I have a completed manuscript. The first in what I hope will be a long series. Here’s a quick blurb:

The series follows the exploits of a former special agent seeking to clear his name. He’s been accused of crimes not handled in the typical court of law. Renditions. Black sites. Interrogations. His only hope is a cryptic trail left by a dead Russian double agent.

Only he’s got a dark past. A family legacy that labeled him guilty from the moment he was born.

With an elite FBI surveillance team closing in, he’s got to solve a grisly murder and collect the evidence he needs to prove his innocence. And his battered RV isn’t exactly made for a high speed chase. Will he choose the path of justice or will he go with outright vengeance?

One thing’s for certain – the guilty will pay.

***

Yep, being a little vague. Kind of like my other projects. With the studio thing, there’s an NDA involved. With this, there’s the almighty Amazon.

This new series will launch exclusively on Amazon. It’s about the only way for an independent publisher to make money anymore.

Some genres like certain flavors of romance can pull off a wider release. Or if a series hits big enough on Amazon and spills over into the general market you can then see success trickle over to other book retailers.

So because it’s on Amazon, I have to engineer a release to tickle their highly finicky algorithms. That means multiple books and a short window on the pre-release.

One book down. Two more to go…

Back to the keys…

But then again…

I’m also considering something I haven’t thought of doing for a long while: seeking representation.

The agent / publisher route is a tricky one to navigate. I briefly tried with my first novel, Crimson Son. Mostly I got crickets. One agent though, and a big name I might add, did reply and said “it was well-written” but that he couldn’t do anything with it. Superhero fiction, even as super-powered heroes took over the box office, was and is not a big seller.

Thrillers on the other hand.

Those sit right below Romance, the biggest category out there. And I developed this series to be as “to market” as possible in a highly active subgenre.

I’ve always been of the opinion that free markets are good markets. That the broader of a market I can participate in, the better. And while the big publishing houses have continued to do nothing but consolidate, they can at least get my books out there on both Amazon and beyond.

Devil, meet the deep blue sea.

So I’m going to put out some lines, see if anyone bites. If not? I stick to my self pub plan. If I do get some interest, well, likely my release plans will be set back months maybe years. I’ll be on a big publisher’s schedule. Ya’ll might not hear about this again for some time.

But that’s all background noise. It can’t drown out the clacking of my keys. That’s the moneymaker.

As always, thanks for reading!

Categories: Author News

Tags: agent, book, jack reacher, novel, querying, submissions, thriller, vigilante justice, Writing