Help Selling More Books – The Write to Market Concept is Crap

Help Selling More Books – The Write to Market Concept is Crap

So yeah, that’s a total clickbait headline. It’s also not true. But it kinda is. Like so many things, the concept of Write to Market has diverged from its original core values into a set of weird “truths” and market and career advice ideas that it has turned into a whole messianic movement.

Let’s start with a basic question – What is “Write to Market?” Chris Fox, a successful midlist genre fiction author, wrote a series of books about how to be a successful author, focusing on many of the things that I tell new and aspiring writers to focus on – writing speed, production speed, don’t get caught up in revising forever, produce the work, you’ll sell more in a popular genre than in a niche genre – all very level-headed, common sense advice. These books caught on, and some people managed to take the tips and tricks that Chris write in these books and turn them into some very successful series, almost overnight.

EDIT – So Chris came on to comment and clear up some of my inaccuracies. According to Chris, and I have no reason to doubt him, he sold enough copies of his book written with the Write to Market theory to hit the NY Times list. I believe him, and congratulate him on that success. I think it’s awesome. My guess that his non-fiction stuff outsold his fiction stuff came from five minute of looking over his ranks on one series. I apparently missed the stuff that sold the best. My bad. He says he outsells me, which puts him in good company. Rock on. I am sincerely happy whenever anyone sells books. Chris obviously sells a lot of fiction, which does lend more credence to the words that he preaches. It does not, however, change the fact that most of the people advocating write to market are not saying the same things he’s saying, and are saying that you can write crap and make money. I still think that’s a load of shit. 

Good for them. That’s awesome.

Then a lot of other people looked at it, decided that it was a great way to make a lot of money in the easy life of a writer, and it all went to shit.

Let me clarify something before I go much further. One, when I call Chris Fox a successful midlist genre fiction author, please don’t consider that any type of insult. I briefly looked at the rankings of his fiction books on Amazon, and it looks like he sells some books. Probably a decent number. Rock on. To me, that puts him in the same category as me and most of my peers who haven’t made it onto a major bestseller list.

But just like a couple years ago people were holding Hugh Howey up as the messiah of all things self-pub, nowadays Write to Market is the Hot New Thing. It’s the Guaranteed Way to Quit Your Day Job and Live the Easy Life of a Novelist! But here’s the thing – that’s a load of shit.

No, I don’t work a day job. No, I am not wearing pants write now, at 3PM. No, I didn’t have to call in to anyone all week the I felt like refried ass and didn’t want to work because I had a stomach bug.

I also don’t know how much money I’m going to make from month to month, I work as many weekends as I do weekdays, and I put in as many hours at work now as I did when I was a middle manager with a dozen people reporting to me. So I don’t have a day job, but unlike some folks, I’m not cruising around on my boat butt-nekkid waiting for my movie to come out.

Don’t visualize. There is no Visine for the mind’s eye.

Please understand – a lot of Chris Fox’s principles are things I agree with. Yes, you need to write fast. Yes, you should probably start your career working in a genre that people will actually read. Yes, you should do some market research before you launch a book. I’ve said many times, in many places, that the idea of writing a book and just letting it float out there on its own is one that should have died when Salinger did. But really, it should have died with Dickinson.

The problem is, nowadays you have a lot of people jumping in the “write to market” pool, looking to make a quick buck. So there’s a lot of folks on lots of internet sites focusing on analyzing market trends, looking for hot genres to capitalize on, talking about forgoing editing in favor of computerized proofreading tools (It’s a TRAP!), and how a good cover and solid story will make up for all the weaknesses in your craft.

Those people are full of shit and will either change their tune or will be out of this industry in a very short time.

While it’s possible to look at a popular genre without a ton of competition in it, dissect the tropes of the successful books in the genre and write a formulaic book to hit all the buttons and sell a bunch of copies, is that really any way to build a career?

Let’s say I want to make a pile of money selling books. I hear that shifter romance is hot, so I decide to write a shifter romance. I buy twenty or so of the bestselling books in that genre, read them, understand the story beats, figure out how they’re put together, and plot out a six-book shifter romance of my own. I write them as fast as I can, pay nominal attention to the editing and the craft, get a decent cover, put the books up on Amazon, and watch the money roll in.

I can probably make a decent chunk of change over the next six months doing that. Then the winds change, the genre cools, and I have to chase the next trend. Again and again and again. How often can you stand to do that? At what point are you no longer doing the thing that made it fun to write in the first place – creating? How long can you stand to follow that mechanical process before it becomes as mind-numbing as the day job you were dying to leave in the first place?

That’s kinda my point, and why I say that despite the fact that Chris’s original principles are things that I think people can apply to successful career creation, the bandwagon-jumpers who are looking to make a quick buck are missing the whole point of writing to market – writing.

You can go online and find a lot of people telling you that editing doesn’t matter, that a good story is all that matters. They’ll point you to a dozen big-selling indie authors whose books are really mediocre as far as the craft, and those folks are moving huge numbers.

Today.

Come back to me in ten years and let me know how those folks are doing. Because I’m seven years into this journey, and I’ve figured a few things out. One of them is that it’s a marathon, not a sprint, and most of the “overnight successes” that I’ve known haven’t been that overnight at all. So if I’d rather listen to advice from folks like Dean Wesley Smith and Kris Rusch and Kevin J. Anderson and Faith Hunter and Chuck Gannon and Ed Schubert, who have been in the business for decades by now, then maybe I’ll just stick with those folks.

The thing is – you can jump on a bandwagon and make a pile of money. But you won’t make millions. You won’t make the kind of money that lets you jump on a boat and sail naked around the world (unless you catch lightning in a bottle). You can make enough money to make a living by dissecting a trend and writing to a trend, then jumping to the next trend and doing it all over again, ad nauseum.

But you can also make a living by writing the books you want to write, as well as you can possibly write them, about whatever the hell you want to write about. I wrote a book about Sasquatch’s dick. Robert Bevan has a whole series about poop jokes and killing horses. Rick Gualtieri, Drew Hayes, and I have ALL written very different books about nerdy vampires. Joe Brassey has a book coming out about sky pirates. These are all successful authors. These are all people writing whatever the fuck they want to write, working hard on their craft, putting out the best product they know how to produce, and putting food on the table while they do it. And I would lay a lot more money on these guy being around in five years than on any of the latest get rich quick schemers that want to write shifter porn just because it’s the hot thing right now.

So to close – Chris Fox had some good ideas, and did a great job of branding himself as an expert on selling books. So much so that his books on how to sell books outsell all of his fiction, so good job. But then a bunch of people who want to shortcut the learning of craft have taken his ideas and turned them into bullet points and now are waving flags for WRITE TO MARKET IS THE ONLY WAY TO MAKE TEH MONEYZ OMG U CAN MAKE TEH MILLIONZ 2MORROW!. So read Chris’s books. There are some good ideas there. You probably do need to write faster, and you probably do need to focus your efforts on a more popular genre rather than writing that antebellum retelling of the Mahabharata set in a far-future Venutian colony.

But you don’t need to cut out your editing. You don’t need to not learn the craft. And you sure as balls don’t need to turn your dream of being a writer into another soulless day job where all you do is dissect someone else’s creativity and regurgitate it for money. That kind of assembly-line shit will get old real fast.

And if you’re looking for advice on how to sell books – make sure the person giving the advice sells more books of fiction than books on HOW TO SELL fiction. Because the folks that have walked the walk, can talk the talk.

Amazing Grace – Chapter 20

Amazing Grace – Chapter 20

This is the latest chapter of an ongoing serialized novel that I’m working on and posting up here in rough draft form. To read other chapters, CLICK HERE

20

Nine forty-five saw us sitting in the Principal’s office with Mr. Robert Mitchell behind his desk and Ian Vernon slumped into a chair facing us. We were crammed into the little office like sardines, since the office was dominated by Mr. Mitchell’s huge oak desk. I swear, you could have just about landed a helicopter on the thing, and it made me wonder what in the world he was trying to compensate for.

Robbie Mitchell had been the biggest hell raiser in my Sunday School class for two years until his parents up and decided to switch to the ARP church and my life calmed down considerably. He never liked me much, since I didn’t let him run wild like some other folks did, and I made him recite bible verses every time he misbehaved. He had about memorized every word of Song of Solomon and Psalms before he changed churches. I reckoned if he’d stayed much longer, he probably would have gone to the seminary, and the world would have been deprived of a man with absolutely zero skill in education or administration, so naturally he went into exactly that field.

“Now Ian, you know that you can request your parents be here for this conversation,” Mr. Mitchell said, but Sheriff Dunleavy held up a hand.

“Actually, Ian, according to these records,” he held up a file that I knew contained nothing but blank sheets of paper, since I had watched him pull them out of the copy machine in the main office and stick them into the folder. “According to these records, you’re eighteen. That means you’re legally an adult, and no, you cannot ask your mommy and daddy to be here when we’re talking to you.” Willis made it a point to make “mommy and daddy” sound as ridiculous and babyish as possible, to keep the boy from asking for his parents.

“You can, however, ask for an attorney. Although, if you can’t pay for one, you’ll probably get a court-appointed lawyer from the ambulance chasers that hang out down by the emergency room,” Willis added.

I knew this was a lie, since there wasn’t an emergency room for fifty miles, and there were’t any court-appointed lawyers in Lockhart. If the boy needed an attorney, they’d have to come from Union, or probably Spartanburg. That would take several hours to round one up and get her over to the school.

“I ain’t done nothing, so I don’t need no lawyer,” Ian said, his tone sullen and his words slurred. He looked everywhere around the room except at me, and I wondered why that would be. I didn’t remember ever having any interaction with the boy, unless he maybe was with his father when he delivered my liquor once or twice. But his daddy delivered liquor to half to houses in town, so it’s not like anybody cared.

“Then you won’t mind if we ask you some questions?” Sheriff Dunleavy asked. He pulled out a small digital recorder and clicked it on.

“Nah, y’all go ahead. Ask whatever you want.” Ian stayed slumped in his chair, working very hard to maintain his disaffected appearance. It wasn’t working, at least not with me. His eyes kept sweeping the room, taking in every detail. He was paying very close attention to everything, he just wanted us to think he wasn’t. I didn’t know if that was the demeanor of a guilty person, or just a boy who doesn’t want the adults to know he’s scared.

“You understand that anything you say to the sheriff can land you in jail, don’t you, Ian?” Mr. Mitchell asked, and I shot him a look that would have burned a hole right through his chest if I had anything like that super-hot vision that Superman throws around.

“Yeah, yeah,” Ian said. “Like I said, I ain’t done nothing, so won’t be nothing.”

I wasn’t sure what that sentence mean, or even if it was really a sentence, but I ignored it and focused my attention on the boy’s feet. Sure enough, they were clad in a pair of heavy black combat boots with thick rubber soles. I couldn’t see enough of them to see if the treads looked anything like the boot print we found in my yard, but they were definitely a military style boot.

“Where were you last night?” Willis asked, setting the recorder on Mr. Mitchell’s desk.

“Home.”

“When did you get home?”

“After school.”

“Did you go anywhere between leaving school and home?”

“No.”

I could tell the brusque answers were annoying Mr. Mitchell, and they were having a similar effect on me, but Willis seemed unfazed by them. I assumed that in his time working in the big city he’d found ways to get information from recalcitrant suspects.

“What if I said I don’t believe you?” He leaned forward, dominating the skinny boy with his uniformed presence. Ian looked younger now, with the sheriff looming over him. His black jeans, black boots, and black t-shirt just made him look pale and nervous, not tall and intimidating like he certainly wanted. His spiky bright blonde hair wavered a little as he shrank back from Willis’ sudden invasion of his personal space.

“I’d say I don’t give a shit what you believe, because it’s the truth,” Ian jerked forward in the chair, almost nose to nose with the glowering sheriff.

Willis leaned back, a little smile tweaking the corner of his mouth. He got a rise out of the boy, got a full sentence out of him, which was some sort of progress. I enjoyed watching him work. He was good at this, working the push and pull of the boy’s resistance.

“Have you ever been to Ms. Carter’s home?” He asked.

Ian’s eyes went wide, then his brow furrowed as he looked at me. “Her? Why would I go over to her house?”

“I don’t know, Ian. Why don’t you tell me why you went to her house?” Willis asked. I pushed down a smile as I saw what he was doing, getting the boy to admit to going to my house, then spinning that around to him being there last night.

“I didn’t, man. I told you,” Ian insisted. “Or if I did, I went there with my old man, to drop off some liquor.” He glared at Willis, all his hatred of authority restored in a blink. “Is that what this shit is about? You trying to use me to put the old man in jail? Shit, all you gotta do for that is ask. Yeah, he makes moonshine. Sells the shit out of it, too. Sells this old biddy a case whenever she calls, sells it to just about everybody in town. Except that asshole BAR NAME? Shorty, he says Pop’s liquor ain’t good enough for his little pissant joint. Man, you want to get that old bastard on bootlegging, I’ll tell you anything you want. You want to know about them half a dozen scraggly-ass weed plants he’s got growing in the tool shed, too?” Ian leaned back, all smug viciousness at having turned coat on his father.

“We’ll come back to all that,” Willis said. I could see him mentally putting a pin in this point of the conversation. I knew from drinking with him at Gene’s that he could care less about a little moonshining, but growing marijuana might be a whole different operation in his mind.

“I want to know why you were at Ms. Carter’s place last night, poking around in her house. Why were you there, Ian?” Willis asked, his voice and eyes hard as flint.

“I wasn’t, man! I done told you, I ain’t never been there but to drop off liquor with Pops. What would I want in her house anyway? It ain’t like she’s rich or nothing.” He got a crafty look on his face. “You ain’t, are you?”

I almost laughed out loud at the clumsy boy, but managed to hold it in. “No, Ian,” I replied. “I’m not rich. I have some antiques, but most of them are too big to move easily. You’d need a truck and help to get them out of the house. That’s what makes this all the more confusing. Why would you break into my home?” I knew why, of course, I just wanted to keep him off-balance, to show him as few of my cards as possible.

“I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I ain’t a thief. I ain’t no kind of crook. I ain’t no pervert, neither, no matter what them two dead bitches did to my phone. That’s what this is about, ain’t it? Y’all think since I hated them snotty bitches that I killed them. Well I didn’t. I didn’t break into nobody’s house and I didn’t kill nobody. I’m a good person! I just…I just don’t know how totally to people sometimes, and sometimes people want to make out like I’m shit because my family’s shit, and that pisses me off, ‘cause I ain’t nothing like them assholes, and then I get mad, and then they say that proves they was right all along, and…and…and…shit, I don’t know. I just know I didn’t break into nobody’s house and I didn’t kill nobody.”

He leaned back with his arms across his chest and a scowl on his face that only an aggrieved teenager can manage. I looked at Willis, but he didn’t return my glance. He was studying the boy, all his attention focused on Ian’s face, the set of his jaw, how he held his shoulders, whether his hands shook. He stared intently at the teen for several long moments, then leaned back abruptly, startling us both.

“Well, Ian, I reckon we can sort this all out real fast, if you’ll agree to it,” Willis said.

Ian cocked his head to one side, his distrust of Willis, all law enforcement, and everybody who could possibly be considered an adult evident in his face. “What you got in mind, Sheriff?”

“We took a photo and a mold of the boot print that the burglar at Ms. Carter’s house wore. It was fresh, so we were able to get a very detailed impression. I’d like to compare that with your boots. If it’s not a match, and those are the only boots you own, then you obviously didn’t break into Ms. Carter’s home.” I noticed that he very carefully did not mention Jenny and Shelly’s murders. It was one thing for him to throw away a burglary conviction, but if he mentioned anything about the boots in conjunction with the murders, and the shoes didn’t match, we could have ourselves a regular O.J. Trial down here.

“Well, shit, Sheriff, why didn’t you just ask?” Ian said, leaning back in his chair and propping both feet up onto the table in front of him. My mouth fell open as I stared at the bottom of the boy’s feet. He had apparently carved all the tread from the center section of his boots, then epoxied or glued somehow letters down the center of each foot. They looked like the brightly colored letter magnets that children play with, except on his right foot it spelled out “P-I-S-S” and on the left foot is read “O-F-F.”

This was not the boot print of the person who walked through my backyard the night before. The boot print we had was normal, nondescript, and almost pristine. Ian’s shoes were anything but. He was innocent, and he was our best lead.

“Are those the only boots you own, Ian?” Willis asked. I could read the disappointment in his every motion. His eyes were downcast, looking at his papers while the boy’s grin burned a hole in the top of his head.

“Nah, I got another pair,” Ian said with a smirk. Sheriff Dunleavy’s head snapped up, then his shoulders sagged at Ian’s next words. “I carved ‘Suck It’ on the bottom of them. Those are for the days when I’m feeling real bright and sunny. They don’t get much wear.”

Ian stood up and pushed his chair back under the table. “I guess I can go now, right? I’ve got lunch this period, and I’d really hate to miss it. It’s fish stick day, and I can’t wait to see what they’re calling fish this week.” He walked out of the office and slammed the door behind him.

Mr. Mitchell looked at Sheriff Dunleavy and I, his ears a little red from embarrassment. “Well, I suppose that didn’t go quite as planned,” he said, standing. He gestured to the door, and we walked out into the main office.

Mr. Mitchell walked us to the door of the main office, then said, in a voice pitched particularly for the student office monitors to hear, “I told you that Ian wasn’t your burglar, Sheriff. You need to focus on catching real criminals instead of coming here and harassing my students. If you come back, you’d better have a warrant!”

Willis looked at him sideways for a minute, then nodded and walked out into the morning sun. I followed, and held up my palm to Jenny as she drifted over. “Not now, honey, I need to go over to the Grill and get some pancakes with enough syrup to wash the taste of teenage jerk out of my mouth.”

“I’ll drive,” Willis said. “I’m gonna need a whole lot of bacon to mask the taste of the crow I’ll have to eat the next time I need anything from Mitchell.” A disappointed sheriff, an embarrassed psychic, and a dead cheerleader headed off to breakfast. If that sounds like the beginning of a terrible joke, then you are beginning to understand how I felt. Like the beginning of a joke.

 

Help Selling More Books – The Write to Market Concept is Crap

Help Selling More Books – Multiple Buckets (or – why you’re not very bright if you aren’t doing audiobooks)

Sorry for the clickbaity headline, but I’d like to get some more traffic. 🙂 So yeah, really not a bit sorry.

When I talk to writers nowadays, sometimes I’ll have the conversation with people about audiobooks that goes something like this –

Writer – “Do you really make any money off audiobooks?”

John – “It’s almost 20% of my annual income, so yeah, I make some money off audio.”

Writer – “I don’t know anything about how to do it.”

John – “I have the technical skills of a tree frog and the patience of a hummingbird on meth. You think I edit any of that stuff? I hire people to do it.”

Writer – “But it’s expensive!”

John – “I usually work with my narrators on a royalty share. That way I don’t lay out anything up front. It’s not as lucrative for me in the long run, but I don’t have to pay a couple grand to get a novel narrated, and I don’t have to do it.”

Writer – “It sounds hard!”

John – “Now you’re just being lazy. I tell you that you can make a grand a month with no upfront cost, and all you have to be able to do is the equivalent of listing something for sale on eBay, and you still don’t want to do it? What the hell? You’re totally paying for lunch, just for being a buttmonkey.”

Disclaimer – I don’t think I’ve ever called anyone a buttmonkey, but I will almost certainly start.

That’s a brief example of the way I feed my family – I have multiple buckets out to catch the rain. If you have one bucket out in your yard, and you need ten gallons of water, then it needs to rain for a long time for you to get all that water. But if you put twenty buckets out in the yard, then you can get ten gallons pretty quickly.

In case you missed it, the rain is money, and the buckets are revenue streams. Just in case you missed it.

It’s increasingly important to have as many revenue streams as possible, especially for someone trying to make a living as a writer. You can’t just depend on one check twice a year from a major New York publisher. That’s crazy, unless the check is ginormous!

Here are the ways I get paid –

Monthly

Amazon – This is the biggest bucket. I have books for sale on amazon in print and ebook. This makes up about 2/3 of my income. Amazon pays monthly. That’s kinda what I budget my life around. Most of my monthly living expenses are covered through Amazon.

Other sites – While I have a lot of titles listed in Kindle Unlimited, I do still have a few things floating around out there across other sites. I use Draft2Digital as the aggregator for those sites, and they also pay monthly.

Patreon – My patrons are wonderful, and they provide about enough money each month to cover the cost of the conventions I attend. This is quite helpful, especially when I have four cons in eight weeks, like I do right now.

Audible – Audible also pays monthly, which is very helpful. Most of this money goes into a savings account for emergencies or taxes, but if there are lean ebook months, I’ll dip into this.

Autographed books – negligible, although I do hope that since I’ve redone that page on the website, that will start to be a reasonable little dribble of money.

Convention sales – let’s face it, if I break even at a convention after I’ve paid all my expenses, it’s a really good con. I’ve been very fortunate this year that sales are going better than normal, but I still mostly pour all the money back into inventory, so on a good month, it’s a wash.

Quarterly – 

Other publishers – I still have a little work out there with other small presses that pay me quarterly. It’s not a lot, but about enough to buy dinner for me and Suzy, or maybe a trip to the movies.

Semi-Annually – 

Bell Bridge, the folks that publish The Black Knight Chronicles, pay me twice a year. This is like clockwork, and it also mostly goes into savings for taxes, but also helps defray the costs of cons like Dragon Con, which are way more expensive than normal conventions, and I don’t sell there.

Intermittent Income – 

Sometimes I’ll do a story for an anthology that has a one-time payment associated with it, or have a small royalty check from some random work I did a while back, or pick up work that has an advance tied to it. Those are pretty much gravy, and they either go towards erasing credit card debt, or go into savings for taxes.

So I have a bunch of buckets out there trying to catch the rain. Not as many as some people, but a good half dozen revenue streams working. That’s how I can afford to make a living writing, and maybe not write much of anything in June, because I can count on another strong month out of the last Harker novella, and the latest two Harker audiobooks to carry me through any lulls in productivity or sales.

The point of this is not to say “Look at how awesome I am for having a bunch of diverse ways to make money!” I mean, let’s face it, you’re here reading this – you already know I’m awesome. 🙂 It’s more to say that you need to explore all the different ways that you can monetize your work. If you are with a small press that doesn’t do audio – do it yourself. If you are self-published, and haven’t done audio – get on it! It’s a huge market, a growing market, and one that needs to be tapped.

I don’t know what the next thing will be that’s like audio, but you’d better believe that I’m looking for it. So get out there and make some more buckets!

Amazing Grace – Chapter 20

Amazing Grace – Chapter 19

This is the latest chapter of an ongoing serialized novel that I’m working on and posting up here in rough draft form. To read other chapters, CLICK HERE

19

I woke up a little before the sun the next morning feeling almost more tired than when I went to bed. Just as I feared, good-smelling law enforcement officers dominated my dreams, and I tossed and turned all night. I stretched, listening the my spine and hips crackling like a bowl of Rice Krispies, and shuffled off to the bathroom in my nightgown to take care of business.

A how shower later, I dressed in a pair of faded blue jeans and a worn Mast General Store sweatshirt that I picked up at the Goodwill in Spartanburg a couple of years back, and I meandered into the kitchen to fix up some breakfast.

“Well, it’s about time you got up, lazybones,” said the ghost sitting at my kitchen table. I stopped dead in the doorway and looked around. My kitchen could have been host of a busybody ghost convention, with Sheriff Johnny, Jenny, Helen, Frances, and Faye all crowded into one small room. It was a good thing they were incorporeal, because otherwise it would have been awful crowded in there.

“Well, ain’t you going to ask what we’re all doing here?” continued Miss Faye, who was the sharpest-tongued sweet old lady I’d ever known, alive or dead.

“I ain’t gonna do a damn thing until I’ve at least had a sip of coffee,” I said, walking over to the counter. “Move, Johnny. You know I can only kinda see through you, and you’re between me and my favorite mug.”

He got out of the way, and I poured myself a cup of coffee into my favorite World’s Best Grandma mug. I wasn’t anybody’s grandma, but it was an oversized mug and held almost two cups of coffee. I had a feeling I was going to need it with the damn United Nations of redneck ghosts floating around my house. I took a sip of the hot brown liquid, and between the shower, the coffee, and the adrenaline of being extra haunted at seven in the morning, my mind was almost clear by the time I took a seat at the table.

“Okay, folks, why are y’all here?” I asked.

“We did some looking around town last night after you went to bed,” Miss Helen said.

“I helped,” Jenny said, her face covered in a big grin.

“Yes, you did, darling. Now hush for a minute,” Helen said, patting the girl’s arm. I always found it interesting that ghosts could touch one another easily, but had to expend a lot of energy to physically interact with anything in our world. Just another one of those “mysterious ways,” I reckon.

“So we did a little digging, with Jenny’s help, and we think we know who broke in your house yesterday,” Helen said.

“Well, that’s great,” I said. “Because that might be the killer.”

“That’s what we thought, too,” Miss Faye interjected.

I sat there, waiting, but no one spoke. “Well?” I asked. “Are y’all gonna tell me who it was, or should I just sit and wait for them to murder me, too?”

“You remember that freak Ian that Shelly hacked his phone? My dad told you about him,” Jenny said.

I didn’t, but it was early. I got up and went into the dining room. I got my little notebook and flipped it open to the pages where I wrote stuff down while I was talking to Mr. Miller. “Ian Vernon,” I said. “He was the school newspaper’s photographer. Shelly made it look like he sent dirty pictures to all his female classmates.”

“That’s the one,” Jenny said, her face contorted in an ugly snarl. “He used to always take pictures of us at the football games, and he made sure to get the shots when we tossed a girl up in the air, or somebody was jumping around and her skirt would flip up. We all wore trunks, but it was still kinda skeevy.”

“What makes you think he was the one who broke into my house?” I asked.

“I remembered that he always dressed like one of those freaks you see on the news that turns out to have a bomb in his locker or something, with long black coats and black boots and stuff. So I went and got Miss Frances, and she called the other women—“

“The Dead Old Ladies Detective Agency,” Miss Helen corrected.

“She got the Agency together,” Jenny said, then went on after a nod from Helen. “And we all went over to his house to look around.”

“Jenny!” I said. “That’s illegal. You can’t just go into somebody’s house without them asking you.”

“What are they gonna do?” Jenny asked. “Arrest me? I’m dead, I think I’ve got other things to worry about other than getting arrested for breaking and entering.”

“Besides, we didn’t break,” Miss Frances said. “We walked right through the walls into his bedroom. Nobody knew we were even there.”

“Except that cat,” Miss Faye said.

“Yeah, that cat didn’t like us very much,” Miss Helen agreed. “Just sat out on the hall meowing and hissing the whole time we were there.”

“Are y’all going to tell me what you found, or just sit there congratulating one another?” I asked. I’m usually far more respectful of the dead, and of my elders, and certainly of anyone happens to be both, which account for four of the five people in my kitchen. But it was early. I blame my poor manners on lack of caffeine.

“The boots match,” Miss Faye said. Her voice was typically matter-of-fact, like she was saying the sky was blue, or that grass was green. I whipped my head around to her so quick my brain had to take a second to catch up.

“The print we saw in Sheriff Dunleavy’s camera matched the boots we found in Ian’s closet perfectly,” Jenny said. “That perv is definitely the one that killed me and Shelly.” She folded her arms across her chest and looked at me, simultaneously proud of herself for finding the culprit and pissed off about being dead. I couldn’t blame her. I kinda felt both those emotions right then, too.

“Well, I guess the next thing to do would be to call Sheriff Dunleavy and get him to interview Ian. Maybe we can find some reason to talk to him at school,” I said.

“Isn’t me telling you reason enough?” Jenny asked, her voice rising. I noticed the coffee cup rattling on the saucer before me, and I reached out to still the shaking porcelain.

“It is for me, honey, but I don’t think your testimony is a whole lot of good in a court of law,” I pointed out. Jenny scowled at me, but had no response. One benefit to being an old woman talking to young’uns is that sometimes they just shut up when they realize they’re wrong. This does not happen nearly often enough with grownups.

I walked into the kitchen and picked up the cordless phone sitting on the antique icebox I used as a catch-all flat surface to hold the phone, phonebooks, notepads, ink pens, and bills that come in the mail until I get around to paying them. I walked over to my purse and dug out my cell phone, then shook my head and hung the cordless back up in its cradle.

“I reckon if I’ve got his number in my cell phone, I could just use that to call him, couldn’t I?” I asked the air. Or I reckon I might have been asking the passel of dead people sitting in my dining room, but they ignored me, talking amongst themselves about all the “proof” they had that Ian was our murderer.

I pulled up Willis’ number in my contacts list and pressed the button to call him, putting the phone on speaker so everyone could hear the conversation. It rang three times before he answered, and his voice was thick with sleep when he did. “Hello?”

“Willis? Sheriff?” I corrected myself, but not quite fast enough.

“Lila Grace?” he sounded like he was starting to come awake. “What time is it?”

I looked at the clock on the stove. “Six-thirty,” I replied. “I’m sorry, I should have waited to call. I didn’t even think that you might not be up yet. I just tend to get up early. I’m sorry, we can talk later. Give me a—“

“Lila Grace,” his voice cracked over the lines. I stopped talking. “I’m awake now. What do you need? Did something else happen in the night?”

It took me a minute to figure out what he was asking. Of course nothing else happened, he went home. Then I blushed a little at the direction my mind went, and I said, “No, no, nothing like that. But I think we might have caught a break in the case.”

“What do you mean?” His voice had not a single trace of sleep-fuzzy in it now. I had his complete attention.

“The ladies went over to Ian Vernon’s house last night, and they seem to think his boots match the print in my yard.”

“The ladies? Lila Grace, you can’t just go breaking into somebody’s house on a hunch. Not only is that against the law, it’s dangerous as hell. You know just about everybody around here has a shotgun. What if he’d shot you?”

“I think I’d be more worried about his daddy, than Ian,” I said. “From what I’m hearing, if Ian shoots anybody, it’s with a camera. And I didn’t go into his house. I didn’t even know what they were doing until these crazy old biddies showed up in my kitchen this morning.”

That got a glare from the assembled self-appointed detectives, and a confused grunt from the man on the other end of the phone. “Lila Grace, what in the hell are you talking about?”

“Miss Helen, Miss Frances, and Miss Faye went over to Ian’s house last night with Jenny. They walked through his bedroom walls and peeked at the bottom of his boots. Jenny says it’s a perfect match for the boot print in the mud in my back yard.”

“I say that because it is,” Jenny said. “Tell him to arrest that little panty-snatcher!”

“Jenny also says that the boy is a little bit of peeping tom, trying to catch pictures up the cheerleaders’ skirts,” I added.

“Lila Grace, every body from twelve to twenty spends half his life trying to get one glimpse of cheerleader drawers. I ain’t arresting this boy on account of him being heterosexual. But I will go talk to Mr. Mitchell and see about getting an impression of the boy’s shoes. If he wears those boots to school today, and his parents agree to it, and the school lets us, maybe we can get him to step in ink and walk on a sheet of paper for us.”

“You don’t have to talk to his parents,” Jenny said. “He turned eighteen back in the summer. He got held back in seventh grade because he got the mumps and missed too many days.” I relayed her words to the sheriff, and got a sigh of relief.

“Well, that’s one less bunch of asshats we have to deal with. I’ve already run into Ricky Vernon a time or two since I started. He’s a real piece of work,” Willis said.

“For somebody from out of town, you’r catching on to life in the Upstate real quick, Sheriff,” I said with a laugh. “You think Ricky’s something, you should have met his Granddaddy.” Ulysses Vernon died when I was a little girl, but he made one serious impression the few times I met him. He was a huge man, with a long white beard that cascaded down over his overalls, completely covering up the t-shirt he wore. I never saw him wear shoes, even when he drove his old truck up to the house a dropped off a peach crate full of white liquor to my daddy.

Daddy would put cherries in that jar of liquor and let it sit on a shelf for about three weeks while he finished off Old Ulysses’ last delivery, and about the time Daddy was out of liquor, the cherries had soaked into the moonshine and cut the taste just enough to make it drinkable. Daddy got a case of  ‘shine every two months from Ulysses until he drove his truck off the side of the road and wrapped it around a tree. Ricky took up the family business after his Granddaddy died, his own daddy having got killed in Vietnam, but the younger Vernon never had the nose for making liquor like his father did. I still got a case from Ricky every now and then, but half a dozen quart jars would last me almost a year, and I stuck cinnamon sticks in mine and let them dissolve all the way down before I drank the firewater.

“I’ll meet you at the schoolhouse at nine-thirty. That oughta give me enough time to get some breakfast and get a shower. Then we can talk to young Mr. Vernon about his fascination with cheerleaders.” Sheriff Dunleavy’s voice jerked me out of my trip down memory lane, and I took a sip of coffee.

“I’ll be there, Sheriff. Let’s get this boy behind bars and find some justice for those girls.” It all sounded so simple. But my life has never been simple.

Evolution – Naked by Alexandra Christian

Evolution – Naked by Alexandra Christian

Why A Spy Thriller Romance?

By Alexandra Christian

I never liked romance novels. My mother was crazy for them, though. As long as I can remember, my mother had hundreds of them piled on the nightstand that she went through like candy. Historicals, contemporaries, cowboys, ghost stories– you name it, she probably read it. Even more hilarious was that some of them were quite scandalous. Or so I thought as a young teenager. I loved the romantic parts. The love story between the main characters was always something that I sought in every book I read, but my mother’s bodice rippers were lacking the adventure that I craved from things like my beloved Stephen King and Anne Rice novels.

When I was in college, I started writing the kinds of stories that I wanted to read. While I loved horror novels and paranormal thrillers, I was missing the love story. Not sicky sweet love stories or anything, but the connection between the characters.

Remember that movie from the 80s, Romancing the Stone? Yeah, that to me is the perfect romance. Two people thrown together to defeat some dangerous foe and falling in love in the process. The hero and heroine get equal time to be badass. They work as a partnership rather than the girl always being saved by the swashbuckling guy with the codpiece. So when I got ready to write NAKED, I plotted out the adventure first and let the romance develop naturally. I want my readers to get pulled into this grand adventure with them instead of just reading from one hot steamy scene to the next. I’ve always described myself as an author who writes romance novels for people who hate romance novels.

I’m also a huge fan of James Bond and spy movies and/or books. Even the “realistic” ones like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (or any John LeCarre for that matter). Gadgets, super-technology, double-crossing, betrayal, secrets– how can you NOT love a good spy thriller? So I knew that I wanted to incorporate that world into my series. As the series goes on, you’ll learn more about Cage St. John and B.E.A.S.T., the spy organization that he works for. And at the center of it all, I promise you’ll find a smoldering love story.

BLURB:

NAKED (Phoenix Rising #1) by Alexandra Christian

Following a brutal act of vengeance, MI:6 agent Macijah St. John is left grieving for his slaughtered family and agrees to participate in a secret government experiment that gives him a magnificent and terrible power.? Now he’s a mercenary spy that solves problems for the right price.? His latest job puts him in the path of the greatest catastrophe yet—a librarian.

Phoebe Addison’s life is a disaster. Crippling debt, a non-existent social life, and being the town librarian is hardly the glamorous existence she’d always dreamed of. But when her sister Jessica, an interplanetary archeologist, gets herself involved with a psychotic billionaire bent on world domination, Phoe is about to get more excitement than she bargained for.

 

BUY LINKS:

Boroughs Publishing: http://boroughspublishinggroup.com/books/naked

Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071CRSKV2

B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/naked-alexandra-christian/1126242975?ean=2940154124833

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/naked-65

Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/718364

Print: https://www.createspace.com/7094497