July 2024 – Page 2 – Ruff Drafts

A Chocolate is Announced (Bean to Bar Mysteries)
by Amber Royer

About A Chocolate is Announced

A Chocolate is Announced (Bean to Bar Mysteries)
Cozy Mystery
7th in Series
Setting – Texas
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Golden Tip Press (June 25, 2024)
Print length ‏ : ‎ 277 pages
Digital ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0CZMXM3BN

Felicity Koerber is finally getting her life together. She has a fiancé, her bean to bar chocolate shop on Galveston’s historic Strand has become a gathering spot for the community, and she is ready to embrace whatever the future holds. She’s ready for another launch party – despite the disaster at her grand opening, when she’d first gotten involved with solving a murder. And this time she’s embracing her status as a sleuth. She’s hosting a murder mystery weekend to celebrate the new Mystery Flavor line of craft chocolate bars. She’s held a contest to choose the attendees, who will all stay at her aunt’s flip hotel and enjoy the island. It’s all supposed to be perfectly random – only, Felicity starts to uncover connections between her guests. When one of them winds up murdered, Felicity has to keep her aunt from becoming the main suspect.

The killer is very clearly calling Felicity out, leaving clues that mean little to anyone other than her. But that doesn’t narrow down the suspect pool. Her guests are there because they love the true crime podcast she’s been featured on. And she can’t decide whether the killer wants her to catch them – or just wants to taunt her.

Meanwhile, Felicity is also playing host to her future in-laws and discovers that her fiancé’s sister, who is also a cop, is very competitive. Can Felicity hold her own and make a good impression, while keeping her business together and her aunt out of jail? And can Felicity solve it in time to protect the people she cares about from becoming additional victims?
Satchmo the retired police dog turned therapy dog returns to help her sniff out a few clues, and one of the guests brings along a ferret named Cheeseburger, who keeps showing up in the most unexpected places.

About Amber Royer

Amber Royer writes the CHOCOVERSE comic telenovela-style foodie-inspired space opera series, and the BEAN TO BAR MYSTERIES. She is also the author of STORY LIKE A JOURNALIST: A WORKBOOK FOR NOVELISTS, which boils down her writing knowledge into an actionable plan involving over 100 worksheets to build a comprehensive story plan for your novel. She blogs about creative writing technique and all things chocolate at www.amberroyer.com. She also teaches creative writing and is an author coach. If you are very nice to her, she might make you cupcakes. Chocolate cupcakes, of course.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW

Name: (If you have a pen name under which you write, please list both names)

Amber Royer

State and City or Country and City where you live

Princeton, Texas (at the edge of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex)

How long have you been published? What titles and/or series have you published and with which publisher? Have you self-published any titles? Please give details.

My sci-fi Chocoverse trilogy was published by Angry Robot Books. The first book, Free Chocolate, came out in 2018. I met a large number of real-world chocolate makers and chocolatiers while researching and marketing those books. After that, The Bean to Bar Mysteries, starring a craft chocolate maker, became a self-published passion project. I’m now on book 7 in the series.

Tell us a little bit about your books — if you write a series, any upcoming releases or your current work-in-progress. If you have an upcoming release, please specify the release date.

In The Bean to Bar Mysteries, Felicity Koerber comes home to Texas as a recent widow. She starts the next chapter in her life by opening a chocolate shop, which over the course of the series has become a gathering place for her friends and the community. Felicity finds herself drawn into solving the murder of an employee who dies at the grand opening for Greetings and Felicitations, and is subsequently called on to solve a number of cases surrounding her friends and her business. In the seventh book, A Chocolate is Announced, that released on June 25, Felicity is hosting a murder mystery weekend to celebrate her fiancé/business partner’s first forays into making his own chocolate bars, a line focused on unusual flavor combinations. Of course, something goes wrong at the party, and Felicity and her friends must solve a locked room murder.

I’m in the outlining stages of the next book in the series, Vanishing into the 100% Dark, which will be set around a chocolate festival in Tokyo. This will be the first time Felicity and friends will be traveling to a different country. (The third book in the series took place on a cruise ship, but they never did arrive at their destination port.) Felicity finds a body that then disappears from the area where a movie was being filmed across the way from the festival. She has to solve the murder to convince people it really happened. Vanishing will be coming out early October.

Describe your goals as a writer. What do you hope to achieve in the next few years? What are you planning to do to reach these goals?

I’m working on a second mystery series and a stand-alone sci fi novel. But in between projects, I’d like to write more short fiction. I’ve set a goal to submit a piece of short fiction to an anthology or magazine once a month.

What type of reader are you hoping to attract? Who do you believe would be most interested in reading your books?

For my current series, my ideal reader likes a little romance in with their mystery. Pretty much everything I write – sci-fi included — has romantic subplots. I hope to attract readers who like a bit of humor and banter mixed in with real emotional growth, and who enjoy getting invested in puzzling out a mystery. For my sci-fi, I think I appeal most to people who like something that will make them both laugh and think – with a side of clean romance, of course!

What advice would you give other authors or those still trying to get published?

Embrace your voice, which is what will allow you to bring something to the table that no one else can. I fought that for a long time, trying to write what I felt like I should be writing instead of what felt natural. I tend to do first person, bantery adventure puzzles, where characters may or may not make up words. It works for my voice – though I’ve written a number of very different protagonists. It wasn’t until I fully embraced this and let myself have fun writing that I came up with something that felt alive enough to be publishable.

What particular challenges and struggles did you face before first becoming published?

I don’t fare very well as a discovery writer. I just get to distracted by fun ideas and go hopping down the trail after random plot bunnies. So for years, I would get positive responses to my query letters, and many of the people I submitted to would devour my sample pages. But when they would ask for the full, I would quickly get a rejection. It wasn’t until someone kindly sat me down and explained that I didn’t fully understand the point of structure that I was able to realize my weakness and learn to outline. (I’m not knocking discovery writing. Just saying how I was shooting myself in the foot by being too stubborn to embrace all of the tools in my writer’s toolbox. Now that I have a better grasp on structure, I do sometimes discovery write, knowing that I can mine the first few scenes of a story for all the pieces I need to get to a logical ending.)

Do you belong to any writing groups? Which ones?

I’m a member of Sisters in Crime (both national and my local SiNC North Dallas. (We just launched our third anthology – Notorious in North Texas. I’ve had a short story in each one.) I am a member of the Cat Writers’ Association. I also lead the Saturday Night Write Craft Discussion Group. We meet on the 3^rd Saturday of the month via Zoom, and unless I’ve wrangled a guest speaker, I’m in charge of leading discussion on any number of writing craft-related topics. (I’ve been teaching creative writing through UT Arlington Continuing Education since 2008, and have worked with other organizations such as Writing Workshops Dallas and Writing Day Workshops, so I’ve had a lot of experience uncovering common writing questions and concerns.)

What are your hobbies and interests besides writing?

I love to travel. Some of my favorite places include Japan (where I will be visiting again soon, to visit friends and to solidify my take on the setting for Vanishing into the 100% Dark) and Hawaii, where we recently spent two weeks traipsing through every coffee and cacao farm that would have us. I also love to cook and entertain, or to be outside walking in the park or playing disc golf with my husband. We also have two cats, who are as challenging as they are adorable.

What do you like most and least about being an author? What is your toughest challenge?

I like how being an author allows me to connect with people. When someone tells me that something about my characters touched them, or echoed their own emotions about a situation, that makes my week – and fuels my desire to write then next book, even in those moments where it feels mostly like shouting into the darkness. I guess my biggest challenge is balancing writing time with everything that comes along with being a writer in the era of social media. Sometimes you have to just focus on getting the draft done before you can worry about building a platform for it.

What do you like about writing cozy mysteries?

Cozy mysteries are all about community. I’ve written in other genres, and they each have their appeal. But one of my favorite parts about the Bean to Bar Mysteries has been developing Felicity’s network of family and friends. Readers reach for cozies for the mystery puzzle, foremost, but they come back to a cozy series because they like spending time in the sleuth’s world, looking forward to cameos from favorite side characters (according to many of my reviewers, they just want more Ash, the blogger who went from Felicity’s arch nemesis to the guy chronicling her cases in his podcast) and the opportunity to learn something about the sleuth’s business or hobbies.

Can you share a short excerpt from your latest title or upcoming release?

Here’s a bit from A Chocolate is Announced:

Ash passes out the packets for everyone’s characters. I don’t get one. Everyone else does — including Aunt Naomi and Uncle Greg.

Once we’re dismissed from the table, Logan shows me his character sheet. He asks, “What am I supposed to do with this?”

I say, “You pretend to be whoever is on the page during the scheduled mystery-solving sessions. You can be yourself the rest of the time.”

Logan gives a dismissive wave. “I know that. I mean, what am I supposed to do with this character? I’ll feel stupid.”

Ash has given him Paisley Vain, an arrogant aristocrat with a heart full of greed. Which is so not Logan. Ash probably thinks this is hilarious, considering Logan is a tough-guy, ex-bodyguard, ex-cop, with a tortured, tragic past.

Logan doesn’t look amused, but I convince him to be a good sport. After all, this event is in his honor. It’s a testament to his personal growth over the course of the time that I’ve known him that he can at least attempt to be silly.

In character now, Ash gathers us in the lobby.

Several people sit on the sofa in front of the fireplace. Imogen lets out a startled, “Oof.” She reaches underneath herself and pulls out the sheathed knife she sat on. She places it on the coffee table, saying, “Oh my, who could have left that here?”

She looks conspiratorially at Ash, but he looks a bit confused.

It must be a prop knife, and maybe there had been some miscommunication on where it had been left. Or maybe the game’s killer or victim was already supposed to have it.

But that sheathed blade, easily a foot long, looks so ominous sitting on the table. It looks so real – like we’ve genuinely invited violence into the room.

Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about you or your books?

I grew up in Southeast Texas, a ferry ride away from Galveston. For me, Galveston will always be the place I think of when I think of the beach. I’ve highlighted something different about Galveston in each of the Bean to Bar Mysteries, and for A Chocolate is Announced, I’ve woven in my childhood memories of the beach itself.

Please list your social media links, website, blog, etc. and include some book cover graphics and author photos if possible.

Website: http://amberroyer.com

Blog: http://amberroyer.com/blog/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amberroyerauthor/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Amber.Royer.Author/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/AmberRoyer

Twitter: https://twitter.com/amber_royer

Tik-Tok: @amberroyerauthor

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Amber-Royer/e/B00PFV4CGM

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8144619.Amber_Royer

A Chocolate is Announced Trailer .mp4

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