A look back, eleven years or so

In 2011 I published A Dozen Crime Stories from a well-known, big-box, discount retail chain, putting it on Amazon, and I was disappointed at the resounding silence I got as a reception. I really had no clue about marketing back then, and was unwilling to spend money advertising, so I began to refer to publishing as "dropping it into the Amazon sea" as it was just a drop in the ocean as far as Amazon was concerned. There are what, thousands of books that are published every day?

I wanted to be careful that I didn't step on anyone's toes, so in a way I was glad that it didn't get instant fame. But in a way I was disappointed too, because it was a good book and I wanted people to read it. I got the local bookstore in Lubbock to sell one on consignment, but someone stole it when they put it out on the shelf. Well, that was confirmation that it was a good concept and a good idea, but I knew that it was totally underperforming in the world of books.

Nowadays I have a group of people who like reading each other's work, and it has proven to be popular. It's a good book to introduce the rest of my stories, because its stories are all well-written and complete. The idea to base it around a certain popular store was a good one. In general it does better than most of my books, at least on Kindle, and I like giving it away knowing that when people read it, they'll respond well to it.

Through that book, I almost went into the crime-story genre. In general most crime stories have much more in the way of wanton ridiculous violence, bloodshed, the kind of story we're all attracted to when we open the news. I don't really like appealing to people's macabre curiosity and desire to learn about these crimes all the time, but on the other hand blood and guns and explosives are just like the stock and trade of these stories anyway and I'm sure to some degree you get used to them and then just enjoy a good short story, which as someone once said, always has an unexpected, but absolutely inevitable, end - it surprises you, but you realize that it had to end that way. You get used to it after you've read a few hundred or thousand I suppose.

Now, with a kind of writer's block impeding my more serious work, I turn to writing other stories just for a little experimental fun. Crime? Yes. Small-town America? Yes. I'm totally immersed in both. I might as well go with it. It reminds me of good old times.

Crime Stories, by the way, turns out to be very popular in the UK, where at the moment it is #104 in US short stories. I would have never known that if I didn't get out and show it to a bunch of social media authors, many of whom are from there, and many of whom read it and liked it. I guess they don't have Wal-Marts in the UK, but because they have a keen eye for a kind of gentle satire on American culture, they have given it a pretty good reception. I still wish I could get it in front of a much wider audience. But it's now over eleven years old, and it might be easier just to crank out a few more. Go into a life of crime, er, stories, as it were. It's always possible.