It’s been quite the ride for The Invisible Hand, my crime novel set in the North Dakota oil boom, but I finally have some good news. I just dropped a publishing contract with New Pulp Press into the mail. The Invisible Hand should release some time in late 2015, although that’s not set in stone.

New Pulp Press is an incredible indie outfit publishing some of the best crime fiction today. Hell, it even publishes Les Edgerton’s The Bitch, one of my all-time favorite novels, among others. For me, it’s a best-case scenario.

I feel excited, and more than a little vindicated, about this development. Last November, I participated in the pilot program of Kindle Scout. Despite a fat dose of press about that campaign (I get more e-mails about it than anything else I’ve done), I did not win a contract with Amazon’s new Kindle Press. It’s not even that Amazon was my first choice. It wasn’t. It’s that I thought this novel had legs, and I needed to find the right people who could see the same. And it turned out that wasn’t the casual readership of Kindle Scout.

No, it was the crew at New Pulp Press. They’re more in tune with this style of batshit crazy story. If there’s a lesson in that, it’s that, writers, whether something is a success or a failure often depends on whether you’ve reached the right reader, not on the quality of work itself. It’s why vertical review outlets, such as Spinetingler or CrimeSpree, are going to “get” a piece of crime fiction better than the horizontal Wild West of Goodreads.

Hot damn. I hope you’ll pick this one up when it launches.

P.S. The cover here is only tentative. It’s a mock-up I used during the Kindle Scout campaign.