Scott Pratt's Blog, page 2

The Writer’s Predicament

Since the last time I wrote in this column, a significant – and important – part of my life has changed. I’m no longer a starving artist, and that, I assure you, is a good thing.

I told you last month that things were going pretty good. I leaked the first four books of the Dillard series onto the market in November, spread out every two weeks, and sold 2,500 books. (And when I say books I mean ebooks.) They moved quickly up the lists on Amazon, and by the 20th of December, I had four titles in the top ten “legal thrillers” and was on pace to sell about 12,000 books for the month. But I was selling them for 99 cents apiece and only making 35 cents a book. Four thousand dollars a month isn’t bad, but I wanted to make four thousand a week. So after much research and nail biting and discussion with my ridiculously intelligent son, plus a couple of email exchanges with Laura Pepper Wu, I raised the price of all four novels from 99 cents to $2.99. At $2.99, I make about $2.05 per book.

My concern, of course, was that nobody would buy them at that price, even though I think they’re excellent books and $2.99 is a a great bargain. I went to bed the night I raised the prices thinking I was probably being impatient and greedy, that the price increase would kill the momentum I’d built, and that after a few days of watching the sales drop to nothing I’d have to stick my tail between my legs and drop the price back to 99 cents. Laura Wu told me that I’d probably see a 30 percent decrease in sales initially, but that I’d still make far more money. She was right.

I sold nine thousand books in December, three thousand of them at the higher price over the last eleven days of the month. Sales dropped about twenty percent initially and the books dropped out of the top ten in the legal thriller category, but both the sales numbers and the rankings have already recovered significantly. So yeah, I’m making serious money now, and I’ve just scratched the surface. I have a new Dillard book ready to go when I think the time is right and I have a stand-alone legal thriller called “Russo’s Gold” and a literary fiction/young adult novel called “River on Fire” in my pocket. I’ll release them, too, when I think the time is right.

Joe Konrath was right. I’ve never met Joe Konrath, haven’t communicated with him in any way. He’s a writer who had an experience similar to mine with the traditional publishing industry and he’s been writing a blog called “The Newbies Guide to Publishing” for several years. His basic message has been that Amazon and ebooks have changed the publishing world forever and that writers can make a good living publishing independently, without the Big Six publishers. His philosophy is pretty simple — write good books, write a lot of them, and sell them inexpensively. I believed the things he was saying, and while I was struggling to get the rights back to my first three novels from Penguin, I took a great deal of great deal of solace and more than a little inspiration from the things Joe Konrath wrote.

So thank you, Joe Konrath. You gave me far better advice than any agent ever did. And cheers to the rest of you. The money is rolling now, finally, and the best part about it is that it’s only gong to get better.

Now, briefly, for the other part of my life, the scary part. First off, I want to thank all of the people who reached out to me with kind words, thoughts and gestures after they read about the return of my wife’s cancer.  Kristy is doing very well under the difficult circumstances of having to take chemotherapy pills and medication to strengthen her bones and medication to shut down her ovaries. She’s tired a great deal of the time and she has to deal with pain and nausea and stomach problems and hot flashes, but her spirit is as strong and as beautiful as ever and I marvel at her strength and her resolve each and every day. Our daughter is moving back to the area from Knoxville to be near her and to help her with her dancing school, and our son has been a tremendous help. We’ve circled the wagons and are ready for a long, long, long fight.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some shopping to do. Kristy turns fifty in a couple of weeks and I plan to take some of my new-found wealth and get her something very, very nice for her birthday. Tune in next time and I’ll tell you what it is.

 

The Writer’s Predicament

I’ve been holding my breath since the last time I blogged. Holding it about a couple of things. One has turned out very well so far. The other not so good.

I began re-releasing my novels November 1. I cleaned up the language, rewrote some things I thought were weak, designed covers, etc. I started with “An Innocent Client,” which I gave away for forty eight hours and then put on sale for 99 cents. I sold seven books the first day, but over the next few days, it started picking up. Two weeks later, I did the same thing with “In Good Faith.” Ten days after that, I let “Injustice For All” fly into the bookmosphere. ”Reasonable Fear” went up a couple of days ago. I’m doing a 24-hour giveaway with it on Amazon as I write this.

The numbers have been encouraging. At first, I only looked every couple of days. Then I sold a hundred in a day and I started checking more often. The books started steadily climbing up the Kindle charts. I tweaked the categories by communicating with the people at Kindle Digital Publishing. (They’re fantastic to work with, by the way, vastly different from the ”traditional” houses.) By the third week in November, I had two books, “An Innocent Client” and “Injustice for All” in the top ten in “legal thrillers” on Kindle. “An Innocent Client” is currently #6, “Injustice for All” is #8, and “In Good Faith” is #15. How does that translate into sales? Twenty-five hundred sold in November, and the numbers are growing steadily. I sold over five hundred the first two days in December. “Reasonable Fear” will go back on sale at midnight. From the way things look right now, if the sales numbers stay right where they are, I’ll sell around 8,000 in December.

And that’s just in the U.S. They’re also starting to sell in Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and India. I’m cautiously optimistic, to say the least.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that since the books have started selling well, Amazon is promoting them from within, and they do it for free. I don’t even have to ask them. It just happens. I typed in “Legal Thrillers” on the Amazon home page the other day and “Injustice for All” was at the very top of the list. “An Innocent Client” and “In Good Faith” were both on the first page. I made a loud and joyful noise, one that I’ve repeated several times over the past couple of weeks.

I was going to release a new Dillard book in December. It’s finished – sort of, I can’t help tinkering – but I’ve decided to let the four I have up roll on through the month. I’ll release the new book in early January, then I’ll release “Russo’s Gold” in late January. I’ll have another Dillard book, the sixth in the series, ready to go by mid-March or early April. I almost hate to write this for fear of jinxing myself, but I honestly believe that by April, I’ll be rolling. Big time rolling. As in 20,000 or 30,000 books a month rolling. Maybe more.

After all this cool stuff happens, I’m going to write one more blog about how worthless agents and publishers are, and then I’ll never mention them again.

And now for the bad news.

My beautiful wife, Kristy, was diagnosed with breast cancer a little over five years ago. She endured months of chemotherapy and radiation and three botched reconstructive surgeries, but we thought she’d beaten it. Two weeks ago, we found out that the insidious disease is back. It has metastasized to her bones.

She’s back on chemotherapy, this time in pill form, and she’s taking other drugs to help her combat the cancer. We were, of course, devastated by the news, and it took a couple of weeks for the initial shock to pass. But now we’re all (and I’m talking about she and I and our two children) on board to line up and fight again. We know it’s going to be difficult, we know there will be ups and downs, and we know what the statistics are. But Kristy is strong and she’s tough and she has no intention of becoming a statistic.

Before we received this diagnosis, back in mid-October when I was rewriting the books, I decided to rewrite the dedications. This is what I wrote:

“This book, along with every book I’ve written and every book I’ll write, is dedicated to my darling Kristy, to her unconquerable spirit and her inspirational courage. I loved her before I was born and I’ll love her long after I’m gone.”

That dedication is in the front of all of my novels and will be in the front of every novel I ever publish. I may have been shafted a few times during my life, but I’ve always considered myself to be one of the luckiest men alive because I was fortunate enough to find a woman I truly love.

So we take the good with the bad and the bad with the good and we soldier on, right? That’s what we’re doing. We’re soldiering, and we’re reminded again that love is the most important thing on this earth.

I wish each and every one of you a joyous and love-filled holiday season. I probably won’t blog again until after the first of the year. Hopefully the news then will be all good.

 

 

The Writer’s Predicament

Back to the business of writing, and believe me, if you want to write full-time, for a living, it’s a business.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time on this blog bitching about the “traditional” publishing business. Today, I’m not going to bitch. I’m going to give you some free advice. You can take it or leave it.

I’m assuming that at least some of you are contemplating self-publishing a novel. I’m in the process of self-publishing seven of them over a two-month period. And you know what? It’s going pretty good. The reason it’s going pretty good right now is that I’ve been in the writing biz for awhile now. It’ll be six years next month, and during those six years I’ve had a wide range of experiences with writing and publishing. Some have been good, some have been bad, but I’ve paid attention, I’m still at it and I plan to keep at it. For those of you who are relatively new to it, allow me to offer a word of caution. There is a school of sharks out there — a big one — just waiting for newbies like you. They know you’re uncertain, and they will prey on your inexperience. They will lure you with promises, and then they will fleece you. They will gleefully separate you from as much of your money as is possible, and you will be left wondering, “What the hell just happened?”

Do you know how much it should cost you to get a novel up and running on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback versions? About four hundred bucks is what it should cost you. I’ve heard stories about indie authors who have paid as much as twenty thousand dollars to get a book published. That’s on the extreme side. More often, however, I hear about the people who spend two thousand, three thousand, five thousand. That seems to be about the norm. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The first big expense for most newbies is editing. Let’s say Josephine Smith wants to write a book about her childhood — a favorite among indie writers. She spends a couple of hundred hours tapping away at the keyboard, and then one day, she looks at her manuscript and says, “Wow, I think I’m done.” So she starts showing it to her family. They tell her it’s good. She shows it to a few friends. They tell her it’s good, too, but a couple of them suggest that perhaps she might consider hiring a professional editor to take a look and make suggestions. There are some typographical errors, some grammatical errors, maybe the story drags a bit here and there. Now Josephine is a bit uncertain, so she goes to Google and starts looking for a freelance editor. She quickly realizes that there are a bunch of them out there. They all say they can help.

And maybe they can, to a point, but they’re not cheap. Some of them will offer a bare-bones evaluation for a pittance, but if Josephine sends her manuscript, she will quickly learn that in order for this editor to “take the book where it needs to be,” she has a lot of work to do. Josephine will, of course, want her book to be taken “where it needs to be,” so she’ll do what the editor says. She will rewrite and rethink and rewrite some more. She’ll send the manuscript back to the editor and she’ll be told to tweak this and change that and cut this and expand on that. And it will cost her in the neighborhood of two thousand dollars. That’s the average. Some editors charge far more, up to five, six, even ten thousand dollars. These are people who, for the most part, don’t write books themselves. They tell other people how to write books. To me, that’s like a coach who has never set foot in a batter’s box trying to teach a baseball player how to hit.

If you can’t spell, if you don’t know the rules of grammar and when it’s okay to suspend them, if you don’t know anything about story structure or plotting or characterization or the value of conflict, you shouldn’t be publishing books in the first place. Write all you want, but don’t publish. If, however, you do know about all those things, then my suggestion is that you become your own editor. Should you give your manuscript to other people to read and critique? Absolutely. But you don’t have to pay them to do it, and ultimately, the choices you make in your book should be yours. Editing your own work is difficult sometimes. It takes patience, it takes time, and it requires you to be brutally honest with yourself. You sometimes have to suspend creativity and concentrate on simply being meticulous. But you can train yourself to do it, and once you’ve trained yourself to edit, your work will get better and better. It’s also free.

Once you’ve finished the manuscript and you’re ready to publish, you have to choose the formats. I suggest trade paperback (you need to do the book in paper) and Kindle. I also suggest using CreateSpace for your paperback and Kindle Direct Publishing for your electronic version. All you have to do is go to CreateSpace.com and follow the directions. Same with Kindle Direct Publishing. You have to have a formatted content file and a formatted cover file. For the content, I recommend TheFastFingers.com. They’ll format for both CreateSpace and the Kindle for $150. They do an excellent job and they get the book back to you within 10 days. As for your cover, there are dozens of affordable cover designers out there. I don’t use any of them because I have a close friend who is an excellent graphic designer and I know what I want the covers to look like. We bounce ideas back and forth and then we sit down and do it. He won’t let me pay him, which is okay by me. You probably won’t have that luxury, but DO NOT, under any circumstances, pay more than two hundred dollars for a cover design. That includes front cover, back cover, spine, and ebook cover.

Once you get your content formatted for paper and ebook and your cover designed, guess what? You should be done spending money. CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing both allow you to upload your book for free. You write the description, choose the categories and tags, choose the price and submit everything. They’ll review it to make sure your files are compatible and the next thing you know, your book will be up for sale in the biggest and best bookstore in the world. It’s called Amazon, and if you’re an indie beginner, it’s the only place you need to be.

Enroll the title in KDP Select and give it away on the Kindle for 48 hours. Do a giveaway on Goodreads and LibraryThing and Shelfari. (You’ll have to figure those out for yourself.) If the book is good, it’ll start to get some legs under it. Tweak your tags and categories, maybe tweak the description. Wait a couple of weeks. Start another book. Do another 24-hour Kindle giveaway. Then another. Then one more.

So there you have it. Write a good book. Edit it yourself. Format with TheFastFingers. Do a good (but inexpensive) cover. Put it up on Amazon through Kindle Direct Publishing and CreateSpace. It should cost you a hundred and fifty bucks for TheFastFingers and maybe a couple of hundred for your cover. You’ll have to buy and ship paper books for the Goodreads, LibraryThing and Shelfari giveaways. Give away five on each site. That’ll cost you around a hundred and forty bucks (six dollars per copy for the books and three dollars to ship each of to the winners).

Five hundred dollars, max, for the whole shootin’ match.

If you pay more than that, you’re a… well, I won’t say it. But P.T. Barnum would love you.

 

 

 

 

Dear Santa, I Want to be John Grisham

Dear Santa,

I know it’s a little early in the year and I’m maybe a little old to be writing, but age doesn’t really matter, does it? As long as I’m wide-eyed and innocent? That’s me, Santa. Wide-eyed and innocent.

I have a special request this year, and I’d really appreciate it if you could come through for me. Could you please bring me some kind of life-warp suit or something that turns me into John Grisham for a day? I mean, I guess I could settle for Scott Turow or Philip Margolin or Richard North Patterson or even Michael Connelly, but John Grisham is the guy I want to be. Just for a day. I want to know what it feels like to sell thousands of books in a day and what it feels like to be a multi-gazillionaire. I also wouldn’t mind being as pretty as John Grisham. He’s pretty for an old guy.

I’d also like to know what it feels like to be able to build a little league park for kids. John Grisham did that, you know. He likes baseball, so he dropped a couple of million to build a new park in the town where he lives. I like baseball too, Santa. If you turn me into John Grisham, I promise I’ll build a little leage park right here in town.

I’ve been a good boy this year. I really have. Well, at least I’ve tried to be a good boy. I did say some pretty nasty things about my former publisher and an editor I named Jerkoff, and I said some not-so-nice stuff about my agents, but all of it was true. Does it count against me when I say bad things about diabolical companies and jerkoffs and worthless agents if the things I say are true? I don’t think it should. I don’t think that should count against me at all.

I drank too much a few times, too, and I’m truly sorry about that. But you know what? I think you’d drink too much too if you’d been dealing with lame ass publishing companies and jerkoffs and worthless agents. Did I just use the phrase ”lame ass?” Are you sure? I didn’t mean to. I really didn’t. I don’t cuss all that much, Santa. I only cuss when I get frustrated. I guess dealing with lame asses makes me frustrated, which makes me cuss a little sometimes. I’ll try not to do it any more if you’ll let me be John Grisham for a day.

And I was just kidding when I wrote in my last blog that I was going to roast a bluebird for Thanksgiving. Come on, Santa, a guy’s gotta have a little fun once in awhile. Besides, they attacked me. They dive-bombed my head and all I was doing was trying to help that poor little bastard — I mean that poor little bird. You shouldn’t hold it against me if I make an idle threat in jest after I’ve been viciously attacked by a group of five-ounce, flying thugs.

And the things I said about that lawyer in New York that works for Penguin, and the things I said to that lawyer? I really didn’t mean any of those things. I was just kidding. I’m sure she’s a very nice lady and the company she works for has everyone’s best interest at heart just like you do. You know how people are sometimes. They get all worked up and then they say things they don’t really mean. That’s all it was. I was just a little worked up. I get that way sometimes.

I did some really good stuff this year, you know. I can’t remember exactly what stuff it was right now, but I’m sure I did some really good stuff. I’ve been extra-special nice to my wife and kids (especially for the past few minutes) and I haven’t done anything mean to any of my dogs unless they deserved it.

So how about it? Will you turn me into John Grisham for just one, single, tiny little twenty-four-hour period? If you do it, I promise I won’t ever refer to you as a lame ass.

I have to go now, Santa. I need a drink.

Sincerely yours,

Wide-eyed and Innocent Scotty P.

 

 

 

Kindle Giveaway

It’s almost 9:00 p.m. on the second day of the Kindle giveaway of “An Innocent Client.” It’s doing well. Number 11 right now in the mystery/thriller/suspense category. Please do me a favor. If you like the book, review it and “Like” it on Amazon. You don’t have to do anything long and fancy, just a few lines to say you liked it. For those of you who have already read it, I’d appreciate a few lines from you, too.

Thanks so much.

Signed, Personalized Copies of Books

A question for those of you who read the blog and for those of you who just happened to be stopping by…

Do you think people would like to be able to purchase signed, personalized copies of my books over this website? I’ve been bouncing the idea around for about a month. It would work like this: If you want to buy a book and have me sign and personalize, you’d simply follow the prompts on the website. Payment would be through PayPal or a credit card. There would be a box for you to type in the personalization you’d like on the book and the address you’d like the book sent to. Once an order comes in, I’d order the book from my print on demand distributor. The book would come to me, I’d sign it the way you want it signed, and mail it to you.

The biggest drawback, as I see it, is double postage. The paper books are retailing for $14.99 now. (The cost for paper books is going up steadily.) With the double postage, I’d have to charge $24.99 for the book to make it worth my time and effort.

So what do you think?

 

 

The Walker’s Predicament

I’ve been blogging about the book biz and indie publishing and my frustration with the traditional publishing industry and all that stuff, but today, I’m just going to tell you a little story. This is a true story, mind you. I promise I won’t embellish.

Strange things seem to happen to me. I don’t know why, but it seems like every time I turn around, another weird thing is happening. This little story is a perfect example.

A few days ago, I made the seemingly innocent decison to change up my daily walk. I walk a lot, at least five miles a day, sometimes six or seven. Last Thursday I walked nine miles. My feet were pissed about it. I almost always walk along the roads where I live. It’s in the boonies so there isn’t much traffic, it’s near the lake so it’s beautiful, and it’s extremely hilly so I get a good workout. I carry this five-foot-long, heavy walking stick that’s hard as steel with me. It’s helped me get through some pretty precarious situations, like the time a hundred and twenty pound pit bull came after me. I also carry a little iPod that has about four hours of music on it. The music helps relieve the tedium of walking long distances. It also makes me feel good. Picture this: a large, fifty-five year old man in a hoodie, walking down the road carry a walking stick that looks like Gandalf’s staff, singing at the top of his lungs. That would be me.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. The decison to change things up. I decided to drive over to Winged Deer Park near Johnson City to walk. My wife and I used to walk there every day with the dogs, but since we moved out to Piney Flats I hadn’t been there. I thought it’d be a nice little change of pace, and it was, until I was attacked.

It was a gorgeous morning, mid-sixties, the sun shining. I walked through the woods and around the softball fields, then back through the woods and across the road toward the lake. I walked along the lake and up by the playground and through the parking lots and was finishing up by walking along the boardwalk. I came off the boardwalk and started up the hill toward my truck. Something on the ground caught my eye. I looked down and there, not six inches from my left foot, just sitting on the ground, was a beautiful, fully-grown, very-much-alive bluebird. I stopped and looked at it for a few seconds, wondering why it was on the ground. It didn’t move, but I could see it breathing. There had to be something wrong with it, right? Bluebirds don’t just sit on the ground while large humans loom over them.

“Hello there, little birdie,” I said in a friendly, non-threatening voice. “Are you hurt? Are you sick or something?”

The bird didn’t answer. It didn’t move, either. It just sat there stone-faced, looking up at me.

“Where’s your nest?” I said. “Are you a long way from home?”

Again, the bird gave me the old silent treatment. He was beautiful, though. He really was. I’m not a bird expert, but I know that if the bird is brightly colored, it’s probably a male. This bird was bright blue with a reddish throat.

I didn’t want to just leave him there, because there was obviously something wrong with him and I have a soft spot in my heart for little birds in distress. So I reached down, very slowly, to pick him up. He didn’t move, didn’t flap his wings, didn’t make a sound, at least not until my hand closed around him and I picked him up off the ground. As soon as I did that, he started squealing like a stuck pig and he started biting my finger. It didn’t hurt, but I was surprised by the violent reaction. And I had no idea a bluebird could make that much noise. The way he was screaming, you’d have thought I was holding him over a pot of scalding water, drooling, plucking him one feather at a time.

I remained calm during his violent onslaught, however. “I won’t hurt you, little guy,” I said as I held him in front of my face. “It’s alright. I’ll just take you home and see if we can fix you up.”

The bird apparently didn’t want to go home with me. His wife and his children or his parents or friends or his cousins – whatever they were — apparently didn’t want him to go home with me either, because the next thing I knew I was whapped in the side of the head by a pair of fluttering wings. Then I got boinked in the back. It happened really fast, Whap! Whap! I looked up and a blue streak was coming straight at my nose. It pulled up at the last second and bumped me in the forehead.

I was being dive bombed. By bluebirds!

Before I realized what I was doing, I let go of the bird in my hand. And do you know what that little twerp did? You’d think he’d fall straight back down to the ground since he was apparently sick or injured, but noooooo. He flew straight up into the tree that had served as a launching pad for his dive-bombing cohorts. I gave them all a little piece of my mind and walked away scratching my head and touching my ears to make sure they hadn’t been ripped off.

What I couldn’t figure out was what that little dude was doing sitting on the ground like that. I’ve since come to the conclusion that they planned it. They baited me, and then they ambushed me. I believe I’m now a victim of a hate crime. Bluebirds must hate humans, and that particular little covey decided to take out their hatred on me. After I was gone, I’ll bet they sat around at a bluebird bar, drinking bluebird beer, laughing and saying things like, “Did you see the look on that guy’s face when I popped him in the head? What a moron!”

I’ll get them, though. I’m planning a new menu item this Thanksgiving.

Stuffed bluebird, anyone?

 

 

 

Book Giveaways

I’m giving away copies of “An Innocent Client” on Goodreads and LibraryThing for the next week. Good luck!

Win a Free, Personalized Copy of “An Innocent Client”

I’ll be giving away five signed, personalized copies of the new edition of “An Innocent Client,” the first in the Joe Dillard series, beginning next week. Please register by subscribing to my blog. The winners will be chosen randomly. Once you’ve won, you’ll be notified and asked to send me an email telling me how you would like the book personalized. I’ll be doing the same thing with the rest of the books in the series over the next six weeks, including the new Dillard book, “Finding Lindsay.” I’ll also be giving away free, personalized copies of “Russo’s Gold” and “River on Fire” in January.

If you’re already a blog subscriber, please RE-SUBSCRIBE. My website administrator tells me we’ve had a little problem with Feedburner and have lost the email addresses of those who have already subscribed. I apologize for the inconvenience, and I wish you luck in the giveaway!

The Writer’s Predicament

I spoke to Laura Wu on the phone for an hour yesterday. Laura is a “coach” of sorts. She helps writers learn to market their work. She’s written a book called “77 Ways to Find New Readers.” I’ve read the book. Three times. She was very nice on the phone. She has a British accent that I could listen to all day.

So the plan, bascially, is this. Provided the formatter gets the book back to me tomorrow so I have time to proof read it again, I’ll re-release “An Innocent Client” on Friday. The new cover is already finished. I’ve rewritten the book and removed the profanity, so it should be clean (pun intended), but I’ve run into issues with formatters in the past. They apparently have to manually enter the book into their own system in order to format it, and when they do, they sometimes get in a big hurry and make typographical errors. I learned about this the hard way when I had “Russo’s Gold” formatted. There were at least twenty typos in that novel that weren’t there when it went off to the formatter. I’m using a different formatter this time, a company called “TheFastFingers.” They’re already four days late getting the book back to me so their fingers aren’t quite as fast as they advertise. I hope they can at least spell. We’ll see.

Laura stressed the importance of having an excellent product page on Amazon, so I’m going to tweak the product description and the categories and the tags. Once I get it up and running on Amazon and get it uploaded to the paperback distributor — Createspace — then I’ll start giving books away. Giving books away gives me a pain in the you-know-what because I work so hard and so long writing them, but people love free stuff and so I’m going to give some away. I’ll give away ten on Goodreads, ten on LibraryThing, and ten over this website. Then I’ll give away ebooks on the Kindle for two days. I’ll ask the people who win the paperback giveaway copies to write a good review. If they can’t, in good conscience, write a good review, I’ll ask them to please keep their opinions to themselves.

I’ve started the process of doing a blog tour with a company called Goddess Fish. Laura recommended them. The tour won’t even start until January, though. I will, of course, Tweet and Facebook the news of the giveaways and the re-release. I have updated my author pages on all the places that have author pages.

Over the next six weeks, I will re-release “In Good Faith,” “Injustice for All,” and “Reasonable Fear.” Then, the first week of December, I’ll release my new Joe Dillard novel. The title has yet to jump out at me. It will, though, very soon. It always does. In late November and during the first three weeks of December, I’ll do book signings at Mr. K’s here in Johnson City and I’ll do the local publicity rounds. After Christmas, I’ll re-release “Russo’s Gold” with a new cover and all those typos removed and then a couple of weeks after that I’ll re-release “River on Fire” and make it available as a paperback.

I’ll also be pitching the books to book bloggers. That’s always fun. “Dear So-and-So, Would you please read my book and review it on your site? It’s a really good book. Thank you.” In return, I generally get one of two things: silence or a rejection. I get as many rejections from book bloggers now as I used to get from agents and publishers. They are quickly coming to consider themselves the new gatekeepers of the publlishing industry. Some of them are right uppity about it, too. They fit right in.

So that’s the plan. New covers, new formatting, a new Dillard book, less swearing, giveaways, book blog tours, social media utilization, sucking up to book bloggers, and local events. Oh, and pricing. The ebooks will be cheap, anywhere from $2.99 to 4.99. Laura says I should price “An Innocent Client” at 99 cents for the first couple of weeks. I haven’t decided on that one yet. I hate to sell AIC for 99 cents. It took me a year-and-a-half to write that book. But I might. If it’ll help sell the book on a large scale and help get me more readers, I’ll bite the bullet.

The fun begins on Friday. You will find me here, finishing the new book, chewing my nails and gnashing my teeth.