I’ve had an idea kicking around for a while to write a weird western, so I’m going to give it a shot. Posting chapters here kept me honest on Amazing Grace, so maybe it’ll keep me motivated on this project, too. It’s called Angel in the Dust (for now), and it’s a near-future or alternate reality western set in a world where the United States is very different, and angels walk among us. Much to our chagrin. I’ll try to post a chapter every Monday, like I did with Grace. Hopefully, this will be as good.
Prologue
The sun beat down like a hammer, cracking the hard dirt and sending jagged lines off in every direction to the horizon, where wavy lines of heat spun up off the red dirt to twist and dance along the edges of the purple sky. The man rode, head down, his bandanna shielding what parts of his neck his hat didn’t shade. He looked neither right nor left, just down and straight ahead, riding as if asleep through the blazing afternoon sun. Every so often, once every mile or two, he reached down to his hip and drew a flask to his lips. A short sip of water, just enough to wash the dust from his lips and cut the muck that filled his throat.
If she hadn’t been lying so close to what passed for a road in this blazing hellhole he never would have seen her. If his horse hadn’t tweaked a shoe when it shied away from a rattlesnake he never would have stopped there. If he hadn’t been unusually clumsy and dropped the hoof pick he never would have heard her. If his batteries weren’t dead, he would have been listening to music on his headphones, the one luxury he permitted himself, and he wouldn’t have noticed her lying there covered in sand.
But she was there, right beside the road where his horse pulled up with the beginnings of a limp, just a mile past where his batteries died, and he did drop the hoof pick on the tarmac, and it bounced onto her back, and when he picked it up, she moved.
It was more of a weak twitch than any conscious movement; she was too far gone for that. But when her body convulsed ever so slightly at his touch, just enough wind-blown sand fell off her to reveal that she was, in fact, a person.
So y’all might have heard that I was in St. Louis last weekend, hitting up both Penned Con 2017 and Archon 41. My conversations with several people at both cons raised the question – Is it worth it?
It’s a valid question, and one I ask myself often when I go to conventions. Last week I drove over 1500 miles round trip. I was away from home for six days. I spent five nights in a hotel, and ate out every meal for six days. That’s not an insignificant investment in time, effort, and money, and that’s before we go into the inventory involved with me taking over 120 paperbacks and hardbacks across five states!
So when I evaluate a convention’s worth, I look first at what kind of convention it is. There are several major types of convention that I attend, some more frequently than others, and I expect different things from all of them. Today, we’ll take a look at what cons fit into what type, and what I’m looking for at each one.
Let’s start with the ones that are frequently the most expensive, and have the lowest opportunity for immediate return on investment, but may have the greatest long term ROI – industry cons. In the writing business there are several different types of industry con, and they are usually the ones that have the highest cost to attend. When I talk about industry cons, I mean World Fantasy Con, World Horror Con, RWA Nationals, and ThrillerFest. Regional writer festivals like the NC Writers’ Network Fall Gathering also fall into this category.
Industry cons often cost everyone but the volunteers and Guests of Honor to attend. Unlike comic cons or fandom cons, even the vendors at some professional cons still have to buy their badge on top of their table fee. And if you don’t have a table, even if you’ve been a pro in the field for decades, you may still have to spring for a badge. That’s not a knock on the convention, it’s just the way they are structured. The target audience of the con is the pros, so they aren’t using your work on panels to draw in the Muggles, they are putting you on maybe one or two panels to speak to your peers.So at these cons you pay for your badge. And they ain’t cheap. Some of these cons will cost several hundred dollars to attend, and it’s less likely that you’ll have an opportunity to make that cost back by selling books, as the number of fans in attendance is far lower than the number of pros. You may find yourself laying out $300 for a badge, then $150-250 per night for a hotel, plus travel. These cons can easily set you back a grand or more, with little to no opportunity to recoup that money quickly.
So why go? Because it’s a long game, remember? I had a great meeting at Dragon Con with an editor that I’m working on a proposal for. If it goes through, it’ll take most of 2018 before I see a dime off that meeting, and I’ve been building a relationship with that editor since 2014 at Dragon. It’s the long game. He’s not going to leave the business. I’m not going to leave the business. If it takes us four to six years to make any money off being friends, so be it. If we never make any money off being friends, so be it. But the connections you make at industry cons have so many more ancillary benefits over dollars and cents and immediate sales. Maybe a drink in the Westin bar turns into a cover blurb given or received. Maybe a panel on the Urban Fantasy track results in contracts for eight novellas (See: Mason Dixon, Monster Hunter). Maybe you meet somebody that you can give advice to, or somebody that you can learn from. Industry cons are great for that kind of networking, that kind of relationship building. I didn’t sell a single book at World Horror Con, but spending the weekend hanging out with Alethea Kontis, Jake Bible, Chris Golden, Charles Rutledge, James Tuck, and other friends was well worth the expense of the con.
That’s not to say that you should jump in on every industry con that’s within driving distance. I’ve never done the RWA national conference. I write very little romance, and most of what I publish can only be called romance in the very loosest of terms. So I don’t go to those cons. I don’t go to the NC Writers’ Network Gathering except when it’s in Charlotte. It’s mainly a literary fiction, historical fiction, and poetry conference, without a ton of genre fiction writers or readers. So while I really like the organization and support their programming, I can’t justify it as an every-year con. I’ll be there in 2018 when they’re in Charlotte, though. That’s for damn sure. So you do have to balance potential return on investment with your attendance, but you don’t have to look at it as a black and white set of numbers on a balance sheet. I plan to attend World Fantasy Con next year in Baltimore because it’s drivable, and I can sell some books, raise the overall profile of Falstaff Books, and maybe sign up some more writers to our stable. It’ll take years to see if that investment will pay off.
Long. Game.
Next week we’ll talk about fandom cons, and maybe move into pop culture cons or comic cons/vendor hall cons. Later on we’ll look at what I call Starfucker cons, then we’ll talk about what you’re trying to get out of a con, how many you should do in a year, and when is it too much of a good thing?
Until then, I had a new book come out yesterday, so I’d love it if you’d go buy Amazing Grace. If you scroll back through the archives, you can hear me read the prologue. If you’ve already bought it, and enjoyed it, leave a review! They really matter.
As a little “Thank You!” to all of you who read Amazing Grace in its serial form, and offered encouragement as I wrote it, I gave you a little present –
This is the recorded Prologue to the novel, in my own voice, because I enjoy doing this piece at readings and thought y’all might like to hear what it sounds like to me.
You can buy Amazing Grace in your favorite ebook format here – books2read.com/u/4DoRWQ. Print copies are releasing 10/17/17, in softcover and hardcover.
That’s the trick, isn’t it? If we write more, we can publish more, and then we can sell more. I publish roughly 2-3 novels per year, plus a couple of short stories, plus anywhere from 9-14 novellas. This year, I will finish up with eight novellas, a couple of short stories, and two novels. Somewhere between 375,000 and 400,000 words of published fiction, plus around 100,000 words of blogging. I don’t count FB posts, but I do count the stuff I write here, because it’s written with intent and forethought, and usually some level of narrative thread. So close to half a million words, or a little more if we take into account the 60K of Black Knight #7 that I trashed, and the 25K of TECH Ops that I’m still working on.
That’s a lot of words. That’s what it takes for me to make a living. I don’t make any kind of extravagant living, but I am the wage-earner for my wife and I. That word count allows me to do that. It also allows me the time to work on Falstaff Books projects, and we will probably end the year producing 20 titles, every one of which I had some level of direct hand in producing.
So the question I get from a lot of writers is “How do you write that much?” Well, here’s how, and I have to give credit where due to Dean Wesley Smith, who wrote some very good blog posts in 2010-11 on a workmanlike approach to writing, and how much you could produce in a year if you just write 1,000 words per day. I shoot for a little more than that, but I also don’t write every single day.
But here’s my basic approach.
Divide and Conquer – I typically work on two projects at once, one main project and one side project. This lets me have a palette cleanser project that I can fiddle with when I need to let my lizard brain work out a plot problem.
Break Down the Project – My chapters are almost always 2,000 words long, so I shoot for one chapter per day on my main project. When I’m working a novella, that means that working Monday-Friday for three weeks gets me to 30,000 words. That’s the average length of my novellas, with a couple thousand words for an epilogue. Since I usually get to the last chapter and binge right through to “THE END,” I write a novella in three weeks. That’s a pretty relaxed pace. Then I use the 1K/day on my side projects to do things outside the Bubba or Harker universes, my novels, or work-for-hire stuff. I’m currently working on some work-for-hire serialized stuff for a client, and they want 5K per part. So that’s one week per serialized chunk.
Don’t Kill Myself – I mentioned that I write 3K per day, and I consider that a pretty relaxed pace. I can do 5K/day, but it’s tiring. I could train myself to write more, and faster, but I’m in this for the long haul, and I have yet to meet more than a couple of people who can do 5K/day for more than a year or two and make it consistently good. That’s pretty important to me – being able to do this for the long term. I’m seven years into my fiction writing career, and 11 years into my professional writing career, so I know what I can do consistently to make the words come out tight and requiring as little polish as possible. I want to turn in clean copy, and about 3-4K/day is my maximum sustainable pace for that. Much faster, and I spend so much time scrapping shit and rewriting that I am better off just writing slower in the first place.
Let Life Happen – I mentioned above that my output this year wasn’t quite what I wanted it to be. I had some months where I didn’t write much, and it was a struggle to get 2K per day. That happens, especially for those of us with depression, anxiety, bipolar (that’s me!) or other mental health issues. Or physical health issues, if you have those. Or family issues. Shit happens, and sometimes you have to deal with that. Hopefully if it shits all over your writing productivity, you either still have a day job, or you have enough of a backlist selling through to carry you. But you can’t freak out about that shit, or you’ll just create a whirlwind of doom and never write anything.
Hop Around a Little – I write four series currently, or more like 3.5, since the Harker books and the Shadow Council books are so intertwined. But that keeps my ADD appeased, with the occasional bone thrown to my distractions by doing something like Amazing Grace (which is out for preorder now). I would likely make more money if I just hammered out Harker novels as fast as I could. But I’m not in this just for the cash. Yes, this is how I make my living. Yes, I need this income to pay my bills. But as I keep saying, I am in this for the long haul. Amazing Grace could turn into a Hallmark movie series, for all I know. What I know about that book is that while writing it may mean that it takes me two years to finish the Harker plot Quest for Glory, I wrote a book I absolutely love and think is the best thing I’ve ever produced. That will pay me more dividends in the long run than jamming out another Harker novella or novel.
That’s what I do. That’s how I work, and how I make a living in this business. Am I killing it like some of the newer self-published Urban Fantasy authors? No. Am I still going to be here in five years? Yeah. I’ve seen a lot of people flame out in the past seven years, and I’ve found the method that lets me continue to produce at a reasonable pace and not burn myself out. You’ve got to find what works for you, but for me, writing for 3-4 hours each day gets the bills paid, as long as I’m doing all the other stuff that goes into being a full-time writer, more than half of which has nothing to do with actually writing.
Remember, if you find these posts helpful, feel free to buy one of my books as a “Thank You,” or you can join my Patreon and pledge your undying support!
Not really. But I have begin referring to myself as “Simon Cowell of small press publishing.” If you’d really like to see why, you can go check out the finalists of Son of a Pitch, an online query contest that gets things read by actual publishers. My pal Samantha, she of the menopausal superhero novels asked me to participate, so I read the 20 finalist queries, and the 250-word samples they submitted. Out of the finalists, who had been winnowed down through two previous rounds of judging, I requested three submissions.
Despite the rapidly growing size of our Falstaff Books catalog, I’m not an easy sell. Let’s be honest, most stuff gets rejected before it gets to me. We have multiple acquiring editors reading submissions at Falstaff, and they have to like it before it gets referred to me. Then I have to read the book and like it enough to put it into one of our very limited novel-length publications slots. Then I have to converse with the author and come to terms with them on a contract. Then they’ve sold a book.
But I’m the bottleneck. Probably 80% of submissions that come in are rejected before they get to me. I take less than half of what comes through our acquiring editors, and only about a third of what comes to me directly.
Yes, there are way to bypass the acquiring editors (the slush pile). Here’s how – meet me face to face and pitch me. I do open pitch sessions at any convention that will let me, but the downside to getting face time to pitch a publisher at a con is that it’s in front of a room full of people and you get my critique of your pitch right there on the spot. If you can stand it, come to Atomacon in November, I’m doing a 9AM Saturday morning pitch session. So now you have to pitch me in front of people, AND I’ll be pissy because it’s early.
I won’t really. By 9AM most day’s I’ve already been working for at least an hour.
We did one of these at Congregate in July, and one of the authors there is in the queue for a contract already. So it works.
But I’m not nice. I try not to be rude, but I really do channel my inner Simon Cowell. Now I never watched him on American Idol, but I’ve seen him on America’s Got Talent, and Simon is the tough judge. Not because he’s a dick, although he puts on that front to attract viewers. No, he’s the tough judge because he’s in the business of making money. He wants to turn records into dollars, just like I want to turn books into dollars. So if you show up with a half-assed pitch, or trying to pitch an unfinished book, I’m going to bounce you off the stage as fast as Simon will. But if you show up with something that you’ve obviously put a lot of work into, and you’ve researched our press, and you’ve done all the right things before you get there, then I’ll probably ask you for a submission.
Then the book has to be ready to submit, and it has to be awesome, but those are steps 2-27 of selling a book. First you have to get past Simon. And only about a third of the 20% that actually gets to me make it to contract.
And I accept a LOT more books than most publishers. So get your shit ready before you submit!
I wrote a couple of posts early in this series about how to build a mailing list with Incentivized and Organic Subscribers, and all that stuff remains true. If you missed them, the first part is here, and the second one is here. This won’t be about the philosophical elements of making a newsletter, this will be about the nuts and bolts, the mechanics, and what I personally do with my mailing lists to monetize them. Some of this is stuff I’ve gleaned from the internet, some of it I’ve come up with on my own, and fair chunk of it is from notes I took in a long conversation with my friend Stuart Jaffe. If you want to read some kickass adventure or supernatural mystery stuff, check him out. And if you sign up for his email list, you’ll get some free shit! Eric Asher is another person I use for a resource on promos and mailing lists, and he’s also got a deal or two running right now.
But how do I deal with my mailing list(s)? Well, that’s been the subject of a lot of thought over the past few days, as I’ve recently relocated my mailing list from Mailchimp to Mailerlite, because for the number of subscribers that I have (currently about 3,600 across four lists) Mailerlite is $20/month, where Mailchimp was $50, and going to $75 when I reach 5K. So that’s not an insignificant savings, especially given what I have in the marketing budget most months, which is frequently dryer lint. By the way, if you click on those links and sign up for Mailerlite, you get a discount and I get a kickback, so if this is helpful, that’s one way to show the love.
As I mentioned, I have four mailing lists, three of which are active, and one I’m just getting moving (slowly) on. The lists are – my newsletter, the Falstaff Books newsletter, and the ARC team for me & Falstaff. Yes, those links are the signup forms for the linked newsletters. Yes, you can get a metric ton of free ebooks just for signing up to all of those email lists and then auto-dropping. I mean, by my rough reckoning, if you signed up for all the lists that I’ve shown you here, you would get six complete novels, two short stories, one sampler anthology, and one anthology. All for free!
But how does it work? How do I get people onto the lists, and how do I deal with the lists once I’ve got them there. Okay, here’s what I do. It’s more than most people, and scale it back to fit your productivity, but remember that I release at least one new product every month, and sometimes more, plus I have a publishing company releasing at least two new books each month, usually more. So I have a lot of shit to notify people about. But here’s the plan.
1) Consistency – I’m a flake, and anyone that has worked with me knows it. I know it, and I also know that I can’t do the things I need to do if I’m flaking out all over the place. So I have an event set up in my calendar to write a newsletter every Wednesday. It’s also when I write these posts, so it kinda just gives me a couple hours in publisher headspace to do this kind of stuff. I do a John Hartness newsletter one week, then a Falstaff newsletter the following week. If for some reason I don’t have anything new coming out that week, the week before, or the week after, I skip a week. That doesn’t happen very often, between appearances, book releases, and audiobook releases, I have something hitting the virtual streets almost every week, so there’s something to talk about. But consistency is critical. If you go too long without sending out a newsletter, people forget about you. And obscurity is our enemy. So I send out a newsletter about every two weeks for each of my major newsletters. The ARC team is a whole different story, and one that I’m still working on. I’ll keep you posted.
2) The Funnel – This is what I learned from Stuart, setting up my automation. I know he didn’t invent the idea. He’s smart, but not that smart. But he was kind enough to take the time to sit down and explain the whole thing to me. So here’s what happens when someone signs up for my email newsletter, and this is another place in which Mailerlite has Mailchimp beat, hands down. This shit was so much easier to set up on Mailerlite that it wasn’t even funny.
Step 1 – Janet signs up for the newsletter. Janet gets a confirmation email with a link in it directing her to confirm that she’s a human and really wanted to sign up for this crap. Once she does that, she is sent to an Instafreebie page. Instafreebie is a website that automates ebook giveaways and integrates them with mailing lists. It lets me do all this without actually having to sit down and send people ebooks. I use it for all my mailing list giveaways. Yes, there is a referral link buried in that link, too, so if you sign up for Instafreebie and upload a book, I get a discount. Just assume that I have put referral links in every link in here, because I probably have. It doesn’t add anything to your cost, and if I am recommending that you sign up for a service, might as well get them to pay me for it, right?
Step 2 – But anyway, Janet goes to Instafreebie and gets her free ebook. Then the automation starts rolling. In a few days, Janet will get a second email, with another Instafreebie link, this one to a different free short story. She doesn’t have to sign up for anything extra, she doesn’t have to get the story. But it’s free, and it’s a story I like, so why not give it away?
Step 3 – Seven days later, Mailerlite runs an if/then sequence. If Janet opened the email, then she gets an email inviting her to join the Falstaff Books email list. This will get her two more free ebooks, plus another set of notifications. If she didn’t open the email, it will resend, to give her a little reminder to become an active fan and read all my shit (and get more free shit!).
Step 4 – Seven days after that, another step runs. If Janet didn’t open the email a second time, she’s removed from the list. I pay per subscriber, and if people aren’t reading the things I’m sending, then I would rather not pay to keep them around. If they are actively interested and just got busy, they can sign up again and get more free shit all over again. If Janet opened the email the second time it sent, she then gets invited to the Falstaff Books email list. To get more free shit. If she opened the Falstaff Books invite, then she gets another email inviting her to join Stuart’s email list and get his shit for free. Because we all like to work together, and a rising tide lifts all boats. So the more books Stuart sells, the more books I will eventually sell, because we’re all about training people to buy indie and small press books, and love us all. So I like pimping my friends.
If Janet didn’t open the Falstaff Books email, then nothing else happens. I don’t refer only moderately active subscribers to other folks, but I don’t boot them, either. If they’ve opened 2/3 of the emails I send, then I definitely want them around.
That’s the way my funnel is currently set up, and it’s constantly evolving. But I want to draw people in as much as I can, and engage them as much as I can. Those are the initial steps to building a list, signup forms, and creating a funnel to suck them into your loving arms forever.
We’re way over the thousand word limit I try to keep these at, but just a quick note – there’s a new Quincy Harker short story coming out soon, and I’m giving away 100 copies on Instafreebie. You don’t have to sign up for shit, just click this link and you can get a free Harker story. Now, you CAN sign up for the email list while you’re there, but it’s not required. There are 80 or so available as of this writing, so go get some free shit!
Hey there! Here’s a badass new book bundle that I’m part of along with some awesome writers including Gail Z. Martin, Mario Acevedo, Dean Wesley Smith, Quincy Allen, Jean Rabe, Kelly Harmon, Stuart Jaffe, and Mindy Klasky. It’s on sale wherever ebooks are sold, and also is available on BundleRabbit!
It includes Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 1, and eight other great books for as low as $2.99 for the whole set!
Yeah, it might seem like an odd question for someone who runs a small press to ask, but bear with me.
It is easier now than it has ever been to make money self-publishing. There are more ways to dissect the market, more tools to create and distribute a quality product, and more people making a solid living self-publishing their own work than ever before. So why would you want to work with a publisher? Particularly a small press, which might not be able to do anything better for you than you could do yourself.
I teach classes on this shit. I’ll be teaching this very thing as a workshop at Penned Con in St. Louis at the end of the month. That workshop is about choosing a path to publication, and it dissects the decision-making process about going indie, small press, or shopping a book to agents and then New York. Since I’ve never sold a book to a Big 5 publisher, or any other press that doesn’t accept unaccented submissions, I can’t say a whole lot about that.
I know, it’s never stopped me before. 🙂 It won’t this time, either. Don’t worry.
But for today, let’s look at the reasons you might want to use a small press publisher over self-publishing.
You don’t want to learn how to do all that shit.
There’s nothing wrong with that as a response. I’ve been at this for seven years and I still can’t design a decent cover wrap. Hell, I can barely design a serviceable cover at all. But I do know how to hire those people. But there are parts of the process that are non-writing related that you have to learn when you are a publisher, whether you are the entirety of the client list, or you have dozens of writers in your stable. You need to learn how to build an ebook, how to create a cover, how to create a cover wrap, how to navigate ISBNs, deal with CreateSpace, deal with Ingram, find an audiobook producer, navigate ACX, upload to Amazon, get the book listed on all other ebook distribution sites, and make decisions about pricing, exclusivity, and all sorts of other market factors.
That’s a lot of shit. If you have a family and a day job, you might just not have the bandwidth to learn all that shit, no matter how intelligent you are. My buddy AJ Hartley is a hell of a writer. He publishes with several big houses, and has had quite a successful career to this point. He also has a day job and a kid to raise, and his wife has a thriving career as well. He should never self-publish (I’m sure he’s glad to hear this, since he also has never wanted to), because he has too much other shit going on in his life. It’s all I can do to get him to send out his newsletter. 🙂 Love ya, buddy.
So not wanting to learn how to do all the things a publisher does is a perfectly valid reason to give up part of your royalties. Conversely, if you are very interested in how the sausage gets made, selling one book or one series to a publisher and following it through the creation and distribution process can also be a great way to learn.
You want to learn to be a better writer.
This is why Bell Bridge Books publishes The Black Knight Chronicles. I have often said that I consider working with Deb Dixon and Bell Bridge to be my MFA writing program, with a fair side of editing classes thrown in. I couldn’t have learned as much in five years of college as I did in the two years we spent taking the first three Black Knight books apart and rebuilding them. Every book I do with Deb, I learn more about story, pacing, plotting, building a series, and writing good, tight fiction. I sincerely hope that someday some of my Falstaff authors say the same thing about their work with me and my team. If you’re not learning, you’re pushing up daisies. So if you can find a bunch of people who you like working with that will help you grow in your craft, then the amount of money you “lose” by working with a publisher is insignificant in comparison to the increased earnings you’ll see down the road.
Let’s also be clear: I 100% made more money on The Black Knight Chronicles with Bell Bridge than I would have on my own, even if I had stayed 100% indie and pushed books out as fast as I can. In addition to the education I’ve gained, getting a Kindle Daily Deal feature several times sure doesn’t hurt!
You need a confidence boost.
It’s a tough world, and a lot of the time it feels like nobody is on your side. A good publisher will always be on your side. Sure, the interest is also partially self-serving, since you selling more books makes money for both of you, but that’s not a bad thing. I’m a fan of enlightened self-interest. It’s a motivation that I understand. So I try to be a cheerleader for my authors. I suck at it, so I usually give them a little Simon Cowell-style tough love and then bring in somebody else to be all huggy, but I try. But whenever you get down, and think it’s too much and you should give up, having a publisher behind you gives you at least one person who really wants you to succeed. And they believe that you can. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have wasted the ink sending you a contract. And they sure as hell wouldn’t have spent time editing your work, and building a cover, and doing all the other shit that we do. Even if we don’t put any money where our mouth is as far as an advance, we do put a lot of time, blood, sweat, and tears into making every book the best it can be. That’s another thing that a publisher does – we spend a fair amount of time as career counselor and cheerleader for our authors. Because a happy author is a productive author. And a productive author writes better.
There are a ton of people out there who’ll tell you why you don’t need a publisher today. And everything they say is correct.
But I don’t need a Krispy Kreme doughnut, either. Like, ever. But damn, a lot of times I want one.
Well, it’s done. Amazing Grace is complete at 29 chapters, plus a prologue and an epilogue. The whole thing is off to my editor now, actually has been for a month or two, honestly. I’ve enjoyed having all of you along with me for this ride. It’s been a fun change of pace for me to serialize something, and to work in a longer format than the novellas I do every month. I also found myself loving Lila Grace and the Dead Old Ladies Detectives.
Don’t worry, there will be more.
Yeah, there will be more Lila Grace, more Dead Old Lady Detectives, and more of this fictionalized Lockhart, SC. Lockhart is a real place, and John D. Long Lake is where Susan Smith drowned her children. There was a guy who lived there named Johnny Thomas, but he wasn’t a sheriff, he was a barber, and my dad’s cousin. The Lockhart in Amazing Grace is a blend of the real Lockhart, plus York and Sharon, all tossed into a blender and mixed until chunky. The cemetery where Lila Grace walks is the cemetery where my mother is buried, and she is one of the Dead Old Lady Detectives, along with her best friends Faye Russell (nee Comer) and Helen (Tot) Good. Miss Faye is still alive, but Miss Tot left us earlier this year, right about the time I started this book. I couldn’t think of a better way to memorialize her than to put her in this book with Mama and Miss Faye, because the three of them did form the Western York County grapevine for a long time.
So there’s a lot of truth in this book, despite the fact that none of the ghosts I talk to have ever talked back. And I’m good with that. So I hope you’ve enjoyed Amazing Grace, and sometime in 2018 I’ll start giving you chapters of Will the Circle Be Unbroken, the next Lila Grace Carter Mystery. The book will be on sale in ebook and print next month, most likely, unless I decide to submit it for publication elsewhere, in which case it will take longer. But I’ll keep you posted.
In the meantime, next week we’ll start something COMPLETELY different. Like, more different than you can even imagine. Starting next week, we’ll have a near-future cyborg adventure called TECH Ops kicking off. I hope you enjoy it as much as you’ve enjoyed Amazing Grace.
I’ll be there sharing a tent with Matthew Saunders, Darin Kennedy, and Gail Z. Martin. We’ll have a shitload of books for you buy, so bring a wagon! Also attending will be awesome people like Christina Henry, Leigh Bardugo, and Sherrilyn Kenyon. They won’t be in the tent with us, but they’ll be there.
Falstaff Books will have multiple authors representing us there, with a truckload of books to sell and some awesome panels to present. So come out and say hi, and bring your wallet!
Friday, September 29 – Saturday, September 30 – Penned Con – St. Louis, MO.
There are a flaming shitload of writers at this multi-genre book festival in St. Louis, including me and Eric Asher. So if you’re anywhere near there, come out and say hi!
That’s the rest of this month. There’s more to come, always! See you soon!
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