Here is the situation: You have written a mystery, police-procedural, thriller, spy novel, western, or something of the like. Now you get to the part where there’s a dead guy. You killed off a character. Maybe your bad guy killed the person. Maybe your good guy killed the person.
It ramps up the drama. It gives urgency and purpose to the story. Maybe the good guy has to stop the bad guy before he kills again. Maybe the vigilante just wrought his first bit of rough justice. Continue reading “How Well Did the Reader Know the Decedent?”
This time last year I was flailing around, trying everything I could think of to find readers for my newly self-published novel. I did the usual Facebook events and .99 cent sales and joined every online group I could find. I was active in Amazon Author Discussion boards, Kindleboards, Yahoo groups, and anywhere else I thought readers might be. The reviews I was receiving on the book were really positive but I couldn’t reach that next level in terms of finding more readers. My background is sales and marketing and I know my way around the internet, but even with all my efforts I couldn’t hit the big numbers that other Indie authors were achieving. In the first six weeks I sold about two hundred books but I knew many of those were friends and family, and other authors who were kind enough to buy it and support me. I was happy to get my work out there but I wanted to find random readers who didn’t know me, and when I checked the Kindleboard monthly listings and saw there were Indie authors selling thousands of ebooks a month I knew that either I had a book that wasn’t going to sell or I was doing something wrong. So, I contacted Robert Bidinotto, and that’s when I learned about “paying it forward”. 
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