Scraps of Paper-Revised Author’s Edition
Publisher: Amazon Kindle Direct
Publisher’s website: Amazon.com
eBook or Print or
Both: eBook
Genre: Murder Mystery
Heat Level: Sweet
Cover Artist: Dawne Dominique
Blurb
Scraps of Paper-Revised
Author’s Edition by Kathryn Meyer Griffith
Abigail Sutton’s beloved husband walks out one night, doesn’t return, and
two years later is found dead, a victim of a long ago crime. It’s made her
sympathetic to the missing and their families.
Starting her new life, Abigail moves to small town and
buys a fixer-upper house left empty when old Edna Summers died. Once it was
also home to Edna’s younger sister, Emily, and her two children, Jenny and
Christopher, who, people believe, drove away one night, thirty years ago, and
just never came back.
But in renovating the house Abigail finds scraps of
paper hidden behind baseboards and tucked beneath the porch that hint the three
could have been victims of foul play.
Then she finds their graves hidden in the woods
behind the house and with the help of eccentric townspeople and ex-homicide
detective, Frank Lester, she discovers the three were murdered. Then she and
Frank try to uncover who killed them and why…but in the process awaken the ire
of the murderer. ***
BACKSTORY ESSAY for SCRAPS OF PAPER-Revised
Author’s Edition:
The
Story of Scraps of Paper
A murder mystery by
Kathryn Meyer Griffith
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 nine publishers and, at least, all total – including rereleases –
twenty-five or more editors. 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 in 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 but has finally ended, for me, happily.
On January 15,
2013 I self-published it, for the first time, as an eBook on Amazon Kindle
Direct, after waiting ten long years as it languished beneath a terribly unfair
hardcover contract with Avalon Books that had a sell-off limit of 3,500 hard
copies. 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 a
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. Inspector Morse.
Miss Marple. I wrote it and then, quickly after, a second in the series All Things Slip Away for Avalon Books.
I got a small 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 somewhere
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 rewritten 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:
***
