Blood Moon, out now!

Yes, finally, Blood Moon, the sequel to my bestselling Amazon thriller Huntress Moon is out now!

--  Book II of the Huntress/FBI Thrillers --

Blood Moon

Twenty-five years have passed since a savage killer terrorized California, massacring three ordinary families before disappearing without a trace.

The haunted child who was the only surviving victim of his rampage is now wanted by the FBI  for brutal crimes of her own, and Special Agent Matthew Roarke is on an interstate manhunt for her, despite his conflicted sympathies for her history and motives.

But when his search for her unearths evidence of new family slayings, the dangerous woman Roarke seeks - and wants - may be his only hope of preventing another bloodbath.

Cover by Brandi Doane

The book launched April 25, which is a full moon, the Wind Moon.  And anyone who has read Huntress Moon will understand why I would want to do that!

And of course, the launch of the book means I'm going to be doing some posts about e publishing.

Last July, after I'd finished Huntress Moon, I made the decision not to pursue a traditional publishing deal for it.  Instead I published it directly to Amazon and chronicled my promotional giveaway experience here on this blog, for everyone who had been asking me to talk about e publishing.  (Links to those posts at the bottom of this blog.)

And I'm setting out again to chronicle my release of Blood Moon here, so there's some definitive version and so I can keep track myself of everything I've done, for next time.

The e publishing scene continues to be just as turbulent as the traditional publishing scene. I was at Left Coast Crime last month, and at the L.A. Times Festival of Books yesterday, and it continues to surprise me that so many authors I know, both traditionally published and aspiring,  are still wary of e publishing, despite the success of authors like Blake Crouch, Brett Battles, Rob Gregory Browne, CJ Lyons, Elle Lothlorien, Zoe Sharp, Ann Voss Peterson, JD Rhoades, Scott Nicholson, Diane Chamberlain, Sarah Shaber and of course Joe Konrath, whose Newbie's Guide to Publishing is a must-read, as are his thrillers.

Personally I could not be more happy with my own decision to e publish Huntress Moon.  The book hit the top of all Amazon's Mystery, Thriller and Police Procedural lists, made me twice any traditional advance I'd ever gotten in just two months of publication, and continues to sell steadily. It was on Suspense Magazine's list of Best Books of 2012.

I am also thrilled to announce that the book was just nominated for the International Thriller Writers' Thriller Award, in the brand-new category of Best E Book Original Novel.

Huntress Moon 

Cover by BHB  (i.e. the fabulous Robert Gregory Browne!)



Money, recognition, thousands of new readers... yeah, I'd say I made the right move.

Of course, the landscape has changed again, as it does pretty much week by week. I don't know if the things I did to promote Huntress will work as well with Blood Moon.  Stay tuned to find out!  But a launch is just a launch... while hitting big is the goal, I also know I have so many new readers from Huntress Moon I'm sure that Blood Moon will find the audience it needs to find.  (And meanwhile, I'm on to Book 3...)

Now that I have several of my traditionally published backlist titles up as e books and the sales numbers continue to coming in, it's clear to me that e publishing continues to be the right choice for me.

How do I know this?  Well, one of the amazing things about e publishing, for those of us who are used to the cryptic and essentially useless sales reports that we get quarterly - maybe - from our traditional publishers - is that now we can see exactly how many copies of each book we're selling and exactly how much money we're making per month.  This is a vastly easier way to ensure that you're making a real living, and it takes huge amounts of anxiety out of the process.  Plus you get paid every month, instead of when your publisher gets around to it, which is a vastly easier way to keep up with the bills, if you see what I'm saying.

E publishing has made making a practical living a much more realistic proposition for authors who are not (yet) bestsellers in traditional publishing. I don't know how long that will realistically last, whether it will get better or worse, but by now, for now, it's unignorable.

But based on the numbers I've compiled with my other books,  I will sell thousands, and very quickly.

I have also become addicted to the speed of release that's possible with e publishing.

If I went through traditional channels, Blood Moon wouldn't even hit the shelves until - best case scenario - a year and a half from now.  How can I possibly think of giving up the tens of thousands of readers I will be able to reach with this book starting NOW?

I want the book out, and I want to be on to Book 3.  I'm already on to Book 3.  I want to be able to release it by the end of this year. Thanks to e publishing, that's all completely possible.

I'll keep you posted on everything.

Have a great week!

- Alex

---------------------------------------

Related marketing posts:

The Madness of Marketing
Letting it Ride (Kindle Select promotion)
Bestseller lists and Tag lists
Liking, Sharing and Tagging 
My e publishing decision 
To Nook or Not to Nook? 
Giving it Away (Kindle Select promotion)

Thriller Award nomination for Huntress Moon!

I am, yes, thrilled, to learn that Huntress Moon has been nominated for an ITW Thriller Award for Best Original E Book.  So many friends on this list!  Huge congratulations to everyone...

2013 Thriller Awards Nominees

ITW is proud to announce the finalists for the 2013 Thriller Awards!

BEST HARDCOVER NOVEL

Sean Chercover – THE TRINITY GAME (Thomas & Mercer)
Brian Freeman – SPILLED BLOOD (SilverOak)
Lisa Gardner – CATCH ME (Dutton Books)
Gregg Hurwitz – THE SURVIVOR (St. Martin’s Press)
William Landay – DEFENDING JACOB (Delacorte Press)

BEST FIRST NOVEL

Daniel Friedman – DON’T EVER GET OLD (Minotaur Books)
Owen Laukkanen – THE PROFESSIONALS (Putnam Adult)
Chris Pavone – THE EXPATS (Crown)
Matthew Quirk – THE 500 (Reagan Arthur Books)
Michael Sears – BLACK FRIDAYS (Putnam Adult)

BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL NOVEL

Blake Crouch – PINES (Thomas & Mercer)
Sean Doolittle – LAKE COUNTRY (Bantam)
Alison Gaylin – AND SHE WAS (Harper)
Alex Marwood – THE WICKED GIRLS (Penguin Books)
Michael W. Sherer – NIGHT BLIND (Thomas & Mercer)

BEST SHORT STORY

David Edgerley Gates – “The Devil to Pay” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine)
Clark Howard – “The Street Ends at the Cemetery” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine)
Dennis Lehane – “The Consumers” (Mulholland Books)
Gordon McEachern – “The History Lesson” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine)
John Rector – “Lost Things” (Thomas & Mercer)

BEST YOUNG ADULT NOVEL

Michelle Gagnon – DON’T TURN AROUND (HarperCollins)
Andrew Klavan – IF WE SURVIVE (Thomas Nelson)
Dan Krokos – FALSE MEMORY (Hyperion Books CH)
Niall Leonard – CRUSHER (Delacorte Books for Young Readers)
William Richter – DARK EYES (Razorbill)

BEST E-BOOK ORIGINAL NOVEL

Jon Land – PANDORA’S TEMPLE (Open Road E-riginal)
CJ Lyons – BLIND FAITH (CJ Lyons)
Alexandra Sokoloff – HUNTRESS MOON (Alexandra Sokoloff)
Allen Wyler – DEAD END DEAL (Astor + Blue Editions)
Allen Wyler – DEAD WRONG (Astor + Blue Editions)

Congratulations to all the finalists!  The 2013 Thriller Award Winners will be announced at ThrillerFest VIII, July 13, 2013, at the Grand Hyatt (New York City).

Love is Murder - now out in paperback!

The International Thriller Writers' romantic suspense anthology Thriller 3: Love is Murder is out in paperback this week.

Edited by Sandra Brown and Allison Brennan, featuring stories by Lee Child, Heather Graham,  Sherrilyn Kenyon, and a whole lot of other great authors.  And me.

As you can see from that lineup, it’s going to be a bit more heavy on the suspense than on the romance!

LIM on Amazon

LIM on B&N

Find an independent bookstore near you

I had no premise at all in mind when I was asked to do a story for Love is Murder. I said yes because - well, seriously! It's not like I could turn this opportunity down - with that lineup of writers, I was going to do whatever it took.  But when I actually had to sit down and write something, I was in a very difficult place emotionally and I wasn’t feeling very romantic. Suspense I can do in my sleep, but love wasn’t the first thing on my mind. So I asked myself what would be a romantic escape, the kind of fantasy setting that I think really helps deliver the experience of romantic suspense? And the first thing that came to mind was my first trip to the Bahamas. We Left Coasters don’t generally do the Bahamas – we tend to go to the far closer paradise of Hawaii if we’re in the mood for an island, so the first time I was in those other islands it was truly an overwhelming experience.

I knew I could do the sensuality of that setting justice, and then I decided not to fight the emotional place that I was in, but rather use the experience of heartache and devastation as a jumping off point for  the story. And once I’d put a wounded character into that lush setting, everything started coming alive – it’s just the magic of the process. I also took a huge hit of inspiration from the image of the Tarot Queen  of Cups – that card was a touchstone for the main character, the Macguffin, and the whole story.

I layered water imagery and the theme of Atlantis and precious objects and art throughout, to make a kind of dreamlike  modern fairy tale (which I won't talk too much about because it's too easy to give away a short.).  

People often ask me to blog about how to write a short story. I find the question difficult because I very rarely write short stories. For me it’s every bit as hard to come up with a great idea for a short story as it is for a novel, so my feeling has always been: why not push through and  MAKE it a novel (or script) which will serve as an income stream instead of just a fun advertisement for your books that ARE income-producing?

That may sound pretty crassly commercial, but writers have to be practical if we want to eat.

(And I don't think that it's a coincidence that the art of the short was at its zenith back when short story authors were paid an actual living wage for their efforts. An older author friend told me what she was paid for a short story in the 60's and OH MY GOD. Seriously.)

But maybe I’m just a long-form writer by nature. I wrote my first short story, The Edge of Seventeen, only because I was asked to contribute to an anthology I thought was a really cool idea – stories about marginalized superheroes (people of color, women), and I thought I could probably manage a dark story about an alienated high-school girl who has to become a heroine in horrific circumstances. She’s dreaming about a terrible massacre at her school, and becomes convinced that she can stop the shooting with the help of a popular boy, her secret crush, who is having the same dream. I wrote it, loved it, and it went on to win a Thriller Award for Best Short Fiction. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the characters and the situations and it just kept nagging me that there was a lot more to it, and last year I finally just gave in to that pull and adapted the story as a VERY dark YA thriller, The Space Between.

I was right – there was a whole hell of a lot more to it, including quantum physics and parallel universes, and I’m actually now going to have to continue the whole thing as a trilogy.

And now that I’ve written my dreamlike Bahamian cat-and-mouse encounter In Atlantis for the Love is Murder anthology, I’m having the same thing happen – I can’t stop thinking about the characters and what happens for them next, and I know I’m going to end up expanding the story into a novel which may actually turn into a series.

So my very infrequent attempts at short stories seem to turn out to be springboards for future novels.

Yet even though I don’t have much experience writing them myself, I can look at stories analytically and come to conclusions that may be helpful (writers, you know my prescription for everything by now – MAKE A LIST of ten of your favorites and see what the storytellers are doing and how they do it.)

I don’t read many short stories these days but I grew up compulsively reading Alfred Hitchcock Presents anthologies, and actively sought out stories by my favorite authors: Shirley Jackson, Daphne Du Maurier,  Ray Bradbury, Poe of course, and Stephen King.

The ones that spring to mind instantly are the horrific "They Bite", by none other than Anthony Boucher, for whom the unpronounceable Bouchercon is named;"The Yellow Wallpaper" - even more horrific in a feminist kind of way, by Charlotte Perkins Gilmore; "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson, to which The Hunger Games owes, well, just about everything. "The Birds" and any number of shorts by Daphne DuMaurier, she is just electrifying. Just about everything in Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. And Stephen King's "The Mist", really more of a short novel, but we've already established that I like long. In fact, every single one of my list (except, I think, The Lottery) are shorts that have been adapted into full-length movies, so it's pretty clear what my taste is. 

I've noticed that ones that I love not only have enough going on to make a whole full length novel - they also have that great high concept premise, which usually includes a huge twist.  I really think that the essence of a short story is the twist, and once you have that, you can set up the story with a basic three-act structure: You have someone who wants something very badly (The Act I setup) who is having trouble getting it (The Act II complications) and eventually DOESN’T get what they think and say want, but they get what they really need instead. (Which creates the Act III twist.)

Because of the restriction of length, often all a short story really does is take a premise and set it up (Set Up is generally just Act I of a novel or film) and pretty much cuts directly to the chase: the final battle and TWIST. The Edge of Seventeen was basically that set up and then the twist. As a matter of fact, when I actually sat down to write the first draft of the novel, I found I used most of the story almost directly as written as the first act!

So with a short story, you have a beginning and an end, but not much of the vast middle section that comprises a full-length novel or film.

I think that's why shorts are so seductive (and arguably good practice) to more beginning writers.  It's pretty easy to write a first act.  It's the middle that's hard. (I may just have gotten myself in a world of trouble, we'll see!)

I did structure In Atlantis in three acts (I'd actually say that ALL stories are three acts, that's what makes them stories), but I'm very aware that the first two acts of the short would be no more than a first act in a full length novel, and that the third act of the short would still be the third act of a novel - with many more twists and action, of course.

But I'm perfectly aware that I may just be looking at the structure of a short that way because it allows me to fit the longer-form ideas that I have into the format of a short.

Another thing I think a short has to deliver - every bit as much as a full-length novel does - is the genre EXPERIENCE (or maybe you've noticed  I'm just a little obsessed with this aspect of writing, these days).

So do you read a lot of shorts? Do you write them?  How do you write them?  Is my "Act I set up, then cut to the Act III chase" resonating with you (as a reader OR a writer) or do you find yourself doing something completely different?

- Alex

LIM on Amazon

LIM on B&N

Find an independent bookstore near you