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Compass Point Mysteries Editorial Note NOTA BENE to Mystery Authors We no longer consider National Park Service Historic Sites as locales for our novels. Due to their existing regulations, vendors to gift shops at these sites must deal only through one of two exclusive distributors—one serves sites east of the Mississippi, the other serves sites west of the Mississippi. While these distributors will happily stock rubber tomahawks and out-of-date postcards, they will not stock fiction (no matter how accurate or how well-researched or how well-written). To put this into some sort of consumer perspective, they will not even stock artistically-rendered mugs or T-shirts! Seemingly, these distributors are not conversant with the wants of the public or the needs of each individual museum. The unfortunate staffs at each museum seem helpless to override these conditions. ______________________________ Our stance can best be summed up with our following experience: One of the very first mystery novels we published was (and still is) the only writing or research ever done on an event which occurred at a specific National Historic Site. This particular novel also won several awards for the author; it was the center of a bidding war by several Hollywood producers; it sold extraordinarily well nationally; and it has had both foreign sales and foreign translations. It has also never been stocked at the National Historic Site it celebrates "because it is a work of fiction." The distributors never returned our phone calls or correspondence when we approached them to reconsider. Five years later, a museum staffer contacted us asking if we would once again please try making contact with the distributors citing that "they have changed the way they do business because of so many complaints." Five years later, they still did not return our phone calls or correspondence. They obviously hadn't changed at all... ______________________________ Copyright © 2000–2014 The Quincannon Publishing Group All rights reserved. |
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