Mirror Ball Man

Ready to rock

Some 75,000 words have been written and rewritten and rewritten and read and rewritten and edited and rewritten and copyedited and rewritten. The third Libertyport Mystery starring one-hit-wonder Baxter McLean is locked down and ready to roll. And the title is <fanfare> ... REVOLUTION ROCK. As you can read in the post below, it's inspired by real events in the hazy, crazy 1970s, when two different groups of leftist radicals found targets worth attacking in ... Newburyport!?! I've merged their missions into one and added a murder - and all that happens in the first three pages. Then we flash forward to 2006 - present day for Baxter - and a parole hearing for one of these domestic terrorists. And, well, that's all I'm going to tell you, except that familiar characters return, including Davey and Abigail and Chief Investigator Wankum, and it's autumn in Libertyport, which we all know is beautiful, right? Cover design is underway, and I expect to have copies on the streets by Halloween. Stay tuned!

He's baaa-aack

It's time to check in with Mirror Ball Man fans. As most of you know, lately I've been putting my online energy into promoting the Essex Coastal Byway Guide. That will continue through the summer, my primo sales season. But since mid-January I've been working hard each morning for an hour or three on the third Libertyport mystery featuring one-hit wonder Baxter McLean and his neighbors in scenic, historic, gentrifying and ever so slightly wacky Libertyport.

I'm going to save the title reveal for sometime in the near future, but there are some things I can tell you.

The book is once again inspired by real-life history in Newburyport, where I live. Our town was attacked twice in the 1970s by American radicals. In 1970, one cell attacked the National Guard armory on Low Street, stole guns and ammunition and set the place on fire. This is the same bunch who robbed a bank in Brighton a few days later and shot Boston policeman Walter Schroeder. It's all on Google.

 

And in 1976, another, even more hapless bunch set off a bomb in the beautiful old Superior Courthouse overlooking the Frog Pond. Some of these folks went underground but most all of them ended up in prison for long stretches.

The idea for the book came from: A) it's pretty amazing that in under two miles I can walk my dog past two places where crazy radical violence happened recently, right here in Newburyport; which led me to B) the ol' what-if...

Oh, yeah - It's a nonfiction book!

Looking at that last post, I realized I've never told mirrorballman.com readers about my next book. It's not going to be a Baxter book. The next Libertyport mystery starring Baxter McLean will come in 2013, I know what it's about and whodunit and everything. You're gonna love it. (Junior high school crushes! '70s radicals! Boating mishaps! And of course murder.) But this fall I am going to publish the ESSEX COASTAL BYWAY GUIDE, a sort of travel book about the Essex Coastal Scenic Byway. When the Byway effort really got rolling last year - when they started putting up signs - I had a moment of inspiration. Usually, of course, I would lie down and wait for it to pass. But this time, I didn't want to wake up in a year or two and found out somebody else had written the byway guide and was selling scads of copies. That would have been a real painful woulda coulda shoulda moment. So instead I got busy. I'm almost done with the writing, and as I said there's a terrifically cool cover in the works. More soon. But now I gotta go write.

It's a cover!

There is now an awesome cover design for the ESSEX COASTAL BYWAY GUIDE, which I will unveil shortly at a strategic moment. It features original papercuts by North Shore artist Dylan Metrano. Check him out in the meantime.

Kindle Direct Publishing, free and me

Open kimono time!

So I got the spreadsheet on my February sales from Kindle Direct Publishing, which tells me how my give-it-away experiment worked for "Mirror Ball Man" and "Mermaid Blues." You can read all the background here. But basically the idea is that you give away your book for free to Kindle users for a couple-few days, and the ensuing hubbub results in paid sales when free is over. It's the latest fad among us self-published types. I figured since "Mirror Ball Man" had been out for a year, it was worth a try.

Well.

If I'm reading this right, I gave away 10,867 copies of "MBM" to US customers over the three days, plus 132 in the UK and 23 in Germany, for a grand total of 11,022. Many of those people if not most will never read it, they're simple grabbing everything they can for free. But I hope a few become fans.

More directly affecting my wallet, for the remaining 10 days of the month, I sold a total of 161 copies at $4.99 list in the U.S., plus two more in the UK. Since I'm mostly focused on selling the paperback edition (at $14.99), that's more Kindle copies than I've sold in any one month; lately it tended to be a handful to a dozen. So, not bad. I also sold 38 copies of "Mermaid" in February, which is more than I would have expected, but not exactly "Hunger Games" numbers.

All in all, it's almost enough to pay for that new water heater, or it will be whenever KDP makes that direct deposit. Which may be the clearest glimpse I can give you into the life of the independent writer.

Free book = big numbers. Now what?

About 36 hours ago, the Kindle edition of my 2010 Libertyport Mystery, "Mirror Ball Man," went FREE on Amazon.com's Kindle store. Right here. At the moment, people have downloaded almost 6,800 copies more than 7,100 copies - several times the number sold up till now - and "Mirror Ball Man" is #22 among all free books on Amazon and #3 among all free mysteries. Since tomorrow is a holiday, I'm going to keep the free promo going through at least Tuesday, to get all the freebie fans who access Amazon at work rather than home.

I'm doing this for obvious reasons, foremost being to get the book in the hands of more readers, especially readers outside the North Shore, where most copies have sold up till now. I also hope that some of those folks will want to read the sequel, "Mermaid Blues" and pay to do so. (I've sold four Kindle copies of "Mermaid" in those 36 hours. Four.)

Win or lose, it's been kind of fun to see the book getting out there so widely, even if most of those 6,800 people who put it on their Kindle never get around to reading it. The whole initiative was inspired by Chuck Wendig.

Wendig is a horror and action writer from "Pennsyltucky," most revered here at headquarters for his writing about writing, at his Terrible Minds blog and in tomes like the hilarious and brutally honest Confessions of a Freelance Penmonkey. He's got an agent and sometimes a regular old-school publisher, but he's also leapt, presumably drink and firearm in hand, into self-publishing and Kickstarter and all of the other changes that are roiling the industry.

A few weeks back, when Wendig noticed that sales had leveled off for his "Shotgun Gravy," a novella about a teenage, um, anti-bullying activist named Atlanta Burns (great character name that) he decided to "take the plunge" and join the KDP Select* program, which meant he could make the book available for free for a few days via Amazon. The idea being that a bunch of free samples seems somehow to lead to a (comparatively modest) number of actual sales. He later wrote about how that worked out for him and why he's actually kinda creeped out by the whole thing, long-term.

Like Wendig, I'm not thrilled by the idea of giving stuff away, nor by the way Amazon has become the million-pound gorilla of the publishing world. But like Wendig, I'm willing to try pretty much anything once to get the books out there and maybe add a few bucks to my Penmonkey accounts. Sales of "Mirror Ball Man" have actually picked up a little bit lately, as readers who discover "Mermaid Blues" want to try the first book in the series. But it's not exactly making me rich, so I figured if it's good enough for Wendig, I would give it a shot.

When the free promotion ends (after five days, or sooner if I so choose), "Mirror Ball Man" will still be available for borrowing by Kindle owners who are also in the Amazon prime program, and I actually get a buck or two from that. But right now I just wanted to go wide and see what would happen. In a few days I'll tell you how it all came out.

*KDP is Kindle Direct Publishing, an Amazon subsidiary.

Bye for now to 'Foley's'

If you've read either of the books, you know that Baxter spends a lot of time at a Libertyport coffee shop called Foley's, especially in the morning, when he is trying to shake off his hangover and whatever horrible things he's seen in the preceding 24 hours. Not a huge surprise to those of you who know Newburyport that Foley's is based on Fowle's, an historic State Street coffee shop were I...you know. Well, last week Fowle's closed, at least temporarily. A new tenant restaurant is going to take over the space and renovate, and the newsstand that takes up half the space is going away for good. I wrote about all of this and its local cultural significance for the Globe. (I took the picture, too.)

I killed a guy here. In the book, I mean.

Thanks, Wicked Local & the Current

There was a great write-up on me and "Mermaid Blues," really mostly an interview, by Rosemary Herbert in the Newburyport/Amesbury Current on Friday and on their Wicked Local websites. Rosemary's lede includes an awfully cautious parenthetical: Joel Brown cannot resist perpetrating (fictional) murders in our neck of the North Shore. But still, how could I not like it? Bonus: I sent them a few pix, but they used the one of me and Buffy on the beach, so now the dog's famous.

I lied to Stephen King

My Sunday Globe Magazine confessional about the pathetic little fib that pushed me onward to finish "Mirror Ball Man" and eventually self-publish these two books.