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By David Rothman

image Speaking of media today, my D.C. newspaper novel is going on sale in the belly of the beast or at least close to it—Capitol Hill, where so much news is broken or not broken.

A venerable local bookstore, the Trover Shop, at 221 Pennsylvania Avenue, S.E., in Washington, is or soon will be stocking The Solomon Scandals.

You can call 202-547-BOOK or fax or e-mail the store to reserve your own Scandals.

imageEven if you don’t live in D.C., you might order from Trover. It’s a nice way of rewarding Trover for its initiative and of thumbing your nose at Amazon, which, at least unwittingly, has done a superb job of concealing the paperback edition from shoppers.

Scandals is to newspapers what the old Network movie was to TV news—an oft-satirical mix of the authentic and the fictitious. A deadly building collapse in Northern Virginia and a Senator’s secret investment in a CIA-occupied building helped inspire Scandals.

Review-proof so far

Coincidentally or not, Scandals has been rather review-proof in an annoying way. The troublemakers at the Washington City Paper recommended Scandals (“Same dark zeal Hammett held for Frisco or Chandler had for Los Angeles”), but not one other pulped-wood publication has carried a syllable about the book even though it’s from a legitimate small press with four finalists in the 2008 ForeWord Book of the Year competition. Scandals carries endorsements from Watergate Pulitzer Prize winner James Polk and from James Fallows, author of Breaking the News, not just a former newsmagazine editor.

Why virtually no reviews? The mass media typically ignore first novels. So very possibly, the explanation could be rather prosaic. Then again, could the newspaper depression have reached the point where some editors and writers have lost their sense of humor and don’t want to be too downbeat about their profession?

Word slowly getting out anyway

I don’t know the answer—only, that news about Scandals will be slowly getting out one way or another. The Fairfax County, Virginia, library system will broadcast an interview with me in the next week or so, The Writing Show will have a Scandals segment coming up later this year, and in July I’ll be featured in a chatcast from a library-related organization called OPAL. In March, Epublishers Weekly praised Scandals for its humor and said that “all the corruption we could ever desire—artistically rendered and skillfully told—is tucked inside the pages of The Solomon Scandals.” Steve Windwalker also recced it, as “a great, very contemporary yarn” (disclosure: he’s a TeleBlog contributor, although he acted on his own without any prompting).

List price is $16.95. I don’t know if Trover will be giving a discount, but I’d hope that wouldn’t affect your buying decision. This is a wonderful way of voting against an Amazon-dominated book business. You can also order P or E editions from other stores, E and P, although Trover would be an excellent choice if you’d like to help spread buzz about Scandals among the influential.

Meanwhile apologies for the horn-blowing, but given the mainstream media’s apathy toward first novels—and perhaps other factors—I’ll resort to whatever it takes to let people know about Scandals.

Related: My comments on the need for big media., even though it can get sloppy about links. The whole works, please—the New York Times and bloggers (and librarians to do reliable archiving!).

 
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