Blowing My Horn

Once a year, here on Murder is Everywhere, each of us gets to blow their horn.

It’s when we launch a new book.

Some lucky few, like Tim, get to do even more horn-blowing, because they’re productive as hell.

Me? No. Just one book a year.

And guess what?

This year, 2012, no new book.

Not in North America anyway.

A Vine in the Blood was launched in December of 2011.

But Perfect Hatred won’t be hitting the bookstores until February of 2013.

There are good reasons for this, which I won’t bore you with.

But, in compensation, and because they are nice people (and savvy marketers) the good folks at Soho are throwing me a very meaty bone. (Arf!)

On the fourth of September, they re-published my first-in-series, Blood of the Wicked – in a special, low-priced, trade paperback edition.

And it's currently making its presence felt in bookstores all over North America.
And quite a few in the UK as well.

Here’s what it looks like:

Most of you, kind regular visitors to Murder is Everywhere, have read the book already, right?

Good. You can stop reading now. Please catch up with me next week when I’ll have something to write about that will interest you.

Now, for those few of you who are left, here’s the pitch:

In a recent review, commenting on all of my currently published books, the Wall Street Journal opined that they have “all the step-by-step excitement of a world-class procedural series”.

The New York Times called Blood of the Wicked “top-notch” and “entirely absorbing”.

Library Journal gave it a star.

The Boston Globe found it “compelling”.

The Toronto Globe and Mail referred to it as “masterful”.         

And Booklist, in another starred review, called my Chief Inspector Silva “South America’s Kurt Wallander”.

If you live in North America, your local, independent mystery bookstore will surely have it.
If you aren't lucky enough to have one of those fine establishments near you, you can get it at Barnes and Noble.

To find where, near you, go here: http://tinyurl.com/97m6m4j

Then, under the orange button that says ADD TO BAG, click on the link that says PICK UP IN STORE.
It will prompt you to enter your zip code.
And locate the nearest shop that stocks it.

End of pitch.
Thanks for your time.

Leighton - Monday

All Over the Map

The folks who contribute posts to this blog have access to a cool feature: Down at the very bottom of this page there’s a little oblong box surrounding the word “sitemeter”.

If you, as a visitor, click on it, all you’ll get is an ad for the service.

But when I, and the other registered administrators of this blog click on it, we get information about our readers.

We don’t get email addresses, or anything confidential like that.

We get general information.

Information like how you got here.  (Did you have us bookmarked? Did you find us through Google? Did you access us via a link from someone else’s site?)

Like how many visits we got in the past hour, past day, past week, past year.

Like which of our posts were most popular, most read, most stood the test of time.

But coolest of all, I think, is the map feature.

When I click on that one, I get a world map.

I can zoom in on a particular area, or I can choose to look at it by continent.

I can choose the last ten visits, twenty, or fifty, or a hundred.

And every visit is indicated by a little dot on the map.

For the last three days, I’ve been doing regular checks to see where you, our readers, dropped in from.

Turns out, it’s all over the map.

You’re on every continent and a lot of islands in between.

Just in the last seventy-two hours you’ve been checking-in from Korea, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Malaysia, Singapore, The Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, The United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, Anguilla, Antigua, Hungary, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Iceland, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the UK, France (including one visitor from Corsica), Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Tunisia, Cyprus, The United Arab Emirates, South Africa, Jamaica, The Netherlands Antilles and Vanuatu.

Vanuatu?

Yeah,  Vanuatu.

Honest.

Murder is Everywhere is…well…truly everywhere.

Our books, alas, are not.

The two great impediments to that are language (translations) and availability.

If you’re reading this, you obviously don’t have much of a problem with English.

But, if you’re our reader on Vanuatu (I’d find it hard to believe there’s more than one) you might find it difficult to get your hooks into a copy of Yrsa’s latest, even in English.

That’s changing.

And what’s changing it is ebooks.

Ebooks are exploding.

I just got a royalty statement from my publisher and discovered that my ebook sales doubled in 2009 over 2008, and, to date, have more than tripled in 2010 over 2009.

These days, it doesn’t matter where you live – as long as you own an ebook reading device, you can get Yrsa’s latest.

Last week, I did something I should have done earlier.

I digitalized my first book, Blood of the Wicked, and put it up on Amazon everywhere in the world where Kindle Books are sold, and where I hadn’t already sold the rights to a local publisher.

And I’m going to do the same with my other books at the rate of one book a month.

The cover image, because of copyright restrictions, is very different from the versions sold in places where the book has already been available. Here's what it looks like:

And, if you’re a reader of this blog, you can get it for free.

Not forever, but absolutely free until the end of this month.

Own an ebook reader?

Haven’t yet read Blood of the Wicked?

Live outside of North America, the U.S. Possessions and the Philippines?

If the answer to all three of those questions is “Yes”, then all you have to do is contact me.

Write to me through my website (you can get there by clicking on my photo over there on the right).

In your email, simply specify whether you’d like to have the book in Kindle or epub format.

And I’ll write back, attaching a free ebook.

Again, because of copyright restrictions, the deal isn't available to residents of the United States, Canada, the U.S. possessions and the Philippines - and it expries at the end of the month.

Write now.

Wherever you are in the world, it'll take you less than a minute to ask for it.

And only seconds to download it once you receive my reply.

 Leighton - Monday