Greg McKenzie Mysteries Boxed Set

Readers unfamiliar with the Greg McKenzie mystery series can get a jump start with the first four books now available for the Kindle in a boxed set. With ebooks, of course, it's a virtual box. The books—Secret of the Scroll, Designed to Kill, Deadly Illusions, and The Marathon Murders—are $2.99 each for the Kindle, but the four-book set is only $7.99, a one-third savings. You'll find it HERE.

The set follows the adventures of Greg and Jill McKenzie from their fateful trip to the Holy Land, through a trek about Perdido Key and the Gulf coast in search of a murderer, an agonizing venture around Nashville involving a missing client and an assassinated Washington bigwig, and a puzzling 90-year-old cold case that leads to more murders.

A retired Air Force Office of Special Investigations special agent in charge, Greg puts his experience to work in the first two books. By the end of book two, it is apparent that Jill possesses her own talents in the investigative field. After that, it's the adventures of a partnership known as McKenzie Investigations.

Those who finish the boxed set have more to read, namely book five with the title A Sporting Murder. This episode follows Greg and Jill on a tantalizing case that finds them narrowly escaping death in an explosion only to come face-to-face with an armed murderer on Christmas Day.

If you've finished the exploits of the McKenzies, you'll find more exciting reading in the two Sid Chance mysteries. And then there is the global sweep of action in the trilogy of Post Cold War political thrillers featuring former disgraced FBI Agent Burke Hill and a cast of unique characters that will transport you from one side of the world to the other.

You'll find them all HERE at my author page on Amazon.

Following a Flair for Creation

I confess I'm not a prolific blog reader, but I enjoy learning how other authors feel about their writing. What it usually boils down to is they see placing words on paper (or a computer screen) as part of their makeup. They have to write. My take on it may be basically the same, but I see it in a little different light.

I look at writing as one way to indulge a talent for creation. Creative types love to produce something out of nothing, to follow the old Star Trek manta of going where no man has gone before. I've always enjoyed the creative process. Back in the sixties I put together all the parts to create Nashville's first slick paper monthly magazine. I followed that with a venture into the advertising world, joining the creative department of Nashville's largest agency.

During the final segment of my life in the business world, I managed a statewide trade association of more than 4,000 members. One of the most fun parts of the job was to create annual conventions with openings that would excite the delegates. I put on a variety of productions using video and music, including one with a young female news reporter staging a TV newscast.

When I set up shop in my home office after retirement, I turned to novel writing as a natural outlet for my creative penchant. The first seven manuscripts I completed got varied receptions from a string of agents, none resulting in publication, but I kept at it because I enjoyed creating the tales of adventure. I finally got a contract and began to produce stories that wound up on the printed page. And as the publishing world changed, they began to appear in the electronic arena.

The first three manuscripts were a trilogy of political thrillers written twenty years ago. I've been working to revise them more in today's style, meaning tighter and somewhat less wordy. The first volume, Beware the Jabberwock, is now on Amazon, and book two, The Poksu Conspiracy, will be there by the end of this month. The new cover is shown at right, featuring South Korea's National Treasure No. 1, the Great South Gate (Namdaemun), above the hangul characters for poksu, meaning "vengeance."

I consider myself primarily a storyteller. I have no desire to write books with messages intended to sway readers' minds in some direction. I keep writing because I enjoy creating stories that interest me and hopefully will interest a few of those millions of novel readers out there. If you are one of them, tell your friends.

The Bone Polisher Out as Ebook

Tim Hallinan, creator of the fabulously successful Bangkok mystery series featuring travel writer Poke Rafferty, has brought back the final novel in his previous series as an ebook available for the Kindle at Amazon.com.The title is The Bone Polisher, originally published by Dutton in 1996. Here's how the blurb puts it:

2011 Edgar and Macavity nominee Timothy Hallinan's sixth and final novel featuring erudite Los Angeles private eye Simeon Grist takes place in the West Hollywood of 1995, where the community is shaken by the brutal killing of an older man who was widely loved for his generosity and kindness. In a time when the police were largely indifferent to crimes against gay people, Simeon is hired to catch the murderer—and finds himself up against the most dangerous adversary of his career, a man who kills his victims one once, but twice: once physically and once in spirit. The story's climax takes place at a memorable Halloween-themed wake, but there's a big plot twist yet to come.

Booklist had this to say about it:

"Simeon Grist is a private detective with a problem: he is beginning to fear the bad guys . . . Hallinan's sixth Simeon Grist novel is putatively about a serial killer who is preying on the gay community of West Hollywood, but it is also a meditation on life, on commitment, on the meaning of age in a youth-obsessed and media-saturated culture. Hallinan captures the littlest human idiosyncrasies, the most mundane familial interactions, and infuses them with a depth of meaning not usually found in the crime genre. He even manages to do so with a sly grin and a loopy sense of humor. Read his latest as a straightforward detective novel, or read it as a slightly off-kilter philosophical tome, but do yourself a favor and read it!"

Mostly Murder gave it this equally glowing, though more succinct review

“Creepy . . . Screamingly funny . . . A snappy thriller . . . The only question that remains unanswered is whether success will spoil Timothy Hallinan."

Tim says it didn't sell enough copies to do that. But here's the kicker: you can get the ebook free on March 10, 11 and 12!

Do yourself as favor. Get it.

Cheap Sells Better

If you sell your ebook for $1.99, will the world of readers beat a path to your door? I've decided to find out. I reduced the price of The Surest Poison on Smashwords to the magic number. If you're not familiar with Smashwords, it's a website where  you can buy ebooks in various formats. They include .mobi for the Kindle, LRF for the Sony Reader, PDB for Palm reading devices, Epub for Stanza readers and others, HTML and JavaScript for online reading, PDF and RTF for downloads to computers.

You may be familiar with Joe Konrath, the author of the Jack Daniel mystery series, featuring a Chicago female cop. Joe is a promoter par excellence. He has a blog where he talks about book promotion. He contends that with books "cheap sells better." He's done a fabulous job selling his books for the Kindle on Amazon. Some people contend that his success results from the way he has promoted his name. He counters with this:

"When Grand Central released AFRAID as an ebook, they priced it at $1.99 for the first month. Keep in mind that Afraid was written by my pen name, Jack Kilborn, who had no built in fan base. In one month, Afraid sold 10,253 ebooks. Then, in May, they raised the price. Since then, it has sold only 3720 copies. If this were a name-recognition thing, the ebook would have continued to sell well. After all, the bestseller lists are filled with high-priced ebooks by name authors."

In another blog, Joe says his publisher sells about as many ebooks as print books, although statistically ebook sales currently represent only about 10 percent of total book sales. He clearly sees electronic publishing as the wave of the future. You can check out some of his thoughts at this link

His newest book on the blogsite is The Newbie's Guide to Publishing, which sells for for the Kindle at $2.99. He bills it as "over 360,000 words of advice." According to Joe, the 1100-page book is too large for a print copy. And if you don't want to spend the $2.99 for your very own ebook, you can download it to your computer for free at Joe's website.

Let's forget Joe for a moment. This is my little experiment with cut-rate bookselling. At this LINK  you can buy The Surest Poison for only $1.99. And HERE is the Smashwords page for the book, where you can read up to 30 percent for free. (If you read that much, you surely won't be able to wait to find out how it ends.) Tell all your friends and neighbors. This is scientific research, folks. Let's see what the month of May will bring. Heck, I may dance around the Maypole tomorrow if things look good.

With book sales slowing, look for new outlets

There’s been quite a bit of talk lately in the newspapers, on TV, and across the web about the deteriorating state of the publishing industry. Publishers are cutting staffs and accepting fewer manuscripts, booksellers are selling less, many are folding their tents. A Waldenbooks in the mall where I walk is closing in a week or two.

Sounds bleak for writers, doesn’t it? But there are still lots of mystery fans out there, buying books and reading them. And one area that continues to buck the trend is the ebook market.

I now have all four of my Greg McKenzie mysteries in the Kindle Store, where they can be downloaded for reading with Amazon.com’s Kindle device. I haven’t done any promotion yet to encourage purchases, but I sold 30 books last year.

I priced the Kindle versions at $8.94. Amazon sells them for $7.15. I get $3.13 per sale. I’m obviously not getting rich with it, but the $93.90 I made last year buys a lot of postage stamps.

I don’t have my mysteries with any of the ebook publishers, but I am looking into that as another alternative. I’ve heard Fictionwise is one of the top ebook publishers, but they want you to have at least ten titles before they will take you on.

Meanwhile, I’m looking to ways to promote sales of the Kindle version. If you have come across any good schemes to do the job, I’d like to hear from you. I’ll pass along via these pages whatever I find.

These days an author must use every available resource to get his or her book out there. If you own the ebook rights, exploit them.