Peschel Press Newsletter for June 2023

Welcome to the Peschel Press Newsletter for June 2023.

Believe it or not, we’ve got things on our calendar in the dog days of summer if you want to meet us in person.

In July, we’ve got one, count ’em, one event.

On Sunday, 16 July 2023, we’ll be at the Mechanicsburg Mystery Bookshop at 2 p.m. for our first Agatha Christie, She Watched book launch! https://www.mysterybooksonline.com/

I’ll be doing a program but it won’t be the one I did before at Mechanicsburg, so if you saw that one, you’ll get a completely new talk!

This time, I’ll be talking about love gone bad in Agatha’s novels.

A great example? Jackie and Simon and Linnet in Death on the Nile. Jackie and Simon are in love but they’re poor. Linnet, Jackie’s super-rich best friend, decides she wants Simon. Simon’s not interested, but he is interested in Linnet’s money. Simon says he’ll marry Linnet, then murder her, so he and Jackie can marry and be rich.

Jackie, who’s the brains of the operation, says that’s a bad idea. What is a better idea? That Simon marry Linnet and they murder Linnet together in a foolproof plan. And, oh by the way, Simon can’t fake his marriage to Linnet. He’s got to do everything a besotted, lovestruck man does with a woman and this is acceptable to Jackie.

Talk about callous!

Next, on Tuesday, 7 p.m., 1 August 2023, Bill and I will do a presentation about the business of writing and incremental improvements to the Main Line Writers’ Group in King of Prussia at 7pm.

Visit their website for more information. They’re a public writers’ group outside of Philadelphia and they want to hear us talk!

On Saturday, 5 August 2023, we’ll be at Murder As You Like It, the annual mystery convention put on by the Mechanicsburg Mystery Bookshop. Bill will be emceeing the all-day event and I’ll be there too, with our tableful of books. If you’re a mystery fan, this is a fun event.

Visit the MMBS website for more details and to sign up.

On Sunday, 6 August 2023, we’ll do our second book launch for Agatha Christie, She Watched at Cupboard Maker Books. I’ll do a program, but probably the one covering the 13 Poirots and 7 Marples I didn’t at Mechanicsburg.

After that, I’ve got Bookstore Romance Weekend at Cupboard Maker (19-20 August 2023). I’ll be there on Sunday from 2-4 p.m. as Odessa Moon, along with A.E. Faulkner and Quenby Olson. If all goes as planned, I’ll also have copies of the long-awaited Escape to Hightower.

Yes, I have been slowly making progress on Escape. AC,SW took all my time and the International edition is taking more time, but the book has been edited by Bill, and I’m getting through the last few chapters.

We’ve also got events in September, October, and November but I’ll wait until later to discuss them.

How to Find Shows to Attend?

You’ll notice that with one exception, our upcoming events are all related to MMBS and CMBooks. That exception is the Main Line Writers’ Group. If you’ve been following us for any length of time, you know we’ve been part of the MMBS and CMBooks family for years. We shop there, we do events there, we promote their stores. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement.

We also do other book events along with some arts and crafts shows within our local area. As a rule, I’ve got to have a good reason to travel out of area, like to the Gaithersburg Book Festival.

How do I find these shows and events? For craft shows, ask around in your local area, keep your eyes open for local signs, and search for craft show listings online.

For book events, you do the same, broadening your search to include libraries and bookstores. You can also visit our sort-of comprehensive listing of book events in the Mid-Atlantic area.

But none of those resources will bring up writing groups like the Main Line Writers’ Group.

Why Do Shows at All?

They are another reason why we do book festivals and craft shows and that reason is you do not know who you will meet.

At the last three events we’ve done, we met someone we otherwise would have not. In each case, Bill did the meeting! Every single time, I was out taking pictures of the event and schmoozing with the other vendors.

Thus, at Forty Elephants, Gary Zenker of the Main Line stopped at our booth. He was not expecting to see writers at Forty Elephants. He most definitely wasn’t expecting to meet writers like us, with 33 wildly varied books in our line, fully on-brand booth in our colors, and a husband and wife writing team.

Although we don’t make a big deal out of it, we are a writing team. We don’t do much cowriting, although sometimes, as I plow through the extensive editorial suggestions Bill has made on Escape to HighTower, it feels like we cowrite everything. We edit each other. Bill does my layouts, but I contribute art elements. He’s done many of our covers but I make my suggestions.

Gary Zenker was intrigued by how we work together. He’s also got a writing group he needs to find programming for every month. Thus, the stars aligned and he asked us to do a program for his group. Are you a writer anywhere near King of Prussia and the larger Philly area? This may be the group you’ve been looking for.

We were interested too. We’ve got a lot to say about incremental improvements, the writing business, reaching the public, and helping other authors on their writing journey. We’ll join Gary’s group, have a lovely dinner, and amuse a crowd of total strangers.

We would have never met Gary Zenker if we hadn’t been at the Forty Elephants show. He’d never heard of us and we’d never heard of him or his group.

Similarly, when we were at Gaithersburg, two things happened. The first is that I was interviewed by Montgomery County Media. I spoke off the cuff for a few minutes, giving it my all. They filmed me and released my little snippet of film into the wild. Here’s the link to our website if you want to see me in person.

If I had not gone out to meet people at Gaithersburg, this would have never happened. I don’t know how many people saw my film clip but I guarantee none of them had ever heard of me before.

In addition to this chance encounter at Gaithersburg, we had another one. Again, this took place when I was away from the booth. Bill met Anthony Mormile, a documentary filmmaker, who is interested in doing something with indie authors. Because he spoke to Bill, but not to me, I asked Bill to forward him the link to the film clip the Montgomery County Media people did so he can “see” me.

(If you’re interested, he’s raising money for the documentary at Seed and Spark. Take a look at his funding video and see if you’re interested in helping him out.)

Will anything come of this meeting? I don’t know. We may get contacted and interviewed and filmed and end up in a documentary on indie authors. How many people will watch this documentary, once it’s finally finished? I have no idea. What I do know is that, again, neither of these chance encounters would have happened if we had not pushed ourselves and gone out to do a public event.

Finally, we were at Old Annville Days on Saturday, 10 June 2023. Once again, I was away from the booth (I swear I spend most of my time at the booth!). Who should come by (we were one of two authors at Old Annville Days, the other being Laurisa Brandt) but a representative of the Pennsylvania Library System! She’s putting together a database of authors in Pennsylvania. Would we like to be part of it? You bet we would. Will anyone ever come across our name? I have no idea, but if we’re not in the database, our odds go down.

Of our chance encounters, one has already led to a speaking engagement. The other encounters… We’ll find out. We may never learn how far our name reaches because of these meetings. But it could be quite widespread. A number of years ago, Bill learned that the book reviews he’d written while at the Rock Hill Herald had been disseminated throughout the McClatchy Newspaper organization. His reviews were far more widely dispersed than he’d ever imagined.

You just don’t know.

The hardest part of this business is not writing your books. It’s getting discovered by the people who want to read your books. Every time you push yourself to go outside in public, you may meet someone who can make a difference — small, medium, or large — in your visibility. If you are sitting on the fence about doing events, this is another reason to get outside, away from your office under the stairs.

We’ll see you again next month! Remember, writers need readers and we can’t do it without you. Also, if you like our newsletter, tell other people about us. Best wishes to you all and we’ll see you at some event or other.