Welcome, new folks!

Hi, there, and welcome! About fifty of you joined the list here from a mystery/thriller promotion event in which Got Trouble was featured. I hope you enjoyed that story of a blue-collar mom tangling with the law and finding her way amid spies, shadowy government agencies, and way too many bullets. If you're looking for another of my mysteries, I have What Grows From the Dead, another mystery set in modern day North Carolina. Also, I want to make sure you know about my free fantasy mystery, Traitors Unseen. If you haven't gotten it, you can get it free here (the site will ask you to sign up for this newsletter, which you're already getting) or here from Smashwords. It's also on Apple Books, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble. Please, enjoy with my compliments.

Indie Fantasy Con - happening right now!

There's a great Facebook group for indie fantasy readers called Indie Fantasy Addicts, and they're trying something new this year - they're running an online convention today with tons of authors and themes and conversations and books. I'm on a panel at 3:15 today on tropes in fantasy with four other authors. The Zoom Link is here if you want to check it out. The full schedule is here:

There's also a great Authors Alley to see, featuring tons of indie fantasy authors. There are giveaway books from most of them, and there's a giveaway contest with tons and tons of book prizes at the bottom. They usually communicate through the Facebook group, so it would help to be a member if you want to be notified of prizes.

A good week for the Inquisitors' Guild

I was lucky enough to land a BookBub promotion last week for my three-book box set of Inquisitors' Guild books. I added some other advertising on to stack with that promo, and over the five days the books were free, over 25,000 people downloaded the books.

By comparison, I've had about 125,000 downloads of all of my books over the six years I've been publishing, so 20% of those downloads came over five days this month. Obviously, I don't make any direct income from the free book downloads, but hopefully, more people discover my books and will try others, and the other thing that happens is that the book gets a boost in Amazon's algorithms, which means that a lot more people find it in Kindle Unlimited. Here's a graph on the same timescale showing the boost in page reads:

The blue part of those bars is the Inquisitors' Guild box set. As you can see from the early part of the month, I typically have 1000-2000 pages a day in KU, and the promo has increased that a lot. When I did this with What Grows From the Dead last year, the boost lasted a month or two, so hopefully there will be a lot more folks enjoying Frosthelm as we move into Spring.

I'm still figuring out the best ways to advertise and reach readers, but these BookBub things are really great (when I can get them - they're very competitive and hard to land).

Writing progress

I'm nearly done with my next mystery! I'm at 95,000 words, and I have probably 5,000-8,000 more words, maybe six more chapters, to go. It's always exciting to be near the end, but it gets tricky, too - like when a gymnast jumps off the balance beam after doing a million tricky things, there's still the potential that you'll fall flat on your face on the dismount.

I'll be trying to stick the landing here, and then I'll go through a detailed edit to bend it all into better shape, and to make sure all the things I added get set up properly and used, and anything I changed as I went still make sense, and to make sure there's a satisfying bunch of plot threads running through the whole thing. Then it's off to my beta readers. I think it might be ready for release by the end of March, but there's still a lot of work to do.

After that, I have a sci fi novel that's about 1/3 done that I'd like to get back to, and after that, I'll have to see what I'm into - I've got a start on two others that I've paused, or I might try something new. It's been a while since I've done an Inquisitors' Guild book, so I might try another one of those.

A SPSFC review

I posted a review of one of the quarterfinalists in the indie sci fi competition (SPSFC) that my team is judging. I'll have five more of these reviews in the coming weeks, and then we'll be on to the semifinals. This book is Wakers of the Cryocrypt, an interesting story about a far distant future where humanity is all but extinct and the world is populated by sentient mechanical life forms.

Some stories to try

I'm part of several author collectives, and we share each other's work to try to help all of us reach more readers. In many cases, the books we share are are free or discounted. Sometimes, they ask that you sign up for a newsletter like this one. Here are some new books I have to share this month:

First, I have Stranded by A.K. DuBoff. This is a brand new book, released February 7, and it already has over 40 high ratings on Amazon. The cover is awesome - a crashed ship on a distant world with forlorn humans in sciencey backpacks. Great stuff. That's the story, too - shipwrecked humans on a planet full of mysteries struggling to survive. DuBoff has written a ton of sci fi, so there are plenty of other titles to check out too.

I also have a group of ninety fantasy and fantasy romance books, all under $5 or free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers. There's a tremendous variety here to choose, and they're all a bargain.

Thank you for reading!

Thanks so much for being part of my literary endeavor here. I'm so happy to have you join me. I'm excited to share some new books with you this year. As always, I love to hear from readers, so if you have any thoughts on my books (or others), or suggestions for something new, or a kind of story you're really hoping for, please let me know.

May the Bloodmother watch over you - 

Dave