Safe at home

Like most of you, we're hiding out in our house, waiting for the experts to tell us the worst of the coronavirus plague has passed. Here in Albuquerque, the peak is expected in late April.

We've been sheltering at home since March 14, when we returned from a quick road trip to San Diego. The Left Coast Crime conference was canceled by health officials six hours after we arrived. We went home the next day, and have been there ever since. As near as we can tell, we're healthy.

The family enterprise, Organic Books, was hit by the closures ordered for retail stores throughout New Mexico. We're still doing business online and by phone, but the Nob Hill storefront remains closed.

If you'd like to help us, you can order new books from bookshop.org/shop/organicbooks and they'll be delivered to your door. Independent booksellers like us get a percentage of the sales. Same goes for audio books at Libro.fm, where you can type "Organic Books" in the bookstore field so we get a cut. Finally, and this especially applies to local customers, if you're looking for a used book, call us at 505-553-3823 and we'll see if we can deliver it.

It's a strange time in publishing. Here's this enormous audience, trapped at home, looking for something to read, but the virus restricts movements and cancels events, so it's difficult to get the word out about new books.

I published my latest crime novel, UPSHOT, in late January, just in time for it to be roundly ignored as the whole country focused on the contagion. I brought out the Kindle version in March and sold a few, but I think UPSHOT and a lot of its contemporaries will get lost in the COVID shuffle.

UPSHOT did get a nice review in the Albuquerque Journal last Sunday, but of course all the stores were closed so it's hard to tell if it did any good. You can read it here, but beware, there lies spoilers.

I've got other publishing projects to pursue during the quarantine. (Next up: a trade paperback edition of BANK JOB, which was published in hardcover and e-book, but never in paperback.) But I'm not trying to write anything new and I'm glad. Too many distractions right now.

Take good care of yourselves during this crisis. Stay home. Wash your hands. Order a bunch of good books. Time passes quickly when you have a book to read.