Three blog posts in a week?  That’s some kind of record for me.  This is a longish post, but if you’re a fan of the Garrison Gage books, or why a writer might choose to write under a pen name, you might find this interesting.

A couple days ago, when I wrote about my upcoming novel, Ghost Detective, I mentioned that I’m doing a little bit of recalibrating with my writing career.  Well, republishing my Jack Nolte books under my own name is a big part of that process.

Why go to all the trouble, and why did I publish those books under a pseudonym in the first place?  Well, at the tail end of 2010, when I first indie-published The Gray and Guilty Sea, both Big Publishing and my own writing career were in a very different place.  I’d published my first young adult novel with Simon and Schuster and was working on a second, plus had an inkling to write a middle grade fantasy involving the untold story of Pinocchio (which turned out to be the book Wooden Bones.) Although I’ve always been one of those writers who writes like he reads — all over the genre map — I was feeling like I was building toward something of a career as a young adult/children’s writer under my own name.

Now, you have to understand, this isn’t how I saw my writing career.  I follow a simple motto when it comes to my writing, one that I actually have taped to my monitor as a daily reminder:  Write your own favorite book. What I mean is, I try not to pigeonhole myself as a young adult writer or a children’s writer or a mystery writer or a science fiction writer or literary writer, though in my short career, you could already make the case that any one of those labels applies.  I just try to write my own favorite book.  I’m not saying I always succeed, but that’s the goal.  I write stories that I want to read, hopefully ones that will stick with me long after the final page is written/read.

If I don’t try to write books that are my favorite books, how can I ever hope for them to be someone else’s?

But back to 2010.  There are many valid reasons to write under a pseudonym.  You could do it because you don’t want people to know (anonymity) you write “that sort of thing,” whatever “that sort of thing” is.  You could do it because you write across genres and you want to more clearly distinguish those books for readers (branding).  But even if you don’t feel the need to write under a pseudonym for those two reasons, there was an even better one if you hoped to have a long and fruitful traditional publishing career:  protecting your sales numbers.

If you wrote thrillers that were expected to move 100,000 units a book, you may not want to release that latest science fiction novel that’s only expected to sell 5000 under your own name.  Especially in the days of the big box bookstores (days that are thankfully coming to an end), those sales numbers could determine how many copies of your next book the bookstore ordered.  So some bean counter sees you only moved 5000 of your last book, not understanding genre expectations, and dramatically reduces your order for your next thriller.

Don’t think this happened?  Oh, yes, it did, all the time, and it killed careers —  unless the writer was willing to re-launch under a pseudonym.  And of course, the smart writers, understanding this phenomena, wrote under pseudonyms from the get go.  My friend Kristine Kathryn Rusch is one of the masters of this, writing award-winning science fiction under her own name, acclaimed mysteries as Kris Nelscott, and quirky paranormal romances as Kristine Grayson — and those are just three of her pen names!  (And if you haven’t read her — any of version of her — you really should.  She’s a fantastic.)

So for some of these reasons (branding, fear of poor sales hurting my career) and because nobody really knew what the future held for indie-published writers in 2010 (though it was looking promising), I decided to release The Gray and Guilty Sea under the pen name Jack Nolte.*

Honestly, I was unsure about the book, too.  A writer’s self-confidence can already be an iffy thing, and this is a book that had failed to sell to traditional publishers.  Granted, it did help land me one of the top literary agents in the business, and it did elicit some very glowing rejection letters, but the editors all passed on the book.  The most common complaint was that they loved Garrison Gage but were hoping for a “bigger” story, with lots of “scope,” something like The Da Vinci Code. But I wasn’t writing that kind of book.  I was writing a character book about a private investigator who “retires” to the Oregon Coast from New York after his wife is brutally killed in a mafia hit, and who, in the book’s opening page, stumbles upon a dead girl on the beach on an evening walk.  It’s a regional mystery, heavy on the character, about guilt and redemption.

So I just stuck it out there with no fanfare, not even a mention on my own blog.  I even put the book at 99 cents originally because I just didn’t care.  I created a JackNolte.com website ( a site which, you’ll notice, now links back here) and treated Jack like he was a separate writer altogether.

And an amazing thing happened. The book started to sell.

Not by the standards of Hugh Howey, Amanda Hocking, or Joe Konrath, you understand, but it was still selling eight to ten copies a day.  I did publish a free short story, “A Plunder by Pilgrims,” a sort of prequel to the book, and I know for a fact that many readers discovered it that way, but otherwise I was doing no promotion at all.  I raised my price to $1.99.  Then $2.99.  Then $3.99.  The book continued to sell at about the same rate.  I eventually raised it to $5.99, trying to position the book at the bottom end of traditionally-published books, and though the sales did slow down after a while, it had a very good two year run and continues to sell at a decent clip.  I released a second book a year ago featuring Gage, A Desperate Place for Dying, and it has also sold well.

Which brings me to today.  I’m just about to publish Ghost Detective, which I think readers of the Jack Nolte books may very well enjoy.  I’m well into the third Garrison Gage novel, which, if the stars align, will be released later this year.  Over the past few months, this whole pseudonym thing has been nagging me a great deal.  It’s hard enough to build one name, and it’s doubly hard if you’re spreading your books among several.  This has always been true, I guess, but it’s even more true now:  The best way to build a career, today, and with indie publishing specficially, is to steadily release new, similar material.  It’s not the only way, and it’s certainly not right for every writer, but it’s probably the most common method I’ve seen writers use to achieve success recently.

The one thing stopping me was this idea of branding.  Though I’m trying to be a little more disciplined in the projects  I select to write (part of the recalibration I mentioned), I can guarantee you that you will see other children’s fantasies, quirky young adult books, and other things that will continue to make me one of those writers who’s hard to pigeonhole.  My muse, I like the guy, but he’s a bit schizophrenic, you see, and I’m afraid I’m stuck with him.

What if a parent who bought A Tale of Two Giants, one of my more gentle children’s fantasies, buys one of my grittier mysteries and is shocked at the profanity?  Will I piss of a reader?  Will I lose them?

Well, maybe.  And you know what?  That’s okay. It’s also possible that a reader who enjoyed my quirky young adult book, The Care and Feeding of Rubber Chickens, may also be a fan of dark paranormal mysteries.  I mean, I am, right?  And by keeping it all under my own name, I make it easier for that reader, the one like me, to find all of my books.  And there are lots of ways to brand books, from font style to cover image.

I’m also reminded of something a long-time pro said to me a few years ago.  I think it may have been Kate Wilhem, though I can’t be sure, though it certainly seems like something she would say.  When I asked what she thought about pseudonyms, she said, and I’m paraphrasing, “Well, I think readers are pretty smart.  In fact, I think they’re smart enough to decide for themselves what they want to read.”

I thought that was pretty wise, even though I decided to ignore it.  (For better or worse, I’m often ignoring advice people give me.)  But now, I’ve pretty much come around to her point of view.  Unless there’s a very good reason to write under a pseudonym — and there still are many — I’m going to be writing almost everything under my own name.

Thankfully, with indie publishing I was able to do this relatively easily.  Here’s what I did over the last week:

1. Add my own name to the online listings of the Jack Nolte books as a co-author
2. Repackage the covers, dropping the Jack Nolte to a “writing as” subhead
3. Direct all traffic from JackNolte.com to my own site.
4. Publish updated versions of the paperbacks with new covers and interiors.
5. Write this blog post, so Jack Nolte fans will know why I’m making this change.

This way I don’t lose any momentum from the Jack Nolte name, but I position myself so that when the third Gage book is released, I can just release it completely under my own name.

It was a bit of work, but it was worth it to me.  I can’t deny that maybe a little bit of ego was involved, too.  So sue me.  My name is my brand.  I don’t know what that brand is, exactly, except I can tell you this:  You may not like everything I write, but you’ll always get my best effort.  I hope that’s enough.

*In case you were wondering, Nolte is my mother’s maiden name, and “Jack” is a handle I used in the early days of the Internet with Usenet and public Bulletin Boards, when as a teenager I wanted to engage in online discussions but also wanted to protect my anonymity.  Mostly, I think, because I was afraid the older kids would come to my house and beat me up.

People might think something’s wrong with me.  I’m blogging twice in one day.  How can this be?

Well, I promise not to make it a routine.  Whenever I spend too much time on the website, it doesn’t take long for me to feel like the effort I put here would be better off spent writing fiction, especially since with a busy day job at a university and all the challenges that come from raising two kids, time is hard enough to come by as it is.  But as I menioned earlier, I’m making a little extra marketing push with the book being published this summer, Ghost Detective. Part of that effort is a short story called “The Haunted Breadbox,” which is not only a prequel to Ghost Detective but was also the inspiration for it.  Here’s a little more information:

Myron Vale sees ghosts. One hundred billion of them, to be precise.

In a world where everybody dies but nobody leaves, Myron Vale is the rare individual who completely straddles both sides of the great divide. In fact, he may just be the only one. His strange ability the result of a gunshot to the head while serving as a Portland police officer, a few years later he recovers to forge a new life as private investigator catering to both the living and the dead.

His biggest problem? He can’t tell them apart.

In this short story prequel to Ghost Detective, the first novel featuring Myron Vale, a house call to an old farmhouse finds Vale investigating the most unlikely of haunted places — a breadbox. What lies inside? It’s not at all what Vale expects.

You can read this story for free right now on this website, or download a free copy in any number of formats over at Smashwords.com —  .mobi for the Kindle,.epub for the Nook, even PDF for your computer.  It’s also available for 99 cents on Amazon.com if you want to make it easy to download it to your Kindle.  At the end of the story is an afterword explaining the origin of the story, which then lead to the novel.

This is another great advantage of indie-publishing.  I’ve sold many short stories  to magazines and anthologies, but if I tried to do the same with this one, it could take six months to a year just sending it around (with no gaurantee anyone would buy it), and another six months to a year before it was published.  Then I’d have to wait another three to six months (an exclusivity period) before I could republish it on my site for free.

By releasing this one now myself, I can get it out before Ghost Detective is published, which hopefully will entice readers to pick up the book.  I did this once before, with a short story called “A Plunder By Pilgrims,” which was something of a prequel to The Gray and Guilt Sea, and I know for a fact that many, many readers discovered the novel via that short story.

A novel, by the way, which was published under the name Jack Nolte, and is now being re-released under my own name.  More about that soon.

I’m pleased to announce that I have a new novel coming this summer, one I’m very excited about:  Ghost Detective. In a world where everybody dies but nobody leaves, Myron Vale is the rare individual who completely straddles both sides of the great divide. Read the full blurb below, as well as the first chapter here, and see if it hooks you.  I’ve also set up a page at www.scottwilliamcarter.com/ghost, where I’ll collect any links or blog posts related to the book.

If early reader reviews are any indication, it could very well be one of the best things I’ve written, which has prompted me to make a little extra marketing push.  When I finished this book, I really wanted to write more books about Myron Vale, and I’ve purposely set it up to be an ongoing mystery series.

When will it be published?  Target date for a simultaneous paperback/ebook release is July 1 (just in time for the holiday weekend), but it could be published a few weeks before that.  If you sign up for my newsletter there on the right, you’ll not only get a free copy The Man Who Made No Mistakes, you’ll also be the first to know when the book is available.  I don’t send many emails, a couple a year at most, but I do try to take care of my most dedicated readers.  You’ll also get first crack at limited editions and other things. I won’t spam you or give your email to someone else.  Promise.

A couple other things.  I’m releasing this book under my own publishing company, Flying Raven Press. When I first dipped my toes into the waters of indie-publishing a couple years ago, I thought it might be good — how can I put this tactfully? — to not be too obvious about that fact.  Even though self-publishing was the norm until maybe a hundred years ago (Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Rice Burroughs and many other notable authors self-published their own work),  it took on a certain stink of desperation in recent decades.  But folks, the game has changed.  Self-publishing, if done right, is not only a viable alternative to traditional publishing, in most cases these days it is the preferred option.  There are so many writers covering this now that I hardly need to do so, but if you’re interested in learning more, read the blogs of Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathtryn Rusch, The Passive Voice, and J.A. Konrath.  That’s a good starting point, and from there, you’ll be led to many others.  I’m thankful to all of them for the help they’ve given writers.

I can honestly tell you I only considered submitting Ghost Detective to traditional publishers for about five seconds before dismissing the idea.

Why? Although I’ve had a great experience with Simon and Schuster with several of my novels, and would certainly consider a traditional publisher again for the right project, the advances, royalties, and contract terms have gotten pretty piss poor unless you have the leverage to dictate better terms. And how do you get that leverage?  By coming to them after you already have a top-selling book.

But even then, it’s not a sure thing whether an author should sign up with a traditional publisher.  Numbers are hard to come by, of course, but the expert analysis I’ve seen pegs non-online sales of most fiction around 40%.  This means that 60% of a novel’s sales (a little higher or lower depending on the genre) come from either ebooks or print sales via online channels like Amazon.com.  And once you know how, you as a writer can reach those markets just as well (or in many cases, better) than traditional publishers.

Yes, this means I have to wear the publisher’s hat in addition to the writer’s, but I don’t mind.  In my early creative days, I started as a visual artist (both cartooning and fine art), and have worked a number of jobs that required me to learn desktop design, so I enjoy putting the books together.  Whether my covers rival those coming out of New York, I’ll leave for you to judge, but I definitely feel I’m getting better.  The final draft of this book is currently being proofread by an experienced New York copy editor.  I can’t promise you there won’t be any errors in the book, because even the big publishing houses miss some, but when it’s all said and done, whether you buy the paperback or the ebook, I want you to feel you’re holding a book in your hands that’s just as good, at least in terms of presentation, as anything coming out of New York.

It’s been an up and down year on the writing side, which I may talk more about soon (or I may not, I’m a pretty erratic blogger, as you can see), but I feel really good about the future.  I’ve made some decisions lately to recalibrate my writing career a bit, and Ghost Detective is a big step in this process.  I hope you check it out.

Ghost Detective
by Scott William Carter

Ebook Publication Date:
Coming July 2013

Paperback Publication Date:
Coming July 2013

Genre: Fiction | Mystery

After narrowly surviving a near-fatal shooting, Portland detective Myron Vale wakes with a bullet still lodged in his brain, a headache to end all headaches, and a terrible side effect that radically transforms his world for the worse:  He sees ghosts.  Lots of them.

By some estimates, a hundred billion people have lived and died before anyone alive today was even born.  For Myron, they’re all still here.  That’s not even his biggest problem.  No matter how hard he tries, he can’t tell the living from the dead.

Despite this, Myron manages to piece together something of a life as a private investigator specializing in helping people on both sides of the great divide — until a stunning blonde beauty walks into his office needing help finding her husband.  Myron wants no part of the case until he sees the man’s picture . . . and instantly his carefully reconstructed life begins to unravel.

Read the first chapter here.

Just received the contributor copy in the mail of my story, “The Way the Rain Bends,” which was just published in The Los Angeles Review. It’s a provocative little short story I wrote while attending a workshop on the Oregon coast, set in Portland and told in second person, featuring the breakdown of a young marriage.  I read it the other day at a local reading and I still like it, very fun to read aloud, though it’s certainly dark and brooding.  Fitting for dark and brooding weather, I guess, which is what we’ve mostly been getting here lately.  I’ve been reading some of the other stories in the magazine, pieces by Natalie Goldberg and Ron Carlson, among others, really great stuff, and I encourage you to think about subscribing.

Just got word that Wooden Bones, my fantasy chronicling what happened to Pinocchio after he became a real boy, will be published in paperback next summer, which is welcome news.   My young adult novel, President Jock, Vice President Geek, was just released in audio, available for digital download from Audible.com and Amazon.com.  Plus my second mystery under my Jack Nolte pen name, A Desperate Place for Dying, featuring the curmudgeonly Garrison Gage, was also published in audio.

As for me, I carry on like usual, writing my four or five pages a day, reading good books, helping the kids with homework and piano, raking far too many leaves, and eagerly awaiting for each installment of The Walking Dead. I’ve also been extracting myself more and more from the Internet.  Went a little overboard during the election, which is usual for me, but I came out of it really questioning how engaged I want to be in general when it comes to the Internet.  I’ve already come to the conclusion that I want to be a minimalist promoting my work (believing, as I do, that the best way to increase your “discoverablity” as a writer, which is the latest buzzword in publishing, is to focus your energy on just writing more rather than trying to hype what you’ve already written, because more work means more gateways for people to find out about you as well as more for them to buy when they do — win, win), but I’ve also been feeling like I want to be a minimalst when it comes to how much time I spend reading online, too.

I already cut out all social media (Facebook, Twitter, and the like), and now I’ve been dramatically curtailing how much time I spend on listservs, blogs, and other things.  It’s a fine balancing act, because I like being informed, about publishing and the world at large, but I really, really like how I feel when I’m mostly disconnected from The Great and Powerful Digital Hive Mind.  The peace of mind is amazing.

This isn’t to say I want to give up the Internet completely.  It’s still the greatest tool for communication since the Gutenberg printing press.  But it is to say that I’m finding how to use it only when I need it (which isn’t nearly as often as I used to think) and not using it because I have this paranoid fear that Something Out There Is Happening And I Don’t Know About It.

I have a new friend in the house.  I picked up this handsome little puppet of Pinocchio in Venice during our summer trip to the Mediterranean.  He now sits on my “brag shelf,” standing guard over all the books and magazines where my work has appeared.   It was a pretty big memento to stuff into my suitcase, but I couldn’t pass it up, seeing how my book, Wooden Bones, was coming out at almost the same time I was visiting Italy.  You see Pinocchio puppets all over Italy, of course, but most of them have the traditional red outfit, and this one better matched the spirit of my book.  The company who produced it is based in Italy, and there was only one store in all of Venice where they were sold.

First, the big news:  Wooden Bones, my dark children’s fantasy that chronicles the untold story of Pinocchio, is now available in both hardcover and ebook from Simon and Schuster.  What happened to Pino, as he came to be known, after he became a real boy?  The answer:  It turns out he can bring puppets to life himself, which gets him into a whole lot of trouble.  Giant hungry wolves?  Dead trees brought to life?  Life-size puppets that march about like zombies?  The book’s got all of that and more.  I hope you check it out.  It’s aimed at the 9-12 age group, but I think adults might like it as well.

It’s been a busy couple of months.  In late July, I co-taught the Think Like a Publisher Workshop with Dean Wesley Smith, where we helped another room full of professional writers learn how to take advantage of all the ways writers can now go direct to readers — even while continuing to work with large traditional publishers, as I am.  It was a great group and always fun to hang out with Dean and all my other writer friends on the Oregon coast.  Hard to believe, but I’ve known Dean over twenty years, ever since I walked into his writing workshop in Eugene, Oregon when I was a nineteen-year-old college student and realized, right away, what a goldmine that workshop was for a newer writer like me.

The first half of August, my wife and I took off for Europe, embarking on a five country, ten plus city Mediterranean cruise, tacking a few days on at the beginning and the end.  In all, we were gone 17 days, and it was quite a trip — Barcelona, Athens, Rome, Venice, Istanbul, I’m still mentally unpacking everything we did on the trip.  It was expensive, no doubt about it, but we have no regrets; it was something we’d been wanting to do for a long time.  And no, we didn’t take the kids.  They stayed with the grandparents (we took them to Disneyland last year, which was the family trip), and had a much better time  than if they’d been with us.  Somehow I don’t think they would have appreciated the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona or the Parthenon in Athens quite as much as we did.

Other news?  Well, I’m buckling down into the writing, working on a dark paranormal suspense novel based loosely on one of my short stories.   More than that I won’t say until it’s finished, but the writing is going well.  I also have a number of new audio books out.  None of them are narrated by me (when I have more time, it’s something I plan to do, but not now), but they’re all excellent reads.  All of them are available for digital download at Audible.com and Amazon, and should be available at iTunes shortly.

With the summer winding down toward fall — I was stunned to realize that the kids go back to school in two weeks — I’m hoping to have a nice, productive stretch of writing for the rest of the year.  Traveling is great, but I truly am a creature of habit, and it feels good to get back in a creative groove.

What I’ve Been Reading Lately:

• The Hunger Games Trilogy, by Suzanne Collins.  Fantastic read, and fully deserving of all the attention it’s gotten.  Felt a little like Ender’s Game meets The Princess Diaries, in the sense that it’s very much told in the voice of a teenage girl (complete with a makeover!)   but the action and war-heavy themes are there in abundance at the same time.  I’d say the third book was the weakest of the three, but it was also the most ambitious in scope.
• Now and Then by Robert B. Parker.  Another great book in the Spenser series, touching on infidelity, the meaning of marriage, and what makes two people stick it out through thick and thin.  Not his best book, but then it’s Robert B. Parker, and even a run of the mill Parker is superb.

Exciting news!  I’m pleased to announce the publication my latest short story collection, The Man Who Made No Mistakes, available as both a trade paperback and an ebook.  Although I sometimes release ebook-only mini collections, this is what I consider my third major collection.  (The Dinosaur Diaries and A Web of Black Widows being the first two.)  It contains stories published in Analog, Realms of Fantasy, and other magazines, as well as a few original tales.  It also bears a striking cover by Billy Norby.  I’m very happy with the book and hope you enjoy it, too.  A little more information is below.

What if you had the power to rewind time?

Make a scene in a restaurant, give your boss the finger, rob a bank just to see how it feels — you could satisfy any whim, fulfill any desire, make any wish you’d ever had come true. The man who wanders into Father Holder’s Las Vegas confessional says he has just such a power. The ultimate in wish fulfillment, he calls it. And if something goes wrong? No problem. He just rewinds. He’s the man who never makes mistakes.

Until, in a moment of weakness, he succumbs to the darkest impulse he’s ever had — and can’t find a way to undo it.

This remarkable tale leads off Scott William Carter’s latest short story collection. A dragon addicted to eating humans, a robot on a devastated planet with a spellbinding story to tell, Abraham Lincoln in a world of one-eyed dragons and drafty castles — hopping across time and space, genre and style, Carter offers up eleven provocative tales that are sure to please his growing number of fans as well as win him new ones.

Ebook:
Amazon | B&N | Smashwords

Trade Paperback:

Praise for the stories:

“The Man Who Made No Mistakes is by far the most ambitious and morally complex story in this issue and arguably in any issue of the magazine since its last resurrection . . . It’s one of the strongest stories I’ve read in months, and I expect to see it on the awards ballots.”–Adventures Fantastic

“Beautiful and haunting.” –SFRevu

“A touching story about loss, and what it means to have someone with whom you want to experience life . . . Riveting.” –Tangent Online

“Carter shares the story of Karvo Portano, a biological-robot hybrid grizzly bear who sings opera. Well at least he used to, until someone pilfered his voice module . . . The story dazzled me. It is a witty, zany trip across the universe with a nice twist at the end and even a message of hope.”–Reading with Mo

“Carter weaves a successful tribute to old-school detective stories with the modern twist of exposing man’s foibles.”–Tangent Online

“I really enjoyed the spin on the classic android becomes a human motif, and this story is a great example of putting a fresh view on old ideas . . . Overall, the witty dialogue was one of the greatest strengths of the story . . . The plot was well stitched together, admirably so. I enjoyed the twists and turns of Duff’s journey, and its profound alieness transported me to this other world . . . a pulpish romp through space. –Nicky Drayden, Diary of a Short Woman

Here’s an attempt at a little out-of-the-box marketing for my book, The Care and Feeding of Rubber Chickens:  A Novel.  In the book, Trevor Livingston’s father owns a rubber chicken factory in Las Vegas (as you can see, it’s a very serious book, right up there with War and Peace) and he wants Trevor’s help writing what he sees as the perfect gag gift — a how-to manual on rubber chickens as pets.  If you buy the print edition of the novel, you’ll see excerpts from the manual at the beginning of each chapter.  For the ebook, however, I’ve done something a little different.  I’ve made the manual available for free (and included the first chapter of the novel at the end of the manual, hoping to entice you to buy it).

You can download the manual for free at Amazon.com, BN.com, or Smashwords.com.  Check it out!  It’s very short, just excerpts, really, but I hope you get a laugh or two out of it.  For those of you without e-readers, Smashwords will let you download the ebook in many different formats — including PDF or HTML, so you can read it on your computer.

* * * * *

In other news . . .

For those of you who are fans of audio books, Flying Raven Press has now published the audio version of A Tale of Two Giants, which you can download from Audible.com or Amazon.com.   And of course it’s available in print and ebook as well.   It’s read by the very talented Alexander Edward Trefethen.  FRP has another half dozen audio books in various stages of production, so stay tuned for more news on this front.

I’m putting the finishing touches on my next major short story collection, The Man Who Made No Mistakes. While I do release individual stories and mini collections in ebook-only format from time to time, this is a definitive collection of what I consider my best stories.  It’s got a handsome cover by Billy Norrby.  It’ll be published in ebook and paperback next month — and audio as well, though it may be down the road a bit.  I’d actually like to narrate this one myself, but I don’t have time at the moment.  Audio production, especially if you’re doing all the back end work yourself, is very time consuming.

In some exciting news, my next book from Simon and Schuster, Wooden Bones, the untold story of Pinnocchio, got a nice boost from the Junior Library Guild, which made it a spring 2012 selection.  While this doesn’t ensure the book will become  a bestseller, it is a major book order which will put the book in thousands of libraries across the country, and because JLG is very selective about the books they buy for their members, it does bode well for the book’s future.  Now all I need is Tim Burton to call and want to turn the book into a movie . . .

The hardcover and the ebook of Wooden Bones, which is due to be published August 7, are already available for pre-order.

On the teaching front — with the day job and the family thrown into the mix, I don’t have a lot of time to teach, but I sure do love paying it forward to other writers when I get a chance — I’ll be co-teaching the Think Like a Publisher workshop again with Dean Wesley Smith July 19-22 in Lincoln City, Oregon.  If you want to know how to run your own publishing company, publishing ebooks, print, audio, and other formats while keeping your costs down and maximizing your profits, this is the workshop for you.  It’s taught at the beautiful WMG Publishing office, which is a treat all by itself.  We’ve taught this workshop four or five times now, I forget how many, and each time we’ve had 25-30 writers from all over the world attend.  I’m not joking when I say that, either.  Not even a majority of the people who attend these workshops are from Oregon.  Contact Dean if you’re interested.  It’s a lot of fun and you’ll learn a ton.

The summer is going to be busy.  What else is new, eh?  Camping trips, a cruise to the Mediterranean with my wife, shuttling the kids to various camps and activities, hikes, working in the yard, bike rides, and of course lots of new words to write — I’m really looking forward to it.

What I’ve Been Reading Lately:

• Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. I’m a late comer to this comic book, but as I work my way through the collected graphic novels, I’m really loving it.  Gaiman seldom if ever lets me down, regardless of the medium.
• Ray Vukcevich’s latest collection, Boarding Instructions.  Reading Ray is like a drug trip without the drug  but just as addictive.  Fantastic stuff!
• Sins of the Fathers by Lawrence Block.  I’ve read other books by Block but hadn’t gotten to the Matthew Scudder books yet.  Figured it was about time, and it only took me a few pages to see why they’re so popular.
• Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson.  An oldie but a goodie, and similar to another time travel book, Time and Again by Jack Finney.  Bid Time Return was the basis for the cult hit movie, Somewhere in Time, which is also one of my favorites.
• Michael Totten’s latest book, Where the West Ends, which I’m reading as an ARC.  A great travel book sprinkled with lots of local color about the Balkans, it’s quite a page turner.  I’ve been reading it a little at a time, savoring it, and I’m sure you will want to do the same.

What I’ve Been Watching Lately:

• The Walking Dead and Downton Abbey. These two series, one about a zombie apocalypse and the other about a rich British family and their servants during the first world war, share almost nothing in common except for their rich characters and fantastic writing in general.

As many of you know, I also write mystery and suspense books under the name Jack Nolte.  Well, after far too long a wait, I finally have exciting news to share:  The next Garrison Gage book is now available — A DESPERATE PLACE FOR DYING. As of this moment, it’s only available as an ebook, but the paperback should be out in early April.  Special thanks to all the people who helped bring this book into being, from my wife, who always serves as my trusted first reader, to the copy editor who helped me weed out as many typos as possible.

I really enjoyed writing this one and hope readers find it fun as well.  I’ve also appreciated all of your wonderful emails.  And if you want to help?  Well, spread the word any way you can!  Facebook, Twitter, random graffiti . . . Oh, and most importantly, if you enjoy the book and have a few minutes, please consider posting a review online at Amazon, B&N, or wherever you bought it.  Even if just the people who emailed me did this, it could really make a difference.  Most readers don’t realize how much those reviews help, and only a tiny, tiny fraction of readers ever do it.

More information is below, including where you can currently buy it.

A DESPERATE PLACE FOR DYING

by Jack Nolte

An old flame.  A killer on the loose.  A crazy cult on the rise.

Nearly a year has passed since Garrison Gage became the reluctant guardian of a troubled teenage girl, but neither fatherhood nor the the intervening months has improved his mood. His right knee is still mostly worthless. He still prefers to drink his bourbon alone. And even with a certain blonde bombshell a persistent part of his life, he still can’t be bothered to buy a cell phone. Or any phone, for that matter. Why? Then somebody might call him.

But grumpy as Gage can be, he still finds that life on the Oregon Coast has settled into a comfortable if not happy routine — until the man who murdered his wife shows up in town.

That’s just for starters. A desperate plea from an old flame — his first love, in fact — soon entangles Gage in a high profile case involving a famous and brazenly outspoken lecturer on evolution and atheism, a crazy fundamentalist cult that uses all means necessary to silence its critics, and a brutal local murder of a far more personal nature.

Before the mystery can be unraveled, Gage’s abilities and beliefs will be put to the ultimate test. And the man who claims he doesn’t need anyone will discover he may just lose everything.

Available in Ebook Format Now:

Amazon | B&N | Smashwords

Paperback:

Coming soon

This is neat, and worth checking out: Edward Kinsella, the illustrator behind the cover of my book, WOODEN BONES, posted a behind-the-scene glimpse of how he came up with the design. He also had some kind words to say about the book — thanks Edward!  I can happily say I feel the same about his illustration, which really captured the spirit of the book. 

We’re still six months from publication, but there’s already a bit of buzz brewing about it, so we’re all hopeful it sells well.  In fact, some of the early sales news has been so encouraging that I’ve already started sketching out a sequel.  Now I just need Tim Burton to call and say he’d like to turn it into a movie and life will be about perfect.

The hardcover is already available for pre-order from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Powells. Pre-order it today to make sure you get a first edition.   At just over $10, it’s quite a bargain.

More about the book can be found on this page.

Also, remember that I have a website dedicated to just my books for younger readers at www.rymadoon.com.  Since I write books that aren’t appropriate for kids, too, I’m trying to make it easier for people to know which ones are targeted at a younger audience.