Book Giveaway Works

I've changed my mind about ebook giveaways. I had read about the experiences of writers like Rob Walker, who has his books in the Amazon KDP Select program where you have five days every ninety days that you can make your book free for the Kindle. Rob is always writing about how he gives away thousands and the result is an increase in sales. I tried it back in the spring when the ebook version of Beware the Jabberwock came out.

I knew it would take a lot of promotion, so I did posts on all the lists I belong to, mentioned it on Facebook, and in my blog. I had read about all the thousands of downloads people would have, but my three-day promotion produced only about 3,000, and I found no subsequent boost in the sales of Jabberwock or my other ebooks. As a result, I took it out of the KDP Select program and decided free books wasn't the way to go.

Then Rebecca Dahlke resurrected her All Mystery E-Newsletter and started a discussion group along with it. She put out eight pages of instructions on how to promote your ebook in the Amazon program, complete with dozens of websites that list free ebooks where readers can find them. After reading it, I thought it was worth another try.

This time I chose to give away my first published book, the one that started my Greg McKenzie mystery series, Secret of the Scroll. I took it off of Smashwords.com, since you have to give Amazon an exclusive to be in the Select program. I had only sold a handful on Smashwords anyway. Then I started going through all the recommended websites, setting up my book to be listed on the free days.

I originally set the promo for August 29-31, and that's how I scheduled it on the sites. But when I went to the book's Kindle page the morning of August 29, it wasn't showing as free. I checked the Promotions Manager and my days had disappeared. I quickly entered August 30-September 1 and tried to notify as many of the free book sites as possible. I also plugged it on Facebook and Twitter, which Rebecca's instructions said was a good place to promote.

By the second day of my promotion Secret of the Scroll was #1 in the Thriller Suspense category for free books and #16 in the Top 100. It stayed at #1 the last day as well. When it was over, 10,253 people had downloaded a free book.

The theory is that giving away books gets your name out there and will result in more sales. In the two days since the promotion ended, I have sold 42 copies of the Secret ebook and 14 copies of my other ebooks. I've also had 19 people "borrow" Secret of the Scroll. Amazon puts up a kitty of about $600,000 each month that is paid to authors of borrowed books, depending on the number borrowed. This is far and away more sales than I've ever registered in such short a period.

So, yes, I'm now a believer in the giveaway feature of KDP Select.

Chester Campbell
Visit me at Mystery Mania

Who's Who in The Poksu Conspiracy

There has been an ongoing discussion the past few days on the subject of using a Cast of Characters in mystery novels. Some people think it's a great idea, others couldn't care less. My wife thinks I often have too many characters in my books. That could be true, but each  one has a specific purpose for being there.

I had thought about including a list a few times and finally decided to go through with it while revising my second Post Cold War thriller, The Poksu Conspiracy. My decision was based on the setting for most of the story, South Korea. With lots of strange Korean names, I thought it would help readers keep the characters separate.

When I mentioned the possibility on my Mystery Mania blog a few weeks ago, I received a positive response from quite a few readers. There were suggestions that the list be organized alphabetically as well as by categories. My colleague Jaden Terrell objected that labeling the last "Cast of Characters" would be "a blatant reminder that none of these people are real. It's a bludgeon to my suspension of disbelief." She suggested calling it a Who's Who.

That's what I've done. I decided there was no need to include people who only appear in only one chapter. That left me with 55 characters in my Who's Who. In the story, Burke Hill, the hero of Beware the Jabberwock, has become an official  of Worldwide Communications Consultants, an international public relations firm that is really a CIA spinoff. The Who's Who category breakdown includes:

Worldwide Communications Consultants
American Officials
South Korean Officials
Seoul Metropolitan Police Bureau
World War II Poksu Guerilla Group
North Korean Officials
Other Americans
In Hungary
Other Koreans

Since one of the main characters is a Seoul homicide detective, the book could be called half thriller, half Korean police procedural. It should be out in ebook format within the next couple of months.

Creating Believable Characters

By Chester Campbell

I think creating characters is one of the most interesting facets of fiction writing. Cameron Quinn, a central figure in my latest novel, Beware the Jabberwock, was a fun person to work with. I originally wrote the Post Cold War thriller in 1989-91 after years of reading spy novels and non-fiction books about the CIA and the KGB. I needed a veteran CIA officer to put on the trail of the Jabberwock conspiracy, and Quinn was my man.

As has been my custom in the years since, I started with a few basic facts in his background, then developed his character more fully as the story progressed. I made him a member of Gen. William Donovan's Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the latter part of World War II. After the war he received a law degree from Harvard. His father was a prominent Boston attorney, and his Ivy League connections made him an ideal candidate for the fledgling CIA.

Quinn became a main contact with the Mossad under legendary counterintelligence chief James Angleton. That put him in a bad position with his current CI chief, Hawthorne Elliott, an Israeli critic and detractor of Angleton. Quinn was a feisty Irishman who had always enjoyed imbibing, and after his wife died of cancer, he went on a drinking binge that got him in trouble at the Agency. Following a six-month drying out process, he hopes to salvage his career with work on tracking down the meaning of the code word Jabberwock.

This is where Cameron Quinn intersects with my main protagonist, Burke Hill, and offers more opportunities to develop his character. The two had worked together informally years before when their cases came together. Burke was an FBI agent then, working with J. Edgar Hoover's Goon Squad on projects of questionable legality. In one instance, Hoover sent Hill to Mexico to take care of a troublesome leftist who turned out to be Quinn's intelligence source. They worked together to placate both agencies at a time when the CIA and FBI were hardly best friends.

When Quinn recruits Burke Hill to assist him in the Jabberwock investigation, his daughter comes into the picture. She was born while Quinn was assigned to the American Embassy in Budapest at the time of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. After graduation from college, she worked with the CIA in Europe for a short time, then got into the travel business in Washington. Her company handles travel arrangements for CIA operators.

I portrayed Cameron Quinn as a likable, almost cherubic, grandfatherly man, but one highly dedicated to his craft and worthy of the nickname Pachinko, "the man with steel balls," which he earned working with the Israelis. He gets into some pretty sharp philosophical wrangles with Burke.

I hadn't considered it when I began dealing with the character, but as things developed, Quinn's drinking problem turned out to be a key turning point in the story. He was certainly an enjoyable person to follow through his ups and downs. It made him come across as a real person you could see and hear and connect with at every level.

Incidentally, Beware the Jabberwock is currently available as an ebook for the Kindle and on Smashwords,com for most any e-reader. Within the next week or so, it will be on Amazon as a trade paperback. You'll find more on my website and  blog.

Writing About Places We've Never Been

For most of my fiction writing career, I have stuck with the idea of only taking my characters to locations I have visited. Even that can be problematic if you aren't careful. When I wrote my first Post-Cold War thriller in 1990-91, I had visited Hong Kong. But when I revised Beware the Jabberwock for publication recently, I discovered I had used a hospital that was too far from where my character had an accident.

While revising the second book in the trilogy set just after the Cold War, The Poksu Conspiracy, due for publication soon, I realized I had broken the familiarization rule. I had a few scenes set in Berlin and Budapest. These are places I've never been. I depended on some maps of Berlin and online information for the German capital, but not much was required since it only involved a drive in from the airport to a downtown office.

The Hungarian part was a bit more complicated. I had Burke and Lori Hill spending several days there. Budapest was Lori's birthplace. Luckily, National Geographic Traveler ran a feature on the city around this time. It included great pictures of various sites and an article that provided lots of information. I also read a book by someone who had lived there several years that gave an inside look at the area.

Among the places described in the magazine was a restaurant that had been restored to its pre-Soviet satellite name, the Cafe New York. It occupied two levels of the old New York Insurance Company building, and the Communists had renamed it Cafe Hungaria. The lavishly decorated upper level was a balcony that looked down on the lower level called Melyviz, or Deep Water. In the old days, the affluent gathered on the upper level to peer down disdainfully on the writers and artists who subsisted on the cheaper fare of Deep Water. Burke and Lori made an important contact there.

My work was validated when I submitted those chapters to my writers group. Turns out one of my colleagues had lived in Budapest while her husband was there with the U.S. military. She said my descriptions were right on.

I haven't begun revising the third book, which was originally written around 1993. Titled Overture to Disaster, it is the longest of the three, currently clocking in at 165,000 words. And much of it is set in locations that I've never visited. I was well versed in the activities of the CIA and KGB back in those days, and I did a great deal of research on areas where the story is set. In the early part of the book, I have scenes in Minsk and Kiev, capitals of two of the new countries that were formerly Soviet republics.

It was only later in my fiction career that I decided to stick with locations I've visited. I'm pleased with what I did in these first three books. I'll be surprised if any of my readers takes me to task for the way I described these places nearly a quarter of a century ago.

Writing Techno-Thrillers

Tom Clancy is the master of the techno-thriller. I was an avid reader of his books from the first, The Hunt for Red October. I enjoyed his use of technology, though at times it grew a bit tedious, such as his detailed description of the bad guys fashioning a nuclear bomb. I was impressed enough, though, that I put quite a bit of technology into my first manuscripts in the early nineties.

I found the genre required a great deal of research into a variety of subjects. I went to the Vanderbilt University Library and got a courtesy card after explaining that I was an author, though unpublished at the time. I spent a lot of hours going through the stacks and reading up on technical subjects, both in books and magazines. Much of the information I needed came from the Engineering section of the library.

I wrote three Post Cold War thrillers that required extensive research. The first, Beware the Jabberwock, now in the Kindle Store, was not as heavily dependent on techno business as the following books. It did include a high-tech security system for an island off the Florida coast, for which I got an assist from my brother, whose electrical engineering career included being director of engineering for the local electric utility. I also researched some technical aspects of aerial photography. In earlier times I had been intelligence officer for an Air National Guard tactical reconnaissance group.

The second book, The Poksu Conspiracy, involves South Korea and nuclear power generation, plus some nuclear weapons issues. I frequented the Vanderbilt Library extensively on these subjects, allowing use of the jargon for getting a nuclear power plant online. I solicited advice from my brother regarding a sophisticated electronic setup for detonating a bomb.

The third book, which turned out as long as a Clancy thriller, is titled Overture to Disaster. Like the first book, it begins in the fall of 1991 as the Cold War was ending. Following parallel plot threads, it tracks a Belarus police investigator seeking answers to his brother's death and the aftermath of an Air Force special operators mission to bring out an important defector from Iran. This required research into the MH-53J Pave Low III special operations helicopter. After writing the part about the mission, I sent it to an operations officer in a spec ops unit for critique. I also did extensive research into Soviet weapons and the use of nerve gas.

Overall, I found that writing techno-thrillers requires a dedication to technical research and finding people who can supply obscure information. It was a lot of fun twenty years ago, but I have since gravitated to whodunits that require a limited amount of outside digging. Those early novels wandered all around the globe. Now I stick mostly to the Nashville area, with a few excursions to places not too distant.

Chester Campbell

Visit me at Mystery Mania

Free Books - an Amazon Promo

By Chester Campbell

When Amazon first announced its KDP Select program, it looked like another effort of the 800-pound gorilla to throw its weight around. I had all of my mysteries set up on Amazon for the Kindle and at Smashwords for all the other ebook formats. The key to Amazon's program is the requirement that you make the book exclusive to the Kindle for 90 days.

The kicker to the deal is that the book is available in the Kindle Owners Lending Library. Amazon currently puts up a kitty of $600,000 a month to be divided among authors whose books were borrowed from the library. The kitty is divided by the total of books borrowed, and each author gets that amount times the number of his or her books checked out. According to the KDP Select FAQ, each book earned $1.70 per borrow in a prior month.  It isn't as much as the 70 percent royalty, but it isn't bad.

Only members of Amazon Prime can borrow books, and they're restricted to one per month. It costs $79 to be a Prime member, but you get other benefits like free two-day shipping on your puchases.

When I finished revising and getting my first Post Cold War thriller edited and ready for publication, I decided to try the KDP Select deal. I know several authors who have done well in the program. One of its features is the ability to make the book free for five days during the 90-day period. It's a good way to get word out on the book and encourage reviews. So here's the deal:

Today (April 27) and tomorrow (April 28), you can get a free Kindle ebook by going to this link: Beware the Jabberwock.

The book is set in the fall of 1991 and spring of 1992. As the Cold War winds down, former enemies on both sides of the Iron Curtain plot to retain power with a deadly stroke against top world leaders. Telephone intercepts hint at its existence. Veteran CIA spook Cameron Quinn finds it necessary to recruit an old FBI friend to assist in his investigation. Burke Hill, still trying to live down his dismissal by J. Edgar Hoover years ago, travels from Tel Aviv to Hong Kong and soon finds himself unable to trust anyone. He and Quinn's daughter, Lori, face one trap after another as they put the pieces of Operation Jabberwock together and find they're fighting against the clock to stop the slaughter.

Pick up your free ebook today or tomorrow and put a review on Amazon.