Welcome back – or is it the other way around? You haven’t heard from me since my book announcement because I’ve been furiously working to market Wager of Death. Once the book is out, the next phase of work begins.
I’m just about ready to do a couple of online promotions (although at least one of them requires a certain number of reviews at Amazon first), I’m preparing to write a communication to a couple of bookstores, I’ve done one interview and working on another, I vended at my first comicon of the year (Planet Comicon in Kansas City, the final weekend of March), and I have a few other tricks up my sleeve either in the works or on the drawing board.
Writing the novel is the easy – and fun – part.
Buy, read, review – that’s my focus for my growing readership base. Buy, read, review. Next month I’ll be in Dallas at a comicon, expanding the readership base further.
So far, the responses to Wager of Death have been better than I had hoped. I say that because there is a mystery element to this thriller, and – as always, with me – the story is multi-layered. The layers need to fit together seamlessly. (Children of the Sundoes not have as many layers because introductory novels are expected, by publishers, to be shorter, so it is approximately 17,000 words shorter than Dead Dreamsand Wager of Death.)
Naturally, when you play the shell game with storylines, you hope that you hid and moved the pea as well as you imagined. It’s all in the distractions. I don’t ask, “Did you like it?” I ask questions like, “Did X sub-plot work?” “Was Character Z likeable?” “Was Character A’s storyline helpful to the story?”
I’m not going to go back and change the story, but I want to know whether ideas translated to paper for you, the reader, as well as they did to me when I wrote and then read those same ideas.
There are plenty of authors better than me at marketing. I’m learning and working to improve; but, no matter what happens, I have to keep working on expanding the readership base.
Think about your friends and family who read fiction – particularly thrillers. Think gifts. Oh, and for those of you on my mailing list because you are sci-fi fans, think about other readers you know. Don’t worry, there will be more sci-fi.
At the moment, Wager of Death is only available here at Amazon. In time, it will be available elsewhere, as will Dead Dreams. In the meantime, please give Wager of Death a read and then post a review at Amazon – I will be forever grateful. To those of you who have already started, or finished it, thank you. I appreciate you.
Until next time, which will be after the Dallas comicon,
Brian W. Peterson
Somewhere on the edge of the Great Plains