Tag: series
Blast-off! And 50% Off!

Blast-off! And 50% Off!

By |
Help me launch the first book in my new series: “Voodoo Vendetta – A Literati Mystery”

And to celebrate a successful year of writing, publishing and living….

Keep reading to find out how to score a great deal on thoughtful stocking stuffers.
Location: Punta Gorda, Florida

In this issue:

  1. RV Rally Fun
  2. Voodoo Vendetta en route to Worldwide Distribution
  3. Case Study – Evolution of a Book Cover
  4. Ice Ops – A Short Story
  5. Year-end 50% Off All My Books!

1. RV Rally

Once in a while, we hang out with some Uber-interesting folks who share our passion for the nomadic lifestyle–the life of itinerant vagabonds.

The Full-timer’s chapter of the Newmar Owner’s Group gathered right here in our town, Punta Gorda in Southwest Florida. Kay and I so enjoyed seeing everyone again.

Fun fact: the RV Park that hosted our rally (food, fun, games, music, tall tales), Creekside RV Resort, saw forty rigs topple during Hurricane Ian’s onslaught. Not so much fun, however, for their owners. None of our group suffered damage as we go where the storms aren’t. When your home has wheels and catastrophe approaches, we beat feet.

We took this opportunity to enjoy a harbor cruise and a Christmas lights canal cruise with our RV friends. We also toured the Edison/Ford museum in Ft Myers. After living here for twenty years (when we’re not traveling), this is the first time we made it to that museum.

A fun harbor cruise with forty of our good RV friends.
Folks in Punta Gorda Isles go all out decorating their houses and boats in the canals, even after a major hurricane.
Remnant of Hurricane Ian during spotted our harbor cruise.

2. “Voodoo Vendetta” is on its way around the world

My ninth novel, “Voodoo Vendetta – A Literati Mystery” is officially available in both ebook and paperback editions in a bunch of online stores now (Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Smashwords…), and on its way at cyber-speed (faster than snail mail) to all the rest, worldwide. Including library services and reader subscription services (except for Kindle Unlimited which requires exclusivity–nope).

You might guess that launching a new title is exhausting. And you would be correct. So many details to manage. Everything has to be, well, perfect. And it takes a village.

While I’ve reduced the process to a straightforward workflow, it’s still a ton of work. As I reported in my last newsletter, early readers are loving this locked room whodunit murder mystery with myriad twists and characters you’ll love and hate, but for good reason. Some, you won’t be sure what to think.

As an adjunct, I thought some of you might like to see how this book’s cover evolved over the last few months based on useful but brutal feedback from readers and designers. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, keep reading. Otherwise, skip to details below on the huge year-end book sale to see how to save 50% on all of my titles, and a bunch of others.

From concept to….

3. Case Study – Evolution of a Book Cover

Never judge a book by its cover.

I.M. Naughtwriter

Poppycock!

In fact, the right cover is any author’s most powerful marketing tool. A great cover needs to:

  • Grab the casual shopper’s attention in two seconds or less, either in a bookstore, or online
  • Entice the online shopper to make a snap judgment from a thumbnail, a minuscule miniature of the book’s cover. That’s asking a lot from a picture the size of your thumbnail, and a design requirement often overlooked by rookie authors,
  • Identify the book’s genre (a murder mystery’s cover will look and feel very different from a romance story’s). This is more look and feel. Best achieved by studying other successful authors in the genre,
  • Set appropriate reader expectations with its title, font, color, text (back cover) and graphics.

Conversely, a not-so-great cover WILL be costly in lost sales. Worse, you may never know.

With each new book I publish, I am humbled by how much I still don’t know about book cover design. But I’m stubborn, and a control freak, and cheap, all of which prevents me from hiring a professional designer for each book. Plus, I enjoy endlessly tinkering with my covers’ designs.

So, I study the covers of other books in my genre–the ones that sell well. Even then, the most prominent feature on a famous and well-established author’s book cover will probably look very different from what my cover needs.

For example, what is the most prominent feature on the cover of a book written by James Patterson or JD Robb or Tom Clancey? Their name, of course. That makes no sense on my books because I’m not famous. Yet.

After tinkering, soliciting feedback, and more tinkering, I will still doubt my own cover design–the perennial paradox–one of many. For me, anyway. I know… madness.

Enough foreplay. Here are just a few of the dozens of iterations I went through for Vendetta’s cover.

Old working title. Eye-catching cover, but too cinematic. Looks like a collage of unrelated images (“What’s with the lipstick and cryptic background handwriting?”)
Too romantic a feel (it’s a mystery!) and too “fluffy.” Plus, this title still did not play well with reviewers. I still hadn’t lost the lipstick. And it looked mushy as a thumbnail. Make that downright illegible.
Better colors (more vibrant) to catch the eye as a thumbnail, and better title font, but still too many different fonts (3) for no good reason.Still too busy, and lacks coherence.
Better (catchy) title, and the overall design “feels” more mysterious (it’s a mystery!), but still too busy. These title/subtitle FONTS did not review well.

I also ground through several evolutions of the rear cover. I won’t bore you with that, but this darn cover drove me crazy. For months.

Thankfully, I received lots of constructive feedback. The final cover below also looks good as a thumbnail, I think, which is critically important for online sales pages. All the text is still fairly legible when reduced to a very small image. The title is a unique color and in a distinctive font called “Trash Hand.” I like that, as did reviewers:

And here’s the winner. Simple, but suggestive.
Dark like the book’s theme. Much takes place in dark basements and tunnels, involves a mysterious (“dark?”) religion, and more than a few devious (dark?) characters and plot twists.
Plus, of course, murder.
Limited fonts (2) with smoky shadows, with a provocative tag line (“Culture That Kills”). Composite images are subtle but suggestive (not visually cluttered).
Emphasizes a singular visual focus (the book’s title) with the series subtitle that grabs less focus, but still prominent (“A Literati Mystery”), which will appear on every cover in this series. One topic of continuing debate: characters’ faces on the cove? Or not? Screw it. I like it.
Decision made! Done, already!
Thumbnail

So, there you have it. A study in dark lavender. As one of my villains in this book says:

“Black is the new white. Reminds me of Moskva’s winter nights after curfew, but without the cold.”

Tihomir Leonov

A cover doesn’t have to be pretty, but it MUST be effective.

4. Ice Ops – A Short Story

I’ll be publishing a collection of short stories in 2023. I offer you an advance peek at one that means a great deal to me. I hope you enjoy this free sneak preview.

“Ice Ops – A Rescue Mission” is a chilling true account of life over death for more than thirty souls, and the genesis of an injury for yours truly that persists to this day. If you are so inclined, you can read it here.

5. Year End Sale 50% Off

That’s right. I’m offering 50% off the eBook edition of all my books–even my newest–on Smashwords (an Amazon alternative).

Just in time for the year-end holidays, click here between December 15 and December 31, 2022 to snag these great deals. Or simply click on the image below:

This is INSANITY!

That’s all for now. So, until… and wherever, my friend…

Happy Holidays!

Gene

Obiwan Geno
Launching A New Mystery Series From Ground Zero

Launching A New Mystery Series From Ground Zero

By |
Help me launch the first book in my new series: “Voodoo Vendetta – A Literati Mystery”
But first, this….
Location: Punta Gorda, Florida

In this issue:

  1. Eye-Witness Report From Hurricane Country
  2. Wonder Whodunnit in the New Literati Mystery Series by GK Jurrens

1. Eye-Witness Report From Hurricane Country

As the man (Uncle Sam) says,
and I’m paraphrasing here,
It ain’t pretty! And so much worse than you see on the news.

Commercial businesses are seen in the wake of Hurricane Ian, Thursday, Sept. 29, 2022, in Fort Myers Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)

“On Sept. 28, Hurricane Ian made landfall near Cayo Costa in southwestern Florida as a dangerous, high-end Category 4 storm after plowing a path of destruction through the Caribbean, bringing particularly heavy rainfall and dangerous surf to Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, and western Cuba.”

Courtesy: Patabook

Other than a national and global news highlight, you might ask, “So what?” You saw “Cayo Costa” mentioned above in the paragraph I quoted from the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration of the US Department of Commerce. We, too, can literally see the island of Cayo Costa west of our condo complex. Miss Kay and I perch on the eastern shore of Charlotte Harbor.

Again, so what? You see, our home was literally at Ground Zero for the worst weather event to strike Florida in almost a century.

Yeah, it ain’t pretty, but we fared so much better than so many others.

“Ian came ashore near Cayo Costa, Florida, at 3:05 p.m. EDT with maximum sustained winds of 150 mph, tying the record for the fifth-strongest hurricane on record to strike the United States.”

NOAA, US Dept of Commerce

Three things about this particular storm you might find of interest, and by now, no surprise:

  1. Its strength: The human psyche just cannot comprehend what sustained winds (for hours) of 150+ MPH means in practical terms. Out in the open, a hundred MPH at ultra-low barometric pressure will suck the air right out of your lungs. Examples of the storm’s brutality: Ian tossed around hundred-foot boats weighing fifty tons, hundreds of feet from the water. There isn’t a sign or billboard in SW Florida that isn’t knocked down, twisted, or just gone. Hundred-year-old trees are ripped from the ground with their root balls still clinging to tons of dirt they brought up with them as they went over. There’s a saying here in the context of such a frightening phenomenon: “If it ain’t concrete, it’s rubble.” Even with several days notice of this muscular weather event’s approach, still, over a hundred souls in Florida alone perished.
  2. Its speed: Hurricane Ian was a very slow-moving storm. Again, in practical terms, that means it, or the hundreds of tornadoes spun off from its eyeball, chewed on anything in its path for more than a dozen hours before the worst of it moved on (per some of our neighbors). If this storm were an evil villain in one of my novels, its strategy would have been to intimidate, threaten, demoralize, and weaken you with a brutal beating. Then, he would torture you, managing to sustain exquisite pain for many hours, far beyond your physical and emotional endurance. When he would grow bored with your suffering, he’d fling your lifeless body and everything you own into the raging sea that had come ashore. But first, he’d ensure the total destruction of everything in your life that you ever loved. After all that, with the coldest of hearts, he’d leave any survivors around you feeling exposed, powerless, and if possible, penniless—for years—as if that would bring joy to the uncaring hole in his soul, a hole that can never be filled. Yeah, even though he’s just an amalgamation of environmental factors, I’d write him as an evil bastard with no hope of redemption. That’s how small we are in the presence of nature’s fury–we can’t be objective. But good people rallied. Survivors clung together. The best of humanity prevailed.
  3. Its size: At over 400 miles in diameter, for some, there was just no escape. It changed the lives of millions by cutting a swath of annihilation across a large portion of this part of the world (Atlantic and Caribbean islands, most of Florida, the SE United States, and the Northeast.

“In all, the storm knocked out power to more than four million customers in Florida, and an additional 1.1 million homes and businesses lost power when the storm plowed through the Carolinas. Recovery costs estimated to be around $47 billion in insured losses, according to research firm CoreLogic.”

NOAA, US Dept of Commerce
Shelters set up across the area aided those rendered homeless by Hurricane Ian.

Because Miss Kay and I are fortunate enough to live (some of the time) in a steel-reinforced concrete building, our condo suffered minimal damage. Others in our association, however, weren’t so lucky.

While the main buildings all survived with aplomb, some windows and lanais (“porches”) were ruthlessly ripped away, allowing water to find a way inside. Some apartments are completely gutted due to water damage after the storm (as ours was after Hurricane Charley in 2004).

Almost two months after the storm, our neighborhood doesn’t look so bad, does it?
It’s what you can’t see at a glance that has a few of our neighbors pleading with their insurance companies for financial compensation.
And it’s that damage that will drive emotional distress for the rest of some people’s lives. What you can’t see.
Kay and I were lucky. And as a neighborhood, the repairs we effected across this 16-acre property after Hurricane Charley in 2004 served us well through this particularly nasty storm.

But beyond our neighborhood, the devastation was complete on the barrier islands between us on the mainland and the Gulf of Mexico (Cayo Costa, Pine Island, Captiva, Sanibel, Ft Myers Beach….). We don’t go down there, even if we could. Strict quarantine and/or curfews try to prevent looting. Many of these looters (“shoppers”) aren’t even from Florida!

A lot of the places we used to frequent are just… gone.

In early October, as we approached SW Florida in our motorhome right after the storm, we saw HUNDREDS of power and telephone maintenance/repair trucks, most from out of state heading south on I-75. Even a bunch of out-of-state fire trucks.

We saw military convoys pouring into the area to aid in disaster relief efforts.

FEMA (the feds) had thrown up entire tent and trailer CITIES as temporary shelters and housing for emergency crews imported from all over the country.

Countless Good Samaritans opened up their homes to the newly homeless, including several of our own neighbors.

Insurance companies imported hundreds of adjusters to assess damage. They have their own tents here and there as focal points for their adjusters.

Soldiers (Army, National Guard) passed out millions of bottles of water, helping local and state law enforcement and fire fighters with evacuations and other forms of disaster relief.

It was thrilling to see this side of humanity in action!

Our own community (Burnt Store Marina), while very well maintained with mostly new docks and other upgraded infrastructure, took a beating worse than our condos.

Boats piled on top of one another, and several docks are either gone or rendered useless. The storm snapped treated wood pilings a foot or more in diameter like toothpicks….

We still see so much damage even now, almost two months downrange from the storm. They’re still picking up the pieces. Repairs and restoration will take much longer.

We can’t see much of the costly damage to boats in the marina. I talked with a diver who says so many boats—the ones that didn’t sink or weren’t flung ashore—took their worst hits below the waterline. Damaged hulls, bent propellers and shafts, gouges and cracks. But most of these boats aren’t peoples’ homes or livelihoods. So we have nothing to complain about.

Nothing.

A diver loads his camera to take insurance photos of a damaged prop, a shattered swim platform, and gouges in the hull–all damage caused by this boat riding up over the dock during the storm.
See those “toothpicks” laying on this decimated dock? They’re at least 15″ in diameter. Poof!
I believe this is (was) someone’s home. It took awhile to get this big sailing catamaran off the seawall.
Fiberglass versus concrete?
No contest.

To answer your next inevitable question, we were not here on September 28. We were in our motorhome on Galveston Island on the Texas Gulf coast as the storm approached Florida.

We then slowed our return home by hanging out in NW Louisiana when the storm made landfall, essentially, right over our home. We then staged to just east of Tampa until power was restored to our neighborhood in early October. Otherwise, we would have become part of the problem.

Now it’s just a matter of each owner chipping in to pay the insurance deductible to address the association’s damage (gulp).

The South Shore community where we live within Burnt Store Marina was so fortunate. None of our neighbors and friends lost their lives. We were blessed to have been traveling at the time. If we’d been here, we’d have rolled on out of here on September 25th before the storm came ashore. The “nice” thing about hurricanes (unlike tornadoes)? You have DAYS of advance warning.

We are also blessed with the means to hire an experienced disaster clean-up company to get us back to some semblance of normal sooner rather than later.

Our “hidey hole” (shelter) from the storm in NW Louisiana as the storm approached our brick ‘n mortar home in SW Florida. I had planned to be there to research the Creole culture for “Voodoo Vendetta,” anyway. We just extended our stay because of a brute named Ian.
No, we were not roughing it (well, no dishwasher, except for me).
How fortunate are we to have an “evacuation-capable” home?
A small matter of eight wheels, an 8.9 liter turbo diesel power plant and a 7.5 kilowatt generator!
Not to mention a co-pilot I love spending time with in this 300 square-foot house.

Kay and I are blessed. We can afford to take nothing for granted, especially in times of disaster and prolonged recovery.
Life is just too short, and getting shorter every day, my friend. For all of us.

2. Wonder Whodunnit in the New Literati Mystery Series

by GK Jurrens

Moving on….

“Voodoo Vendetta’s” Kindle edition is now available for pre-order for automatic November 30th delivery.
Paperback edition to follow in all major online storefronts worldwide soon after Thanksgiving (well before Christmas, if you’re looking for gift ideas).

You can check out the basic premise and early reviews of Book One, “Voodoo Vendetta” here. But below is something extra,, just for you—a short chapter that reveals my main character’s motivation:

Sunday, June 21st

A Few Years From Now

DuSable Park

Chicago, Illinois

11:30AM

* * *

It would be a day to remember.

The mid-morning air glowed with uncharacteristic brilliance. The haze abated, allowing the summer sun to boast its magnificence in a sky of muted blue. A miraculous day, a unique day of days.

Melissa and Clancy Greigh stood in a line that meandered around the corner of their favorite food truck, Aphrodite’s Kitchen. They chuckled at each other’s stupid jokes, none of them worthy of a full-fledged laugh. But their hearts were full, unlike their stomachs.

Now it was their turn to order, at last. Aphro looked down at the pair of redheads, mother and daughter. In her heavy Greek accent, she chirped, “And what may I make for you lovely ladies?”   

Instead of sharing an order of moussaka—their standard fare for their traditional Sunday morning outing to the park—Clance bubbled with anticipation as she delivered her well-rehearsed little speech. Though only six years old, Clance already enjoyed a sophisticated palate. “Mummy, could I have my own gyro today instead of splitting a moussaka? Please, please?” She widened her smiling eyes and wrinkled her tiny forehead as her eyebrows shot farther toward her hairline in gleeful expectation. 

After all, she was a big girl now. 

* * *

Mel grinned up at Aphro.

The street chef shrugged at the convincing little speech. Mum gazed down at her little redhead. What an amazing child. If only dear Greigh were here. She reflected on this, one of those defining moments in a parent’s life. He was missing it, but she knew how important his project was to him—and to all of them. After all, The Literati was their home. 

Clance had become her own person, and her brilliance beamed for all to see. Mel imagined what her little girl would do with her gifts in life. 

She was about to yield to her beautiful daughter’s big-girl plea, even though she knew the sandwich would be way too much for her. And then a terrible crack of thunder echoed through the park. Mel studied Clance’s wide-eyed wonder as a field of crimson blossomed across her tiny chest and her white camisole. 

Mel registered instant concern, thinking Aphro might have dripped tomato sauce on her from above, which stains, but then lightning struck, and night fell. 

* * *

Sir Aubrey Greigh labored at home.

With a maniacal focus, he pursued his twin passions—writing and crusading. He owned suite 7D in Hotel Literati. As a condo owner and president of “The Lit” Homeowner’s Association, he labored with prodigious passion to ensure their home never fell into the hands of a greedy land developer.  If that happened, they’d demolish their beloved building.   

Sure, they’d offer a generous buy-out, but that wasn’t the point at all, was it?

And then the call came that changed everything. 

Later, the news anchor reported.

“A sniper fatally shot five people and wounded two others standing in line at a Greek food truck in DuSable Park near the waterfront earlier today. Authorities will release no details until they notify families of the victims….”

Wednesday, June 24th

Apartment 7D

Hotel Literati

Chicago, Illinois

* * *

Ten PM came and went. 

Three days ago, Greigh’s universe went super nova. He sat on his sofa facing a dark fireplace… lost. He couldn’t even cry.

More than a hundred of his neighbors and sundry celebrities—he had no friends, really—shared his profound grief at the funeral earlier that afternoon, and afterward, for his ladies’ interment in the family crypt. 

Just another unsolved random mass shooting. An acquaintance looped into the investigation told him the only “signature” left by the killer was a unique slug—a .338 Lapua Magnum cartridge—from an ancient weapon called an IWI DAN .338, a tactical rifle that hadn’t been manufactured for almost fifty years.

Two slugs from that weapon ended the lives of Melissa and Clancy Greigh. It might as well have ended his, too. 

That’s all for now. So until… and wherever, my friend (from Ground Zero for a few more months)…

Gene (and Miss Kay)

My Jedi imitation….

Archives