My next newsletter comes out next week!

What's this place? If you've read The Case of the Shifting Sarcophagus you might recognize it. Read all about this little-known spot in Cairo in my next newsletter, coming out next week. Every issue contains a short story, travel article, and a coupon for a free or discounted book. And even better, I never share your information, because that would be a really lousy way to treat my readers. Click here to subscribe!

New Print Edition Available and New Release Soon to Come

The print edition of The Case of the Shifting Sarcophagus, the second in my Masked Man of Cairo historical mystery series, is out now. There was a big delay thanks to a hopeless layout company I will never hire again. Publishing is full of landmines. Now, at last, it's available.

The third in the series, The Case of the Golden Greeks, is moving forward again after a long spell of ghostwriting that will fund some trips later in the year to Morocco and Egypt. I'm also in final edits for Emergency Transmission, the fourth in my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series. That will be coming out in early June. I'll be sure to announce it here.

If you want to hear more from me, you might consider joining my Facebook page, where I make all my announcements as well as share my online writing for other sites and one or two interesting articles on archaeology or history every week.

The Case of the Shifting Sarcophagus Out Now!

The second book in my Masked Man of Cairo series, The Case of the Shifting Sarcophagus, is out now. It's the next adventure for Sir Augustus, Moustafa, and Faisal, who we met in The Case of the Purloined Pyramid. I'll be writing the third book in the series late this year when I go back to Egypt. A blurb is below.

An Old Kingdom coffin. A body from yesterday.
Sir Augustus Wall had seen a lot of death. From the fields of Flanders to the alleys of Cairo, he’d solved several murders and sent many men to their grave. But he’s never had a body delivered to his antiquities shop encased in a 5,000 year-old coffin.
Soon he finds himself fighting a vicious street gang bent on causing national mayhem while his assistant, Moustafa Ghani, faces his own enemies in the form of colonial powers determined to ruin him. Throughout all this runs the street urchin Faisal. Ignored as usual, dismissed as usual, he has the most important fight of all.

Available as an ebook on Amazon, Amazon UK, and all the other Amazons. Print edition coming soon!

Update on my Books

Things are pretty busy here at the fiction factory. First off, the print edition of The Case of the Purloined Pyramid is finally out. Also, the Kindle edition is only $1.99 all this month in the Amazon US store.

I should have had the print edition out a while ago but I've been buried in ghostwriting assignments. I just finished one for a client that turns out to be my 52nd book-length project, 40 of which are novels. I finished it on Sunday and took Monday off. I needed a break!

Next up is another ghostwriting project, plus a mystery under my own name set in Tangier during the International Zone era just after World War Two. Yes, I'm going back to Tangier for ten days to write it next month. Should be fun!

Then summer will be right around the corner, time to finish up the next Toxic World book plus a nonfiction book I'm writing on the writing habits prolific authors. No, I'm not one of those yet. To be covered in my book, and author has to have written at least 300 books. I may never reach that level!

Some Good News and Some Bad News

Bad news first. . .Kindle Press is no longer taking submissions. As of today, the Kindle Scout Program, which was the one way to get into Kindle Press, is shutting its doors. Kindle Press will continue to market the 200+ books it already has on its list.

So it looks like The Last Hotel Room and The Case of the Purloined Pyramid will be the only books I will have with Kindle Press. While I am disappointed that I won't be able to launch a campaign for The Case of the Shifting Sarcophagus later this month like I intended, I can't say I'm all that surprised. Kindle Scout always felt like an experiment. Amazon was trying out various marketing strategies (with us as paid guinea pigs) to see what works and what doesn't. I suppose after more than two years in operation, they got their data and are moving on.

The Case of the Shifting Sarcophagus, the next in my Cairo detective series, is now with the beta readers and will come out in a month or so via Kindle Direct Publishing.

In other news, The Case of the Purloined Pyramid is on sale in the Amazon US store only for $1.99 until the end of April. So if you didn't vote for it during the Kindle Scout campaign, here's a chance to grab it. A big thank you to all my readers who helped support my two campaigns. I wouldn't have been publishing with Kindle Press without you!

My Second Cairo Mystery Novel is in the Editing Stage!

The Case of the Shifting Sarcophagus, the second in my historical mystery series The Masked Man of Cairo, is now in the editing stage. I finished the rough draft a couple of days ago, finally squeezing out some time from my busy ghostwriting schedule.

The sequel to The Case of the Purloined Pyramid sees Augustus, Moustafa, and Faisal teaming up again to solve another murder. This time an Old Kingdom sarcophagus appears in Augustus' house while he is asleep. He opens it to find the former chief of Paris police dead inside! How did such a huge sarcophagus get into his house unnoticed, and why did the murderers deliver the body to Augustus? You'll find out when it's released.

If you want to know about the release of this and other books of mine, consider signing up for my newsletter. It comes out every two months or so and includes a short story, travel article, news, and a coupon for a discounted or free book.

My Writing in 2017 and Looking Forward to 2018

Happy New Year! Well, at least if you use the Gregorian calendar like I do. It's been a busy year and I'm looking forward to an even busier one in 2018.
At the beginning of the year I set myself the challenge of writing a million words a year. I counted words the same way I did in 2016: fiction, nonfiction, and blogging all count. I also included editing at a ratio of 10:1, so editing 10,000 words counts as writing 1,000. I rounded down to the nearest 250 words.
So how did I do? I got to 927,000 words, up from 900,750 in 2016. So I missed my goal, but still had my best writing year to date. I'll be trying for the million mark again this year. We'll see how that goes.
Despite it being my best year, I was not entirely happy with my output. Much of it was ghostwriting, and while that certainly helped my bank account, it meant that no new titles came out under my name in 2017, a first in more than a decade. I also ended up in a higher income bracket and the taxman really nailed me.
I did have some successes. My neo-pulp mystery novel, The Case of the Purloined Pyramid, won the Kindle Scout program and got a contract with Kindle Press. The ebook edition comes out January 9 and the print edition later this month. I also got more than a third of the way through the next in the series, The Case of the Shifting Sarcophagus.
This year I'm making a concerted effort to work on more of my fiction. This will mean saying no to some ghostwriting offers, but I think it's best for my long-term career. Sales of my own books fell off sharply in 2017 because I wasn't bringing out more stuff, and that needs to change. In this new publishing world, visibility is the key. So, besides a million words for this year, here are some more resolutions I'll try to stick to:
Writing 1,000 words a day of my own fiction.
Writing a short story every month (more on that later).
Pitching a nonfiction article every month.
Getting more of my back list out in print, and sprucing up things like metatags and blurbs.
It's going to be a busy year!
If you're a writer, artist, or other creative type, how did your past year go? What are you plans for this one? Tell us in the comments section!

Off to Egypt!

Two of the five Abusir pyramids

Today I'm off to Egypt for another three-week writing retreat. During the last one I worked on The Case of the Purloined Pyramid, the first in a series of neo-pulp detective novels in the Masked Man of Cairo series. This time around I'm going to continue the adventures of Augustus, Moustafa, and Faisal in The Case of the Shifting Sarcophagus.

I'll be visiting friends and old haunts in and around Cairo, and seeing some new sites as well. The main one will be Abusir, a V Dynasty pyramid field that was built by the pharaohs after the Giza plateau filled up in the IV Dynasty.

I probably won't be blogging much, but I will be posting regular pictures and updates on my Facebook author page and my Instagram account.

Stela from the tomb of Ptahshepses (vizier under the pharoah Nyuserre)

Images courtesy Wikimedia Commons. My own pics coming soon!