#poweredbyindie: No one can take this away from me

Want to know a secret? I never tried to find a publisher. I never even considered it. I was DIY from Jump Street because I didn't want to tell marketable stories.

I wanted to publish whatever the hell I wanted.

My first novella, The Single Staircase, was plotted over years but written in just a couple months. It's 18,000 words of gritty, depressing, determined cop talk, mashed up with an Agatha Christie-style locked room puzzle. No publisher in the world would have touched it. But why would I have needed them to? It was exactly the story I wanted to tell.

So I got on to CreateSpace and KDP and figured out the process. And today the Owl and Raccoon series has fans all over the world.

Now, Sin Walks Into The Desert? That book, I could've found a publisher for. Desert noir isn't really a thing, but sexy tattooed loner kids with guns and grudges are pretty fucking marketable. But by the time I finished writing it, I was rolling. I loved my book. I wanted to make it real. Even more, I wanted ultimate responsibility for its success or failure.

Sin went on to sell thousands of copies, get picked up by the Thrilling 13 anthology, and win Shelf Unbound's award for Best Independent Novel of 2015.

At this point, any sane publisher would have been hounding me for more Sin books. But I wanted to jump genres. Sever is a melancholy memoir about college in the '90's, but with four rampaging ax murderers running around. Should it be marketed as YA horror or Gen X time capsule? I don't know. It's not my problem.

The most important thing is this. Every day I get to look myself in the mirror and say, "I did this. Maybe it sucks and maybe it's brilliant. Maybe it'll find an audience and maybe it won't. But I did this. And no one can take that away from me."

All because one day I decided to jump. To upload the file. To hit the publish button. To be #poweredbyindie.

[Ed. - This post is part of Amazon's #poweredbyindie month. I hear a lot of griping about how Amazon is a giant juggernaut that uses authors. But if Amazon didn't provide free publishing tools and a free sales platform, I might not be an author to begin with. The Single Staircase would still be a 122-page Word doc in a folder somewhere. So thanks, Amazon.]

Presenting a novella about how four ax murderers can really jack up your summer

Publishing is like pregnancy. The first few months are all mysterious and wonderful. But the last couple are frustrating and gross, and you mostly just want the whole thing over. So it is with pride and no small amount of relief that I finally hit the publish button on my first horror novella, Sever.

It's not just horror, of course. Sever's also a coming-of-age story. And a love letter to college. And a memoir of the '90s. And a melancholy reflection on how to raise kids in a scary world. But there's a whole lot of slasher mayhem going on.

If that sounds fun, the Kindle version is on Amazon. As is a print version.

Eleven crime writing cornerstones

In this Amazon list, I write about the books you have to read to understand crime fiction. And I take a stab at guessing which may have inspired some of my favorite modern authors.

Want a free copy of Sin Walks Into The Desert?

You can enter to win one right now on Goodreads. If you're not sure if it's for you, check out the reviews on Amazon.

Every bullet had hit something: An excerpt from Sin Walks Into The Desert

Over the weekend, I published Sin Walks Into The Desert on Kindle and in paperback. It traces the story of a young man searching the desert for his missing mentor. The action bounces back and forth between the present day and scenes from his troubled childhood. Unlike my previous novellas, it's driven by character, setting and emotion, not plot and dialogue.

To celebrate, I thought I'd post a bit of it here. In this scene from chapter four, Anderson has stolen his dad's .357 and is trying to teach himself to shoot:

This was heaven.

Freezing cold, two inches of crusted snow across a never-ending prairie, horizons miles away, gray skies everywhere, sharp winds turning his pink twelve-year-old skin red.

Anderson had stolen the .357 again. He crunched through the snow to set up a target he’d made in the basement. A piece of plywood, cut six feet tall and three feet wide, a red dot the size of a fist right in the middle.

He stepped back twenty yards, extended one hand. The gun felt heavy in it. He reached out with his other palm, tried to cup it beneath his fist. His hands were already turning red in the cold, his fingers going numb.

He extended both arms out in front of him, squeezed one eye shut, aimed, jerked the trigger and felt the gun kick a foot high.

The bang was so big but there was no echo, the soundwaves spreading out over the field in all directions off into infinity. That was ok. There was no one within a mile. His parents weren’t home yet. The nearest farm might assume someone was poaching and call the sheriff, but probably not and even if they did, Anderson’d be long gone before anyone made it out here.

The boy looked around the barrel of the gun at his plywood target. He squinted.

Nothing. Not a scratch.

He took four steps closer, extended and squeezed again.

The gun bounced high again. He waited for the ringing in his ears to stop and looked at the target. Again, nothing.

Anderson took big steps forward, firing with each one. Bang, bang, bang, bang until the cylinder clicked dry. By the time he got off the last shot, he was only ten feet away.

But of six bullets, only one had hit the target at all, low, crotch level, and way to the right.

One of six.

Where were the other five bullets? Anderson’s heart started to pound. Even in the cold, constant wind, his face began to burn. He looked into the distance and could see nothing except the horizon line out there.

He imagined the five bullets racing towards it, straight lines until what? They slowed, gracefully arced to the ground, buried themselves harmlessly past the snow into the soil?

No. Every bullet had hit something.

Anderson took one more long step, kicked the target over, shoved the gun in his pocket, turned, and ran the half-mile back, his boots high-stepping, breaking through the crusted snow the whole way home.

Sin Walks Into The Desert is on Amazon now on Kindle and in paperback. Enjoy.

The Single Staircase barely escapes average

The average self-published book sells 150 copies. Theoretically that's the point at which an author has exhausted his friends and family, and starts to sell books to strangers who spend their hard-earned money based on reviews, advertising, and word-of-mouth.

When I published The Single Staircase, I saw that number cited a couple places. As far as I know, there's no way to prove its validity. But still, I fixed 151 in my head as the number at which I'd qualify the book as a success. Today, I finally hit it.

Of course, there are other ways to measure success. I've given every penny I've earned from The Single Staircase to charity and will continue to do so.

Thanks to everybody who bought my first novella. And especially the 10 who took the time to review it. (Even three-star reviews almost always caused an immediate bump in sales.)

First donation from book sales made!

I got the money last night. All of $44. Not much, but it's my first payment as a professional author. My first royalty on sales of The Single Staircase. So cool. This morning I paid it forward to The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

All profits from sales of my novella will go to charities that help protect children. So thanks to everybody who purchased or reviewed it on Amazon or Good Reads. And if you haven't bought it yet, here's the link. Thank you.