Thanks to my Constellate Creatives cohort Jill Blocker for reminding me that it’s almost THAT OCTOBER.
I mean, we’re speeding toward October with a strong tailwind and it’s a good time to remind people that my 2025 novel, a YA thriller that I’ve more often than not referred to as a high school crime novel, is out there in the world. Poor little THAT OCTOBER, which has been out for 15 months-plus now, has taken a backseat to my promotion of SEVEN ANGELS, which came out three months ago.
But THAT OCTOBER – set in October 1984 – is a good fall season read, with Halloween, Elvira Mistress of the Dark on MTV, football, the TERMINATOR and peak 1980s pop music as the mood overlaying the crime story at its heart: When a classmate is killed and another disappears, six high school friends – frustrated by how lackadaisical the adults in town are acting – decide to investigate on their own with the hope of solving their friend’s murder and bringing another friend home.
Along the way, they stumble upon dark secrets not only in their town but also in their own families.
The wonderful author Heather Levy said THAT OCTOBER was “perfect for fans of STRANGER THINGS,” although the only monsters in my novel are the human kind.
You can find THAT OCTOBER literally anywhere books are sold. Here are some salient spots:
Ink Drinkers Anonymous, the Black-woman-owned bookstore in my hometown of Muncie, Indiana, through bookshop dot org.
So does Amazon, which offers it in paperback or ebook.
And The Hive Bookshop, my friendly neighborhood bookstore here in town. The Hive has signed copies, as does Ink Drinkers and Aw Yeah Comics, the latter two in Muncie, Indiana.
I always enjoy when friends and readers note on social media they’ve received a copy of one of my books, like the new one, SEVEN ANGELS, but I don’t usually post about it here.
Today, I am, because my friend Karen Grose, a rightfully proud Canadian author of several bestselling novels like ALL JUNE LEFT BEHIND and FLAT OUT LIES as well as WHAT WE KEEP SILENT, which is near the top of my Towering To Be Read Stack, posted on social media last night that she’d finallly received a copy of my crime novel SEVEN ANGELS.
Earlier this week, I posted here about my Canadian writer friend, who I’d been talking to for months about why Amazon Canada kept delaying delivery of my book that she’d ordered. I was stumped. Karen was stumped.
Maybe all it took was for me to post about it here, because Karen received the book something like the day after I posted about the delay. I’m certain the two are related, right?
Anyway, I told Karen that I hope she enjoys the book – now that she finally received it – and I’m looking forward to reading hers.
Despite that Britannica drawing of beautiful Lake Ontario, I’ll reassure you up front here that I won’t rehash every element of the idiotic and juvenile threats the current occupant of the White House has made against Canada. I won’t even repeat the ones from just today. Before 2015, I didn’t think it was possible to live in both the stupidest and most depressing and dangerous timeline but that’s the situation we find ourselves in.
But I will note this, and as far as I know, this isn’t the fault of anyone except some nameless, faceless mid-level manager or bureaucrat. I haven’t yet found a simple explanation of why this is the case, but it’s annoying as hell to me and a writer friend who tried to buy a copy of SEVEN ANGELS, my crime novel that came out June 1.
This writer friend in Canada had happily told me that she’d ordered a copy of the book either well before or sometime not long after it went live on Amazon as well as bookshop dot org and Barnes & Noble and many other sites I’d urge anyone to use before considering ordering from Amazon, whose owner has profited from harming smaller, indie booksellers and at the same time undermined democracy with his craven support of the current U.S. president.
Anyway, at some point my writer friend, puzzled, asked if there was any reason why Amazon Canada would be taking so long to send the book. Not that I know of, I replied. Every time I checked, either the American or Canadian Amazon sites, SEVEN ANGELS was available for sale.
Weeks and weeks passed. I checked with her periodically and she still hadn’t received her copy. She’d show me a screenshot of her order form with an inevitably far-future delivery date. And the date slid backward.
This is the status quo last week, ar the end of August, when my friend told me that Amazon Canada was now forecasting a delivery date of October 2 – four full months after the book’s publication date. (Amazon Canada is also charging way more than any U.S. bookseller, but I’m assuming that’s either standard operating procedure or the result of the Rancid Babyman’s tariff tantrums.)
In the meantime, as Amazon Canada was predicting an October 2 delivery for an order placed on August 24, the U.S. version of Amazon was forecasting an August 31 delivery date.
Also in the meantime, my Canadian author friend, after I told her I was going to write a piece titled “Another Reason for Canadians to Hate Us,” replied, “Maybe I should follow up with an article saying We love Americans and would love our neighbours to kindly read our books.”
We love y’all too, my Canadian friend. And we love how you sneak those extra u’s in American words. (Kidding.)
But what’s the reason for this bizarre difference in how this works for Canadian readers?
In November 2024, the site Cybernews reported, “It turns out that if you live in certain countries, you won’t be able to order certain books from Amazon’s US storefront – especially if they revolve around sensitive subjects like erotica, Christianity, the occult, and LGBTIQ issues.
According to The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, a laboratory focusing on the openness and security of the internet, Amazon deploys a special system on its “amazon.com” storefront to restrict shipments of certain products to specific regions.
While researchers found more than 17,000 such products, the most common product category restricted was books, especially the ones related to the aforementioned subjects.
In February 2026 on the Amazon forum site, Amazon reported that some ebook purchases are geographically restricted (although this isn’t an e-book issue; the e-book of SEVEN ANGELS isn’t even out yet and will come later this year). A Reddit post also notes that its a roll of the dice to determine if you’ll be able to order some items: you have to enter your Canadian address and then see if your purchase would be deliverable.
A Quora post outlines the absurdity of this situation, advising that while Canadians can order from the U.S. version of Amazon – recognizable by the .com suffix rather than .ca – “If, however, you want to get Amazon U.S. prices and save on customs and brokerage fees, you can do what many Canadians do: time your shopping so you can have the products shipped to a U.S. address while travelling in the U.S. Many hotels, for example, will accept packages for guests (make sure to check first). Along border cities there are many businesses on the American side that simply accept packages for a client and hold them until they can be picked up.”
None of this explains why Amazon Canada continues to offer the books and promises a delivery date that it constantly fails to make.
So do we live in a global economy or not? And can ridiculous threats complicate matters even more?
BTW, I’d have long since just mailed her a copy of SEVEN ANGELS, but the shipping cost would be multiples of the cost of the book itself. And my friend is waiting to see what happens this time to delay her order. But she’s committed to getting her hands on SEVEN ANGELS.
And that’s the sign of a friend, a highly valued thing to have in a time when U.S. leaders seem to be going out of their way to offend as many friends as possible.
For most authors, especially indie authors, getting your books on bookstore shelves is a huge end goal.
It can seem like an impossible goal because brick-and-mortar bookstores have only so much shelf space. Your book is competing for space with books by masterful writers and the most hyped – many times rightfully so – books in print.
So as someone who’s recently placed my second crime novel, SEVEN ANGELS, on the shelves of the Hive Bookshop, a local woman-owned store here in Knoxville, I can tell you what steps I took that might have paid off and landed a spot on those shelves not only for SEVEN ANGELS but also my first crime novel, THAT OCTOBER.
(And yes, I say “might have paid off” because, ultimately, who can say why a bookstore owner or manager decides to stock the books they stock? I’m sure there are as many reasons for carrying a book as there are books.)
First, write your book. Finish your book. And work on it, with friends who are willing to read it – not to mention a pro editor, if you can afford it – until you’ve got a good book. Yes, I know that’s highly subjective, but in my case, the Hive owners asked if I could drop off copies of my two books so they could check them out. A few weeks later, they let me know they wanted to stock the books. One of the owners apparently read them, or at least enough of them to know a few customers might consider buying them.
And when I say “work on your book,” I’ll note that I outlined SEVEN ANGELS around 2009 and then returned to that outline to write the novel in 2019, after I’d taken a buyout from the daily newspaper business and could devote time to writing it. I added major characters and subplots years later, in 2022 and 2023 or thereabouts, that made the book more well-rounded. This isn’t a typical book-writing timeline for me, although it did take me about a year and a half to write THAT OCTOBER.
Secondly, timing is important. The Hive is literally a new bookstore, as opposed to the long-established other local indie bookstore that didn’t even respond to my request – in person and through their formal process – that they carry my work. Is a new bookstore less hidebound? Is a new bookstore more willing to take a chance on a new author? Certainly the Hive emphasizes that they’re very focused on community and local authors. Maybe your bookstore is new or they have a new decision-maker or they’re just willing to take that small gamble.
Third, cultivate relationships. I didn’t do a lot of that with the Hive, but I don’t think it hurt that I visited their store during their soft opening and bought a book, DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL, which I’d been wanting to read. Nothing’s better than when your bookstore knows you’ll not only support their store but also recommend their store to others.
Fourth, be understanding and don’t be pushy. Understand what an investment opening and maintaining a good bookstore is. As much as I wanted to, I didn’t “circle back” to the bookstore during the weeks after they had copies of my books and before they notified me they’d carry my books. I figured the owners had enough on their hands without having to respond to multiple email inquiries with an “are we there yet?” type message.
(I have traditionally been pushier with two stores back in my hometown of Muncie, Indiana. The wonderful folks at Ink Drinkers Anonymous and Aw Yeah Comics have been receptive not only when I ask if they’ll carry my books but also when I ask if they need more copies.)
Fifth, have good packaging and presentation. My cohort Jill Blocker and I published THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS, the latter through Constellate Publishing, Jill’s book imprint spin-off of her Constellate Creatives company. (Link to Constellate is at the end of this piece.)
Sixth: Try to copy edit to avoid typos – we didn’t manage to have no typos, but I see professionally published books that have typos – and have someone – Jill in this case – who can format the book in an eye-pleasing manner.
Seventh: Have a good cover. I’m lucky that my artist friend Sara McKinley drew the cover for THAT OCTOBER based on my suggestion that I wanted something reminiscent of a dramatic X-Men comic book cover pose for the young protagonists. With SEVEN ANGELS, I knew I wanted a cover that paid tribute to those Robert B. Parker covers for the Spenser books that had one or two or three elements on a background. I found the three elements – a lipstick, a bullet and a badge – and Jill executed the cover.
Eighth: Your book might be totally bookstore-worthy but never find its way onto shelves. I thought that would be the case with mine. I didn’t give up, but I was pretty resigned to never seeing my cover in a bookstore.
And I was doubly thrilled when it happened and hope it happens for you if that’s your goal.
I had the coolest experience I’ve had in a long time on Saturday: I signed copies of my novels SEVEN ANGELS and THAT OCTOBER for a bookstore. And not just any bookstore, but my local indie bookstore The Hive, which opened this spring.
(Link to the Hive site at the end.)
I’ve had books in local bookstores for 10 years now, since 2016, when the first of my co-written true crime books, WICKED MUNCIE, was published. Each of the three true crime books that followed were also placed in Muncie bookstores (and in displays at Walgreen’s and other stores) by the History Press. Whatever else you might say about History Press, but they have the juice to get books in stores in and around the area that’s depicted in the book.
Since publishing my first novel, THAT OCTOBER, in June 2025, I’ve tried to get it in stores here in Knoxville, where I’ve lived for not quite four years. The long-established indie bookstore here turned up its nose at my request they carry that first novel. And by turn up its nose, I mean that I brought the book to that store and went through their formal online process for requesting that the store carry a book. I heard crickets back. They just never responded, and it’s been 16 months.
And yes, I know all about how much of a premium shelf space in bookstores is. Spare me that factoid, please. Because even though Barnes & Noble replied to my request that they carry the book locally with a refusal to do so, at least THEY REPLIED. (They carry my books online, as does virtually every other bookseller, so I appreciate that.)
So I didn’t have high hopes for the Hive, even though pretty early on it was obvious how they liked to focus locally, with space on shelves and book clubs and talks and signings. I asked.
So when the Hive responded a few weeks ago with a “we’d be happy to carry your novels” and this past week said, “Your books have arrived, would you like to come in and sign copies?” I was just incredibly, pleasantly surprised.
(When I vague-posted on social media about this, some people thought I had interest in my books from TV or movies and, yeah, I have gotten a nibble in that regard but I’ve yet to see follow-through and yet to ensure it’s legit. So we’ll see.)
I’ve been lucky since THAT OCTOBER came out that not only libraries back in Indiana but two of my hometown bookstores, Ink Drinkers Anonymous and Aw Yeah Comics, have been happy to carry my novels. And it was a hell of an experience in 2025 when THAT OCTOBER was carried in the bookstore at Bouchercon in New Orleans.
So the Hive carrying my novels and asking me to sign them and even marking them with a “local author” tag was the best thing yet.
In this “all about me” celebration and back-patting here, I’ll note that there’s a slightly larger issue here. I self-published, through the good work of my friend Jill Blocker, THAT OCTOBER and Jill and I published SEVEN ANGELS through Constellate Publishing, the indie publishing imprint and spinoff of Jill’s company, Constellate Creatives.
So three things can be inferred from my personal victory of The Hive carrying my books: Indie bookstores are the best. Decisions about what books to stock are best made locally.
And indie authors and small imprints should be heartened by the fact that small potatoes book publishing can get your book into bookstores.
Some of you are old enough to remember July 24, where on this very site I said that I’d unsubscribed from a “help for authors” newsletter because they’d pushed out 14 newsletters in a month and that seemed like a lot.
How many newsletters is too many? Well, we’re about to test that number. This entry that you’re reading now is the eighth new piece I’ve posted here since that July 24 column. Those posts have been fueled by a lot of commentary on AI and some book self-promotion.
Each new item I post results in an email to those of you who subscribe, so it’s almost as if I was sending out some kind of … well, newsletter.
So I’ll be keeping track of how many I post and we’ll see if I exceed 14 in a month. And y’all can keep track too and blast me in comments or social media if (when) I blow past that milestone of 14 in a month.
But today, here’s some housekeeping stuff. As Carl Kolchak of “The Night Stalker” fame always says, item:
Item: Shoutout to Andrew Careaga, in the latest edition of his newsletter today, for citing my August 5 piece on the blog here about AI. You should subscribe to Andrew’s newsletter, Friday Five.
Item: The Publishing Confidential newsletter by Kathleen Schmidt has rapidly become one of my favorite newsletters.
Item: Also essential are the various daily newsletters for subscribers to Publishers Marketplace. There’s an expense to the subscription – basically a dollar a day – but I’m feeling more plugged in to the industry as a result of Publishers Marketplace, newsletters like Schmidt’s and Careaga’s and some others I’m going to cite here from time to time.
Item: As someone who has maintained a Facebook page, Wicked Muncie, for 10 years and this site, which began life as a WordPress blog something like 15 years ago and has now amounted up more than 1,100 posts about pop culture, books, Halloween vintage costumes and a bunch of other stuff, I wanted to mention that it’s hard to maintain an active site or blog or social media account and in particular I wanted to cite Mark Evanier’s News from Me site. Evanier, a veteran writer of comics, TV and books, posts pretty much every day, sometimes more than one post a day. He knows a lot about entertainment and he knows a lot of old Hollywood types and his annual Mel Torme Christmas post is reason enough to check out his site. I’ll include a link at the bottom of this post.
Keep me in your thoughts. I’m editing manuscripts from friends and upcoming books from us at Constellate Publishing and I’m doing a lot of reading for a super-secret project that I’ll detail around the middle of 2027.
And yes, I’ll post here this weekend or early in the week because something very cool is happening in regard to my novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS. No it’s not a movie adaptation. (Although … no, I’ll tell you that story someday.)
I’ve noted in this space before that most of my books and short stories occupy the same universe that mostly varies from the town of Seven Angels, Tennessee, to the small city of Middletown, Indiana. The former is the focus of my newest novel, SEVEN ANGELS, and the latter is the setting of my 2025 novel THAT OCTOBER.
I’ve plotted references to those locales in most of my fiction, including my upcoming novel GHOST SHOW, which is set in Middletown in 1948 (THAT OCTOBER was set in Middletown in 1984).
And there’s been a few times I’ve had characters cross over from stories to novels. I’ve previously mentioned here Butcher Crabtree, who pops up in SEVEN ANGELS and a few stories.
But in GHOST SHOW, when it shows up this winter, you’ll see some characters I introduced in “A Fighting Life,” a short story in the 2025/2026 anthology FIGHTING WORDS, edited by Scott Bradburn and published by Leonardo Audio.
Four of the Anderson siblings, who are the focus of GHOST SHOW, are in “A Fighting Life,” which is also set in Middletown in 1948.
They’re pretty different characters in some ways, and very much the same characters in other ways. In “A Fighting Life,” siblings Marie, Saul and Peter get into vacant-lot-punchfests when the three, all of them teens or pre-teens, discover they can make money by letting other neighborhood kids fight them for nickels. They’re foul-mouthed little bastards, as Courtney Fabrizio, the marvelous narrator of my story for Leonardo Audio, alludes to. (You should read the story, but you really should get the audio version of the anthology, particularly for the amazing work of Courtney.).
In the story, Marie, Saul and Peter take on all comers – and get rescued by their big sister Rachel as they’re about to be busted by the cops – and it’s a story that is, by turns, fun and dire.
In GHOST SHOW, Marie, Saul and Peter are still the youngest members of the Anderson family and Rachel sometimes rescues and sometimes needs rescuing. GHOST SHOW is a story that’s very, very loosely based on my mother and her siblings when they were young, and the four are based on one of my aunts, two of my uncles and my mom. There wasn’t as much mayhem in real life as I injected into either the short story or the novel.
I’d encourage you to buy FIGHTING WORDS not just for my story “A Fighting Life” but also for the really crisp and tough writing by the other writers in the anthology. And it might tide you over until GHOST SHOW arrives.
I wrote GHOST SHOW between writing SEVEN ANGELS and THAT OCTOBER.
I’ve always described it as “Rich Man, Poor Man,” but there’s no rich men. It’s VERY loosely based on the post-war years, when my mother’s family had moved to Muncie, Indiana (in the novel from Seven Angels, in real life, from Jamestown, Tennessee) to find work and a life.
The characters, several siblings from the Anderson family, work, play and try to survive and find their consciousness raised in the process.
The novel has gangsters, traveling Romani, infidelity, untimely death, lesbian college professors, a Bela Lugosi-type washed-up movie star, a traveling “ghost show,” a haunted theater with a real ghost named Milo and the President of the United States, Harry Truman, who visited Muncie that year as part of his election campaign.
But know this: Truman’s role is the most tearjerking of the entire book.
We’re going to publish it through Constellate Publishing in the coming months.
Photo above is by my friend John Disher and it’s a photo of the real Rivoli Theater, taken from just below its dome, in the theater’s final days before demolition in the 1980s.
GHOST SHOW is a big book. If you’re looking for a long and absorbing read, this will be it.
I’ve no idea when I first heard of Substack, the online writing and posting platform that a lot of people use and quite a few people forego. For the time being, and probably into the future, I’ll be in the latter camp. But Substack has become a hoppin’ place, especially for writers and other people who express their thoughts.
I was thinking about Substack today after reading the latest newsletter from writer Andrew Careaga. You should look him up and enjoy his writing, not only on his various platforms but also his fiction, including his short fiction story in the brand-new Bad Intentions anthology. (I’ve got a story in the anthology too; Michael Downing edited the book and Literary Kitchen published it. It’s out now.)
In the newsletter from Andrew I received today, he talks about the pros and cons of being on Substack and – this is oversimplifying, so I apologize – notes that he’s got his hands full, like a lot of us, with being ON EVERY FREAKIN’ PLATFORM IMAGINABLE. It’s the online presence writers feel they must maintain if they want to reach readers and, truth be told, people who will pay to read our work.
Andrew cites the good and bad points of Substack and links to a Guardian story from February reporting how Substack is generating revenue for and from what the Guardian calls “Nazi newsletters.”
Considering the number of people who are acquainted with Substack’s platforming of white supremacist groups and writers, it’s a little surprising that so many people who are definitely NOT Nazis, like Heather Cox Richardson, are so present on Substack. Richardson is one of 50 million Substack users worldwide, according to the Guardian.
There’s unlikely to be a mass exodus from Substack similar to that when the new owner of Twitter took over and threw the doors open wide for white supremacists and Nazis. The frequently-cited point is that if you start letting Nazis into your bar and more Nazis follow, you eventually become a Nazi bar,
And yes, I’m still on what used to be Twitter. I made the move to Bluesky for my social media platform of choice a couple of years ago. And I should note that a lot of people who temporarily left Twitter have come back.
I’m on social media platforms owned or run by truly reprehensible people and corporations, namely Meta – three separate Facebook pages – plus Instagram and Threads.
Don’t bother to tell me if Nazis own Pinterest. I have a page there, created just this year to promote my new crime novel SEVEN ANGELS. But I’ve all but given up on posting anything there because I have virtually no followers. So I don’t care if it turns into a Nazi bar with kicky hairdo and decorating ideas.
FFS, I’m even on LinkedIn.
There’s no social media or writing platform that is without concerns and extenuating circumstances. If we’re waiting for a platform owned by a corporation that isn’t reprehensible in some ways, we might have a very long wait. Why? Because there are few good corporations when it comes to mass communication. It’s their real estate, obviously, and we just toil there. That’s the case with virtually any social media platform.
And, of course, wherever people gravitate, dating back to the days of the town square, aberrant and abhorrent views will be presented.
I post on many of those social media platforms – I’m calling out my own compromised moral stance – and will continue to post here, a WordPress site I’ve had for 15 years and one on which I have subscribers (all unpaid) and which gets a couple of thousand views each month.
So my problem with Substack, overlooking the kind of moral compromise that allows me to keep using social media platforms that are equally awful, is that I’m not likely to start over and do anything but spin my wheels, i.e. the Pinterest Effect.
Is all of this thinking flawed? Yes. Is there a good solution that gives me and my work some exposure but doesn’t compromise my morals? No.
But Substack is, for the moment, a bridge too far for me. Your mileage my vary.
