New, Lower Prices for D&S Series E-Books

To celebrate the publication of The Fregoli Delusion, The Plaid Raccoon Press has reduced the price on the e-book editions of Blood Passage and Marcie's Murder, the first two books in the Donaghue and Stainer Crime Novel Series.

Blood Passage is now available for the new low price of $1.99 USD, while Marcie's Murder may be purchased for $2.99 USD.

These new prices have already been implemented, but may not have reached all distribution points at this printing. If you see the old price still listed, feel free to follow the Smashwords link listed below, where you may obtain copies for the device of your choice, and the new prices are already in effect.

Blood Passage e-book links:

Kindle                        Nook
Kobo                         Sony
Apple
Smashwords

Marcie's Murder e-book links:
Kindle                       Nook
Kobo                        Sony
Apple
Smashwords

A Note on the Pricing
The Fregoli Delusion is the third novel in the series, and many e-book authors have discovered that their sales jump noticeably once they publish their third book. One of the techniques used by many authors includes dropping the price of the first book to Free, which increases the volume of downloads they see and helps hook readers into the series.

We've decided not to make Blood Passage available for Free.  We're hoping that being able to purchase all three titles in the series for a grand total of $9.97 USD will be enough of an incentive to entice more readers to take the plunge.

Why have we decided not to reset the price of Blood Passage to Free? Last year The Plaid Raccoon Press published several short stories featuring Donaghue and Stainer, and these were all made available at no cost to the reader. While the stories saw a great many downloads, there was never any way of telling whether or not people were actually reading the stories or just collecting "freebies."

More importantly, though, the comments and "reviews" we did receive were occasionally very nasty. Every independent author experiences this phenomenon, of course, and one soon learns to grow a thick skin, but it seemed that many people felt getting something for nothing entitled them to say whatever popped into their head, including vulgarisms, racist remarks, and other slurs that made it obvious the person either hadn't read the story or else had read it very carelessly. It wasn't making very good business sense to keep these stories posted with such negativity attached to them.

The final straw came in a bizarre twist when two people started using one of the free stories as a mail drop. The good news was that each time they entered a comment they gave the story a five-star rating, but the messages they exchanged were in some kind of cryptic code that soon began to creep us out. It was time to remove the free stories altogether and rethink this strategy.

As a result, Blood Passage is listed at $1.99 USD. While we may occasionally offer it for a lower price, and perhaps even for free during promotional events through the use of coupon codes, The Plaid Raccoon Press has implemented a policy of never again setting an e-book price at Free in the future. If readers feel an overwhelming desire to register their outrage, hatred, and anger at what they read, well, frankly, they can pay two bucks for the privilege.

Meanwhile, we can rest easier at night in the knowledge that the comments section of our publications are not posing any kind of security risk!

Thanks to you all for your patience and understanding.

M.J. McCann
L.L. Clark
The Plaid Raccoon Press

A New Novel Begins

This week I’ve begun to write the third novel in the Donaghue and Stainer Crime Novel series, The Fregoli Delusion.

For those of you keeping score at home, Blood Passage is the first novel in the series, published this summer by The Plaid Raccoon Press. The second novel, Marcie’s Murder, is in pageproofs. After I hear back from one more reader it will receive a last revision and a final proofreading before going to press. Fregoli, the third in the series, will hopefully be finished in draft form by April, when Marcie’s Murder is published. After passing through my team of readers and going through the usual revision and proofreading process, it will hopefully go to press in Fall 2012. That’s the plan. The upcoming year will be a very busy one, I hope.

I don’t normally talk about what I’m writing until after it’s done. This time, however, I’m going to try an experiment of sorts. I have now moved my blogging from the morning, which is when I write best, to the evenings, when I write the worst. Hold on, though, that’s not the experiment I meant. Some writers, such as David Hewson for example, blog while they’re writing their next book, and David also tweets while writing, often telling us how many words he produced that day. I plan to post a few of my experiences here on The Overnight Bestseller while writing Fregoli in the hopes that you may find it interesting to follow the ups and downs of the novel-writing process as I happen to live it over the next few months.

I’m nervous making this kind of commitment because it’s something of a risk. I could conceivably crash and burn, the story could abandon me, I could jinx myself and develop a severe case of writer’s block. Who knows?

Might be interesting to stay tuned, though, to see how it goes. Don’t you think?

UPDATE #1: This week gets it off to a good start. Today I finished the fourth chapter and my word count currently stands at just over 10 k.  That's all right, I suppose, given that I hope to finish in the mid-90s. I'm not going to worry about the word count, however. I intend to follow my outline, tell this story as I want to tell it, and deal with the length of the MS afterwards.