Skip to content

The Writers in Residence

We are a group of published writers who come here weekly to entertain, inform, and encourage you in your writing and your reading journey. Grab a cup of coffee, get comfortable, and join us.

  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
The Writers in Residence

Tag: ebook promotions

The Long and Short of Why I Write Short Stories in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series

by M. Louisa Locke

MPdandydetectsforwebIn the spring of 2010, just six months after I published Maids of Misfortune, the first novel in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, I published a short story in that series called Dandy Detects. Besides the fact that I wanted to give a character from the first book, a young Boston Terrier named Dandy, the chance to star, my primary reason for writing the story at that time was for marketing purposes.

It is hard to imagine, but in 2010, the indie author movement was in its infancy, there were only a few indie authors achieving much visible success, and selling books at 99 cents was the new—and very controversial— strategy that these authors recommended. Their logic, which has proven quite valid, was that a reader would be more likely to take a chance on an unknown author if the price of the book was low enough. Then, if the person enjoyed the book, they would be more likely to buy the author’s other books at full price.

However, with only one book out, which I didn’t want to discount, writing a short story seemed the most sensible alternative. Dandy Detects became my loss leader and did its job more successfully than I could have imagined. After it was featured in Kindle Nation Daily, one of the first ebook promotional sites, enough people went on to buy Maids of Misfortune at full price to place it on Amazon’s historical fiction best seller list, where it remained for the next year. Dandy Detects also continued to do well, selling over 30,000 copies since it was published.

In time, I no longer had to rely on a short story as my primary marketing tool. With more books in my series, I started to take advantage of promotional sites like BookBub where I could temporarily discount my full-length books to attract new readers to the series. Next, I made Maids of Misfortune, as the first in my series, free, and it now acts as my permanent loss leader.

That doesn’t mean I have stopped writing shorter-form stories. It just means I am writing these stories because it gives me a good deal of pleasure to have a medium where I can develop stories for the minor characters in the series. As of this date, I now have seven short stories and three novellas in the Victorian San Francisco Mystery series (compared to seven full-length novels.)

As a reader, one of the reasons I have always enjoyed mystery series, for example Louise Penny’s series set in Three Pines, is the continuing cast of characters that are introduced along the way. Whether these characters are family members, neighbors, co-workers, or local officials, they make the stories richer as they introduce humor, conflict, and even romance into the basic mystery plot.

Yet, as an author, I discovered that minor characters can slow down the plot too much if I give them free reign. It’s difficult to balance writing a well-plotted mystery, with well-developed main characters, within a rich historical setting, and my historical mysteries are already fairly long for this sub-genre—coming in at between 100,000 and 140,000 words. This means I really can’t afford to develop my minor characters as much as I want to within these novels, particularly since there are so many of them! My main protagonists, Annie and her husband Nate, run the O’Farrell Street boardinghouse, which currently has three servants and nine boarders. And these twelve minor characters also have family and friends, who often appear as minor characters as well.

My solution has been to give some of these characters their own published stories.

MPMoffetsforwebFor example, in Maids of Misfortune, I had created two elderly dressmakers who lived in the O’Farrell Street boardinghouse. One of these sisters talked all the time, the other never said a word. And that was about all a reader learned of them in that first book. But I had developed a whole history for them and I wanted my readers to learn that backstory. So, in my second short story, The Misses Moffet Mend a Marriage, I gave them a minor mystery to solve that helped reveal a good deal about their past as well as their current occupation.

This desire to expand upon a minor character has also been behind my novellas—which in truth each started as a short story that just sort of grew. In Violet Vanquishes a Villain, I was curious about why Annie and Nate’s sister-in-law, Violet, was so hostile to the idea of women having a career. In my second novella, Kathleen Catches a Killer, it was the tension between Kathleen Hennessey, the young Irish boardinghouse maid, and her beau, the police officer, Patrick McGee, that I wanted to explore.

Thankfully, fans of the series seem to get as much enjoyment out of reading about these characters as I do in writing about them. In fact, a number of the reviews of the sixth book in my series, which was set mostly on the University of California Berkeley campus, complained that they had missed hearing about boardinghouse residents and what they were up to back across the Bay.

That’s why I wrote one of my latest short stories, Beatrice Bests the Burglar. Beatrice O’Rourke is the boardinghouse cook, and a great favorite of series fans. In this story, as she spends the day reminiscing, I was able to feature what I consider a major character in the series, the boardinghouse itself.

MPrsz_omalley_cover_1600x2560Finally, I write these stories so I can explore historical themes in more detail. In Mr. Wong Rights a Wrong, I addressed the anti-Chinese movement in the city, and in Dandy Delivers, I looked at the plight of the city’s newsboys. My most recent short story, Mrs. O’Malley’s Midnight Mystery, let me portray the difficulties a poor widowed woman in 1880s San Francisco would have faced, trying to raise children in a crowded two-room apartment––difficulties that seemed all too real as I wrote this story in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In each of these cases, if I had gone off in this kind of detail on these subjects in one of the full-length novels, I might very well have lost a reader’s attention or weakened the effectiveness of the mystery plot. Instead, I get to give readers something inexpensive to read while they patiently wait for my next full-length novel and to make a little money for myself in the process.

###

mlouiselocke_crm_smallLouisa Locke, a retired professor of U.S. and Women’s History, is the author of the USA Today best-selling cozy Victorian San Francisco Mystery series. This series features Annie, a young boardinghouse keeper, and Nate Dawson, a local San Francisco lawyer, as they investigate crimes with the help of their friends and family in the O’Farrell Street boardinghouse. Not content with just exploring the past, Locke also helped create an open source, multi-author science fiction series called the Paradisi Chronicles. You can find out more about Locke’s books from both of these series at https://mlouisalocke.com.

***

This article was posted for M. Louisa Locke by Jackie Houchin (Photojaq)

 

 

 

.

Author photojaqPosted on July 22, 2020July 20, 2020Categories author publicity, blogs, fiction writing, Historical fiction, Mysteries, novel descriptions, novel writing, novellas, short fiction, short stories, short story author, short story markets, writing, writing short storiesTags 1880's San Francisco, Beatrice Bests the Burglar, boardinghouse, BookBub, Dandy Detects, ebook promotions, In Violet Vanquishes a Villain, Kathleen Catches a Killer, Louisa Penny, M. Louisa Locke, Maids of Misfortune, Marketing, minor characters, Mr. Wong Rights a Wrong, Mrs. O'Malley's Midnight Mystery, novellas, Paradisi Chronicles, short stories, The Misses Moffet Mend A Marriage, University of California Berkley, Victorian Sand Francisco Mystery series12 Comments on The Long and Short of Why I Write Short Stories in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 352 other followers

Follow The Writers in Residence on WordPress.com

M.M. Gornell

Jackie Houchin

Linda O. Johnston

Miko Johnston

Jill Amadio

Rosemary Lord

G.B. Pool

G.B. Pool

Cynthia Naden

Cynthia Naden
Cynthia Naden (Claire Naden)

Bonnie Schroeder

  • RSS - Posts

Recent Posts

  • Building a Character Arc
  • Two Murders in One Book: A Story-Within-a-Story
  • What planner to use? My conundrum.
  • Social Media and Me
  • WHAT MAGELLAN STARTED…

Archives

  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • September 2014
  • May 2014
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • January 2009
  • November 2008
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
The Writers in Residence Blog at WordPress.com.
Cancel

 
Loading Comments...
Comment
    ×