News flash! Writing a book is just the first step of the process. How’s that for obvious? Make no mistake, it’s a huge first step, but the first never the less.  The real task is how to spread the word to the masses.   So what do you do?  Simple question.  Simple answer. The easiest way to sell your book is to have lots of money.  Hire a marketing professional and undertake a national campaign.  See, easy answer, but, for me (and I would imagine most indie authors) the national campaign slush fund is dry.[..]

I love music.  I’ve been a guitar player for years.  I love to write.  I’ve been a writer for almost as long as I’ve been a guitar player.  I always thought I’d have a CD/album/whatever you want to call it out before I ever even thought about publishing a book, but things don’t always turn out the way you want.  Not that I’m disappointed.   I continue to work on my first musical release, but while I do, I have a novel out that people are reading and seem to like.  (For the curious it’s called[..]

Since I’ve been kicking around in the blogging world, trying to spread the word about my debut novel, The Trust. I have been amazed at the people I’ve met who have been amazingly great about helping a new author like myself along.  Since I spend so much time trying to promote myself, I thought I’d add an extra blog entry this week to say thank you to some folks who have gone above and beyond for me. Rich Evens is the force behind the blog, R. A. Evans Writes.  He does reviews and blogs, but[..]

We’re little more than a month out from the publishing of The Trust and I’m starting to realize I have a lot to learn about book promotion.  What I have learned can be boiled down to one word. Presence. Of course reducing any idea to a single word means using an approach similar to that of a chef when an ingredient is reduced for incorporation into a dish.  You concentrate the ingredient and then blend it to spread its flavor to the entirety of the dish. This is the same approach for the presence I[..]

When I was a kid I enjoyed spelling different words.  Mississippi was one in particular I loved from the sing-songy approach “M-I-crooked letter, crooked letter, I…” When a recommendation came up on my Nook that was just that, I was intrigued and later amazed. Tom Franklin’s tale of murder, mystery and personal conflict spans several decades of small town Southern America and will hopefully not be his last tale.  I grew up in a small, one stoplight southern town so the dialect, the characters and setting were a trip through not only the past but[..]

I went to sleep on January 20, 2011 to little fanfare.  I was at a conference staying in a nice hotel on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.  Oddly enough there was talk of snow for the weekend.  I awoke on the morning of Friday, January 21, 2011 and it was pretty much the same as any other morning. That is with one minor exception. On the 21st my book, The Trust, was published.  I began writing it in 2004 and it had been a part of my life for a long time. There were times[..]