Category: News of Note

GHOST DETECTIVE: Coming this Summer

I’m pleased to announce that I have a new novel coming this summer, one I’m very excited about:  Ghost Detective. In a world where everybody dies but nobody leaves, Myron Vale is the rare individual who completely straddles both sides of the great divide. Read the full blurb below, as well as the first chapter here, and see if it hooks you.  I’ve also set up a page at www.scottwilliamcarter.com/ghost, where I’ll collect any links or blog posts related to the book.

If early reader reviews are any indication, it could very well be one of the best things I’ve written, which has prompted me to make a little extra marketing push.  When I finished this book, I really wanted to write more books about Myron Vale, and I’ve purposely set it up to be an ongoing mystery series.

When will it be published?  Target date for a simultaneous paperback/ebook release is July 1 (just in time for the holiday weekend), but it could be published a few weeks before that.  If you sign up for my newsletter there on the right, you’ll not only get a free copy The Man Who Made No Mistakes, you’ll also be the first to know when the book is available.  I don’t send many emails, a couple a year at most, but I do try to take care of my most dedicated readers.  You’ll also get first crack at limited editions and other things. I won’t spam you or give your email to someone else.  Promise.

A couple other things.  I’m releasing this book under my own publishing company, Flying Raven Press. When I first dipped my toes into the waters of indie-publishing a couple years ago, I thought it might be good — how can I put this tactfully? — to not be too obvious about that fact.  Even though self-publishing was the norm until maybe a hundred years ago (Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Rice Burroughs and many other notable authors self-published their own work),  it took on a certain stink of desperation in recent decades.  But folks, the game has changed.  Self-publishing, if done right, is not only a viable alternative to traditional publishing, in most cases these days it is the preferred option.  There are so many writers covering this now that I hardly need to do so, but if you’re interested in learning more, read the blogs of Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathtryn Rusch, The Passive Voice, and J.A. Konrath.  That’s a good starting point, and from there, you’ll be led to many others.  I’m thankful to all of them for the help they’ve given writers.

I can honestly tell you I only considered submitting Ghost Detective to traditional publishers for about five seconds before dismissing the idea.

Why? Although I’ve had a great experience with Simon and Schuster with several of my novels, and would certainly consider a traditional publisher again for the right project, the advances, royalties, and contract terms have gotten pretty piss poor unless you have the leverage to dictate better terms. And how do you get that leverage?  By coming to them after you already have a top-selling book.

But even then, it’s not a sure thing whether an author should sign up with a traditional publisher.  Numbers are hard to come by, of course, but the expert analysis I’ve seen pegs non-online sales of most fiction around 40%.  This means that 60% of a novel’s sales (a little higher or lower depending on the genre) come from either ebooks or print sales via online channels like Amazon.com.  And once you know how, you as a writer can reach those markets just as well (or in many cases, better) than traditional publishers.

Yes, this means I have to wear the publisher’s hat in addition to the writer’s, but I don’t mind.  In my early creative days, I started as a visual artist (both cartooning and fine art), and have worked a number of jobs that required me to learn desktop design, so I enjoy putting the books together.  Whether my covers rival those coming out of New York, I’ll leave for you to judge, but I definitely feel I’m getting better.  The final draft of this book is currently being proofread by an experienced New York copy editor.  I can’t promise you there won’t be any errors in the book, because even the big publishing houses miss some, but when it’s all said and done, whether you buy the paperback or the ebook, I want you to feel you’re holding a book in your hands that’s just as good, at least in terms of presentation, as anything coming out of New York.

It’s been an up and down year on the writing side, which I may talk more about soon (or I may not, I’m a pretty erratic blogger, as you can see), but I feel really good about the future.  I’ve made some decisions lately to recalibrate my writing career a bit, and Ghost Detective is a big step in this process.  I hope you check it out.

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Ghost Detective
by Scott William Carter

Ebook Publication Date:
Coming July 2013

Paperback Publication Date:
Coming July 2013

Genre: Fiction | Mystery

After narrowly surviving a near-fatal shooting, Portland detective Myron Vale wakes with a bullet still lodged in his brain, a headache to end all headaches, and a terrible side effect that radically transforms his world for the worse:  He sees ghosts.  Lots of them.

By some estimates, a hundred billion people have lived and died before anyone alive today was even born.  For Myron, they’re all still here.  That’s not even his biggest problem.  No matter how hard he tries, he can’t tell the living from the dead.

Despite this, Myron manages to piece together something of a life as a private investigator specializing in helping people on both sides of the great divide — until a stunning blonde beauty walks into his office needing help finding her husband.  Myron wants no part of the case until he sees the man’s picture . . . and instantly his carefully reconstructed life begins to unravel.

Read the first chapter here.

New Story Published: “The Way the Rain Bends”

Just received the contributor copy in the mail of my story, “The Way the Rain Bends,” which was just published in The Los Angeles Review. It’s a provocative little short story I wrote while attending a workshop on the Oregon coast, set in Portland and told in second person, featuring the breakdown of a young marriage.  I read it the other day at a local reading and I still like it, very fun to read aloud, though it’s certainly dark and brooding.  Fitting for dark and brooding weather, I guess, which is what we’ve mostly been getting here lately.  I’ve been reading some of the other stories in the magazine, pieces by Natalie Goldberg and Ron Carlson, among others, really great stuff, and I encourage you to think about subscribing.

Just got word that Wooden Bones, my fantasy chronicling what happened to Pinocchio after he became a real boy, will be published in paperback next summer, which is welcome news.   My young adult novel, President Jock, Vice President Geek, was just released in audio, available for digital download from Audible.com and Amazon.com.  Plus my second mystery under my Jack Nolte pen name, A Desperate Place for Dying, featuring the curmudgeonly Garrison Gage, was also published in audio.

As for me, I carry on like usual, writing my four or five pages a day, reading good books, helping the kids with homework and piano, raking far too many leaves, and eagerly awaiting for each installment of The Walking Dead. I’ve also been extracting myself more and more from the Internet.  Went a little overboard during the election, which is usual for me, but I came out of it really questioning how engaged I want to be in general when it comes to the Internet.  I’ve already come to the conclusion that I want to be a minimalist promoting my work (believing, as I do, that the best way to increase your “discoverablity” as a writer, which is the latest buzzword in publishing, is to focus your energy on just writing more rather than trying to hype what you’ve already written, because more work means more gateways for people to find out about you as well as more for them to buy when they do — win, win), but I’ve also been feeling like I want to be a minimalst when it comes to how much time I spend reading online, too.

I already cut out all social media (Facebook, Twitter, and the like), and now I’ve been dramatically curtailing how much time I spend on listservs, blogs, and other things.  It’s a fine balancing act, because I like being informed, about publishing and the world at large, but I really, really like how I feel when I’m mostly disconnected from The Great and Powerful Digital Hive Mind.  The peace of mind is amazing.

This isn’t to say I want to give up the Internet completely.  It’s still the greatest tool for communication since the Gutenberg printing press.  But it is to say that I’m finding how to use it only when I need it (which isn’t nearly as often as I used to think) and not using it because I have this paranoid fear that Something Out There Is Happening And I Don’t Know About It.

Postcards from the Garage: Guardian of the Brag Shelf

I have a new friend in the house.  I picked up this handsome little puppet of Pinocchio in Venice during our summer trip to the Mediterranean.  He now sits on my “brag shelf,” standing guard over all the books and magazines where my work has appeared.   It was a pretty big memento to stuff into my suitcase, but I couldn’t pass it up, seeing how my book, Wooden Bones, was coming out at almost the same time I was visiting Italy.  You see Pinocchio puppets all over Italy, of course, but most of them have the traditional red outfit, and this one better matched the spirit of my book.  The company who produced it is based in Italy, and there was only one store in all of Venice where they were sold.

WOODEN BONES – Now Available!

First, the big news:  Wooden Bones, my dark children’s fantasy that chronicles the untold story of Pinocchio, is now available in both hardcover and ebook from Simon and Schuster.  What happened to Pino, as he came to be known, after he became a real boy?  The answer:  It turns out he can bring puppets to life himself, which gets him into a whole lot of trouble.  Giant hungry wolves?  Dead trees brought to life?  Life-size puppets that march about like zombies?  The book’s got all of that and more.  I hope you check it out.  It’s aimed at the 9-12 age group, but I think adults might like it as well.

It’s been a busy couple of months.  In late July, I co-taught the Think Like a Publisher Workshop with Dean Wesley Smith, where we helped another room full of professional writers learn how to take advantage of all the ways writers can now go direct to readers — even while continuing to work with large traditional publishers, as I am.  It was a great group and always fun to hang out with Dean and all my other writer friends on the Oregon coast.  Hard to believe, but I’ve known Dean over twenty years, ever since I walked into his writing workshop in Eugene, Oregon when I was a nineteen-year-old college student and realized, right away, what a goldmine that workshop was for a newer writer like me.

The first half of August, my wife and I took off for Europe, embarking on a five country, ten plus city Mediterranean cruise, tacking a few days on at the beginning and the end.  In all, we were gone 17 days, and it was quite a trip — Barcelona, Athens, Rome, Venice, Istanbul, I’m still mentally unpacking everything we did on the trip.  It was expensive, no doubt about it, but we have no regrets; it was something we’d been wanting to do for a long time.  And no, we didn’t take the kids.  They stayed with the grandparents (we took them to Disneyland last year, which was the family trip), and had a much better time  than if they’d been with us.  Somehow I don’t think they would have appreciated the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona or the Parthenon in Athens quite as much as we did.

Other news?  Well, I’m buckling down into the writing, working on a dark paranormal suspense novel based loosely on one of my short stories.   More than that I won’t say until it’s finished, but the writing is going well.  I also have a number of new audio books out.  None of them are narrated by me (when I have more time, it’s something I plan to do, but not now), but they’re all excellent reads.  All of them are available for digital download at Audible.com and Amazon, and should be available at iTunes shortly.

With the summer winding down toward fall — I was stunned to realize that the kids go back to school in two weeks — I’m hoping to have a nice, productive stretch of writing for the rest of the year.  Traveling is great, but I truly am a creature of habit, and it feels good to get back in a creative groove.

What I’ve Been Reading Lately:

  • The Hunger Games Trilogy, by Suzanne Collins.  Fantastic read, and fully deserving of all the attention it’s gotten.  Felt a little like Ender’s Game meets The Princess Diaries, in the sense that it’s very much told in the voice of a teenage girl (complete with a makeover!)   but the action and war-heavy themes are there in abundance at the same time.  I’d say the third book was the weakest of the three, but it was also the most ambitious in scope.
  • Now and Then by Robert B. Parker.  Another great book in the Spenser series, touching on infidelity, the meaning of marriage, and what makes two people stick it out through thick and thin.  Not his best book, but then it’s Robert B. Parker, and even a run of the mill Parker is superb.