Valerie Bonham

Elizabeth Peters introduces her latest Amelia Peabody book, A River in the Sky.

Next stop, the mystery bookstore.

Recommendation from the DorothyL email list:

• Best of Kindle Books

The Left Coast Crime convention at the La Fonda hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, wraps up tomorrow, and magazines and bloggers tell us all about it.

• Convention attracts lovers of mystery writing to La Fonda, Santa Fe New Mexican
  Down below, patrons moved through he book room, where Canadian dealer Donald Longmuir explained the popularity of the genre. “Murder mysteries have changed a bit over the years,” he said. “Now it’s like a window into a person’s life. The actual murder mystery can be secondary to following the lead character’s life.”
• Dorothy B. Hughes: Ghost of Honor, Sisters in Crime
  This year, one of Left Coast Crime’s Ghosts of Honor is Dorothy B. Hughes, one of my favorite authors. … Of course, she is best known for In A Lonely Place, a masterpiece that is overlooked too often. It covers the anxiety and darkness of the men who have been taught to kill in World War II and who must return home to fit into a society that no longer appreciates that skill.
• Left Coast Crime – Friday, Lesa’s Book Critiques
  This blog post has pictures.
• Clues Sisters has continuing commentary.
• The Big Chile Facebook page for LCC

If you have a blog post or website article about this year’s LCC, please leave a link in the comments section.

You have to be careful who you pal around with.  The characters made so many pots of coffee, I couldn’t stand it any longer.

The odd thing is, I don’t usually drink coffee.  Good thing Netflix sent me the second disk of Castle, because, decaf or not, I know I’m going to be up late tonight.

Just a thank you to the people ‘behind the curtain’ for maintaining service during a recent attack on the WordPress servers.

Ebooks are gaining ground in the literary marketplace, although I doubt that the  Literary gatekeepers will accept that ebooks are literature.  This blog post from the Idea Logical Company compares the burst of ebook growth to the early surge of paperback novels:  Ebooks are making me recall the history of mass-market publishing.

For writers who hope to attract readers to books they publish outside the mainstream, publishing either with indie publishers or self-publishing on ebooks, the difficulty in attracting readers is breaking through the noise — “‘Signal-to-noise ratio’ is sometimes used informally to refer to the ratio of useful information to false or irrelevant data in a conversation or exchange.”  (Wikipedia)

Gar Haywood writes about self-promotion at:  The Most Stupendous Blog Post You Will Ever Read!

For indie-published writers, the “noise” is the avalanche of published material:  books, magazines, newspapers, comic books, online texts, cereal boxes and toothpaste tubes.  The modern world is swimming in text.  Making a publishing splash on your own that anyone notices is probably equal to the chances of anyone paying attention to a stone that a (fictional and conveniently located) tourist tosses into the thundering plunge pool under Niagara Falls.  Self-promotion is a must when the writer tosses her book into the stream of books that makes up the literary Niagara Falls.

Just before midnight, the clouds moved away.

Yes, this is the moon.  I recognize it.

The writers recommended these sites recommended during today’s Wednesday Chat:

• Duotrope’s Digest:  writers’ resource listing over 3300 current Fiction and Poetry publications
• QueryTracker:  Organize and track your query letters to literary agents and publishers.

Mary Kennedy:

And the Beat Goes On: Creating Characters with Legs

Denise: It is essential that the character’s core values remain the same so that, although that character has grown and evolved, he or she is still the same person the reader originally met and liked.

Carolyn: That is at the crux of the mystery novel. The protagonists want to live in a good and decent world and always strive to do the right thing.

more at blog

The Henderson Files:  GUEST BLOG: M. Louisa Locke on Selling Your Kindle Book

I now average 55 books sold a day, and I am making enough money that I have retired completely to work on the sequel, Uneasy Spirits. When I started, I had no particular expertise and no fan base, but I did have access to a world of advice being put out daily on blogs and websites hosted by indie authors, designers, editors, and marketers.

more at blog