2012 February | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Feb

the best advice I ever had was: leave what was behind

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

I received a very sophisticated piece of phishing spam this weekend (see image). “Bank of America” claimed that they were “unable to verify my account information” during routine maintenance. I just needed to click on a link within the email to update my records. The email had excellent English and formatting, as well as a Bank of America logo. I have plenty of other emails from my bank that don’t look quite as nice.

This might have worked if I were a Bank of America customer. However, since you couldn’t pay me to do business with Bank of America^*, I was suspicious.

click for full size

What impressed me the most was how the email avoided the common traps that security professionals warn you about. I wasn’t asked to reply with my password or SSN or mother’s maiden name. In fact, you’ll note that the email even warns me not to enter my password on any site without the SiteKey(r) logo! Phishers have grown more sophisticated, as they inevitably must. Countermeasures have arisen to protect against thieves, so thieves now devise counter-countermeasures. It’s a constant struggle.

The threat you’re expecting – a phisher asking you to email your password – may not be the threat you face in the next generation. I was thinking about this after reading a post on the Passive Voice blog about Barnes & Noble, erstwhile scourge of independent booksellers:

While Amazon is considered a disruptor company for many of the changes today – hated by independent book store owners and publishers, especially after they promoted their price-check app over the Christmas holidays, in the 80’s and 90’s Barnes and Noble was considered the “brutal capitalist” of booksellers. And its history is extremely interesting, considering what has been happening in the book world of late. Barnes and Noble was the first major bookseller to discount books, by selling The New York Times best-selling titles at 40% off the publishers’ list price. In the eighties they bought up chain book stores like B. Dalton, Doubleday Book Shops, and Bookstop. In 1998 they tried to purchase Ingram Book Group Inc., the largest book wholesaler in the United States but were unable to do so because of antitrust concerns. Supposedly one reason Waldenbooks and Borders opened so many stores was to keep up with Barnes and Noble’s superstores.

[...]

In 1998 Barnes & Noble got sued by the American Booksellers Association and 26 independent bookstores who claimed that Barnes & Noble and Borders had violated antitrust laws by using their buying power to demand from publishers “illegal and secret” discounts and then in 2003 Barnes and Noble was the first bookseller to publish its own line after acquiring Sterling Publishing Co., the nation’s largest publisher of how-to books, competing side by side with Modern Library and Penguin Classics.

In the 80s and 90s, publishers and booksellers feared “big box” bookstores grinding out the mom & pop store on the corner. Now, in the 10s, those same forces want B&N to save them from Amazon. They’re rallying behind the big box, hoping that B&N doesn’t go the way of Borders, to prevent Amazon from slashing their margins.

I can’t blame them. Amazon has made no qualms about gunning for the Big Six; obviously they’ll fire back. But IT professionals know that you don’t keep your desktop secure by protecting against last year’s threats. As soon as your adversary shows that they’ve adapted to your countermeasures, you need to respond proactively. If you don’t, you start hemorrhaging users at the fringes until your system’s hollow on the inside.

If you want to follow my attempts to stay on the nimble edge of publishing, check out my debut novel, Too Close to Miss and meet Mara Cunningham, whom readers call “flawed yet gustsy, smart [and] driven.” Download it off of Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes and start reading it within seconds.

If you want to send your friends a message that they’ll appreciate better than a password phishing email, please tell them what you thought of Too Close to Miss via Facebook, Twitter or old-fashioned word of mouth.

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* A business model that might work better than the current one, where I have to pay them to do business with them.

Feb

50 books: 2011

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

I didn’t think I made 50 books in 2011, but Goodreads tells me I pulled it off. Goodreads also makes it immensely easy to export my ratings into a .csv file, and that greatly simplified the year-end roundup.

Best Nonfiction: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, Barbara Tuchman. The most detailed, accessible and enjoyable history of the 14th century – and of medieval Europe – one could ever hope to read. Dense with detail, but also full of Tuchman’s mild irony and a real sense of having been present.
Runner-Up: War, Sebastian Junger.

Best Inspirational Nonfiction: Quitter: Turning Your Job into a Dream and your Dream into a Job, Jonathan Acuff. Acuff doesn’t give you a book full of checklists, worksheets and exercises. What he gives instead is clear entertaining prose that makes clear he’s been in the same place you are. He recounts all the same fears that you’re having right now (I highlighted more passages in this book than I do in most others) and explains how to live with them. This isn’t a manual; it’s a philosophy.
Runner-Up: Read This Before our Next Meeting, Al Pittampili.

Best Literary Fiction: Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison. Not just an important novel, but also a genuinely good novel, too – a page-turner, an engrossing adventure, a deep look inside one lonely man’s struggle for identity. Full of wit, passion and arresting imagery. Highest recommendation.
Runner-Up: The Magician’s Assistant, Ann Patchett.

Best Thriller / Mystery / Suspense: The Keepsake, Tess Gerritsen. Gerritsen writes better thrillers than anyone on the market today. The pacing cracks right along. The tension keeps mounting – I was reading this on the subway and still felt chills as the killer’s plan unfolded.
Runner-Up: The Enemy, Lee Child.

Best Sci-Fi / Fantasy: The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch. The most entertaining fantasy novel I’ve read in nearly ten years. Not only does it have a compelling milieu, fun characters and high stakes, it’s a page-turner, too! I had a hard time putting it down! Considering the overwrought exposition dumps that we’ve come to expect from fantasy fiction, Lynch’s taut prose is like an oasis in the desert.
Runner-Up: The Blade Itself, Joe Abercrombie.

Biggest Surprise: The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins. Collins is a master at depicting a strange world – somewhat familiar, but still bizarre and dangerous – with a few throwaway lines. She makes her protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, seem real without being frustrating: torn by conflicting desires but not paralyzed by them. The story thrusts dire choices at her in a constant barrage. Watching her deal with these choices is fascinating.
Runner-Up: The Rookie, Scott Sigler.

Biggest Disappointment: Three Felonies a Day, Harvey Silverglate. I wanted a collection of stories about regulators, law enforcement officials and busybodies targeting common people. Instead, I got a few overwritten anecdotes about the Feds going after local politicians, corporations, and junk bond traders. Sure, if these people were innocent then it’s a shame, but this isn’t going to arouse anyone’s sympathy.
Runner-Down: The Company We Keep, Robert and Dayna Baer.

If you’re trying to read 50 books in 2012, Too Close to Miss is a quick read – a neo-noir crime thriller set in Boston that readers say “opens with a bang and never relents.” Download your copy on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

If you read the book and liked it, or even if you thought it needed work, use Goodreads to write your own review! Word of mouth has been my biggest sales driver so far, and I value every write-up I get.

Feb

but big heads with soft bodies make for lousy lovers

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Whenever a group of people do something terrible enough to make the news, whether it’s taunting a child into suicide, lying about the creditworthiness of mortgage-backed derivatives, or adopting the SS logo for their Marine Corps squad, I see a common reaction. As the news is being passed around, wall to wall and tweet to tweet, someone asks, “How can anybody act this way? How come nobody spoke up?”

My question: “why would you expect them to?”

At what point in the curriculum do we teach children to call bullshit on people in power? I know most course loads have a few sections devoted to critical thinking, but, as I recall, that’s mostly reading comprehension and word problems. The only lessons I got in resisting peer pressure came in the drugs and alcohol section of Health class. And compared to tormenting a kid until he hangs himself, weed is harmless.

In each of these newsworthy cases, here is what happened:

Someone with a bit of authority, earned or granted, suggests doing something questionable (e.g., “let’s get drunk and drag race!”, “let’s sell credit default swaps to pension fund managers!”, “let’s adopt the logo of a Wehrmacht unit for our squadron!”).
A bunch of people agree that it’s a good idea, either because they genuinely believe it to be – they followed the same chain of reasoning the originator did – or because they like power and want to be seen supporting it.
One or two brave souls realize that this might not be a good idea (e.g., “what if we crash?”, “what if a statistically unlikely number of mortgages default?“, “hey, didn’t the SS implement the Reich’s ‘final solution’?”).
Here we fork: these dissenters either keep their objections to themselves or voice their concerns. I couldn’t say what the breakdown is, but call it 50/50.
If they voice their concerns, the originator and his supporters either shout them down (“pussies!”) or, even worse, acknowledge the logic of the objections and then water down their suggestion slightly, in bad faith, in a way that doesn’t address the core harm (e.g., “let’s only sell the derivatives that Moody’s rates AAA”).
Everyone goes along with it.
They get caught.
A fraction of them feel no guilt for what they’ve done; a sizable portion are “sorry they were caught” and grapple with guilt for a while; the fraction who recognized the issues earlier and [did/didn't] speak up are mentally broken.

There’s no solution in the existing pedagogy. You can’t teach a lack of respect for authority: even if power-worship weren’t wired into the human genome, skepticism and iconoclasm run counter to the principles of instruction. “Never take anyone’s word at face value, except mine, and only about this!” Perhaps the solution is to stop teaching, or to teach a different set of skills that will grow into independent thought, or to accept these occasional outbursts of group monstrosity as the price of a civil society.

Feb

you break my heart, you blow my mind

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

My work laptop crashed once every dozen days, so IT replaced it this week. Tim the IT guy dropped off a Thinkpad – slimmer than the last Thinkpad, already pretty svelte – and stuck around through the Outlook install and the mail import. “Just copy anything you need off your old computer onto the shared drive,” he said, “then copy it back to your new computer. You’ll have to reinstall any programs you use, but that’s it.” And even that wouldn’t mean a loss of data, as my music, notes and files all live in the cloud. Swapping computers took all of 30 minutes.

Kathryn Lilley of The Kill Zone wrote a post last week about a dog savaging her tasty leather Kindle case and losing the ereader in the carnage. I sympathize with her loss and with the frustration she feels at having to replace the Kindle. She lost her entire library!, we think. Only she really hasn’t, because as soon as she buys and activates a new one, Amazon can restore all her old books and notes to her.

We’re reaching the era where hardware only matters as a portal to content.

This scares a lot of people. Legacy publishers scramble for ways to push the lightning back into the sky, whether by censoring the Internet, suing content creators, or shaming people who buy used games. To their frustration, none of it’s working. Very few people seem to care about the competitive feature set that the latest forms of hardware provide. Volition spent millions developing Saints Row the Third and will likely recoup all of it. Angry Birds cost scant thousands to develop. Yet people seem just as engrossed by the chirping cels of the latter as by the rich graphics and hi-def sound of the former. More engrossed, perhaps, as my mother definitely would not enjoy Saints Row the Third.

Compelling content does not cost as much to create as the entertainment industry is paying to create it. The entertainment industry is being re-educated to this fact, though I use “re-education” in the same sense the North Vietnamese did. It’s a brutal process of creative destruction that is going to cost thousands of people their jobs. Obviously they’re going to fight it. They’ve invested a lot in certain institutions – publishing houses with printing presses, video game companies with design labs, record labels with recording studios – and they’ll die to defend it.

I don’t want to go all Thomas Friedman on you. This process, like all adolescent phases, will hurt as much as it helps. Going back to Kathryn Lilley’s example above: yes, she now has the power to take her entire library with her to the park for a read, but she also runs the risk of losing her entire library (or at least losing the keys to it) if a hungry Rhodesian Ridgeback gets the scent. On the historical scale, that’s not a bad problem to have. The kind of catastrophe you’d need to suffer to lose your whole library in 2002 would probably take down some of your house and/or family with it. But that’s little consolation when you’re staring at the wreckage of your favorite piece of electronics.

Still, it’s inevitable. The First World’s demand to be entertained is effectively unlimited. Get in front of that and produce interesting content with whatever means are at your disposal and you’ll do okay. Try to interrupt it and you’ll be shocked at the force of the response.

Check out my foray into this brave new world of raw content, Too Close to Miss, which Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings said “passes the key thriller test of ‘I stayed up later than intended to finish it.’” Download it off of Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes and start reading it within seconds.

If you’ve already read the book and are down with its bold digital content, please let your friends know via Facebook, Twitter or old-fashioned word of mouth.

Feb

fly me high through the starry skies, maybe to an astral plane

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Ferrett has an entertaining post on the supposed magical aspects of writing that I got a chuckle out of:

There is a lot of magic in the art of storytelling – the writer sits down, furrows his or her brow, and a world spills from their fingers. People emerge who’d never been there before, and begin to have adventures. It’s a mysterious, unfathomable Process that cannot be fully explained to mere mortals.

Or so writers would tell you.

Look, I’ve done a fair amount of writing in my time, and yes, sometimes you wake up and the faeries have sprinkled dust in your ears and lo, a story springs onto the page.

But most of the time I’m sitting down to the keys after eight hours of work, tired but ready, and today I’m going to fix the awkward dialogue in this scene, and rework the characterization so that Penelope The Heroine doesn’t come off like a complete idiot. Most days I write not because my head is buzzing like a beehive with Ideas, but because I’m 3,500 words in and one more scene means I can call it a day.

This is certainly true.

Every writing instructor and every experienced author stresses the discipline of writing. The scutwork. The drudgery. Getting up early every morning or setting time aside before you go to bed to get your pages in. You do this on the days when it feels great and you do this on the days you have a head cold. You keep at it. And eventually a novel emerges.

Ferrett is right to say that this isn’t magical.

And yet there’s a reason people call it magical, and it’s not just because that helps writers get laid. For one thing, talking about my writing, even when I was on the market, has never helped me get laid, except insofar as speaking passionately over drinks about interests another person can enjoy did it. But you can do that much with skiing.

My theory is that we call writing “magical” simply because we don’t know where it comes from.

By way of example: just two days ago, I started a scene in the current novel where the protagonist and her nemesis finally catch up. The nemesis begins laying out the history that brought them to the current crisis. He does so in a very personal and humanizing way that I hadn’t expected at the time. It was obvious to me, as I was writing the scene, that it had to unfold in this direction; it was opaque to me, before I started writing the scene, how it would go.

(I apologize for talking so abstractly, but it’s near the end and I don’t want to spoil anything)

I know exactly how I got there: by writing every day, I accreted details about these characters and their relationship until I had an organic world from which this scene grew. But I don’t know exactly how I got there. I have the oven and the ingredients, but I don’t have the recipe. I just know that I spent hours mixing things and suddenly there’s a bundt cake.

I mentioned this in one of my inaccessible political rants, so I’m not hurt if you skipped it, but: there’s a difference between unplanned and random. Evolution is the best example of that. All species are the product of natural and sexual selection, just like a puddle is the product of the shape of the hole it’s in. But those forces do not have a grand genius behind them.

Similarly, there’s a difference between a story emerging unplanned and a story emerging by magic. If you show up to your computer every day and you build a world, detail by detail, then scenes will emerge that you did not anticipate. The result is not magical, anymore than penicillin in a petri dish is magical. But nobody predicted it.

Ferrett’s right to say that writing isn’t magical, but let’s not throw away all the metaphors yet. Let’s say instead that writing is not alchemical but chemical. Writers do not tap into Atlantean wisdom and brew potions to turn lead into gold. Instead, writers show up in the lab every day. They study a hundred different samples and jot down figures in a wilting marble notebook. Then, if they’re patient and they’re diligent and they don’t hurry to publish, they may just discover a miracle.

If you want to find out what two hundred hours in the lab gets you, then buy a copy of Too Close to Miss, the Boston suspense novel that readers are calling “richly evocative,” available on Kindle, Nook or iTunes.

If you’ve already read the book and didn’t get an allergic reaction, please let your friends know via Facebook, Twitter or old-fashioned word of mouth.

Feb

tension = uncertainty x stakes (part 2)

Posted by Perich at 11:04 am

When I laid out my formula of tension = uncertainty x stakes last week, I wrote at the end:

So we have uncertainty and we have stakes. Combine them and you get tension. But tension isn’t just a straight line through the narrative. It should be an arc, building toward the end and then exploding like a firework.

Laying tension out like an algebraic formula makes it clear how to build that arc. You multiply the tension by either raising the uncertainty or raising the stakes.

Let’s go back to the WW2 commando I mentioned in the last post. We can flesh out the rough beats of a story using the details I hinted at before.

Our hero gets his assignment: parachute with a commando unit into occupied France and secure the Nazi’s rocket plans.

Uncertainty: Low. The briefing scene at HQ makes it seem like everything’s been accounted for.

Stakes: Low. Yes, with this new rocket the Germans could incinerate London from the comfort of Berlin, but we know how the war turns out. Also, that’s a rather abstract danger. We as readers care more about one beloved character losing an arm than a city full of strangers dying.
The commando team is about to be dropped into France, but anti-aircraft guns shoot down their plane. Our hero and two other officers just barely make it out of the plane before it explodes.

Uncertainty: Rising. Before, we had a full commando squad; now we have three guys with whatever equipment they have in their packs. Can they complete the mission?

Stakes: same as before.
One of the other officers starts to lag behind. His teammates realize he was nicked by shrapnel in the explosion. They can slow the bleeding, but they need a surgeon to remove the metal and prevent an infection.

Uncertainty: same.

Stakes: Rising. There’s a chance we might lose a likeable supporting character, one of the protagonist’s buddies.
The commandos rendezvous with their French Resistance contact. But it’s not their contact – it’s a Nazi spy posing as him! They kill the Ratzi and find their original contact buried in the cellar, tortured to death.

Uncertainty: Rising. How much did he reveal before dying? Is the plan compromised?

Stakes: Rising. Now the team has to hustle before the Nazi spy’s failure to report is noticed.
Using the Nazi spy’s uniform, our protagonist poses as an officer to filch some first aid gear from a nearby camp. While there, he spots an old flame of his from his days at the University of Heidelburg, tending to injured soldiers. They lock eyes from across the tent.

Uncertainty: Rising. Did she recognize him? If she did, will she break his cover?

Stakes: Rising. The smart play would be to take off running. But now our hero has to know: what is she doing here? Is she an ardent Nazi or just going along with the cause? And does she still have feelings for him?

I’ll break off the beat-by-beat here, partly because you can see where I’m going with this and partly because it’s getting exhausting. That’s four consecutive beats where we’ve cranked the tension up on our beleaguered commando unit. At this point in the story, I would cool things down for our heroes just a bit. Maybe the old flame tracks our heroes down and gives them cover IDs so they can get into a party her husband the Baron is throwing. This eases the pressure off on their getting caught, but ratchets up the romantic tension. “I can’t believe you married him!” “I can’t believe you abandoned me!” And so on.

I hope the exercise, and the formula behind it, prove useful. Whether tension is the point of your story (as in thrillers and suspense novels) or simply part of the story, it’s not something you can ignore. Look at all the characters and events you have assembled. Examine how each of them contributes either to the uncertainty or the stakes. Then start cranking on the dials until the boiler screams.

If you want to use this formula to check my math, then buy a copy of Too Close to Miss, the crime thriller that readers are calling “a new spin on a classic thriller,” available on Kindle, Nook or iTunes.

If you’ve already read the book and liked what you found, please let your friends know via Facebook, Twitter or old-fashioned word of mouth.

Feb

and it’s greatly to his credit

Posted by Perich at 10:33 am

I haven’t forgotten part 2 of my theories on building tension, but I had to hurry something along for Overthinking It this week: the next installment of OverWinging It, my review/analysis of Season 2 of The West Wing. This one covers “The Midterms,” “In This White House” and “And It’s Surely To Their Credit.” Ainsley Hayes! AIDS in Africa! H.M.S. Pinafore! And more.

Feb

tension = uncertainty x stakes

Posted by Perich at 10:05 am

Every story needs tension. Every story except the truly experimental needs to instill anticipation in the reader, to keep them turning the pages. Even those abstruse literary novels that are adapted from tales everyone knows (like The Story of Edgar Sawtelle) contain some tension, in the mystery of “how is he going to address this issue?” if nothing else.

My current genre, the thriller / crime novel, requires more tension than most. People turn to thrillers when they want compelling page-turners and the chance to escape into an exciting world. So I thought a lot about tension in writing Too Close to Miss, and I’m thinking about it even more with the next book in the series.

And I’ve hit on a formula that (I think) is original^* and (I hope) is useful:

TENSION = UNCERTAINTY x STAKES

Let’s break this down.

By uncertainty, I mean ignorance about what’s coming. Uncertainty is distinct from risk. Risk is a known quantity, like the odds of sevening out in craps. It means you can predict the outcome and make an informed decision. Uncertainty, on the other hand, is an unknown quantity. There’s a difference between not knowing how the dice will come up (risk) and not knowing what you don’t even know (uncertainty).

(Frank Knight breaks this down much more dryly in Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, so I’m not making this up)

To take a cliched action movie example: our hero is crouched behind a concrete pillar while a gunman at the other end of the street fires at him. If our hero chooses to duck across the alley, spraying bullets over his head for cover, that’s a risk. He’s taking a chance on getting shot in order to achieve the payoff of a better angle. If the gunman is actually a concealed sniper, however, then we’re dealing with uncertainty. Where is the gunman hidden? When is he going to fire next? How good of a bead does he have on our hero? And so on.

(You might say that uncertainty tends to slide into risk; as our hero gets answers to those questions above, he starts calculating the odds on when to act next)

Not seeing a lot of options here.

To use a popular example: risk is Luke and Leia swinging across the gap in the Death Star in Star Wars: A New Hope. Yes, there’s a chance they’ll fall in, but all the dangers seem pretty visible. Uncertainty is Luke stepping onto the board over the Sarlacc pit in Return of the Jedi. He seems to know how he’s getting out of this, but we don’t. He’s surrounded by guards! Leia’s already been captured! Giant flesh-eating pit monster! What’s with that jaunty grin on his face?

Uncertainty keeps the audience guessing. It actively engages the readers in the process of building the narrative. You read something weird and you can’t help but try to guess what will happen next. That makes for a much more satisfying reading experience.

By stakes, I mean what our hero is in danger of losing. In the thriller genre, this is typically a threat on the hero’s life. There’s a maniac with a knife obsessed over the pretty cop; there’s a brutal stranger who’s been torturing his victims. The use of good sensory details makes this danger more evocative.

Of course, you can put something besides the hero’s life at stake. Maybe their reputation is in danger: if word gets out, they’ll be too ashamed to ever leave the house. Or maybe it’s a relationship: they have a chance at true love, but it’s slipping away. Say what you will about their quality, but romance novels are good at playing with these sort of stakes. The millionaire heiress might lose her fortune and her reputation if anyone finds out about her relationship with that rough but tender cowboy, and so on.

The best sort of tension arises from when more than one factor is at stake. So the loner cop not only has to find the serial killer, he also has to keep his marriage from falling apart. The commando not only has to smuggle the German rocket plans back to Lisbon, he has to rescue the beautiful Baroness as well, without revealing to his comrades that she’s married to an SS commander. Force your hero to choose between what’s at stake. Or force him to compromise. This keeps the anticipation churning.

So we have uncertainty and we have stakes. Combine them and you get tension. But tension isn’t just a straight line through the narrative. It should be an arc, building toward the end and then exploding like a firework. I’ll write about how to do that next time around, as this post is getting a little long.

If you want to see my theories on building tension put to use, check out Too Close to Miss, the crime thriller that readers are calling “compelling, incisively smart, and witty,” available on Kindle, Nook or iTunes.

If you’ve already read the book and felt properly seat-edged, please let your friends know via Facebook, Twitter or old-fashioned word of mouth.
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* Googling “tension = uncertainty x stakes” yields this review of Circus Vargas. I swear I hadn’t read it before writing this post. Since people who know me know that I’m the last person on Earth who would actively seek out circus reviews, I think I can lay claim to an original thought here, or at least parallel development.

Feb

working too hard can give you a heart attack

Posted by Perich at 9:47 am

Speaking of sales numbers, here’s an update on what I’ve moved for Too Close to Miss in January.

Amazon: 37^*
B&N: 148
iTunes: Unknown at this point

I expected sales to drop when I raised the price. My hypothesis (or rather my hope) was that raising the price 4X would result in less than a 4X drop in sales. In the case of B&N, I saw almost exactly a 4X drop; with Amazon, I saw more than that. So demand for ebooks by debut authors is predictably elastic! Useful data.

As to why sales dropped so much, I have a few theories:

(1) A natural drop-off from the initial surge. The day I posted the announcement, I saw an immense number of purchases. More than twenty friends of mine shared the post on Facebook. That sort of momentum couldn’t be sustained forever.

(2) I’ve also eased up on the self-promotion this month, not out of any consideration for your feelings but due to being busy. I also want to make sure I’m finding effective means of promotion, which has taken some research and planning.

(3) Pricing myself out of the market. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration: $3.99 is not too much to pay for an ebook (and at such quality!). But the data I referenced on Tuesday suggests that the plurality of ebooks on Amazon are priced between $2 and $0. That’s where all the action is. B&N books average higher, so I’m not costing myself as many sales there.

The plan for now is to keep the price at $3.99. I didn’t hit the 1000 copies total this month (I rather ambitiously called that shot two weeks ago; oops), but at this rate I’ll easy make that in February. The plan for now is to use social media to promote word of mouth and to focus on the next Mara Cunningham novel, which is roaring around the curve as you read this.

If you haven’t checked out Too Close to Miss, my neo-noir Boston crime thriller, you can find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes for only $3.99.

If you’ve already read it, please let people know what you thought – either with a review on your site of choice or by sharing the good tidings on Twitter or Facebook.

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* Technically 38, less one refund. And Kindle credits the refund at $0.99, meaning this was before I jacked the price. So somebody bought my book, read enough of it to decide it wasn’t for them, and said, “I want my ninety-nine cents back.” I have flown too close to the sun.