Doing the Promotion Pole Dance

I like to know what readers are thinking, especially when it comes to my writing. For instance, while reviews are vital for an author's success these days, they're not just for social media's algorithms: They can also let the author know what may or may not work for his audience.

And they can drive the author to drink, but never mind.

That's why I ran that poll earlier this month, in which I asked readers which of our book or books they thought I should run promotions for next. I got a lot of hits on that blog, probably not because of my sparkling wit. The surprise: 100% of those who voted in the poll thought I should promote one of my romantic comedies next.

Or maybe not such a surprise. considering that at this writing only three people actually voted.

Ah, well. One of my friends said they couldn't access the poll from where they were, cyber-speaking, so I'm just going to pretend that slowed down the results by, say, 500%. Oh, if you want to hit me with a contradictory vote, it's still up:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1bV_IvSwiWKchvD8TaEQ1z0Nw5GbdHdXhKQpXerhxJdM/edit

 

Promotion isn't the most exciting thing to vote on, after all. Besides, if I wanted to make it easy on myself, I'd have stuck to just one genre to begin with.

Still, when 100% of people motivated enough to give their opinion give the same one, maybe that should tell me something. I think, in between submissions and working on my new novel, I'm going to put a little more time and money into promoting Coming Attractions.

Guess I picked the wrong decade to give up drinking.

It's my newest novel, and I really think it deserves more of an audience. Besides, since getting the rights back to two of the others we haven't had time to reissue them, so their presence on the internet is limited right now. The last one, Radio Red, also deserve more readers (in my opinion), but it's not as recent, so Coming Attractions it is.

Now I have another question for you, especially for my readers who are writers themselves: What is your preferred/most effective method of promoting books? I've had some success here and there, but not enough to really make back the money I spent. I'm considering doing an Amazon promotion, which some authors swear by. Me, I just swear.

Opinions? I promise not to put it in a poll.

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

 

book review: Scavenger Hunt, by Dani Lamia

Some novels dive right into the action; some try to get you interested in the characters and their world first; and the best ones try to accomplish both right from the get-go.

Scavenger Hunt, by Dani Lamia, is a slow burn, so slow I was convinced I was reading a literary novel at first. (Literary novel definition: No plot, no fun, and everyone dies in the end.) And yet, despite the fact that I'm a vocal hater of literary novels, Scavenger Hunt managed to draw me in to the story of Caitlin Nylo, a rich kid who, as the novel opens, comes home to find her mother has committed suicide.

See? No fun.

Jump forward to present day, when Caitlin is divorced, second in command of her eccentric father's toy and gaming company, and unwilling wrangler of her four dysfunctional siblings. Lamia puts a lot of words into describing the world of Caitlin and her family's world, and despite myself I was drawn in. The first twist comes when her father passes away, and Caitlin is enraged to discover his multi-billion dollar inheritance--including control of the company--will go not to his number one daughter, but to whichever brother or sister manages to win an elaborate scavenger hunt.

After that, the twists start coming so fast that I had to put pain cream on my neck. The competition exposes old injuries and sibling rivalries, and that's before the game becomes deadly.

https://www.amazon.com/Scavenger-Hunt-Dani-Lamia-ebook/dp/B085HKPSY1

Have you ever read one of those books that was good, then had a final twist that made it great? When I got to the end of the second to last chapter I had to stand up and walk around the room, yelling and shaking my head. My co-workers weren't amused.

Otherwise I'm still of mixed feelings, because I wanted so badly to dislike a setup that took a third of the book, but I just couldn't. Lamia drew me in with Caitlin's damaged, cynical outlook on life, as well as vivid descriptions of the other characters and their world. It drew me all the way to the scavenger hunt, which went nothing at all like the characters, or I, could have expected. Literary novel? Maybe literary mystery would be a better description.

You probably won't finish this book with a smile on your face--but you won't forget it easily, either.

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

Dad's Gift

 It's been a few weeks now since we got together for my father's birthday, but Emily and I have been sick most of the time since then and I've just now gotten around to putting up the pictures.

Not that they're the greatest pictures I've ever taken, but there was food to eat. Priorities.

Dad turned ... something. I figure if I don't think about his age, I won't think about my own. But he still has enough lung power to get those candles out, so it's all good.

 

But the coolest thing of the day, if you don't count the fried chicken (we're southern) was this very cool mural. Mural? Wall hanging? Heart posty-grandpa cloth?

It lists all of Delbert Hunter's children, grand-children, and great-grandchildren, of which I'm one. (I'll let you guess how far down the list I am.)

Hearts are appropriate ... a lot of love, there.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Don't forget to take the book promotion poll:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1bV_IvSwiWKchvD8TaEQ1z0Nw5GbdHdXhKQpXerhxJdM/edit

 

I'll bet no author has ever asked you which book he should promote next.

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

 

Dispatchers Do It By Phone

 Every five years I do nothing to honor National Public Safety Telecommunications Week, so I'm reprinting this from 2017. Hah! No, I'm not taking the week off, I'm just working on a novel, instead. There's a fire truck in it.

In 1991, after an unfortunate encounter with a teething baby, a Congressman from Delaware became the very first person to yell, "What's the number for 911?"

Okay, I was kidding about the baby: He just wanted to complain that the Congressional Dining Room coffee had gone cold. Still, he made a basic mistake that led to a delayed emergency response: He tried to dial "nine eleven". In an effort to get the word out that the number for 911 is "nine one one", Congress declared the second full week in April to be National Public Safety Telecommunications Week. (They declared the third full week of April to be Teething Baby Awareness Week.)

Indiana made that same declaration in 1999, and this year April 11-17 is that very same week. That's why, being a public safety telecommunicator myself, I tried to take that week off.

I mean, it was my week, right? Daiquiris in Hawaii for all dispatchers! But it turns out emergency dispatch centers have to be manned 24 hours a day, something they didn't tell me when I signed on.

(Okay, it's possible they did tell me that. It was thirty years ago--and while I haven't slept well since then, I have slept.)

I call myself a dispatcher because "public safety telecommunicator" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but the longer term is more accurate. In bigger dispatch centers, one dispatcher might take 911 calls, another might page out ambulances, a third radio police, a forth may be dedicated to fire departments, and so on. In a smaller dispatch center (like mine), the dispatcher does all that.

He might also enter calls into the computer, do other computer work like arrest warrants, stolen vehicle entries and missing persons reports, run licenses for traffic stops, and take business line calls. He might empty the trash, make coffee, and operate the security doors for the county or city jails. He might set off the local tornado sirens (hopefully during tornado warnings). He (wait, I think most of them are she) might enter missing person and Amber Alert reports into national databases, try to talk down suicidal people on the phone, or talk somebody through doing CPR to their loves ones. It might be any combination of the above at the same time.

So "dispatcher" doesn't really cover it.

Part of the time you don't really need all the people who work in a dispatch center. The rest of the time you need three times as many. Sadly, no one has yet come up with a way to predict which time will fall at which--well--time. But there are certain ways to tell if it's going to get busy:

If you just heated up your meal.
If there's a full Moon, regardless of what the research "experts" say.
If some moron just said, "say, it's been quiet tonight".
If you just realized your bladder is full.

In the emergency services, breaks are just an obscure theory. They're best taken at the dispatch console, with a microwave nearby. My record for reheating soup is eight times, but hey--I'm a slow eater, anyway.

When 911 calls you away from that already lukewarm chimichanga, it might be to help someone whose little toe has been hurting for three days. Or, maybe you're about to become the last person someone ever talks to. Not knowing is a large part of the stress.

I'm told the average career length for a 911 dispatch is 7-10 years, give or take. If you do it longer than 10 years, you qualify as legally insane. I've done it for three times that long.

In that time I learned some of the really serious stuff is actually the easiest. Your house is on fire? Send the fire department. You're having chest pains? Send an ambulance. Many of my least favorite calls come in on the non-emergency line, and start with "Can I ask you a question?" In my business, there's a fine line between "question" and "complaint", but either way it's bound to end up being one of those head scratchers.

There's also the fact that many 911 calls aren't emergencies, and sometimes business line calls are.

So yeah, I think it's great that people in this job get a week of their own--they earned it. You know how I want to celebrate Public Safety Telecommunications Week? That's right: a vacation.

But I can wait a little longer for that ... maybe take it on a weekend, in the summer ... during a full Moon.

 

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

 

 

 

 

Taking the Promotion Poll Position

 Time for a poll!

I mean, a survey--get your dancing mind out of the gutter.

I just realized, it's been over four months since I did any kind of promotion or advertising at all for our books. This is not how one should run a business, but it's easy to do, since I have a hard time thinking of writing as a business.

Last year, I spent ... well, more money than I took in, advertising. Yes, it produced an increase in sales, but it's hard to tell how much, and what worked best. To paraphrase the old joke, there are three good ways to promote books, but nobody knows what they are.

The other question is, which books to promote? We won't be able to get a new book out as soon as I'd hoped this year, but I have a dozen or so previously published ones to keep on everyone's reading radar. (Didn't LeVar Burton host Reading Radar?)

Should it be the most recent one, More Slightly Off the Mark?

 

Or my first published novel, which sees its tenth anniversary later this year?
 

(It's the one on the left.)

Or maybe I should go by genre, since I've written in more genres than Congress has pay raises. Humor doesn't sell worth crap unless you're already famous, so maybe I should give up on it or get an HBO special, or maybe a prison term, which always ups sales.

Maybe I should do a poll. Anyone know how to do a poll? Me, either. Let me check around.

💁✌💤

Okay, well, now I know how to do that. Let's try again:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1bV_IvSwiWKchvD8TaEQ1z0Nw5GbdHdXhKQpXerhxJdM/edit

 

You should be able to tell me what to spend my money on to get you to spend your money! I mean, if we're not getting rich we might as well have fun, right?

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

Happy Spring Trails to You

 Emily's going back to work (I mean, other than editing our books), with the Pokagon Saddle Barn opening up Easter weekend--and every weekend until Memorial Day, when they'll go all week long.

They feature trail rides, which are, well, rides ... on trails. On horses. Keep up.

Although Pokagon is a State Park, the saddle barns are contracted--so they're one of those many small businesses who could use your support in this time of pandemics and such. Last year they didn't open at all until Memorial Day weekend, and had very little advanced notice to get ready. Hopefully things will go more smoothly this year.

Last year I caught Beowulf trading racing tips with some of the Pokagon steeds. What with them not being human, I'm not sure it was illegal.

It's just another sign that spring is here. And boy, this past winter was a particularly long one, wasn't it?

May all your trails be happy ones.

As for me, I just finished polishing a novel that involves state parks, horses, and dogs (and murder, but never mind), and the Pokagon Saddle Barn is certainly one place that gave me inspiration for it. Hopefully I can use it to inspire a literary agent to take me on, or at least get a trail ride.

Some Thoughts On Being Sick

 The other day I sneezed my head off, and I'd like to thank my wife, Emily, for not only retrieving it but helping me get my head on straight.

It was a challenge. I sneezed so hard my head bounced from the living room into the kitchen, where our dog got his hands--um, mouth--on it, thinking it was a new toy. Emily ran after him and got it back, but now I have tooth marks on my forehead and a chewed up ear. The staples I won't complain about--we didn't have thread.

She had to tackle him. It wasn't pretty.

Okay, it's possible I'm exaggerating. Slightly. Certainly my sneezes did startle Beowulf several times, and he'd come running to make sure I was okay. Or possibly he came running to see if I'd overturned a plate of food. It was all because we made a foolish mask error, and two days after we did Emily came down with a bad head cold. When I got it a few days later it was worse, of course, because I'm a man.

You may have heard the term "man flu", but it really was only a cold, and since it wasn't the coronavirus I don't have much room to complain. Just the same, Emily and I agreed that this was "just" a cold the way the Federal government does a "little" overspending. We were down for a week, much of which I don't remember because NyQuil is wonderful.

They way I measure my illnesses: I know it's bad when I take a sick day from work. In my job, if I call in sick somebody else has to work the shift, and I don't need any new enemies. At the same time, I've often lectured coworkers that if they might be contagious they should stay the heck home, and either I was contagious or my wife and I take this sharing thing way too far.

A rare photo of me pre-sneeze. The camera was recovered days later, but the photographer remains missing.

 

The next levels of illness involve what I do if I stay home. If I can get some writing done, I'm in fairly good shape. If I don't feel up to writing, then that's quality reading time. If all I can do is sit in a lump and catch up on TV, call the coroner.

If I lose my appetite, I'm on death's doorstep. I did lose a few pounds over that period, but it's not a diet I'd recommend.

Meanwhile I really did have some impressive sneezes, although the only damage they did was crack windows and shatter nerves. The US Geological Survey says the worst of them only registered as a 4.7 in Chicago, which is barely higher than the sound of cell doors slamming on indicted Illinois governors.

Anyway, we got by with the help of chicken noodle soup, vitamin C, and modern pharmaceuticals. Wait. Pharma ... p ... h ... a ...

Um, drugs.

NyQuil is coma-inducing manna from Heaven. Did I mention that? On one day I slept for ten hours straight. But I have the same question about it that I have about Benadryl: Does it really do anything about my symptoms? Or does it make me sleep so deeply I just don't notice them? I don't remember.

Oh, I almost forgot one other indispensable thing: Kleenex.

The guy who invented Kleenex deserved a Noble Prize in Awesome.

The trick is to position so many boxes around the house that you could step from one to another. We had 2.4 boxes of Kleenex per room on average, with fewer in the basement and one by every chair in the living room. Fourteen trees died for our noses, in just one week. Always have plenty of Kleenex.

And NyQuil. Did I mention it's awesome?

A recent photo of my upper respiratory system.

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

Sing Along With This Month's Newsletter

 I've been mostly offline due to being deathly ill for the last several days. (It was only a nasty head cold: Emily and I just felt like we were on the edge of death.) Luckily I'd scheduled our monthly newsletter just before that, and you can find it here:

https://mailchi.mp/a7d0d4972714/spring-has-sprung?e=2b1e842057

Of course, you can just subscribe to it, no questions asked. Once a month or so you get a cute picture of the dog, some writing stuff, and news or lack thereof about my attempts to get published again. Most people show up for the dog photo, I think.

But this particular newsletter has something different: a little song I wrote. Very little. Join us, and you probably won't be sorry! (Just so you know, we did not have a computer virus.)

You've seen this photo before, but in the newsletter it's usually a new one.

 

 

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

Why We Love Trouble is a mystery

See that little play on words I did with the title? No? Never mind.

 

 I finished the final polishing of We Love Trouble. It tops out at 81,000 words--still the longest novel I've written yet. Boy, is writing a mystery tough: characters, suspects, clues, red herrings, ghosts, horses, Bigfoot ... 

 Well, it's that kind of story.

I already have Beowulf: In Harm's Way, Fire On Mist Creek, and Summer Jobs Are Murder at various points in the submission process, and I think I'll send this one out on the literary agent hunt. I really like it ... which doesn't mean it's good, of course, but if readers have half as much fun reading it as I did writing it, it should do pretty well.

I've described We Love Trouble as "The Thin Man meets Scooby Doo". For those of you who don't remember "The Thin Man", I could also describe it as "Hart to Hart Meets Scooby Doo". For those who don't remember "Hart to Hart", I'm at something of a loss. I assume everyone has heard of Scooby Doo.

I finished a submission cover letter, and here's one of the blurbs I came up with:

A near collision with a riderless horse leads travel bloggers Travis and Victoria Noble to an unconscious teenager—then to a dead man. A quiet Indiana camping trip for the Suzuki twins and their steeds has become a conspiracy involving horse racing, blackmail, and … morel mushrooms.

It's another fun mystery for the always helpful Nobles, who are so used to being suspects they have bail money on speed dial. Not so for their dog Wulfgar, whose unusual talents include seeing dead people. He struggles to protect his humans and pass on what the ghosts tell him: Something's unusual about the twins' horses, and the threat to the Suzuki family—and the Nobles—is far more than supernatural.

 

Yeah, I'd read that. Well, I already have, about a dozen times.

 

"Did you say dog?"

 

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

 

Ford ... Falcon?

I have a feeling you wouldn't want to be in this car when the driver's dodging potholes.

Guess I should have waited to post this until May Fourth ... but I've been holding on to it since last summer, and with the recent weather I'm getting a new hope that summer might actually get here again.

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"