I’m not a stranger to my work being made available in different formats. Most – maybe all? – of my co-authored true crime books are available in e-book formats and “The Westside Park Murders” is available in an audiobook format from Audible and other platforms.
But there’s something neat about the e-book format of THAT OCTOBER, my 1984-set high school crime novel.
The book has been out in paperback since June 1 in an edition that shows off my friend and editor Jill Blocker’s beautiful interior design and my friend and artist Sara McKinley’s gorgeous covers. I’ve been really gratified by how good the response has been.
So last week I uploaded THAT OCTOBER to Kindle Direct Publishing and it drops, as the cool people say, on September 1.
The e-book is available for preorder now and I really appreciate the response so far.
I went viral on social media – two different social media, with two different posts – over the Fourth of July weekend.
(This is not a pat myself on the back post. I think there’s something interesting that’s happened here, beyond the viral-ness.)
The first post that went viral is the one above. On Saturday, I was in the Barnes & Noble bookstore near me and took a picture of the first table inside the door. If you can’t tell from the picture, it’s a display marked “Dystopian Vibes” and offers books including “1984,” “Animal Farm” and the works of Margaret Atwood and Octavia E. Butler.
I thought I’d snap a picture and post it and thank Barnes & Noble for putting these books out there so prominently. Yes, that placement encourages sales. Yes, it’s ultimately a big corporation trying to move copies of books. But it’s something.
I thought the post might get some traffic, but I never get a lot of engagement, even with 3,000 Bluesky followers.
By Sunday afternoon, this was the response:
380 accounts reposted my post, which got 2,700 likes.
This is a multiple of thousands the reaction I was expecting. I had to mute notifications on the post.
That wasn’t all, though.
I saw a bitterly amusing meme on a friend’s Facebook account – there was no indication on the account who originally posted it – and I posted it on various social media, including Instagram, which shares posts to the social media app Threads (which I don’t use much).
Here’s the post, and the reaction:
Believe me when I tell you, I usually don’t get 600 likes on Threads, a social media I barely use.
So what’s the upshot to all this, besides a little more engagement and traffic to the companies that own Bluesky and Threads, the latter the detested Meta? (The even more detested Twitter turned up with very little notice of either post, by the way.)
The upshot, it seems to me, is that there’s a lot of interest and engagement in posts about our currently untenable, dangerous and yes, dystopian path.
That’s a good thing, that people are engaging in posts critical or even acknowledging the path this country is on.
And, as a bonus, the Bluesky post shows a ton of engagement about books that forecast, define and address our society.
There’s nothing more encouraging than the realization that people are engaging with literature that calls to light our current peril.
So maybe a small percentage of the frogs in this slowly boiling pot of water are aware they’re in a slowly boiling pot of water. I hope.
I promise I won’t give you a daily countdown, but how could I resist a nice round period of time like one month?
On June 1, my 1984-set crime novel THAT OCTOBER will be available. My editor Jill Blocker and artist Sara McKinley and I have really reached the finish line in this self-publishing journey – don’t all journeys have finish lines? – and all that remains now it to get the word out.
The paperback is available for pre-order on various sites now. Before June 1, we should have the electronic version available also.
I’m doing a couple of talks back in my hometown of Muncie, Indiana – inspiration for the city of Middletown, where THAT OCTOBER takes place – in June. although I don’t expect that to be of interest to many of you unless you’re in the Muncie area or somewhere in the Midwest with a lot of time on your hands.
In the next month, I’ll tell you a little about THAT OCTOBER and the world when it takes place: A time when high school students should have been spending all their time thinking about dates, football, seeing the biggest movies – “The Terminator” was new in October 1984, and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” would come out within a couple of weeks – MTV and Halloween.
Instead, the six high school friends in THAT OCTOBER are thinking about the murder of one of their classmates and the taking of another.
And they don’t understand why the adults in town seem unconcerned or, at best, evasive when the friends urge them to DO SOMETHING to solve their friend David’s murder and bring Lee Ann home.
Jackie and Michael, new siblings in a blended family, and their friends Sammi, Toni, Elmer and William push forward with their own investigation, which follows a trail rooted half-way around the world, in a time before any of them were born.
I’ll share a bit more as we move forward. I hope you come along for the ride.
Here’s a little something for my fellow geeks out there: The end credits of the 1984 film “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.”
The movie, starring Peter Weller, Jeff Goldblum and Ellen Barkin, came out in the summer of 1984 and was met with a collective “Huh?”
The story of Buckaroo, a surgeon/musician/adventurer, and his posse was a throwback to pulp stories featuring superheroes like Doc Savage.
But the movie left a lot of people cold. It did play like a long inside joke, admittedly, but it was an inside joke that I appreciated.
I saw this at the (now gone) Northwest Plaza Cinema in Muncie. It was the summer of “Ghostbusters,” “Beverly Hills Cop,” “Star Trek III” and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” and Buckaroo and the Hong Kong Cavaliers got lost at the box office.
Overlooked as it was, there’s been talk of a sequel and of a TV series, and Buckaroo’s HQ, the Banzai Institute, has a Facebook page.
And the legend lives on in the film’s cult status.
keithroysdon 