Happy Holidays! And May I Suggest...

It’s that time of year again, when people are frantically shopping for the holidays and the black cloud of university final exams is hovering over select houses (ours being one of them!). For me personally, it’s not often that I can say the Christmas season is the most relaxed schedule I’ve had in a while, but it’s certainly true this year. With two book launches and a completed manuscript in my rear-view mirror, I’m finally getting the chance to concentrate on the Christmas season and to recharge a bit. Hallelujah! Being busy is great, but a person needs a little downtime every once in a while to avoid burnout.

So, dear reader, while you are working on your own shopping lists, may I suggest some great books for the mystery and thriller readers in your life?

For the mystery reader/geek/science-leaning/lover of a touch of romance—The Abbott and Lowell Forensic Mysteries:

• DEAD, WITHOUT A STONE TO TELL IT: The book that started it all. Massachusetts State Police Trooper Leigh Abbott joins forces with Boston University’s Dr. Matthew Lowell when skeletal murder victims are found buried on the Essex coast.
• NO ONE SEES ME ‘TIL I FALL: Matt, Leigh, and the team reunite when the remains of a young woman are found carelessly tossed away in a garbage dump.
• A FLAME IN THE WIND OF DEATH: As Halloween looms and bodies are discovered following catastrophic arson fires, Matt and Leigh are drawn into Salem’s Witchcraft community to stop the killings.
• TWO PARTS BLOODY MURDER: The discovery of human remains in a Prohibition-era speakeasy starts Matt and Leigh’s investigation into a  series of connected murders spanning from the 1930s to present day.
• LAMENT THE COMMON BONES: When a skeleton in a university research lab is found to be a murder victim, Matt brings the case to Leigh, setting off a deadly chase that could mean the end of the team… permanently.

For the thriller reader/dog lover—The FBI K-9s:

• LONE WOLF: The first book in our newest series features FBI handler Meg Jennings and her search-and-rescue black Labrador, Hawk, as they track down a mad bomber with a grudge who is blowing up government buildings, killing innocent bystanders inside.
• BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE: When victims resembling Meg are kidnapped and trapped in deadly scenarios, the team can only save them if they are able to decipher a cryptic coded message, solve the resulting puzzle, and rescue the victims before time runs out.

The FBI K-9s series continues next fall with STORM RISING!

No matter what holiday season you celebrate, best wishes to you to enjoy it with family and friends, and to find the time to recharge and rejuvenate as you look forward to the new year. See you in 2018!

The CreateSpace Experience

First of all, I’m happy to say that Ann and I completed the manuscript for FBI K-9s #3, STORM RISING, and passed it off to Esi Sogah, our editor at Kensington. We’re looking forward to working with her to fine tune the story in the new year.

Publishing LAMENT THE COMMON BONES was certainly a different experience for me. I’m the first one to admit that I like working with a publishing house rather than doing it myself. Maybe it’s because I have a full-time job on top of a busy writing schedule, but I really appreciate not having to worry about covers and formatting and distribution etc. Also, we’ve been lucky to have great publishing partners, so I wasn’t actively searching out another avenue to publishing. But we also had a manuscript that was crucial to the Abbott and Lowell Forensic Mysteries because it tied up a major multi-book arc, so, in the end, there wasn’t really any question about whether we’d put it out or not. Luckily, authors now have more options than ever if they want to self-publish.

We’d self-pubbed a novella before, but this was the first time I’d done a print version as well as an e-book. Because of my previous experience publishing NO ONE SEES ME ‘TIL I FALL through Kindle Direct Publishing and Kobo’s Writing Life, I knew the e-book would be no problem and could be done separately, but I looked to CreateSpace to put the print copy together and to ensure seamless delivery through Amazon worldwide.

When LAMENT THE COMMON BONES was orphaned by Five Star’s decision to close down their mystery line, the book was already written and had gone through the developmental edit. But we knew it needed another set of eyes on it, so the amazing M.M. Harden graciously offered her services as our copy editor. She can adjust her edit based on what an author is looking for; I asked to be hit with both barrels, and definitely got it in the form of a comprehensive and critical edit. My theory has always been that you have to know the flaws in a book so you can fix them. Yes, it’s hard on your ego and you hate to see your baby bleeding, but the final completed version was so much improved, it was definitely worth it.

A huge thank you goes to my husband Rick for taking on the task of formatting the manuscript. Not difficult work, but fiddly and time consuming in the extreme, requiring a large amount of patience for whenever Word starts getting frisky and doing things on its own (or so it seems!). All those section breaks and text formatting, then adjustments around page numbers, and indent size, and page size, and so on. So many changes and slightly different versions of the manuscript. However, we learned a lot with this manuscript that will make subsequent attempts MUCH easier. I will say that CreateSpace’s ability to upload the document and then convert it into a virtual live version of the printed book was incredibly helpful to the fine-tuning process. Many versions, many uploads, but we worked through the kinks until we had the interior exactly as we wanted.

The cover was a little trickier, but was not beyond my daughter Jess’s skills. She’s also the brains behind the cover for NO ONE SEES ME ‘TIL I FALL, but now has a lot more experience as a photographer and photo editor under her belt. She initially did the front cover for the e-book version, but then expanded that image into the full cover complete with spine, back cover copy, and previous reviews for Abbott and Lowell. It took a few kicks at the can to get the cover right (partly due to CreateSpace’s vague error emails about why the cover didn’t work during the review process). But this is another exercise that taught us a lot and we’ll definitely be more prepared next time.

Getting an ISBN for each of the three versions was a breeze as Collections Canada provides them free of charge to Canadian publishers, so that was lightning fast and saved purchasing separate numbers for each.

This pretty much put the print copy together, so we completed the setup and I ordered a hard copy proof to make sure there weren’t any errors (and yes, there were… I always catch errors in new formats because I look at the book differently). This was a step that cost a little and took some time to have the copy shipped, but was well worth both.

Rick reformatted the manuscript for the e-book versions and we got those up and ready for pre-order with a few weeks to go still. This process would have been a little simpler if I hadn’t been juggling the still work-in-process post-crit team manuscript for STORM RISING, but somehow it all managed to fit in. And on November 21st, LAMENT THE COMMON BONES went live. And I survived the self-publishing process! ;)

What’s next for Abbott and Lowell? I’m going to tackle the re-release of DEAD, WITHOUT A STONE TO TELL IT, A FLAME IN THE WIND OF DEATH, AND TWO PARTS BLOODY MURDER in print. Five Star has stopped printing the hardcovers, and, honestly, I always thought those were too expensive for a debut author’s book, so I’m going to be putting together the trade paperback versions to match LAMENT THE COMMON BONES. So, watch for new covers to come in the new year with the book releases following shortly after. Rick and I are already well into the formatting of those manuscripts and I’ll be working with Jess over the next month or two to get new covers ready to go. More of that in the new year. Stay tuned!