Well, this is exciting — the sequel to SHADOW PLAY is off to the printers, meaning I should have copies within ten days and can start shipping these out. This one took a bit of time to get right; I had problems with my computer and only realized this morning (just as I was about to hit ‘send’) that two important clues in the original MS word version hadn’t saved, so I got hold of my typesetter and he was kind enough to fix it right away. Yayy!!!
I hope we caught all the tiny errors and typos but I know my sharp-eyed readers will pick those up and let me know. The nice thing about doing this, this way is that I can correct errors between print runs so we can identify those kinds of mistakes and fix them quickly.
I was at the Ottawa International Writers Festival last week with an all female panel of crime writers, which was a lot of fun, and I owe a big thanks to my friend Paula Wilson who came with me and helped stickhandle sales. Here’s a shot of me with organizer Sean Wilson (I don’t know the name of the other person who was also involved in the festival — we’re hunched over because we’re trying to all get in the frame of the shot and make sure that SHADOW PLAY was displayed!)
I had quite a few folks come over to where Paula and I were set up to sell books in the Festival Cafe and say they’d been looking in bookstores (one fellow had been to three in Ottawa !) trying to find my books, but of course, I don’t sell through bookstores.
I only sell through reboundpress.com, as I need to make this small press work and while I love bookstores, and spend a fortune in them myself, the discount they need from the list price in order to keep afloat themselves would put me under. So I hope readers continue to order online or search me out at author events and author pop-ups if they’re local so that we can keep this series going. The good news, though, is that I have HUNGRY GHOSTS in stock again (it had sold out) as well as UMBRELLA MAN and SHADOW PLAY:
The other good news this week is that I now have the rights back to the entire Inspector Ramirez series! I had already put UMBRELLA MAN and HUNGRY GHOSTS back in print; hope to get THE BEGGAR’S OPERA and THE POISONED PAWN back in print this year as well.
And we are moving forward with The Toby Awards: a pal in Victoria who does silversmithing is coming up with little eyeglasses for the metal Toby and another friend is working on a wooden base for it. Hope to start meeting with some of the folks who offered to help — maybe later this week or the week after — and figure out how to get readers involved — it’s been so crazy busy at work that I haven’t had time to think about this, but I’m on it now! As a reminder, the Toby Award will for Canadian mystery authors, who like me, fall through the cracks (Nita Prose, at our panel, called me a “hybrid”) because we were shortlisted and won literary awards previously when published by traditional publishers but no longer qualify now that we are self-published and not selling through regular retail channels.
The other Toby Award will be for jacket cover art for Canadian mystery novels (I haven’t decided yet whether to keep that one Indy as well, or open it up — hope to get some input on that front). My hope is that libraries will get involved in that one, because the covers, as you can see above, can be spectacularly beautiful and complex, and there is no national Canadian award for jacket cover art. I have it in my head that libraries will display the top ten and have a way for readers to vote for their favourites, so if you are with a library and might be interested, let me know!
Peggy Blair - Getting Published 