One of the undocumented features of longevity in the publishing business is that you wind up with lots of orphaned offspring.

Well, truth to tell, we love our kids and hate to see them languish in unfinished stories. We want to know what happens as well, and we don’t know until we write the book(s). From the feedback we get from our readers, we know they’d like to know as well. And if we hear, just one more time: “How did I miss this?” or “Why haven’t I seen this before?” or “Where was this hiding?” …well, let’s just say, thanks to the e-book format, our backlists aren’t hiding any longer.

The three of us have been friends and each others’ editors for a very long time. We’ve also seen the worst and the best in New York publishing and we see the possibilities in the realm of e-books. In the spring of 2009, we got together (no small feat, as we literally live at opposite ends of the country) and came up with the idea of a combined “storefront” for e-books. We call ourselves Closed Circle because we aren’t a publishing company…it’s just the three of us and we’re writers; we want to write. And we want to get our books out into your hands.

We’re rescuing our kids as fast as we can get the rights back, scan and edit them for all the typos put in by New York, and give them a new look. (Getting the rights to use the original covers is an altogether different matter. Besides, all of us being visual artists in our own way, we kind of like the idea of presenting them our way, not New York’s way.

We’re also rewriting a lot of these books. Why? Well, for one thing, we learned a lot on the way, both about writing and the characters, and this is a chance to let the work reflect that. For another, in many cases, the books never reached their full potential because they were written for a market where length was a primary concern…or they were trimmed due to marketing ‘category’ limitations. Does this mean we’re going to use this opportunity to “pad” books already edited by professionals? By no means. We’re professionals as well, and we edit each other ruthlessly. It means that nuances we had to leave out because it didn’t fit ‘category’ can be put back in. It means that books that came out less than we liked because we had a deadline to meet when Real Life was cascading around us can finally be rewritten the way we would have liked to have written them in the first place. We’ll offer both the original versions and the reworked editions.

Best of all, we’re going to have new books and short stories. Books too “different” from the current best sellers for New York to want. And they’ll have an infinite shelf life. You’ll always know where to find them. The more you buy, the less tied to New York we become and the more new things we can offer you.

We hope you will support our efforts to bring out reasonably priced new work, fairly priced old works, and over all, to build a community of readers who can discuss with each other and with us, in what has long been called The Literature of Ideas. We each have interactive blogs: links below: and we’d love to hear from you and to get into those discussions.

How can you help us? Lots of ways.

Most obviously, you can buy our books from us and goodies from Cafe Press.

Also, pretty obviously, you can donate to keep us working. And caffeinated with a virtual latte. Or if you’ve downloaded one of the multitudinous pirated copies out there and wanted to clear the record without paying the full price of a download, here’s the answer. No need to give a reason, just designate to whom you’d like the donation to go.

Third, refuse to purchase our works from pirates, which pop up so fast it’s impossible to catch them all. Our copies are better, too.

Fourth, pass the word that we’re here and in business. Wear our tee shirts (soon to be available at Cafe Press). Pass out our flyers at cons. Join our blogs and discuss away. Join other online communities and talk about us. Mention us on your own blogs with links to the site.

We want to hear from you, and if you have questions about the books, trust us, you won’t be alone. On the interactive blogs, you can ask questions and we can answer you—and answer all those too shy to ask at the same time.

CJ’s Blog	Lynn’s Blog	Jane’s Blog
E-mail CJ	E-mail Lynn	E-mail Jane

Our post office box, should you need it:

Closed Circle

Box 18656

Spokane WA, 99228