Page 99 - Just Deserts
P. 99

Stiff Competition

          “Two minutes?”  he gulped.  “Well,  first of all, it’s right up your
        alley—I mean, just the sort of book LibrAries Press already publishes
        in great quantity. I’ve researched the market, you know: went to a lot
        of supermarkets and looked at the racks by the checkout stand. ‘Stiff
        Competition’  combines  all  the  successful  elements  of  your  best-
        selling authors like Steele Galant: lots of romance, dark secrets, jet-set
        locales, sexual athletics, and several nasty murders. The suspense is
        nonstop: you can’t put it down, a real page-turning thriller! And it is
        also a mystery: the hero is a dashing young private detective, hired by
        the  heroine  to  discover  who  is  killing  off  her  old  college
        roommates—all  of  whom  lead  exciting  and  glamorous  lives  in
        various parts of the world.”
          He paused for breath. Tina Crumpet said, “Thirty seconds.”
          “Okay,  okay,”  he  went  on  at  breakneck  speed.  “Professor—I
        mean, Mr. Orpimenter—is a meticulous craftsman. You won’t need
        to do much editing at all. It’s 732 pages, the average of the last ten
        Steele Galant novels, and no new words at all! Yes, he made a list of
        all  six  hundred  or  so  words  that  are  used  in  romance  fiction,  and
        managed  not  to  go  beyond  it.  But  you  must  get  thousands  of
        manuscripts, I know, I know. Why this one? Don’t look at the first
        page, Ms. Crumpet: look at the last page.”
          He goggled at her with such earnest imploration in his soft brown
        doglike eyes  that  she  grimaced.  “Oh,  what  the  hell  are  you  talking
        about? Last page?” She flipped the massive tome in the air as if it
        were a crepe, and peeled back the last page. “Why, what is this stuff?
        It’s covering the last few lines.”
          Sonny Lemmatina grinned.
          “That’s  our  gimmick,  that’s  what  will  sell  a  million  copies.  The
        name of the murderer, the arch-criminal the hero has been looking
        for throughout the entire story, is under that silver foil. This is just a
        mock-up,  you  understand:  the  real  stuff  will  be  that  scratch-off
        material  they  print  over  the  numbers  on  ‘instant  winner’  lottery
        tickets and supermarket prize coupons. It wouldn’t add but a penny
        to  the  manufacturing  cost,  you  see,  and  it  completely  changes  the
        reader’s attitude—he or she will have to read the whole thing before
        finding out the identity of the murderer—no more casual glancing at
        the end of the book and ruining the rest of it. And we figure people
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