Author Kathryn Meyer Griffith is with us today to share the backstory of her latest release,
Scraps of Paper.
****
I’ve been writing for over forty-one years and have
gone through a lot of frustrating or downright infuriating situations with
publishers and editors. Since 1981 I’ve
had eight of them. I’ve suffered 4% royalties, dreadful covers, bad editing and
shoddy proof-reading, confusing statements, late royalty payments (or nonexistent
ones) and other near-criminal acts committed against me by publishers and
editors I’d so naively put my trust into over the years. Now days I like to
look back at those occasions, write about them; smile or even laugh over them, though
they weren’t so funny when they were happening. This is one of those smiling times…because
the conception, writing, publishing and, finally, self-publishing of my murder
mystery Scraps of Paper has had such
a long vexing journey.
On January 15, 2013 I self-published it as an eBook,
for the first time, on Amazon Kindle Direct, after waiting ten long years as it
languished beneath a terribly unfair hardback contract with Avalon Books that
had a sell-off limit of 3,500 hardcopies. Ten years where they claimed it
barely sold (no joke…their asking price was ridiculously high at $26.00) and that
it didn’t sell one copy in the last
two years of its contract–though the book was on sale everywhere on the
Internet. I never received one royalty statement and had to beg in yearly
emails to be told how many copies had sold that year. Of course, since the
totals never got near the 3,500, , they said, I would get no royalty
statements. And I never did. Not one. Ever. Last month my book was finally mine
again and I was free of that atrocious contract and now, after a revision and commissioning
a new stunning cover from my cover artist Dawne Dominique, I’ve released it
into the world without the publisher’s shackles to imprison it. Fly little
bird, fly!
Originally I wrote it be the first of a series set in
this quaint, quirky little town I tongue-in-cheek called Spookie. I mean, most
of my books before were horror novels and I was basically considered a horror
writer, so the town’s name was the tip-of-the-hat to my horror roots. It’d be
my first venture into that genre, which I’d always loved. Sherlock Holmes. Murder
She Wrote. Detective Frost. Miss Marple. I wrote it and then, quickly after, a
second in the series All Things Slip
Away for Avalon Books. I got a modest advance up front for each one.
It was 2002. I’d come out of a lengthy publishing
dry spell. My seventh paperback novel, Zebra’s The Calling, a ghost story with an ancient Egyptian theme, had come
out in 1994. Then they dumped a lot of us mid-list horror writers, me included,
saying horror was dying; and for eight years I couldn’t sell another book. Well,
living my life got in the way during some of that time. I’d lost my long-time
good-paying graphic artist job in 1994 and had to find another one. The pay was
a lot less. No good for my budget or my standard of living, which really fell. I
went from one of five bad jobs to another over the next six years…each worse
and lower paying than the one before.
Each more demanding. I needed
to make money. No longer could I live with pie-in-the-sky literary dreams. I
had to face reality. So I stopped writing for a while.
When I finally came up for breath and my head was back
on straight again I decided to write something different…a mystery. I’d always
loved mysteries. I began writing Scraps of Paper. About a woman, an
artist named Jenny, whose husband has been missing for two years, and who’s
just learned he’s been dead all that time–a victim of a gone-wrong mugging. She
begins a new life and moves to a small town full of fog, quirky townspeople and
mysteries. And right away she’s drawn into one of her own when she buys, renovates,
a fixer-upper house and uncovers hidden in it scraps of paper written by two
young children who once lived there with their mother, and who supposedly drove
away thirty years before and were never seen again. The town thought they simply
went someone else; began a new life. But Jenny suspects they never left the
house; suspects they’d been murdered. Then she finds three graves in the back.
Of course, with her history of a missing husband
she develops the overpowering urge to find out what happened to them. The
scraps of paper she continues to find makes the bond, the desire, stronger. She
forms a friendship with an ex-homicide cop, Frank, and together they try to
solve the mystery. Only thing is there’s someone still living in the town that
just as desperately doesn’t want them to. Someone who’d kill to keep the
murderer’s identity secret.
When done I was proud of it. Thought it was good. I
sent it to Avalon Books in New York.
They loved it and bought it. I signed the contract, though I didn’t like some
of the things in it. But I was desperate. I hadn’t had a book published in so
long and, as my mom always said, beggars can’t be choosers. I sold them the second in the series, hoping
it’d help sell the first. They got great reviews. But I came to regret signing
both those contracts more as every year went by because I never received one penny more for either book for the next ten years.
I know, it sounds impossible. But it happened to me. I’m sure it happened to a
lot of their authors. Probably one of the reasons Avalon Books sold themselves
lock-stock-and-barrel to Amazon Publishing in June of 2012 and, without their
authors’ knowledge or permission, including mine, sold away their authors’ contracts
from under them as well. I guess you
live and learn. I was just lucky Scraps
of Paper’s contract had run out. I took the book back.
But, all that is in the past, and my revised Scraps of Paper-Revised Author’s Edition is now available, on sale for $3.99 (much
better than $26.00), at Amazon Kindle here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B1W4A2K
And I hope people will have the chance
to read it this time around and like it.
***
About Kathryn
Meyer Griffith...
Since childhood I’ve always been an artist and
worked as a graphic designer in the corporate world and for newspapers for
twenty-three years before I quit to write full time. I began writing novels at
21, over forty years ago now, and have had seventeen (ten romantic horror, two
romantic SF horror, one romantic suspense, one romantic time travel, one
historical romance and two murder mysteries) previous novels, two novellas and
twelve short stories published from Zebra
Books, Leisure Books, Avalon Books, The Wild Rose Press, Damnation
Books/Eternal Press and Amazon Kindle Direct.
I’ve been married to Russell for almost thirty-five
years; have a son, James, and two grandchildren, Joshua and Caitlyn, and I live
in a small quaint town in Illinois called Columbia, which is right across the JB Bridge from St. Louis, Mo.
We have three quirky cats, ghost cat Sasha, live cats Cleo and Sasha (Too), and
the five of us live happily in an old house in the heart of town. Though I’ve
been an artist, and a folk singer in my youth with my brother Jim, writing has
always been my greatest passion, my butterfly stage, and I’ll probably write
stories until the day I die…or until my memory goes.
Novels and short stories from Kathryn
Meyer Griffith:
Evil
Stalks the Night (Leisure, 1984; Damnation Books, 2012)
The
Heart of the Rose (Leisure, 1985; Eternal Press Author’s
Revised Edition 2010)
Blood
Forge (Leisure, 1989; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition,
2012)
Vampire
Blood (Zebra, 1991; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition,
2011)
The
Last Vampire (Zebra, 1992; Damnation Books Author’s
Revised Edition 2010)
Witches
(Zebra, 1993; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition 2011)
The
Nameless One (short story in 1993 Zebra Anthology Dark
Seductions; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition, 2011)
The
Calling (Zebra, 1994; Damnation Books Author’s Revised Edition,
2011)
All
Things Slip Away (Avalon Books Murder Mystery, 2006…Amazon
Kindle Direct ebook & paperback 2013)
Egyptian
Heart (The Wild Rose Press, 2007; Author’s Revised Edition,
Eternal Press 2011) My self-made
Winter’s
Journey (The Wild Rose Press, 2008; Author’s Revised Edition,
Eternal Press 2011)
The
Ice Bridge (The Wild
Rose Press, 2008; Author’s Revised Edition, Eternal Press 2011)
BEFORE
THE END: A Time of Demons
(Damnation Books 2010)
The
Woman in Crimson (Eternal Press 2010)
The Complete Guide to Writing Paranormal Fiction: Volume 1
(I did the Introduction)
4 Spooky Short Stories (Amazon Kindle 2012)
Telling
Tales of Terror (I did the chapter on Putting the Occult into your Fiction)
Dinosaur Lake (from Amazon Kindle Direct 2012)
Human No Longer (Amazon Kindle 2013)
Scraps of Paper –Revised
Author’s Edition (Avalon Books Murder Mystery, 2003; Amazon Kindle 2013)
My Websites:
The Man Who Built the World by Chris Ward
