Paradisi Chronicles Launches Today: Nervous and Excited!

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Like the character quoted in this picture, I feel like I have embarked on a rather perilous but exciting adventure with the publication today of my two works in the Paradisi Chronicles series. My coming of age adventure, Between Mountain and Sea, and the short story I co-authored with my daughter, Butler’s Brother, are both now available on Amazon–and there is no turning back! The experience of collaborating with six other independent authors to create an open-source, science fiction universe was an adventure all its own, (see the background on the Paradisi Chronicles here), but I hadn’t anticipated how nervous I would be about actually publishing my own novel in this new universe. I always wondered why other authors said they were writing new series outside their regular genre under secret pen names. But now I think I understand…because for the first time Read more…


Podcast Interview with Hank Garner

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Two weeks ago, I was contacted by author Hank Garner who does interviews for his Author Stories Podcast, and the interview just went live today. Hank is a great interviewer (so check out his site), and I was particularly happy that we not only got to talk about my Victorian San Francisco Mystery Series but that I was also able to introduce his listeners to the history behind the Paradisi Chronicles–the open source science fiction universe I have been working on with six other authors for the past year. In fact, the reason Hank had heard of me was that, even though the first round of works written for the Paradisi Chronicles aren’t going to be out until September 1, our whole enterprise was now the subject of a good deal of buzz among the science fiction/fantasy world of indies. Read more…


The unexpected effect of the “perma free” strategy on my productivity

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In a post entitled Time for a Pivot? I detailed a shift in my marketing strategy for 2015. In 2014, all my books were in Amazon’s KDP Select (which requires exclusivity) and I used the 99 cent Kindle Countdown KDP Select tool as my primarily form of promotion. In December 2014 I took all my books off of KDP Select in order to sell them in a variety of bookstores (Apple, Nook, Kobo, GooglePlay), and for these first six months of 2015 I have been using the perma free strategy (making Maids of Misfortune, the first book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, permanently free) as my major promotional tool. I also committed to writing more short stories, getting audiobook editions out for the next two novels in my series, and writing a short story for a new science Read more…


The Paradisi Chronicles: or how I ended up writing science fiction

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Paradisi Chronicles… A science fiction adventure through time, space and generations, brought to life through the creativity and independent perspectives of multiple authors. Enter the world of the Paradisi Chronicles, where every new journey is a surprise ride you’ll never want to get off. The Beginning: Almost exactly a year ago, on July 19, 2014, a fellow indie author, Amanda Allen, brought up the idea (inspired by this post by Hugh Howey) that a group of us should get together to create a science fiction world in which we could all write, with the goal of publishing the first round of works all at once. We could then open up the world to any author who wanted to write in that world. A sort of open-source indie version of Kindle Worlds. I loved the idea. While I write historical mysteries, Read more…


News, new books, new strategies, new results

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I was just reading a blog post entitled, “Short is the New Black” and I thought…why haven’t I posted anything in…over 2 months!!!! And the answer is, in the past my posts have been long….very long….sometimes longer than a short story. And I have been too busy writing fiction to write blog posts. So I am going to try something different. Short and sweet. News: The audiobook version of the third book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery Series, Bloody Lessons is now available, and the ebook version is 99 cents in most ebookstores for the next 2 days (May 6-7), and if you by the Kindle ebook version you get the audiobook version on audible for only $1.99) A very good deal. New Books: Deadly Proof, the fourth book in the series, (which is also available in all major ebook Read more…