Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here. NEW BOOK! It’s been a while since I’ve been able to write those words. I had a long stretch when I wasn’t writing anything new at all, but now, in just eight days, my NEW BOOK will be released.

I’ve written about The Valentine Veilleux Mysteries here before, talking about the cover art. Here’s what the final cover looks like:

You’ll notice I worked in both my names. That translates to listing Kathy Lynn Emerson and Kaitlyn Dunnett as authors at the top of alternate pages in the text. That’s only fair. The first two stories were previously published in a collection under Kathy’s name. The third short story and the novella have never appeared in print before, but the Valentine Veilleux character shows up in two of the books I wrote as Kaitlyn.

Now the trick is to get people to actually buy the book. I’m terrible at self-promotion. I’m hoping fans of my Liss MacCrimmon Mysteries and the Deadly Edits series will remember Val and want to read her adventures. For those who don’t have a clue who she is, here’s the blurb I’m using for the book:

The three short stories and a novella that comprise The Valentine Veilleux Mysteries feature professional photographer Valentine Veilleux as an amateur sleuth. Val specializes in creating calendars for organizations to use for fundraising purposes. She is a free spirit who travels the country in a RV, custom-designed to serve as both home and workplace, with her three-legged cat, Lucky, for company. In the course of each job she takes on, she becomes involved with a group of people who know each other and often share dark secrets. When a member of such a group is murdered, Val has the advantage of an outsider’s perspective combined with an insider’s knowledge of the suspects, while her photographs provide clues the police have missed. Val first appeared in Kaitlyn Dunnett’s ninth Liss MacCrimmon Mystery, The Scottie Barked at Midnight, and reappeared in the second book (Clause &Effect) of her Deadly Edits Mysteries. Kaitlyn Dunnett is a pseudonym for Kathy Lynn Emerson, Agatha-award winning author of both fiction and nonfiction.

The Valentine Veilleux Mysteries will go on sale on Tuesday, November 9, in both e-book ($5,99) and trade paperback ($10.99) formats, although be advised that if you want the paperback, you should order as soon as possible. Supply chain delays have affected print-on-demand printing as well as the production of traditionally published books. My book is published with the aid of Draft2Digital, which provides pre-ordering through Barnes & Noble and Apple, but not with Amazon. You’ll have to wait to order until November 9 if your heart is set on the Kindle edition. Here is a link to various stores where it can be purchased as an e-book and in trade paperback format: https://books2read.com/u/bpaPlz  More online bookstores will be added closer to November 9 and you can also ask your local library to order a copy in either format. Independent bookstores can obtain copies of the paperback if you ask.

Question for readers: do you pre-order books, either e or print? Doing so can help impress a writer’s publisher if she’s traditionally published, so I imagine it factors into some algorithm or other for all books. What I do know is that sales matter. So do reviews, especially on Amazon. Any help in getting the word out about The Valentine Veilleux Mysteries will be much appreciated by both Kaitlyn and Kathy.

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-four books traditionally published and has self published several children’s books and three works of nonfiction. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. Her newest books are Murder, She Edited (the fourth book in the contemporary “Deadly Edits” series, written as Kaitlyn) and, as Kathy, I Kill People for a Living: A Collection of Essays by a Writer of Cozy Mysteries. She maintains websites at www.KaitlynDunnett.com and www.KathyLynnEmerson.com. A third, at A Who’s Who of Tudor Women, is the gateway to over 2300 mini-biographies of sixteenth-century Englishwomen, now available in e-book format.