Readers: An Author’s Best PR Team

Unknown Female is hot off the press, and you can grab it from Amazon in paperback and kindle formats.

My new novel goes deeper and darker than the last one, but the two have plenty in common. Both Sarah and Marx deal with unstable, dead parents. Of course, Sarah’s mom suffers from bouts of schizophrenia while Marx’s is a sociopathic killer. Sarah’s a young aspiring artist, and Marx draws forensic sketches for law enforcement. Sarah’s mom paints and sculpts, and Donald Bath murders people and uses their blood to paint works inspired by the likes of Alfred Rethel.

The plot draws on my experience writing about unsolved murders and South Carolina’s dark past in general.

I’m planning readings, including one in Winston-Salem and Charlotte later this month. So far, Amazon sales numbers are off to a decent start. But I’d like to break the 10,000 rank and hold it for at least a week. Here’s what you can do to help: send links to the Amazon page or my website to your friends through Facebook and Twitter. If you’ve ordered a copy, thank you. When you’ve finished, please post a short review (1-2 sentences) on Amazon. The more reviews a book has, the better the chance people will discover it.

Readers are an author’s best PR team. Promoting books is tough work these days, especially for indie writers. We don’t have large financial resources to compete with bigger publishers. We usually can’t leverage book retailers like B&N to display our books on front tables or hang huge posters about our books on their windows, or even get them to keep copies on the shelves. You won’t even find some of my favorite authors in brick & mortar stores. On top of that, major newspapers and magazines are reluctant to give much attention to titles from small presses. Even when they do, we still depend on readers to actually buy our books and recommend them to their friends, colleagues, families, and students.

Indie authors hardly ever get rich. At best, we make enough cash to fuel our own book-buying habits. In my case, I’ve spent nearly every cent of my royalties on books–sometimes at indie stories, sometimes from Amazon.

To conclude, here’s a growing list of who else has used blood in their art: Lennie Lee, Ron Athey, Yang Zhichao, Kira O’Reilly, Marc Quinn, and Andrew Serrano.