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“After half a century of being on the lookout for a crime fiction writer with a voice that rivals Chandler’s, one has finally appeared…. His name is Larry Brooks. The guy has a slick tone and a crackling, cynical wit with lots of vivid descriptions (of both interior and exterior landscapes), and the sparkling figures of speech dance off the page and explode in your inner ear. Though as modern as an iPad 5S, he is truly and remarkably Chandleresque. He’s dazzling. Check out his new one, Deadly Faux—it’s sexy, complex, intelligent; a truly delightful novel with more plot twists than a plate of linguine swimming in olive oil.”
—James N. Frey, author of How to Write a Damn Good Novel
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5 Responses
And this also goes to emphasize – you must MARKET your work, and your work must be MARKETED by others. Otherwise, no one will buy it because no one will know that it exists.
Amazon’s KDP self-publishing program last week (in my opinion) “tacitly admitted defeat” by changing its system to pay authors once a month whether-or-not the accumulated royalties had exceeded their minuscule threshhold … I think it’s $50 … and just recently they paid me $5.11 (woo, hoo!) that they’d been holding on to since April. Amazon’s accountants probably realized that the company was holding millions(?) of dollars in “accounts payable” that would never be otherwise paid-out, because the (un-promoted) books weren’t selling, and never would.
It’s a fundamental of any business, about any product, that marketing drives sales, and that without marketing, sales do not occur. Amazon’s notion so-far seems to be that “reader reviews” will do the job, but most readers don’t actually bother to write reviews (uhh, mea culpa …), and in any case you can’t review something that you do not know exists in the first place.
You’ve not only got to write “great promotional copy” (or have someone write it for you), but you’ve got to get that copy in front of someone’s NOSE.
Apparently James can write a damn good book blurb as well.
Larry – I’m wondering if you’ve ever thought of the engineering behind good back cover copy? Seems to me there’s an underlying structure there… I’d love to save myself some time if you’ve already thought about that and would like to share some insight.
Very nice. Was that electronic mass mail or snail mail or both? And to whom was it mailed?
Now you need a YouTube book trailer… They seem to be becoming more popular. I did one for each of my first two books of my series, Black Fury Comic Books by Marti Nenza. Unfortunately, I renamed the series to Comic Books for Kids and didn’t rename the videos, so I have no idea what effect they’ve had on sales, if any. But it can’t hurt!
This is very cool. Congrats, Larry!!!
It was a worthy read, IMHO. If by chance you haven’t done so…might wanna stick it your holiday gift list, or just treat yourself 🙂
Loved Deadly Faux. I just received Bait And Switch in the mail yesterday. Can’t wait to read it. Question Larry. When are those of us who purchased Deadly Faux going to be getting the deconstruction ebook? I sent my receipt to the email provided back on October 8th when you first mentioned it but haven’t received anything since. I know you said a couple more weeks but that was around a month ago. You waiting until Christmas? Still busy with it? I can’t wait to get my hands on it! lol