Reading Suggestions and Book Updates
A quick update this week due to other demands on my time
The Good Killers - Sample Scene, Part 2
Next week, I plan to share the 2nd half of the sample scene from The Good Killers. I was going to do it this week but got sidetracked by work. I usually plan, draft, and schedule my posts at least 4 weeks in advance, but when I decided last week to start sharing samples of my books, I had to make changes to that schedule. I also had to do a bit of prep to get the upcoming scenes ready and that took more time than I anticipated.
To keep things moving, I’ve swapped some posts around in my posting schedule and have a few updates for you:
Slough House
While taking a break in December from writing my next novel, I turned to one of my favorite authors, Mick Herron. Herron is the writer behind a highly acclaimed spy thriller series known as Slough House. Over the past few years, I've been watching both the Apple TV series and reading the books. Although the plots of the series tend to track the books pretty closely, there are a significant differences with the books that make the books still very entertaining standalone works. There's also the brilliantly snarky writing of the author, which makes the books very entertaining to read, and wonderful characters. Right now I’m on Book 4 and loving it.
In the coming weeks, I’ll have a full writeup of the 4th book in the series, Spook Street, along with some thoughts on the book and AppleTV+ series in general.
Update: My Favorite Suspects (Novel)
Although the initial reader reviews for the novel version of My Favorite Suspects were positive and encouraging, sales of the book have been flat since the debut last December. This has been very puzzling because I thought I had taken all the marketing lessons learned from my first novel, The Good Killers, and applied them to the rollout of My Favorite Suspects. I had carefully selected the keywords, Amazon categories, worked on the book blurb, and created a book cover design that reflected the nature of the story and (in my eyes) fit with the genre norms. The cover also got good feedback.
The disappointing sales of the book have given me a lot of food for thought. I’ve revisited the keywords, categories, and blurb, and tried different approaches. I also did more research into comparable books to figure out if there’s something that I overlooked. I found out, to my surprise and dismay, that searching for “My Favorite Suspects” on Amazon returned a lot of mystery books in the YA and Middle Grade. That certainly isn’t the target audience I had in mind for my book! Anyway, I have a new cover design and blurb in the works and will share that with you in a few weeks.
In the meantime, I’d appreciate any thoughts you have on the My Favorite Suspects novel regarding what you think the appropriate genre would be. Heck, if it fell into mystery romance I wouldn’t be surprised (I don’t think it fits there).
And otherwise, have you read anything by Mick Herron? Any other authors you recommend? Let me know in the comments!
Click on the links below for the items I mentioned in this post.
Items mentioned in this post (ads):
Mick Herron’s Slough House series - Book 1
And my novels…
Click this link to find all my books on Amazon.
Thank you for being honest about your sales being disappointing. That must be very frustrating for you. I wish I had some advice, but I'm the furthest thing from a marketing person. Good luck.