A Second Printing and Upcoming Events

Sorry to be so long between posts. So much going on here! We've finally moved off our sailboat for the year and are busy transferring our lives from our sea home to our land apartment which means moving clothing, food, bedding, etc., as well as draining and winterizing all boat systems. Not to mention a good general cleaning both inside and out. A ton of work which we'll turn around and do in reverse in the spring!

Big news on the book front is that we've just had a second run of Matinicus printed (that's me signing hundreds of copies last week at Maine Authors Publishing up in Rockland, ME) and I'm about to hunker down for the rest of the final edits of Reese's Leap, the 2nd book in my Island Mystery Series, which I will have to the copy editor by Thanksgiving IF IT KILLS ME!! This may mean another few weeks of non-communication, but so be it!

A few upcoming events to tell you about. Sunday, November 11th, I'll be one of about 50 authors participating in the annual NE Authors Expo Holiday Book Sale at the Danversport Yacht Club (Danvers, MA). This event is free to the public and runs from 1:00 - 7:00 p.m. A great opportunity to pick up some fabulous books for your Holiday gift list!

I also have two events coming up in January, the first the New England Book Festival and Awards which runs all day and into the evening of January 19th at the Parker House Hotel in downtown Boston. I'll be both speaking and selling books at this event, which also includes the annual and much anticipated NE Book Festival Awards. The second event is on January 26th, when I'll be a guest at the Local Buzz Coffee House and Wine Bar in Cape Elizabeth, ME as part of "Local Writers at the Local Buzz" from 4:00 - 5:00 p.m.

Hope to see you at one of these events!!

Wanted to let you know about two Matinicus giveaways going on just now, one at http://www.goodreads.com/ (ending May 10) and another at http://www.librarything.com/ (ending May 18).  All winners receive a signed, personalized copy of the book. If you win, please remember to leave feedback on these sites and on Amazon.com!

Upcoming events include a radio interview discussing Matinicus with the folks at Zone Radio, 103.1 FM and AM620 in Bangor, Maine at 9:05a.m. on Tuesday, May 8, followed on May 17th by the official Matinicus Book Launch Party, 7:00 p.m. at RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth, NH. Hope you'll join us!

The Thing About Reviews

All authors want reviews. Okay, maybe not want them the way we want love and chocolate and oodles of money, but we need them. And just the good ones, thank you. They're important for the exposure they generate, and if you're lucky enough to land a few of these priceless things pre-publication and have a half-decent marketing plan in place, you can hit the ground running. Creating early buzz is important when so many hundreds of thousands of books come out every year. That's hundreds of thousands. I try not to think about that part.

Thing is, getting someone to agree to a review is a crapshoot. Even if you've managed to ink out the best book of the year, there'll be plenty of folks who don't like it. Trust me on this. Say your reviewer is a woman who was once jilted by a guy who just happens to have the same name as your lead character, lost a child the exact age as one who dies in your story, or has a fight with the boyfriend or the boss the day she sits down to read your novels. Maybe yours is the hundredth mystery/romance/science fiction/western (take your pick) she's reviewed this year and she's simply had it. Makes herself a big old martini, sits down at the keyboard and takes her snarly mood out on little-old-you.

Paying for reviews is a whole other ball of wax. Some of the most prestigious review sites charge big bucks for a review they promise will be completely honest, which doesn't necessarily mean "good" (see above). That means you can pay a lot of money for the chance to get majorly, where-did-I-hide-those-razorblades depressed. These companies charge a ton for their reviews because they know that you know that if by some miracle you manage to eek out a good one, you've got a leg up in the game.

All of this by way of explaining, perhaps, that I'm fully aware the absolutely stunning review I just received from Kirkus for Matinicus (due out in May) http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/darcy-scott/matinicus/, had as much to do with the luck of the draw as anything else. Don't get me wrong. I'm really proud of the book, I busted my ass on it, and I'm ever-so-grateful that whoever reviewed it liked it almost as much as I do.

Just sayin'.

Let's Launch This Thing!

Okay, so we're really rolling now. The Book Launch for Matinicus (my double mystery set on the Maine island of the same name) has officially been scheduled, so if you're a planner like me and you're going to be anywhere near Portsmouth, NH on Thursday evening, May 17, please join us at RiverRun Bookstore for a short reading and signing followed by a reception just down the street at the Portsmouth Athenæum. If you've never been the Athenæum, this alone will be worth the trip. Portsmouth's oldest cultural institution, its four floors are home to thousands of books, documents, centuries-old maps and all manner of ephemera relating to NH's Seacoast. Hope to see you there!

FYI...The cover for Matinicus is just about finalized, so be sure to check back!

Changing Publishers

Okay, I promise to be better about keeping you updated. Been offline for a bit while I regrouped. The long and short is that I needed to change publishers to guarantee my vision of Matinicus (the first book in my Maine Island Mystery Series) as both a tree book and an e-book. 

So here's my rant...While it's true that e-readership is very much on the rise and the costs of putting out paper books have become nothing short of ludicrous, it's also true that the world is chock full of people who still prefer to curl up in their favorite chair with the real thing. And when all is said and done, it's about making your readership larger, not smaller. A no brainer, really--well to me anyway. But apparently not to my former publisher's bean counters, who decided to nix my softcover version. That was all it took for me to jump ship. Scary to give up a sure thing for something as ephemeral as artistic vision, but well worth it in the end. So, after a few months of teeth-gnashing and sleepless nights, I'm back on track with "real" books and all manner of e-versions due out in May. Yeehaw!

The other biggie is that I finished the draft of Reese's Leap, sequel to Matinicus, and have sent it off to readers for commentary. One long-time reader came back with the comment "Boy, you do paint those baddies well," and I'm hoping she's right. Murderous scumbags bent on twisted, seemingly unwarranted revenge are too easy to get wrong. Tentative pub date for this one is spring, 2013.

And here's another promise...this one to share the cover of Matinicus as soon as it's ready!

Wintery Reads

Writers read a lot. A LOT. For me, reading an hour each day before I start my own work fires up the brain cells. The story has to grab me, of course, but I also read for craft: to see how other authors put their stories together; how they use dialogue, voice, tense, etc. And winter's the perfect time: no grass to mow, the boat's wrapped up tight in the back yard, and the icicles are getting longer by the day above the back bedroom window.

Gotta tell you, I've been reading some pretty cool stuff lately. By far the most unusual novel I've read in years is Don Winslow's The Savages, which follows three twenty-somethings as they get drawn into the world of crime--a spoiled, lost young woman and the two men in love with her (and yeah, this gets a bit kinky). Everything about this book is different: the structure, the syntax, the dialogue, even the way Winslow uses punctuation. Case in point: the first chapter is just two words. "F--- you." Succinct, no?

Just this week I finished Tana French's excellent Faithful Place (one of Time magazine's Ten Best Books of 2010). A mystery-love story set in Ireland, it follows a cop whose seminal life moment was the night the woman he was planning to elope with left him--or so he thought. Gritty storyline, excellent pacing and use of dialogue. No pat ending, either, which is very important to me.

Dennis Lehane's Midnight Mile, the sequel to his excellent Gone Baby Gone was another good one, and I'm about to start the much lauded Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.

So send me your suggestions! I'd love to add them to my list...

"Matinicus" to be Published March, 2012

Happy to report that a just last week I signed a contract with PublishingWorks, a terrific small publisher here in NH, for the publication of Matinicus--the first of three mysteries set on the coast of Maine. Matinicus is a double murder mystery tracing the development of a stubbornly self-sufficient fishing community through the eyes of a disturbed and unhappily married island woman of the 1820s, a conflicted twenty-first century teenage girl, and a middle aged, womanizing university botanist—Dr. Gil Hodges—who arrives on-island to verify the existence of a purported 22 species of wild orchid only to find himself hounded by the ghost of a child some 200 years dead. Matinicus is the prequel to Reese's Leap, the novel I'm currently writing. PublishingWorks specializes in the fiction of New England and just as importantly from my point of view has signed on for national and international sales distribution with Publishers Group West (PGW), the leading book sales and distribution company in the United States. One thing I've learned over the last few years: distribution is everything. Funny how I found them, too. I was scouring the mystery section of RiverRun, our local indie book palace, for publishers I'd not yet submitted to. PublishingWorks had just come out with a new New England-based mystery entitled Sumner Island which was set prominently on RiverRun's "new releases" table. I jotted the name down, emailed them that afternoon, later sent them some chapters and then the full ms. Four months later, they signed me. How cool is that? Look for Matinicus in March, of 2012. Available everywhere in paperback and all e-formats!