New right now on Indiana Public Radio, the Pop of Culture interview with me and Jill Blocker about our new books, our publishing venture and our Muncie appearances in July. Thanks to longtime friend Michelle Kinsey for the chance to talk.
As Michelle points out, she and Jill and I all have a newspaper in common: The three of us formerly worked at The Star Press in Muncie, Indiana.
The authors of Constellate Creatives and Constellate Publishing are going to be out and about this summer, talking about our books, our publishing journey and our quest to find new authors to bring to the reading public.
Here are some of our events:
Okay, I should just acknowledge that when you’ve published a book, the promotional push for it is never over.
But it feels like we’ve reached something of a milestone as my new crime novel SEVEN ANGELS is published tomorrow, June 1, 2026, by Constellate Publishing, a publishing imprint of Constellate Creatives, a company founded by my longtime friend Jill Blocker and for which I do some editing and other work.
By way of noting that promoting a book is never ending, I’ll say that I’ll be darkening your doorstep plenty even after the book is published.
A few quick words on how I got here:
I wrote a few crime novels back in the early 2000s that weren’t completely baked and I didn’t pursue publishing them. A few years later, sometime before 2010, I outlined a book called SEVEN ANGELS, a crime story about a fictionalized version of the little town in Tennessee where my parents grew up.
(I was still about 14 years from being a Tennessee resident myself, but I’d been down here plenty of times, visiting family.)
After I outlined SEVEN ANGELS, I set it aside. I didn’t write a book-length project again until my first true crime book, co-authored with Douglas Walker, was published in 2016. Three more true crime books followed. It turns out that writing and co-writing and editing those books was essential for me in figuring out how to write a book-length manuscript. I’m a plotter and outliner, and turning out an outline – one paragraph per chapter, outline length in total 15 or 16 pages or more – is a step I can’t imagine skipping.
In 2019, I took a buyout from my newspaper job and finally felt I had time and focus to write novels. In a few years, I’d written SEVEN ANGELS, GHOST SHOW and THAT OCTOBER. The latter was the first to be published (self-published) in 2025.
I’d gone back to SEVEN ANGELS almost every year since 2019, fleshing it out with new characters and I hopefully made it better.
The blurbs and comments and reviews have been laudatory and I appreciate it.
For a few months now, I’ve been actively compiling ideas for a new novel, including using some elements from an aborted novel from 2025. (I’ve mined those early 2000s books for a number of ideas and characters, and I’ve done the same with GHOST SHOW, so nothing ever entirely goes to waste.)
So here I am with a promise: I’ll be working on the next novel, along with articles and short stories.
And I’ll be promoting it all, so forewarned is forearmed.
Less than a month until my second crime novel, SEVEN ANGELS, is out.
A young woman returns to her small Tennessee hometown to help run the family funeral business after her father’s death and discovers Seven Angels has changed for the worse: prescription drug abuse is rampant, murders go unsolved, the sheriff is corrupt, white supremacists rule and a human trafficker from Russia controls the town.
Gloria Shepherd grew up in Seven Angels and is shocked by the changes. She gets drafted into replacing her ailing mentor as the county coroner. The duties put her in deadly conflict with the sheriff and the trafficker, who pursues a Ukrainian girl.
Gloria assembles a close group of trusted friends – including an overlooked sheriff’s deputy, a fearless state investigator and an old mountain woman – to fight the forces of crime and corruption and rescue the missing girl.
You can pre-order the softcover anywhere now. Ebook to come late summer/early fall.
When my friend Jill Blocker and I started talking about publishing my crime novel SEVEN ANGELS through the Constellate Publishing imprint, I knew how I wanted the cover to look:
Like the covers of novels by Robert B. Parker, a grandmaster of crime and mystery writing and one of my greatest influences.
I would never compare myself favorably to Parker, whose books about Spenser and Hawk, Sunny Randall, Jesse Stone and other heroes protecting people and confronting crime are still my favorite novels. (Perhaps tied with Dennie Lehane’s Patrick and Angie books.)
But I was thinking about Parker when I wrote SEVEN ANGELS in 2019. Like Parker’s protagonists at times, Gloria Shepherd isn’t so much a detective as a bulldozer. I always thrilled at Spenser and his inclination to push the bad guys until they crack and make a mistake or overplay their hand.
Part of what appealed to me about Parker’s characters’ direct approach is that it was reflected in the best covers of his books: Spare and vivid imagery that matched the spare and relentless push to resolution of Parker’s characters.
There’s a scene in SEVEN ANGELS when Gloria, the coroner of Crockett County, Tennessee, pushes into the private office of a local corrupt businessman and confronts him and the Russian trafficker he’s working with. I was channeling Spenser the day I wrote that, for sure. Not sure if I was successful, but that’s what I was aiming for.
I told Jill what I wanted and she designed a cover that I loved immediately. This cover above will be modified some and authors’ blurbs will be added before SEVEN ANGELS is published this spring.
I can’t match Parker at his peak. Never will. But I can pay tribute to him.
Curious about Constellate Publishing, our company that’ll publish SEVEN ANGELS?
I won’t pretend to sum up the weird state of small publishing here. If you’re been following the world of indie and small publishing, you know that 2025 has seen some small imprints go out of business – in some cases leaving authors unpaid – and others purport to try to fill that void.
I’m not sure that Constellate Creatives’ publishing arm, Constellate Publishing, the enterprise I’m affiliated with, will fill that void. For one thing, we can’t be all things to all people.
But as we started Constellate’s venture into editing – developmental editing and copy editing — and publishing and marketing a few months ago, it became obvious that somebody needed to be around to step in and catch a few worthy projects. Or maybe juggle chainsaws.
It’s making for a 2026 I’m really excited about. Constellate Publishing will publish my novel SEVEN ANGELS but there’s a diverse lineup of books on tap for the first two quarters of 2026, including a book of mindful self-help, a book of poetry, my novel and two by Jill Blocker, a reissue of her WHAT WAS BEAUTIFUL AND GOOD and her new novel, HAPPILY AFTER EVER. The latter is what’s increasingly termed a “new adult” book and will appeal to readers post-YA in their reading interests.
I’m proud to have noticed that every book besides mine is written by a woman and even mine has a cast of woman as protagonists.
And note the slide I’ve posted above: Constellate Creatives is offering editing, publishing and marketing services, or some combination of those, and at socially-responsible fees based on the regional wage in each writer’s local economy.
Some of us love to edit copy and help with developing your work. Others (raises hand) love marketing. Yes, I’m weird like that. We can’t promise that PR about your book will land on large market-share sites like KTLA, where our news release announcing our slate for the first half of 2026, was picked up. But we’ll be pitching your work and you won’t have to deal with the dreaded marketing.
There’s a button somewhere on the CC site that will lead you to a free consultation. We might be able to answer some questions for you.
I’ve been a writer since high school and a reporter most of my life. As of today, I’ve got a new title: head of Content and Publishing at Constellate Publishing, part of Constellate Creatives.
The title is fun, but what I’ll be doing is what’s important: Helping other writers work toward their goals of writing, completing their book and publishing their work and helping them reach readers.
There’s a button on the CC site that’ll lead to a free consultation.
If writing is your dream, we can help make that dream a reality.
I love a good mystery. Obviously, it’s what I write, at least a lot of the time. So as Constellate Creatives is putting together my novel SEVEN ANGELS for 2026 release, I’ve put titles to the novel’s 69 chapters.
Here are some. And yes, I deliberately tried to invoke the “say what now?” feeling of the cryptic episode titles of shows like STRANGER THINGS.
Looking forward to June 2026 publication of SEVEN ANGELS.
It’s a work in progress, but aren’t we all?
Y’all know by now, if you care to, that I’m working with my friends at Constellate Creatives. We’ll be helping writers with editing (both developmental and copy editing) book design, cover design, marketing and publicity for their books.
The boss at CC came up with the CP logo above, which stands for Constellate Publishing.
We’ve got a bunch of stuff in the works and best of all we’ve got a few books in the pipeline for 2026, when we really gear up. They’re a diverse lot, too.
Here’s a link if you want to know more about Constellate Creatives. There’s a button on the site for more info (services with a foundation of socially responsible pricing based on regional wage numbers), including free consultation.
And I’ll tell you more over the next few weeks.
I’ll never forget seeing my novel THAT OCTOBER in the bookstore at Bouchercon, the world mystery convention, in New Orleans this summer. I geeked out and thanked the woman from Garden District Book Shop, which ran book sales for the NOLA Bcon, several times over the course of the conference.
I’ve been writing since I was in high school and over the decades in the newspaper business I won more than 30 first-place journalism awards, both state and national. I’m the co-author of four best-selling, award-winning true crime books.
But there was no experience quite like seeing THAT OCTOBER among books from other authors, available to anyone. (It’s all over online booksellers too, but again – having a novel that someone can pick up is an incredible experience.)
That’s a big reason I’m working with my longtime friends at Constellate Creatives to help other writers with developmental editing, copy editing, cover design, interior design, marketing and publicity including social media.
Maybe some of this perception was all in my head, but at the time of my first Bouchercon, in Nashville in 2024, I didn’t have a book in print and it felt very different to be in NOLA in 2025 with a book that people could literally pick up and purchase.
Constellate wants to help you with a goal of getting your book in readers’ hands.
There’s a button you can smash – as the young people say – on the site to ask about a free consultation.
We’re writers just like you. We’ve got some ideas.
keithroysdon 