Have you published anything else?
It’s been an odd journey for me. My first book was Crime of the Century: The Lindbergh Kidnapping Hoax, a non-fiction, true crime analyses of the so-called Lindbergh kidnapping case. It got written more by accident. In 1990 I had stumbled across an old article about the case. Of course, reading about the child’s disappearance, and the subsequent investigation and trial, some fifty plus years after the fact, gave me the advantage as a modern criminal defense lawyer of being privy to forensics, motivations and knowledge of intra-familial crimes that law enforcement officials did not have in 1932. Over the years the case had been looked at by journalists or others who had never tried a criminal case to verdict, and therefore lacked that perspective. What started out as a hobby ended up evolving into the book, which I co-authored with a police criminal investigator. And I’ve been rewarded with the number of contemporary investigators, victims rights advocates, etc., who have contacted me since its publication and said how obvious the solution to this perplexing crime had been. Obvious today, perhaps, but unthinkable in 1932. I had an agent, and Crime was published traditionally. It had a bit of literary and commercial success, and I started thinking hey, maybe I could write after all. Any advice for other writers/indie authors out there? Don’t have an ego! If there is a criticism that you receive, don’t become defensive. Think about it and try to figure out how you can improve, or at least address the criticism. And for God’s sake, get an editor or persons to teach you how to write essay. Don’t assume that your agent or publisher will help you – or for that matter be especially good at it. It does not have to be a professional editor (they can be expensive and I really don’t know how good they are anyway) but with the advent of Kindle and e-publishing I am seeing a lot of books with awful and multiple mistakes – missing grammar, missing quotation marks, missing words, misspelled words that spell check often won’t catch (“than” for “that,” etc) so get someone else to comb through it, again and again and again. And then again. Every book, no matter where published, has two or three typographical errors per book – but I am seeing strong e-book sellers with one or two per page!
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May 2019
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