We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Mark Jones. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Mark below.
Mark, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.
I retired early after a long career in higher education, and I assumed I would need to work another job for 4-5 more years. Fortunately, we were able to work things out, and I did not have to do so. I wanted to write, or at least try it, but moving from public finance to writing was not something I had foreseen becoming successful.
I began taking classes, joining writing groups, attending conferences, etc. My interests were in mystery and suspense, so I started on a story of a detective pulled into a whirlpool of mistrust after discovering a dismembered body in a park. A portion of this manuscript won first place in a statewide writers’ contest, and a few months later, I received a contract offer from the Wild Rose Press for multiple books in this series–Peculiar Activities was published in October 2021, and Shadowed Souls was released on Halloween 2022.
A risk that worked out well.
Mark, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I retired in 2017 after thirty-three years working in higher education finance. The Wild Rose Press released Peculiar Activities on October 6, 2021. This is the first book in the Detective Henry Ike Pierce series. This manuscript won first place in the mystery category of the 2019 Oklahoma Writers Federation annual contest. I signed a contract for the second in this series called Shadowed Souls, with a release date of Halloween 2022. I am one of thirteen authors bringing together thirteen mystery/suspense/horror stories for a Friday the 13th series; one released on May 13, 2022, and my short story is A Gentleman from the Darkness. January 13, 2023, will see the next release in the series, and my story is Hell is Empty.
I grew up in Duncan, Oklahoma, then attended the University of Oklahoma, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science and public administration.
My wife and I have three grown children, our first grandson, and we celebrated our forty-first anniversary in November 2022.
Mystery/suspense/international intrigue novels are my favorite reads, and I’ve found a niche with medieval murder mysteries. It’s interesting to see the lifestyles from other eras and how crimes were solved.
My favorite music includes Elvis, Chicago, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Boz Scaggs (among many others).
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
I’ve gotten to know a whole new set of friends in the publishing/marketing/public relations/writing industry. It’s been awesome at the later stages of life to find so many new things to do.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
A work in progress for sure. Building an audience is slow, sometimes painful, and frustrating, but it will show rewards. Learning how in a different industry is the first step, and becoming aware of all the various social media sites is another huge step–which ones may be best for you to learn, how to get audience responses and differences between one platform to another, etc. I’m getting there!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://mejbooksllc.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/markjones_author/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mejbooksllc/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mejbooksllc/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/mejbooksllc
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_cnVNuZyz6DUJYOZkbDFBw
- Other: LinkTree https://linktr.ee/mejbooksllc
Image Credits
Images are my personal photos or those loaded from image sites for personal use.