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
98