Greetings from South Carolina!
We’re currently stopping over in the land of smiling faces and beautiful places as we continue south to our winter destination in Savannah, Georgia. In a quiet* little town, we’ve had mild weather and plenty of time to hunker down and work.
(*Quiet except for the trains. And the sirens. And the explosion at the nearby recycling factory. Kade must be rubbing off on me more than I thought…)
In the last email to my mailing list, I laid out a very rough release schedule for Phase Two of the Fort Black Thrillers.
Phase One includes the first three novels: Devil’s Churn, Death Bed, and Mineral King. And if you haven’t yet gotten your copy and left a review, click one of those links and get on it!
I’ll also be running a sale on the Devil’s Churn eBook this weekend and into Cyber Monday. So if you want to wait a few days, you can get a crazy good deal on the opening salvo at Fort Black.
Phase Two will include the next three books. I originally planned their release like this:
Phase Two
Book 4 In the Gap (Winter 2023)
Book 5 Roundhouse (Early 2024)
Book 6 Russian Hill (Spring 2024)
We’re still on schedule with book 4’s first draft currently undergoing revisions. I’ve got a couple weeks before the ARC copies go out, but a release by the end of 2023 is definitely in the cards.
One thing I had to change though was the name of Book 4.
Originally, I chose In the Gap as a play on words meaning both The Delaware Gap where the action takes place and the intelligence gaps master spies like Sergei love to exploit.
But if you type “Gap” or “In the Gap” into the Amazon bookstore search engine, well…go ahead. Give it a shot. I’ll wait.
Yeah.
Solid wall of man chest romance books. All about ladies hitting it with guys of a different age.
I’ve run into this so often in my publishing career. I’ve got the utmost respect for romance authors. They’re a force to reckon with in the book world. But when you take such a crazy-good selling genre and apply a dumb store algorithm to the metric crap-ton of books these romance authors sell every day, minute, and hour, that dumb algorithm begins to assume everything is a romance novel.
That’s one reason why when I wrote superhero fiction, I got crowded out of my category by vampire romances. And already with Vigilante Justice, the category is getting flooded with “Mafia Romance.”
I would normally have shrugged and kept the title I wanted. But I simply couldn’t. I have to try my damnedest to make sure the idiot algo doesn’t lump me in with the wrong books. If that happens, it could derail the entire series.
So the new title? Stay tuned. I’ll do a full cover reveal this Friday to help push the sale this weekend. PLUS I’ll be putting the book 4 pre-order online.
Shaping up to be a busy Thanksgiving here. I wish you all the best for the holiday and I’m thankful you’ve stuck around to listen to a story or two (or six).
Russ
Categories: Author News
RUSS LINTON 
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