Today's dumb book deals

Once in a a while it's encouraging to look at the Publishers Marketplace list of book deals -- they post two or three dozen every day, that's how many writers are buying champagne on a daily basis (the rest of us just drink cheap wine) -- and see how much ridiculous crap out there is actually getting published.

Encouraging because, if they publish stuff like this, it's only a matter of time before they publish my novel):

Founder and Executive Director of the CIO Collective Stuart Robbins's GRID COMPUTING, a survival guide to our next technology platform for executives and IT professionals, written in fictional form and showing how we need to change ourselves in order to improve our information systems, to Sheck Cho at Wiley, by James Levine at Levine Greenberg Literary Agency (world).

He's Executive Director of a CTO group -- doesn't that sound like the blind leading the blind -- and he's written up his vision for the future "in fictional form." This is part of a long-standing trend in business books in which egomaniacal suits, stuffed to the gills on business plans and reports which are largely fictional, as well as bad thrillers consumed in business class on long flights, get the notion they can write a story. Which is nice, since they probably can't write business English in the first place, and can't be bothered to check facts. So let's just write our bogus future vision "in fictional form"!

Cue Mr. Spock moaning "PAIN.... PAIN..."

Kathleen McGowan's The Magdalene Line, three thrillers that fictionalize her two decades of research into a gospel written by Mary Magdalene, beginning with her originally self-published THE EXPECTED ONE for publication in August 2006, to Trish Todd at Touchstone Fireside, in a major deal, for seven figures...

Hmm, more non-fiction masquerading as fiction. Did you notice this book was originally self-published? If her book is anything like her utterly horrid website, I think I would rather have it dropped on my head from the Hollywood sign than read it.

Finally:

Twenty-year veteran of the Port Authority Police Department and night commander of the WTC Rescue and Recovery Operation William Keegan with Bart Davis's CLOSURE: The Untold Story of the Ground Zero Recovery Mission, about the nine months Keegan and his men spent grappling with shattered concrete, twisted steel, body parts, grief, and political pressure....

Notice all the stuff there about the long and gripping resume of nominal author Keegan and then, slipped in like a piece of chopped liver, "with Bart Davis." Well, it's a good bet your typical Port Authority cop might find it hard to write a birthday card, much less a memoir cashing in on people's fading memories of nine eleven, so you bet there's a ghost writer.

writers, book deals