About that Beautyman short story …
About two months ago I posted about a short story I’d finished in my mystery series. I still like it, but I think I’m going to hold off publishing it. Why? Because I think it’s better as a novel. A member of my writing group made a suggestion, and it really got me thinking. I think I like it a lot better as a full-length novel than as a 30 page short story. Unfortunately, that means it’s going to take longer to come out. I’m working hard on my sci-fi novel–it’s already 56,000 words, about as long as The Saints Read more…
Kindle highlights
There's a feature on the Kindle that I rarely use: highlighting lines of text so you can find them later. I can count only a few times I've found this to be helpful. But! As an author, it turns out that it can be enormously encouraging. The Little Book of Gold, my fundraising guide for small nonprofits, has spent almost four months on the Kindle best-selling list for nonprofits. Crazy! One of the features of Amazon is that they will show you commonly highlighted passages in a book. That means that I (and anyone else) can see what people find Read more…
On the Merits of Reading Anything and Everything
I will pretty much read anything. Actually, I try to be selective within genres–for example I read Bridget Jones' Diary, one of the most influential and earlier "chicklit" books, but I haven't read widely within the chicklit genre. But, more generally speaking, I will pick up pretty much anything. I devoured all the Star Trek novels in the Swasey library as a kid and even continued to read them through high school and even into college. I've read pot-boilers like Clive Cussler and Dan Brown. I've read a bunch of old classics–Dickens, Verne, Hugo (helpful hint: reading old French books Read more…
“The Saints Go Dying” is free through Monday night!
I'm once again trying out marketing by giving away a book. Here's The Saints Go Dying on Kindle. It's free for the next 18 hours or so (it goes back to being $2.99 at midnight Monday night). So far, January has been a better month than December, and December a better month than November, and November better than October … But a lot of those sales were driven by The Little Book of Gold, which basically spent all of January in the Top 100 Kindle Books for Nonprofits list. Sales of the mysteries dropped a bit, though, so I wanted Read more…
The only copy in existence
I will soon have more physical books of The Marinara Murders, and hopefully of The Saints Go Dying shortly after that. This was a proof that I autographed and labeled #001. It was a prize at last night’s Social Media Club. Who knows, if I write enough of these books, maybe it will be worth something some day? But for now, it’s the only physical copy in existence. That’s kind of awesome to think about. It cost me $15 to create, and more than half of that was expedited shipping, to get it in time for the Social Media Club. Read more…
A weekend of writing …
Mary and I headed east for a weekend in Plain, Washington. My goal was to get a lot of writing done. I figured that the snow and the quiet would motivate me. And it did! I wrote about 5,000 words this weekend, and things are really moving along. I also enjoyed the beautiful snow. We got several inches over the weekend (of course, had I known that Tacoma would get dumped on too, we probably could have just stayed here for the same experience). The snow dragon was from an afternoon trip into Leavenworth yesterday. And the colorful fiber is Read more…
RIP Reginald Hill, author of Dalziel and Pascoe mysteries
One of my favorite mystery authors, Reginald Hill, recently died at 75. His Dalziel and Pascoe series were always a treat. Funny, literary, thoughtful, compelling … they were fabulous. I didn’t read them in order, so allow me to recommend one from mid-series: Pictures of Perfection. I don’t know what it would be like to read this one first, but it’s one of my favorites of his. It’s a book that few authors could pull off: the central mystery is trying to figure out if a crime has even been committed. Reginald Hill taught me a few good things about writing Read more…
Have you read one of my books?
One of the great things about self-publishing is getting reviews and feedback from readers. This one was came yesterday from a new Executive Director of a nonprofit who took the time to email after reading The Little Book of Gold. "It's given me incredible 'peace' in fundraising and outlook in the future, a few ideas I thought about abstractly which you confirmed in your book. It is truly appreciated and just thanking you for this resource." Now, first–holy cow! This is soooo incredibly gratifying. But alternatively, The Little Book of Gold sits on the Amazon shelf without a single Read more…
10 Days on an Amazon bestseller list (no, really!)
My self-publishing experiments actually began in 2009, before I started publishing murder mysteries to the Kindle. I wanted to create a book that would be helpful to people. The thing I knew the most about was managing nonprofits. And what I saw were a lot of nonprofits who were terrible at fundraising. This was most true in small nonprofits, where the organization was too small to have paid development staff. My model was Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. I wanted a book that was very short, readable, and specific to a very narrow segment. Even though I think Read more…
“The back half of the chessboard”
Matthew Yglesias had a really interesting post last month that I keep thinking about, so I've finally decided to post on it. There's an old story about a king who agrees to pay someone by putting one grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, two grains of rice on the next, four on the next, then eight, sixteen, thirty two, etc. Each square has twice the number of grains of rice as the previous one. The king things he's got a bargain, but with 64 squares on the chessboard, he's actually bankrupted the kingdom. By just the Read more…
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