July 2014 News

A Tine to Live, a Tine to Die is on sale this month. If you've been patiently waiting for the price to go down, all of the digital versions - Kindle, Nook, Apple - are now available for only $1.99 thanks to Kensington Publishing. Get it while supplies last! Oh - that's right, it's digital...

Sales of 'Til Dirt Do Us Part continue to do nicely - if you haven't picked it up yet or asked your local library to stock it - well, it's perfect beach or lake reading and it's never too late.

I finished my historical mystery set in Amesbury in 1888 and it's out for review with several historical and birthing experts. Here's a first pass at a blurb for Breaking the Silence, the first in the Carriagetown Mysteries:

Quaker midwife Rose Carroll hears secrets and keeps confidences as she attends births of the rich and poor alike in 1888 Amesbury. When the town’s carriage industry is threatened by the work of an arsonist and a carriage maker’s adult son is stabbed to death, Rose is drawn into solving the mystery. Things get dicey after the same man’s mistress is also murdered, leaving her one-week old baby without a mother. While struggling with being less than the perfect Friend, Rose draws on her strengths as a problem solver to bring two murderers to justice.

I'm working hard on a new project that I'm not allowed to announce yet, but I'm very excited about it. Stay tuned for an announcement later this summer. 

Lots of events still to come this summer. Please click the Events tab for details. I've also been guest at quite a few awesome blogs - the Guest Blogs tab should be up to date with permanent links to those essays.

And the release date for my alter-ego Tace Baker's second Lauren Rousseau mystery, Bluffing is Murder, is November 11. The cover should be out soon from Barking Rain Press.

Finally, thanks for your support and your appreciation of my mysteries! One of the best ways you can support an author you like, besides reading (and buying, if it's within your budget) her book, is to write a positive review and post it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Goodreads, your church newsletter, or wherever readers can be found. I'd be nowhere with my reader fans!

On Marketing

Rae Francouer

JoeAnn Hart

North Shore writer Rae Francouer recently interviewed Berrett-Koehler publisher Steve Piersanti,  another author, JoeAnn Hart, and me on how to market books. It's a nice article so I thought I'd share one of the links to where it appeared in a Wicked Local news outlet, this one in the Daily News of Newburyport. The Amesbury News printed it on the first page featuring my picture in color, too.

Here's how the article begins:

You’ve spent a few years, at least, writing your book. You’ve locked yourself away from loved ones, muted the phone and sacrificed vacations. You’ve gained five pounds from all that sitting and, to add insult to injury, you’ve got a touch of repetitive motion tendinitis.

The good news is your agent sold the book to a notable publisher.

The bad news? Your hardest work has only just begun.

I can attest to the five pounds! Hope you find the article helpful. I think Rae did a great job with it.

Three Years on the Blog Highway

I'm coming up on the third anniversary of starting this blog. At each year anniversary I've written about the past year: Two Years of Blogging and One Year in the Blogosphere.

It's been a great three years! Anyone who follows me here will have noticed a change in the frequency of my posts in the last year. That was due to several things:

• Total knee replacement in January  which took the expected recovery and therapy time.
• Books! A Tine to Live, a Tine to Die released at the end of May and I turned in 'Til Dirt Do Us Part at the end of June. Writing and promotion uses the bulk of my time, which is as it should be.
• Our new Wicked Cozy Authors group blog, where I blog every week or two, plus
  
  contribute to the Wicked Wednesday topic every week, plus comment on the other posts and push news of the blog out. I hope you'll stop by and check it out!

I hired Kathleen Valentine to freshen up the look and functionality of this entire web site this spring, which I'm happy with. 

In terms of interesting stats, I find it fascinating that the second and third highest numbers of views come from China and Ukraine. I have to believe this is not from the huge number of mystery readers in those countries, but who knows? Internet Explorer on Windows were the most used browser and operating system, and people got here usually by way of Google searches. No big surprise on those stats.

My post on Finding a Pen Name was viewed the most of all three years of essays. Wow! The one about Quaker fiction also got a lot of views, as did my post about Girl Scouts.

As for the year to come? I'll be right here writing and promoting, and will put up a post now and then. 'Til Dirt Do Us Part will be out next June, with the paperback version of A Tine to Live, a Tine to Die next May. I'm finishing up the first draft of the second Lauren Rousseau mystery, Bluffing is Murder, now, and hope to send that off to Barking Rain Press this fall. Farmed and Dangerous (for a June 2015 release) is already underway. And there might be another series in the works. Watch this spot for news!

What do you think, gentle reader? Are blogs alive and well in 2013? Are they replaced by Facebook? Where online do you prefer to have a conversation? I'll send a copy of A Tine to Live, a Tine to Die to one lucky commenter (US-only, please - if you're from elsewhere, I'll send you an e-copy of Speaking of Murder), so be sure to leave your email address if you think I don't already have it.

Essaying Around the Blogosphere

I've been fortunate enough to be a guest at some wicked awesome blogs lately to help celebrate TINE's release. In case you didn't catch them, here are the posts (I'll update it as new essays appear):

• Where I Write at Sheila Webster Boneham
• I Was a Bouchercon Virgin at Crimespree Magazine
• Top Five Places to Visit in a Cozy Town at A Prairie Girl Reads
• On Farming and Birthing at Jungle Red Writers
• A Writer's Dream Vacation at Fish Nets Anthology
• Grates and Tunnels and Turtlenecks, Oh My! at Fish Nets Anthology
• CSA Murder and Intrigue at Seasonal Savory
• Growing Garlic at Escape with Dollycas Into a Good Book
• My Life as a Farmer at Patricia Stoltey's blog
• Inspiration from a Traveler at the Guppies Anthologies blog
• The Mystery of Reviews at Mysteristas
• The Common Ground Fair at Maine Crime Writers
• My history with Poe at Poe's Deadly Daughters (look for the June 7 post)
• My favorite food and other interview questions at Beth Groundwater's blog
• Cam's Marinated Asparagus at Killer Crafts and Craft Killers
• Preston, Norwegian Forest Cat at Mochas, Mysteries, and More
• Cam's Herbed-Spring Garlic Quiche at Mystery Lovers' Kitchen
• A Day in the Life of Farmer Cam Flaherty at Dru's Book Musings
• How to Find Early Reviewers at Write Here, Write Now
• What I Wish I Had Known at Killer Characters

And then there are my regular posts over at our Wicked Cozy Authors blog, plus my contributions to the Wicked Wednesday discussions:

• Renewal
• The Value of One
• Setting as Character: Location, Location
• Freedom
• On Secret Lives
• How I Spent my Book Birthday
• On Writing Full Time
• My Feline Friends
• Who is Edith Maxwell?

Edith's Feline Friends

Over at our new Wicked Cozy Authors blog, I'm talking about my cats! 

Stop by and let us know your feelings about pets, and what you expect from a cozy mystery. 

The Value of the Brown and Green

Growing up in Southern California, I was a Brownie and then a Girl Scout from second grade all the way through senior year in high school, in the Santa Anita council.

 

It was an important part of my life. My older sisters were in scouting, too, and my mother was a leader for many of those years. She was Leader of the Year for our council in 1968 and also worked at a couple of summer camps.

Here's me my first summer at Girl Scout camp. 

My family's summer vacation was always camping for two weeks among the giant Sequoias in Sequoia National Park, so I was accustomed to being able to live simply outdoors.  But our troop did so much more than camp.

Of course, with the era I grew up in, scouting sometimes reinforced traditional roles for girls. I remember learning as a Brownie how to make a hospital corner with a bed sheet, a skill I found fascinating (and hadn't learned at home), and we sewed our own skating skirts when we took roller skating as a group. 


But we also learned about Juliette Gordon Low. We were taught to tie knots, brush and ride a horse at summer camp, sing in harmony, live with dirty knees and hiking boots, and, of course, how to become excellent little sales people when cookie and calendar time came around every year. I even studied judo with my older sister's troop. Despite being decidedly non-militaristic as an adult, I must confess that I loved wearing a uniform and marching (wearing white gloves) in step in parades. 

Being competent and self-reliant was part of the Scouting package and that identity has carried through my life to this day. We also learned to work well with others, to support other females on our team, and we were led by kind, strong women. I never experienced any of the cliquish in fighting that went on among girls in my larger world.

When I was a Senior Scout, our troop volunteered with a disabled girl who needed directed limb exercises. We put on a community pancake breakfast to raise money for some charity. We wore our camp uniforms to meetings: white blouse, green bermuda shorts, and knee socks in a time when girls couldn't even wear pants to school. Over the blouse we had light-blue cotton jackets on which we sewed patches collected from every trip we took.

The picture above shows a happy-but-tearful me being sent off by my troop to my exchange year in Brazil halfway through my senior year in high school. One of the best parts of my year of living with a Brazilian family, attending high school, and learning Portuguese by immersion? You guessed it: being welcomed into an equipe de Guias Bandeirantes, a Girl Scout troop.

In my Local Foods mysteries, a central character is Ellie Kosloski, a plucky 14-year old Girl Scout just entering high school. In the first book, she's working on her Locavore badge -- one of the newest badges  -- and she's volunteering on Cam Flaherty's farm. She ends up being trapped in a near-fatal situation with Cam toward the end and the two work together to forge their escape. We see her mature as the series continues but she continues being a Scout.


I'll admit that when I read about the new Locavore badge, I just had to add Ellie to my series. But it was a natural addition for me who, like many of my author peers, grew up on Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames, strong girls who solved intriguing puzzles. When I informally surveyed a number of crime fiction writers in Sisters in Crime, forty-one reported having been a Girl Scout with only two saying they hadn't. Some who had didn't stay in long, but many said it really formed their self-perception as a person who could do whatever she wanted.

What about you? What childhood experiences shaped your best adult traits? Was scouting part of it?

Finding Reviewers

I'm looking for readers. 

It's a little over two months until A Tine to Live, a Tine to Die releases and I have a couple dozen advance review copies of it to give away (Preston stays here, though!). What I want is reviewers with a wide reach. 

I've contacted several respected reviewers who I met through Facebook and they agreed to read the book. The Natural Farmer, the newsletter of the Northeast Organic Farming Association agreed to review it for their June edition, which goes out to 10,000 subscribers. I even asked Johnny's Selected Seeds to read one and they said they could mention it on their social media.

Another thing I did was start a Goodreads giveaway.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Tine to Live, A Tine to Die

by Edith Maxwell

Giveaway ends April 04, 2013.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

I don't hang out on Goodreads much but probably should!  

My publisher is handling the big review sites, like Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and major newspapers, as well as publications like Edible Boston. I'm not sure how that works but am leaving it up to the publicist there. 

If you have a venue where you could circulate a review to a lot of readers, please contact me and we can talk about arranging an ARC for you. I want to get the word out!

Farm Blog Posts

I have an idea for this blog for next year (which starts in a week and a half).

Farmer Cam Flaherty's Great-Uncle Albert is going to write some posts on farming. He actually suggests that to Cam in A Tine to Live, a Tine to Die. (Today's exciting news is that the book is up for pre-order with its gorgeous cover on both Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Whee!)

I already have a garlic-planting post planned out, one on battling woodchucks, and another on planting fall greens. Albert can talk about pruning fruit trees in early March, about planting buckwheat as a summer cover crop, and about putting the fields to bed in late fall. Composting is already at least partly covered in TINE, but that's a possibility, too.

The posts will likely show up every other week so as not to over burden the author (me!) who is writing furiously on the second book in the series, so far titled 'Til Dirt Do Us Part.

What farming or gardening topics would you like to read about? If you are a grower of food, what's your most challenging crop, and your most enjoyable? If you don't have that much success with your green thumb, what would you like help with?