Report on my latest KDP Select Free Promotion: Getting into that Holiday Spirit

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Well, Amazon announced its new Kindles devices this week, and the first of the new Kindle Fire HD devices ship as early as next week, with the rest rolling out in October and the end of November. There is no telling at this point how many of these new devises will be bought as upgrades or additions by people who already have Kindles, but if the past two holiday sales patterns are any indication, authors should expect a growing number of new users to start looking for Kindle books over the next few months, culminating in a book buying frenzy in the months after Christmas. At least that is my hope. In December 2009, my first book, Maids of Misfortune, had just been published, my Kindle sales were miniscule, and unless you typed in “Victorian mystery” as a key word Read more…


Victorian San Francisco in 1880: Social Structure and Character Development

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What follows is a brief summary of the social structure of San Francisco in 1880 (primarily from my dissertation, Like a Machine or an Animal) and how this has influenced some of the choices I have made in developing my characters in the Victorian San Francisco Mystery series. Brief Summary: “In 1880 San Francisco, with a population of 233,959 residents, was the ninth largest city in the United States. Located at the end of the peninsula that separates the Bay of San Francisco from the Pacific Ocean, this city of hills, sand dunes, fogs, and mild temperatures had been only a small village called Yerba Buena less than forty years earlier. This small village was one of the chief beneficiaries of the incredible influx of    people into the region after the discovery of gold to the north in the winter Read more…


Update on Kobo’s WritingLife: A Work in Progress

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As I discussed in my last post on my experiences going off of KDP Select, while I was not entirely happy with Kobo’s new indie publication initiative, WritingLife, I was pleased that, unlike Barnes and Noble, the support staff I contacted were very responsive to my communications with them over problems I encountered. So I feel I should point out a positive change that has happened this week. If you read the blog post, you will know I was concerned about with the way Kobo treated free books, and I was glad to discover there is now a 3rd way you can find free books–by clicking on a link that says Search a List of our Latest Free Books. When I discovered this link and clicked on it this morning, I was surprised to discover that my short story Dandy Read more…


My brief experiment going off KDP Select: At least I got this nifty blog piece out of it!

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So… I lasted only a month off of KDP Select. It was an eye-opening experience. I knew that I would lose sales on Amazon without the borrows and KDP free days to keep my books visible on the historical mystery bestseller lists, but my hope was that I would be building enough sales on Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and the Smashwords affiliates, to make up for these lost sales. I even told myself I was willing to accept lower overall sales for 2-3 months in order to test the idea that having my book on multiple sites (even if the sales on those sites were lower, on average, than on Kindle) was a workable alternative to exclusivity on Amazon, which is what KDP Select requires. But this was predicated on being able to figure out how to get my books, Read more…


How realistic must we be when writing historical fiction? Victorian San Francisco Mistresses and Maids

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I had planned to write about the social structure of Victorian San Francisco when two recent events got me to thinking about the tension historical fiction authors feels between accurately portraying the past and telling a good story. The first event was a mixed review I got for my most recent mystery, Uneasy Spirits. The reviewer suggested my treatment of the relationship between my protagonist Annie Fuller (who runs a boarding house in addition to being an amateur sleuth) and her staff was “unrealistic” because she treated her servants as friends and permitted them to have a Halloween party. The second event was an article in the New York Times Magazine entitled Nannies––Love, Money, and Other People’s Children, which reminded me how little the has changed between the Nineteenth and the Twenty-first century in terms of the problematic nature of Read more…