Let’s Talk Books

I spent most of yesterday working on my new Tinder Street book, A Changing World, and as always with this series, a lot of time was dedicated to research and checking facts to get the timeline correct for the events that were happening in the last half of the Great Depression. I’m about 8,500 words into the story now, and plan to finish another chapter today and then I will print out what I have for Miss Terry to edit and proofread before I send it off to my other two proofreaders.

Speaking of books, several people have asked me if any more of the Big Lake or John Lee Quarrels series will be out as audiobooks, as well as the Tinder Street series. At this time I have no plans to do so because the time and expense involved in producing an audiobook far exceeds the return from them. I know some authors that do very well with audiobooks but I am not one of them. I sell hundreds of e-books and dozens of print books for every audiobook I sell. It just makes good business sense to focus my time and resources on what most positively affects the bottom line.

Since we’re talking about books, I thought today I would tell you about some other books I’ve been enjoying by some excellent authors. First and foremost would be my friend Ben Rehder, who just released Weed Killer, another installment in his excellent Blanco County mystery series. If you like my Big Lake books, you’re going to love reading about the hijinks of the people in Blanco County. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

Another good friend of mine is retired police officer Patrick O’Donnell, author of the Cops And Writers series, which every crime and mystery author should read at least twice. But you don’t have to be an author to enjoy this series. If you’re interested in police work and how one starts their career as a police officer, give them a read.

Patrick also has a very good crime-based fiction series out, Brew City Blues, following the career of Army veteran Michael Collins from his days as a recruit officer with the Milwaukee Police Department fresh out of the police academy and going through his field training and probationary period and now as a full-fledged patrolman, with plenty of action and adventure along the way. If you want to read a cop series written by a cop’s cop, this one’s for you.

My friend Randy Atwood and I share some common background, as he spent the first sixteen years of his career working in newspapers. If you are interested in Native American stories, check out Randy’s Heart Chants, the second book in his Phillip McGuire mystery series, about a burnt-out former foreign correspondent who leaves the news business to run a bar and gets drawn into the mystery when two Navajo students go missing from a nearby Indian college.

I never had the opportunity to meet Karl Bort before he passed away but I wish I had because I think he was my kind of guy. But I have been fortunate enough to get to know him through his Detective Nicholas Silvano crime thriller series, based on his 27-year career as a police officer in Cleveland, Ohio.

That should keep you reading for a while until I get my new Tinder Street book out and start on my next John Lee Quarrels mystery.

Thought For The Day – Show respect to people even when they don’t deserve it. Respect is a reflection of your character, not theirs.