Crime thriller Disintegration by Scott Nicholson is available at Amazon, Amazon UK, B&N, and Smashwords. Signed copies available at Haunted Computer.

Disintegration was written four or five years ago during a dark time in my life. The title just sums up what was going on, and what I had to write to survive. I knew it was going to be dark and bleak, and that good people would do bad things and terrible people would do worse things. The evil twins are just a symbol of where I was at the time. And I knew the ending was not going to be happy, and I put off writing the last five pages for nearly a year because I knew what had to happen and I didn’t want to type it and make it real.

I don’t think I ever showed it to my agent. I thought it was too dark to ever share with people, and I was a little ashamed of what it revealed about me. I think stories help us solve what is going on inside our heads and hearts, but it also leaves us vulnerable because written communication is so personal and intimate. If it wasn’t for self-publishing, and the encouragement of mystery writer Vicki Tyley, I never would have released it. My wife said, “Somebody might need that message.”

With low expectations, I put it out during my 90-day Kindle Giveaway Blog Tour last fall, and it hit #30 on the Kindle list. That was weird, to have the biggest success of my writing career on a book I never wanted to publish, on my own, after six books with a traditional press. That taught me something about “writing to market” or “writing to please people.” First, you have to take chances and put it all there. If you get the back end, and the connection with readers, that’s the bonus and completes the purpose of the story.

Luckily, I’ve put the pieces back together over the years since I first wrote the novel, and it helped launch me onto other books and success. I owe a bit to Jim Thompson and James M. Cain and some of the other noir writers, and William Goldman, Shirley Jackson, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, Patricia Highsmith, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Ira Levin, James Lee Burke…that list could just keep going.

I am a full-time writer now, but I’m only as good as whatever chance I take today, whatever basic principles of the craft I discover anew, and whatever I get back from a reader. Really, I’m only as good as the last sentence. And the next. There’s no other way to write a novel except by building it out of nothing. It’s easy to stay humble when you are tackling something that is essentially impossible. Once in a while, you get lucky and the words fall in place and share something about what it’s like to be on the crazy ride we call Life.

Enjoy the ride.

—
Scott Nicholson is author of more than 20 books, including Liquid Fear, The Red Church, and Speed Dating with the Dead. His website is www.hauntedcomputer.com and he wastes too much time being clever on Facebook and glib on Twitter

Scott Nicholson
http://www.hauntedcomputer.com
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About Sibel…

Sibel Hodge is the author of romantic comedies and chick lit mysteries. In her spare time she’s Wonder Woman!

Her first novel, Fourteen Days Later, was short-listed for the Harry Bowling Prize 2008 and received a highly commended by the Yeovil Literary Prize 2009. It is a romantic comedy with a unique infusion of British and Turkish Cypriot culture. Written in a similar style to Sophie Kinsella and Marian Keyes, Fourteen Days Later is My Big Fat Greek Wedding meets Bridget Jones. My Perfect Wedding is the sequel to Fourteen Days Later, although it can be read as a standalone novel.

The Fashion Police was a runner up in the Chapter One Promotions Novel Competition 2010 and nominated Best Novel with Romantic Elements 2010 by The Romance Reviews. It is a screwball comedy-mystery, combining murder and mayhem with romance and chick-lit, and the first in a series featuring feisty, larger-than-life insurance investigator, Amber Fox. Written in a similar style to Janet Evanovich and Myron Bolitar, The Fashion Police is Stephanie Plum meets Harlan Coben. Be Careful What You Wish For is the second Amber Fox Mystery.

Tell us a bit about Be Careful What You Wish For…

Be Careful What You Wish For is the second Amber Fox murder mystery that follows on from The Fashion Police:

For fans of Janet Evanovich, Kate Johnson, and Gemma Halliday…

Armed with cool sarcasm and uncontrollable hair, feisty insurance investigator Amber Fox is back in a new mystery combining murder and mayhem with romance and chicklit…

Three deaths.
A safety deposit box robbery.
The boxing heavyweight champion of the world.

Somehow, they’re all related, and Amber has to solve a four year old crime to find out why.

As she stumbles across a trail of dead bodies and a web of lies spanning both sides of the social divide, it’s starting to get personal. Someone thinks Amber’s poking her nose in where it’s not wanted, sparking off a game of fox and mouse – only this time, Amber’s the mouse.

Amber’s forced to take refuge in the home of her ex-fiancé, Brad Beckett, and now it’s not just the case that’s hotting up. So is the bedroom…

All Levi Carter wanted to be was the boxing heavyweight champion of the world, but at what cost?

All Carl Thomas wanted was to be rich, but would his greed be his downfall?

All Brad Beckett wants is to get Amber back, but there’s a reason for the ex word.

Be careful what you wish for…you might just get it.

Amber Fox is a feisty, wise-cracking insurance investigator with wild hair. Is she anything like you at all?
Absolutely! She’s got a lot of her in me but I’m not telling you exactly which bits for fear I might incriminate myself!

What was your favorite part of Be Careful What you Wish For?
Ooh, that’s sooo hard! It’s my baby so it’s all my favourite. I love the fact that it’s got a solid mystery combined with a lot of humor, wit, and romance. Probably typing The End is my favourite part – then you know that all the ideas in your head have finally come together.

Will we get to hear more from Amber Fox in the future?
Amber loves to talk so she’ll definitely back to tell another story. Just try and shut her up!

How do you get the ideas for your books?
It’s all the voices in my head that make me do it. I write so I won’t have to be medicated!

Do you ever suffer from Writer’s Block?
Sometimes. When that happens I usually drink a bottle of wine and throw ideas around with my husband. Well, that’s my excuse for cracking the wine open anyway!

What’s your favorite thing to snack on while writing?
Nuts (no jokes, please!).

Do you plot everything before you start writing or do you just see where the story takes you?
I’m definitely a fly-by-the-seat of my Wonder Woman knickers kind of girl! I think I’ve got Plotophobia. I make most of it up as I go a long – creative or crazy? I’m not sure which.

What are you working on now?
I’m working on some new ideas for my next chicklit novel which will be called The Hen Party. It’s about a group of girls who go to Vegas for…yes, you’ve guessed it, a hen party. But they end up getting much more than they bargained for. I’m also hoping to start the next Amber Fox mystery at the end of summer.

Do you have any advice for aspiring indie authors?
First and foremost, you have to write a good book with a good blurb and cover if you want to succeed. But to do that, you need to learn your craft well. That’s the first hard bit over with! The second is marketing and promoting, and this is pretty hard, too. What works for someone else won’t always work for you, and it takes up a lot of time that you could spend on writing. But I’ve mingled with some inspiring and fantastic authors and met some great fans because of it. Would you get that if you were trad-pubbed with a marketing department? I don’t think so. Being on a personal level is so much more rewarding.

I think you can do anything you want to in life. You might have to go a different route to get there than you originally thought, but if you never try, you never know what might be. Go for it!

What do you do besides write?
Promotion takes up a lot of my time, but it’s lovely to interact with other readers and authors. I swim, do yoga, walk, read. Oh yes…and the occasional bottle of wine!

More about Sibel…

Sibel talks to WG2E about how she went from 200 rejections to Amazon top 200! http://thewritersguidetoepublishing.com/welcome-to-the-wg2e-sibel-hodge

Sibel’s interview on The Eerie Digest, the Online Mystery and Hollywood Insider Magazine. http://www.eeriedigest.com/wordpress/2011/07/interview-with-author-sibel-hodge/

Sibel talks about plotting her novels on Traci Hohenstein’s blog. http://msthriller.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/guest-blog-by-sibel-hodge/#comment-152

You can find out more about Sibel on her website: http://www.sibelhodge.com/

Be Careful What You Wish For is available from:

Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004VGWJYE/ref=s9_simh_gw_p351_d0_i4?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=04MN44YYE7YSJ8C0369G&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846

Amazon.co.uk
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Careful-What-Amber-Mystery-ebook/dp/B004VGWJYE/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1310631718&sr=8-3

Smashwords
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51824

And Sibel will be doing a live Facebook chat at http://www.facebook.com/summerbookclub on Saturday night July 23rd at 6.30 pm UTC/GMT – which for the US is 11.30 Pacific, 12.30 Mountain, 1.30 Central, and 2.30 Eastern. She’ll be giving away an ebook copy of Be Careful What You Wish For to one lucky commenter!

Facebook Alert! J. Carson Black will be doing a live Facebook chat on Saturday July 16th at 4:30 p.m. Eastern time at facebook.com/summerbookclub. Please join us with your questions for J. Carson.

*****

When I decided to write a new thriller, I had several ideas on the table. None of them made the final cut. The idea for THE SHOP came out of the blue, thanks to a cable TV news show.

Come to think of it, most of my ideas come out of left field. When one of these ideas strikes, it’s like being hit by lightning. I get a tingle in my gut and then my mind starts working a hundred miles a minute.

This time, my husband Glenn and I were watching cable news while eating dinner. John Mark Karr’s plane was coming into Boulder, Colorado, where he would face charges for killing JonBenet Ramsey. He’d been flown over from Europe, dining on shrimp cocktail and entertaining his captors—federal marshals, I believe—and generally having a great time of it. Now the press was lined up along the airstrip in Boulder to cover his arrival. Picture the private jet coming in for a landing, with all the pomp and circumstance of the Space Shuttle. The reporters, the news vans, the cameras, the microphones, the breathless reporting on the ground and in the studio: an absolute frenzy!

Glenn and I looked at each other. This was a farce worthy of commentary. This is the new American way: celebrity from nothing. It turned out later that John Mark Karr was playing everybody. He didn’t kill JonBenet Ramsey. But he’d fulfilled his purpose—he’d fed the hungry maw of the media for a short time.
Something could be done with this—the distraction of celebrity. That was the seed for my story, THE SHOP.

In the opening scene of THE SHOP, celebrity Brienne Cross is killed in her Aspen chalet, along with the four finalists of her reality show, SOUL MATE, and the producer of the show.

I knew right away who killed them. But why?

Even the killer wants to know why. And so he sets out to find the truth.

Getting a plot idea from television news. Who knew?

*****

J. Carson Black is the author of THE SHOP—available for purchase as a Kindle ebook for $0.99 (USD)—a Summer Book Club promotion for a limited time at amazon US and amazon UK.

Learn more about J. Carson at her website and blog at jcarsonblack.com

Follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/jcarsonblack

Fan her Facebook page at facebook.com/pages/J-Carson-Black-Author-Page

J. Carson Black will be doing a live Facebook chat on Saturday July 16th at 4:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time at facebook.com/summerbookclub.
Please join us with your questions for J. Carson.

Thanks to the Kindle and other e-readers, those days are gone. What to take? How do you choose from the hundreds of thousands of books available?

We set up The Summer Book Club to help you overcome that tricky problem this summer, whether you’re going away or relaxing in the garden. We handpicked eight books to entertain, thrill and enlighten you; make you laugh or shiver with fear. The eight authors in this anthology are all ‘indie’ writers who took their destiny into their own hands and self-published. All enjoy considerable success on Amazon, selling many thousands of copies and pulling in great reviews.

In this book you will find exclusive short stories and articles from these authors along with first chapters from each of the eight books specially selected for the Club. If you like what you read, all the books are available on Amazon right now.

This anthology is only the beginning. Connect with other readers and talk about the books with the authors on our Facebook page at facebook.com/summerbookclub.

Each week during the summer of 2011, the Club will feature a different book from one of the participating authors, from a range of genres to suit all tastes from thriller to romance to paranormal.

All authors’ royalties from the sale of this book go to help victims of the recent tornado that hit Joplin Missouri. We will donate all royalties to a fund supporting members of staff at the Joplin Public Library.

Happy reading – whatever you’re doing and wherever you’re going this summer.

The Summer Book Club
http://www.facebook.com/summerbookclub

***** The Books of THE SUMMER BOOK CLUB *****

THE SHOP, J. Carson Black. In this pulse-pounding US bestseller, the murder of a celebrity in Aspen sets the table for an orgy of death, destruction and infamy, revealing a shadowy conspiracy going to the very heart of the United States government.

SUGAR AND SPICE (US EDITION), Saffina Desforges. Would you trust a convicted sex offender to help you find your daughter’s killer? The groundbreaking debut UK crime novel that dares to tackle the last taboo – now recreated for the US.

KILLING CUPID, Mark Edwards & Louise Voss. Alex is obsessed with his writing tutor, Siobhan. He stalks her, breaks into her house, hides in her wardrobe…But when he loses interest Siobhan decides to take revenge. By the UK No.1 authors of CATCH YOUR DEATH.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR, Sibel Hodge. Armed with cool sarcasm and uncontrollable hair, feisty insurance investigator Amber Fox is back in a new mystery combining murder and mayhem with romance and chicklit…

NOT WHAT SHE SEEMS, Victorine Lieske. Steven Ashton, a billionaire from New York, and Emily Grant, on the run from the law…and when they meet he can’t help falling for her. What he doesn’t know is that interfering in her life will put his own life in danger.

TO KILL A WARLOCK, H.P. Mallory. Dulcie O’Neil is a fairy. When a warlock is murdered and Dulcie was the last person to see him alive, she must uncover the truth. First in the new urban fantasy series from the bestselling author of Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble.

DISINTEGRATION, Scott Nicholson. When a fire destroys his home and kills his daughter, Jacob Wells enters a downward spiral that draws him ever closer to the past he thought was dead and buried. A shocking psychological thriller from the author of Liquid Fear.

LIFE IS BUT A DREAM, Cheryl Shireman. A story about the power of love, the devastating consequences of depression, and the strength of the human spirit. A woman goes alone to a secluded cabin to rethink her life in the stunning debut novel from a talented new writer.

It appears that there is considerable downward price point pressure being applied by the reading market. Story after story gets told on Joe’s blog and others, and on the forums, about how sales skyrocket after drastic price reductions. Joe’s experimentation is revealing. Very cool — balancing price point and demand. Is anyone doing formal research on this–acquiring and crunching data?

Will the shakeout be a business model that ultimately is based on free product while driving other revenue streams as a result? Remember the Grateful Dead, they pioneered “freemium” product — essentially giving away the recorded music (even letting fans freely record the live concerts), while making a killing on ticket sales, merchandise sales and other revenue sources. And this was before the Internet.

So…will eBooks pricing be inexorably driven downward, forcing authors to find alternate revenue streams to be competitive and to ring the cash register while meeting the demand for free, or virtually free product?

We may be seeing the evolution of the TV business in reverse — going from a completely paid model to a fully advertiser/sponsor supported model. There may be other revenue models we haven’t even seen yet (placing another author’s book promotion for cash in the back of your own Kindle book, a form of co-promotional sponsorship, is only the beginning). Corporate sponsorship, product placement, promotional tie-ins, consumer sales overlays of other products–I don’t think we have even seen the beginning of what this business will eventually look like. What do you see out there on the horizon or right in front of you?

In our interconnected, interlinked, and networked society, more and more we will need to position the book as the center of a network rather than at the end of a delivery chain. We know the effect that rapidly evolving social media is having on the way we consume content of all kinds. Content is becoming more sliced up, reconnected, blended, “mashed up” and reused–and that includes books. This may apply mainly to non-fiction books right now, but look out for the new modes of delivery and the ways that fiction books are also created and presented. Check out the Vook for an example of a new trend of presenting book content through a variety of interconnected media.

New modes of reading published work are proliferating like mad, with reading platforms such as the Amazon Kindle, Sony’s e-reader and now the iPhone taking on whole traditionally-published books, e-books, periodicals, and even pdf versions of documents of all kinds. We’re getting new choices on what we read, how we read it, and when we read, and oh by the way, with whom we share it.

Not all books need to be networked books. Just like radio never went away with the advent of television, printed books will continue to satisfy the need for the physical touch, the total immersion experience of reading print on the page. And the traditional book publishers still exercise creative judgment over what they will produce and distribute and readers will continue to spend their money on product that passes through the gates of these gatekeepers. There is value in that for many readers and that will continue. But when an author can publish cheaply a novel electronically to Amazon and use search engine marketing to drive a substantial number of niche-market readers to ordering the book for reading on their e-readers, Kindles and the like, then the number of viable and sustainable business models begin to increase.

For now, “Old Publishing” will not go away. Authors will continue to get their best deals there, the money and status needed to earn a living and survive. Authors will take their novels created for large audiences to the major publishers which still wield tremendous influence and control over what the retail distribution chain offers to the buying public (although that is diminished from year’s past and even their marketing role has decreased substantially).

Going for the apex of the publishing pyramid currently inhabited by the best selling authors holds tremendous appeal for any author who wants to get their physical books into the hands of large numbers of readers. These books are carefully selected, edited, packaged by the publishers and then presented for retail sale by the drug stores, the major book chains, and Costco and Target stores.

But the value in the delivery chain is shifting from a model where the content is wrapped up with the distribution to a model that simply values the content. Publishing is evolving and so quickly that we may not even recognize it when the evolution reaches its natural state.

Traditional publishing is concerned with quality control and has inherent big-time costs associated with the business model. The New Mode of publishing is cheap for production and distribution and is an open content market unconstrained by the type of organizational taste exercised by the major book publishers.

Watch out for the new and expanding trend of Web-only fiction and alternate publishing modes. Like electric vehicle charging stations, fast print-on-demand machines are going into bookstores like the University of Arizona’s Main Bookstore on campus. Electronic editions of many kinds and destined for more and more new devices coming online every day will be offered with varying levels of editorial selectiveness. It may be something of a crapshoot on quality, but with social networking and word of mouth, readers will find their own base of “experts” and other readers whose recommendations hold weight.

In the New World of marketing and PR, where the crowd holds sway, niche markets reached through search engine marketing strategies offer ways to reach buyers where breaking into a sale to a traditional book publisher isn’t possible or maybe even desirable.

Tastes are changing and becoming more variegated. Web-only fiction is becoming popular and often doled out in episodes similar to the TV model and the serial novels of the 19th century. And some novels aren’t languishing in a market backwater. Some have built large audiences of tens of thousands of fans. Major publishers, noticing that there is a built-in fan base/market for these novels, have picked them up and given large advances to the authors, and published them well. This is an interesting track that is really different from the standard route of hiring an agent, having the book submitted to publishers and their acquiring editors, and completing a sale into the production and distribution chain.

I’ve just finished formatting two novels for Amazon Kindle, written by one of my clients. These two books were published as mass market paperbacks by Signet, an imprint of New American Library (part of Penguin USA). The books went out of print and now Amazon and other digital outlets offer a new lease on life for these out of print books that went away. Once I upload them to Amazon and begin their search engine marketing campaign, they will find new audiences.

Major new publishing roads are under construction and content creators, including new and established authors, are already traveling down those roads to reach new audiences in innovative ways. How the major publishers will evolve in line with these changes remain to be seen.

In the meantime, Internet marketing and digital distribution offer authors and Internet publishing companies rich opportunities for success.

New Roads for Publishing