Stuff To Die For, last September’s release about two clueless young guys in South Florida who buy a used box truck and get into all kinds of trouble, won two national awards this weekend in L.A. The Indie Excellence Award for best thriller/mystery, and the Foreward Magazine award for best mystery. But, most authors tell me, awards don’t sell books. Not all authors confirm this. Our own Jeff says he sees a spike in sales when a book gets this kind of attention, but even my publisher says, while an award is nice, it doesn’t necessarily translate to a lot of the books being sold.

Maybe some of that is due to the fact that the book is already out of the stores, because the ’shelf-life’ is finished. I think a lot of awards are like that. I’ve noticed that many times a movie is already out of the theater when it receives an Academy Award. Often times a play is already off Broadway when it wins a Tony and TV shows are sometimes cancelled before they receive an Emmy.

Still, it feels good to know that two organizations thought enough of the book to give it a ‘best of’ honor. The awards were presented at the Book Expo America, a huge gathering of publishers, sellers, writers and everyone else associated with the industry. Oceanview Publishing sent a representative who accepted the awards, and unless she keeps them and puts them on her own mantle, I should have both in a couple of days.

The second STUFF book, Stuff Dreams Are Made Of, comes out in September, and I’m working on number three, Stuff To Spy For. One more Stuff story. Writers are obviously pleased when someone wants to make a positive comment about their work. I was talking on the phone to an agent yesterday, and he was talking about goals and ambitions. He finished by saying, “As James says, ‘We shouldn’t have regrets over what we’ve done, only regrets over what we haven’t done.’
I was silently shaking my head, thinking that was somewhat profound, then I realized he was quoting one of the characters in Stuff To Die For. James would have been thrilled. I know I was.