For the Weekend 9

This weekend is Halloween and I thought it appropriate to recommend something horribly spooky for your entertainment.

Crispian Thurlborn

Crispian is one of my favorite authors. If he writes it, I’ll read it. For this weekend, I recommend:

Exit. This is a slow burn chiller. Something like the twilight zone. Mysterious, with a shocking revelation at the end. Get the book at Amazon!

01134. We’ve never been so connected, yet we’ve never been so alone. We crave companionship and when we get it we’re on top of the world. When we lose it… A superb tale of psychological horror. On Amazon!

Cinder. Jill is a college student, and like all college students she needs money. Which means she takes the occasional babysitting job. And the job of watching the Comptons’s kid seems to be like any other. That is until those things desiring to ward of the chill of the coming winter make themselves known. Get it on Amazon!

Sign up for Crispian’s mailing list and get the terrifying short story “Wednesday’s Girl”.

Richard Schwindt

Richard is another author who writes outstanding fiction. If he writes it, I buy it. For this weekend, I want to draw your attention to:

Herkimer’s Nose. This was the first book I read by Richard and it’s still my favorite. A fabulous cast of characters, with lots of humor, terror, monsters, ghosts, and spies. A delightfully spooky tale, that’s at Amazon!

Tony Price: Confidential. Tony is a social worker and an amateur occult detective. If you like mysteries and monsters, this trilogy is for you. I loved it. Get it at Amazon!

Ottawa Confidential. This story is the Tony Price prequel. And very appropriate for Halloween. It’s about dogs. Well, not really. More like wolves. Well, not really that either. Just read it. You won’t regret it. At Amazon.

A Killing in Samana. Murder mystery meets occult detective. And we discover Richard’s other amateur sleuth, Chris Allard, knows Tony. Together, they solve an eerie murder case. Pick it up at Amazon.

R.H. Hale. Hale’s Church Mouse duo is an incredible work of fiction. The writing is literary, and some of the finest I’ve read. I don’t care for a lot of description, yet Hale’s descriptions mesmerize me. They set the mood and atmosphere, and establish the eerie Gothic quality that makes these books work so well.

Rona, the main character and narrator of the story, is exceedingly well-drawn. She is truly lifelike.

Sergei, the vampire and antagonist, is also very well-drawn. His character is richly complex. We hate him and we love him.

The Church Mouse duo easily makes my top ten list of recommended horror reads. They are novels you truly do want to read before you die.

Get Church Mouse: Memoir of a vampire’s servant at Amazon, along with Church Mouse - Book 2: The Change, also at Amazon.

Lastly, a bit of shameless self-promotion. Aside from my Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigations series, I’ve published the following stories:

Do One Thing For Me. George is old and going senile. Beth isn’t what she appears to be, but George isn’t sure she’s even real. And then she makes him an offer he can’t refuse. Or can he? Get it at the Zon.

Ancient History. Two brothers with a history, and not a good history at that. But they’re getting older and maybe it’s time to mend things. Put things right. But the ghosts think otherwise. And as one reviewer wrote: “…the ending was a shocking twist I never saw coming!” On Amazon.

Metamorphosis. I love vampire stories. And this is my contribution, to date. Devon is sick and having a mid-life crisis. His solution? Become a vampire and leave the problems behind. But his minister, who is a vampire, convinces him otherwise. Or does he? At Amazon!

What the Next Day Brings. A tale of the Cthulhu Mythos, set in 1920s Vienna. Everyone of us makes choices. Sometimes out of desperation. And starving to death, that’s what Franz does. However, as we all know, such choices often hand us more than we bargained for. Also at Amazon.

Plenty of good reading for your Halloween weekend. Enjoy!

What to Write?

 Most writers have a story to tell and tell it. And in the opinion of Anthony Trollope, a writer should never do otherwise.

There are, however, indie authors who ask their readers what they should write. Personally, I’ve never seen much sense in that. It’s akin to a comedian asking his audience what jokes he should tell.

So how does a writer decide what to write? I think most of us have all manner of stories inside our heads just waiting to be told. That being said, how the story gets told is what differentiates one author from another.

Caleb Pirtle III is writing a superb historical novel series called The Boom Town Saga. It’s the story of con artist Doc Bannister, who falls in love with Eudora, a woman with a past as mysterious as his own. The books are part historical drama, part love story, part mystery — and all fabulous.

Caleb’s books are set in 1930s East Texas. But what if we took that same story and set it on a planet in the Delta Omicron system, a backwater in the crumbling Muratorian Inter-Planetary Republic?

Or what if we changed the oil that Doc Bannister is supposedly trying to find for Magic — something everyone wants and no one has in an alternate universe version of East Texas? Now, that historical novel becomes urban fantasy.

We could take Caleb’s con man, put him in 21st century Dallas, selling bogus bonds that suddenly are worth something, and play up the romance aspect in order to get a romance novel.

Same story + different setting = different story

Sometimes, we do find ourselves in the situation where we have to tell a story. Maybe we’ve been asked to contribute to an anthology in a genre that we normally don’t write. The problem is easily solved.

All we have to do is take an old story and recycle it. James Scott Bell, in his book Write Your Novel From The Middle, suggests that very approach when one has run out of ideas and is looking for one. And it does work.

The ideas for what to write are all around us. No writer worth his salt need ask anyone for ideas. But if he runs short, he can always take that old book from 100 years ago, that no one reads anymore, and turn it into gold. How many times, I wonder, have Shakespeare’s plays been retold?

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading (those old forgotten books)!

Anthologies

 Short story anthologies are a great way for an indie author to get additional titles on his or her author page with a minimum of effort.

I’ve participated in three anthologies, with a fourth in the works, which gives me three additional titles to promote and gives readers more books to check out when they visit my author page.

Anthologies are also a great way for readers to sample your work. And if they like what they read in the anthology, they may very well move on to read the rest of your oeuvre.

I have two short stories and an article published in three outstanding anthologies.

Once Upon A WolfPack: A #WolfPackAuthors Anthology. A collection of 15 stories and 2 poems, all with a wolf somewhere in the tale. And the stories range from science fiction to fantasy to horror to mysteries to fairy tales. Literally something for everybody. And all proceeds go to a very good cause: Lockwood Animal Rescue Center.

If you want to find out about Minneapolis’s ace private detective, Justinia Wright, take a read of my story “Mrs Solberg’s Problem”.

Once Upon A WolfPack is only $2.99 at Amazon.

Overmorrow: Stories of Our Bright Future is a collection of a dozen optimistic science fiction stories. Stories exploring a fundamentally positive vision of the world and human achievement.

I’m honored to have my story, “The Sun is but a Morning Star”, lead off the collection. I don’t write much science fiction, and was pleased to have the editors, Jon Garett and  Richard Walsh, accept my tale of an Earth colony planting mission finding a better world.

Overmorrow: Stories of Our Bright Future is available at Amazon.

The Phantom Games: Dimensions Unknown 2020, edited by John Paul Catton is a collection of 16 science fiction and fantasy stories and 17 accounts of life in a pandemic. I contributed an article, “Be Happy”, for this collection. My musings on COVID-19.

Originally intended to celebrate the Tokyo Olympics, life threw the editor a knuckle ball. But he adapted and made a super anthology even better.

Get The Phantom Games at Amazon.

I encourage you to take a look at these anthologies. You’ll find great stories to entertain you and give you food for thought.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

It’s All About Work

 Last month I wrote about The Business Of Being Indie. And it’s important to emphasize that word business, because we indie authors are in fact publishers — and publishers are in the business of selling books.

For most of us, the significant roadblock to success as an indie author is our ignorance of business. Specifically, our ignorance of how mail-order businesses work.

Because, whether we realize it or not, whether we like it or not, we indie authors are, at the heart of it all, mail-order businesses.

How do your readers get your books? By snail mail or email. Very few of us indies are in bookstores. So if your readers and mine get our books by mail, we are mail-order businesspersons.

To succeed, we need to get rid of our business ignorance and learn the ins and outs of mail-order business.

Belief in the Magic Wand. 

Most of us think that our business model goes something like this:

Write book + Wave Magic Wand = Thousands of Sales

However, we soon find out there is no magic wand. We write our books, publish them, and ask ourselves why isn’t anyone buying and reading my Great American Novel?

Generally speaking, people don’t read our books because they don’t know they exist. 

With millions of books in Amazon’s database, and thousands of books being added every day, how are readers going to find your book and mine? It’s a near impossibility.

Because Amazon is a business too. They are going to drive traffic to the books that sell and make them money. The infamous Amazon algorithms see to that. Our job is to sell enough books to get Amazon’s attention so they will work for us.

There is no Magic Wand. We have to go to work and drive traffic to where our books are. Which means we have to find the traffic, our potential readers, and get our book in front of their eyes. This takes work. There are no Magic Wands. There is just work or excuses for not working.

Not realizing how much work it actually takes to become a successful independent author-publisher, most indie authors are unprepared for what to do next after their book appears on Amazon, or any other vendor. 

Writing for a living has always been difficult, with few being successful at it. And nothing changed with the advent of ebooks. 

In fact, one could say things have gotten more difficult. Because instead of just trying to convince one editor to buy your story, you now have to convince hundreds and thousands of readers to buy your story.

The Mailing List

I started looking into self-publishing in 2014. One thing that I’ve noticed over the past six years is that, generally speaking, there is only one path to success as an indie author — assuming of course that the wannabe author actually knows how to write. That path is the creation of a mailing list that contains your readers and fans.

Yes, there are outliers. Those individuals who break the rules and become successful and wealthy while doing so. But the vast majority of successful indie authors have become successful because they’ve captured their readers and fans on a mailing list and use that mailing list to catapult themselves into the top selling ranks on Amazon.

So my advice, after six years of observation and study, is this: spend time, and maybe money, learning mail-order business practices.

Australian fantasy and science fiction author Patty Jansen has an excellent book series on how to build a mailing list. Her books are an excellent place for you to start your business education.

The link to Amazon for Patty Jansen’s The Three-Year, No-Bestseller Plan For Making a Sustainable Living From Your Fiction.

There are also expensive courses, costing hundreds of dollars, that you can take. But I’m not convinced that the money spent will give you anything more than what Jansen will give you for a fraction of the cost.

In our books there may be magic unicorns and magic wands, or a genie who will grant the hero three wishes. But in the real world, we have to work for a living.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy working!

The Nine Deadly Dolls is live!

The Nine Deadly Dolls

A Justinia Wright Private Investigator Mystery

About the Book

Nine little dolls. Voodoo dolls. A suicide. Or was it?

When Bobby Joseph Frieden visits Justinia Wright with a mysterious demand letter and the belief his uncle was murdered, Tina takes his case.

But how are the dolls connected to Frieden’s uncle’s death? And what is with the mysterious box that is the subject of the demand letter?

What begins as a cozy little mystery, turns ugly real fast, and Tina has to work quickly to stop the killers.

The Nine Deadly Dolls is live today! Pick up a copy at Amazon!

About the Series

Set in Minneapolis, home of Minnesota Nice, the sister and brother detective team of Tina and Harry Wright catch the bad guys and make sure Minnesota stays Nice.

This series has thrills and spills aplenty — along with good food, wine, and wisecracking humor — it’s as if Nero Wolfe moved to Minnesota.

What Readers are Saying About the Series

“Some fictional universes are just places you want to be…”

“CW Hawes has created a cast of characters that stand tall next to any traditional detective, whodunit mystery you want to put them up against. … Hawes has developed characters that you can't help but care about.”

“The story line is wonderful, creative, and kept me expectant throughout. Hawes is wonderfully descriptive, drawing the reader in and holding them until the final page.”

Pick up a copy of The Nine Deadly Dolls at Amazon. The game is afoot!

For the Weekend 8

 This weekend I am offering a bit of a smorgasbord for your reading pleasure. A little something for everybody.

MACABRE

If the weird is your thing, or the paranormal, or horror, if you will, then look no further. One of my favorite authors, Crispian Thurlborn, has what you’re looking for!

Exit by Crispian Thurlborn is a fine tale of the bizarre, the uncanny, the weird, and, yes, horror. The slow burn and subtle kind of horror that doesn’t fully hit you until sometime after you’re done reading the book.

You can get Exit on Amazon.

I’ve become a big fan of occult detectives over the past year or so. And guess what? There is a magazine devoted to the occult detective. Its former name is The Occult Detective Quarterly, and the new name is Occult Detective Magazine.

If you’re into the occult, the paranormal, the weird — and you like mysteries as well — then Occult Detective Magazine is for you.

It’s available at Amazon.

CHRISTIAN FICTION

Do you like YA? Strong female characters? A faith that produces tough, resilient people? Then give CJ Peterson’s Strength From Within a try. Once again, you can find it at Amazon.

ROMANCE

Perhaps you’re looking for romance with a dash of mystery and angsty stuff dealing with PTSD, then NE Brown’s Carson Chance, PI series just might be your cup of tea. Check it out on Amazon.

POST-APOCALYPTIC

I’m a big fan of the cozy catastrophe — that version of the post-apocalyptic novel where the survivors try to create a better world than the one that was destroyed.

One of the finest writers of the cozy catastrophe today is Matthew Cormack.

Ganbaru is set in his Piranha Pandemic world. It’s a classic tale of good vs evil. The characters are dynamic and the situation he paints is totally realistic.

Get Ganbaru on Amazon.

SCIENCE FANTASY

Erik Ga Bean writes books that border on the surreal, with a delightful touch of whimsy.

You really shouldn’t ignore his Trifle Airship. It’s a delight and you can get it on Smashwords.

That ought to keep you going until next time.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!