Tag Archives: publishing

Social media and selling books

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You think that guy looks insufferable there, wait until a few more weeks pass. You’ll be sick to death of him.

My 1984-set crime novel THAT OCTOBER publishes June 1. It’s available now for pre-order on the usual bookselling sites, although I encourage you to purchase it through the least harmful to society one.

I hope you like the book. The authors who were kind enough to read it and give me some comments that I could blurb seemed to like it, citing the 1980s nostalgia content and the twists and turns of the plot.

Although THAT OCTOBER is self-published, there’s nothing especially straightforward about marketing a book these days. Unless you’re a huge author, you have to flog your book to potential readers. That’s usually done through social media.

There are a lot of authors who innovate in how they market their books. Some include odd tidbits they came across while researching and writing their book, and I’ll probably do some of that. Some authors post recipes true to the time period or story. Others, notably Beau Johnson, make and post creative videos to publicize their work. Beau’s videos are hilarious and effectively promote his books, including LIKE MINDED INDIVIDUALS, which continues Beau’s multi-book storyline of anti-heroes who punish the worst criminals on Earth.

Since social media is important to promoting our books, it’s especially tricky to do so in a manner that doesn’t promote some of the worst humans around, including the owners of the former twitter and Facebook and related platforms.

I don’t spend a lot of time on the former twitter anymore, mostly just to check on friends who still post there as opposed to a slightly more “clean hands” site like BlueSky. For the past week, I’ve tried to observe a week-long boycott of Facebook-related platforms, breaking that only to note a rare earthquake in East Tennessee and a Mother’s Day post about my mom, who left us nearly 20 years ago.

But I’ll continue to post on my author page on Facebook to publicize my writing. It’s not a decision I’m entirely comfortable with, but Facebook is still a place where people go, and authors are expected to have a social media presence there.

Anyway, god go with you in the next few weeks (months? years?) as you see me posting here and on social media to promote THAT OCTOBER. I hope you tolerate me and I hope you like the book.

Some honesty for you: Self-publishing my novel THAT OCTOBER and rethinking short story writing

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A quick update to start things off: My editor and I pulled the trigger on THAT OCTOBER the other day, uploading the book for self-publishing. What’s next? An electronic proof, then a print proof, then ARCs, then the electronic edition and getting the book in front of as many people as possible.

Writing the book felt easier and more straightforward than self-publishing, it seems. But we’re pushing forward with the book after some technical red flags about the cover. We think it’ll be okay.

Uploading the book came within the same 24-hour period of getting my latest short story rejection. I don’t think I’ve placed more than a short story or two so far in 2025, after a good year in 2024 with about a dozen short stories sold or accepted. One of those has a very long lead time and will be published on December 21, 2025. In the meantime, I’ve got several stories out on submission that I haven’t heard back on.

So it felt like a good time, frankly, to reassess what I’m doing with my writing.

I’ll continue to write pop culture pieces for CrimeReads – my latest, about men’s adventure magazines of the 1950s-1970s, was published today. I’ll have other non-fiction pieces out there too.

But as much as I loved writing short stories – and there’s no doubt it’s a thrill to see them accepted and published – I’m not going to chase every call for submission I see anymore. I’m going to write short fiction more strategically, and I hope to make good on my one 2025 writing goal, besides getting THAT OCTOBER out in the world: targeting the biggest – and most competitive – markets with my short fiction.

This will let me focus my remaining brain cells on the most important tasks I can take on.

And it’ll free up some time to work on my next crime novel.

I haven’t written a novel since I finished THAT OCTOBER in 2023. I’ve got two previous novels that I might revisit, but I want the thrill and enjoyment of writing something new – which will have the added benefit of letting me throw some characters I created for unpublished novels as far back as the early 2000s into the mix.

So I’ll update y’all here, of course, as well as socials like my BlueSky account and my author page on the accursed Facebook.

It’s a good time, with everything in chaos, to exercise a little control over what I’m doing.

I think we can all agree that exercising some control over what we can control these days is a good thing.