the mainstream reviewers are even more hopeless. Even if a customer walked in and asked for one of my books the clerk there would look it up on a computer that only lists books they have in the central warehouse or books they can order from one or two bulk wholesalers - that customer would be told my books are “out of print” or never existed. Your remaining big boxes like Barnes & Noble just take whatever mix of books they get sent from “corporate,” which works from the lists of the big New York houses owned by the German conglomerates. Q: The marketing for these books seems a little like a guerrilla campaign why do they seem to stay under the radar where the mainstream press and distributors are concerned?Ī: Not entirely by choice. But I also didn’t want everyone to sound like they were trying out for a part on “ Murder, She Wrote.” A little regional dialect goes a long way. But I think readers would just give up, it would be too much constant work sounding things out, if two acquaintances running into each other on the street said “Hawaiiya?” “Goodinyou?” “Hanginintheah.” “Scone-on?” “Nah’much.” “Meeneitha,” “Avvagoodwon,” “Tawktyasoon.” I did try to give the charter boat captain a little different sound, and I didn’t want Marquita Solana to sound like a New England college lass.
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Don Bousquet illustrated a paperback by Mark Patinkin, years ago, called the “Rhode Island Dictionary,” that’s a lot of fun. And yes, I made a decision early on not to spell out dialogue among the main characters with phonetic indications of the local accent. People have made studies they contend they can pinpoint your age within a decade and your home town within a couple hundred miles depending on whether you say “sofa” or “couch” or “divan,” whether it’s a “gramophone” or a “record-player” or a “stereo” –- I suppose now we’d have to add a Walkman or an IPad - whether it’s a “water cooler” or a “bubbler.” New Englanders refer to “soda” where folks further west say “soda pop” or just “pop” in New England it’s always a “paper bag,” never a “paper sack,” since sacks have to be made of woven fabric. Q: Your characters don’t seem to have strong Rhode Island accents …Ī: I try to keep the terminology pretty accurate -– folks in Southern New England are more likely to order a “hot oven grinder” than a “sub sandwich,” a term I think first encountered at a Blimpie’s in New York. If the rides don’t get more challenging as you go along, why bother?
#Miskatonic books blog series#
though of course I have no interest in a series where they’re all the same except you substitute a blonde suspect with a knife for a redhead suspect with a gun, in Perry Mason and his descendants. New England is beautiful in the fall, in December you get snow and the Christmas lights if the readers and the market give me any encouragement to continue the series there’s still material there to be mined. The old houses are real, with old trees and sandwich shops for the college crowd. There’d be trouble over where customers would park, unless you tore down one of the adjacent old houses to pave a parking lot, which would arouse the ire of the historical preservation folk - only the university itself seems to be able to get away with that kind of thing. It’s the oldest part of town, the first settled, so the hillside streets were laid out in the colonial era, they’re very narrow. I don’t think there could be, in that area within a few blocks of the Rhode Island School of Design, just down the hill from Brown. No, there’s no actual “Books on Benefit,” that I know of. Lovecraft was from Providence, there’s some historical resonance to work with.
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And of course Edgar Allen Poe passed through a few times H.P. I published the weekly Providence Eagle from 1980 to 1985, so I knew enough about the town to set the stories there, I can mostly get the geography right. So a few used bookstores actually survive there, even in this Internet age. Q: Is there a real “Books on Benefit”? Why is the series set in Rhode Island?Ī: Providence is a relatively bookish town, along with Cambridge (pick your Cambridge) and Berkeley, and a couple of places in between. (This is the fourth part of a week-long Q&A with Vin about his new novel, “The Miskatonic Manuscript,” continuing the adventures of rare books sleuths Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens, this time carrying them far beyond peaceful Providence, Rhode Island.