I do not ordinarily review books on this website. In fact my old website had a header labeled book reviews, as I had intended to fill it up with reviews of books from the various self publishing houses, in order to give my readers an idea of the sorts of things they publish. However I never did that, so I never bothered adding such a header to this site.

    My question was and is still, is it possible for American writers who work hard to write quality literature and stories that are well told, to be able to get published by American publishers. I am not talking about subsidy publishers. I ask this in light of the changes within our publishing industry within the last half century.

    During the late eighties and nineties, our publishing houses merged and then merged again, until we have perhaps four—it certainly isn’t more than that—major media corporations. Then, during the nineties, these corporations broke contract with all their midlist writers—the writers who up until then had been the backbone of the publishing industry.

    For those of you who do not know, publishing houses had several ways to earn money. The first was by publishing reference books. These would be dictionaries, encyclopedias and some text books. These books were revised and brought up to date on a fairly regular basis, and kept in print almost constantly.

    The second class of books were the midlist books. These consisted of literature as we once knew it. The publishing houses paid $50 to $75 thousand to the authors of these books. Then the publisher had these manuscripts thoroughly edited before they went to press.

    Then there were the best sellers. These were generally written for the lowest denominator of the reading public. People who enjoyed literature tended to avoid these books.

    As I said, the publishing houses broke contract with all their midlist writers, and a few years later they let all of their editors go. They wanted to concentrate on just the best sellers, for which they would happily pay a few million dollars per manuscript.

    Now we come to Marie Bostwick who wrote A Thread of Truth, published by Kengsington Books – www.kensingtonbooks.com. These people call themselves the last independent publishers in the US. Marie Bostwick has written several historical romances, but this book is a modern romance.

    In any other genre, Marie Bostwick—if she is not in reality a collection of minimally paid ghostwriters—would never be published, certainly not in the condition this book went to press. This reader found errors in grammar in nearly every other paragraph of her book.

    Setting scenes and expressing dialogue is an art. You want to make the reader feel as though he is participating in the drama and that he is one of the main characters. Therefore, dialogue must be written much as people speak, unlike this example from the first chapter.

    Charles rolled his eyes. “It’s your big day, woman! Don’t you remember? You’ve got those movie people coming today. They’re probably used to fancy caterers and champaign at breakfast. You’ve got to have something decent to offer them, something besides that jar of biscotti in their individual fresh-from-the-factory plastic wrappings you bought from the office supply store.” He made a disgusted face. As the owner of New Bern’s most elegant and popular restaurant, he was clearly concerned the town’s culinary reputation would suffer at my hands. “One look at the things and the crew will probably pack up their cameras and go back to Hollywood.”

    I laughed. “First of all, they’re from Texas, not Hollywood. Big difference. At least I think there’s a big difference; I’ve never been to Hollywood. And second, they are television people, from the House and Home Network, not movie people, and I really don’t think it’s quite as big a deal as you are making it, Charlie. It’s not like they’re in town to shoot the chase scene of next summer’s big block buster. It’s just a little promotional video. It’ll be Mary Dell, a cameraman, and one of her producers—that’s all—and the whole thing shouldn’t take more than an hour. Mary Dell told me herself. But it was sweet of you to go to all this trouble, Charlie.”

    Evidently these people are used to giving five minute speeches every time they open their mouths, and nobody ever gets impatient or interrupts. Still, her characters are likeable and the ideas they promote—women’s liberation from violent relationships and breast cancer research are ideas that are almost guaranteed to win a reading audience. The book reads as though an amateur writer had been handed a chapter by chapter plot outline along with a slate of characters and told to write the story. Because the story is constructed fairly well, one scene does lead to the next, but the writing leaves much to be desired. The fact that this book was published at all is an insult to anyone who has ever spent months developing a story, and then editing to make certain every word was in place.

    The fact that some of the books this woman wrote, if she indeed exists, have been on the best seller lists is sad. The fact that at least one of her books sold over 70 thousand copies is almost tragic. This writer has come to the conclusion that Kensington Publishers is capable of taking garbage and making best sellers of it. Come to think of it, I have a manuscript, which has been collecting dust at the back of my desk, that I might just send to them. Besides, my garbage is better than her garbage.