I had been writing short stories and essays and had even been successful selling one of them when I decided to write a suspense novel. I had this idea just rolling through my head, and without an outline or any characters developed on the page, I started writing.
It took me about a year to finish that first draft, and it wasn’t very good. I got help from and editor to rewrite and polish. I thought it was good enough to submit to agents, but they disagreed. This was in the days when you actually had to mail in your submissions in these packets, and there I would go, headed to the post office with these bundles of manilla envelopes in my hand. The responses started coming back within a week. Thanks, but no thanks, they said.
I kept submitting to every agent I thought might be willing to take a look. Eventually I had enough rejection slips I could have papered my bathroom wall with them. Then I gave up. Self-publishing was becoming a more viable option at that point, though the thought was depressing. Only failed writers self-publish! That was my mindset when I uploaded my book to Book Baby.
Nobody was buying it at first except family and friends and I had no knowledge or experience in book marketing. But I ordered some post cards with the book cover on the front, description on the back and started putting them everywhere—in coffee shops, bulletin boards, even car windshields in parking lots. I even ordered this huge magnet with the book cover on it, and very brief description and put it on the back of my car like a big tacky roving billboard. (You have no idea how many people stopped me in parking lots to ask where they could get the book). I did a book blog tour, and slowly, sales started picking up, not enormously, but in trickles.
Over the course of two years, I sold six thousand copies. I didn’t know if that was good or bad.
I just kept moving. Then one day I opened my email, and there it was. A letter from a publisher wanting to know if I wanted to republish through them. I had no idea at the time that publishers were watching the Amazon sales ranks, and were keeping track. They offered me a small advance, and I signed on, becoming an officially published author, though I had been all along and I didn’t know it. My writing career has waxed and waned and my journey wasn’t over just because I had been signed. I was dumped as easily as they had picked me up. It’s the business and you just have to keep moving, find another crack in the system and slip through.
My advice to writers—keep moving. Keep loving writing, don’t let anyone stop you or discourage you. Don’t ever give up. Humble yourself. And edit your work or get someone to do it for you. And when you think you’re done editing, you’re not. I found mistakes in my manuscript after three edits and a professional run-through.
Murder in the Neighborhood—the story of the first mass shooting in the US Ellen J. Green
Genre: True Crime
Publisher: Thread Books, Hachette UK
Date of Publication: 4/28/2022
ISBN13: 9781909770706
Number of pages: 324
Word Count: 85k
Cover Artist: Thread books
Book Description:
On 6 September 1949, twenty-eight-year-old Howard Barton Unruh shot thirteen people in less than twelve minutes on his block in East Camden, New Jersey. The shocking true story of the first recorded mass shooting in America has never been told, until now.
The sky was cloudless that morning when twelve-year-old Raymond Havens left his home on River Road. His grandmother had sent him to get a haircut at the barbershop across the street—where he was about to witness his neighbor and friend Howard open fire on the customers inside.
Told through the eyes of young Raymond, who had visited Howard regularly to listen to his war stories, and the mother trying to piece together the disturbing inner workings of her son’s mind, Murder in the Neighborhood uncovers the chilling true story of Howard Unruh, the quiet loner who meticulously plotted his revenge on the neighbors who shunned him and became one of America’s first mass killers.
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Excerpt:
That September
morning started much like any other. Camden, New Jersey, the sparkling little
sister of Philadelphia, connected by the high arches of the Delaware River
Bridge, was waking up to heat nearing the mid-seventies—by nine o’clock the
humidity was sitting high above the city, waiting to descend.
Cramer Hill, a
small section of Camden, bound by the Delaware River to the west, the Pavonia
Train Yard to the east, State Street to the south and 36th Street to the
north—a grid of streets twenty-four blocks long, and about five or six blocks
wide contained within—was about to draw the focus of the world but nobody knew
it, not that morning at nine o’clock.
River Road cut a
swath through Cramer Hill where open-bay trucks rumbled through all day long,
overloaded with tomatoes headed for the Campbell’s soup factory a few miles
away. The clearly visible cargo was only held in place by wire mesh caging
along the sides. The loud engine sounds called to children to get out of the
street, to stand and watch, waiting for a tomato to break loose and fall into
their small hands. They were often rewarded when a bump in the road threw a few
of the greenish-red fruits into the street.
The smells of
the river wafting in, the sounds of the boats, the hint of tomatoes cooking at
Campbell’s, the smoke from the stacks of Eavenson and Sons soap factory a mile
away—it was all there. But mostly it was the shoemaker’s pungent aroma of
tannery oils, the lingering, savory fragrance from Latela’s Italian
luncheonette on the corner, the endless din of Engel’s bar across the street,
and the music that poured out of its doors after the sun went down that filled
every home.
Five businesses
shared one side of the small block—a cacophonic mix of a pharmacy, a
barbershop, a cobbler, a tailor and a café. The other side only had two: a
grocery and a bar. Most of the owners lived there, nestled in their small
apartments above their establishments. They all knew each other well enough on
that small stretch of River Road. Enough to pull a chair out onto the sidewalk
on summer nights for a chat. Enough to get a drink at Engel’s now and again.
Enough to keep an eye on things and on each other. But not one of them saw it
coming. Not the Pilarchiks, the Hoovers, the Hamiltons, the Zegrinos or the
Cohens. They’d safely shared that space together for years, but not one of them
was spared.
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Ellen J. Green is the Amazon
Charts bestselling author of the Ava Saunders novels (Absolution and Twist of
Faith) and The Book of James. She attended Temple University in Philadelphia,
where she earned her degrees in psychology, and has worked in the psychiatric
ward of a maximum-security correctional facility for fifteen years. She also
holds an MFA degree in creative writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University.
Born and raised in Upstate New York, Ms. Green now lives in southern New Jersey
with her two children.
Website https://ellenjgreen.com/
Twitter https://twitter.com/ejgreenbooks
Amazon Page https://amzn.to/3Hnikh2
Newsletter Sign Up https://ellenjgreen.com/newsletter/
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