#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.]

No damn character arcs: The story behind the missing Owl and Raccoon novella

In January 2015, I sent a breathless get-stoked message to my email list. "The third Owl and Raccoon novella is coming! A kindergartner disappears from a moving school bus! Here's the gripping opening chapter!"

Cut to July 2016. I finally published the third Owl and Raccoon novella. Except it was called Not With A Bang. And the missing kid was a teenager. And the bus was a city bus. And, yeah, obviously not the same book.

So what happened to the novella I'd titled Last Child Missing?

One of my goals when I sat down to write the very first Owl and Raccoon novella, The Single Staircase, was to avoid anything that looked like a character arc. Owl and Raccoon were adults uniquely suited, in different ways, to hunt for missing children. The decision they make in that book's final pages was based on decades of dedicated police work and frustrated personal lives. They weren't meant to evolve, they were meant to find Sophia Grey.

But after the second Owl and Raccoon novella, WDYG, I started to get a clear vision of where Owl and Raccoon were going in their lives. I knew them as humans. And I wanted to let them follow their different paths.

So when I wrote Last Child Missing, I ended it with a moment that would irrevocably alter the course of their lives. And here it is:

Raccoon executes a pedophile and Owl covers it up.

I came so close to publishing that book. But I couldn't do it. Because I hated my ending. It was like the serial killer from The Wire. Or the episode where you learned Buffy was hallucinating. Or that whole arc where Crockett got amnesia. It was a moment so stunning it eradicated the grinding, quiet, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other universe I had worked so hard to create.

So I sat on Last Child Missing. For sixteen months.

This was harder than it sounds. While Sin Walks Into the Desert is my most successful book, it's had tons of advertising, awards and reviews supporting it. Meanwhile, the Owl and Raccoon novellas just kept plowing forward, earning readers through giveaways, word-of-mouth, and the support of blogs like The Locked Room Mystery and The Invisible Event. I needed to keep the momentum going with a third installment, but I couldn't make myself publish Last Child Missing.

Unfortunately coming up with a third mystery was hard. Wait, that's inaccurate. I came up with dozens of great mysteries. It was coming up with one great solution that took forever.

But eventually, I figured it out. And I'm glad I waited. Not With A Bang moves Owl and Raccoon forward in a way that's true to the characters and the series as a whole. The title is an allusion not only to the book's end, but to the struggle I faced writing it. In the real world, there's no big catharsis and there's no dramatic closure. There's just people making the best decisions they can with flawed and incomplete information.

Or as Owl himself says, "We're all good men. Things just go sideways on us."

[Ed. - If you've never read any Owl and Raccoon books, I recently published The Single Staircase, WDYG and Not With A Bang in one collected box set entitled Owl And Raccoon: Locked. You can get it on Amazon now.]

Not With A Bang featured today on The Invisible Event

Mystery blogs like The Invisible Event, The Locked Room, Brandywine Books  and Crime Fiction Lover have been so encouraging to me. Most days I feel like publishing a book is just flipping pennies into a well. And then, at last, there's a splash.

Today the former has a five-star review up of the third book in the Owl & Raccoon series, Not With A Bang:

[W]hat I particularly love about Ingwalson’s writing is how inside of those words he finds so much space for pathos, and fear, and hope, and redemption, and love, and all the other quiet things that gnaw away at us, and it makes these achingly human stories motivated by these beautifully universal themes. But — crucially — he does it without ever smacking you over the head about how Human and Universal his themes are, and throws in an excellent update of the impossible crime while doing so, keeping everything moving at a brilliant pace and slowly binding these threads tighter to each other on the way to the solution.

And the blog's writer let me publish a guest post, too:

The man’s nose had been broken and his teeth were bloody. He was looking into the cop car. And he was laughing at me. 

Why was he laughing at me? 

For a second, I couldn’t figure it out. I was on an overnight ride-along with the Denver police department. And a stabbing at a club had incited a legit riot. Hundreds of half-drunk club-goers had poured onto the street and for several minutes, our city was chaos.

Go check the whole thing out.

Owl & Raccoon #3. Get it first, get it free.

Not With A Bang, the next Owl & Raccoon locked room mystery, is just about wrapped up. So this is a reminder that everybody on my email list gets a free advance reader copy. Subscribe in the sidebar of this blog before July 17 if you're interested.

Maybe you shouldn't try to disrupt your category after all

I work in advertising. For almost 20 years, I've been telling clients they need to stand out in the sea of sameness. Zig when the market zags. And so on.

When I started publishing the Owl & Raccoon series, I took my own advice. I looked at the covers of competitive police procedurals and flipped everything on its head. Instead of moody photos, I went with bright colors. Instead of modern type, I went with hand drawn titles. I asked for metaphorical illustrations instead of clear depictions of starring characters.

The authors I know told me I was making a huge mistake. They said my covers looked like they were meant for children's stories. And that crime readers are more likely to buy books if they are clearly marked as a series.

But I stuck to my guns. And I have to admit, when I put paid advertising behind my giveaways, the covers do pop off Amazon's Top 100 Free page. But the Owl & Raccoon books aren't making money. The Single Staircase has sold about 300 copies, WDYG half that. (Yes, I still give all proceeds from The Single Staircase to charity.) Compare those sales figures to Sin Walks Into The Desert, which has sold more than 9,000 copies. True, Sin Walks Into The Desert has that big fancy award, but most readers review the Owl & Raccoon novellas just as highly. What's more, Owl & Raccoon have actual fans. People tweet and email me to ask when their next case is coming out. I feel like The Single Staircase should be just as successful as Sin Walks Into The Desert.

Maybe it's not the covers' fault. But I want to try something. So yesterday I republished the cover art on the books' Kindle pages. If I see a sales bump, I'll finesse the layouts and apply the change to the print covers too, as well as the upcoming third Owl & Raccoon novella. In the meantime, if you have thoughts, let me know.

Take the poll: What should I publish next?

Cover art for upcoming books. Which should I publish first?

“Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed.”

I always assumed Sylvia Plath wrote those words. But even the Internet isn't sure. It's true, though. Writing isn't difficult. It's something you're just sort of compelled to do.

But rewriting, editing, publishing - that shit is hard. It takes money, dedication and time. End result being I have three (count ‘em) novellas finished. And zero energy to brush them up and get them out the door. I need to pick one and focus. So what do you want to read next?

To Guns is the third book in the Sin and Nicki series. It’s a full-tilt, neo-Western shootout, putting the two in a Mexican standoff with meth dealers and Italian assassins in the middle of the Colorado Rockies. Tonally, it's close to Sin Walks Into The Desert. While it makes sense on its own, Nicki's storyline is based on her actions in Regret Things.

The Last Child Missing is the third Owl and Raccoon novella. Like the others, it begins with the detectives showing up on the scene of a seemingly impossible kidnapping. The entire timeline takes place in one six-hour period, as they race to uncover how a five-year-old vanished from a crowded bus on the first day of school. It can stand on its own, but the climax will hit you harder if you’ve read the other two novellas, starting with The Single Staircase.

The third book is named Sever. It’s a new genre for me. The story is about a college campus that’s simultaneously set upon by four axe murderers, two of them serial killers. It’s a horror story, gory as hell. And it’s also a first-person love letter to those four magic years when you feel invincible, like you can drink and have sex and sleep late and lie in the sun and never die.

My marketing brain says there's no rush to publish any of this stuff. I have some good opportunities coming up for Regret Things, and it makes sense to ensure it gets traction before moving on to another book. But fuck it. What are you most excited about reading? Let me know in the poll at the top of my righthand sidebar.

Why do you write?

I never really asked myself that question. Why do I write? I don't know. Why do you breathe, jerk? But then there's this from Field Notes:



"I'm not writing it down to remember it later. I'm writing it down to remember it now." That's just inspiring as hell. So I decided maybe I'd think about why exactly I've spent the last 40 years writing. (And it has been about that long.)

People tell me I have a recognizable voice. I disagree. The dizzying Manhattan chapters of Regret Things aren't anything like the cop dialogue of The Single Staircase, which is nothing like the haunted noir of Sin Walks Into The Desert.

And the themes of my books seem disparate to me, too. Sin is about family and violence, while the characters in Regret Things are obsessed with materialism and driven by a need to be desired.

I asked, ok, what do my books have in common, then? And I came up with this. They're all about how our lives are ruled by ghosts. About the things we do to get right with the dead. About our search for the vanished.

Owl & Raccoon are barely human. They're detectives defined by their hunt for missing children.  And they know their mission is hollowing them out, stealing their evenings and ruining their relationships, but they can't stop themselves:

Back in the Explorer a few questions later, night fallen all around. "This is what I do," Owl thought. "I get in and out of this car chasing shadows."

It's the same in Sin Walks Into the Desert. As a child, Sin spends his days in his big sister's empty room, writing her letters he will never send. And years later, he leaves his job and girlfriend to hike into the desert, guns on his belt and go-bag over his shoulder, to learn if and how and why his uncle has disappeared.

It'd be a spoiler to tell you whose death begins the cycle of violence in Regret Things. But Nicki's no dummy. She knows she's committing a terrible crime to get right with someone who'll never know what she's done. When her accomplice asks her if the dead would even want revenge, she replies it doesn't matter:

"The dead don't live through us. We live through them."

So why do I write? Maybe I'm like Owl. I got shadows to chase. Shadows I never expect to catch.

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.)

New novella dropping within a month

When I was writing The Single Staircase, I'd send rough drafts to a cop I know. He'd tell me whether the dialogue and investigation felt authentic. He'd also explain the interworkings of the police department. His insights were the inspiration for WDYG, a new novella starring Owl and Raccoon. I got a printer's proof yesterday, and hope to have it published on Amazon within a couple weeks. The cover art was designed and donated by Jen.

Like the first mystery, this novella is a combination of modern police procedurals and classical locked room mysteries. What's new is the focus on Owl and Raccoon's contentious relationship with Homicide and SWAT.

I have another piece of news, which is almost surreal considering how busy I've been at work. I've finished a first draft of my first full-length novel. It's something I have been working on, in fragments, for almost 13 years. It's sort of an epic story of crime and consequences, stretched out over a decade and played out in places like Manhattan, Las Vegas and the high plains of Wyoming. I have no idea when I might get it published. Don't hold your breath. But it's coming.