Killing the Beast

I'm working, albeit deliberately, on a sequel to The Hero of Gucci Gulch.  Called Killing the Beast, it features plenty of murder and mayhem just outside the halls of Congress and implicates leaders at the highest level.  Who are the murderer or murderers?  And who or what is the beast of the tale's title?  That, of course, is the mystery that drives the action in this coming book.

I'm on chapter 22 now, with another few chapters yet to conceive. As is usual with mysteries, mine at least, even I don't know how it will end or the culprits will be found out. But that's the fun of writing!

Like The Hero of Gucci Gulch, now in production for an audiobook, I'll be releasing via Audible.com when it has been published, sometime later this year.  I'll announce it here when it's available.

Update on My Audiobook

As I mentioned previously, I began the process of converting my first novel, The Hero of Gucci Gulch, into an audiobook.  I'm pleased to report that I received seven auditions for the narration before I made a final selection.  I could have gone with any of three of the narrators.  The one I chose, A. Bran Peacock, has both the voice and the interpretive skills that will bring my novel to life.

Over the next several months, he and I will review his initial performance to identify any pronunciation and performance issues.  After that, he'll narrate the entire story.

I'm hoping the fully-narrated novel will be ready for release sometime this fall.

The Hero of Gucci Gulch, a murder mystery set on Capitol Hill, features a public interest lobbyist as amateur sleuth.  It's an easily read novel with a lot of action that I think will translate easily into narrated form.  When it has been released by Audible.com, I hope you will agree.

The Story Line of Gucci Gulch

The Hero of Gucci Gulch features Henry Wright, a milk-loathing dairy promoter turned environmentalist, who is naïve, unsure of himself, sometimes quirky.  Now he is caught in the political fight of his life—to get a climate change bill passed by a Congress riddled with the scheming pals of polluters.  But this test of his political skills is no match for his fight to escape his own seemingly inevitable death. The Hero of Gucci Gulch is set in the halls of Congress, where anti-environmental skullduggery mixes with mayhem to create exciting twists and turns sure to entice any fan of mysteries.  

Henry befriends Alicia Cummings, a pretty young intern whose passion for environmental justice matches his own. But youthful impetuosity leads her to ignore Henry’s warnings and she digs too deeply into the nefarious plans of the powerful opposition.  When Henry finds her strangled body in a lonely Washington garden, he becomes the number one murder suspect.  He tries to plow his anguish into his legislative campaign, but the unsolved murder weighs heavily on him and he can’t leave it alone.  He stumbles onto clues that point to his anti-environmental enemies, and when the police are slow to act he takes matters into his own hands.  His increasingly daring amateur investigation gets him crosswise with the police but he persists until violence and still more death force him to live on the run. Henry faces both personal threats and political challenges as he claws his way toward the surprising conclusion. 

The first novel in a series featuring the lobbyist amateur sleuth is rich with Washington and political insider details and explorations of environmental policy and the need for climate change legislation . It will appeal to mystery fans, environmentalists and lovers of political intrigue alike.  But climate change-deniers should probably not apply!

The Hero of Gucci Gulch is available at Amazon.com and in the CreateSpace eStore.  A Kindle edition is in the works.  I'll announce it here when it becomes available.

And Now Available on Amazon.com!

Today I discovered that The Hero of Gucci Gulch, my murder mystery novel set on Capitol Hill, is available for sale on Amazon.com.  They had promised it would become available in five to seven days; they made it in one!   It is even available for free shipping by Prime, if you subscribe to that service, so you can have a copy by Monday if you order today.

As I said in my last post, the book will also be available in a Kindle version, but converting the file will take me a while so I can't yet predict when that edition will be ready.

At Last I'm Published

My murder mystery, The Hero of Gucci Gulch, passed all of CreateSpace's hoops as well as my own critical review (for the umpteenth time) and I approved it for release yesterday.  So now it's published!

Copies can be purchased immediately at the CreateSpace eStore.  It takes CreateSpace another week to release it on the Amazon.com web site, where it will be more readily available to the buying public.  A Kindle edition is also in the works, but that involves a fair bit of reworking of the text to make it readable in the scalable Kindle format.  However, because Kindle reaches a different audience--and a large one at that--I will make the necessary changes and get it posted there as soon as possible.

You can read the synopsis and my bio statement at the CreateSpace site.

On Ice

Today I'm in a holding pattern.  I've submitted The Hero of Gucci Gulch, my murder mystery novel, to CreateSpace for review and it passed all their tests.  Then I ordered a review copy, paying extra to have it delivered quickly.  It is due to come today.

But will it come?  Yesterday we caught the tail end of a major snowstorm that afflicted much of the east coast.  We did not get the predicted 10" of snow--at least, not so I can tell with it blowing around in the high winds.  But we did get maybe 5".  Why is this important?  Because it will disrupt package deliveries. 

The book is coming via UPS.  I live atop a fairly steep hill and have an unplowed, gravel driveway.  UPS will not come up my driveway when it has snowed any amount and certainly not through the drifts that have accumulated in the driveway.  Instead, they will fling my packages at the foot of my mailbox.  That is, if they come at all.

And if my book does arrive today, as expected, then the issue is whether it will pass muster.  The small  photo of the cover I viewed on-line suggested that the book title may be shifted somewhat to the left of the page.  If so, I'll want to repair the cover and send the book back through the review and reprinting process, something I would be very unhappy to do because of the delays it will entail.

But until the book arrives, I don't really know what I'm faced with.  I want to release it for publication so I can start marketing it and--I hope--generating royalties.  But I also want it to look right.  So, until the physical copy arrives, I'm literally on ice.

Publishing Through CreateSpace

Amazon.com's self-publishing arm, called CreateSpace, turns out to be a suprisingly easy and affordable way to publish a book.  At least, that's been my experience so far.  CreateSpace gives you two options: do your own text and cover layout or hire their experts to do it for you.  If you are able to carefully format your text in Microsoft Word, you can do it yourself.  That's the option I chose, which is the free option.  Amazon then makes its money from sales of your book on-line.

The same is true for your book's cover.  You can choose one of their standard cover templates and add your title information; you can pay their experts to design a cover for you; or you can develop your own in a photo editing program such as Photoshop using the layout template CreateSpace provides.  Since I am somewhat Photoshop-adept, I chose the latter option.

The hardest part of the process, frankly, is getting your text formatted.  I chose a 6X9" book format, which is the one recommended by CreateSpace for best distribution and sales.   To accommodate it, I changed the page size of my document in Word.  This necessitated reviewing all of the page breaks and eliminating the resulting widows and orphans.  This was eased, I later discovered, by turning on the widows and orphans feature in Word, something that would have saved me considerable time--not to mention several read-throughs--had I done it earlier.  Numbering the pages also turned out to be something of a challenge; numbers kept popping up on blank pages and in other places where they were unwanted.  I had to insert special breaks in the text, sometimes seemingly at random, until all the page numbers ended up where intended.

Once I had my text formatted the way CreateSpace needs to get it, I converted it to a pdf file--the preferred method for uploading to CreateSpace, though apparently they will also take Word files.  I filled out the background information needed--title, author, choice of ISBN option and where I want my royalties deposited--then uploaded my text for review.  In a matter of minutes, the text is returned in a form you can scan on-line for errors.  The review, in fact, will tell you whether or not your text passed CreateSpace's tests.  Mine did, with one minor error.

While your text is being reviewed and approved, it's on to the cover.  This is uploaded as a pdf file also.  It must meet CreateSpace's specifications for layout and spine thickness (which depends on the number of words and the choice of paper color).  This too is reviewed by CreateSpace.

That's where The Hero of Gucci Gulch stands now--waiting for final review.  Once I get approval--a matter of a day or less, in my brief experience--then I'll order a single print copy for final inspection of the book as produced.  If all is then OK, I'll release it for publication. 

This process has proven to be very quick.  I've spent three days getting the text laid out in final form and through the review process at CreateSpace twice.  Now I'm down to waiting to order and receive the first hard copy.  I'll let you know how that goes.

Publishing My Novel

Over the last several years, I've been polishing a mystery novel--The Hero of Gucci Gulch--that I started now several years back.  Or, in reality, it has mostly been lying about untouched because I did not know how to go about getting it published.  But recently, my friend and cousin Jim Crawford, under the pen name of Mokuri, published a short volume of poems by Li Po via Amazon's CreateSpace. This gave me the idea that I would be far better off using this free service to get my book out to the world than fretting over the difficulty and costs of publishing it by other means.

CreateSpace is a print-on-demand service that sells books when purchased via Amazon.com and by offers them to other booksellers and libraries in the U.S. and Europe.  Books can also be made available in Kindle editions.  Although you can pay CreateSpace to set up your book for you, it is quite possible to submit a final edited text and cover design of your own making.  The cost of doing it yourself is nothing.

Books can be printed in any size, include color illustrations and artwork if desired, and run to any length--short or long.

Royalties can be paid out automatically to your bank account or sent via check.  A user dashboard allows you to check in and watch your royalties as they accumulate.

There are many other epublishing services out there, but most that I've found charge fees for even basic services--sometimes astonishly high fees!  While my book has not yet been published, it is in the queue for review and may be available in a few days.

I'll announce it here when it appears.