Breakthrough publishing company Ingram/Spark features “First Degree Burn” testimonial

By Peter Lance July 20th. I began my association with Ingram Book Group, the nation’s largest wholesaler of books, with the publication of my first novel, “First Degree Burn” in 1997.

It was a mass market paperback that sold out of its initial printing of 55,000.00. As you’ll see from The Preface to the new updated hardcover edition published in April, that paperback original got a rare starred review in Publisher’s Weekly: 

Also, it ranked No. 35 on The Ingram A-List The Top 50 Titles in Mystery/Detective Fiction. The A-list was a true best seller’s list featuring the top mystery and thriller writers of the day including John Grisham, Tony Hillerman, Agatha Christie, Robert B. Parker, James Lee Burke, Patricia Cornwell and James Ellroy. In fact, with little or no promotion my little paperback from Berkley-Penguin ranked No. 35 on the list right behind the trade paper edition of Ellroy’s “L.A. Confidential,” the week the film adaptation of that classic opened in theaters.

In 2013 Ingram created Ingram/Spark a publishing platform through its subsidiary Lightning Source that quickly became a rival to amazon.com’s independent publishing resource createspace.com.

Although I’m a best-selling author with four books published by HarperCollins since 2003, Ingram/Spark and createspace allow me the freedom to publish my titles independent of the major houses in a way that gets the books to readers worldwide in hardcover, paperback and ebook formats.

This past week Ingram/Spark began featuring a testimonial I gave them on their website’s homepage and already it’s caused thousands of readers worldwide to find my work.

I’ve enjoyed a terrific relationship with Harpercollins which published my FBI-counterterrorism trilogy in hardcover and trade paper editions between 2003 and 2009 and most recently published my epic investigation of the Bureau’s organized crime track record “Deal With The Devil” in 2013 and 2014.

 

Now through Ingram/Spark and createspace I’ve got new editions of “First Degree Burn,” and “Stranger 456,” my second novel which I’m adapting as a dramatic cable television series; as well as the iconic true-crime title “Murder, Inc.” by Burton Turkus and Sid Feder.

First published by Farrar, Strauss & Young in 1951, the story of the Syndicate’s “killing machine” had sold more than one million copies by the 1970’s.

In 2012 I got the publishing and film/tv rights from the authors’ heirs and with the help my extraordinary book designer Walton Mendelson and cover designer  Wells Moore, published a beautiful new edition, which includes a Foreword that I wrote, mugshots of the principals and crime scene phones never before available in the previous hardcover and paperback editions of the book.

So now via Ingram/Spark and createspace.com whole new generations of readers will be able to learn the details of how the so-called “Big Six” of Louis Lepke Buchalter, Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Joe Adonis and Albert Anastasia got together in the 1930’s and 40’s and created the modern “five family” structure that J. Edgar Hoover later branded La Cosa Nostra.

Fans of the new AMC docudrama series “The Making of The Mob New York” will find that “Murder, Inc.” provides the core material for much of the storyline in the last few episodes, although for unknown reasons, they eliminated the character of Lepke and used Frank Costello to round out “The Big Six.”

In truth Costello who went on to lead “Charlie Luck’s” crime family (which later became the Genovese family) had little or nothing to do with Murder, Incorporated, the syndicate murder-for-hire “combination” which dispatched killers from a candy story in Brooklyn and was responsible for more than 1,000 homicides nationwide before Lepke was convicted by Burton Turkus and sentenced to die in the gas chamber at Sing Sing; the only mob boss in U.S. history to be executed.

As an author who has now sold more than 85,000 copies of my books worldwide, I believe that Ingram/Spark and createspace will do for publishing in the future what iTunes and YouTube.com did to the music industry — leveling the playing field by giving first-time or previously unpublished author’s an alternative means of “storming the gates,” and getting past the old guard literary agent/major publishing house process.