Dear friends:

Every once in a while, I get an e-mail from Inkshares with the subject line “You’re Selling Books.” Opening those e-mails is like opening a long awaited present. Those e-mails mean that a bookstore has decided to take a chance on my novel, and it will be carrying one or several copies of The Catcher’s Trap.

The first thing I do when I get those e-mails is googling the bookstore,  finding out where is located and then sending them a thank you tweet for taking a chance with a new author.

So far six independent bookstores will be carrying my book: A. C. Vroman, in Pasadena, Ca. Common Good Books, in St. Paul MN. Tattered Cover in Denver CO. Prairie Lights Book, in IOWA City IA, Mysterious Galaxy Books, in San Diego CA and Flyleaf Book, in Chapel Hill NC.

There are over sixteen hundred independent bookstores in the U.S. It would be a dream come true if all of them carry my book, but, in the meantime, I’m thankful for those 6.

Hopefully, a bookstore in my home state of Connecticut will take a chance on me.

I also dream about taking a road trip and visiting every single one of the bookstores carrying my book. So far my map looks like this:

My trip would cover 4 thousand miles and it will take 61 hours of driving. If I’m lucky, and readers love my book as much as I do, many other stops will be added. Maybe I’ll have to take a year off to cover them all. An author can dream, right?

 Have a wonderful weekend!

Hi everyone! I have things to tell you about!



First, Kris Calvin’s One Murder More is currently 99cents for Kindle. This was the first Inkshares book I read and I enjoyed it! I love murder mysteries, and I bet some of you do, too.

Amazon allows ebooks to be gifted via the wonders of the internet... so the first FIVE of my readers who like this update will receive the ebook of One Murder More as a gift! (Just readers who have purchased my book, not followers; this is a thank-you gift! And if you don’t have a Kindle, apparently Amazon has a free app so you can read it on your computer. I’ve never tried it, though.)

We all want to relax and chow down on a political thriller while we lounge on the beach (or something), right?!



Also, there’s a new syndicate in town, and it’s a book club!

For those who don’t know, syndicates are a sort of book-of-the-month thing where you pledge $10 (ebook) or $20 (print) to purchase a book agreed upon by the syndicate each month. If the price is different from the pledge, you are refunded the difference.

Elan Samuel’s Inkshares Book Club Syndicate will select and read a currently available Inkshares book every other month and discuss it together! Syndicates have mainly aimed to support currently funding books to help them get published, so one that selects available books is a new angle to take. Since it has to be monthly at this point, the syndicate will support funding books on the off months.

Consider checking it out!

FINALLY, a She Is the End update:

I have untangled the disaster that was Episode VIII, and Alex is currently doing developmental edits on Episode VII. I solved a problem in the final climax that was leaving the ending too weak, and in general we’re tightening things up, cutting like mad, and I AM SO. EXCITED. TO SEND THIS BOOK TO BETA READERS SOON.

And when I do, I will be taking a little break from writing. It will be... Art Time. I’m going to be sketching out the illustrations for my
book!!!

Until next time, my space-faring friends...

We have a publication date – March 28th 2017!!!

This awesome little addition was made to my Inkshares page last night.

Thank you all for being so patient with me, I know many of you didn’t realize just how long a wait it was going to be when you generously supported my quest to publish The Bones of the Past. To tell the truth, I had no idea how involved the process was myself. I’m now on a schedule to make edits and respond to questions from a sequence of editors through to October.

First up is the developmental edits where plot holes are identified, chronology issues are addressed, fat is trimmed and any big issues fixed. Then comes the copy edits to fix the overall quality of the writing and address any weird word choices I might have made and managed to ignore over my repeated rewrites. Then proofreads, looking at the layout of print and eBook formats… all of which is going to take longer because I can’t manage to tell a story in less than 460 pages… And of course during all that, the interior and cover of the book are going to be designed.

So there’s still lots of work ahead for me, but it’s a hugely exciting process where I get to work with a great bunch of very talented people. The end result is going to be so much better than I ever could have managed alone.

March 28th is a long way off and yet it’s tight for all the work still going into the book and then the marketing efforts that roll out before Bones lands in bookstores. But you won’t have to wait quite that long – Inkshares orders usually show up about a month early! 

Thank you all for your continued support, interest, and *cough* great taste in books! March is just around the corner!