My publisher thought my new thriller was too political. So I found another.

There are three high bars in the modern literary trade — writing a good novel, getting it published, and selling it to the public.

I’ve cleared the first two with my new political-thriller mystery, “The Camelot Trail,” which comes out November 17. Now I have to clear the third.

I committed another contemporary heresy in ‘Paper Tigers’: I gave the character I politically disagree with dignity and wit.

That last bar used to be lower once you cleared the first two. Publishers, even smaller ones, had a built-in promotional pipeline. They would set up radio interviews and nationwide book signings and send review galleys to genre-specific media like Analog for science fiction, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for mysteries, and Romantic Times for, yes, romance novels.

But that was