Two-Day Sale of Victorian Mystery Books on Kindle

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I don’t usually just post when I am doing a promotion, but I am experimenting this time with a pre-Holiday promotion of my two Victorian San Francisco Mystery novels so I thought I would let you all in on the experiment. Uneasy Spirits, the sequel in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery Series is FREE on KINDLE for two days, Tuesday-Wednesday, December 11-12, 2012.  Here is the link for the U.S. Kindle Store, and the U.K. Store. A second part of the experiment is to offer the first book in the series, Maids of Misfortune, for 99 cents for the same two days that the sequel is on sale. While I know there are lots of people out there who already have Maids of Misfortune and are going to be glad to pick up the sequel for free, I wondered if those Read more…


Authors Need to Get a Clue: How to devise the best marketing strategy for the Holidays

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Everywhere the discussion is raging among indie authors: should they sign their books up for KDP Select for the holidays or not? This is an important decision because, if last holiday is any guide, the bulk of ebook sales are going to come in the ninety days after December 25, when huge numbers of new ereaders and tablets of all sorts are found gift-wrapped under the tree. On the surface the decision should be easy. If the vast majority of a specific ebook’s sales are on Amazon, if you have enrolled the ebook in KDP Select program before and achieved a decent number of borrows (for example, more than the total number of ebooks you were selling in non-Amazon stores), and if you held free promotions that increased your sales––then probably it would be a smart move (at least financially) to Read more…


Tools to use to Recreate the Past: Annie Fuller’s Boarding House

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I am working on Bloody Lessons, the third book of my historical mystery series, which means I am wrestling once again with how adequately and accurately to portray the past, in this case 1880 San Francisco. This led me to the idea of describing some of the tools I used in creating the historical background for my protagonist’s home, which appeared first in Maids of Misfortune and will continue to play a role in all of my books, a boarding house in the 400 block of O’Farrell Street of San Francisco, between Jones and Taylor. First of all, as Susanne Alleyn points out in her clever and very readable book, Medieval Underpants and Other Blunders: A Writer’s (and Editor’s) Guide to Keeping Historical Fiction Free of Common Anachronisms, Errors, and Myth, an author of historical fiction needs to recognize that Read more…


Uneasy Spirits Excerpt: In Celebration of Halloween

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Halloween is fast approaching, and I thought it might be fun to put up an excerpt from Uneasy Spirits, the second book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series. This is a chapter near the end of the book where the main protagonist, Annie Fuller (a boarding house owner who supplements her income as a clairvoyant, Madam Sibyl), is taking a walk with two of her boarders (Barbara Hewitt and her son Jamie) and one of my favorite characters, their Boston Terrier, Dandy. Chapter Thirty-five Tuesday evening, October 28, 1879 “No Fun for the rats. A ratting match for $200 took place the other evening in a well-known sporting resort…The dogs were the imported bull-terriers ‘Crib’…and ‘Flow.’” —San Francisco Chronicle, 1879 “Jamie, hold tight to Dandy’s leash. I don’t want any rat-catching tonight,” said his mother, Barbara Hewitt, who then Read more…


Update on Categories and Keywords: Why authors should still care

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A year ago (October 2011), I wrote a piece entitled Categories, Key words, and Tags, Oh My!: Why Should an Author Care?, which has become the most frequently viewed post on my blog. It has been reposted numerous times, and I still get comments on it weekly. There is a reason for this. The subject is complicated, confusing, and yet crucial to selling a book successfully online. While most of the original post is still relevant, it seemed time to update it, with the special addition of a section on how categories play a role in KDP Select promotions. For those of you who never read the original, I hope this helps. For those of you who did, I hope I have clarified a few sections and added some useful information. This post focuses on ebooks on Amazon (although the Read more…