Palm Springs Plumbing

We're currently working on the sixth Henry Wright Mystery, Guilty by Association, and are working hard on research. Since this story involved syndicates and plumbing - yes, we know it's an odd combination - research takes some interesting forms. As a result, with this story set in the Inland Empire city of Palm Springs, we're spending a lot of time there. During our research we discovered that a lot of plumbing in Palm Springs is actually outdoors. This area has the greatest concentration of private outdoor swimming pools anywhere in the United States. That started us thinking about a mystery surrounding a swimming pool. Certainly there must be a story for our intrepid detective Henry Wright to investigate? If you have been following our blog, we have posted the first few chapters of Guilty by Association on scribd.com for your comments. We'd love to hear from you and listen to what you think of our story so far. We'll be working on it during the summer when once again we move our household to Palm Springs. We'll post an update here at that time. Until then, stay hydrated!

Palm Springs Mid-Century Modern

During our recent visit to Palm Springs I became more familiar with the mid-century homes featured in my first mystery book, For Sale in Palm Springs. In that story, a Realtor is brutally murdered inside a home that he has listed for sale. In odd coincidences I found myself walking through an Alexander tract home build in the late 1950's with a realtor. Was there a murderer lurking around the corner? Hiding in a closet? No, not during this trip, but these homes are certainly interesting and the father and son team that built them in the late fifties and early sixties put up so many that they doubled the size of Palm Springs by doing so. We're sure there is another murder mystery lurking within these homes and the neighborhood, we'll just have to spend more time in Palm Springs.

Pricing - always a difficult topic

After selling the Henry Wright Series - currently 5 full length books and two short stories - on our own through DesertDreaming.com, we are now only selling through online distributors - mainly Amazon and Smashwords. Links on DesertDreaming will take you to Smashwords, we will no longer be emailing out files and CD production has stopped a while ago.

Why the change? When we first decided to publish these as eBooks online - after receiving a lot of rejection letters from literary agents - there were no Kindles, no iPads, the only place to read the books was a PC or a Palm. Since December of 2009, 3 million Kindles have been sold. In the first month of availability, Apple has sold 1 million iPads. DesertDreaming is going to ride that initial wave of eReader adoption by making sure that all of its works are available on these devices and that they are priced right so that everyone will read them.

That leads us to the topic of pricing. We just changed the price of 4 of the 5 books on Amazon and Smashwords. Amazon puts a 24 hour hold on books after prices are changed, so right now Amazon book sales are suspended until tomorrow. For Sale in Palm Springs is still 99 cents on Amazon, we'd give it away for free if we could, but Amazon won't let us. (Smashwords does, you can download it for free!) We've just set the other prices at $1.99 per book, the short stories - available on Smashwords - are still 99 cents.

It's tough to decide to reduce prices, but with many other eBooks priced at $1.99 and a lot of pressure, it was the right thing to do. No eBook author is in this for the money (at $1.99 sale, Amazon gives the author $0.70, or about 1/3). You need to sell a LOT of books to make this a full-time job.

Will the price drop spur sales? Who knows? The challenge remains to write a compelling story with a good set of characters that everyone will want to read.

Albert Simon

Getting packed

We're packing up to go to Palm Springs. A little R&R, a little research and probably some writing. If you haven't been to smashwords.com yet to download "For Sale in Palm Springs", head over there now. The 1,000th download will get the second book "Springtime in Sonora" for free with my appreciation. Also, if you write a review for any of the books, I will send you a coupon to use at Smashwords. So please, let me know how we're doing and how you like the Henry Wright Mystery Series.

Now, back to the packing - the drive is 7 1/2 hours and we are scheduled to leave Wednesday morning at 4. Hopefully it won't be snowing which is the current prediction!

Happy reading!

Albert Simon

All books now available on iPad

We use Smashwords.com as one of our distribution channels. (In fact, we're stopping distribution of the eBooks through our DesertDreaming website, we do much better with Amazon Kindle and Smashwords.) Smashwords notified us last night that as of today, the books are available for Apple's iPad. We're excited about the new platform and are looking forward to continued distribution. We'll get specific instructions for downloading to iPads soon, stay tuned here for all the info.

Great sales in March - discount coupon

To celebrate record sales, here is a coupon at smashwords to purchase the second book in the Henry Wright Mystery Series, Springtime in Sonora for half of the normal price. The link to the book is: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/9060

The coupon code is: PD53P

March is proving to be a record month for the Henry Wright Mystery Series. Amazon Kindle has sold more books this month than in any other month and For Sale in Palm Springs is about to reach 1,000 downloads on Smashwords.com.

We appreciate your support, more soon on our upcoming research trip for our newest story Guilt by Association which you can start reading at Scribd.com:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/19497873/Guilt-Assoc-090831

Tomorrow kicks off eBook week and to participate, we've set our "for pay" books at half price at smashwords.com. For Sale in Palm Springs has been free for some time (over 1,000 downloads at Amazon's Kindle store, Smashwords.com and Scribd.com). Now the others are half price to promote eBook week. Please visit one of these sites and help spread the word about eBooks. Happy reading!

Sales are up!

To all of you who have recently purchased one of my books through Amazon for the Kindle. Thank you! We're currently working on getting the books published for the Sony book reader and the Barnes & Noble reader as well. We'll post that on this blog and on the website desertdreaming.com when it is available.

In other news, we're planning a research trip to Palm Springs in April to look at locations that will be described in the latest book, Guilty by Association. If you're interested in reading the first few chapters and leaving some comments on the story so far, please go to scribd.com and let us know what you think.

Stay tuned for more news as the trip to Palm Springs gets closer and look for updates at scribd on the new book!

Albert Simon

www.desertdreaming.com

My family and I live in the beautiful Sierra Nevada mountains of Northern California. Unlike the rest of California, or the California depicted on all the television shows, we actually have four seasons, due to our elevation. Since my wife and I hate winter, we take every chance we get to escape to our favorite sunny destination - Palm Springs. While it is also in California, it is miles and worlds away from the mountains. If you were to drive from the Oregon-California border to the California-Mexico border, you'd spend a couple of days, as it is a trip of 800 miles. So the 450 miles to Palm Springs, while still a considerable distance, is very doable in a day.

It's about this time of the year (cold, rainy February) that we start making our plans for a trip in April. We're scheduling the end of April, when the weather in the desert should be in the mid-nineties with sunshine every day. We'll also spend some time researching our latest book Guilty by Association, a great mystery about the disappearance of an innocent young woman and a syndicate that is cheating homeowners across Southern California. The book's first few chapters are available at Scribd.com, click here to read it.

If you're interested in our writings, please leave us a comment here.

Welcome

With travel between Northern California, specifically the Mother Lode in the Sierra Nevada, and Southern California, Palm Springs mainly, I hope this blog will be interesting and will show some insights into my inspirations for my mystery series.