Tag Archives: The Dead Women of Juárez

All I want for Christmas

I have written on this subject before, and fairly recently, but I thought it was time to revisit it for the benefit of those who either don’t come to the blog very often, or who have yet to do (for whatever reason) what I’m about to request. I hope you can excuse the repetition.

My Goodreads blog is not updated as often as this one and the content remains focused squarely on my writing habits and projects. If you haven’t gone by, please do. There’s something new there almost every Friday, with some exceptions, so now you have a reason to visit Goodreads that maybe you didn’t have before. As with everything else I do, I appreciate your time and your eyeballs.

Anyway, my second-to-last update concerned itself with reviews, or rather the lack of good ones that I’m currently seeing. This is especially a problem for The Dead Women of Juárez, which is currently at an average of 3.36 stars based on 105 ratings/reviews. While there’s no particular shame in being average, the truth is that people will rarely read or buy a book that doesn’t have at least a 4.0 or higher, and therein lies the issue. To whit: people who like the book aren’t making their opinions known. That really must change.

It’s early days yet for Tequila Sunset, so I can’t speak to the kinds of sales it’s having, but I know from my royalty statements that The Dead Women did quite well in the UK, where it was initially released. The only real trouble here is that all of those sales didn’t translate into a deluge of reviews on sites like Goodreads and Amazon. To say that this is a concern is understating things a bit.

To explain: when people go to get book recommendations at Goodreads, they are more likely to see highly rated books. And the more actual reviews those books have, more than simple ratings without a review attached, the better. Readers are more educated now than ever about their choices, thanks to the surfeit of information available on the web, and a book that lacks abundant coverage is a book that is not going to sell or be read.

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Randomness

Les Disparues de Juárez, by Sam Hawken I don’t have a unified theme for today’s blogging, as I’ve touched upon various writing topics in detail over the last couple of weeks and don’t wish to revisit them so soon. Instead I’ll give you a rundown on a couple of things and we’ll call it a day. Sound good?

First of all, The Dead Women of Juárez is now available in France from Belfond Noir, and though I don’t have a “buy it now” link for it, you should have no trouble finding it in the usual places where one purchases French things. It’s far, far too early to know anything about sales, sadly, but I can reveal that the initial reviews have been very good. This was also the case with the book in Germany, though readers seemed more divided, but I’m happy to take the plaudits where and when they come.

When I did my interview for Suspense Radio, I was asked why The Dead Women hadn’t been released in any Spanish-speaking countries. The truth of the matter is that the market in Spain is absolutely terrible due to their recession/depression, so the chances of the book appearing there are slim. On the plus side, there’s the possibility of a Mexican release, so if you’re waiting on a Spanish translation, you may be in luck very soon. We shall see.

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It speaks!

Promotion for the US release of The Dead Women of Juárez has been going on for the last couple of months, most of which I’ve linked here or at my official Facebook page. You can dig through the archives here or scroll that awesome Timeline to find entertaining tidbits, whichever you prefer. Or you can start your Dead Women experience right here.

The minds behind this publicity push tried very hard to get me into some high-profile places, but unfortunately I don’t have the cachet necessary to get late-night talk shows or anything of the sort. A few best-sellers down the line, maybe, but not right now. To make up for it, I’ve been featured in places like Slate and various specialty blogs, answering questions about the book and generally trying to get Americans interested in taking a shot at it. Maybe it worked with you and now you’ve come seeking more, more, more!

The latest bit of promotion I did was for Suspense Radio just this past Saturday. If you have “liked” my official Facebook page, you got a heads up before the interview started, and that’s not the only exclusive people have gotten over there, so please click through and add your thumb to the ups.

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There it is!

So I was in a Barnes & Noble the other day just seeing what there is to see (I bought a copy of Dredd), when I decided to take a quick look for The Dead Women of Juárez. Since B&N doesn’t have a crime section, I figured my best bet would be mystery, and as I turned onto the aisle for that section I saw, from twenty feet away, the familiar red-orange tones of the book. They had it!

There were three copies of the book on the shelf, face-out in the new release area of the mystery section. There were four or five other books beside it but I have to say, at risk of sounding totally biased, that my book’s was easily the standout cover. The other ones weren’t bad by any stretch of the imagination, but the colors of The Dead Women really popped and made the book stand out significantly.

Also significant was the moment itself. For almost two years, The Dead Women has been something of an abstraction to me. Yes, I have a few copies of the first edition released in 2011 and I also have a handful of copies left of the second edition, which is what saw release in the US, so I already knew that the book existed as a physical object and had indeed held it in my hands. Yes, I knew from photographs shared with me over time that the book had been in bookstores. But I had never had the pleasure of seeing the book, in person, on sale in a store.

Maybe it doesn’t seem all that big of a deal to you, and maybe I’m overstating its impact a little bit, but that moment meant a lot to me. It’s one thing to look at images and to see the listing on Amazon, knowing that these things represent the sales life of the book, and something else entirely to stand in the middle of a bookstore with thousands and thousands of other books all around, and see one’s handiwork take its place among them.

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