M. Louisa Locke's Blog, page 6

July 4th, 1880 Victorian San Francisco

[image error]Jefferson Square Park was considerably more crowded by the time the first group of friends and boarders returned from watching the parade. The first to arrive were three of her boarders, Mr. David Chapman, and Mrs. Barbara Hewitt and her son Jamie, along with her maid Kathleen’s younger brother Ian. They’d all been invited to see the parade from the upper floors of the firm where Chapman worked.

Annie, watching the boys tell Kathleen and Beatrice about the parade, said to Barbara Hewitt, “They certainly seemed to have had a splendid time. How long did the march go on? I expected you all would get to the park earlier. Were the crowds just awful once the parade ended?”

Nate was now two hours late, and she was trying not to worry that more than crowded horse cars were the cause. What if he’d gotten cold feet after last night? Setting the date making their future together all too real. No, she was being silly.

“My goodness, yes. While the tail-end of the procession passed us around three, just getting across Market Street took forever.”

Annie turned to Jamie who had come up beside them, saying, “What was your favorite part of the procession?”

“Oh, the wagon with the mining camp. They were so jolly. There was a fiddler, and they were doing some sort of jig. You should have seen the cart that was supposed to be the North Pole with the ship the Jennette that is stuck up there. The ice looked so real, and there was a polar bear and everything.”

“My, that does sound wonderful. I gather there were a good number of bands. We could hear some of them as we left the boarding house. They must have been quite loud.”

“Deafening, some of them,” said Barbara. “Each trying to outdo the next.”

“Well, from where you were watching the parade, you were probably getting them coming and going,” Annie said. “I am just glad everyone had a good time. Jamie, why don’t you go and ask Mrs. O’Rourke to start distributing the food? I expect you and Ian are pretty hungry after all that excitement.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jamie said with fervor and ran back over to Beatrice.

His mother laughed and said, “You would think they hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, but Mr. Chapman was so thoughtful––providing lemonade and sandwiches for us all. I don’t see Laura yet. Is Mr. Dawson bringing her?”

“No, Laura was invited by her friend Kitty Blaine to attend the procession, and I do believe they were going to attend the literary and musical events after the parade. As for Nate, I don’t know what has kept him.”

Barbara pointed towards the street and said, “Look, isn’t that Laura getting out of that carriage? Oh, and there is Kitty behind her.”

“Oh, Annie, Barbara, what an extraordinary treat today has been,” Laura said, running up and giving each of them a hug. “Kitty’s father rented a room right at the corner of Third and Market, so we saw everything. And since we were at the beginning of the procession, there was lots of time for us to make it to the Grand Opera House down on Mission for the later events.”

Annie reached out her hand to Kitty, who hung shyly in back of Laura, saying, “Miss Blaine, so pleased you were able to come to our picnic. And I know that Mr. Dawson would like me to convey his thanks to you and your father for entertaining Laura today. He should be here soon to thank you himself.”

“It was all my pleasure, Mrs. Fuller. Father knew I wouldn’t want to sit with him on the viewing stand, and literary events aren’t exactly his cup of tea, so he was delighted I would have a companion for the day. And John the coachman did an excellent job of making sure we weren’t bothered by the crowds.”

Annie smiled inwardly, having met “John the coachman” several times when she went out to ask if he wanted something to drink while he waited to take Kitty home from visiting Laura. He was a slow talking but very polite giant of a man, who appeared quite capable of acting as chaperone to his mistress. She didn’t imagine even the most high-spirited of July Fourth revelers would dare harass any young lady under his protection.

Annie told Laura and Kitty to go over to say hello to Mrs. O’Rourke. “She and Kathleen seem to have cooked up enough for an army.”

To Barbara, she said, “Why don’t you rescue poor Mr. Chapman from the boys, while I see if Kathleen will make up a plate for Kitty’s coachman? I know from experience he won’t leave his horses, but it looks like he is planning on staying until it is time to take Kitty home.”

A few minutes later, Annie stood for a moment to look at the scene laid out before her. Beatrice had turned over the sturdy wooden crate she’d used to transport the plates and utensils for the meal and was sitting on it in queenly dignity under the shade of the oak. Meanwhile, Kitty and Laura were laughingly trying to sit upright on the ground in their fashionable attire, while eating from their heaped-up plates. Kathleen, whose dress was a bit more serviceable in the shape and volume of its skirt, was sitting quite primly, eating a ham sandwich and listening to Ian and Jamie, who were trying to eat and talk at the same time. David Chapman had piled several of the extra blankets up for Barbara to sit on and was holding her plate while she delicately picked at her potato salad.

[image error]All around her in Jefferson Square were similar scenes. Small children darted and shrieked around women in gaily colored outfits and men in their more somber hues. She heard snatches of songs from a group with a guitar, noticed an impromptu game of croquet at one corner of the park, and saw that the members of one of the parade’s bands were asleep under a tree in apparent exhaustion, their instruments at their sides. There were a couple of hours before the sun would sink behind the dunes to the west, but the shadows were long, and the light through the dark green shrubbery and evergreens of the park already began to take on the soft haze that meant the evening fog was massing along the coast.

Annie felt suddenly chilled, and she pulled up her shawl and walked over to Beatrice to ask her to make up two plates, one for her and the other for Nate. Surely he will be joining us soon. –– Deadly Proof: Victorian San Francisco Mystery Book 4

Hope you are all having a lovely 4th of July. I am deeply into the editing of my next two books in my Paradisi Chronicles series. But I am happy to announce that the Violet Vanquishes a Villain, the novella that comes right after Deadly Proof is now available as an audiobook.  Also, I have started the research for the next book in the Victorian San Francisco series.  

M. Louisa Locke

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What I learned from my Recreational Reading: Part Two

[image error]I wasn’t surprised to learn that almost all of the books I bought and read in 2016 were ebooks—bought online from Amazon. In fact, a number of the books I decided to reread I already owned in print, but I decided to buy ebook editions after I started to reread them. This was because those books that were paperbacks (some that I bought over 30 years ago) were generally in terrible shape—covers falling off, pages falling out­­––and the small print made some of them unreadable. The hardbacks were in better shape, with larger print, but they tended to aggravate the arthritis in my wrists when I read them for any length of time at one sitting.

In contrast, my Kindle Paperwhite is small, lightweight, with adjustable fonts, and it is easy to dust so I don’t sneeze when I pull it out to use.

Of course, all of these reasons for my shift to ebooks are to a degree related to my age, but there was another reason I was willing to pay for a book I already owned, as well as buy so many other books by new authors; the relatively low prices on many ebooks.

Throughout this past year, there has been a constant stream of articles stating that ebook sales are in decline (and print sales are up.) See this post as one of the most recent examples.

While the data coming out from traditional publishers—and the Association of American Publishers—seems on the surface to support this claim, what anyone who has followed this discussion should know by now is that this data only describes what is happening with books published by traditional publishers. In contrast, the Author Earnings Reports, which are the most comprehensive data we have on ebooks, conclude that Amazon ebook sales rose 4% in 2016.

The main plausible explanation for this negative trend in ebook sales for traditional publishers is their pricing. Once the big five got back the right to set their own prices for ebooks without discounting (something they had lost temporarily when they were found guilty of anti-trust violations), they went back to pricing their ebooks higher—often at the same or higher price than their mass market paperbacks.

At the same time, Amazon, once they lost the right to discount traditionally published ebooks, started discounting traditionally published print books. This made the print editions of traditionally published books more attractive than ebook editions to many customers.

What publishers didn’t anticipate was that this simply drove more people to buy their print books online (when their stated goal for pricing ebooks high had been to help brick and mortar books stores stay competitive.) Ah, the problems of unintended consequences.

And what traditional publishers seem willfully to misunderstand is that many of their customers didn’t just shift to the print edition of a book, many of them decided not to buy that traditionally published book at all, but to take a chance on an indie authored book.

I found my buying patterns quite representative of these trends in consumer buying.

Let’s first look at my buying patterns before ebooks, which followed a very predictable pattern.

First, for authors who I had read and liked, I routinely bought their books as hardbacks as soon as the book came out. I justified this because I knew there was a very good chance I would reread those books often multiple times, so the higher price (and longevity) of the hardback seemed worth it.

Besides I didn’t want to wait for the year or more for the book to come out in paperback. Of course this is why traditional publishers were very reluctant to start issuing ebook editions of their books for at least a year…hoping that impatient readers wouldn’t wait.

Second, I found new authors primarily at the public library, and I would often go every couple of weeks and just browse, picking up books based on the cover and blurb.

Third, if I really liked one of these books I got at the library, I would then go to a bookstore and look for less expensive paperback editions of the author’s work, particularly looking for earlier books in their series. If I found myself rereading this these paperbacks…I might then shift to buying the author’s newest books in hardback as the were published.

So, I got books by new untested author for free, bought backlist books as inexpensive paperbacks, and bought the newest books by my favorite authors as expensive hardbacks (although at one point I also joined a mystery book club where I could get those hardbacks at a discount.)

So how do I act now that I read mostly ebooks?

Some basic data. Twenty percent of the books I bought (not downloaded for free) were .99 cents, and an equal percentage were over $9.99, leaving sixty percent between the price of $2.99 and $9.99. This is the price range that Amazon recommends (and encourages indie authors to set by giving them better royalties for books priced in that range.)

Again, not figuring in free books, the average price I paid for an ebook in 2016 was $7.90. And I spent over $500 on ebooks.

What surprised me was that my pattern book buying was very similar to the pattern I followed before ebooks—although I probably paid more on average for books back then.

The ebooks in the higher price category (above $9.99) were either bundles or box sets—which meant I was actually getting a whole lot of stories or books for the higher price––or they were newly published books by my favorite authors. Except for the existence of bundles and box sets—which I never bought before—this followed my usual pattern before ebooks.

Yet, there are a good number of formerly “favorite authors” whose new books I decided not to buy last year when I saw the high price of their ebooks. And, unlike the consumer that the traditional publishing houses celebrated, I was unwilling to shift to buying these authors’ books in paperback—even if the paperbacks were cheaper.

I can name at least 8 authors whose books I consciously decided not to buy that fall into that category. And the only time I bought print books this past year were either children’s books for my grandchildren, a couple of books for research that weren’t in ebook form, and several used paperbacks of books by a favorite author that were both out of print and not reissued as ebooks.

I am clearly one of those consumers who’s reaction to the higher priced ebooks by traditional authors was turn to start looking for books by different authors.

As in the past, I still preferred to try a new author if their book didn’t cost me anything. But instead getting these books at a library, I discovered them in promotional emails or browsing in Kindle Unlimited. Interestingly, the books I was most likely to start and then not finish were those I got through Kindle Unlimited. I think that this is because I am really thinking of them as “borrowed,” very much like the books I used to get from the library. They hang around in my to read pile, in case I get moved to pick them up again, until it is time to return them so I can try another unknown.

This doesn’t mean I don’t read books I get from KU, just that I seem more willing to risk getting something completely unknown if it is free, and the chances of one of those books not panning out is therefore higher. Yet, if the author I just took a chance on pans out…I will go on and buy other books by them.

So that brings us to the 99 cent price point. These are the kind of books I used to buy as paperbacks. Most of the 99 cent books were books I saw discounted in some sort of promotion. And while a couple of them were by new authors I was taking a chance on, most of them were older books by authors I had already read and knew I liked. Many of them represented the books I talked about at the start of this post—books I owned in print but wanted in ebook editions and jumped at the chance to snap them up when they went on sale.

Then there are the books I paid between $2.99 and $9.99 for.

These were by the authors I’d discovered at a low price point (free or 99 cents) and gone on and bought all of their books in the series or bought the author’s newest book that was just released. By in large these were books by indie authors, and these were the authors who had replaced my formerly favorite authors published by traditional publishers whose ebook prices were just to steep for me.

I feel some sympathy for those authors—the one’s who rightfully feel the new world of traditional publishing (with smaller advances, more competition for less shelf space in bookstores, and lower yearly royalties) are not serving them well. But it is their publishers’ decisions on pricing that created this new reality for them. It is their publishers who have chosen to believe that readers like me will be so loyal that they will limit the number of books they can buy a month in order to pay the higher price for a specific author’s book.

So, here I am, still getting books by untried authors for free (or 99 cents), getting backlist books from authors I’d discovered in this fashion for moderate prices, and only paying the highest prices for my very favorite authors. The only difference is they are all ebooks, they are all bought online, and more and more of my favorites are indie authors.

So, what are your buying patterns for recreational reading? And have they changed with the introduction of ebooks, online stores, and social media promotions?

M. Louisa Locke, March 10, 2017

Oh, and for those of you who like free books, for a limited time you can enter to win Deadly Proof, the third book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, plus more than 45 Women Sleuth Mysteries – plus a Kindle Fire!

The contest ends March 13, and you can enter the contest by clicking here: bit.ly/women-sleuth-myst

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What I learned from my Recreational Reading: Part One

[image error]This past week I got sidetracked from writing (after 3 weeks in a row where I achieved my stated goal of 5000 words a week) because I was putting together all the figures l needed for my 2016 taxes. However, in the process I made a list all the books I bought in 2016, whether or not they were ebooks or print, and what I paid for each, and this has prompted me to do a little more analysis on my reading patterns.

First of all, I was pleased to discover that I had bought 65 books this year and had read almost all of them. This meant I read, on average, more than a book a week, nicely confirming of my impression that I had read more books in 2016 than I had the previous year.

Second, while the list also confirmed that a large proportion of those books were short story anthologies, something I have already discussed in my last post, I was also interested in the patterns I saw in the full length novels I read.

When I looked at the list, I was struck by the fact that most of the novels I bought were either books I had read before, new books by favorite authors, or all the books in a series by a newly discovered author. This makes sense and actually dovetails with my reasons for reading so many short stories. Because of the limited time I have in my life as a busy writer, when I commit to reading a full-length book, I want to know there is a strong chance I will enjoy the experience.

It is one thing to try a short story by an unknown author—if it turns out it isn’t my cup of tea, I have only lost 10-15 minutes. But since I have difficulty just dropping a novel in the first sitting, when I eventually decide to drop a book I have usually spent at least an hour so, hence I have been sticking to full length books I know I will stick with.

I haven’t always been so risk averse in my reading choices, but I have noticed that when someone mentions that I should read some book they have just read by an author I know nothing about, I say: “Oh that sounds good, maybe when I really retire and I go back to reading all the time I will give a try.”

However, I was also struck by a third realization. I was choosing books that I thought would give me tips on how to improve my own writing. Also, not surprising when I thought about it. I am a firm believer that a writers should above all be a reader. And, if you want to write books that other people enjoy reading, you need to be aware of what improves your own enjoyment of a book.

For example, with several of the books I read this year, I noticed that the authors emphasized what the characters smelled—not just what they heard and saw in a scene. As a result, I have started looking to see places where I could add that sense to my descriptions.

With other books I stopped myself when I started to skim over a section of a book and asked myself why I was getting impatient with the story. Usually that impatience came in sections of books where there was too much detail (often backstory or setting of the scene) that didn’t add to the story. I seldom skimmed in sections of dialog or described action.

The key here, however, was relevance to the story. William Gibson’s science fiction novels are full of incredibly rich detail that range from name brands of clothing, and graffiti on walls, to the music coming out of a car’s speakers. But all of that detail is what builds up a feel (almost on the level of virtual reality) of his near future world—so like our own, yet so very different.

Then there were Deborah Crombie’s mysteries, which also provide a good deal of detail, in her case on the different neighborhoods of contemporary London. In her case, these settings enrich the story by providing a better sense of the characters who inhabit those neighborhoods, keeping the police moving around to break up what would have otherwise been more static police interviews, and often revealing important clues to the contemporary mystery that are buried in the history of those neighborhoods.

Each time I noticed how detail was used effectively (or not) in one of the books I was reading, I would then to back to my fiction and make sure my use of detail wasn’t bogging down my plots. Did my readers really need to know who the mayor of San Francisco was in the fall of 1880 and why he was seen as corrupt? Or was it more important to describe how it felt to try and climb onto a cable car wearing a long tight dress with a bustle? Did the reader of the science fiction novel I was writing need to know the technical term for the mechanism for traveling through a wormhole, or would the dialog be more natural if my young protagonist just called it “jumping” through a wormhole.

Another time, I noticed I was having a hard time keeping two characters in a book straight because their names started with the same letter. And I went back and changed the name of a minor character I just introduced, so there wouldn’t be a similar point of confusion in my own book. This might seem trivial…but I’ve learned that I want to avoid anything that brings a reader out of my stories…and find and replace makes changing a name an easy fix.

Finally, I thought about what such different books as the Georgette Heyer Regency romance I was rereading, C.J. Cherryh’s newest Foreigner book, or Ilona Andrew’s Innkeeper Chronicles books, which were a new discovery for me, had in common. And I concluded what I liked best about the books by these three authors was that they included a substantial dollop of humor, transported me to worlds different from my own, and had main characters who, despite their flaws and the difficulties they had to overcome, were genuinely admirable people who achieved some degree of happiness by the end of the novel.

And not surprisingly these are all key elements I try to include in both my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and my Paradisi Chronicles work. And I do believe I have been able to steadily improve my craft because of what I learn each time I read novels by these and the other novels on my list.

Stay tuned for part two of my analysis, when I look at the prices I paid for the books I bought this year.

M. Louisa Locke, March 1, 2017

Just in case you are looking for a humorous, sweet, historical mystery, Bloody Lessons, the third book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, is Free for the next two days March 1-2 in all major bookstores. Click Here for buy links.

2017 Goals #2: Do More Recreational Reading

[image error]In my goal setting post last January, my third goal was to do more recreational reading. And that is a goal I can definitely say I accomplished. The primary reason for that success was that I discovered the fun and convenience of reading short stories.

While I have written short stories—about minor characters from my Victorian San Francisco mystery series––and I have even written about why I like to write short stories in this blog post, I hadn’t actually read many short stories for years…maybe decades.

In fact, except for a number of years in my youth when I found the time to read the New Yorker from cover to cover (including the short stories), I don’t really remember when I ever chose short stories for my recreational reading––certainly not mystery and science fiction short stories.

So, what caused the change in my reading habits in 2016?

First, ever since I retired from teaching and started writing full-time, I stopped finding the time to read for pleasure. I read non-fiction as research, other authors’ works as a beta reader, but not fiction for the pure joy of it.

Trying to figure out why, I determined that one of the reasons for this is that I have never liked to start reading a story when I know I won’t have the time to finish it right away. I am not one of those readers who is content to spend weeks slowly making my way through a novel.

I solved this problem when I was a busy history professor by binge reading fiction over holidays and summer vacations and during the rare days I was too sick to go into work. However, once I started my second career as a writer, things like holidays and summer vacations became irrelevant, and I started working seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. (The reason for that is for another post!)

In short, without really even thinking about it, I began avoiding novel that weren’t directly related to my writing because that would mean a couple of days when I wasn’t making progress on the newest manuscript or working away at my long marketing to-do list. As a result, I got out of the habit of reading strictly for pleasure.

But then in 2015, I discovered the Future Chronicles, a series of science fiction/fantasy anthologies published by Samuel Peralta. Peralta had expressed interest in publishing an anthology of short stories in the Paradisi Chronicles series, the open-source science fiction world I helped create that year. It only seemed sensible to read some of the anthologies he’d published to see if this felt like a good fit for those of us writing in the Paradisi World. (Here is a blog post about this series and the subsequent Chronicle Worlds: Paradisi anthology Peralta published.)

While this decision was work related, what I hadn’t expected is how much I would enjoy these short stories. And rather than just reading one or two stories in a couple of the anthologies, I went on during the rest of 2016 to read all of the stories in twelve of the anthologies. And in the process I discovered that I had solved my problem of how to continue to read fiction for pleasure because with a short story, I could start and finish the story in one sitting.

So simple, but up until then, I stupidly thought of short stories as something you found in print magazines (I am showing my age here). And, when I had a small window of time to read, the only magazine in our house with fiction in it was the New Yorker. And I had stopped enjoying their stories decades ago.

This is where ebooks and my Kindle came into play in changing my reading habits.

I have blogged about why I like having a Kindle so much—but frankly recently I was primarily using it to read novels the four or so times a year I was traveling to see my daughter and grandchildren (or got a bad cold.) So my foray into reading Future Chronicles anthologies was the first time I used my Kindle to read short stories by other authors.

And lo and behold, I started reading these short stories in those short windows of time: you know––the twenty minutes or so I was sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, while I ate lunch, when my husband is watching the news (and I had had enough news for the day), and during the hour of insomnia that seems to be accompanying my aging process with distressing regularity.

And over the past year, with just finding one or two of these short intervals of time a day, I have read 144 short stories in the Future Chronicles, a fun bundle of Christmas short stories, and the stories in two issues of the Fiction River: An Original Anthology Magazine. Oh, and I also read all of the Paradisi Chronicle short stories that ended up in the anthology Peralta published for us.

And, like priming a pump, reading these short stories in the science fiction genre has actually encouraged me to take more time off to read full-length novels. As a result, this past year, I have also re-read through the entire William Gibson canon, read all three books in Ilona Andrews’ Innkeeper Chronicles, all eight books in Lindsay Buroker’s Fallen Empire series, and all the books in Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Diving Universe series.

Now you will notice the preponderance of science fiction in my recreational reading, which reflects the fact that this year I have been primarily writing in that genre: including my own short story, “Aelwyd: Home,” for Chronicle Worlds: Paradisi, the novella, The Stars are Red Tonight, that I co-wrote with my daughter in the Paradisi Chronicles series, and my current WIP, Under Two Moons, which is the sequel to the full-length Paradisi novel, Between Mountain and Sea, I published in 2015.

Reading other science fiction work has been a great source of inspiration for my own writing, while also bringing me a good deal of joy as a reader.

But by late this spring I will be back doing the research for my next book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series. So time to branch out.

I would therefore love to hear some recommendations for short story collections of historical fiction or mysteries, since I am ready to make 2017 and even greater year for recreational reading!

M. Louisa Locke, January 19, 2017

2017 Goals #1: Writing More Blog Posts

[image error]Once I start to think about goals for a new year, I start to think about goals I failed to achieve in the previous year. And one of those goals was to blog more frequently. Well, guess what? Having written only 6 blog posts of substance in 2016 (only about half the number I did in 2015), I think I can firmly say that goal wasn’t met!

However, being the analytical person that I am, I decided to blog a bit about why I think that happened.

First, when I began blogging in December of 2009, I was primarily detailing my own journey as an independent author, in a time when we were rare enough creatures to actually be quite interesting to others.

Second, I soon discovered a few selling strategies that were working very well for me that not everyone had heard of (for example, using free short stories to hook readers, tweaking categories to help make a book more visible, using KDP Select marketing tools), and as a result I felt that I had something valuable to share with other authors.

And in addition to blogs about my writing journey and strategies, I wrote pieces detailing the historical background to my mystery series, set in Victorian San Francisco. And as my readership for this series grew, positive reactions to these pieces followed.

And frankly, what writer doesn’t like to write about things that other people are interested in reading?

So what happened this year?

Well, first, indie authors are now a dime a dozen, and many indie authors are enormously more successful than I am in terms of books written and sold.

And, not only have most of my strategies been discussed to death in detail elsewhere, but they are no longer as universally applicable, so I feel I have to qualify every piece of advice I give.

In short, I began to find it harder and harder to believe that continuing to tell about my writing journey or providing detailed discussions of my current marketing strategies was of much interest or particular value––or couldn’t be found just as easily on some other author’s blog.

As a result, I found myself hesitating whenever I looked at my to-do list and saw “write a blog post” on it. And what I usually decided was that I would rather spend my time working on my next work of fiction. Or, if I was going to spend time doing something on social media, I would rather do something that takes less time.

Which brings me to the third reason I haven’t been blogging. I take too long on each blog, including the historical ones. Generally, it took me at least a day, if not more, to review what others are writing on a subject, put together my own marketing and selling statistics, or gather together the historical research I have done on a topic. Then at least another day, to write and edit the actual piece.

So each time I get to that “write a blog piece” on my to-do list, I ask myself how many chapters could I write on my WIP in that time? How many facebook posts could I compose? How many pages of someone else’s manuscript could I edit?

Well, you get the point.

Yet the truth is, that I know people still want to hear more about Victorian San Francisco…something I am uniquely qualified to write about. And at least once a week or more I find myself giving marketing advice on different group forums, or answering emails from beginning writers about things they should consider as they make the jump to independent authorship. In short, it does appear that there might be some people who would still find what I have to say on these subjects of value.

So, this year I have decided to try something different. I have decided to try to write a post at least every week. But to only let myself spend one hour researching and writing a draft, and one hour editing that draft, before I hit publish. This might mean simply taking an old marketing post and updating it, or breaking my posts up into smaller segments. Or just trying to be more succinct!

So here goes. Post number one of 2017! And I seem to have completed it in under two hours from start to finish. (Smile)

M. Louisa Locke, January 7, 2017

Oh, and by the way, Maids of Misfortune, the first book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series is still perma free everywhere and Between Mountain and Sea, the first book in my Paradisi Chronicles science fiction series is also 99 cents on Kindle for two days, (January 7-8).

A Victorian San Francisco Christmas

[image error]Because the most recent book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, Pilfered Promises, is set during the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas, 1880, I spent a good deal of time researching how residents of that city were celebrating the holidays that year, including looking for articles in the San Francisco Chronicle. What I found was that many of the traditions that we are familiar with today started in the Nineteenth century…including the importance of advertising special holiday sales!

“The Arcade: We are offering this week SPECIAL and EXTRAORDINARY INDUCEMENTS to buyers of HOLIDAY PRESENTS, especially in our SILK DEPARTMENT” ––San Francisco Chronicle, December 19, 1880

However, these traditions were actually relatively new. Before the mid-1880s, most native-born Americans, particularly Protestants from the Northeast, saw Thanksgiving and not Christmas as the key national holiday. In fact, throughout the 1800s, a number of Protestant denominations were very resistant to the celebration of the birth of Christ in any fashion beyond religious observances.

Not surprisingly, it was the Southern state of Louisiana, where there was a significant Catholic population, that first declared December 25th a holiday (in 1837), and Christmas wasn’t declared a national legal holiday until 1875. The huge influx of European immigrants to the United States, starting in the 1840s, many from Catholic countries, also played an important role in shaping the way Christmas began to be celebrated, especially in the larger cities.

This multi-cultural perspective certainly held true for San Francisco in 1880, which makes sense since at that date three-quarters of the city’s population of over 233,000 were immigrants or their native-born children.

The Stocking:

“But the presents would lose half their charm did they not come through the medium of the huge stocking, religiously pinned to the chimney side…” ––San Francisco Chronicle, December 25, 1880

To see the rest of this post, please click go to IndieBrag, where it is being hosted by a great organization of readers dedicated to finding and promoting outstanding self-published books. 

M. Louisa Locke, December 23, 2016

Holiday Promotions

[image error]I thought I would let you all know about a couple of promotions I am running for the holidays. Maids of Misfortune, the first book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, is still free in most ebookstores, but I have also made Uneasy Spirits, the second book in the series, FREE until 12/27 on Kindle, iTunes, Nook, Kobo, and GooglePlay.

In addition, Uneasy Spirits has just been whispersynced, which means that if you own a copy of the Kindle ebook edition you get the audiobook version for only $1.99.

For those of you like to give ebooks as gifts, a reminder that the first four books in the series is available as a boxed set for $8.99–a 40% discount.

Finally, Between Mountain and Sea, my first novel in the Paradisi Chronicles series, will be only 99 cents on Kindle between January 2-8, 2017. (Oh, just wrote 2017 for the first time!) Since I am busily working away on Under Two Moons, the sequel, you might think about getting it now (and it is free for a limited time on Kindle Unlimited as well.) 

Happy Holidays!

M. Louisa Locke

Launch of Chronicle Worlds: Paradisi

For those of you interested in my work in the open-source Science Fiction series that I helped create (see this blog piece on the origin of this series), I am proud to announce that a new anthology of short stories, Chronicle Worlds: Paradisi, set in this world, has just been launched…zooming up to the top of the Amazon best-seller Science Fiction Anthologies list.

Part of the acclaimed ‘Future Chronicles’ series of speculative fiction anthologies, published by Samuel Paralta, in Chronicle Worlds: Paradisi, twelve authors take us on an incredible journey with adventurers, scientists and colonists, as they push the boundaries against the unknown, against alien civilization, and themselves.

I am excited to have one of the stories in this anthology, “Aelwyd:Home,” which tells the story of Kammie, one of the minor characters in my full-length Paradisi Chronicles novel, Between Mountain and Sea. 

In addition, my daughter, Ashley Angelly, is one of the other authors in this collection, with “Aderyn Tanllyd: A Tale of New Eden,” the story of two Ddaeran brothers.

For a limited time, Chronicle Worlds: Paradisi is only 99 cents on Kindle. I highly recommend it as a great introduction to the whole series.

In addition, to celebrate the launch of this anthology, I am discounting Between Mountain and Sea to 99 cents, and Ashley and I are offering The Stars are Red Tonight, the novella we co-wrote in the series for Free until November 8, 2016.

Between Mountain and Sea, a science fiction coming of age novel, introduces Mei Lin Yu, a young New Eden girl, and Mabel, her ancestor who took the journey to New Eden from Earth over a century and a half earlier. This work is part of the Paradisi Chronicles.

Mei Lin Yu should have been looking forward to the next stage in her life. As a descendant of one of the ten Founding Families who led the exodus from a dying Earth and now rule New Eden, her choices are endless. But she has never felt part of that Founding Family or the world of technological marvels and genetic perfection they created.

All that will change the summer she spends at Mynyddamore, her ancestral home in western Caelestis, wedged between Mynyddeira, New Eden’s highest mountain, and the Sapphire Sea. Here, living among the Ddaerans, the original inhabitants of New Eden, she will discover secrets her family want to keep buried and a truth about herself that will forever change her destiny.

Between Mountain and Sea is 99 cents on Kindle

The year is 2092 and Earth is slowly dying, but Trevor and Saya are holding their own. They have steady work in Seattle and unlike ninety-nine percent of the planet’s residents, they aren’t starving, their city isn’t underwater, threatened by fire, ravaged by disease, or under military rule. Their jobs are boring but at least they are safe. That is until an encrypted flash drive falls into their hands. Suddenly their lives are upended and nothing will ever be the same again.

The Stars are Red Tonight is part of the Paradisi Chronicles series, a science fiction adventure through time, space and generations, brought to life through the creativity of multiple authors. In this romantic suspense novella, Ashley Angelly and Louisa Locke introduce the Kuttners, one of the ten founding families who escape a dying Earth to colonize New Eden, a planet a galaxy away.

The Stars are Red Tonight is Free on Kindle

So for under $2 you get a novel, a novella, and twelve short stories set in this exciting new series! Can’t get much better than that.

Victorian Shoplifters

Pilfered Promises, the fifth installment of my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, is now available in print and ebook. This book takes my two protagonists, Annie and Nate Dawson, into the world of the modern 19th century department store, and on the Historical Fiction Authors Cooperative blog, I have written a post about the surprising role of women shoplifters in the Victorian era. Please check out the blog post HERE.

Pilfered Promises can be bought on Kindle  iTunes  Kobo  Nook and as a paperback on Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.

Get the chance to win one of two paperback copies by applying to the GoodReads Giveaway between August 8-22, 2016.

Murder and Mayhem: Four Historical Mystery Novels

 

Murder and Mayhem is a boxed set of four historical mysteries written by members of the Historical Fiction Authors Cooperative that will be only 99 cents between March 22-27.

These four mysteries range in time periods and settings from I. J. Parker’s The Hell Screen, set in Medieval Japan, to Anna Castle’s Murder and Misrule, set in Elizabethan England, to Libi Astaire’s Tempest in the Tea Room, set in Regency England, to M. Louisa Locke’s Maids of Misfortune, set in Victorian San Francisco.

*****

Normally costing you 19.96, this boxed set will be 99 cents until March 27, 2016 and can be found in the following bookstores: Kindle, Kobo, iTunes, Nook, Scribd and Page Foundry

M. Louisa Locke, March 22, 2016