I’m pleased to welcome back onto the blog, author Elizabeth Maria Naranjo. I interviewed Elizabeth way back in October 2022 as part of her The House On Linden Way Book Tour (read it HERE) and now she is back with a new YA series – Sweet Dreams – and the first book, Murder By Milkshake. Instead of another interview though, Elizabeth has written us a guest post about the joy of bite-sized books… take it away, Elizabeth 😊
Short And Sweet:The Joy Of Bite-Sized Books
When I first envisioned writing a series of YA cozy mysteries, one of the things I knew for sure was I wanted the books to be short and sweet. Ever since the Harry Potter series debuted in the nineties, books for children have mushroomed in size. That’s not a bad thing! I love a hefty read as much as any dedicated book lover. But it’s also nice to have a choice between a sprawling tome and something a bit slimmer and more easily digestible. It is the publishing industry’s prescriptive standards for minimum word counts, a rule driven by profit margins, that has robbed us of the joy of bite-size books.
For example, growing up I could choose between 1,000 pages of Stephen King or 180 pages of Sweet Valley High, and they both fully qualified as books to me. Not every story needs to be 400 pages long. In the eighties and nineties we had Francine Pascal (Sweet Valley High), Ann M. Martin (The Baby-Sitters Club), and R.L. Stine (Fear Street) churning out books in series we adored. These were slender mass market paperbacks, often 200 pages or fewer, and you could read them in a day. They were books that didn’t make you work too hard, guilty pleasures you read over and over and loved with all your heart despite (or because of) their over-the-top and formulaic plots. There are plenty of series like these for middle grade readers (Goosebumps! Cupcake Diaries!), but teenagers looking for a bookish escape that doesn’t require them to commit to a 60,000-word novel (versus the average 35,000 words that made up a Sweet Valley High book) have a harder time, and usually the shorter stories available to them are limited to romance.
So I vowed to keep my cozy mysteries between 35,000 and 45,000 words. And since there is no place in traditional publishing for YA books of that length, I decided to self-publish. Which also meant I could choose my own trim size. Of course I picked the mass market paperback size! After all, there’s just nothing like the joy of a bite-size book.
Book Summary : Murder By Milkshake
Life is sweet for high school senior and ice cream slinger Genevieve Winterland. Her father owns Sweet Dreams Ice Cream Parlour, the cutest confectionery shop in their little town of Pinewood, Arizona. Genevieve loves her job, but when her father hires a broody newcomer with a dark past to provide extra security on her closing shifts, Genevieve bristles. Is this part of her father’s plan to send her away to college, when all she wants is to stay in Pinewood and run the family business?
Meanwhile, everyone’s favorite new teacher at Pinewood High, Miss Love, is receiving death threats, and then she goes missing. Genevieve suspects the crabby substitute, Ms. Pierce, who seems murderous about being passed over for the position. Or is the culprit Mr. Garcia, the longtime instructor who Miss Love replaced after he was fired for assaulting a student? Just when Genevieve thinks she knows the answer, she stumbles across the dead body of another missing faculty member.
Can Genevieve find the killer terrorizing the teachers in her beloved hometown—before someone else gets iced?
Genre: Cozy Mystery
ASIN : B0D94VG7L8
- Publication date : July 15, 2024
- Print length : 220 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #897,102 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
Murder by Milkshake is available in print and as an ebook at Amazon. You can add it to your GoodReads reading list as well.
About the Author, Elizabeth Maria Naranjo:
Elizabeth Maria Naranjo is the author of The Fourth Wall, The House on Linden Way, and What Was Never There. Her stories and essays have been widely published and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best American Essays, and Best of the Net, and her short story, “Windows,” was selected for Best Microfiction 2023. She lives in Tempe, Arizona, with her husband and two children.
#murderbymilkshakenaranjo
Elizabeth and Murder by Milkshake can be found online:
https://www.elizabethmarianaranjo.com
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8124819.Elizabeth_Maria_Naranjo
MURDER BY MILKSHAKE BOOK TOUR DATES
All photographs have been published with the kind permission of Elizabeth Maria Naranjo. Thanks to Elizabeth also for her guest post.
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