I'm An Amazon (Kindle) All-Star!

Based on my sale of books (thanks to you all!), I have been selected  Kindle all-star and awarded a cash prize of $1000.  Here is the email I received from Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) where all ebooks get published:

Congratulations! You have qualified for a KDP Select All-Star bonus for the month of February.

To further reward the books that are most popular with our customers, we recently introduced KDP Select All-Star bonuses, based on what KDP Select (KDPS) titles and authors are being read the most.

The following author qualified for a bonus:

John Ellsworth |  $1,000

We determine ‘most-read’ rankings by combining books sold plus qualified borrows from Kindle Unlimited (KU) and the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL) during the month on Amazon.com. Calculations include only titles that are enrolled in KDP Select during the period.

The payment schedule and payment method is the same as your other sales from KDP. You will receive your bonus approximately sixty (60) days following the end of the calendar month during which applicable sales occur.

For more information on KDP Select All-Star bonuses, please go here:  https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A2X66QXB12WV2

Best regards,

The Kindle Direct Publishing Team

Thanks to all you readers. I love each and every one of you and am so grateful to you for reading my books. I will keep working hard at it in order to please you and provide you with the kind of stories you like. (all the gang says hello too: Thaddeus, Katy, Turquoise, Henry, Christine, Sarai, and all the rest).

Look Out World: Here Comes Christine Susmann!

Christine Susmann, the brainy, ex-army paralegal, is getting her own series! That's right, I am writing the first book now, starring Christine as a new law school grad interested in public policy law. Her cases will be exciting and they will deal with matters of public importance.

This is the series my agent, Jane Dystel, will sell for me when I have the first book ready. So...say a little prayer for yours truly and wish me well.

Hello, Christine, my name is John. Let's talk....

Learning to Write - What I Did, Example 1

When I was just out of college I was very taken with two writers: J.D. Salinger and John Updike. I read Salinger's stuff and I saw that it "was mostly dialogue," as I saw it way back when. I looked at Updike's work and I felt like I was in the presence of an angel describing the world in ways I had never seen it before. My first inclination, as maybe it is with all young writers, was to imitate what I was seeing.

So...I opened [i]Nine Stories[/i] to page one and began...typing Salinger's story on my typewriter. I wanted to see how it felt to write those sentences. I wanted to see how the meter and rhythm of the sentences changed so the reader wouldn't become bored.

And moved on. Many new writers back then, when I was learning, were Hemingway imitators. Everything was a simple sentence. Until it wasn't. Gerund phrases, said Hemingway's critics--you must learn to use gerund phrases if you are ever going to describe action that's happening right before the reader's eyes. So...I was teaching English to high school students then...I learned what the heck a gerund phrase was. Then I went looking for the animal of that name in Hemingway's writing. I tried it out. I wrote a hunting story and it ran on for about a half page in one place, building gerund phrase upon gerund phrase until the protagonist must have been winded and exhausted by all the movement.

Moving forward. I wrote out John Irving's first chapter to Garp. This was after I studied under John at Goddard College in 1976 in Vermont. He was teaching that summer session in their low-residency MFA program and I showed up ready to earn an MFA, but instead was told that writing couldn't be taught, it had to be learned. Oh well.

Writing out other writer's words.

What methods or techniques have you used to improve your craft?

The New York Times Bestseller: a Novel

Know what I like? I like writing. I especially like writing when I'm 68,000 words into an 80,000 word novel. Which is where I am with the NYT Bestseller. At this stage, a novel either takes on a life of its own and becomes more than the writer knew it could be, or it becomes stale. I'm lucky, because this book has suddenly begun to run away with itself. Sub-plots that I never imagined, going in, are rising to the surface and torquing the story. It's going to be a fun read, worth every penny of $2.99.

If you'd like to sample the first two chapters of this cool book, free, go here: http://johnellsworthbooks.com/free-chapter/

Excuse me now while I get back to it. The book should hit the shelves "Kindle Market" in about thirty days--edits and all that once I've done my part.

Signed With Literary Agent Today!

When I first published 13 months ago I was very upset with New York. I had just queried 37 agents one snowy afternoon about my new novel, The Defendants. Not one of them responded. So I looked around and stumbled across KDP. At last, I thought, no one could stand in my way of getting published. But I was still angry at NY. Not really, but I didn't understand the numbers then: how many unsolicited mss they get and must deal with. I was one fish out of many that day, I'm sure. Still, hard not to take personally.

Over the next year I wrote and published six more books in the series. They've all gotten good reviews and they've all gotten some not-so-good reviews. In that year I sold over 41,000 books and gave away 177,000, thanks to Bookbub.

But I wanted more: I wanted to see how far I could actually go with my books. I’m one of these people who likes to try stuff, stir things up, see what happens.

So I queried again. But this time, to only one agent, Dystel and Goderich. Jane Dystel of Dystel and Goderich asked for a chapter, read it, and said she'd be glad to represent me.

Done deal, I signed. (Keeping in mind I'm a lawyer and I knew a little bit about contracts, which the agent was only too happy to change around until I was cool with it. Which was a relief.)

The agency rep is for a new series, none of which is written except for that first chapter of the first book, the one I sent Jane. It does not cover my existing or hereafter Thaddeus Murfee series, the books that pay the rent.

Which is kind of cool, because someone has actually accepted me on the basis of yet-unwritten work. I like that vote of confidence.

We'll see where this goes. But the cool thing is, I'm in again. I'm writing with renewed interest and energy. As soon as I put down 35K more words on Thaddeus 8, I can start the new series. It's a spinoff, one of the characters from the Thaddeus books that many readers have said they'd like to see more. A woman. An Iraq war veteran and a paralegal. Tough as nails, ready to take on a new assignment. I know this woman already. But now I'm going to get to know her a lot better.

How I Decide What Language and Scenarios Are OK for My Books

In my own experience as a fairly newly published novelist, readers have written to me objecting to this or that. Some left reviews in which they objected to this or that. Rather than being offended or feeling put-upon, I have usually found myself looking deeper into my use of certain language and found that, in my writing, I had actually violated some of my own personal beliefs or values for the sake of my “art,” that sensibility that anything goes, wordwise and expression-wise, as long as it’s true to the character.

Um, no. I have learned other ways of expressing those same things so that certain group of readers–and I–would no longer be offended by those conventional expressions.

Then there was the reader who wrote and said if my MC killed one more person she was going to quit reading me. So, the next time I came to one of those inevitable killing moments, her words came back to me, I paused on that path, and found myself thinking, “How else could I, the writer, approach this storyline and avoid killing?” After all, to kill again was predictable and maybe okay, given the nastiness of the target. But, horror of horrors, it was trite and it was predictable. So what actually happened was a wholly different twist to the storyline suddenly presented itself and I headed in that new, and, it turns out, really cool direction. (Later MC does kill again in a totally different scenario and book, but hey, sometimes…). So that’s been my experience with reader feedback, in the main. If you look through my novels you’ll find that, since I’ve honored my own sensibilities, there are no longer F-bombs or expressions of a higher power’s name “in vain,” as it were. Not because I felt threatened by the objecting reader but because my own deep-down sensibility was thus honored and my automatic writing reviewed and changed.

OTOH, would I change an expression I found okay, or a scenario I found okay, just because some group or other was offended? Never. The predicate being, “I found okay.”

What I’m relating here is in no way meant to be didactic; rather, it’s a simple recounting of some of my own experiences as a writer, FWIW.

First Chapter of New Book - Read Free Here!

The New York Times Bestseller

is one-fourth finished and the first chapter, second draft, may be read here. This is an exciting book, all about a skyjacking. When it happens, Thaddeus is sitting on the plane with Christine Susmann on one side and Angelina Sosa on the other. Angelina is a brand new journalism grad looking to make her mark. She decides that the skyjacking is her chance to write a Pulitzer Prize winning story for her paper, the Chicago Tribune, and maybe even writer a New York Times bestseller book. The plane is diverted and lands in Moscow. Christine is taken off the plane by Russian intelligence officers, who believe she is actually a spy. Thaddeus follows her and Angelina darts off with them in pursuit of her story.

That's about all I'm going to reveal right now. Please read the first chapter and enjoy!