My award-winning true crime title,
Luggage By Kroger, has been available on Kindle since February, and I have been so amazed with the response that I knew I had to join this web site to learn more. I’m really curious about the ways Kindle fans find new books. I’ve had no Kindle-specific marketing, but it’s been selling at a clip of about one-per-day the last couple of months. So, thanks, Kindle readers! I am eager for feedback on exactly how that happens.
Meanwhile, about the book: Since publication in December of 2008,
Luggage By Kroger has won the silver medal in true crime from the 2009 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPYs), the bronze medal in true crime from the 2008
ForeWord Magazine Book-of-the-Year Awards and been named runner-up in true crime in the 2009 National Indie Excellence Awards. It also was named a finalist for Book-of-the-Year in the
ForeWord contest and was a runner-up in general nonfiction at the 2009 New York Book Festival.
I employed contests as the backbone of my marketing program, and it appears to be paying off. I view the Kindle as my alternative to a mass market paperback option, and hope I have tapped into the wave of the future with that strategy.
So, what’s all the fuss? Well, the basic story of
Luggage By Kroger is well-traveled and widely publicized in the last 30 years. It’s been twice-optioned for movie treatment, with one production actually resulting in a movie. It’s been recounted in newspapers and magazines, been featured on
48 Hours and
American Justice and even got me on Oprah, Regis and Sallie Jesse Raphael back in the late 1980s as the poster boy for true-life fatal attractions. But I had never had time to sit down and write my personal account until the last couple of years.
The story relives my relationship in 1979-80 with a notorious female Houston attorney who has been investigated in several Texas murder cases over the years. When we met, I was the courts reporter for the old
Houston Post newspaper and she was the reigning femme fatale defense lawyer at the courthouse, already under investigation for the murder earlier that year of a former boyfriend she had claimed as a common-law husband. Although I knew her reputation, my opportunity with her occurred at a vulnerable time for me. Estranged from my second wife, I was sleeping on a buddy’s couch, driving a $200 car and carrying my dirty clothes in a paper grocery sack, thus my title:
Luggage By Kroger. I was looking for some excitement and mystery when she popped up to provide it. But you can’t have a butterfly without a cocoon, and that’s why my book is a memoir of self-discovery as much as a slash-and-burn true crime thriller. With the earlier still-unsolved murder as a backdrop, my book follows our relationship through the January, 1980 attempt on my life and the two trials required later that year to convict her. It also covers the troubled relationship with my second wife and our kids and offers a surprise ending that most reviewers have found satisfying.
Following the 1987 success of the movie
Fatal Attraction,
People magazine included my story in an edition on true-life fatal attractions, and that spawned a tour of the talk shows as well as recreation of the story in an ABC-TV anthology show called
Crimes of Passion hosted by James Woods. A 1989 movie deal failed to produce a film. By 1999, however, she was practicing law again in Dallas and under investigation for a murder there that ultimately sent her husband to prison for life. New publicity on my role in her troubled past triggered another movie option in 2004 that saw Melanie Griffith and Esai Morales portraying characters based on us. It was a good payday for me, even though CBS rejected the final result. It never aired in the US, but friends have told me they see copies of an Australian version on e-Bay from time-to-time under the title
Fatal Seduction. I’ve never seen it. But all the interest in my story and the growing popularity of the so-called “Nobody Memoir” stimulated me to start dabbling with a written version, and
Luggage By Kroger is the result.
Now, when people ask me to tell the story again, I can tell them to “Look it up.” And, if you want more details, you know where to find them. I also have an author’s page with more personal background and a blog at Amazon linked to the paperback version. Amazon says it hasn’t linked those to the Kindle book pages yet, and I don’t know why.
Currently, I am a senior writer for a daily newsletter that covers the oil and gas industry. So,
Luggage By Kroger is my sideline, and I am having fun sharing the story. If you are a fan of femme fatale-driven true crime, legal procedurals or memoirs, you should check it out. And, if you are one of the Kindle readers who already has added it to your digital library, I’d like to learn how you stumbled across it before I got here.
Thanks for your time.
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