True Crime Memoir Update & Book Deals

Work-in-Progress Update

I’ve mentioned before that I am helping two friends write their true crime memoir. It’s an incredibly compelling story — so compelling that Michelle was asked to tell it on the PBS show “Stories from the Stage.”

Check out her 7-minute story here; it will whet your appetite for the full book, which we hope to be selling to a publisher soon. (As I write, we are making final edits to the manuscript.)

Read Beautiful & Terrible Things for Free

The ebook version of Beautiful and Terrible Things is now available through local libraries for the first time. So if you haven’t yet read the book Indies Today named 2024’s Best Literary Book of the Year, and you don’t want to purchase your own copy, you can borrow the ebook from your library!

Simply request that your library add Beautiful and Terrible Things: A Novel to their ebook collection via what’s called OverDrive. (OverDrive is a platform where libraries around the world obtain ebooks – they’ll know what it is.) You can ask the next time you visit, or shoot them an email now, or even call if that’s easier.

This matters because libraries only add ebooks to their collections if patrons request them. And the more requests they receive, the more likely they are to obtain the title.

Be sure to give them the long version of the book’s title — Beautiful and Terrible Things: A Novel — because there’s another book out there with the title Beautiful and Terrible Things but that one is a collection of essays. Fun fact: This is why my publisher added “A Novel” to the end of my book’s title.

If you email your request to the library, you can include this link for them: https://www.overdrive.com/media/12381347/beautiful-and-terrible-things

Beautiful and Terrible Things is already appearing in libraries in New York and New Mexico, which is very cool. Let’s get it into your library next! Thanks in advance for your support.

Black Rose Writing’s Holiday Sale

My publisher is having a holiday sale, if you want to pick up the paperback of Beautiful and Terrible Things at a discount. Use promo code SEASON20 to get 20% off, through Jan. 31, 2026. This is a healthy discount — by comparison, when the book was in its pre-order phase, the discount was 15%.

But I’m going to be honest with you, if you have Amazon Prime and get free shipping, you’ll get a slightly better price over there.

If you don’t get free shipping from Amazon, then the Black Rose Writing price is better. It’s probably also cheaper than other online sites selling the book. Purchase from the publisher here. And while you’re there, check out their other great titles, in all genres.

(Disclaimer: I don’t control any of these prices, which are always subject to change.)