No cell phones. No GPS. No cameras everywhere. People hitchhiked. Strangers disappeared. And a lonely road could take you somewhere you never intended to go.
DEADLY BYWAYS is my new six-book series of character-driven crime stories set against the dangerous roads and hidden places of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The first book, THE DUNGEON, is set in 1979.
All six books will be released during the second half of 2026.
THE DUNGEON is available now on Kindle and in Kindle Unlimited.
Debbie Gibson has been showing up in my personal Facebook feed of late, even though I haven’t subscribed to her, and even though I’ve never been a particular devotee of her music.
This is probably because of demographics. I’m a Gen Xer in my 50s. Debbie Gibson is a pop star from the 1980s. Therefore, Meta reasons that I should be a Debbie Gibson fan.
(And just to be clear about this: I never actively disliked Debbie Gibson or her music. But I was never really part of her target audience, either. She specialized in a brand of pop love songs that were written for 14-year-old girls enduring their first serious crushes. Debbie Gibson’s breakout year was 1988. In 1988 I was a 20-year-old male.)
This morning Debbie Gibson showed up in my Facebook feed wearing a bikini. Now once again it is necessary for me to provide a disclaimer. Gibson looks damn good in her swimwear, for a woman of any age. So there’s no “body shaming” going on here.
But the economist in me has to wonder… What compels a 55-year-old woman who has been famous for 40 years to post bikini photos of herself on social media? That might make sense for an up-and-coming, wannabe social media influencer. But Debbie Gibson, who has been famous since Ronald Reagan was in the White House?
I think it might have something to do with the way media marketing has changed since the halcyon 1980s.
Forty years ago, Debbie Gibson’s marketing cycle looked something like this:
Release an album.
Record a music video.
Appear on MTV.
Do magazine interviews.
Maybe appear on television.
Disappear until the next album.
In the old days, marketing assets were expensive to produce and deliver. Barriers to entry were high. Therefore, marketing tended to occur in high-end, highly curated campaigns.
The internet and social media all but eliminated those barriers to entry. Now everyone, from your local plumber to your next-door neighbor’s daughter, can achieve more marketing presence than would have been possible for Debbie Gibson in 1987. As a result, everyone who hawks their wares online needs to market themselves like your local plumber or your next-door neighbor’s daughter.
There is nothing conspiratorial or sinister about this. Technology and economics are doing their thing.
All of this seems second-nature to anyone under the age of 30. But to those of us who can remember the previous century well, the shift in the media landscape can often be discombobulating. I wonder if Debbie Gibson would agree.
Over time, however, I realized that the setting itself had far more stories to tell.
Halloween in suburban Cincinnati during the Gen X era provides a unique backdrop for supernatural fiction. Kids still roamed neighborhoods after dark without cell phones. Parents gave them a little more freedom. Familiar streets, parks, and neighborhoods became places of mystery once the sun went down.
That world is simply too rich to leave behind after a single novel.
My newest story, The Gold Coin and the Crow, expands that universe.
Like 12 Hours of Halloween, it takes place on Halloween night in 1980. It features a different cast of characters and tells a completely standalone story, so you can read it whether you’ve already read the novel or not.
The story begins with what seems like a simple trick-or-treat stop. A strange homeowner has no candy to offer, but he does have something far more tempting: nineteenth-century gold coins scattered throughout his backyard.
There is only one catch.
You have to get past the crow.
From there, the story becomes an increasingly strange journey into the supernatural, filled with the nostalgic atmosphere of suburban Halloween nights, childhood curiosity, and the unsettling feeling that the ordinary world may not be quite as ordinary as it appears.
If you enjoyed the mood, setting, and Gen X nostalgia of 12 Hours of Halloween, I think you’ll feel right at home in The Gold Coin and the Crow.
This is also just the beginning.
My goal is to continue expanding the 12 Hours of Halloween story world with additional tales set during different Halloween seasons, following different characters, and exploring new supernatural mysteries—all while returning to the same familiar world of autumn nights, suburban neighborhoods, and the strange things that sometimes happen when the barriers between worlds grow thin.
I will never be accused of age discrimination. I find that people of various ages get on my nerves more or less equally, albeit in different ways.
The twenty-somethings with their neurotic cell phone obsessions… the aging Baby Boomers who dawdle and shuffle about… the now-forty-something Millennials who are still trying to be hipsters, as if the calendar had been pushed back to 2005.
And we haven’t even gotten to children and teenagers yet.
The point here is that people of all ages can be annoying, so there is no reason to discriminate against any of them, in a knee-jerk, automated manner.
Bethany Michel, who is now 28, moved to a retirement community in Florida in 2020 to take care of her terminally ill father. This was obviously during the COVID pandemic. Her father subsequently passed away and she inherited the house from him in 2023.
The HOA in Michel’s neighborhood is now trying to force her out, apparently, because she is under the age of 55. The campaign to oust her began three months after her father’s death, when she received a letter informing her that she did not meet the requirements for residency. (Although she was an adult, she was too young for the 55+ community.) The HOA is now trying to evict her with formal legal measures.
Age discrimination is one of the last socially acceptable forms of discrimination. Often it is directed at those of us who are older.
I will soon turn 58. Every now and then I’ll see the term “creepy old man” tossed about on the internet, on social media or elsewhere. What’s the deal with that? Does anyone seriously believe that a 30-year-old man can’t be creepy? I can show you a lot of evidence to the contrary.
A more systematic, though carefully hidden, form of age discrimination is used in job interview situations. There are some hiring managers in corporate America who don’t believe that people over 50 are capable of learning newfangled things. (Once again, I could provide plenty of evidence to the contrary.)
But there is also an ilk of people over 55 who seek to discriminate against younger adults—especially those younger adults with children.
Many of them live in age-restricted 55+ communities. Such communities are legal under the Housing for Older Persons Act (HOPA) of 1995.
Many of these communities provide exemptions for live-in caregivers. For example, The Villages, a huge retirement community in Central Florida, will allow the under-55 to reside within their hoary confines so long as:
“at least one member of your household is 55 and you are not younger than 19 years old.”
And they’re serious about those under-19-year-olds. The Villages “absolutely” does “welcome children and grandchildren”… to a point. “Please note,” the community’s website informs us, “visitors under the age of 18 are limited to 30 days in the calendar year.”
Unless, that is, the under-18-year-old is a pit bull or a Rottweiler. The Villages is aggressively pet-friendly. The community has many dog-walking paths and parks.
Certain forms of “age discrimination” are both commonsense and unavoidable. We have all been exasperated by the twenty-something who purports to have all the answers to all the world’s problems. Romantic relationships with vast age gaps—even among consenting adults—will always raise eyebrows.
But where ordinary social interaction is concerned, we are becoming a bit too precious as a society if we now demand the right to only associate with those who were born in the same decade as us. On the contrary, this is an area where we could all benefit from a little more diversity.
One of my friends at my local gym is a guy named Bob. Bob, who is exactly 30 years my senior, will turn 88 this year. Bob was a well-known college basketball player in the early 1960s. I love listening to his sports stories. I also enjoy talking with him about the way America was during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years.
This doesn’t mean that I now want to restrict my company to people on the verge of 90. I also enjoy interactions with twenty-somethings, much as they sometimes frustrate me. I occasionally get ideas from my twenty-something acquaintances that I simply wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else.
At the same time, I enjoy interacting with my fellow Gen Xers, now mostly fifty-something adults who fondly remember what it was like to come of age in the 1980s and early 1990s.
If you spend too much time talking to only Gen Xers, though, you’ll develop a worldview that is a little too cynical and sarcastic. I find that I benefit from deliberately pulling myself out of the Gen X bubble at regular intervals.
This was true even when I was a teen and twenty-something myself. At that time, everyone who was significantly younger than me was literally a child. Most of my age-disparate interactions, therefore, took place with older adults. I enjoyed listening to the Baby Boomers’ stories about Vietnam and the 1960s. I enjoyed listening to my World War II generation grandparents tell me about the 1930s and 1940s. I never wanted to live in an age-restricted bubble.
Back to Bethany Michel and her housing fight. There are photos of the 28-year-old online. She’s blonde and very easy on the eyes. And while I’m perfectly happy with my current next-door neighbors, I would not shriek in horror if Ms. Michel were to purchase their home.
So who, exactly, is so offended by her presence? And why? And why would The Villages want to severely restrict the presence of younger people, as if anyone under the age of 19 will turn into a flesh-eating zombie after 30 days?
As for me, I’d be a lot more annoyed by all the dogs.
Throughout the world, people who make Internet inquiries about Kuwa6226 meet violent deaths.
In online forums and chatrooms, people are warned not to mention the mysterious entity.
But who, or what, is Kuwa6226? A supernatural force? A cult? A global conspiracy?
Most people say that it’s better not to ask…and Kuwa6226’s reign of terror goes unchallenged.
***
Then two unlikely sleuths, from opposite sides of the world, unite.
Minoru Watase is a corporate IT employee in Japan. Julie Lawrence is a college student in the American Pacific Northwest.
Julie and Minoru have each lost a friend to Kuwa6226. Together, they are determined to discover Kuwa6226’s true identity and eliminate the menace.
Their search will take them from the streets of Tokyo to an American college town in Washington State. When they finally come face-to-face with Kuwa6226, Julie and Minoru will be unprepared for the revelation…and the ruthlessness of their adversary!
Kuwa 6226 is a horror-mystery with endless twists and turns!
I was briefly involved in the Boy Scouts from 1979 to 1980, when I was 11 years old.
I will admit that I was somewhat lukewarm about being a Boy Scout from the get-go. I got involved with scouting at the behest of a friend of mine. We are still friends today, but I have learned not to take his advice on important life decisions.
Don’t get me wrong: I had a great time as a Boy Scout. I made some friends in the Boy Scouts who are still friends today, some 45 years later. (Or well—at least they’re friends on Facebook.)
The things I liked about the Boy Scouts included the merit badge system. Even as a youngster, I liked the idea of diving into subjects and learning about them from the inside out. I earned a respectable handful of merit badges.
My big problem with the Boy Scouts was camping. I never learned to enjoy sleeping in a tent. Nor did I enjoy making complete meals out of Spam and deviled ham.
And as for answering calls of nature out in the woods… well, we won’t even go there.
A Boy Scout who doesn’t like camping? Whoever heard of that?That’s why I didn’t last long in the Boy Scouts.
As a result, I made it only to the rank of Second Class. No Eagle Scout bragging rights here.
The official magazine of the Boy Scouts was Boy’s Life. I would have been a member in January 1980, when the issue below was released.
Boy’s Life contained articles about fishing, camping, and other outdoorsy stuff. There was content about history, and profiles of professional athletes. This was the right magazine for me at that age. I enjoyed Boy’s Life a lot more than I enjoyed the campouts.
I understand that Boy’s Life has been renamed Scout Life, to conform to the new coed nature of scouting. The BSA began admitting girls in 2018. In 2025, the Boy Scouts of America officially changed its name to Scouting America.
There have been other changes, as well. It really isn’t the same organization I was involved in back in 1979 to 1980. I have no official opinion on Scouting America, and I’m much, much too old to be reading Scout Life, anyway.
What Ohio’s school voucher system may have done to the cost of private education
I attended Catholic schools for most of my K–12 years.
I went to a public kindergarten. From first grade through eighth grade, I attended a parish school on the east side of Cincinnati.
I completed my high school education at a Catholic school that was also located on the east side of Cincinnati. (And, as we will shortly discuss, still is.)
I’m not here to apologize for attending Catholic schools. Nor do I have any horror stories to relate. My educational experience was almost uniformly pleasant. My teachers were dedicated, responsible adults. As for my peers—well, high school was high school—but most of them were pretty nice people, on balance.
My public school options were not horrible by the standards of the 1970s and 1980s. But I’m glad my parents spent the extra money to send me to Catholic schools.
But how much money?
When I graduated from high school in 1986, my parents were spending about $1,000 per year on my tuition. That’s about $3,100 in present-day dollars.
Tuition at the high school I attended now costs more than five times that inflation-adjusted amount. Tuition at my former high school costs about $15,000 per year. Additional fees bring the total to nearly $17,000 per year.
What the heck happened?
Back in the 1980s, tuition-based Catholic schools operated under market constraints. All private schools did, for that matter. They could charge only what families could feasibly afford. Therefore, they had to keep their operating costs in line.
In the mid-1980s, my high school had two full-time administrators. There was one full-time guidance counselor.
And that was for a student body of about two thousand kids.
The high school I attended now has fewer than half that many students. According to the internet, about 700 students now attend my alma mater.
But, as you might have guessed, my old high school now has more administrators. (In fact, one of my former classmates is the Director of Admissions there.)
I’ve also noticed that the school has gone on a building spree in recent years. When I was a student there in the 1980s, we all used more or less the same facilities that my mother and her classmates had used in the 1960s. (My mother was a 1964 graduate of the same school.) Our accommodations were comfortable, but not luxurious. (And when you’re 15, 16, or 17 years old, who really cares about plush surroundings, anyway?)
But now every alumni newsletter from my former high school seems to feature some new building project. I was last inside the school for an alumni activity about a decade ago. I could barely recognize the place.
So…what the heck happened?
Government money is what happened.
Ohio has a program called EdChoice, aka a “voucher system.” In Ohio, families can receive up to $8,408 in voucher assistance for private high school tuition.
If half of the students at my alma mater are receiving the full EdChoice stipend, that would mean an annual influx of about $2.9 million. Give that much money to any group of educational administrators, and they’ll spend like drunken sailors on shore leave.
There are two sides to the school voucher debate. The first is that school vouchers siphon money from the public school system. While that issue is well worth considering, an equally serious problem is that school vouchers can artificially inflate costs at private schools. I know—because I had a quite satisfactory educational experience at a private Catholic high school during the mid-1980s for about a fifth of its current, inflation-adjusted cost.
Government money, I should note, is not the only type of external funding that can inflate costs. I’ve noticed a sharp increase in the cost of glasses and eye care over the years. (I’ve worn prescription lenses since 1978.) A few decades ago, insurance companies were not involved in routine eye care to the extent they are today. Now they are, and the costs we all pay have risen concomitantly.
You’ve no doubt had the experience of receiving a $1,600 bill for some routine medical test. Why do these tests cost so much? Because, in most cases, an external insurance provider will ultimately be paying the bill.
Whether that insurance provider is the government or a corporation is immaterial from an inflationary standpoint. Third-party insurance payments tend to weaken the market constraints that would otherwise keep prices in check.
So do school vouchers, it seems.
Meanwhile, public education funding is in a perpetual mess here in the Buckeye State. Many of the local districts do not have regular bus service. Each year, there are rancorous debates over school levies and property taxes, which fund public schools in Ohio.
These are problems that we did not have in the 1980s. Granted, I was not a homeowner paying property taxes in 1986, but I don’t remember my parents complaining about the property taxes they shelled out. (Nowadays, everyone in Ohio grouses about how high their property taxes are.) Nor was there ever a problem providing school buses for both public school kids and parochial school kids.
I reiterate: I am not a foe of Catholic schools. On the contrary, I’m both a fan and a beneficiary of them. But they were a lot more affordable—for both parents and taxpayers—before school vouchers came into the picture.
EdChoice is not a panacea for parents. If a family receives the full $8,408 in EdChoice assistance for tuition to my old high school, that still leaves about $8,600 out of pocket. That’s an inflation-adjusted net cost of nearly three times what my parents paid in the 1980s.
There is a cashier at a nearby grocery store where I regularly shop. She is an avid reader of my books.
This woman (I’ll call her Beverly) is probably in her mid-forties. Like me, she has spent most of her life in Ohio.
Beverly subscribes to Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program, and she reads most of my books through KU.
The other day, I asked Beverly if she did much reading on non-Amazon platforms such as Apple Books, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, or Kobo.
Beverly gave me a perplexed look.
“Why?” she asked, honestly surprised by the question. (She had never even heard of Kobo—or, at best, was only vaguely aware that it existed.)
I grew up in an era when the retail book market was wonderfully distributed and diverse. We had Waldenbooks and B. Dalton in the local mall. There were independent bookstores throughout the eastern Cincinnati suburbs where I lived. There were also at least two bookstores serving the University of Cincinnati, which I attended in the late 1980s.
When the brick-and-mortar superstores Borders and Barnes & Noble came to Cincinnati in the 1990s, the retail book market consolidated somewhat—but not all that much. There were still no online book sales, and the market was large enough to support multiple retailers.
That’s the way I prefer things to be. But as is so often the case in the twenty-first century, I find myself out of step with the times.
A few months ago, I took a handful of my ebook titles wide, meaning that I removed them from Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program (which requires exclusivity) and made them available through Google Play, Apple Books, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.
This past week, I decided to remove those books from wide distribution and place them back into Kindle Unlimited. That decision was based on sales data, as well as further analysis of broader market trends. One factor was the overwhelming cost competitiveness of Amazon’s Kindle devices.
As a result, seven of my titles will be returning to Kindle Unlimited. This process should be complete by the end of the month. It is taking longer than I expected because several of Kobo’s international bookseller partners have been slow to delist the titles, and I cannot enroll them in Kindle Unlimited until they have been fully removed from those sites.
These are the titles that will be returning to KU over the coming weeks. You can find all of them on my Amazon author page:
The Woman in Crosley Tower is a new title for preorder in my Uncanny Ohio series. It’s a novella of about 24,000 words. The novella will be released on June 26, 2026.
This horror/dark fantasy story is based on a single question: What would happen if a woman disappeared inside a building in the University of Cincinnati during the summer of 1987, and emerged 39 years later?
There is a lot more to it than that, of course. This is a story for fans of parallel world stories, and tales of liminal zones (like the “backrooms” urban legend). And since much of the story is set in 1987, there is also a generous portion of Gen X nostalgia, an element which is rapidly becoming part of my “brand”.
The Woman in Crosley Tower will be initially released in digital-only format (Kindle). For those of you who like to read on paper (and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, of course!) the title will be released in a combined volume with several other Uncanny Ohio titles later in the summer/fall.
Also, The Woman in Crosley Tower will be in Kindle Unlimited, at least for the foreseeable future. So you can read it there if you’re a Kindle Unlimited subscriber.
In the mid-1980s, I became a rabid fan of Stephen King. My fandom started with a random confluence of events, as so many things do.
My sophomore year of high school, I had a job manning the checkout desk at my school’s library during my study hall period. So I had plenty of exposure to books. One day, I happened across a paperback copy of Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot.
The novel had been made into a two-part television miniseries five years earlier (1979). I had seen the miniseries, and it had creeped me out. I remembered enough about the miniseries to know what the novel would be about, but not enough to ruin the book for me.
I was instantly hooked. I blazed through ‘Salem’s Lot in only a few days. After that, I checked out every book in the school library that was written by Stephen King.
When I exhausted the school library shelves, I turned to the Waldenbooks and B. Dalton stores at the local mall. This was in the mid-1980s. By this time, Carrie, The Shining, Cujo, and Christine were already published.Rose Madder, The Green Mile, and 11/22/63 were still years in the future.
Teenagers are natural-born fanatics. During those years, I was a fanatic of Stephen King’s work in the same way that I was a fanatic of the music of Rush and Led Zeppelin. During the remainder of my high school years, I read Stephen King’s novels and short story collections with a dogged, joyful determination. I wanted to read everything he had written to that time. (And given Stephen King’s prolificness as a writer, there was a lot to read even then, in the mid-1980s).
By the time I graduated from high school in the spring of 1986, my dedicated reading had more or less caught up with Stephen King’s prolific writing. But a few months later, Stephen King had a new novel out, and it was widely billed as the writer’s magnum opus.
I looked forward to the book weeks before it came out.
The “it” I’m talking about is It, Stephen King’s mammoth horror epic. The book was released on September 15, 1986. I purchased my copy that very same day. I know this, because I preordered the book from the B. Dalton’s at my local shopping mall.
I remember starting the book while on a break at my university library. (I attended Northern Kentucky University in the fall of 1986.) To say that I was in an anticipatory mood would be a gross understatement. Here was 1,138 pages of new fiction from myfavorite author.
Original hardcover dust jacket for It, 1986
What followed was one of my first experiences in youthful disillusionment (Many more were to follow, of course; but those are other episodes for other essays). It dragged. The novel contained too many subplots, too much padding, and a long, saggy middle.
What I loved about Cujo, Carrie, and the short stories in Night Shift were King’s fast pacing, narrative discipline, and literary economy. Most of these early works were written when Stephen King was still establishing himself as a writer, and was therefore subject to marketplace competition.
By 1986, though, Stephen King was already a celebrity writer. His short story “Trucks” had been made into a movie that summer, Maximum Overdrive. King was frequently interviewed, and widely known as “the Master of the Macabre”. He had even done a television commercial for American Express. In 1986, American pop culture was still characterized by scarcity and monolithic names. In popular fiction, King was one of those monoliths, alongside big names like Danielle Steel and Tom Clancy.
Stephen King on the cover of Time magazine, 1986
No discussion of It would be complete without mentioning the book’s controversial sex scene—what amounts to an orgy among its adolescent characters.
As a mature adult in 2026, I am supposed to get in a high dudgeon about the potential exploitation issues involved here. Back in 1986, very few adults did. There were some raised eyebrows, sure; but no public outcry greeted It, not even among members of the religious right. They were too busy lobbying to get Playboy and Penthouse banned from 7-Eleven.
But there was another factor in play for me, at the time. Keep in mind that in the fall of 1986, I was barely 18 years old myself, and only a few months out of high school. I was much closer in age to the members of the Losers Club than to the novel’s middle-aged author. Did my youthful age place me adjacent to something exploitive? Was I somehow a victim in all of this, too? Teenagers of the 1980s were not programmed to ask such questions.
Even at that age, though, I sensed that something was odd about this scene in It. I remember wondering if, perhaps, Stephen King had been drunk or high while writing this scene. (In light of King’s subsequent revelations about his substance abuse struggles during this period, my speculations may not have been too far from the mark.)
The sex scene involving the adolescent members of The Losers Club may or may not have been exploitative. It was, however, inappropriate and unnecessary, and definitely jarred me out of the story.
Forty years after the publication of It, Stephen King is still writing novels and I am still a fan.
Nowadays, however, I tend to read his work more selectively. King’s novellas and short stories are as engaging for me as ever. I often skip his longer, doorstop-size novels. I struggled to get through The Outsider, 11/22/63, and Fairy Tale.
Likewise, my early, teenage attempts at writing fiction were thinly disguised attempts at imitating Stephen King. But after all these years, and so many books of my own, I don’t sense much of King’s influences in my own work anymore. (I will, however, forever admire the stories in his first collection, the aforementioned Night Shift (1978). Every one of those stories is a gem.)
Stephen King is now almost 80, and I’m, well…a lot older, too. I hope King has many more years of writing ahead of him. I can’t promise to read all of his novels, but I’ll always show up for his short story collections.
Kobo, the Canadian alternative to Amazon, has recently announced that its Kobo Plus subscription program will be made available in the Czech Republic, Greece, Luxembourg, the Philippines, Poland and Romania. (Kobo already has a significant presence in many other European countries.)
This move will doubtless benefit the many writers who are producing work in those local languages.
I should also note that there are presently many fiction writers in Europe who should be writing in their local languages, but who are nonetheless writing in maladroit and often incorrect English, because they have been programmed to believe that English is the only language that matters in the book market. I want Polish and Romanian language writers to have all the opportunities that can reasonably be made available to them.
But what about writers like me, who mostly produce work in English? Since I have my writer/publisher hat on now, I’m going to take the liberty of examining this from a self-interested perspective.
Some indie writer gurus wax enthusiastic about the prospect of selling to the “whole wide world”. This often comes up in the context of wide distribution, i.e. distribution beyond Amazon. These commentators make much of the fact that their books can be made available in Poland, France, Spain, South Korea, and Bulgaria.
This is mostly wishful thinking.
Yes, I realize that English is studied as a second language all over the world. But even in Germany, where English-language skills are higher than the European average, books really need to be translated into German in order to sell well in the local market.
There is a tendency in publishing circles to conflate two very different categories:
People who can function in English
People who can (and will) read novels in English for pleasure
I have adult-level reading skills in both Japanese and Spanish. I can read a newspaper in either one of those languages with only an occasional reference to a dictionary.
And yet—I rarely read fiction in Japanese or Spanish—unless I’m specifically working on leveling up my language skills. And when I do purchase fiction in Japanese or Spanish, it’s almost always a work by a well-known writer: Keigo Higashino or Gabriel García Márquez.
The bottom line is that a reader in Poland who has rudimentary skills in English isn’t going to read or purchase many indie-published novels from the United States. This is a fact that US-based publishing commentators and wishful thinkers (few of whom have much experience with foreign languages) frequently overlook.
Many of you have noticed that my books are now available at multiple retailers.
But not all of my books are available at multiple retailers.
There are reasons for this. Allow me to explain.
As recently as last year, I was Amazon-exclusive on all titles (with the exception of a few non-fiction books). All of my fiction was in Kindle Unlimited.
That’s not the way it is anymore.
Why?
The publishing landscape is changing.
Amazon is still the dominant player in the ebook retailing space (and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future).
But Kobo is rapidly emerging as a viable alternative for many readers (as the video below demonstrates). Other readers will toggle back and forth between the two.
Kobo is not the only non-Amazon e-book retailer, of course. There are also Apple Books, Google Play, and Barnes & Noble.
But Kobo, with its high-profile line of e-readers, seems to be the one that is making the most headway. Kobo is serious about increasing its market share.
Where readers go, authors will follow, and vice versa.
The wild card here is Kindle Unlimited’s exclusivity clause. If a title is enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, it can’t be sold (in ebook format) at any of the other retailers. Historically, this has meant that thousands of titles listed at Amazon aren’t available at Kobo, Google Play, etc.
Many readers, I suspect, aren’t even aware of this.
I’ve noticed a trend: More romance authors are publishing their books “wide”, with an emphasis on Kobo.
Yes, romance… the genre that dare not speak its name at this blog. Regular readers will know how I hate werebear shapeshifter romance, reverse harem romance, and all the other ridiculous romance genres.
But I don’t deny their collective footprint in the marketplace. Those weird romance genres, much as I disdain them, may be instrumental in propelling Kobo’s growth in the near future.
This will indirectly benefit the other non-Amazon retailers—not only Kobo. Because if you’re publishing your book on Kobo, then you had might as well publish it on Google Play, Apple Books, and Barnes & Noble too.
Readers will go where the books go. This is the network effect in action.
But for me, publishing wide doesn’t mean abandoning Kindle Unlimited. I will still be keeping many backlist and new titles in Amazon’s exclusive subscription program.
Yes—I know that means that those titles will only be available at Amazon. But Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program is a major player in its own right. In my opinion, part of being “wide” means having a footprint in Kindle Unlimited.
This diversified strategy may strike some readers as needlessly complicated. But remember: I’m from the 1980s. And back in the 1980s, content publishers regularly thought in terms of market segmentation.
For example: there were movies and TV shows that were available on network television for free.
Other movies and shows were available on HBO (a subscription program).
Others required viewers to access them via a pay-per-view system.
Then there were all those VHS rentals.
And finally, there were movies that could only be seen at the cinema.
I’m doing something very similar. Some of my titles are exclusively at Amazon, other titles are “wide”.
Nor have I forgotten about free, frictionless discovery venues: I’ve also been adding readings of some of my books and stories to my YouTube channel.
The 2026 content distribution marketplace is complicated; but in some ways, it’s no more convoluted than it was in 1986. So we go back to the 1980s yet again.
Brett Arnold of Yahoo! is distinctly unimpressed with the latest, endless installment in the Star Wars franchise:
“‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ is easily the worst Star Wars movie, but even calling it a movie feels like giving it more credit than it deserves. It’s a feature-length episode of streaming-era television, and boy, does it look and feel like it. It’s uncinematic in pretty much every way, from the drab visuals to its repetitive structure that lacks the storytelling heft needed to make the jump from TV to film. Say what you will about ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ or the prequel trilogy; at least they’re movies!”
Reading the above, I feel a little like the lead singer in the J. Geils Band, who discovered that his high school sweetheart had been turned into onanistic fodder for a girlie magazine:
Star Wars was amazing when it first came out. I can say this with certainty because I was there at the beginning.
It was the summer of 1977 and I sat with my dad in a cinema in northern Kentucky as the very first Star Wars film began.
I was nine years old.
I will soon be 58.
I’m sure you caught the irony. That was almost half a century ago.
The last Star Wars movie that was really necessary was Return of the Jedi in 1983. I remember watching The Phantom Menace in 1999, sixteen years later. It didn’t feel like Star Wars.
Since then, the movies have only gotten worse. It’s obvious that Disney is just milking the Star Wars universe as one of its few reliable cash cows.
Star Wars was great! But it’s time for new science fiction stories and fresh space operas.
I have a new release: Family Secrets. Here’s what it’s about (Amazon description):
“When a Cincinnati businessman connects with a distant cousin on Facebook, he agrees to stop by the man’s remote rural property on his way home from a business trip.
The visit should have lasted thirty minutes.
Instead, he finds himself trapped in a doublewide trailer deep in the woods, drawn into the disappearance of a local girl, and forced to search a dark pond for a body that may—or may not—be there.
But something else is moving through the woods that night.
Something ancient and hungry.
Family Secrets is a supernatural mystery/thriller inspired by regional folklore, nightmares, and the eerie landscapes of the Midwest.”
This is the second book in a new series I’ve created: Uncanny Ohio:
“Uncanny Ohio is a series of atmospheric supernatural tales set in southern Ohio, in and around the Cincinnati area. Traditional ghost stories and urban legends with a strong regional flavor.”
This was a natural move for me. Many of my supernatural stories are set in southern Ohio, and take inspiration from the ghost stories and urban legends that I absorbed as a kid in the 1970s and 1980s.
Family Secrets is currently enrolled in Kindle Unlimited.
I’ve been watching Banshee, a crime drama that originally aired from 2013 to 2016. I’ve always enjoyed Jonathan Tropper’s books, and I was originally interested in the show because of his involvement.
First, the negatives. This show has far too many plot holes, some rising to jump-the-shark levels of absurdity. Characters don’t always behave consistently, and often behave in ways that are not even plausible. For this reason, the viewer is never quite able to suspend his or her disbelief.
But I don’t believe that realism is Banshee’s goal. This is compulsive, potato chip entertainment that keeps you watching—from one scene to the next, and from one episode to the next. The tension and power oscillations that are achieved in some of Banshee’s scenes are worth studying—especially if you’re interested in writing fiction or film scripts. (They’re also worth your time if you’re simply looking for some not-too-challenging, pulp entertainment.)
Another positive: There is quite a bit of sex in Banshee. But the sex, while occasionally excessive, is used strategically.
In all too many shows, and in 99% of all the romance and erotica novels being published nowadays, sex is used as a cover for weak storytelling. Not so in Banshee. In Banshee, the sex heightens the tension and complicates the plot. A sex scene in this show is almost never only about sex.
