The three reasons I have fallen in love with writing short stories
I am the last author you would think would be writing short stories. As a writer who tends to be prolix, the short form wouldn’t seem a good match for me. I don’t write anything short––not emails, not blog posts, not books. Twitter, forget it––the most I can do is retweet those of you who are good at being succinct. I don’t even read many short stories, (except by 19th century writers like Alcott, Wharton, and James). Yet, this spring I took time off from doing the research for Deadly Proof, the next book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, to write my third and fourth short stories, which are now part of a collection, Victorian San Francisco Stories, that I just published on Kindle, and I have every intention of putting out more short stories in the coming Read more…
Summer Kickoff: Update and Uneasy Spirits Sale
It has been 3 months since I wrote a substantive blog post. So you might be wondering, what have I been doing? The answer is simple, I actually started taking some of my own advice, and I have been concentrating on writing and getting more work out there and available rather than spending so much time marketing or giving everyone else advice. Did you miss me? Mostly, I have been writing short stories for my Victorian San Francisco series. If you want to see my most recent one, Mr. Wong Rights a Wrong, you can buy it for 99 cents here. The story I have almost completed, Madam Sibyl’s First Client, is going to be available for free in June for a limited time to those who have signed up for my newsletter. Additionally, I am working on bringing my Read more…
My Main Character Blog Hop: Annie Fuller in the Victorian San Francisco Stories
Ana Brazil has tagged me in this blog hop where I will answer seven questions about my main character in my Victorian San Francisco series. Ana has a forthcoming historical mystery entitled Fanny Newcomb & the Irish Channel Ripper. I suspect my character Annie Fuller and Ana’s Fanny Newcomb might quite like each other! You can find out more about her work and Fanny Newcomb here. ♣♣♣♣ The concept behind my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series came from my desire to find a way to introduce the reading public to the women who lived and worked in the far west at the end of the 19th century (the subject of my doctoral dissertation). As a fan of mysteries with amateur detectives (Sayer’s Lord Peter and Harriet Vane) and female sleuths (this was in the early 1980s and Sue Grafton had Read more…
Is Kindle Countdown the new Free? Keeping books visible in 2014
For the past year there has been a good deal of hand-wringing over the question of KDP Select free promotions. Have they de-valued fiction, do they attract negative reviews, do they even work anymore? As anyone who regularly reads my blog posts knows, I have been a strong proponent of offering ebooks free for promotional purposes, and free promotions have been very good to me in terms of increasing my reviews and keeping my books visible and selling. However, I also believe one of the distinct advantages we have as indie authors is our ability to use our own sales data to respond innovatively to changes in the marketing environment. As a result, in the past year I followed a number of different strategies to keep the books in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series visible, including beginning to experiment Read more…
Dandy Detects is now an Audio Book
I am excited to announce that my first short story, Dandy Detects, is now available as an audio book on Amazon, Audible, and iTunes. I am trying a new narrator, Alexandra Haag, who I love, and I hope she will be able to do the rest of my work. But, ultimately it is the fans of the series who can tell me if Alexandra has captured the world of Annie Fuller, Nate Dawson, and the O’Farrell Street Boarding House. The price for the audiobook is $3.95 (I don’t set the price and I know this seems steep for a short story—but it is cheap for an audio book—and it has already been discounted on Amazon to $3.45). To encourage you all to give it a try I am giving out a limited number of free coupons—just send me a message Read more…
^