My thriller, THE SHOP, has had a checkered career. This book got me the agent of my dreams, one of the best in the business, who could get the undivided attention of every big publisher in New York. She read the book on a plane during a terrible thunderstorm, and told me that reading the book was the only thing that kept her mind off the prospect of the plane crashing. She was positive the book would sell, and sell very well.

But that didn’t happen.

Meanwhile, my husband Glenn and I had built a promotional blog to attract agents and publishers called “Who Killed Brienne Cross”? whokilledbriennecross.com

Putting together “Who Killed Brienne Cross” was a labor of love. We created an alternate reality, adding stories, interviews, photos, and comments over two years’ time. Some of our friends commented, too—and those comments are pretty funny. If nothing else, “Who Killled Brienne Cross” should qualify as a very nice piece of performance art. But I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t yearn to show it off to the world.

Fast-forward to the summer of 2011. Thomas & Mercer, Amazon’s thriller imprint, bought THE SHOP as part of a three-book deal. THE SHOP will be rereleased, newly-edited and packaged, on February 6, 2012.

No longer will we have to find a way to promote the book to publishers.

Now we want to promote THE SHOP to readers.

And so I have this labor of love—I’ll be frank with you, this is my baby—still sitting up there on the Internet, pretty as a picture and twice as sweet, and I’d like to put it to work.

So I’m asking. Readers, fellow authors, entrepreneurs, marketing gurus, publishers, husbands, wives, kids, cute little kittens and puppies. How can we use this site to get the news out about THE SHOP? I’d love ideas, no matter how crazy, off-the-wall, staid, obvious, creative, or scintillatingly brilliant.

Please help.

whokilledbriennecross.com

Zandri comments, “I could stare at this cover forever…Or perhaps have a poster of it framed and hung in my living room.”

He goes on to say:

“Darkness on the Edge of Town is one such thriller that is a runaway bestseller (Carson is currently smoking my sales numbers). What makes this novel enticing initially is the cover. Its depiction of a neon lit street corner screams noir. The image has depth and wickedness in it, and mucho suspense. Words appear floating over the image…words that appear to have been typed on an old fashion Smith Corona typewriter. The kind Dash Hammett might have used when writing The Maltese Falcon, or when typing up a grocery list for his mistress Lillian Hellman which no doubt included several bottles of gin.”

Read Vincent Zandri’s blog post, Sunday Blog in Bed: The Eye of the Reader, and see why a great cover is an important element in the overall mix of what makes an eBook novel successful in the new realm of publishing.

Breaking News: J. Carson Black has three novels in the Amazon Top 100
#20 THE SHOP
#28 THE DEVIL’S HOUR
#59 DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN

Okay, now that we have that out of our system (wahoooo!), lets move on to the scintillating and entertaining Vincent Zandri and the latest installment of the Vincent Zandri and J. Carson Black Q&A.

Without further ado, you may now go to The Question of Multiple Climaxes from The Vincent Zandri Vox Blog–May 26, 2011

From Zandri’s post:
Ok, get your mind out of the gutter.
This is a family show after all.
But what J.Carson Black has me exploring this time is this: Is it possible for an indie author (to) experience multiple climaxes with his or her books or, what’s known as “spikes” up the E-Book, Kindle, and NOOK bestseller lists?

Why is this significant? Yes, the visibility and prestige of the ranking does translate into more sales, in addition to the sales that propelled the three Laura Cardinal thrillers to this ranking. In this new digital publishing world, Amazon ranking on these bestseller lists means greater exposure to readers. More important, readers will find this new 1-2-3 ranking significant in that the core of the Cardinal thrillers lies in the narrative thrust of Arizona DPS detective Laura Cardinal’s quest to get justice in the extraordinarily difficult homicide cases she investigates.

J. Carson Black meticulously researches both the context for her stories and the nitty-gritty “inside baseball” particulars of a state agency investigator facing daunting challenges in her personal life, in her professional circles, and coming from really bad guys (and gals) doing their best to do bad things to a lot of people.

Black sought and gained the trust of an Arizona Department of Public Safety detective in Tucson Arizona who shared with her his decades of experience as a investigator with that agency. The depth of primary research that Black pursued with this detective went so far as to actually walk a fictional crime scene with him for Darkness on the Edge of Town in Bisbee Arizona. Read about this in J. Carson Black’s post on jcarsonblack.com, “Walking the Crime Scene for Darkness on the Edge of Town”.

Take a look at the Laura Cardinal Series published on Kindle and see what tens of thousands of readers find entertaining and engaging about this breakthrough series of crime thrillers: Darkness on the Edge of Town, Dark Side of the Moon, and The Devil’s Hour. Like many of us, you may fall in love with Laura and walk with her on the path to get justice for the victims of the crimes she investigates.

J. Carson Black asked Vincent Zandri: “You have broken many sales records. Is there any silver bullet for bestselling E-book sales?

From the Vincent Zandri Vox Blog:
Is There a “Silver Bullet” to Achieving Bestselling E-book Sales?

(What follows is part one of an ongoing informal Q&A I’ve got going with bestselling author J.Carson Black. The Q&A will be published in parts here and on Black’s blog and eventually in its entirety)

The Silver Bullet for bestselling book sales: Does it actually exist?
My humble opinion: There is no silver bullet per se, when it comes to selling a lot of E-Books, Nooks and Kindles, so much as there are “bullets.”

What’s for certain is that every E-Book which is successful (and paper book for that matter) will have at least four things in common:

1. A great cover.
2. An intriguing and well written product description.
3. A price that says “Buy me” to impulse buyers ($.99 is a good place to start).
4. Great writing and a great story.

The other stuff or, in this case, more bullets: Social Networking on Facebook and Twitter helps keep you in the know, and so do virtual tours. Every published author has to maintain an up-to-date blog these days, and it pays to put out as many books as you can write well in a reasonable amount of time since you never know which title or titles is simply going to take off. Bestsellers like Aaron Patterson and JA Konrath have reminded us of the important of title proliferation time and time again in their own blogs.

The one silver bullet no one can control however is this: Luck.

Some books either have it or they don’t. There are books out there that get terrible reviews and win no prizes that somehow hit the Amazon Top Ten Bestselling Kindle E-Book List and there are books that win major awards like the Edgar and receive wonderful reviews that tank in the marketplace. You simply never can tell.

I’m convinced my new books have sold well in part because I’ve published two novels with the big legacy publishers in New York City. Titles that received a lot of praise from such notable publications as Publishers Weekly, The Boston Herald and the New York Post. Those reviews are mine to keep forever and ever, and my new publisher at StoneHouse/StoneGate Ink does not hesitate to display them prominently now that the same books, THE INNOCENT and GODCHILD are republished and enjoying Top 100 Amazon Kindle Bestseller status (“Innocent” was in the Top Ten for a month).

However, despite all the above, if you were to twist my arm and hold me down on the ground and demand one solid answer to the question, “What’s the silver bullet?” the closest sure bet would be price. Simply said, when a title is $.99 it tends to sell. On the other hand, there are many more books priced at $.99 that DO NOT SELL than there are books that move! Remember what I just said about luck?

There’s something else to consider about price: Do these “one buck” discounted e-books make the kind of money that a novel priced at $2.99 or even $3.99 will make? Not by a long shot. But if you are lucky, you might move a thousand or more per day and that will give you a great Amazon ranking.

“Innocent” was priced at $.99 for a short time. But at the start of this month it went back to its normal, $3.99 price tag. At the same time we witnessed a steady drop in ranking from No. 3 to around 90-120 over the past three weeks (after moving around 80,000 – 100,000 units in eight weeks). Trust me when I say we are pleasantly surprised. A price increase of 400% raised the possibility of the novel immediately plummeting in ranking to somewhere back in the 4 figures. But “Innocent” has proven its worth with a great cover, great product description, great reviews, and what I hope is very good story. What it won’t do at that price however, is entice many of the impulse buyers who buy now/read later. Still, the novel is making far more money at the new, higher price. And we feel that $3.99 is still a bargain. Have you bought a Big Mac lately?

So, to repeat, there is no silver bullet when it comes to selling books, but there are bullets. And each and every one of them is painted with a layer of luck in order for them to hit their target.

WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM

And now, here you can experience through this scene in J. Carson Black’s The Shop, Cyril Landry’s reflection on his signatory day of Navy SEALs training:

* * *

Stepping outside into the diamond-hard sunshine, holding the RadioShack bag with the boxed microphones inside, Landry looked in the shop window next door.  He gathered the store sold clothing for the new generation, casual stuff you could wear to class or on a skateboard.  Navy hoodies were displayed in the window, a photo above showing an unshaven twenty-something rappelling down from a helicopter.  The clothing line was called “SEALS.”

“If you only knew,” he said to the display.  The kid in the ad would likely want no part of SEALs training he endured at the Naval Amphibious Base on Coronado.

*  *  *

That evolution of  BUD/S training was to keep him from drowning by making it a working proposition. He, along with the other trainees, was thrown into the water bound hand and foot.  Hands behind the back. Normally, he was pretty tough. He liked to train—no, make that, he loved to train—and he was strong.  Stronger than the guys that quit. Stronger than the guys that stayed. He was bigger than most but he was able to keep up with the little guys, the compact guys who excelled in SEALs training.  He was near the cut-off at the top of the age range, but he was as good any of them and smarter than most.  Invincible.  But when he plunged into the nine-foot deep pool, something inside him broke loose.  It was mortifying; this rebellion at the idea of drowning, apparently hardwired into him.  There was yelling, there was berating, there was the water closing over his head as he sank. There were other bodies in the water, wires of refracted light cutting their bodies into pieces.  They looked like prisoners.  They looked like less than human beings, and he knew he looked just like them.

Commotion at three o’clock.  Guy flipping out.  Had to be taken out of the pool. Thrashing like a fish on a hook.  Landry felt like flipping out, too, felt like he really was drowning, even though he wasn’t.  Straining to breathe.  Chest burning.  The first time his feet touched bottom he had forced himself to stay under, using what little breath he had, holding it for the required minute before shooting up to the surface like a cannon. He was expected to bob on the surface for five minutes.  Any way he could, but ideally, he should conserve energy. There was some fuck with a watch. Yelling at him.  That fuck was his BUD/S Indoc instructor, a real hard-ass named Keogh, a man he admired.  No, make that a man he worshipped. But right now he was just the fuck who was stretching the time out, way past five minutes. Fifteen minutes, maybe. How could he get away with that? It was blatantly unfair, but that was something Landry’d learned first thing: the SEALs were not about fairness. They were about unfairness. He could feel himself slipping under the water. Blow it out. Grab a breath. Chin up. His body bucked, got torqued around.  He looked like a prisoner and he felt like a prisoner.  At this moment, he was less than a human being.

He was less than nothing and more than everything, because if he made it through he truly would be invincible.

This was how you were forged.

This was what made you a warrior.

His swim buddy was having trouble. He couldn’t let that happen.  His bond with his swim buddy was greater than his bond with his wife. They did everything together. They never left each other’s side. They even went to the head together. He managed to get closer, managed to throw him some confidence. At least he thinks that’s what happened, because they both made it. Float, bob, swim, forward and back flips. Other stuff. Interminable.

They call it drown-proofing.  It was the worst thing he had to do, the one thing where he thought he would break, where he thought he would give up the dream and admit defeat.

But he didn’t break that day. He didn’t quit like some of the others.

He didn’t have quit in him.

Didn’t have quit in him.  True then, true now.  Landry saw things through to the end.

* * *

To learn more about Cyril Landry, his exploits as a former Navy SEAL and his new quest to take down The Shop, read J. Carson Black’s The Shop on Amazon Kindle.

Some of her sources, although willing to contribute their knowledge and experience, are unnamed and will not be given credit publicly because of the sensitive nature of their work and the requirements for national security. Read the article and get insights into what makes The Shop the runaway Amazon bestseller and Cyril Landry one of the most memorable thriller characters.