The Dead List (A John Drake Mystery) - Martin Crosbie

Happy New Year!

The Dead List is an intriguing mystery novel. It's easy to see why the Kindle Scout folks picked it to publish and promote. And it's a fine option for this night, whether it's the year that's passing or the one to come that you want to keep your mind off of.

John Drake is something of a cipher. He's from somewhere back in eastern Canada, or so he claims. But he's landed here in the tiny town of Hope, British Columbia, with some police training under his belt, and is working for the local police department. Then a man is found dead. The local cops want to call it an accidental death, but Drake thinks it's murder -- and saying that aloud is enough to bring in the RCMP.

Crosbie's style is engaging enough that even when there's not much movement in the plot -- and there's not, for perhaps the first third to half of the novel -- you're caught up in the story anyway, watching the interplay among all the characters. When things get moving, though, the book becomes very tough to put down.

I'm looking forward to reading more books about Drake, if only to find out what he's running from.

My Name Is Hardly (My Temporary Life #2) - Martin Crosbie

That was a short dystopian summer...although I imagine the Troubles in Ireland were a sort of dystopia for those who lived there when they were going on.

Readers were introduced to Gerald "Hardly" McDougall in Crosbie's first novel, My Temporary Life (which itself will be a Rursday Read, by and by). But you don't have to have read the first book to figure out what's going on here.

Hardly is the son of an alcoholic father, and a short kid who fought off his share of bullies while growing up in Scotland. When he comes of age, he enlists in the British Army, and finds himself stationed in Ireland during the Troubles. Owing to his size, he's often placed with a comrade in some British sympathizer's cramped attic, where they gather intelligence about the movements and plans of the Irish Republican Army. As the book opens, Hardly and one of his pals is holed up in yet another attic, in what they hope will be their final mission. And when he gets out of there, he plans to help his buddy track down the man's sister -- a woman who Hardly has fallen in love with through his brother's descriptions of her.

My Name Is Hardly packs love, hate, suspense, and adventure into its pages. It's a great book. I highly recommend it.

How I Sold 30,000 eBooks on Amazon's Kindle - Martin Crosbie

The "how to sell a whole bunch of e-books and make a tidy profit" genre is ever-expanding. I've read a number of them, and many aren't worth the time of day. Often, they suggest slightly underhanded methods ("hire somebody to write ten pages of copy for you, publish it through Kindle Direct Publishing, and rake in the cash!!!") or base their money-making strategy on algorithms that Amazon used in January 2012 but has changed three or four times since then.

Crosbie's book is neither of these. Well, yes, he was lucky enough to get in on the Amazon free-book gravy train. And yes, he made $46,000 in one month on sales of one book, My Temporary Life (which deserves to be a Rursday in its own right, and no doubt will be, presently). And yes, Amazon featured him as a KDP Select success story (even as its programmers were tinkering with the system to make it harder to do). But Crosbie is also candid about his experience since then; he's working on understanding the constantly-evolving marketplace, just like the rest of us indie authors, and he's upfront about the mistakes he's made.

Along the way, he imparts a lot of solid information about how to launch your book and which sales strategies are working now. The list of places to advertise your free days alone is worth the price of admission.

If you're an indie author, or if you've been thinking about getting into indie publishing, this is a great resource for the way it is out there right now.