There were some good rights questions I'll deal with soon, but since this is moving into a promo blog I wanted to fill you in on the New York is Book Country two-day event. Some cities -- LA and Charlottesville, VA come to mind -- have terrific weekend-long book festivals. New York's is good, but not at the scale of LA's. In past years it's lined 5th Ave. This year it moved to my neighborhood, Greenwich Village. Many publishers and some bookstores had booths. So did a number of book-, publisher-, or writer-related publications, like Poets and Writers Magazine, which I recommend, by the way.

www.pw.org

I signed books at the Black Orchid bookstore booth yesterday, and today did a panel with Sujata Massey, Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, and Leslie Silbert. We had an audience of 50 people, which, considering we were up against Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin and Frank McCourt on one side and a publishing panel on "How to Make Your Book More Successful" on the other, was pretty good. Signed more books afterwards, including the stock Borders had brought. It used to be the case that signed books couldn't be returned by the bookstore to the publisher, so there was a great incentive for a writer to sign every book that came in sight. That policy has changed, but it's still true that bookstores tend to display signed books more prominently, so it's a good idea to sign whenever you can. Tomorrow and Tuesday, before my launch party, I'm going to sign stock at B&Ns all over town. I'll do the other mystery bookstores, too, besides the one I've already done, Black Orchid, and the one the launch is at, Partners and Crime. While I'm on the road that's one of the things I'll be doing in each town I go to, signing stock at the other stores besides the one where I'm reading.