July Writing update

Hello again!

It's summer, and up in Oxford on my annual research trip. I'm delving into the archives of the famous Bodleian Library to research the 1930 election in Germany and the independence movement in Egypt. I love doing research for my historical novels.

New books in both the Masked Man of Cairo series and The Berlin Murders will be out by the end of the year. I also intend on having a sequel to Cordelia Cracks the Case. Currently I'm working on a post-apocalyptic thriller called Bunker. Those should be out by the end of the year too More on that soon!

In the meantime, Radio Hope, book one of my post-apocalyptic series Toxic World, is only 99 cents through July 16, so if you might want to give it a try.

See you next month!

Radio Hope is now Free!

Radio Hope, the first volume in my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series, is now free on all platforms. That's right. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and all other vendors have it listed as free. So if you like gritty, realistic science fiction, give it a try! A blurb is below.

In a world shattered by war, pollution and disease. . .

A gunslinging mother longs to find a safe refuge for her son.

A frustrated revolutionary delivers water to villagers living on a toxic waste dump.

The assistant mayor of humanity's last city hopes he will never have to take command.

One thing gives them the promise of a better future--Radio Hope, a mysterious station that broadcasts vital information about surviving in a blighted world. But when a mad prophet and his army of fanatics march out of the wildlands on a crusade to purify the land with blood and fire, all three will find their lives intertwining, and changing forever.

My Writing Year: A Look Back And A Look Forward

This past year has been an interesting one for me, being both productive and unproductive.

How so? Well, I wrote the least amount I ever have under my own name in a long time, coming out with just two books in 2021. This is due to getting a lot of ghostwriting work. While remunerative, it kept me from doing as much as I would have liked under my own byline.

I still wrote a lot. Although I once again missed my goal of writing a million words in a year, I did get well past 900,000 and made the most money I ever have in this career or my previous one, so that was nice.

I did come out with two books under my own name. The first was Flight to Fez, the third book in my Interzone Mystery series. The second was The Case of the Asphyxiated Alexandrian, book five in my The Masked Man of Cairo historical mystery series. So a good year for mysteries!

What's coming up in 2022? My ghostwriting work is still going strong, and I have managed to get on a saner publishing schedule that will allow me to build up my own career a bit more. My new year's resolution is to write 1,000 words a day of my own stuff. A trio of short prequel novels for The Masked Man of Cairo series are in the works, as are two new series. These are Tech Scavengers, a space opera series, and an as-yet-untitled mystery series set in Weimar Berlin. I'd also like to squeeze in book 5 of Toxic World, titled Election Day. If you have any preferences about what you'd like to read next, tell me in the comments section!

You can follow my progress with the word count bars to the right and also by signing up to my newsletter.

It's going to be a fun year!

A Free Book, A New Look, and New Markets for the Toxic World Series!

As you can see from the photo, my cover designer has switched out the cover for Radio Hope, Book One of my post-apocalyptic Toxic World series. The old cover was a bit flat and this one has more pop. I hope you like it.

I've also taken the series out of Kindle Select and published it wide. You can now find the series on Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Scribd, and many other outlets. Click on the title to find a list of links for Radio Hope. Hitting on your favorite store will take you to that title and the rest of the series.

Also, I'm giving away The Scavenger, a novella set in the Toxic World, for free on all those venues. Click on the link to grab your copy today!

My Writing Year: A Look Back And A Look Forward

The year 2020 is gone, and I'm sure none of us are sad to see it go. Hopefully 2021 holds out more promise with vaccines and the chance to live our lives fully once again. Here in Madrid we had worse lockdowns than most, but that didn't affect my writing. In fact it helped, because I had fewer distractions. Nothing like writing to stave off boredom and cabin fever!

This was a good writing year for me. My ghostwriting career has taken off with a great new client, the return of an old one, and the regulars staying with me. Demand for ebooks has gone up massively this year and because of that I'm getting more work than ever before. The sales on my own books rose as well. It's never been a better time to be an indie writer.

While my income has risen, my word count is almost the same as 2019. I set myself an annual goal of a million words. I've never made that goal, but having a tough goal makes me work harder. I got 947,000 words written in 2020. Not bad but still well shy of the million mark. I'll make it some year!

I also reached the milestone of writing my 50th novel. I'm now hard at work on numbers 52 and 53. There's no secret to this. I just keep plugging away every day and the novels pile up. I know a lot of writers who have written far more than I have.

The increased demands of my ghostwriting career has meant that I haven't gotten as many of my own books out in 2020 as I would have liked. At least I added a fourth book to the Masked Man of Cairo series, The Case of the Karnak Killer. I also added a short story collection to the Toxic World series, Tales from the Toxic World.

Both series will see new novels in 2021. I'm also researching a new mystery series set in the Weimar era, and have various other projects in the works. You can check my progress in the right-hand column of this blog and stay in touch via my newsletter.

I hope you all are staying well through this pandemic. I've gotten off easy, not having lost any loved ones or my job. So many others have it worse. Stay safe and get vaccinated as soon as you can!

Tales From The Toxic World Out Now!

Toxic World fans, the wait is over! 

The latest installment in the series is out--Tales from the Toxic World. Here are nine stories featuring some of the most popular characters in the series, plus new characters and a town the citizens of New City have no idea exists! This collection expands the Toxic World setting. The fifth novel in the series, Election Day, will come out next year.

A scavenger with a wondrous artifact from the Old Times sets out to avenge his past …
The sheriff of a post-apocalyptic shantytown investigates a baffling murder …
Two fishermen in a toxic sea make a startling discovery …
A peddler has to compromise his faith to help others and not end up dead …
Here are nine stories from a grim future that’s all too possible. The world has been destroyed by war, pollution, and environmental degradation. Now only a few lonely outposts struggle to keep the light of civilization lit amid vast toxic wasteland filled with human predators.
This collection is a long-awaited addition to the popular Toxic World post-apocalyptic science fiction series. It’s sure to please fans and newcomers to the series alike.

You can buy Tales from the Toxic World here. 

To get it FREE, sign up for my newsletter, Sean's Travel's and Tales, the latest issue of which is coming out later this week. There will be a coupon in there for your free download.

Two Free Lockdown Reads!

Bored during lockdown? Have a couple of free ebooks on me! Through the end of this weekend I'm offering my novel The Last Hotel Room and my novella The Scavenger for free.

The Last Hotel Room deals with the Syrian refugee crisis and is based on several refugees I interviewed in Iraq and Morocco.

He came to Tangier to die, but life isn’t done with him yet.
Tom Miller has lost his job, his wife, and his dreams. Broke and alone, he ends up in a flophouse in Morocco, ready to end it all. But soon he finds himself tangled in a web of danger and duty as he’s pulled into scamming tourists for a crooked cop while trying to help a Syrian refugee boy survive life on the streets.
Can a lifelong loser do something good for a change?

The Scavenger is set in my Toxic World setting for the series of the same name.

In a world shattered by war, pollution, and disease, a lone scavenger discovers a priceless relic from the Old Times.
The problem is, it's stuck in the middle of the worst wasteland he knows--a contaminated city inhabited by insane chem addicts and vengeful villagers. Only his wits, his gun, and an unlikely ally can get him out alive.
Set in the Toxic World series introduced in the novel Radio Hope, this 10,000-word story explores more of the dangers and personalities that make up a post-apocalyptic world that's all too possible.

Enjoy!

The Fourth in the Toxic World Series is Out Now!

The fourth book in my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series is out now. It's called Emergency Transmission and takes up where We Had Flags left off. Yu-jin is back, and we get to learn more about some of the other characters who have been in previous books but haven't had their chance to shine. A blurb is below:

Trust is the only thing that can save the world.
The problem is, everyone has their own agenda.
When an offshore platform starts emitting toxic fumes that threaten to destroy the last outposts of civilization, the residents of New City have to team up with a foreign freighter to fix it. But a lingering mistrust remains, and neither side has the resources to stop the leak.
That is, until help comes from the least reliable source.
Can old enemies finally set aside their differences for the greater good?

Emergency Transmission is available on Amazon US and all the other Amazons.

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.

Update on my books

I haven't blogged for a while because I was busy up in Oxford researching and seeing friends. Now I'm back in Madrid, hard at work getting you folks some more books. Three titles will be coming to you by the end of the year:

Tangier Bank Heist is a mystery with a dash of humor set in 1950s Tangier. In those days it was the wildest city in Africa, as this book will show. It's all set except for the cover. The artist is working on that now. This is the first book in a new series!

Writing Secrets of the World's Most Prolific Authors is with the beta readers at the moment. This is a book aimed at beginning and early career writers. It looks at a dozen famous writers such as Edith Blyton and Isaac Asimov, and how they managed to write hundreds of books while still maintaining a high standard of quality. It's been inspiring and helpful for me, and hopefully will be to the readers too.

Emergency Transmission is in the copyediting stage. It's the fourth in the Toxic World series of post-apocalyptic books. New City's Chinese population decides to assert its civil rights by celebrating Chinese New Year, and people begin to take sides. Then a mysterious preacher sails into port. . .

All of these books will be out by the end of the year, in the order that I've written them up here. My current project another Tangier mystery to follow up Tangier Bank Heist.

So of course I'll be spending the next couple of weeks in Morocco! Then it's back to Cairo to work on the next Masked Man of Cairo novel.

I'll also try to blog a bit more regularly. I know, I know, famous last words. . .

July Sale: Two Ebooks for 99 Cents Each!

You folks deserve some cheap summer reading, so until the end of July, I'm slashing the price of two of my novels to only 99 cents each. Radio Hope and Trench Raiders have both been around since 2014 and they've sold steadily, but in the past year they've been eclipsed by some of my more recent efforts. So this is a chance to rediscover some of my earlier writing. While both are the start of series, they can be read as standalones.

Radio Hope is the first of the Toxic World series, which has three books and a spin-off novella. Book Four is coming out in the autumn. A blurb is below.

In a world shattered by war, pollution and disease. . .
A gunslinging mother longs to find a safe refuge for her son.
A frustrated revolutionary delivers water to villagers living on a toxic waste dump.
The assistant mayor of humanity's last city hopes he will never have to take command.
One thing gives them the promise of a better future--Radio Hope, a mysterious station that broadcasts vital information about surviving in a blighted world. But when a mad prophet and his army of fanatics march out of the wildlands on a crusade to purify the land with blood and fire, all three will find their lives intertwining, and changing forever.

Radio Hope is available on Amazon, Amazon UK, and all the other Amazons. Enjoy and please spread the word!

Trench Raiders is the first in the Trench Raiders series of World War one action novels, which includes three novels and a novella. Here's the blurb:

September 1914: The British Expeditionary Force has the Germans on the run, or so they think.
After a month of bitter fighting, the British are battered, exhausted, and down to half their strength, yet they’ve helped save Paris and are pushing toward Berlin. Then the retreating Germans decide to make a stand. Holding a steep slope beside the River Aisne, the entrenched Germans mow down the advancing British with machine gun fire. Soon the British dig in too, and it looks like the war might grind down into deadly stalemate.
Searching through No-Man’s Land in the darkness, Private Timothy Crawford of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry finds a chink in the German armor. But can this lowly private, who spends as much time in the battalion guardhouse as he does on the parade ground, convince his commanding officer to risk everything for a chance to break through?
Trench Raiders is the first in a new series of World War One action novels that will follow the brave men of the British Expeditionary Force through the major battles of the First World War a hundred years after they happened. The Battle of the Aisne was the start of trench warfare on the Western Front, and it was there that the British and Germans first honed their skills at a new, vicious brand of fighting.

Trench Raiders is available at Amazon, Smashwords, and within a few days will be available at all other online outlets. 

My next newsletter coming out this week, sign up for a free ebook!

The third issue of my newsletter, Sean's Travels and Tales, will come out later this week. This issue includes an article on an odd artifact I spotted in the National Museum in Cairo, a short story from my Toxic World series, and a coupon for a free ebook.

So click on this link to sign up to my newsletter. I promise not to share your email with anyone, because that's a sure way to tank my career!

Get Radio Hope for only 99 cents!

For the next week, through July 19, my post-apocalyptic science fiction novel Radio Hope is only 99 cents on Amazon. This is the first of the Toxic World series, which has three books and a spin-off novella. Book Four is coming out in the autumn. Radio Hope, however, can also be read as a standalone novel. I'm not pulling you into some sort of crack dealer arrangement. :-) A blurb is below.

In a world shattered by war, pollution and disease. . .
A gunslinging mother longs to find a safe refuge for her son.
A frustrated revolutionary delivers water to villagers living on a toxic waste dump.
The assistant mayor of humanity's last city hopes he will never have to take command.
One thing gives them the promise of a better future--Radio Hope, a mysterious station that broadcasts vital information about surviving in a blighted world. But when a mad prophet and his army of fanatics march out of the wildlands on a crusade to purify the land with blood and fire, all three will find their lives intertwining, and changing forever.

Radio Hope is available on Amazon, Amazon UK, and all the other Amazons. Enjoy and please spread the word!

The Scavenger: Post-Apocalyptic Ebook Free Through May 22

I'm offering my post-apocalyptic story The Scavenger for free on Amazon for the next five days.

This story is a 67-page adventure set in my Toxic World series, which starts with the novel Radio Hope. The Scavenger a standalone story, but it gives a different perspective on some of the places and characters that appear in Radio Hope.

The blurb is below:

In a world shattered by war, pollution, and disease, a lone scavenger discovers a priceless relic from the Old Times.
The problem is, it's stuck in the middle of the worst wasteland he knows--a contaminated city inhabited by insane chem addicts and vengeful villagers. Only his wits, his gun, and an unlikely ally can get him out alive.
Set in the Toxic World series introduced in the novel Radio Hope, this 10,000-word story explores more of the dangers and personalities that make up a post-apocalyptic world that's all too possible.

I'd like to get it in front of as many eyeballs as possible. So please, between now and Monday, May 22, feel free to share, like, tweet, etc!

Word Count Wobbles

You might have noticed the word count meters I have on the right-hand margin of this blog. It helps my readers keep track of where my projects are and helps inspire me to write more. The book I'm currently working on the most is The Masked Man of Cairo: The Case of the Purloined Pyramid, a neo-pulp detective story set in 1919 Cairo. I'm almost done with that, but I've been almost done for a couple of weeks. At first I thought it would be 60,000 words. Then I upped it to 65,000. Then a minor character sent the plot sideways and I corrected it to 75,000. Now I really am almost done and it will be 75,000 words or a little less.

This is unusual for me. I can usually guess the final word count of a novel to within 5%, even before I start. I know how a story feels to me. Perhaps it's because this is a new genre for me.

You'll also notice that annual goal of one million words. I just reached the one-third mark on that yesterday, but of course we are slightly more than a third of the way through the year. I'm going to have to pick up speed if I want to hit that goal.

Then there are the other two books. Emergency Transmission, the fourth in my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series, has been on hold for the past couple of months. I'll get started on that again the first week of June. Last but not least is The Saga of Egil Thorfinnsson and the Weaklings, a historical fantasy about Norse Greenland. That was a novel that stopped dead in its tracks years ago before I really hit my stride of daily productivity. I've put it up there to remind myself to finish it someday. And I will. Someday.

Then there's all the ghostwriting I'm doing. . .

I update the word count meters every Sunday if you want to watch my progress!

The Scavenger: Post-Apocalyptic Ebook Free Through January 22

I'm offering my post-apocalyptic story The Scavenger for free on Amazon for the next five days.

This story is a 67-page teaser for my Toxic World series, which starts with the novel Radio Hope. The Scavenger a standalone story, but it gives a different perspective on some of the places and characters that appear in Radio Hope.

The blurb is below:

In a world shattered by war, pollution, and disease, a lone scavenger discovers a priceless relic from the Old Times.
The problem is, it's stuck in the middle of the worst wasteland he knows--a contaminated city inhabited by insane chem addicts and vengeful villagers. Only his wits, his gun, and an unlikely ally can get him out alive.
Set in the Toxic World series introduced in the novel Radio Hope, this 10,000-word story explores more of the dangers and personalities that make up a post-apocalyptic world that's all too possible.

I'd like to get it in front of as many eyeballs as possible. So please, between now and Sunday, January 22, feel free to share, like, tweet, etc!

Finished National Novel Writing Month!

Hello from Morocco! I'm down here for one of my regular writing retreats and making a rare appearance online. I mostly ignore the existence of the Internet when I'm here. Anyway, I just wanted to announce that I made it through another National Novel Writing Month, a movement of mass craziness every November when people around the world write 50,000 words in 30 days.

Actually it's not as hard as it sounds. Like any other skill, writing becomes easier with practice. The more you write, the more you can write. It helps that in Morocco I don't have any distractions to lower my word count!

Mostly I've been working on the fourth of my Toxic World series of post-apocalyptic novels, Emergency Transmission, which sees the reappearance of the mysterious freighter`and the reappearance of a certain crazed cult that wasn't fully done away with in the first book. I also did some ghostwriting. I've been getting a lot of that sort of work lately.

I'll be in Morocco for another couple of weeks. I'll post some pictures when I can!

Doing National Novel Writing Month Again This Year!

It's that time of year again, when writers all around the world brew an extra post of coffee and pound their keyboards until their fingers bleed. That's right, it's National Novel Writing Month, when we go for the goal of writing 50,000 words in a month.

This year is a bit different for me because I'm in the middle of a bunch of things, so instead of writing a whole novel in a month, I'm finishing one ghostwriting novel, starting another, and continuing work on Emergency Transmission, the fourth in my Toxic World series of post-apocalyptic novels. I guess that means I'm doing National Partially Write Three Novels Month. Whatever, as long as I make 50,000 words!

If you're doing NaNo and want to hook up online, you find me at my participant page.

Get the Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Radio Hope for Free!

For the next five days, through July 11, my post-apocalyptic science fiction novel Radio Hope is free on Amazon. This is the first of the Toxic World series, which has three books and a spin-off novella. Book Four is coming out in the early summer. Radio Hope, however, can also be read as a standalone novel. I'm not pulling you into some sort of crack dealer arrangement. :-) A blurb is below.

In a world shattered by war, pollution and disease. . .
A gunslinging mother longs to find a safe refuge for her son.
A frustrated revolutionary delivers water to villagers living on a toxic waste dump.
The assistant mayor of humanity's last city hopes he will never have to take command.
One thing gives them the promise of a better future--Radio Hope, a mysterious station that broadcasts vital information about surviving in a blighted world. But when a mad prophet and his army of fanatics march out of the wildlands on a crusade to purify the land with blood and fire, all three will find their lives intertwining, and changing forever.

Radio Hope is available on Amazon, Amazon UK, and all the other Amazons. Enjoy and please spread the word!

More Honest Numbers from a Kindle Giveaway

Back in March I blogged my numbers for an Amazon free promotion of my post-apocalyptic novel Radio Hope. Click the link to see the data. I just finished another giveaway, this time for The Scavenger, a 10,000 word short set in the same world. It also includes the first three chapters of Radio Hope as a teaser.

As usual when I do a promo, I tweeted and blogged about it, and I bought an ad in Book Barbarian, a newsletter catering to fantasy and science fiction fans. It goes out to more than 12,000 subscribers and my ad was posted on their Facebook page, which has 12,867 fans. The ad cost $25 and ran on May 6. Here are my numbers broken down by country:

Thursday, May 5: US (47), UK (3), Germany (1), Spain (1)

Friday, May 6 (Book Barbarian ad): US (616), UK (1), Germany (1), Netherlands (1), Canada (1), Australia (1)

Saturday, May 7: US (118), UK (2), Germany (1), Canada (1)

Sunday, May 8: US (52), UK (1)

Monday, May 9: US (29), UK (1), Canada (1)

TOTAL: US (862), UK (8), Germany (3), Spain (1), Netherlands (1), Canada (3), Australia (1)

GRAND TOTAL: 879 downloads

As you can see, there was a major spike on the day of my ad, and a sizeable tail for the following day. That launched me into the top five in two categories, where I remained for the next couple of days.

Otherwise the giveaway was rather lackluster. I have a couple of explanations for this. First off, this was the fourth time I've done a giveaway for this title, meaning quite a few people who search for this genre have already downloaded it (or decided they're not interested!). Second, note that my categories are in Kindle Short Reads. When Radio Hope got in the top ten for post-apocalyptic novels, that led to a lot more downloads than I'm seeing this time. It's been shown time and again, with my data and others, that readers prefer full novels to shorts. It appears that considerably more people are checking the top free books in novels than in Kindle Short Reads. I'm one of those people!

It's also interesting to note how few downloads I had outside the US. Normally about 15% of my sales on any given month are to the UK, with another 5% to the rest of the world combined. But for this giveaway non-US downloads accounted for only a little more than 2% of the total. The Radio Hope giveaway also didn't do so well beyond the US. I have no idea why this is the case, although part of it certainly is that low initial downloads kept me from getting into the top ten of these markets, hurting visibility and stifling downloads.

So was it worth the $25 I paid for the ad? Yes. Getting my book on 879 devices will lead to a lot more readers, some of whom will go on to buy the other books in my series. These giveaways are part of an ongoing process to raise the profile of my writing. There won't be any overnight successes, but a gradual climb upwards. It's already been heading that way thanks to my previous giveaway.

I hope this helps some of my fellow writers out there!