What are some of your favorite ways to promote your work?
I try and do a number of blogs, both posting and interviews, maybe a brief mention of a release with a cover shot on some social sites. I do not contact every person available on Face Book, Good Reads and Twitter announcing my book has been available for forty-five minutes and please help me move to the top 1000 on Amazon. That serves as a real turn-off to me. I have a continually growing group of readers who follow my books, they are die-hard Dev Haskell fans and I put the word out to them. I have a Dev Haskell face book site where I post some funny stuff including images of women who have become fed up with Dev and ended their relationship. With social media there is a very fine line between being effective and becoming a pest. Amazon just published an article about how their top ten best selling authors spend very little time on social media sites and almost no time checking sales figures. I have some newspapers that regularly review my books and I’m in touch with a number of online book review sites. You have to work to get the word out there, but that said, ‘in your face’ is not my style.
What is a typical writing day like for you?
Writing is a solitary occupation. I’m an early riser so I answer emails for maybe an hour and a half, I probably finish breakfast around 7:30 AM. Then I sit down and edit what I wrote the previous day. I read this out loud, make some minor corrections along the way. I’ve just described maybe two and a half hours. This puts me in the flow of things from the previous day and I begin writing anew. I do not work from an outline. I have a rough idea where things are going, but nothing too specific. I usually write until around 5:00 PM. At the end of any given day I’m as surprised as the next person at the plot twists and turns my story has taken. I usually do not answer phone calls or run errands while writing, I save that for the evening. Yeah, I know, I’m a pretty dull guy.
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