Why DIY Publishing is not a Dead End

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This morning I read a post by Anderson Porter about a four-piece article written a few weeks in the Boston Phoenix by Eugenia Williamson, entitled The dead end of DIY publishing. I had read the Williams piece earlier, and the more than fifty comments, which in my opinion had done a more than adequate job of pointing out its problems. But when Anderson seemed to accept much of her analysis, and labeled the comments as “the usual pitchfork-waving, spittoon-dinging dismissals, I found myself spending the rest of the morning writing a reply. When I finished, I thought I ought to expand abit, and post what I had to say as a blog, thereby at least justifying a morning lost to writing on my next book. So here goes: I am a DIY self-published author, who found Williamson’s piece upsetting because Read more…


Victorian San Francisco: Domestic Service

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If you are going to write mysteries, as I do, set in urban America in the 19th century, servants are going to play a role, and so it is not surprising that you will find servants as important characters in my Victorian San Francisco mystery series. However, as I have mentioned previously, my purpose for writing this series, besides providing entertainment, is to illuminate the kinds of occupations held by women who had to work during the late 19th century. Maids of Misfortune, my first book, therefore was intended, from the beginning, to introduce the reader to the world of domestic service, the most important job young women had in the 19th century. In fact, it was while I was doing research on my doctorial dissertation on working women in the west that I found a diary by Anna Harder, Read more…


What was San Francisco like in 1880? The Economy

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This is the first in a multi-part series describing San Francisco in 1880. For those of you who have read any of the books in my Victorian San Francisco mystery series,  this will provide you with some deeper understanding of the city where my main characters, Annie Fuller and Nate Dawson, lived as children in the 1860s and returned to as adults in the 1870s. If you are not familiar with my Victorian San Francisco mystery series, I hope these historical pieces will pique your interest––although I promise my fiction is much livelier reading. All the material quoted below is from my thesis, “Like a Machine or an Animal: Working Women of the Far West in the Late Nineteenth Century,” University of California: San Diego dissertation, 1982 pp. 60-69.”  I must say, it is much more entertaining to convey historical information through Read more…


What I love about being an Indie Author: I can shift course on a dime!

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Despite the gloom and doom of some of the blog pundits, and despite the relatively weak effect of my last KDP Select promotion at the end of March, which came in the midst of Amazon’s shifting algorithms, I decided to put the two books in my Victorian San Francisco mystery series, Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits, up for another round of free promotions this month. While my goals have remained the same, my strategy changed in response to the changing algorithms, and, as a result, my outcomes this time around improved. Goals: As usual, the primary goal for my promotions was to push both of my novels up on the historical mystery bestseller list and to get them as high as possible on the historical mystery popularity list. I have written numerous times about my conviction that keeping my Read more…


The Victorian San Francisco Palace Hotel: Gone but not Forgotten

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The Palace Hotel One of the difficulties an author faces in writing historical fiction is recapturing the feel of cities in a prior period. In the United States, city landscapes are constantly changing at the whim of urban renewal/development projects that tear down and rebuild buildings in succession, often making it difficult to imagine the city fifty years earlier much less a century before. My series of novels and short stories are set in late 19th century San Francisco, and there are particular problems for picturing this city in this period because the 1906 Earthquake and Fire wiped out a great deal of the physical history of the city, so that even the kind of civic buildings or historical landmarks that other cities have preserved are missing from that city in modern times. In addition, people who have visited San Read more…