The past several weeks I have been preparing my first novel, Sparkles of Discontent, for publishing. https://booklocker.com/books/10538.html
For those of you interested, the story is about Nia D’Amato, a feisty but impulsive Boston Police detective, struggling with demons from her past and a biased deputy commander. She is called to a pawnshop robbery gone wrong and questions an eyewitness with a suspicious cover story. Days later she meets the witness again in an alley in back of the jewelry store where he worked.
Her investigation uncovers an inside robbery of high-end diamonds. She follows one of the suspects fleeing on a greyhound bus to Canada through a raging snowstorm. The bus gets delayed by downed power lines and is forced to stop at the Vermont Inn.
Ongoing tensions at the inn between the owner and his wife escalate and she storms out, quickly finding herself lost and fighting to stay alive. An increasingly nervous suspect, an obnoxious bus passenger, an undercover cop, a frantic owner, and a handyman who is more than he appears to be, set the stage for a tension filled evening at the inn while a blizzard rages outside. Nia arrives at the inn in time for a final dramatic confrontation with a murderer.
I have been using BookLocker (https://www.booklocker.com) to handle most of my publishing needs. I tortured friends and family to read and provide feedback on the manuscript. My wife, daughter, and I scoured the text for spelling or grammatical errors. Even after a number of careful reads through the document, we would find some errors. When we reached the point of what we thought was an error free document, we sent it off to Angela at BookLocker. I used a graphic designer recommended by them for the book cover, providing only a stock photo from iStock.
A few weeks later I received a printers proof copy in the mail that I quickly approved for printing. So the paperback can now be found at BookLocker (which also has a PDF version), Amazon, and Barnes and Noble. (ISBN: 978-1-64438-989-8). There were formatting issues with getting an epub version out at the same time, so I’m told it won’t be available for a couple of weeks.
I’m just starting to plan my marketing of the book which includes advertising it at conferences (CrimeBake, etc.), setting up talks at local libraries, using this blog, facebook, twitter, email contacts, working with other writing groups like the Maine Mystery Writers, etc.
I hope you’ll tell your friends and family about the book. Word of mouth is a powerful ally. Thanks.
Words to Die For 