Chihuahua of the Baskervilles hits the shelves!

It’s here, the day you had no idea you were waiting for — Tuesday! Ah, but a Tuesday different from all others, because you can finally get Chihuahua of the Baskervilles in either hardback or ebook. (Yes, ebook! You could be reading it right now, instead of this parenthetical comment!) Links to your favorite sellers are in the sidebar, top right.

I had some extra excitement this morning in the form of a short radio interview with Tron Simpson of the popular morning radio show, “Tron in the Morning.” Super nice guy. I requested anything by Aretha Franklin.

Also today, if you’d like an extra-special (aka “tiny”) bonus scene from the lives of Angus, Suki and Michael, come over to the Killer Characters blog, where I am answering any and all questions, many with the same answer. (“I don’t know.”)

Hope you all had a great holiday weekend. We watched the Folsom Field fireworks from our super-secret parking lot, which was enlivened by a guy who had smoked a great deal of pot (“This is just like when I was sucked up into the cosmos as an enormous ball of light! I was pure love!”).

Happy Tuesday!

Boulder Daily Camera reviews Chihuahua of the Baskervilles

I’ve had good reviews, I’ve had bad reviews, but this is the review of my dreams, from today’s edition of the Boulder Daily Camera.

To curl up with a book about a ghost Chihuahua named Petey is to thank heaven you ever learned to read in the first place.

Dude. Here’s the rest.

Exclusive preview for free!

CriminalElement.com has made the first three chapters of Chihuahua of the Baskervilles available to members. It’s free to register, and the site has a ton of great features/content for people who love mystery books.

New review of Chihuahua of the Baskervilles

Nikki of Obsessive Chihuahua Disorder wrote a review on the advance review copy I sent her. Gotta love a reviewer who includes photos.

Chihuahua of the Baskervilles kept my attention from the very beginning to the very end. I couldn’t wait to get back to reading each time I had to put down the book because it was time for dinner, time to go to work, time to go to class, etc. I couldn’t wait to find out who was behind all the strange activities going on in the Baskerville’s house.

Read full review here.

Chi of B available through Mystery Guild Book Club

Obsessive Chihuahua Disorder

Nikki, of the fantastic site, Obsessive Chihuahua Disorder, is in the process of reading an advance copy of Chihuahua of the Baskervilles.

(Bebe is my fave of Nikki’s Chis, btw. She’s the little mite who is second from the left in the photo below. To give you an idea of how wee she is, Monte (second from right) weighs three and a half pounds. Bebe is the dog equivalent of a sparkling fairy pony or a shoulder dragon with tiny flapping wings.

I have to mention some coincidences between Nikki and the book. Suki is Tripping Magazine‘s staff photographer. She’s half-Japanese. Nikki is also half-Japanese and a photographer. And their names both end in ‘i.’ There will be one more coincidence at the end of the second book, Portrait of Doreene Gray. You’ll just have to wait and see.

Oh, and if you’d like to join a super-fun Facebook group for Chihuahua lovers, join Nikki’s. I’m on there all the time, cooing over photos of Bebe.

Mystery authors: Why you can’t afford to bypass Twitter.

I don’t know why I’m more of a social-media creature than most of my age peers, but it puts me in a position to see an interesting phenomenon. Traditional and cozy writers are often in the 40+ demographic, and the vast majority are not on Twitter.

One of the most useful things about Twitter is that it allows you to search everyone’s comments for a certain topic of interest…say, cozy mysteries. In June of last year, there were 190 million Twitter users, or tweeps. They generated 65 million tweets a day. Spreading the news of a book release to all their fellow tweeps took one click of the Retweet button.

If you’re promoting your new cozy/traditional mystery releases in bookstores or on blogs, then you may have a problem. People who spend time on Twitter find their book recommendations there. And if you’re thinking, “I target readers who are 40+, so they won’t be on Twitter anyway,” ask yourself this: Do you want to sell your books five, ten, or 15 years from now? Because people who grew up using Twitter and Twitterlike platforms are not going to magically stop using them when they reach a certain age.

How do people find information on Twitter? How do they help others find their stuff? One way is through the use of hashtags.

Let’s say I want to find out what brand-new thrillers are out there. I would get on Twitter and type #thrillers in the search field. Hashtags.org tells me that the high number of tweets about #thrillers so far today is 53, at 8:00 this morning (Bless those unpaid publicity interns). The high point so far today for #cozies is seven. Let’s compare the seven tweets on #cozies to the more general #books. Hashtags.org doesn’t measure that in individual numbers, because it’s too many. Instead, they say that at one point today, .14% of the total Twitter traffic was marked #books. In June of last year’s numbers, that would be over nine million tweets about books. Heck, #cats only made it to .05%. Cozy writers with series about #crafts? #crafts hit .01% at one point today, or 650,000 tweets. Definite sweet spot.

Here are some guidelines for using hashtags, followed by examples.

Standardization. Thus, tweets about this year’s Bouchercon are labeled #Bcon2011. Last year, it was #Bcon2010.
Brevity. Tweets can only be 140 characters long, so #bestmysterybooks, while appealing, takes up too much real estate in your tweet.
You can search on multiple tags. So while #mysterybooks didn’t show up at all today, #mystery #books had three tweets. Someone out there is trying.
Don’t reinvent the wheel. Get on Twitter and search your topic without a hashtag in place. Keep changing your search until you find the most pertinent tweets on your subject, and use whatever hashtag they’re using. That’s how I found out about #Bcon2011.

Twitter isn’t rocket science, and it doesn’t have to take a lot of time. You don’t need to follow people or get into conversations. But when you write a blog post about your cozy’s characters, or interview a fellow author, or announce a book release, get on Twitter and say something like,

Interview with Rhys Bowen, author of Molly Murphy #cozies. #mystery #books http://tinyurl.com/4z5cb3r

[The original URL (the http part) for that blog post made the tweet too long, so I went to TinyUrl.com, cut and pasted it into the field, and clicked the button to make it smaller.]

Here’s another example.

Death in Show now available on #Kindle ! #cozies #books #dogs http://tinyurl.com/4mojnkw

Help me colonize Twitter with the #cozies hashtag. Do it for the children.

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Additional articles:

Twitter for Writers, author Elizabeth Spann Craig

Things I Should Probably Say About Twitter, author Elizabeth Spann Craig

Sources:

http://Twitter.com

Costolo: Twitter Now Has 190 Million Users Tweeting 65 Million Times A Day

http://twitter.pbworks.com/w/page/1779812/Hashtag

http://Hashtags.org

Upcoming Promo Tip post: Syndicating your blog on Facebook’s Networked Blogs.

Big ol’ discount if you pre-order Chihuahua of the Baskervilles

I should mention you can save $8.50 if you pre-order Chi of B on Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble (it’s coming out in hardcover first).

Oh, and if you want to do me a favor that doesn’t require committing to anything, click the “I’d like to read this book on Kindle” link. Wait…with a little cleverness on my part, you can just click here for that. Hey, I can be clever.

Thanks!