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SPSFC3 Books I loved that didn’t make semis

Now that my team has announced our two semi-finalists, I want to send personal shout-outs to a few books I read as part of the judging process.

Both of the team’s semi-finalists were also my top two choices (Guess I must have good taste!) But my next up after those two was Stargun Messenger by Darby Harn. Man, this book! It was all about the author’s unique voice. It had some things that kept it out of the top two, but this was the book that most made me think, “This. Is. A. Writer!”

Likewise, The Sequence by Lucien Telford did have some reasons why it didn’t move on in the contest, but the author’s skill in talking about genetic engineering just gripped me viscerally. In my own Exile War series, the characters all kind of take the attitude of “Oh yes, the genetic engineers were very horrible, but that was all centuries ago.” In The Sequence, it’s not centuries ago. It’s right now, it’s in your face. And the horrors of what it really takes to turn the human genome into your own personal art project will blow your mind. I wish the whole world could read this book before we go too far down this path, so we could be warned of what lies hidden underneath the promises of genetic engineering.

Red Sky at Morning by J. Daniel Layfield was the most “Greenwood-esque” book I’ve read so far in the contest. I confess that this is somewhat vain praise, but I felt likeI could have written this book. It’s not like my sci fi though, it’s like my thrillers. As I was reading it, every single plot point made me nod approvingly. Layfield has a knack for thrillers.

I believe there are some takeaways for all SPSFC writers and future potential entrants. Truly, genuinely, I mean this, it’s a subjective process. Your book may not advance, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t find someone who loved it. Never walk away thinking “I didn’t make the semis, I must not be that good a writer.” Somewhere in the team that had your book, there’s probably one judge who really did enjoy it. These books didn’t get through, but I loved them.

The contest is designed so that you have to win the approval of a whole team to move on, and that’s as it should be. Most writers want to appeal to a broad audience. But everyone who’s ever drilled down deep into the Amazon subgenres knows that there’s also such a thing as a niche. I read some books that were very well attuned to my niche, and I’m grateful to the authors for entering them.

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Review of The Widow Spy by Martha Peterson

All of my book reviews contain Amazon affiliate links. That means if you make a purchase after clicking one of them, I may earn a small commission.

Like spy stories? Like Espionage? This book is the real thing. A non-fiction account of being a CIA Case Officer in Moscow at the height of the Cold War. Learn about dead drops, car tosses, avoiding surveillance, and more in this real first hand account of an American captured by the KGB in Moscow. I loved this book.

The author, Martha Peterson, was one of the first female Case Officers in the Central Intelligence Agency, stationed in Moscow during the Cold War. She helped run one of the most successful agents of the day until she was captured by the KGB.

The style is very straightforward, just a simple accounting of the facts. It’s easy to imagine, while reading it, that this is how the CIA teaches its officers to file reports.

If you have any interest at all in intelligence or the Cold War, I highly recommend The Widow Spy. Get yours here.

Do you like science fiction and space opera? Try my Exile War series! The first book, Onslaught, is free on all U.S. retailers, and only 99 cents if there’s anywhere it isn’t free. Prefer mysteries and thrillers? Check out my Sherman Iron Mysteries. The first book, Irons in the Fire, is free on all U.S. retailers and only 99 cents where it isn’t free.

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Deepest Cut Excerpt

Enjoy this free sample of my upcoming historical thriller The Deepest Cut

Prologue

It’s 1982.

The U. S. And the Soviet Union prosecute a silent struggle for ideological supremacy between Capitalism and Communism. To keep the horror of all out thermonuclear war at bay, the combatants do their dirtiest deeds under cover of darkness, with full deniability. Rather than soldiers and armies, the battles are fought by spies and special forces in clashes than never see the light of a newspaper article.

They call it the Cold War, but in trouble spots around the world it flares dangerously hot.

Chapter One

Marco Villarta was dead. Murdered. And Clara’s pistol had been used to kill him.

She stood wrapped in darkness on a street in Panama City’s Terraplén district. Every passing second upped the danger of being caught. At three-thirty in the morning, revelers coming home late from the clubs or workers whose shift started early could pass her at any moment, and the longer she stood there looking at Marco’s body, the greater the risk.

Even so, Clara Verona wasted precious seconds staring. Marco was dead. Her mission had probably died with him.

Night wrapped her in anonymity for now, but not for long. When the sun rose, it would reveal a woman with blonde hair in a ponytail, brown eyes, skin that tanned easily here in the tropics, and the lean physical fitness of someone who used her muscles for a living. Long ago, the Verona family earned their money on a fishing boat, and Clara had grown up helping her father with it.

Around her, the rain tapered off, leaving only sprinkles. The streets mumbled and groaned as they woke up. Her jeans and loose blouse felt damp against her skin; her hair clung to her scalp.

The warbling tone of sirens sounded in the distance, a sign that the time for staring was over. Clara scooped up the 9mm Makarov pistol lying beside her dead contact. It was the standard-issue sidearm of the Soviet military. She’d been issued it when she’d been given this assignment. Discovering it missing from her room was what had brought her out here tonight. She’d found her pistol, and found far worse besides.

The gun was obviously intended to be discovered with the dead body. No sense letting her enemies’ scheme go as planned, whoever the enemies were, so she recovered it. Clara flicked the safety on, then shoved the weapon mostly inside the pocket of her jeans.

Something had gone wrong—badly wrong. A simple assignment to infiltrate the Communist Revolutionary Front had just turned deadly, and Clara suspected she was going to need that pistol. Whoever had killed Marco couldn’t possibly have any good intentions toward her, or toward her mission.

In Terraplén the buzz of people grew as dawn drew inexorably nearer. Poverty was the norm here, and the foot traffic consisted largely of service industry workers coming home after the bars closed. Dock workers and laborers made up the rest. Ramshackle two-story buildings bordered tiny, cramped streets. Only a short distance from her location, unfortunately, sat the headquarters of the Guardia Nacionale, or National Guard, Panama’s combined military and police.

Which, of course, meant they were quick to respond to the scene of the murders. A police car pulled into the narrow street behind her, visible only because of its flashing sirens, cutting off one of the two choices of escape routes. A voice shouted “Usted queda detenida!” at her.

That was the Spanish version of “You’re under arrest,” but Clara paid it no mind. She took off sprinting like a bolt of lightning.

She rounded the corner in front of her just before a second police car could cut it off. She immediately took another turn and cornered again, but the sound of racing footsteps behind her would not go away. Sirens wailed all around her. Shouts of “Detenida!” echoed off the buildings.

Clara had been very well trained in police procedure, and she knew that the police would swamp the streets with officers until they caught the suspect. It was a standard practice worldwide.

Her training also included the fact that the National Guard of Panama, awash in a culture of corruption that sank down from the top, had far different ideas of due process than cops in America. Getting caught was not an option, so she ran faster. But the footfalls behind her got louder, accompanied by more shouts of “Usted queda detenida!”

She whipped around a corner. In the fraction of a second she was out of view of the cops, instead of sprinting on, she pressed her back to the wall of the building and waited. She drew her pistol back out of her pocket. Seconds later a green-uniformed officer rounded the edge of the structure looking for her, gun in hand.

He failed to check his six, and that was all the advantage Clara needed.  She put the Makarov to his temple.

He froze without her having to say anything, and the moonlight offered her a picture of her victim. Dark hair, dark eyes. Tall. Muscular. And men just looked good in uniforms, it was a fact of life. If she had met him in a bar back home, she might have let him buy her a drink.

But they were not in a bar, and they were not back home.

She said, “Call them off or die.”

Any American who heard her speak would have said the words came out in perfect Spanish. Of course, the cop was not American; Clara had no doubt that he could identify her Cuban accent. In a way that worked in her favor.

“There are a dozen of us chasing you,” he growled back. “You can’t kill us all, that gun doesn’t have enough bullets. Reinforcements will be here any second.”

“Not if you call them off. Your radio. Use it. Move slowly, so I don’t do anything to ruin this little moment we’re having here.”

Just because they weren’t in a bar back home didn’t mean she couldn’t have a little entertainment, after all.

In reality, though, Clara sincerely hoped she didn’t have to shoot this man. The situation was bad already. Killing a law enforcement officer would make it far worse.

Sadly, the cop seemed to know that too. “Go ahead. Shoot me. The gunshot will just draw the others faster.”

If you’ve got a gun, pull the trigger.

Her old instructor’s words whispered in her memory, but Clara decided not to follow his advice. Not this time.

Rendering a human being unconscious is far harder than most people think. Not long ago, a very good instructor taught her how to do this, but then advised her never to try it. To be done successfully, the key is to impart a sudden motion to the skull that causes the brain to jostle back and forth inside it.

She said, “If we meet again, try to remember that I didn’t kill you when I could have.”

Then Clara shifted her pistol to her left hand, whipped it out of the way and drove her right fist with maximum possible force into the man’s temple, just as they taught her at the Farm. The cop crumpled to the ground. She dashed away into the night.

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Review of The Sequence by Lucien Telford

The true power of The Sequence lies in the middle of the book. Between 20% and 65% I simply could not put it down. What has Kit discovered? Who is trying to acquire her discovery, and killing all these people to do it? I came to care about the characters — so much so that the author succeeded in creating powerful conflicting emotions in me about one of them. I can’t remember the last time a book gave me feelings this strongly. I cared about these people and this story.

I did not experience the ending in the same way I did the middle. Characters and tech crucial to the ending are only hinted at, or not introduced at all until the last act.

The Sequence presents a fascinating world, probably 100-ish years into the future. There are three protagonists/antagonists, who work both for and against each other in fascinating ways. One is a detective with the Hong Kong Police named Johnny Woo, a genuinely good character who I liked and wanted to see succeed. The second is a smuggler for the criminal underworld named Dallas, who does most of his smuggling at the helm of a stealth jet.

And then we have Kit McKee. Kit is a genetic engineer who has discovered something for which people are willing to kill, and kill in large numbers, and kill gruesomely. If you look in the dictionary under antihero, you will find Kit McKee.

Pros:

  • A compelling mystery, made more compelling by the horrifying revelations about genetic engineering uncovered by the Hong Kong police in the course of trying to solve it. The mystery pulled me in like a tractor beam.
  • A character who’s at the same time easy to relate to and easy to abhor. I rarely experience fascination and disgust in such equal measure for a fictional character.
  • A likable detective, very relatable. Every other character in this book is either evil or morally gray, but Johnny Woo is the bright, shining hero. I kept hoping for another Woo section of the book, so I could feel clean again.
  • A vividly imagined world, including a criminal underworld that feels terrifyingly real and a genetic engineering profession that I dearly wish was not as realistic as I think it probably is.

Cons:

  • Significant characters were barely hinted at, or not introduced at all, until the last quarter of the book.
  • Dallas’s connections make a lot of challenges fall too easily.
  • Moves very slow at the start.

My opinion: Very very strong writing, characterization and world building made weaker by the ending.

Before you read The Sequence, you should know that the means by which Kit and the other genetic engineers in this book advance their work are gruesome and horrifying. Many people may not have a strong enough stomach for it. I almost didn’t. Take that into account before you buy. Check it out at this link.

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Adult coloring books

I had never tried “Adult coloring books” until Annie Douglas Lima’s “Hide it in your Heart with Thankfulness.” I was surprised at how relaxing and de-stressing it was. The Bible verses are good ones, and I appreciated the journaling prompts. Click here to check it out.

 
The concept of adult coloring books was a surprise to me, but before she passed away my mother told me about trying them. So when I heard about this one, I decided to give it a try. It’s a surprisingly satisfying way to pass the time, and have something pretty to look at when you’re done.
 
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Book Review: Coventry 2091

Coventry 2091 was a really fun book with a prose style that moves you right along. It’s a well-thought out world. There’s always a little bit of “hand waving” in science fiction, but for the most part it’s clear the author thought about the details quite a bit. I recommend this highly.

I freely admit that I’m not as well-read in science fiction as I could be. Nevertheless, the “travel oaks” in this book were a fundamental sci fi mechanic I had never encountered before, and I credit the author with a lot of creativity for that. If I’m wrong and someone else invented it, that’s cool too, it was still a lot more unique than I’d seen anywhere else.

There are some similarities to Atlas Shrugged here, in a small group of people able to preserve technology in the face of a tyrannical regime.

Coventry 2091 is a very well thought out colonization novel with the most unique system of FTL travel I can ever remember having encountered. You should read it today!

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Amazon’s Without Remorse

If you’ve read my first novel, Death of Secrets, then you know I’m a fan of Tom Clancy. I was about a sophomore in high school when The Hunt for Red October came out, and I fell in love with it almost from the first page. Finally someone who was as fascinated by the details of military hardware as I was! Over the years I read all of his books — back when it was still him writing them, before his name became little more than a brand.

But Without Remorse had a special place in my heart. It wasn’t a typical Clancy novel. Yes, there was a bit of Vietnam-era tech, but overall it didn’t focus nearly as much on ships, planes, and helicopters. The novel Without Remorse is about manhood. On its face it was the story of one man’s obsession with revenge, but in the course of creating John Kelly, Clancy created something of a masculine archtype. Kelly was strong, but violent only at need. He was protective of women, but not chauvinistic. He was hyper-competent at everything he did, but always humble.

I frequently tell women of my acquaintance, “Read Without Remorse. You will understand how ever many wants to see himself.”

Amazon’s version of the story left all that out. The surface level “Obsession with revenge” theme was all their was, and the work of literature that extolled the virtues of genuine honorable masculinity was completely set aside.

It was a good action movie. I had fun. Kelly — in Amazon’s telling — is badass, and I would watch the movie again. Stronger in the first half than the second it’s still just a fun action show.

Yes, it’s a bit woke, but not in a way that bothers me. That wasn’t my chief complaint. All the meaning that made Tom Clancy’s novel the greatest of his works is not just gone. It was never there to begin with.

Every genius has flaws. Among Clancy’s was that, in his later years, he fell too much in love with his characters. The stories became more about a reunion with old friends, and less about the richly-researched details and the complex, multi-POV plot. Amazon’s Without Remorse ends on that note, with a somewhat smarmy lead in to the Rainbow 6 universe. I guess Amazon has the rights now, and intends to milk it for all it’s worth.

If you like action movies, watch Without Remorse on Amazon prime. You’ll like it. But if you want to ponder the truth of manhood, and study what it means to have been created the stronger vessel, read Tom Clancy’s novel of the same name.

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Extraordinary World Building

The Wolf's Pawn (Sajani Tales Book 1) by [Chaaya Chandra]Hurry up and read The Wolf’s Pawn (Sajani Tales Book 1) by Chaaya Chandra I just submitted a review on Amazon, and if you’ve paid attention to any of my ranting, you know that comparisons to the Immortal Clancy are not something I hand out lightly:

The worldbuilding in The Wolf’s Pawn sucks you in and keeps you turning the pages. The politics are interesting, the intrigue is suspenseful, and the characters feel like real human beings — even though they’re wolves. The technologically superior elves invade the Vykati, resulting in a privateer/guerilla war. It reads a bit like Clear and Present Danger and a bit like Red Storm Rising, all while being high fantasy.

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Intro to Self Publishing

This is my attempt to provide a roadmap to building a following as an indie author. I am by no means an expert. I still need a day job, so take all this with a grain of salt. Or a pinch. Or the whole shaker.

This is not original to me, dozens of people write books on it and sell online courses on it. I’m just going to type down my own thoughts on it.

The bad news is, it’s not a get rich quick scheme. The only road I know of to anything like success at self publishing is long term. It’s writing book after book after book and slowly, over time, increasing the number of people who want to buy them.

The good news is, this formula definitely can work. Many far more successful writers than me use it.

Here’s what we’re going to cover:

Build an email list of subscribers/customers. Keep growing it over time. Send emails to this list to sell your new books when they come out.

Get your cover, blurb, and reviews to the state where people who land on your books pages will actually download them.

Give books away for free. Use free days and create a book or books that are permafree.

Promote those free books through paid promo sites or social media to send new potential readers to those free book pages.

If your cover, blurb, and reviews are good, many will download the free book.

If your writing is good, some will finish the book and sign up for the email list to get more. Some of those will buy your other books that aren’t free.

Let’s dig in!

Before You Publish

You may already have published. That’s probably OK. A lot of this can be done retroactively after you’ve published. Some will take more work to do retroactively, but… we’ll get to that.

So, before you publish your book, first, create an email list. Pick the mass email service that’s best for you. I use Mailchimp, and they have a limited free plan, but there are many others. Add whoever you can to the email list. Your friends who are willing to hear about your books. Your family.

(If you’ve already published, just go ahead and create the email list now.)

Second, put the link to your email list signup form at the end of your book.

“Did you enjoy this book? Sign up here for updates about my next one!” 

You want this to be the very next thing the reader sees after they read “The End.” They’re happy, they liked your protagonist, they want to know more, and boom, the very next thing offers them more. All they have to do is give you their email address.

If your manuscript is already published, You can update your local file with this link and re-upload it.

Third: do a paperback manuscript too. I find that I sell close to zero paperbacks, but they’re valuable as a sales tool. They make it look like, “Hey, this paperback costs $15, but if I buy the e-book it’s only $2.99. Look how much I’m saving!”

Fourth: Write a series. It’s just so much easier to get people to buy the second book when they already know the characters and the world.

Now: a couple of pieces of advice that are going to cause a bit more controversy.

You need a book cover before you publish. The best advice I can possibly give you is to pay money for a professional cover.

(NB: Do as I say, not as I do. My Sherman Iron Mysteries have covers I made myself. I broke the rules deliberately for a specific reason. Don’t you do it. Pay money for a professional cover.)

This is why I recommend a professional cover designer: books absolutely do get judged by their cover, and it happens in less than two seconds. Sucky cover = sucky sales. If your cover is bad, people will get to your book page on Amazon and leave immediately without buying.

Next controversial advice:

I suggest going exclusive to Amazon at first. The reasons for this are:

1) Having your book exclusive to Amazon gives you free promotion days you can use to grow your email list. Five days per quarter, you can make the Kindle version of your book free. I’ll talk about why it’s a good idea to make your book temporarily free a bit further on in this document.

2) Having your book exclusive to Amazon means your book is in the Kindle Unlimited program. KU, as it’s called, is where readers pay Amazon $12/month to read all the books they can get through. If you’re exclusive to Amazon, one of the books they can choose from is yours, and you get paid a certain rate per page read.

3) Amazon has 80-some percent of the e-book market. Yes, being exclusive to Amazon means you can’t reach that other 20 percent. But to reach that 20 percent, you’re going to need powerful marketing, and you don’t have that yet or you wouldn’t be reading this guide. You can go to Apple and Kobo once you’re up and running. To get started, Amazon exclusivity gives you marketing tools you really need when just starting out.

If you’ve already published your book on all platforms, or if you’ve already published many books on all platforms, then all the stuff about using free days to build subscribers isn’t going to work for you. But keep an eye on the part about making books permafree.

There is one more “before you’ve published” step. I recommend a professional editor almost as highly as I recommend a professional cover designer. A lot of indie authors can’t afford this because they’re pretty expensive for a novel-length manuscript. I write a little bit below on ideas to come up with the money for it. But if it is anywhere at all within your means, a professional editor is one of the two most powerful expenditures you can make on behalf of your book.

Right now you’re probably thinking, “Yeah, I’ll just do my own editing, get grammarly, and have some beta readers. I don’t need to hire a professional editor.

If that’s all your financial situation will permit, then it is what it is. But there is a very specific reason why I recommend a professional editor if it’s at all possible, and you’ll see it below in the section on reviews.

After You’ve Published

Get your book on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback formats.

Email your subscribers that the book is now for sale. Then, email your subscribers on a regular basis. Let them know where you’re at as far as progress on the the next book, and other personal tidbits. These are customers. Just like regulars at a restaurant, they are more likely to keep coming back if you invest in the relationship. Talk to them. Share from your life.

Every time you mail those friends and family you put on your initial email list, beg them for reviews. Beg. 

How many reviews you have, and how many stars the reviews rate your book, are almost as powerful as the book cover. 100 5-star reviews? I might buy. 10 reviews and half of them are two star? Probably not going to buy. Reviews sell books. Number of reviews and high star rating are absolutely essential to sales. 

So have no shame. Beg. Plead. Demand. Everyone who tells you they’ve read your book, congratulates you on having published a book, or asks about what it was like to get it published, tell them: Reviews are a huge help, would you please write one.

There are two selling tools that matter more than anything else on Amazon. These two things alone sell more books for you than everything else you can do on your book page. Book cover and reviews. I already made my pitch about a professional book cover.

Here’s my pitch about hiring a professional editor: Mistakes, typos, bad grammar —> bad reviews. It’s direct, inevitable, and instantaneous. Readers will quit out of a book to leave a bad review for it if they hit enough typos. A professional editor is the first step to good reviews. If your editing is bad, no matter how many people you get to buy your book, each sale will be reducing the odds of future sales, because people are leaving bad reviews after they read “your” instead of “you’re.”

If you can’t afford it, you can’t afford it. But if you go without, it’s like going onto a medieval battlefield without armor. If everything goes right, you might still win, but it would be a whole lot easier with some chain mail.

Create a second book. At the back of it, include not only the email signup link, but also a link to buy your first book.

Email your list and let them know the new book is out.

Go back into the manuscript of the first book. In addition to the email signup link, add an excerpt — 2000 words, 5000, 10,000, whatever — from your second book, and following that excerpt a link to buy it. Re-upload to Amazon.

Continue emailing your subscribers regularly. Always be asking your email subscribers for reviews. Continue regularly using free days for all books, and promoting them for free on social media.

This is the basic theory: Your email list is how you sell your expensive books. Your marketing is how you give away your free books. And your free books are how you get people on your email list so you can sell them expensive books. It’s like the circle of life. Someone call Simba.

Shampoo, rinse, and repeat for a long time, and prepare yourself for…

Leveling Up

There are some huge steps we’re going to take here that may be mentally challenging.

The first is to create some content that people get for free whenever they sign up for your email list. The obvious choice here is a book or short story, but other things can work. 

The idea is, they get to the end of your novel, they loved it, they loved the characters, they want more, and there’s that link we did earlier inviting them to sign up for your email list to hear when the next book is due. But now, instead, that same link says, “Get an absolutely FREE short story set in my universe right now by signing up for my email list.”

That’s more attractive than merely the subscribe link. You should begin to get a larger percentage of people who read your book converting into email subscribers.

The next step is making one of your books permanently free. “Permafree” is slang you’ll hear all the time in the indie author community.

Amazon won’t let you do this. Their minimum price is 99 cents. The trick is, they WILL do it if your book is free on other book buying sites. So we’re going to take one of your books “wide.” In other words, publish it on many book publishing sites, not just Amazon as I advised before you publish.

Go to smashwords.com, go through their entire publishing process, and especially include the steps they require for them to distribute your book to Kobo, Nook, Apple, etc. This can be somewhat challenging, but you can do it! 

Set the price to $0.00. Once you’ve gotten through all this successfully, your book is now $0.99 on Amazon, but $0.00 everywhere else. Amazon will want to fix this. Have someone you know go to your book page on Amazon and use the link to report a lower price. Give it a few days, and your book will be free on Amazon. 

Now, you’ve got a free book on Amazon, and it’s always free. The next quest in Level 2 of the Self Pub RPG is…

The dreaded boss fight…

Spend money to promote your free days and free book.

Ack! Spend money? But I’m broke! I’m writing because I need money, not because I have it to spend on promotions.

I know, I know. I’ve been there. I would still be there if I didn’t have a great day job to help fund my writing. And at the end of this essay, I’ll make a suggestion or two about how to get some money for this. But first, let’s cover the subject itself.

I already mentioned, email subscribers are the key to selling books for money. And by this stage of the process, maybe you’ve got a hundred, maybe a thousand, whatever. But there are people out there who have hundreds of thousands, in some cases even millions of email subscribers. And for a fee, they will email their subscribers about your book.

The biggest names in this business are Freebooksy, Fussy Librarian, and… drumroll please… ominous music plays… the 900 pound gorilla in the room, BookBub. Trust me: start with Fussy and Freebooksy.

So you buy a $50 promotion on the Fussy Librarian for your free book, they email all their hundreds of thousands of subscribers, your book gets a ton more free downloads than you’ve ever had before, some of those actually read, and some subscribe. A few may buy some of your other books. You probably don’t make the $50 back on those other book sales, but you probably do make some of it back, and you get something that may be worth more money in the long run: new email subscribers!

A Note About Making Your Books Free

I’ve said a lot about free promotion days on Amazon, and making books permafree. You may be asking something like this:

“What? Free? My book is a masterpiece! It’s worth $30 a copy just like James Patterson gets!”

I know. I feel the same. But James Patterson doesn’t get $30 per copy because his writing is good (far from it, imho). He gets $30 per copy because everyone has heard of him and knows exactly what they’re getting when they buy a book with that name on it. No one has heard of me. No one has heard of you. So we don’t get $30 per copy, and have to resort to giving the book away for free to build awareness.

More importantly, free promotions can get you something that, in the long run, can be more valuable than the $2.99 you might have gotten for your book if it weren’t free.

Email subscribers! Email subscribers are the heart and soul of selling indie e-books. 

So use your five free days per quarter that you get for being exclusive to Amazon. When it’s free, Facebook it. Twitter the heck out of it. Hashtag like crazy. Let the good people of Parler know.

Conversion rates are small. Not everyone who actually finds your free book’s page in Amazon will download. Not everyone who downloads will open. Not everyone who opens will finish. But when they do finish, they probably liked it. Those are the ones you want on your email list.

A Note About Paid Promotional Sites

There are several that actually do deliver decent results, but the newbie level of this is Freebooksy and Fussy Librarian. Be confident that you know what you’re doing before going to any other book promotion site.

I know there are many authors who make Amazon ads work for them. I’ve never been any good at it, so I don’t have any useful advice to give. 

I’ve never had even a little bit of luck with buying ads anywhere for a full price book. It has to be free or $0.99 to have any chance at all of the paid promotion / ad achieving any results.

Facebook can be useful once you have confidence in your book marketing, but I don’t recommend it while you’re learning.

The best time for paid book promotions is after you have 3 books and some free email subscriber giveaway content. That’s when your odds of recouping your investment become decent.

You might not be able to afford paid promotion sites. I’ll be honest, this gets a lot harder when you can’t afford paid promotions.

The main substitute is to chase social media followers as hard as you can. Hashtagging on Twitter. Asking people to share on Facebook. Ugh. It’s a long slog, and every day Facebook makes it harder and harder to promote for free on their site. If this is all you can do, pour your heart into it, because it sure won’t work if you don’t give it maximum effort.

Another free substitute for paid promos is asking other writers you know if they’ll do email swaps with you. You send an email to your subscribers about their free book; they send an email to their subscribers about your free book. It exposes you to some new customers in the same way Freebooksy or Fussy do, but at much smaller numbers.

Building on Your Foundation

Congratulations. You’ve mastered the basics of this system. Level 3 is about refinement.

Are your book covers the best they could possibly be? Do they clearly communicate the genre you’re writing in? Do they catch the eye? Especially the permafree book, is its cover eye catching and selling? 

I want to be clear about this: The entire theory of book marketing I’ve outlined here depends on three things: Cover, Reviews, and Blurb. Once people get to your page on Amazon, they have to decide whether or not to buy (or download for free). The three biggest factors in that decision are, in order of importance, cover, reviews, and blurb. 

We’re writers. We can probably do the blurbs ourselves. But the cover, if you’re not a professional graphic designer or artist, then you should be spending money on this. Get the cover right. It’s the only way people will actually buy/download for free a copy of your book.

Are the books themselves the best they can be, especially the free book? Have any reviews pointed out typos?

  1. Polish your manuscript up and re-upload it to Amazon (and smashwords, if it’s the free one. Remember, the entire purpose of your free book is that people will be so delighted they’ll buy the next one and sign up for your list.
  2. Get a better cover if you can. Cover is the most powerful selling tool you have. And, for this step, we have to go to …

Startup Cash

Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform to help creative products get off the ground. A quick outline of how it works is, you create a budget for how much you need to launch your creative project, and you invite people to “invest” in the project at certain levels. Each level has a prize they get for investing. 

Kickstarter doesn’t like us to say it this way (or at least they didn’t. It’s been years since I did this) but we use it, in effect, as a pre-order platform. People give you money *before* the book is out, and once the book comes out you give them their reward for investing at that level.

So for self published authors, create a budget. Here’s a quick and dirty thumbnail sketch of how I would do it if it was me:

$400 for professional editing

$400 for professional cover

$1000 for marketing

$1800 in total.

Now, set one investment level of $40, and for it, people get a signed copy of your book.

Get creative with some other investment levels. When I did it, I had one where people could be named on a page in the book, one where people could name a character… etc.

Get two people to kick in $100 each to be named in the book, then get 40 people to essentially pre-order signed paperbacks, and you’ve got your marketing budget funded.

But the thing about Kickstarter is, you get no money, and your investors are not charged, unless the entire stated budget is funded. It’s a balancing act. If you don’t think you can get $1800 from your friends and family and other potential early investors, make the budget lower. You can get covers for cheaper than $400. You can cut the marketing budget back as far as you need to, but be aware that less marketing = less sales.

If you think your potential circle of early buyers can reach a higher number than $1800, go for it. Add the excess into marketing.

Some people don’t like this Kickstarter thing, because it is, essentially, asking your friends and family for money to start a business. But then again, you’re going to do that anyway once your book is out. I say try it this way.

CONCLUSION

As an unknown writer, your challenge is that no one has heard of you. How do we slowly fix that? There are about ten million indie e-books on Amazon’s Kindle store. How is anyone going to discover yours? 

The answer is to build your own email list of customers so you can make sure they do discover each new book you write.

Get your cover, blurb, and reviews to the state where people who land on your books’ pages will actually download them.

Use free days and create a book or books that are permafree.

Spend money with respectable promotion sites to send new potential readers to those free book pages

If your cover, blurb, and reviews are good, many will download the free book.

If your writing is good, some will finish the book and sign up for the email list to get the free story.

And if that’s good, they’ll buy your other books that aren’t free. 

Keep at it. This is hard and it takes a long time. There’s no shame in having a day job.

Be systemic about it. Track your spending on promotions.

There are going to be long days when it feels like you’re doing all this work and getting nothing. But if you believe in your writing and keep working hard, it’s definitely possible to slowly grow your readers list.

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Sneak Peek at Iron 3

This is the unedited, raw manuscript of the opening scene of the third Sherman Iron mystery. I’ve been stuck on this for a long time, and I hope by letting my friends and readers have a look at it, I can mobilize myself to finish the story.  Remember: Unedited! Have mercy about the typos, they’ll get cleaned up long before it’s published. The cover and the “Forging Iron” title are also tentative.

***

The County Clerk and Recorder had a service dog, and it was a real struggle for me not to pet it. He was a golden retriever with a sleek, freshly-brushed coat, giving every impression of being asleep right next to me. If I could just scratch between those ears and whisper “who’s a good boy,” everything would be right with the world. I could feel it all the way to my bones. 

Alas, it’s kind of a faux pas to distract a blind person’s guide animal, so I used my hands for taking notes instead. It was, after all, my job.

I’m Sherman Iron, I’m a reporter for the Hunter Post.

Tall, skinny, and entirely-too-light-haired for my own liking, I wore my jeans and hiking boots almost everywhere, including to the County Commission’s public hearing on zoning issues that evening. But in a change from my old addiction to T-shirts, I wore an oversize red and black flannel shirt, untucked, hanging loose and far past my belt.

The reason for that was riding in an inside-the-waistband holster on my right hip. The loose plaid lumberjack shirt concealed a revolver.

I covered the crime beat. Murders, burglaries, casino robberies — these were my stock in trade. With the tide of illegal drugs rising higher every day, the job got more dangerous all the time. Last summer I’d had to use an ancient over-under hunting shotgun as my only weapon against thugs carrying 9mm submachine guns, and I had vowed to change that. So a new acquisition nestled secure and invisible under my big wool shirt.

I liked my job. I liked cops. I particularly liked the prosecuting attorney. I liked writing about crime.

Politics? That I did not like. But tonight I had no choice. My colleague whose job it was had called in sick.

The Hunter Post had a guy who wrote government and election stories. He covered the Congressman and the Senators every time they came through town. He wrote up local races. He had all the big deal connections in both parties, and could get his call answered if he dialed the Governor’s cellphone.

He also had pneumonia. So my new city editor told me it was now my job, at least for the next week. My ill colleague dropped into my lap a brand new story about money in politics, a tip about the first question to ask, and a wish for good luck before he exhausted his energy and fell back asleep. 

Thus, cell phone in hand, voice recording app launched, I left behind Rhonda Comings the Clerk and Recorder and her eminently huggable golden, and made my way to the front of the room as soon as the meeting ended.

With Halloween coming up and an election not long after, autumn had seized firm control of the local weather. The forced air heating of the county courthouse dried things out so thoroughly I was afraid if I blinked, my eyelids would stick to my eyes. Outside, yellow leaves reflected the streetlights back into the fourth-floor windows.

A gently curved head table dominated the front of the room. Rows of cheap audience seats stretched from it to the back wall. A podium and microphone stand poked up in the middle of the table’s arch, like a baby tree in the middle of a freshly-mown lawn. Members of the public and county employees who came to report to the commissioners were supposed to speak from there.

An unassuming, stain resistant berber carpet impressed no one but didn’t distract. Behind that curved table were three leather executive chairs that looked like each of them cost more than everything I owned, including that brand new handgun, which was not cheap. It seemed to me like someone spent the entire facilities budget on their chairs, and forgot about the people who’d have to attend meetings.

One of those chair-lovers scurried for the back door as I approached, but I caught him before he could get away. The classic monk’s fringe of silvery hair made a kind of halo of seniority around his head, while deep furrows crisscrossed his face like the famous canals of Mars. Spectacles slid down almost to the edge of his nose and distorted the sides of his eyes through their coke bottle lenses. A smartwatch poked out from under the sleeve of his jacket; the sportcoat and khaki slacks came from Wal-Mart; I knew because I had passed by the same choices when I went to buy my new flannel button-downs.

My disease-ridden colleague had told me what question to ask first, so I popped it out right up front.

“Commissioner, is it true you spent a hundred thousand dollars of your own money on your re-election campaign?”

His eyes widened a bit, and he eased backward, crossing his arms over his chest as he did, making the cheap jacket bunch up a bit. The corners of his mouth settled down like the foundation of a cheap house.

“That’s entirely legal under the campaign finance laws.” 

Ole the political reporter had been right. Springing that on him out of nowhere caught him off guard.

“I know, Commissioner, it’s just a lot of dead presidents. I’m curious why.”

Commissioner Ambrose Pryor had recovered his verbal balance. When I asked him about the money, I apparently caught him off guard, and his defensive response about campaign finance rules reflected it. Now, he threw me some spin to try to recover.

“You can’t put a value on serving the people of Hunter County. I’ve invited Montanans to invest in my campaign, and they have. It wouldn’t be right for me to ask others to chip in if I wasn’t willing to bear as much of the burden as possible myself.”

I dutifully made a note of his answer, then, “What are you planning to do with the money?”

“I’m running for re-election because I have a vision for our community. Communicating that vision to the people is the heart of running for office.”

“So, TV ads then?”

“Our campaign plan calls for a diverse spectrum of markets.”

I nodded, noted it down, and thought, TV, in other words.My sometime-semi-friend Gil Farshaw’s job was safe at least. He had been promoted from “weather guy with occasional news duties” to a full time real reporter. A hundred thousand bucks to his station ought to keep him paid for at least a little while. Heck, with what they paid local reporters these days, Commissioner Pryor’s hundred grand might just be paying Gil’s salary for years.

That could have been enough for a story. This wasn’t my beat, I was just filling in for a colleague. And I didn’t care about politics, except for my girlfriend’s re-election campaign. 

But something was bothering me.

Commissioner Pryor bought his clothes at the big box discount store same as me. As one of three elected Commissioners for Hunter County, he drew an annual salary of $65,000 per year. Not bad… way better than a reporter makes. But how could he afford to part with more than a year’s salary?

Investment-wise, it penciled out. Six years as county commissioner multiplied by 65K was almost 400 grand. For him to spend one hundred grand to win four hundred grand definitely worked in terms of profit and loss.

But did he really have it to spare? And if he did, why was he buying “George” brand made-in-China sportcoats?

Curious, I made a small wager with myself.

The county courthouse had a parking garage right next door, and I was willing to bet that the Commissioners had reserved spots there. I left the commission’s public hearing on zoning behind, rode the elevator down to the first floor, resisted the temptation to stop in at the County Attorney’s office, and walked through the bitter October air to the parking garage. The open cement half-walls offered almost no protection from the wind. Cold I may have been, but I also won my bet. The first 10 spaces in the garage were all marked reserved, and the third one in particular bore a sign that said, “Commissioner Ambrose Pryor.”

Parked in it was a no-longer-white 1999 Ford pickup, rust all over the bumper, front fender painted in gray body primer rather than the same color as the rest of the vehicle. I looked through the window. Striped fabric seat covers failed to hide massive rips in the seat. Fast food wrappers littered the floor.

A faded, green hardbound book with no title, that looked a bit like an accountant’s ledger occupied the passenger seat. While there was no title, someone had scratched a word on the front cover with a knife. I couldn’t read it through the glass in the dimly lit garage, though.

But I didn’t need to know about his reading material to answer my own question: Pryor wore cheap clothes and drove a broken down ancient clunker. If he had a hundred thousand bucks to spend, why not spend some of it fixing this junkheap up.

I had one last item to check, but I needed a computer to do it. I headed out on the windy fall streets of my home town, watching golden leaves drift to the sidewalk in streetlamp haloes. The moon over the Rockies lit my path back to the Hunter Post.

My paper lived in a white and brown pebbled concrete building downtown bought and, fortunately, paid for back in the days when local dailies used to get fat on ads, literally and figuratively. Corporate was always talking about selling this building and making us rent space in a minimall, but thank goodness so far the rents on minimall space were too high to fit the budget.

At this hour, the front doors were closed. Entering through the employees-only entrance on the side, I left behind the chilly almost-winter evening, strolled across the newsroom to my desk and sat down to turn on the computer. Moments later, I was looking at the county treasurer’s property tax records, where I found the residence address for one Pryor, Ambrose.

Armed with the address, Maps Street View gave me a look at the house. Paint peeled off the faded wood, helped along by the winter air. A rain gutter had pulled away from the roof. The chain link fence to the back yard sagged and was pulling away from its frame in places.

It didn’t take an ace investigative reporter to reach the obvious conclusion. Ambrose Pryor couldn’t spare a hundred thousand bucks.

So where did it come from?

That question could wait. I had a story to file before deadline, and we can’t just randomly speculate about people’s financial health in the paper. I would need proof before I could do that, and it wasn’t going to come in before the morning edition.

I led with the “That’s perfectly legal” quote because it sounded defensive and gave the impression he had something to hide. His smoother lines, I tucked in at the back. Political talking points aren’t news, but sometimes honesty is. I clicked submit on the content management system, and my 600 words went winging off to the editor to prove that I had done as I’d been told.

Then, my job technically done, I put my feet up on the desk, put my hands behind my head, and let my mind go back to the question I’d been asking since I talked to him. How could Ambrose Pryor afford a hundred thousand bucks?

The picture of his house on Street View wasn’t necessarily 100 percent reliable. I’d have to go out there in person at some point, if I decided I cared enough about this story to work harder. But his truck? That I’d seen with my own eyes, and it was a piece of junk. You didn’t need a green accountant’s ledger on the seat to know that…

My train of thought stopped in its tracks.

All the hair on my arms stood up, followed by goosebumps. A profanity tumbled out of my lips, gravel out the back of an overfull dump truck.

The ledger!

At once I was out of my seat, pushing the employee door open and heading for the county courthouse. The night wind nipped at my cheeks, and I knew Montana weather well enough to know snow lay in our future, but at that moment I didn’t care. I walked as briskly as I could back to the parking garage next door to the Hunter County courthouse, but I was too late.

Pryor’s pickup was gone.

With it went my chance to take a look at that hardbound green volume with no printed title but a word carved into the cover with a knife.

Which was too bad, because I was pretty sure I knew what the word was.

I had seen that green book before, but not for almost fifteen years.

It belonged to my father.

And the word on the front was “Sherman.”

***

Like it? You can get the audiobook of Irons in the Fire, the first Sherman Iron mystery here on Amazon, here on Audible, and here on Apple.

You can get the e-book version of Irons in the Fire here, and the e-book version of Iron Law here.

Do you have any thoughts at all? Hit that contact form!