Authors Electric

This month I spent a week with a client in Saigon , getting a feel for their life and for their city. I’ve not been before so my expectations had been largely shaped by Graham Greene’s The Quiet American , news coverage throughout my younger life and the musical, “Miss Saigon”. It’s called Ho Chi Minh City now of course, but that doesn’t sound nearly as romantic. It is also sprouting tower blocks, making the riverside skyline indistinguishable from other Far Eastern boom towns from Hong Kong and Beijing to Singapore and Bangkok – or even Canary Wharf for that matter. At street level, however, some of the old magic still simmers and steams in the wet heat. You can still sit at a pavement table outside the Continental Palace Hotel or in the roof bars of the Caravelle or the Majestic, and imagine Greene lurking in a corner.  A figure as obviously foreign as me will still be offered massages by street girls and shoe shine services by young entrepre...

It was back in April that I wrote a blog post for Author’s Electric  on the process of promotion that I undertook ahead of the publication of my new thriller Powder Burn . By September I had a new short story on the blocks and ready to go; called The Sniper, it’s a prequel about the antagonist in my Janac’s Games thrillers . I had a cover, blurb, and an edited and formatted manuscript. What I did not have was time to do any promotion. Since I could not see how things were going to improve any time soon, I was left with a choice of holding back the book indefinitely, or going ahead and publishing with essentially no promotion or marketing. I chose the latter for three reasons: 1. I’m impatient. 2. I thought it would be interesting to see what happens when you just push a book out on the major ebook websites without any marketing support. 3. My eventual plan for the book is to drop the price to zero and run it as a loss-leader for the Janac’s Games series, and so I ...