marginal

Hi all! Long-time member, daily lurker, infrequent poster. DVDTalk is pretty much the only forum site I look at on a regular basis, and all you folks here seem like pretty avid readers, so I figured this would be as good a place as any to let people know about my new novel. It's a political thriller called The Faithless. Here's the back cover pitch:

How many votes does it take to become President of the United States? The answer, as Jack Patton learned from his father at an early age, is just 270... the key is making sure they’re the right 270 votes. When his father passes away, Jack comes up with a plan to honor the man in a way that respects his small-town, politically active legacy. But someone else has a different plan in mind... one that could not only put Jack in the center of a deadly political conspiracy, but could also result in one of the most audacious thefts of all time: the stealing of the presidency.

The ebook is only $2.99 on Amazon (link here) and Barnes & Noble (link here). You can also read the first four chapters for free on Amazon. I was hoping to have the book free for a limited time through Kindle Select, but the only way to do that is by making it exclusive to Amazon for three months... and since the subject matter is somewhat timely, I just couldn't do that.

Anyway, thanks for looking, and if anyone has any thoughts or comments about the book, I'd love to hear.

mhg83

Congrats! How long did it take you to write the book? How many pages would you write a day? What pushed you to keep writing? Did you have to go through an editor or anything to get your book published on Amazon?

PhantomStranger

Are you writing under a pseudonym? The alliteration in the name makes it sound a bit made-up.

marginal

Hi mhg83! Good questions. Probably about a year total to write, but most of it was done in the past six months. I still had to do my normal job, plus I volunteer for around 40 hours each week... and on top of that, I tend to procrastinate. I kind of just had to set a deadline to meet. Since the subject matter is inherently timely (presidential election), I figured it would be a complete waste if I put in a bunch of work on it but didn't finish it at least a few months before the election.

As far as how many pages per day, it was probably just a couple per day... but it varied greatly. I also tend to write less than a lot of authors. (My experience is that a lot of self-publishing authors tend to be quite liberal with their verbiage.)

For self-publishing through Amazon, you use their Createspace service (www.createspace.com... it used to be a separate company, but was acquired by Amazon a while back). You don't have to have an editor look over your work to publish through Amazon. However, I would highly recommend having someone competent and trustworthy go through your work to look for typos and other errors. I'm a professional writer for a living, and I've worked as an editor, so I was at an advantage in that regard. Still, I already found a typo after approving the proof. (A left-facing quotation mark that should be a right-facing quotation mark... hard to see those when you're proofing on a computer screen, unless you're really zoomed in.)

Basically, anyone can get just about anything published through Amazon. But the downside is, anyone can get just about anything published through Amazon. So there are mountains of total crap for potential readers to sort through. Marketing is the number-one challenge for self-publishing authors.

Are you planning on writing a book? If so, good luck! I'm happy to answer any questions about the process (some of which I'm still learning myself).

PhantomStranger: Yes, it's a pen name. I actually have a couple of bylines on Amazon under my real name, but unfortunately, my name is far too common.