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On Book-Marketing: A Few Words about a Series of Novels 6/11/2017 6:46:40 PM
For about a year now, I've been sending newsletters to people who signed up for an email list I've been building. I usually send out letters twice a month and feature whichever of my novels is free on kindle for five days that week. I've just finished a letter to tell readers that the fourth novel in the one series I've written will be free for five days. The email will go out Monday at 10:00 am.
While I worked on this brief message, I realized that I wanted to do the best I could to get readers to know about the series I call "Witnesses". For one thing, it covers a swath of American history, from a 17th century war between English colonists, who wanted native land, and a coalition of tribes who hoped to drive the intruders out of their territory. The bloody war they waged was costly to both sides, especially to the natives.
The series also includes references to later American conflicts -- the Civil War, 19th century battles between natives and the American military, and a losing conflict in Asia in the latter half of the 20th century. I also invented accounts of a fictitious battle in the recent past that the American government and concerned citizens fight against an imaginary cult called the Scythians.
So the five novels of "Witnesses" highlight armed conflict as a long-standing part of American life.
The special emphasis of the series is that it portrays the effects of war on the lives of ordinary people who didn't start fights but must deal with them. The people in the series cope bravely and competently with crises that disrupt families, communities, and nations. They reflect on their experiences and tell or write their stories in hopes that others will benefit by gaining courage to endure or hope that hardships will pass or finding inspiration to search their own experiences and share their knowledge of the world and its quandaries.
When I wrote the early drafts, "Witnesses" was one long, unwieldy novel. I broke it up into five parts and added new material. It took me 25 years of steady work, with an interruption or two, to get it in shape so that I was satisfied that people could read it.
Throughout the time of revision and my attempts to overcome fears that no one would want to spend time with my work, "Witnesses" kept its nature as an experiment in narrative. The novels consist of eight novellas and 14 short stories with two narratives around and between them. One is about Paul Kingsley, who wrote the stories and novellas, while the other concerns the editor Stephanie Markham, who brings Kingsley's writings together, arranges the surrounding material, and tells part of her own story.
To explain why warfare and America's past hold my attention so much, I can say that after finishing undergraduate work with a degree in history, I served for four years as an enlisted man in the American army, with a year and a half in Bangkok at the start of our war in Vietnam. After that, I went home to eastern Massachusetts, whose history has always been close to my heart. I can add that I've been an ardent reader of fiction since I was a teenager, and still am. My ambition has been to make a contribution to the art of story-telling, as a witness myself. In other words, there's a lot of me, in disguised form. in this collection of novels. My task now is to find readers for it.
