Status Report!

Three Months to Publication of Book 4 and Other Stuff

Hello!

It’s another weather day here, and my school is closed due to many inches of concrete-like snow clogging the roadways. It’s on days like this when I’m very pleased to have hired Pete the snow guy, who will take care of the removal while I take care of other things, on which I will now update you!

First, Making Friends Can Be Murder, out June 10th and available for (Yep! You guessed it!) PREORDER!

I have been on a quest to get people to feel very excited about this book, excited enough to preorder it. To be honest, I thought if I tried really, really hard to explain about preordering and to ask people to do it, it wouldn’t be that difficult to get a few hundred or even a thousand preorders. The book is good! It’s funny! It’s paperback and costs less than twenty dollars! It’s the perfect escape from our hellish reality! I’ve never written anything sweeter or more readable!

Okay, I’m laughing out loud at my naivete.

It turns out, it’s the hardest thing in the world to get people to preorder the book. I have 215 preorders, and my goal is 2,000. The good news? I’m having a fun time thinking about preorders and updating the world on my (lack of) progress. Every month I make an Instagram reel about it, and about a thousand people watch each of those videos.

Still, only thirty people preordered the book last month.

Laughing again.

Book Five: No Guarantees That This One Will Ever Be Published, but It’s Fun!

I’m also having a pretty good time working on book 5. That alone—the idea that I’m enjoying writing—would have seemed impossible a few months ago. But now, I’m working on a project I’m calling NASA Conspiracy Murder Book in which a guy (Sam, an MD, PhD epidemiologist) blasts off to the International Space Station, and not forty-eight hours later, one of the founding women astronauts from Sally Ride’s era (a fake one, Kathy Winston, who I made up) gets murdered. Emily (Sam’s wife) investigates, inspired by feminism and because her husband is accused of espionage.

So, that synopsis is a little rough, which is why I’m using Story Genius by Lisa Cron to figure out why exactly Emily decides to be a dogged investigator in addition to being a novelist and a professor and a Brontë scholar (?!), and also the mother of two teenagers.

I’ve written a third of a first draft of this new cozy mystery starring Emily and a rag-tag group of co-sleuths. Every Monday, I report on how it’s going on Instagram. I thought I’d report about it on TikTok, but then I felt like TikTok might imminently disappear, so why not stick with what I know? The videos are called Monday Stats, and I make them from my desk at the middle school where I work, usually under fluorescent lighting and from an unflattering angle. Enjoy!

Last Thing: Marathon Eleven

Finally, I just registered for my eleventh marathon. Running, along with reading, has been the main constant in my life since I was eleven years old.

After I ran my tenth marathon in California last year, I thought perhaps I was done with the 26.2-mile distance. Marathons are hard and unpredictable, and no matter how well you do in training, anything can happen on race day.

Hmmm. Remind you of anything?? Like perhaps publishing a novel?!

It feels fitting that I decided to go for another marathon, a quest with an unknown outcome, at the same time I’m going for Book 5. I don’t have a contract for this fifth book, so what will happen is this:

I’ll write the whole thing, revise it a bunch of times, and then my agent will try to sell it. Depending on how Making Friends does, this could be exceedingly difficult. I had a contract for that book, so even though my third book was a sales flop, Book 4 was already on order.

With Book 5, I might need to try to publish under a pseudonym, so my bad track record from the poor sales of books 2-4 doesn’t follow me. I might need to abandon it and write something we think is more workable for the market. I might decide to self-publish it after we hit fifteen different walls.

OR, Making Friends might be a big success and people will want to read more cozy mystery from me! I could make a deal with my current editor, whom I adore, or maybe find a new publisher! Maybe before NASA Conspiracy comes out, I’ll write a sequel of Making Friends because everyone will want more Sarah Jones! (This is my secret dream. I’d be doing it right now if my agent hadn’t told me not to get my hopes up.)

Anyway, we don’t know what will happen until you do the training and show up to the starting line. So that’s what I’m going to do. Marathon Eleven and Book Five, here we go.

Other Things:

• Not too late to enter this giveaway for a free copy of Making Friends! (It helps me if you enter!)

• Epic launch party happening on June 10th in Minneapolis at Pryes Brewing. Everyone who preorders at Magers & Quinn gets a drink ticket! If you’ve already ordered from another shop, you can have a drink ticket if you order a backlist title from M&Q or buy a copy for a friend. Free registration for the party coming soon.

• Not local? Your personalized, signed copy can be shipped by M&Q!

• Ideas to make my book a giant bestseller? I’m totally listening… hit me up. ;)

Happy snow day!

Kathleen