Been a bit buried with a few things lately, but I wanted to slip in a quick bit of news. For those of you who prefer your words in the spoken form, the third Garrison Gage book, The Lovely Wicked Rain, is now available for download at Audible.com, Amazon.com, and iTunes. It also happens to be narrated by the fantastic Steven Roy Grimsley, who narrated the first two Gage books. If your weather is anything like the weather we’re getting here in Oregon —cold, gray, and rainy— this book might be a fitting read.
Summer Update (And Why I Just Gave Away 140,000 Books in the Past Few Weeks)
A quick summer update while I have a few minutes. My story, “Perfect Notes,” was just published in the Fiction River anthology, Universe Between. I really enjoyed writing this one. A number of years ago, a particular image of a piano player seeing his dead father at the back of a recital hall came to me, but I never quite had the story to go with it. When the invite to this anthology came long, the story clicked into place. I’m also in fine company in this book, so I hope you check it out. It’s available both in ebook and print. You should also consider subscribing to the series. Lots and lots of great stories in this one.
I haven’t done a regular update in quite a while, and since I have a lot of new readers (the reasons for which I’ll explain in a minute), I thought I’d give everyone a general update. As of last week, I’m halfway through my Master’s degree in Library and Information Science. Since my job at Western Oregon University was transferred to the library, I’ve really enjoyed the direction my position has taken, so I decided to even more fully commit to this path. While I don’t blame any writer for wanting to pursue writing full time, I really enjoy both of my careers, and libraries, particularly academic libraries, are evolving in a direction that perfectly aligns with all of my interests. I like the balance, too. Juggling writing, an intensive grad school track, the job at the university, and family life has been a bit challenging, but it’s also made me realize how much more productive I was capable of being even when I thought I was already productive. That’s a lesson I plan to apply going forward.
Kids have two weeks before they’re back in school. While we didn’t go on any big trips this summer (we did that back in March when we took them to Orlando), we’ve kept their schedules pretty packed with camps, swimming, trips to the beach, and other assorted fun. It’s been a good stretch.
As for why I suddenly have a lot of new readers, that mostly has to do with the ebook of The Gray and Guilty Sea going on sale for FREE a few weeks ago on all major platforms (see this post for more info and links). In that time, more than 140,000 people have downloaded it, by far exceeding my expectations. Hundreds of reviews have come in, my mailing list practically doubled overnight, and I’ve gotten some very nice fan emails. More importantly, sales of the next two books have exploded. The plan was to make this promotion last a month, hoping to hook people on the curmudgeonly Garrison Gage, but it’s worked so well that I’m extending it for the time being. Hey, why mess with success? (Unless it’s to try to make it better, of course. I did improve the cover and put the book through another round of copy editing.) Right now I just need to get myself to write faster . . .
Speaking of that, the current work in progress is the sequel to Ghost Detective. Yes, there are definitely more Garrison Gage books planned (the guy feels like family to me now), but you may have to wait until next year (although I certainly hope you try Myron Vale on for size). Oh, and the audio book of The Lovely Wicked Rain, the third in the Garrison Gage series, is now in the works. It will eventually be available at Audible.com and iTunes. I’ll post on the blog when it’s out.
If you want an email so you don’t miss a new release, please sign up for my mailing list. I’m currently offering a free download of my short story collection, The Man Who Made No Mistakes, as an extra incentive.
FREE for a limited time: THE GRAY AND GUILTY SEA
A dead girl on the beach. A private investigator haunted by his wife’s death. Get THE GRAY AND GUILTY SEA for FREE for a limited time.
Set on the moody Oregon coast, The Gray and Guilty Sea is FREE as an ebook for a limited time from all of your favorite retailers. Readers have called the book, the first in the Garrison Gage mystery series, “irresistible,” “unputdownable,” and a “fascinating character study.”
Want to find out why? Now’s your chance.
Download the ebook for FREE:
Amazon | B&N | Kobo | iTunes
“Carter’s writing is on target.” – Publishers Weekly
A curmudgeon. An iconoclast. A loner. That’s how people describe Garrison Gage, and that’s when they’re being charitable.
After his wife’s brutal murder in New York, and Gage himself is beaten nearly to death, the crippled private investigator retreats three thousand miles to the quaint coastal town of Barnacle Bluffs, Oregon. He spends the next five years in a convalescent stupor, content to bide his time filling out crossword puzzles and trying to forget that his wife’s death is his fault. But all that changes when he discovers the body of a young woman washed up on the beach, and his conscience draws him back into his old occupation – forcing him to confront the demons of his own guilt before he can hope to solve the girl’s murder.
Author’s Note: A newly revised and reformatted edition of The Gray and Guilty Sea was published in June 2014.
If you get hooked on the grumpy Garrison Gage like many other readers, there are two more books in the series:
A New Edition of The Dinosaur Diaries (and Some Thoughts About WIBBOW)
My first short story collection, The Dinosaur Diaries and Other Tales Across Space and Time, has been republished by Flying Raven Press (links to retailers below). This is my own publishing company, of course, which gave me an opportunity to package the book in the way I really wanted it, with a snazzy new cover and everything. The eighteen stories originally appeared in places like Asimov’s, Analog, Ellery Queen, and Weird Tales, among others. I have nothing against the fine folks who published the book originally back in 2010, but it was just time to make a change.
I never liked the original cover much, and I also didn’t like that in the print edition they tried to squeeze 80,000 words into under 200 pages. It made the book seem quite thin, and even if the number of words is the same, it can give a potential reader the sense that the book is not worth the money if they happen to pick it up. This print edition stretched it out to around 250 pages. The original ebook was also four years old, so I took the opportunity to reformat it with some of the better tools available today.
From a business perspective, this was probably not the wisest use of my time. Yes, I’ll see a higher royalty, but honestly, if I was interested primarily in what was in the best interest of my bank account, the time spent re-publishing this book should have been spent working on new material.
From a writing perspective, however, it feels great.
Here’s how I see it. I know there are writers who can approach writing purely from a business perspective, but that doesn’t work for me. A few years ago, when Dean Wesley Smith and I were co-teaching some “Indie Publishing” workshops to help writers get started in this arena (this was way back in the cave man days of indie publishing, you know, circa 2011), I coined an ugly acronym as a test writers could use whether some non-writing related task was worth their time: WIBBOW.
Which stands for Would I Be Better Off Writing?
Lo and behold, this ugly acronym actually caught on and I see mentions of it around the Internet, often by people I’ve never met. The idea was that as indie publishing gained popularity, there were even more tempting ways to spend your time other than writing new material that could make you feel productive but, when playing the long game, might not be the best choice.
However, the thing about WIBBOW is that it is entirely subjective. It’s up to each writer to decide whether something is worth doing when measured against spending that time writing. For me, re-publishing The Dinosaur Diaries passed the test, because I also operate by another motto: Write for yourself, publish for the shelf. What I mean is that no matter what happens with my writing career, I want to feel good about my choices. I want to feel like I wrote what resonated with me (hoping it does for others) rather than writing what I think resonates with others (and hoping it will for me). And when I publish something, I want to be able to look at it on the shelf (even if that’s metaphorically, online) and feel that the book’s presentation is giving it the best chance to find an audience—and even if it fails it that regard, that I’ll always be proud of it when I look at it.
I’m proud of this book. I hope my readers will feel the same.
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The Dinosaur Diaries and Other Tales Across Space and Time
Available Now: