Yay for me, at any rate, that my manuscript for Dear Josephine is handed off to my editor, although my editor may be having a different reaction altogether. Dear Josephine, Book Two of The Steep Climes Quartet, is about the same size as Kill Well (Book One), but at present at least, it also contains 52 chapters. This may suggest to you that I write a chapter a week, but this is what is called co-incidence and is not the result of some master plan.

Meanwhile, sales for Kill Well are chugging along, and I’ve scored my first award, too, another Yay for me moment. Kill Well is available at several local bookstores and a couple of local libraries (Pittsfield’s Berkshire Athenaeum and Great Barrington’s Mason Library) that are part of an inter-library loan system), so it’s easy to get the book without interacting with Monopoly Amazon. Here are the local bookstores:

The Bookstore, Lenox, MA

The Bookloft, Great Barrington, MA

Oblong Books, Millerton and Rhinebeck, NY

Various ebook versions of Kill Well, as well as the paperback, are through Amazon and Draft2Digital (for non-Kindle formats).

One of these days I’m going to write about how Amazon abuses their monopoly position and why authors have little alternatives (hint: monopoly position). There is also this crazy eco-system that has sprung up around self-published books, including You Tube gurus, including quite a few You Tuber stars who have only a small amount of editorial or publishing experience—I can name two such people off the top of my head, with both such folks each having less than a year’s experience in publishing, and both as interns. This sort of background is common among other editorial services you can find online, whether through Reedsy or Fivver or other such gig platform, although there are also plenty of experienced and talented people one can discover through such sites.

Of course, publishing means selling, so please, go buy Kill Well! 

It’s been weird getting back into publishing after so long and then starting CMTI Publishing. After my editorial stints in book publishing, I covered ebooks as a trade journalist for years and then worked at a consultancy serving digital content technology companies and their customers. It’s been fun drawing on this experience for a character who ties all the books in the series together, working as he does for an online newspaper called South County Interactive in Kill Well, and as it expands its market is then titled Berkshire Interactive in Dear Josephine, which takes place three years after Kill Well. This online effort is successful, so I may be open to the charge that I’m writing fantasy.

I’ve been focused on publishing The Steep Climes Quartet, which looks at climate change and how consequences effect our local part of the world. It isn’t a catalog of world-destroying storms, or ravaging zombies, or other unrecognizable wasteland. The Steep Climes Quartet comes out of a long study about climate change’s wide effects, including economic, social, and political consequences, as well as, of course, those times we can’t breathe too well because the world seems to be on fire, or those other times when heavy rain deluges cause flooding and destruction, or… well, you probably get the picture. Or do you? Do you know, for instance, that there’s a proposal by a federal advisory panel urging the government to expand the areas considered by regulators to be at high risk of flooding? Other studies are reporting the cost of property insurance is going up and going up a lot, because of climate change. It turns out that the insurance companies, nor the re-insurer companies that serve insurance companies, want to be left holding the bag.

There are a couple of other projects in the works, including working on public presentations that describe the changes coming over the next couple of decades for our area. CMTI Publishing is also pursuing popular scholarship works (meaning, taking the work of the best academics who look closely at a subject and getting them to write in a way about the subject that we can all understand). One early target is the effects of digital content platforms on content itself and the creative economy behind the content. Think about Spotify, or, really, any of the big music streaming services, for one subject.

And, oh, about the award, Kill Well has been recognized by The Book Fest for Second Place Award in the category of Dystopian Fiction – Climate Change, and I have the shining digital medal to prove it.

Umm, about that crazy eco-system that has sprung up around self-published books that I was talking about earlier?