Buy now from Amazon worldwide: Lost Anchors
JL Whitaker as JJ Kirsten, with Taran Roberts and Justus Lewis
– Print and Kindle editions available
A frantic Julia Stewart has lost someone in the middle of Melbourne – her banker husband, Michael. Or has she? In a desperate phone call to her long-time counsellor, psychiatrist Dr. Sadhu Singh, Julia pleads for help. When Julia reports her fears to the police, Detective Taylor Franke joins the hunt for the missing Michael.
As far as family friends and Michael’s co-workers know, the relationship has been a relatively happy one, raising daughter Michelle, spending time sailing, planning a trip to visit Michael’s family in Scotland. Of course, there was Julia’s breakdown a few years earlier, as well as Michael’s mysterious ‘men’s business’ meetings upstairs at The Anchor Cafe, his long unexplained mid-week lunches, and the stash of unlikely garments locked in his office file cabinet. Could he have run off with Michelle’s trust account? Does he have a lover? What about the refuelled family boat in the harbour? No one in their circle has seen him for a week. That doesn’t match Julia’s fuzzy stories – at all.
Over the course of the next five days, Dr. Singh and Detective Franke work to answer the question Julia needs answered: Where’s Michael? What they eventually find, they could not have imagined.
Buy from:
Amazon sites Worldwide: On A Life’s Edge
iTunes: On A Life’s Edge
Shawna Charity has an abusive partner, little money, no skills, and three children under six, one with an intellectual disability. To save them all, she escapes with the children to her widowed mother’s home. Shawna’s goal: to become a hair-dresser so she can provide a good future for her family, and be rid of Randall. Retired English bachelor Max Candle lives next door. Facing end stage cancer, he is ready to throw in the towel. But when Shawna asks him to baby-sit while she goes to college, he is persuaded to delay the inevitable, pushes through his pain, and rediscovers joy playing checkers with a little boy. When Randall stalks Shawna and challenges a restraining order, she must gather her own strength and accept Max’s help. Together, they fight back against the mayor’s son, a potentially corrupt judge, a drug kingpin, and a backstabbing childhood friend who has her own dark agenda. Shawna’s challenges are those that many young mothers face today. So too, Max. It is through their courage, strength, and the support of family and true friends that they find renewal and fulfillment, on a life’s edge.
Hi,
You probably get a lot of this. I’m a new author, and I’m just trying to figure out how to make some money writing. I currently in the Online Writing Workshop. I have no experience in any of this. The only thing I’ve done is self publish on Amazon. I’d appreciate some advice.
Mark H.
Hello Mark
OWW is terrific. I’ve learned heaps from the email group. Because I haven’t written spec fic (yet), I haven’t joined the workshop itself for critique, but instead joined different online groups which matched my genre (mystery). Even so, the discussions we have on the mailing list is invaluable to me. So stick with that to continually build your craft skills.
My first piece of advice is figure out what kind of writing you want to do. If the answer is novels, Lots of money won’t be the result unless you are very very very very VERY (did I say ‘very’ enough?) lucky. You can make some. And that’s done through letting people know about your books. The books won’t sell themselves and they won’t stand out in the Flood of books on Amazon. I created an email list of all my contacts who I thought would be potential buyers. I left out very few names, including even people I hadn’t communicated with in years. It was a great way to re-establish contact, a nice adjunct result to the effort. I needed validation of my work. I wanted reviews on Amazon. Family and friends bought the books and gave me feedback, both constructive and affirmative, as well as writing those reviews on Amazon.
I was also advised to use the various tools in Amazon, such as the right subject category and sub categories, the keywords, and enticing book descriptions to match the genre. I also established an author page in Amazon. Readers like to connect with the author as a person. They may not post or reply, but eventually as you build a reader base, they will want to know about you. I also created a Twitter account, spent time developing a presence there, and also redirected my website (this blog), which used to be about my prior professional activities.
So the next question is: what is my motivation? If it’s money, then consider other forms of writing. There are many articles on the net about that. Those that I recall suggested short articles, ‘how to’, clever fillers for blogs and those print items that still exist. But whatever medium you do pursue, expect a period of ‘apprenticeship’ and doing your homework, both for the right matching outlets and the content about which you will write.
If your motivation is being creative, writing good stories, even changing society through your work, keep writing, keep getting feedback from beta readers and critiques, and keep putting work out there so you build a body of work. And make sure your expectations are realistic. It’s definitely not a ‘get rich quick’ thing. But it can be very rewarding in a range of ways.
Hope this helps!
Jan
Yes, it does, thank you very much!