QR Codes

You've seen them everywhere, in the supermarket, on the menu of your favorite restaurant, on posters in schools. They are the the square mash-up of lines and boxes that look like someone sneezed pixels. What are they? They are QR codes. Smart phone users, by which I mean your kids and grandkids, scan these things with the camera on their phones, which takes them directly to a website.

At this point you might be yawning and saying, "so what?" So what? Did you read the previous paragraph? The key words are "smart phone users" and "kids and grandkids." This is the demographic for whom tech is cool, who have disposable income. These are readers you want to reach. Say you're doing a booksigning. A few people stop, those that like the old dead tree products, but a lot of folks just whiz on by. A few might drop the word that they only read ebooks and you say, "I've got an ebook. Go to aitch tee tee pee colon slash slash dubya dubya dubya dot whatever dot com slash mywebpage slash mybooktitle." You better shout it because they are already gone. Another potential sale lost.

So how do you capture that ebook impulse buyer? You need a QR code. Put it on a poster next to your table or on your bookmarks or your postcards. Your young customer pulls out a smart phone. (It's a Pavlovian reflex whenever a QR code shows up in a young person's world.) Quick click and they are at your website buying your book. The phone will need a QR reader, of course, but that is a free app from the android or Apple store. Ask your grandkids if their phones have QR readers and they'll look at you like you've just asked them do they like Captain Crunch (which they're eating, while watching the video they scanned off the box.)

Have a smart phone with a QR reader? Try it now to get a free short story, Drop Dead Zone. Scanning the code will take you to a website with details about the story and how to purchase it. When you go to check out, enter the following coupon code: SW68X  (not case sensitive). No smart phone? No problem. Go to http://tinyurl.com/dropdeadzone.

Creating a QR code is easy.

• 1. Go to Google and type "url shortener" into the search window. Or go here: http://goo.gl/. 
• 2. Paste your long URL into the box that appears and click the "shorten" button. Your long URL will appear, followed by a short URL and, on the right, an active link labeled "Details." 
• 3. Click "Details." Voila!. Your QR code is generated. 
• 4. You can right click on it (PC) or control click (Mac) to open it in a separate window or download it. I like to open it in a new window because I want to do one more thing to it. 
• 5. After opening in the new window, notice that the URL looks something like this: http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=100x100&choe=UTF-8&chld=H%7C0&chl=http://goo.gl/BCR17.  I have highlighted the 100x100 because that governs the size of the code block. Change that to something like 400x400 (500x500 is max.) This will make it bigger. 
• 6. Now download it or capture it with a screen capture and paste it into your book display ad or bookmark or whatever. That's all it is.

You will also want to use the shortened URL on your ads. I prefer the URLs from tinyurl.com to Google's because I can add a meaningful tag to it, whereas Google just puts in a bunch of random characters. But that's just my preference.

The idea for using QR codes this way came from a discussion with my daughter-in-law. The middle school she teaches at has a policy of allowing any and all technology on campus. So teachers put these codes all over the school and in their lessons for kids to find school notices, supplementary material, and just interesting stuff. That's the way young people are learning now. If you want to reach that demographic with your stories, get on board with the technology.

If you've read this far, you're hip to technology and anxious to do more QR scanning, so here's another one for you. For a limited time, you can get an ebook of Pilikia Is My Business at half price. Scan this code and enter CZ43W at check out. You can also go to http://tinyurl.com/pilikia-business.

Mark Troy
Hawaiian-Eye Blog

More backlist stories released

Back when my first novel was coming out, I set out to write a series of short stories with the idea of building up buzz for the novel. It didn't work, in part, because too many magazines that published short stories were closing down and ezines had not yet found readers. So, even though many of my stories were published, they didn't enjoy much readership. This summer, I decided to republish those stories as ebooks with the hope of reaching a new audience. The eight stories in the Val Lyon series are being released singly. A collection of all eight will follow, probably by the end of this month. I have already promised copies of the collection to some of you and I assure you it is coming. In the meantime, here are the stories that have been released so far through Smashwords and Kindle.

The Big Dance With Death appeared in 2001 in FUTURES. It's my longest short story to date. The big dance, of course, is the NCAA basketball tournament. In this story, Val Lyon takes a job as assistant coach of her alma mater's basketball team in order to find out who is threatening two of the players and why. Along the way she discovers that the death of her predecessor as assistant coach was not an accident as originally thought, but was a murder.

Drop Dead Zone was my first published mystery story. It features Val Lyon on her first skydive. Drop Dead Zone appeared in Mystery Buff Magazine in 1998 and was nominated for a Derringer Award by the Short Mystery Fiction Society. The title of this story came about before the story. A group of us were drinking beer following my first skydive when one of the jumpers, now my daughter-in-law, said I needed to write a story about it. We came up with the title immediately. Drop Zone from where skydivers jump; Dead Zone from the Stephen King story; and Drop Dead from what we all wish for people who annoy us. It took a lot longer to write the story because I wanted the murder to happen in the air, or at least result from something that happened in the air. I also had the idea that I did not want the murder to result from tampering with the parachute as I thought that was probably a cliche'd method. As a result, I spent a lot time trying to figure out the murder. Note: Tampering with equipment would not have been a cliche' because Drop Dead Zone, to the best of my knowledge, was only the second skydiving murder mystery. Two more have been published since. Mystery Buff Magazine debuted in January 1998. Drop Dead Zone appeared in the February issue. The March issue was printed but never got into the mail and no more issues were printed. See what I mean about markets shutting down?

Kill Leader is a story about beach volleyball. Paula Evangelista—Vengelista—is at the top of her game on the beach volleyball circuit. Knocking down kill after kill, she is trying to regain her title of kill leader. But someone wants to put an end to her streak and maybe an end to her life. It is up to Val Lyon to find out who wants to kill the kill leader and prevent it from happening or end up as another kill herself. The title for this story came first. I was at a Texas A&M volleyball game with my wife and, while reading the program, saw that one of the players led the conference in kills. I thought, "She's the kill leader." How could a mystery writer NOT write a story with that title? Kill Leader appeared in the inaugural issue of Plots With Guns, a great hard-boiled ezine, which continues to this day. The inaugural issue didn't have many readers, but Kill Leader has had some pretty good success with Sniplits as an audio book and as part of an anthology, Killer Fiction.

The cover art for these stories were drawn by David Shackelford of Austin, Texas. My favorite so far is the Kill Leader cover. Next up is Horns and after that will be Teed Off. Wait until you see those covers.

Mark Troy
Hawaiian Eye Blog

My Inspiration

A few days ago, Ben Small posted about some of his sources of inspiration. I thought that was a great post and decided to follow up with some of my own. thanks, Ben, for starting the thread.

Looking over my stories, I see that a lot of ideas and plot points originated in the pages of Sports Illustrated. My first published story was inspired by an article in one of the SI Swimsuit editions. There are words in the SI Swimsuit edition? The truth is there are fewer and fewer, and, yes, I am complaining. There was a time when the Swimsuit had fewer photos and more articles about outstanding women athletes and some of the lesser known women's sports. An article on the women's open ocean canoe race from Molokai to Oahu over 40 miles of treacherous ocean inspired my story, "Wahine O Ka Hoe" (Women of the Paddle.) Another SI article that inspired a story was titled, "Homewreckers," and was about the women of Purdue beating the women of Tennessee on their home court. An article about rodeo bulls being athletes and another one about the experience of being a rodeo clown inspired my latest story, "Horns" on The Thrilling Detective website.

Inspiration can come from a variety of sources. One of my favorite stories came about because of a television commercial.

The story is "Drop Dead Zone" published in 1998 in Mystery Buff Magazine. (Mystery Buff lasted only two issues. DDZ was in the second issue, but I don't believe it caused MB's demise.) It tells the story of a murder during a skydive. We were all sitting around drinking beer and eating pizza following my first jump when the woman who is now my daughter-in-law said I had to write it up in a story. We came up with the title on the spot, a combination of drop zone, drop dead, and Stephen King's "Dead Zone."

The title was the easy part. Figuring out a death in a skydive was a lot harder. At this point you're probably saying, "Whoa, dying in a skydive is easy. Not dying is the hard part." Well, yes and no. Falling out of the sky can kill you, but skydiving is a sport that is all about safety. All the procedures and equipment are designed to get the jumper safely on the ground. Skydivers themselves are fanatical about following procedures. So, killing someone in a skydive posed a real problem. I had two other conditions: First, i was thinking about it as a locked-room type of murder where the murder occurs in a limited space and the killer can't get away; Second, it had to look like an accident.

The second condition caused me real problems. I could have the killer tamper with the victim's parachute so it wouldn't open properly, but as I already mentioned, skydivers are fanatical about their equipment. If you tamper with a skydiver's gear, the chances are very good the tampering will be discovered before the jump and, instead of a corpse, you'll have a very angry skydiver. Rather than messing with the skydiver's gear, I had to mess with his behavior, i.e. get him out of his safety routine.

The inspiration occurred during a broadcast of a Super Bowl commercial. You may remember it. It's a Mountain Dew ad called "Duet" in which a boy and a girl on snowboards come flying off a mountain and meet in mid-air. Both have parachutes on their backs and one has a Mountain Dew. They both grab the Dew and circle in the air until the girl pulls the boy's ripcord and off he goes. As soon as I saw that, I had my story. Read the story on my website and see if you can tell how the commercial inspired it.

So those are some of my inspirations, what are yours?

Here's a deal for you. I can't find the Mountain Dew ad on the net. The first person who sends me a link to it will get a copy of "Pilikia Is My Business." Don't forget to send me your snail mail address. For another chance at "Pilikia," see the contest on my other blog, Hawaiian Eye.

Mark Troy
metroy@mac.com
http://hawaiian-eye.blogspot.com
http://www.marktroy.net