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:
I think there are few writers who enjoy asking other writers and book influencers for blurbs, quotes and reviews.
I don’t know that I’ll continue to seek out marketable opinions of my books, if I continue to write books, but I’ve been blessed with insightful comments from people who’ve had a chance to read my books – in advance for inclusion as blurbs like the one shown above by wonderful author and friend Emily J. Edwards – and after the books are published as the most marketing-heavy element of book marketing.
I’ve had only one author say they’ve been too overwhelmed with their own work to take the time to read the book for a blurb or review.
How this process went for me:
Of course, we all know what reviews are, but blurbs are those little snippets of opinion – inevitably praising – that you see on book covers and inside. They attest to the value of the book and, sometimes, of the author.
With my first published novel, THAT OCTOBER, I waited until almost too late to ask. The book was slated for self-publishing on June 1, 2025 and I probably didn’t ask people until March or April. Every person I asked except for one hugely busy person was able to read the book and provide a blurb.
With SEVEN ANGELS, I was a little more organized and asked weeks, months, earlier, well before its June 1, 2026 publication date. I did so politely and with the understanding that they were probably too busy to do it, but they all did. One author who’d said she wouldn’t be able to blurb the book emailed later to say she’d begun reading it and wanted to blurb it. I’m not sure I got a higher compliment than that.
Each of the authors got a copy of the manuscript and I told them that there would be no substantial changes to come that might affect their opinions.
The blurbs were included in the book, most inside and one by Claire Booth on the back cover. My friend and cornerstone of Constellate Publishing Jill Blocker decided the positioning.
Afterward, when I had copies of the book, I asked a handful of people, friends and online tastemakers, who I provided either copies of the proof or copies of the book to. I stepped gingerly with my request here: “If I sent you a copy, would you consider reading it and possibly posting about it?” This was a step I didn’t take with THAT OCTOBER.
In the five days (as of today) since SEVEN ANGELS was published, I’ve encouraged people to post reviews on Amazon or other sites like Goodreads. And of course people I don’t know who might read the book might do the same.
It’s a ticklish process, for sure. You have to assume that the people you’re asking MIGHT like the book and be willing to say so publicly. If they don’t, though, at least they gave it a shot and shared their honest opinion.
Because years from now, if I’m lucky, someone might have an opinion. If it’s positive or negative or mixed, it’s still a sign that someone found the book and connected with it.
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.
So I’m scrolling on LinkedIn – yes, it’s come to that – and I see an ad for AI-generated headshots and I think mine came out pretty damn good, don’t you?
Of course, that’s Exeter from the classic sci-fi movie THIS ISLAND EARTH. My tan isn’t nearly that nice.
Anyone who follows me on social media – bless you dear folks – knows that I’ve been promoting my new crime novel SEVEN ANGELS, which publishes June 1 from our own Constellate Publishing.
When I wrote SEVEN ANGELS in 2019 I was living in Indiana but had a history with Tennessee: My parents were from the little town I based Seven Angels the town on. And I had family members in Tennessee and still do. More than three years ago, I moved from Indiana to Knoxville, where the finishing touches of the novel were written.
I didn’t get to hear “Southern Comfort,” a song by the sister blues/rock/country duo Larkin Poe, when I was writing SEVEN ANGELS, but I’ve grown to love the song and feel it relates closely to SEVEN ANGELS with its story of a woman who returns to her home place.
There’s a verse in Larkin Poe’s “Southern Comfort” that struck a nerve:
Left my soul in the Nickajack
God willing, I’ll find my way back
Counting down, my days are numbered
Gimme, gimme that southern comfort
But what is the Nickajack?
There are more accomplished historians than me – I’m not one at all, really – who can tell you better what the Nickajack is or was, but it was basically parts of two states, Alabama and Tennessee, that didn’t support the Southern ideal of slavery and whose leadership considered secession from the Southern secession movement.
The Nickajack would have been a state of its own, independent of Tennessee and Alabama, and an ally of the North. Leaders of the Nickajack modeled their secession plans after West Virginia’s exit from Virginia.
It never came to that, fortunately or unfortunately, because that would no doubt have cost lives if hostilities had broken out.
And the defeat of the South by the Union meant that the boosters of the Nickajack’s statehood movement dropped their plans.
So when the Lovell sisters of Larkin Poe sing about leaving their souls in the Nickajack, they’re talking about a pro-Union, anti-slavery part of the country, made up of parts of Alabama and East Tennessee, where I live now and where SEVEN ANGELS’ main character is from. Gloria Shepherd is a prosecutor’s investigator in Knoxville as the story begins but she returns to her home of Seven Angels in Crockett County, where much of the story takes place.
So now you know at least a little about the Nickajack. There’s more out there, especially about the Native American history of the area and the African American history of the Nickajack, and I’ll link to that below.
Credit to the Justin Brown and the Battleground substack for a lot of history and for that illustration of the Nickajack above.
https://battleground.substack.com/p/statehood-nickajack
And more info here:
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.
As part of a series, I’m highlighting some blurbs from authors who’ve read my new novel SEVEN ANGELS, out June 1 from Constellate Publishing. Today, Ms. Emily J. Edwards.
Maybe I violate some unspoken rule here when I note that some of the people who’ve read my book and been kind enough to blurb it are friends, like Colin Harker and Emily J. Edwards. But who would not want to claim them as friends?
Emily is a friend I met through social media and we chat a lot about writing and publishing. We trade pieces and snippets we’ve written to give each other some thoughts and she’s so smart and savvy.
I was recently a guest on her upcoming podcast, Silver Screen Sleuths, and we had a blast recording it.
She wrote the “Girl Friday” series of 1950s-set crime novels, led by “Viviana Valentine Gets Her Man,” and you should see out those books because they’re spot-on recreations of the time and setting, New York City.
Emily had written short stories and has a new novel in the works that you will, trust me, love.
To know more about Emily:
For writers and screenwriters of crime and mystery stories, cellphones pose some problems but also some solutions.
Two of the three novels I’ve written have been set pre-cellphones, in 1984 and 1948. I really enjoyed writing scenes for THAT OCTOBER and GHOST SHOW in which the characters have to urgently contact or find each other and can’t communicate via cellphone like my characters in SEVEN ANGELS – set in 2019 – can. It’s a great exercise in how your characters can problem solve.
Cellphones are so handy to modern-day stories that they can pose a problem writers must work around: They’re so handy that you have to find a way to circumvent them, like no cell service or a broken phone or a lost phone. Kind of like how the writers of the Superman comics, radio show, TV show and movies had to find a way around Superman’s godlike powers. The dude is hugely powerful, so you introduce Kryptonite or block him from the rays of the yellow sun, two things James Gunn used in his excellent 2025 film.
But one way that cellphones change everything is surveillance in thrillers, cop stories or spy stories.
No long would a gunsel like Elisha Cook Jr. in “The Maltese Falcon” have to sit in a public place, pretending to read a newspaper, looking so suspicious that Humphrey Bogart clocks him.
These days, a shady type can simply sit or stand and look at their phone, or pretend to. Think about it: How many times a day do you see someone looking at their phone and assume they’re scrolling social media or watching Korean pop music and never think they’re surveilling someone? Surveilling you?
It’s been two years since the first time one of my short stories was published in an anthology. The Cowboy Jamboree Press MOTEL anthology, edited by Barbara Byar, came out in March 2024. I’d had short stories published before, starting in 2023, and of course my non-fiction had been published since 1977 and in true crime books since 2016. But having a short story in an anthology was a very cool development.
I still really like the story, “Independence,” about an unnamed cowboy passing through a small Tennessee town who gets caught up in a conflict between some small business owners and the corrupt sheriff. If you read my upcoming second novel, SEVEN ANGELS, you might realize that town is Seven Angels. I never cite the town by name in “Independence” but the sheriff in the short story is named and he’s the same corrupt sheriff as in SEVEN ANGELS.
It was a kick to have the story published in an anthology and a few followed. It’s always a kick, although I suspect the anthologies you have to purchase have smaller readership than the stories published online. Still a kick, though.
This year, in 2026, I’ll have short stories in three anthologies I know of, including my story “A Fighting Life,” about foul-mouthed kids in 1948 who figure out they can make money by scrapping with neighborhood kids, which is in the just-published-in-paperback FIGHTING WORDS. My story “This Just Doesn’t Seem To Be My Day,” about a kid spending the day with his older brothers in 1970, will appear this fall in DAYDREAM BELIEVER, an anthology of crime stories based on Monkees songs.
And a while back, I had a crime story accepted for an anthology that hasn’t been announced yet.
For me, three stories in anthologies in one year is a lot, so I doubt there will be others. But I’ll submit some stories and we’ll see.
Here’s a link to the paperback of FIGHTING WORDS is you want to read my short story and the work of some really amazing authors:
I’m occasionally posting here the kind comments provided by authors who read my new novel SEVEN ANGELS. They’re included in the book – out in paperback on June 1 and available for pre-order – and have my undying gratitude.
Today I wanted to include author Colin Harker’s quote and I love that she noted Seven Angels, the small town in Tennessee, would be a nice place to visit. I agree – once my heroine Gloria Shepherd and her friends have worked to clean up the town.
If you judged Colin by her writing, you’d think she was a horror maven and that’s certainly true. But since Colin and I became friends a couple of years ago, I’ve learned there’s a lot more to her. She’s a wonderful writer, definitely, but she’s a wonderfully engaged reader too and even though we’re not at all in the same age cohort, she has a love for some of the great books I loved growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, we’ve been bonding over Harlan Ellison, the famously talented and cantankerous author.
I got to have dinner with Colin and her sister – another hugely talented author – at Bouchercon in Nashville in 2024 and we talked about all kinds of things, maybe especially ghosts.
To know more about Colin:
