In the Texas panhandle, a stagecoach full of passengers rolls southward over lonely, dangerous trails. A group of buffalo hunters led by a brutal, ruthless killer stalks one of the last of the great herds of the shaggy beasts. And a Comanche war party under the command of the legendary chief Quanah sets out to drive the white invaders from their lands.
These three groups will come together in a frenzy of fire, blood, and death in TEXAS BUSHWHACK, the latest Western from bestselling author James Reasoner. Full of violent action and compelling characters, this is a novel sure to please readers of traditional Western tales.
This Western novel is available now on Amazon. Here's a brief excerpt from the book:
His breath caught in his throat as he saw the animals covering the plains on either side of the creek, and he felt a surge of excitement. He had found the herd!
Compared to some of the massive herds he had seen in Kansas, this was a small one. His experienced eyes scanned the scene and set the number somewhere between thirty-five hundred and five thousand. But the herd would furnish a good kill, especially for this time and this place.
As he sat his horse and looked down across the valley at the grazing animals, he almost felt sorry for them. They had been driven down here by the gun, and now they were running out of room. The herds would continue to drift south, but Trace doubted that many of them would ever reach Mexico, not that they would be safe even if they did.
When the buffalo were gone, that would be the end of them, the end of a lot of things.
More books coming soon!
4 comments:
Looks good. On the Fictionmags list, someone was asking how well western fiction was selling these days, in comparison to crime fiction or fantastic fiction as wholes...is anyone reliably coming up with figures in public (even given how bestsellers will tend to be removed from the counts of what publishers want to see as Category Books)?
Does a big success of the likes of YELLOWSTONE or some of the last decade's relevant films ever move the needles too much for the fiction?
Traditionally published Westerns don't sell well with the exception of the William W. Johnstone books, which sell very well indeed. Books from small press/indie publishers such as Wolfpack and Dusty Saddle don't put up the sheer numbers that the Johnstones do, but they generate decent money, much like the mid-list Western market of old where a reasonably prolific writer could make a good living by selling a couple of books to Doubleday and two or three more to various paperback houses each year. And there are some purely self-published Western writers who appear to be doing well, but I have no idea how much they're actually making. Overall, Westerns started a downward spiral in the Nineties, bounced back a little a few times, and gradually settled into a market that's maybe a fourth as big as it was twenty years ago. The same is true of other genres. Everybody's numbers are down.
I don't think YELLOWSTONE has affected the sales of Western novels at all. When LONESOME DOVE came out, people would say to me, "Oh, LONESOME DOVE is so successful it must be helping all Western novels." No. LONESOME DOVE helped Larry McMurtry, that's about it. I suspect the same is true of YELLOWSTONE.
The "SF Writers in Western fiction mags" document that a number of us put together in the early days of the WesternPulps list is still in the files there. It hasn't been updated since 2005, but it might be of interest to the Fictionmags group. I'm still a member over there and could resurface to share it with them if you think they'd like to see it, or you can get it and send it to them if you'd like.
Thanks! A discussion of John Shirley's westerns briefly revived the sf/western crossover mentions, and one member was wondering about the sales of western novels generally (and I realized I hadn't seen much about the sales figures in PW or any other likely source I see often, other than the vaguest of generalities). Resurfacing in FM would be a benefit to the list, if you choose to. I should go look at that 2005 document (which might also have been ported over before). Yeah, the collapse of book markets (outside of Amazon, which wants to sell Amazon products and higher price-point merch), despite B&N and BAM doing OKish (after the quarantines relaxed) and some indy stores thriving, hasn't helped, and the big chains being among the last newsstands these years hasn't helped the magazine trade even more.
Glad you're getting work out there sustainably, but the cutback in sales being so drastic is more than sobering.
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