Maids of Misfortune: A New Audiobook Edition
I am very pleased to announce that a new audiobook edition of Maids of Misfortune is now available. This is a completely new version, narrated by Alexandra Haag, who has narrated all the rest of my Victorian San Francisco mystery series and my science fiction trilogy. In addition, if you get the book from AppleBooks, Nook, Kobo, or GooglePlay, you can get it for under $10. I am particularly excited about the fact this book, as well as most of the rest of my books, are now available to rent as audiobooks from libraries. I decided to have this new version of Maids of Misfortune done for two reasons. First, I was so happy with the way that Alexandra Haag has been interpreting my characters that I wanted listeners to get a chance to hear her narrative interpretation of this crucial Read more…
January Promotions
Maids of Misfortune is the first book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, and I am pleased to say that six years after I first published it on Kindle, it is still selling quite nicely (one of the benefits of writing historical fiction is that these books never go out of date.). It has over 1100 four and five star reviews, and the whole series continues to attract readers who just want a light, fun, easy read (always my goal.) It will be 99 cents on Kindle for the next 3 days. Next up is the second book in my series, Uneasy Spirits, which will be free on Kindle 1/20-22. This book is probably my most edgy, in that it deals with the question of whether or not spiritualism (which was a very popular belief in the 19th century) Read more…
Introducing Katja Blum, translator for my German Edition of Maids of Misfortune
I am very pleased to introduce Katja Blum, the person who did such a lovely, professional job translating Maids of Misfortune into the German edition: Dienstmädchen im Unglück. She graciously answered some of my questions in my quest to get to know her, and I think you will be as charmed as I was with her answers. 1. Please tell the readers about yourself and how you got into translating. I began working as a translator (English into German) while I was studying at Hamburg University in Germany – sheesh, that was almost twenty years ago. My major wasn’t translation, by the way, but American Literature and Women’s Studies. For my first job, I translated Harlequin romances into German. I’m fluent in English, I’m a writer – how hard can it be? The answer: Very. I learned many important things from working with Read more…
Maids of Misfortune in German
Notice that Victorian woman on the cover? She looks almost exactly as I picture Annie Fuller, the main protagonist in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series. Which is lovely, since this is the cover of the new German translation of Maids of Misfortune, the first book in that series. Available now for pre-order, this edition is coming out in print and ebook in exactly a month, on September 2, 2014. So how did this happen? As an independent author, I knew that getting my books translated into foreign languages would be more complicated than if I had a traditional publishing contract and/or agent. And, while I knew of other indie authors, like David Gaughran and Joanna Penn, who were working to find translators on their own (often using a royalty splitting agreement), or using a distributor like Babelcube, which matches Read more…
What does it mean when your characters name themselves?
This week I read an interesting post the importance of choosing the right names for fictional characters. One of the points the post made was that authors should avoid doing anything that might bring a reader out of the story, including having names that sound alike. I first ran into this specific problem when I was about to publish my first book, Maids of Misfortune. Most of you know the story by now: I published this book thirty years after I came up with the plot and twenty years after I wrote the first draft so, as you might imagine, I had grown very fond of the character names I had chosen. Then one of my beta readers pointed out that two of my main characters, my main protagonist, Annie Fuller, and Annie’s maid, who I had named Maggie, had Read more…
^