Michael J. McCann

Clayton Bye, Managing Editor and horror fiction reviewer for The Deepening World of Fiction, has completed a review of The Ghost Man that may be viewed at http://www.thedeepening.com/horror/2009/11/05/the-ghost-man-by-michael-j-mccann/. Mr. Bye is a poet, novelist, critic and self-help expert with a long list of publications, and his website is well worth perusing.

The Ghost Man is an entrant in the 2010 Amazon.ca First Novel Award. This award recognizes outstanding achievements of first-time Canadian novelists.

You can check out their website at http://www.amazon.ca/First-Novel-Award-Books/b?ie=UTF8&node=1194446 to see last year's winner and finalists. It was great to see that a neighbour, Mike Blouin of Oxford Mills, ON, was a finalist for his novel Chase and Haven. His website is found at  http://minor-poet.blogspot.com/. Congratulations, Mike!

Fans of The Ghost Man should keep their fingers crossed, and maybe good things will happen! Finalists will be announced early in the new year.

It's been three months between blog entries, which kind of defeats the purpose of a blog, I know, I know, but I promised an update on review requests and BOY OH BOY that process is slow. So here I am pinging you now from the event horizon of the "area of space-time with a gravitational field so intense that its escape velocity is equal to or exceeds the speed of light," aka the black hole of blogs.

Dawn Davis of thebookblog.ca has promised to review The Ghost Man, so we will watch for that. Don MacLean of Ottawa Life magazine has also agreed to review the book, and hopefully it will appear in the November issue, either online, in the print version, or both. Clayton Bye, horror editor of The Deepening World, has also agreed to review the book. His website is found at reviews.thedeepening.com and we can all keep pinging it to see what he has to say about it once he has a chance to read it. Interesting fellow.... Take some time to read his stuff.

Meanwhile, work is ongoing. Homicide Lieutenant Hank Donaghue and Detective Karen Stainer have completed their first adventure together. The manuscript of The Seventy Club is finished, readers are reading it and providing feedback, and the search for an agent is underway. Their second adventure, Marcie's Murder, is now on the stove and cooking nicely. Their third and fourth adventures, The Serenity of Night and The Chairman, have been scoped out. What will be the ultimate fate of bad guy Peter Mah? Well, he's not going to go away easily. And will he actually help Hank and FBI Special Agent Sandy Alexander in their search for a serial killer terrorizing the city? Tsk tsk. So many questions. You're just going to have to read the novels one at a time, all right?

When you have no previous experience marketing a book, progress is measured in inches rather than miles, that's for sure! But I have to tell you it's great fun. An adventure I never thought I'd have a chance to experience.

Watching the listings for my book cascade across the internet from Amazon out into the world has been absolutely a blast. To think that someone could order and receive my book in places as far away as Norway, Switzerland, New Zealand, Sweden, and Rome, Italy is sobering. I know it's almost all virtual, that only a few of these places actually have the book available in their bricks-and-mortar stores, but just the same, my book is available for anyone to read in any of these markets. That's quite a feeling.

A major undertaking was getting this website indexed in internet search engines. Since you're reading this blog you've obviously found the site, but it may be because I'd already given you the URL. For the multitude out there who are mildly curious and take the time to run a search, I need a link for this site to appear in the search results. Man, that's how I find all kinds of stuff on the internet.

I was able to get this site indexed on Yahoo! in about two days. It was pretty effortless. Google, however, was a much tougher nut to crack. I think I must have submitted it too many times and Google punted me through the uprights. This week, however, I took a shot at getting it indexed through DMOZ, the Open Directory Project that feeds website links to all sorts of search engines, including Google. Today I find my site appearing in Google's search results, so I must have succeeded. Yahoo!!! Oops. You know what I mean.

A word to the wise: if you search for Michael J. McCann in quotation marks, this site is a first-page hit in Yahoo and Google. If you do that search without quotation marks, it's still a first-page hit in Google but I gave up trying to find it in Yahoo after 16 pages. If you search for Michael McCann in Google, it appears on page 13 of their search results.

Also, a reminder: if you're searching for the book in order to buy it, your best results come if you search for "Ghostman" as one word, since that's how it got listed in Amazon. The title is actually "The Ghost Man," but I'm not about to quibble as long as people can find it.

Next posting: trying to get the book reviewed.

International availability of The Ghost Man continues to grow.

In the U.S., readers in Oregon may order the book through  Boone Bridge Books at  http://www.boonebridgebooks.com/The_Ghostman_Michael_J_McCann-i-189751221X?bbb=ed5f159f6dd1eb7b6f6c75532b52d774 .

In Italy, The Ghost Man is available through DEA (Diffusione Edizioni Anglo-Americane) in Rome at http://www.deastore.com/book/the-ghostman-michael-j-mccann-saga-books/9781897512210.html and also online through IBS, the Internet Book Store, at http://www.ibs.it/book/9781897512210/mccann-michael-j/the-ghostman.html .  

In South Africa, order the book through Kalahari.net at http://www.kalahari.net/books/The-Ghostman/632/34394050.aspx .

In New Zealand, purchase the book from Fishpond at http://www.fishpond.co.nz/Books/Fiction_Literature/Ghost/product_info/15146951/?cf=3 . This is New Zealand's biggest book store.

In Norway, buy The Ghost Man from Oslo's Ark Bokhandel, which has a very good English language selection. Online, find it at http://www.ark.no/SamboWeb/produkt.do?produktId=4379830.

Readers who regularly shop online for supernatural and erotic fiction can find The Ghost Man at Tower Books at http://www.tower.com/ghostman-michael-j-mccann-paperback/wapi/113544977 . Comic book enthusiasts may order The Ghost Man from World Famous Comics at http://www.worldfamouscomics.com/shopping/item-189751221X.shtml .

Finally our high speed internet connection has been restored, so that I can get back to the business of blog writing!!

Just a couple of notes on availability of The Ghost Man.

Those of you living in the Ottawa area may purchase a copy at Books on Beechwood, 35 Beechwood Avenue. Their website is found at http://www.booksonbeechwood.ca/books/whats-happening/.

Readers in the U.K. may order The Ghost Man through Waterstones.com at http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/home.do. Use their search engine and the key words "Michael J. McCann" or "The Ghostman" -- two words, not three -- and you will find it in their database.

Summer is coming -- or what passes for summer around here. I finally got my screen tent set up and have had one or two afternoons so far to sit in a comfortable chair, puff a cigar, and stare at the thousands of mosquitos hanging on the other side of the mesh, staring back at me, longingly.......

Mornings are my best time to write, and in the afternoons once the ideas have run dry for the day, if I have a little time, I will sometimes grab a book and head out to the screen tent with a cigar and maybe a beer, if I don't have to go anywhere afterwards. While I hope everyone is open to buying new books (esp. The Ghost Man) the fact is that we all love to scour yard sales and second-hand stores for whatever books are both cheap and interesting. I thought it might be fun to share a few of my "found books" for this summer with you.

I'll start with a book I found recently in the Value Village. Published in 2004, Candy Freak by the appropriately-named Steve Almond is an absolute blast. This guy brags in the opening chapter that he thinks about candy at least once an hour, every day, and has between three and seven pounds of candy in his home at all times. To prove it he drops everything to conduct an inventory of all the candy in his apartment, at that moment as he is writing that chapter. He finds 2 pounds of miniature Clark bars, 1.5 pounds of dark chocolate-covered mint patties, 24 peanut butter cups, a pound of Tootsie Roll Midgets, 4 ounces of cinnamon disks, 5 ounces of cherry-flavoured jellies, a gold-foiled milk chocolate ball with truffle filling, 2 squares of semi-sweet chocolate and 3 pieces of Fleer bubblegum. This doesn't count the fourteen boxes (boxes!) of Kit Kat Limited Edition Dark chocolate bars he has stored in an undisclosed location. As a random sample, that's not too bad a selection, I suppose.

Having established his credentials as a candy freak, Almond explains that the inspiration for writing the book was the question that popped into his mind one day: whatever happened to the Caravelle chocolate bar that he loved as a kid? The more he wondered, the more he thought about other chocolate bars and candies that mysteriously vanished somehow when his back was turned between childhood and adulthood. Where did they all go? The book chronicles his search to find out how the candy companies control their market and determine what we stuff in our gobs and what gets cast aside, never to be smacked again.

It's a really fun book, and if you ever see it, grab it. You'll probably want to read it with a box of chocolates beside you, though, rather than the cigar......

Today I'm happy to announce that The Ghost Man is now available through Saga Books. It feels a little strange to be talking about a book I finished writing more than a year ago, as my daily thoughts are filled with the problems my current book, The Seventy Club, is causing me.  I've got about a hundred pages left to go on the first draft and it's a struggle because I can't find enough time right now to sit down every morning and get it finished. Writing is as much problem-solving as it is stringing sentences and paragraphs together, and when your manuscript gets up over 400 pages the problems become trickier to solve. Anyway, more on that subject later.

Right now I want to take a moment to talk about The Ghost Man.  As I said, I'm very happy that it is now available for people to read. What a weird concept. When I finished the manuscript and began looking around for a place to publish it, I read a great deal about how difficult it is for writers, especially fiction writers, to get their stuff into print. What was it I read? Something like one manuscript in 20,000 actually gets published? So right up front I owe a big THANK YOU to Ruth Thompson of Saga Books for not only liking the darned thing but agreeing to publish it for me. She has been absolutely wonderful in guiding me through the process of getting it into the light of day. Please be sure to take a look at Saga's website, and take a moment to contemplate how much of a challenge she has been facing as she has continued to work with her authors and suppliers. I'm not likely to forget this kind of courage and strength. Ruth, my hat's off to you.

I hope you have a chance to read The Ghost Man, and don't hesitate to send me your feedback.