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Today’s featured author is Iris March, who is soon to celebrate the launch of her first cozy mystery (cue applause!). The Broken Bridge hits shelves on May 24th. Those of you on #MysteryBookstagram may know Iris as Maureen, a.k.a. @searchingformysteries. I have to say, the pen name “Iris March” is so perfect for her new cozy series about a gardening center!

In the interview below, Iris chats plants and gardening, self-publishing, writing cozies, and more. Any aspiring authors and self-publishers in the crowd? You’ll love her tips for assembling a group of ARC readers, thoughts on establishing a publishing imprint, and online resources for new publisher-authors.

Sleuths! You can connect with Iris on Facebook, Instagram, and her website. Pick up The Broken Bridge today on Amazon, Kobo, or Barnes & Noble.

Hi Iris, thanks for joining me! Your debut novel, The Broken Bridge, book one in your new Succulent Sleuth cozy mystery series, launches May 24. The Broken Bridge features succulent-savvy sleuth Molly Green, who runs an eco-friendly garden center (and, of course, runs into mysterious trouble). In your opinion, what makes for a great cozy sleuth and theme? Where did you get the inspiration for Molly and this gardening theme?

I have always adored plants and trees but am just not great at keeping houseplants alive! Houseplants have about a 50 percent survival rate in my care, unfortunately. I figured if I was going to write a main character, I should really like her and she should have some qualities that I want to have myself, including being skilled at tending plants. The Succulent Sleuth name hit me one day on a run and I knew I needed to use it for my entire series. 

I think the best amateur sleuths are the ones not looking to get involved but are just shoved into the job. They also need to have some capacity to investigate and knowledge that not just everyone has. I enjoy a cozy mystery with a unique theme and haven’t seen a garden center yet, although there are a few flower shops. I also threw in a lot of green living tips through Molly’s lifestyle choices. I’ve worked in sustainability my entire career and just can’t write anything without that stuff in it. For a while, I thought about editing them out but was told to lean into who I am and embrace it, so I did!

Where I work, at AuthorImprints, we take publishing imprints very seriously, and believe they are an important component of self-publishing. So, naturally, I loved seeing that you’ve established an imprint for your books—Wandering Ginkgo Press—as well as a logo. Can you share your reasons for creating your imprint and any tips for selecting a name and crafting a logo?

A few months ago, my husband ordered a book from Amazon and I could tell right away that it was self-published because there wasn’t an imprint logo on the spine or the back. It looked sloppy to me. I knew I wanted my books to appear as professional as possible and having that detail of the imprint and an imprint logo makes them look more polished. All sales pages also list the imprint name. I’ve already mentioned my love for trees. Ginkgos are so unique, so old, and can withstand a lot of pollution—they’re my favorite and I wanted to use them somehow. We planted one in our front yard and it’s still alive! I also wanted a verb in the imprint name and went around and around for so long about what to use. Wandering is a nice descriptor of what happens when writing a book. I’m thrilled with the name. A graphic designer friend of mine came up with a dozen different logo options and I chose my favorite. I really couldn’t be happier with the outcome. There is a Gingko Press but they do not wander, and they use the other spelling so we won’t be confused.

Another big topic for new authors is getting readers. I know that you’ve been hard at work assembling an ARC team to read and review your book before its release—can you explain how you reached out to potential reviewers, and share your experience with this process?

I found ARC readers through other cozy mystery author friends, real life friends, other bookish people I know, as well as cozy mystery readers that I found on Instagram. I put a call out on social media for ARC readers and found a few that way. Mostly, I asked people directly and very few turned me down. I knew I was asking people who liked to read the sort of book that I was writing.

I asked everyone who was interested to fill out a form so that I had all the info together. This also demonstrated that they were interested enough to do a tiny step for me online and hopefully they’d do something else in the future. I was going to make a Facebook group so that they’d all sort of meet each other, but I have since been told that being too connected with people who leave reviews for you on social media might work against you on Amazon. So instead, I’m sending group emails to all of them. I’ve got about 40 ARC readers—I have no idea if that’s too many or too little!

What have you learned as a new author? Can you share any resources and/or advice for those looking to embark on a writing and publishing journey? And/or, could you talk about how you planned the mystery and your writing process?

When I started writing my first book (see below), I struggled with knowing how to introduce characters and how much to reveal about them from the start, as well as how to pace the story. These issues got me searching online for answers and I found the ladies at Write Publish Sell. Since, I’ve attended three of their online conferences and at least a dozen of their webinars as well as their Book Launch in a Box class. I also love Joanna Penn’s podcast, The Creative Penn. Dallas Woodburn is my book coach and helped me iron out some details and figure out some of my insecurities. Finally, the info produced by New Shelves Books and their weekly Free Advice Friday book publishing Q&A sessions are great.

There’s so much to learn and do as an author (self-published or not!) and I think that the pace of writing a book lends itself to allowing authors to also learn what they need to know along the way. Certainly, I barely know enough to make it work, and have a lot more to learn.

For both of my completed books, I knew how the story opened and how they ended. The gaps needed to be filled in. I tried to outline the entire story, but as authors often say, the characters did what they wanted to and my outlines kept getting thrown out. I think having that outline still helped me at least have an idea of where I wanted to go and tricked my brain that I knew what would happen next (even if that’s not what really happened). That kept me writing. In the murky middle of both books, I keep a spreadsheet of daily words written to keep myself accountable. You have to be a bit obsessed with a story to finish it. 

In a cozy mystery, you need some red herrings and a plot twist. I knew who my suspects would be from the start and some problems Molly would face. It’s funny—I didn’t know she was a twin until I was into the second chapter and had to go back and add her sister, May, into the start. I also didn’t know who my baddie was until I was well into writing it. Knowing some of those major components of a story helped me move it forward even if I didn’t know the whole thing.

You have a second book launching in September 2022 (so soon, yay!). What can readers expect in this next story? I’m hoping you can share some fun bits about your upcoming projects!

My second book is not a sequel to The Broken Bridge but is set in the same fictional town and the garden center is mentioned. It’s the book that pushed me into being an author and tells the story of my sister’s experience of having Hodgkin’s Lymphoma while being pregnant with twins. The story is told through her fictional male nurse who becomes obsessed with an abandoned building on his running route. (I have a very similar building on my own running route but it’s much less exciting!) He ropes my sister’s character into helping him do some research and she makes phone calls and web searches from her hospital bed. It’s a story of teamwork and finding inner strength and courage. I’m really excited to publish it, but it’s not as easy to market as a cozy is. It is a clean read with a mysterious building, but it’s not a cozy mystery.I am still noodling and outlining the sequel to The Broken Bridge and am really hopeful it will be in the world in 2023. Honestly, I’m having a harder time coming up with believable suspects this time around! Molly has a lot more mysteries to solve, though, for sure.

Thanks so much to Iris for the interview. Sleuths, I hope you enjoyed it! If you aren’t already subscribed, please be sure to sign up for the Cluesletter and get author features like this alongside other mystery goodies, delivered to your inbox every other Tuesday.

Today’s featured author is Matty Dalrymple, who writes the Ann Kinnear and Lizzy Ballard series and podcasts as The Indy Author. Readers will love Matty’s insights on paranormal suspense, and authors will learn a thing or two about publishing imprints and podcasting. When Matty and I connected at the March 2022 Women in Publishing Summit, I was very impressed with her platform, books, and podcast—so this was an exciting interview. Happy reading!

Connect with Matty on Facebook, Twitter, and her website. Buy Matty’s eBooks directly via her PayHip store; see her website for more eBook, print, and audio retailer links.

Hi Matty! Thanks for joining. Your Ann Kinnear suspense novels feature a psychically-inclined heroine sleuth who uses her spirit-sensing abilities to solve mysteries. Book five in the series, A Serpent’s Tooth, just launched this April. Readers love the edge-of-your-seat suspense in these stories—in your opinion, what is the best way to craft a thrilling and gripping mystery?

There is lots of great information out there about creating suspense (for example, check out this tongue-in-cheek topic from my podcast, The Indy Author: Episode 043 – Twelve Sure-fire Ways to Kill the Suspense of Your Novel with Steven James). But there are two approaches I have used for the Ann Kinnear and Lizzy Ballard novels to ensure that the foundations of plot, timeline, and character motivations are firmly in place before I dive too deeply into the story.

First, to understand the story at a strategic level, I create a story “frame.” I love nautical metaphors for the writing craft and the publishing voyage, and I call this a frame because it mimics the function of a boat frame, providing a foundation to which to attach the planks of the story and the “brightwork” of detail and dialogue. I create a third-person, present tense description of the scene, with notes reflecting the plot-, timeline-, or character motivation-related reasons for various aspects.  For example, if I have a character take the scenic route from work to home, I will note the reason (e.g., “because they need to pass by the scene of the crime”). These notes remind me of the ripple effect that a change to that aspect might have. The frame enables me to tweak minor story aspects, and even to overhaul major ones, far more easily than would be possible with a novel-length draft. During the framing of Ann Kinnear 6 (about 30K words for a novel that will eventually come in at about 85K), I made several changes to the crime in which Ann becomes involved. (If you’re interested in more detail on the benefits of and approach to creating a story frame, keep an eye out for an article I penned for “Writer’s Digest” that will come out later this year.)

Another key component of crafting a compelling mystery is who-knows-what-when. To understand the story at this more tactical level, I create a spreadsheet with chapters along one axis and characters along another. Then in each cell I note what the character knows, believes, thinks, and feels at that point in the story (e.g., “Ann, irritated with the progress of the case, meets Randall, then has a conversation with Marilee (although Ann thinks she’s Lara)”). I can review all the cells on one axis to see what all the characters know, believe, think, and feel at any point in the story. I can review all the cells on the other axis to trace an individual character’s evolution through the entire story. That saves me from writing a scene that assumes a character knows something that they won’t learn until later, or of having a character’s motivations vary illogically through the course of the story.

You also write the Lizzy Ballard thriller series, a completed trilogy that, like Ann Kinnear, also has paranormal elements. What makes writing paranormal suspense and thrillers exciting for you? Can you speak to the advantages and/or disadvantages to crafting a thrilling mystery with paranormal themes?

I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of what happens when an extraordinary ability transforms an ordinary life. Tweak just one aspect of normal life and see where it takes you! Ann Kinnear has the ability to communicate with the dead. It would be a spoiler to share what Lizzy Ballard’s ordinary ability is, but it’s one that sets this naturally sociable young woman apart from the people she yearns to interact with.

In both series, the extraordinary abilities open opportunities for suspense and thrills that wouldn’t be available in a story that didn’t include paranormal elements. As long as Ann can speak with the dead, I can’t imagine running out of ideas for how that ability could get her in trouble, and how she can use it to get herself out of that trouble.

You established an imprint, William Kingsfield Publishers, for your books. Can you describe, for other indie authors who might be reading, the advantages of owning your own publishing imprint (versus publishing under your name, or simply “Independently Published”?).

Authors who consider their writing and publishing work to be a profession (rather than a hobby) have to treat every aspect of their endeavor as the business it is, and that includes presenting a professional face to your readers and to the industry. You wouldn’t open a restaurant and call it “Non-chain Restaurant”; your imprint deserves the same consideration.

Your imprint name could communicate something about your books (e.g., Joanna / J.F. Penn’s Curl Up Press), your own brand (e.g., Mark Leslie Lefebvre’s Stark Publishing), or your own background as a writer. I chose the name William Kingsfield Publishers for my imprint in honor of my father, who wrote under that pen name. His stories appeared in Collier’s Weekly (“Tobe” and “The Captain’s Counterfeit”), Cosmopolitan Magazine (“The Rut”), and Esquire (“So Quietly Waiting”).

In addition to your suspense and thriller novels, you also write nonfiction, produce a podcast, and discuss the writing craft as The Indy Author. How do you balance writing fiction with maintaining The Indy Author? Can you give advice for authors looking to expand their platform beyond fiction, as you have, into the podcasting/writing craft space?

As a full-time writer and publisher, I believe in the benefits of multiple streams of income. I also believe in paying it forward to my fellow authors by sharing the information that I and my colleagues have gained through our experiences. Those were two primary drivers of my decision to launch The Indy Author Podcast. With the explosive growth of audio, podcasting was an obvious choice for sharing this content and for building community with my listeners and viewers. (The Indy Author has a YouTube channel as well: https://bit.ly/YouTubeTIA.)

In fact, I’m such a believer in the power of podcasting for authors that I wrote a book about it, “The Indy Author’s Guide to Podcasting for Authors.” Authors who are interested in exploring this avenue can find more information, including free downloadable resources, at this link.

However, my fiction work is still my biggest income source, so I allocate my time to make sure I’m not skimping on my fiction writing. I generally work on production, distribution, marketing, promotion, and the podcast until 12:30, at which point I have an almost-daily writing sprint with two fellow authors until 2:00. After a break for dog walks, I continue working until it’s time for cocktails with my husband, and spend most evenings reading, which I believe is one of the best—and most enjoyable—ways of improving one’s writing! I read a lot in the suspense / thriller / mystery genres, but I also read outside my own genre—you never know what you can learn from great writing of any type!

Lastly, what’s on the horizon for you? Are more Ann Kinnear novels in the works, or perhaps an expansion to the Lizzy Ballard trilogy?

I’m currently working on Ann Kinnear Book 6, which was inspired by an off-season visit to a friend’s condo in Ocean City, Maryland. There’s something inherently creepy about summer destinations in the winter, and of knowing you might be one of only a very few people in a huge building . . . with no one nearby to hear you if you scream. 🙂

Thanks so much to Matty for the interview. Sleuths, I hope you enjoyed it! If you aren’t already subscribed, please be sure to sign up for the Cluesletter and get author features like this alongside other mystery goodies, delivered to your inbox every other Tuesday.

When I first picked up One of Us Is Dead by Jeneva Rose, I was hoping for something suspenseful, something escapist, and a good heap of drama—and it sure delivered. Told from the perspective of four women of Buckhead and rich in luxury, sex, and betrayal, this thrilling read will walk you through these women’s tenuous relationships before you discover who is the victim. Because here’s the clincher: you don’t find out exactly who died—and why—until the very end.

I chatted with Jeneva about One of Us Is Dead, plus her 2020 bestseller, The Perfect Marriage, and her tips for writing suspenseful reads, honing multi-POV narratives, and book marketing on TikTok.

One of Us Is Dead hits shelves April 26. Preorder here. Connect with Jeneva on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Goodreads, and Twitter, and sign up for her mailing list on her website.

Hi Jeneva! Thanks so much for joining me. One of Us Is Dead features multiple characters’ points of view as they navigate life and, eventually, death in Buckhead. What are the challenges and advantages of writing multiple perspectives?

Thanks so much for having me! The challenges of writing multiple perspectives is ensuring that each point of view is unique and that readers will be able to easily differentiate between them without having to flip back to the start of the chapter to see which point of view it belongs to. I spent a lot of time finessing each character to make them easily distinguishable, giving them quirks, differences in dialect and how they describe the world around them or one another. Each character also essentially has a ‘title.’ You have the scorned ex-wife, the young new wife, the social climber, the mother hen, and the salon owner caught in the middle of it all. 

The advantage of writing multiple perspectives is the reader gets a peek into each character’s head, and this works especially well for a novel about gossip, betrayal, scandals, secrets, and murder. So, just when you think you know what’s going on—the point of view switches and you’re given new insight from another character.

Your bestselling thriller The Perfect Marriage also explores themes of psychological and domestic suspense. What tips do you have for authors looking to heighten suspense in their novels? How do you approach writing twists and shock endings?

My thrillers, like most, hinge on major twists, surprising reveals, and shocking endings. Readers expect to be surprised when they pick up a thriller, so I have to deliver. When I start writing a book, I almost always know what the major twist is going to be. With the exception of One of Us is Dead, because I ended up changing it several times, because I felt it wasn’t good enough, and I needed to live up to the shocking twists that so many loved in The Perfect Marriage.

The reveals and twists that happen throughout one of my books usually come about during writing sprints, when I set a timer for fifteen minutes and write as many words as possible. I think when you combine the path you’ve set out for the reader which includes red herrings, clues, unanswered questions, and a writing sprint, you’re bound to let the story take you where it’s going to take you and, in my experience, it usually adds some fun twists and reveals.

What I especially loved about One of Us Is Dead is its story structure—true to the title, the reader doesn’t find out who actually is dead until the very end of the book, and instead has to understand the complex relationships between the women in Buckhead before getting to the final reveal. How did you approach writing this twisty story?

I’ve written six books and this one was by far the most challenging because of how it’s structured. There are five points of view, and it switches between past and present—with the present that of the salon owner explaining to a detective what transpired between her elite clients. The past is from all five points of view (the clients and the salon owner) detailing what happened in the weeks leading up to the murder. So the reader doesn’t know who’s dead, who killed them, nor why.

I did a lot of plotting with this novel to ensure the story moved forward swiftly without repeating what happened in a scene from a different point of view. My pantry and cupboards were covered in post-it notes for a few weeks while I worked through the plot and chapter alignment. I love short chapters that end on cliff hangers, so there are eighty-four in this book and the cliff hangers make it a ‘one-more page’ type of read. I also gave each ‘housewife’ equal page time, so the reader could get to know them as individuals and understand where they were coming from and what their struggles and goals were.

I always like to ask authors, whether traditionally or independently published, about their marketing efforts. You have a strong platform and are especially active on TikTok (with over 400k followers!)—can you speak a bit about your TikTok strategy? What do you like about the app, and how do you use it to promote your writing?

When I got the offer of publication for The Perfect Marriage from a small digital-first UK publisher, I knew it would be on me to market the book. I have ten years of social media and digital marketing experience with five of them working on major household brands at a Fortune 500 company, so I knew I could do it. I also knew if my debut wasn’t a success, I’d most likely be pigeonholed and not be able to achieve my goals of signing with a larger publisher.

I had a lot of success on Instagram early-on creating fun content and working with bookstagrammers. Even the film/tv deal was a result of me being very engaging on the platform. But I knew I had to set my sights on something else because the algorithm on Instagram can be quite challenging.

As an author, I was an early adopter on TikTok (back when it was considered “low brow” to be on that platform) and I saw a huge opportunity there to create book content. What blew up The Perfect Marriage was a trend I started on TikTok where you tell a story as if it were your own but at the end you hold up your book, explaining that it’s actually the plot of your novel. In January of 2021, I posted that video and it amassed 4.5 million views. Over 11 thousand copies of The Perfect Marriage sold in just the four days after. That TikTok made me an Amazon Charts, Publisher’s Weekly, and Barnes & Noble bestseller, and it literally made my career. The Perfect Marriage has gone on to sell several hundred thousand copies across formats and has been translated into a dozen languages.

I’ve continued to actively use TikTok ever since with a lot of success, and I switch it up between book content and humorous, everyday life content, which includes my hilarious husband and my stubborn English bulldog.

Lastly, what can readers expect from you in the future? Do you plan to continue with thriller/suspense, or do you have other genres in mind? (Future books you can talk about, perhaps?)

I can’t say too much about it yet because it hasn’t been announced, but readers can expect a lot more thrillers and suspense novels from me. My next thriller, You Shouldn’t Have Come Here, centers around an Airbnb and a fast romance that’ll surely have an outcome worse than heartbreak. It’s told from dual points of view of the guest and the host, and it’s a cautionary tale of what can go wrong when you open up your heart and your home to a total stranger. It’ll release sometime in Spring/Summer 2023. 

Thanks so much to Jeneva for the interview. Sleuths, I hope you enjoyed it! If you aren’t already subscribed, please be sure to sign up for the Cluesletter and get author features like this alongside other mystery goodies, delivered to your inbox every other Tuesday.

Today’s Cluesetter interview is with Camilla Chafer. Camilla has several mystery series under her belt: the Lexi Graves series and its spinoff, the Deadlines Mystery Trilogy, as well as the Calendar Murder Mysteries. She also has some dark urban fantasy books, the (completed) Stella Mayweather series.

I reached out to Camilla after browsing the new mystery releases on Amazon (as one does) and noticing that her newest book, Pied Sniper, was a bestseller, more than a week before its release. I chatted with her about this huge accomplishment and more in the interview below.

Connect with Camilla on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, and Bookbub. Plus, visit her website to sign up for her newsletter and learn more about her books.

Grab Camilla’s books, available from various retailers: Pied Sniper (Lexi Graves, book 15); Curated Murder (Calendar Mysteries, book 5).

Hi, Camilla! Thanks so much for joining me. Your Lexi Graves mystery series is now in its fifteenth installment (Pied Sniper hit shelves March 24—congrats!). What do you like about writing a long series? Do you have tips for authors looking to write a longer series?

Hi, thanks for having me! When I started writing Lexi, I never envisaged the series would get to fifteen books with still more to come. I love that I can write an individual mystery for each book but develop the character arcs over time. We get to see Lexi start as a temp worker and very unmotivated in life, to learning so much and developing her skills as she finds her calling as a PI. Writing a series gives me the breadth to do that.

My number one tip is if you’re going to write more, be that a sequel, trilogy or a long-running series, is start a spreadsheet and keep all your character and location info in that so you can refer back to it. I might not remember how my characters take their coffee in a book I wrote ten years ago, but you can be sure my readers will know!

Your other series include the Deadlines Mystery Trilogy (a Lexi Graves spinoff) and the Calendar Murder Mysteries, a series of standalone but connected books. How does writing the Lexi Graves books compare with the more traditionally “cozy” Calendar mysteries?

There’s definitely a difference in styles. Lexi and the Deadlines books feature racier conversations, crazier situations and I take more liberties with them. The Calendar mysteries are traditionally cozy. It’s small, quaint, idealistic living . . . so long as you don’t mind the murders! Lexi starts off as a young, single woman, but I’m trying to get a breadth of Calendar heroines to reflect my audience—from the single woman, to the mom, to the woman not living the life she really wants.

You have a background in writing traditionally-published nonfiction and working as a freelance journalist. How would you compare those two careers/writing styles with what you do now?

Writing comes with a lot of transferable skills. As a journalist I was used to writing to deadline, researching, creating a structure, keeping my audience engaged, and adapting styles to the publication. These are all skills I use now as an author, even if novels can be 90 times longer than your typical article. When I pitched my first nonfiction book, I could point to my solid resume as one of the reasons I was perfect to write the book. Being able to write a nonfiction book made me sure I could write a novel too.

You’ve built a loyal fan base that loves your books—so much so that Pied Sniper hit the bestselling mystery chart on Amazon during its preorder! How do you like to connect with your readers? What marketing strategies do you find most effective?

I was thrilled when Pied Sniper hit the mystery charts, especially as I hadn’t published for a year due to issues arising from the pandemic (homeschooling, amirite?). That showed to me how loyal my readers are and how worth it it is to build up that fanbase.

Marketing has never been my strength but early on I added an email subscribe button to my website to capture those enthusiastic readers. They’re my primary sales base and I can reach them directly. (I’ve just switched to MadMimi for my sign-up button and emails as it’s a good value and great to look at.) I have a presence on Twitter, Instagram, Goodreads, and Bookbub, and my readers can connect with me there. I love it when they take the time to reach out. It’s such a boost to have a conversation and know people are enjoying your work.

Marketing involves pre-order emails, Insta teases such as a cover or first-line reveal, and tweeting. Periodically I offer a freebie; it’s good to reward loyalty! It’s fair to say I’m a work in progress.

What can your readers expect in the future? Are you planning more books in the Lexi Graves and Calendar Murder Mystery series, or perhaps starting something new?

I’m currently writing the next Calendar Murder Mystery and then I’ll either write another Calendar or the next Lexi. I have a novel planned featuring Maddox from the Lexi novels—it’s going to be wild! I always have a list of ideas for novels I think I, and my readers, will find compelling.

Thanks so much to Camilla for the interview. Sleuths, I hope you enjoyed it! If you aren’t already subscribed, please be sure to sign up for the Cluesletter and get author features like this alongside other mystery goodies, delivered to your inbox every other Tuesday.

It’s a tale as old as time: a young woman with big dreams swaps her small town for city life, only to return years later and find—of course—a mystery. So begins Roadside Homicide, the first book in Nancy Basile’s River Sutton Country mystery series. When Robin Pearce comes back to her West Virginia hometown, the last thing she expects is a bleeding, near-death man to stumble in front of her car, causing her to put her sleuthing skills to the test and find the culprit.

In today’s Cluesletter interview, I speak with Nancy about the charm of small town cozy mysteries, indie publishing and marketing strategies, and future releases.

Connect with Nancy on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. Plus, visit her website to sign up for her newsletter to nab a free copy of A Shoulder to Die On, a novelette-length prequel to her River Sutton Country series.

Grab Nancy’s books on Amazon (they’re all in Kindle Unlimited!): Roadside Homicide (Book 1); A Fatal Fumble (Book 2); The Disappearing Deliveries (Short Story).

Hi, Nancy! Thanks so much for joining me. You write the River Sutton Country series, set in a small town in West Virginia. In your opinion, what makes a great cozy mystery setting? Why do you think small towns are so popular in cozies?

I think a great cozy mystery setting is one that seems like a place the reader would want to visit. Whether it’s a country town set in the hills, like mine, or a seaside resort, or a mountain retreat. Readers want to take a vacation when they read cozy mysteries, so any setting that takes them away from a regular day-to-day setting will be a hit. And small towns work well because you can get to know the quirky characters so well. People get lost in big cities, but in small towns, you feel welcome and loved. The characters know each other, share stories, and act neighborly. That gives readers a chance to relax and laugh alone with their unique personalities.

 A Fatal Fumble, book two in your River Sutton Country series, launched earlier this year (congrats!). You also recently published a short story, “The Disappearing Deliveries,” and a prequel novelette, A Shoulder to Die On, both of which belong in the River Sutton universe. How would you compare writing a mystery as a full-length book versus a shorter work? Do you have any tips for or thoughts on writing mysteries in varying word counts?

I wish I had advice for writing a true short story, which is under 5,000 words, but I can’t seem to keep my stories that short. I guess I have too much to say. The nice thing about short stories is being able to tell a very specific story and speak to the characters’ specific character traits that deal with that plot, rather than have stories weaving in and out of each other and developing a character’s full life story. A “one and done” lets you really focus on the plot devices you need to complete just that story. A novel, as we all know, is quite an undertaking and can seem daunting. But the advantage is you can spend more time building the world, developing characters, and telling side stories. My advice would be to try both. You would be surprised how writing one length can build skills with writing the other.

As an indie author, is there anything you’ve learned during the publishing process that you’d like to share? Are there things you wished you did differently? What would you tell your past self preparing to publish your first books?

Oh, my goodness. I’ve learned so much in the past year. The first piece of advice I have is don’t do it in a bubble. And don’t fret about which group to join or which conference, online or real-life, to attend. Just pick one and go. No matter where you start, you’ll learn something. And the more you learn, the more you can plan what you need to learn next, and what you don’t need to focus on. The number one place I learned the most was the Women in Publishing Summit. It opened up the entire world of self-publishing for me, as well as a lot of writing help I needed. The next group I find most helpful is the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA). Their magazine, podcast, and website are chock full of information and tips for self-published authors that have been incredibly helpful for me, in terms of writing and marketing my books.

I love asking indie authors about their marketing, and I know you are active with a mailing list and online presence. What marketing efforts have you found most effective? Do you have advice for other authors looking to boost visibility, sales, and reviews?

I know everyone says email is dead, but I have found the opposite to be true. Social media is great for increasing your exposure to people, but I think it’s hard to get people to leave Instagram or any other platform to go buy a book. The best thing you can do is get people to sign up for your email list, and the best way to do that is through BookFunnel. BookFunnel has been the best way to market my books. I’m able to team up with other authors in my genre to offer sales or free books. I can also feature authors in my newsletter in exchange for having them feature my books in theirs. It’s really the most direct way to reach people who want to know about new books and buy them right now. And the most cost effective. As a new author, I don’t have a big budget for marketing, and this is the way to get the most bang for my bucks.

Lastly, I have to ask about your upcoming books—what do you have planned? Will there be more installments in your River Sutton Country series? If yes, where do you see the story headed?

There will definitely be more River Sutton mysteries, because my wonderful readers ask for them! I would hate to let them down. The next book will see Jenn and Deb in their new bed and breakfast. And Robin and Chris will finally start dating, though their romance has a rocky start. But I’m really excited about a new haunted house cozy mystery I’m writing. It’s set in Mistwick, West Virginia, which is based on Wheeling, West Virginia, a beautiful little city on the Ohio River full of history, a central market, Victorian houses, and turn-of-the-century architecture. I just started writing the first draft and I can’t wait to share it with everyone in a few months.

Thanks so much to Nancy for the interview. Sleuths, I hope you enjoyed it! If you aren’t already subscribed, please be sure to sign up for the Cluesletter and get author features like this alongside other mystery goodies, delivered to your inbox every other Tuesday.