Best Seller
It’s been a surreal couple of days, pushing out promotional messages, and watching the rankings fluctuate, but my book, The Kill Chain, has been updated with the Best Seller sticker. Six months after being offered a publishing deal and a month after publication, I’m now officially an Amazon Best Seller!
First reviews have come in and they are positive and although I know I cannot please everyone, all in all I’m happy I’ve reached another milestone in my writing career. All of the no replies, all of the rejections, have been steps on the road to this point. The Kill Chain was turned down by other publishers, but I persevered. Yes I was disheartened then, and yes I had to pick myself up. No one else was going to do that for me. No one else was going to make it better. Rejection is part of the process, as is negative reviews and one star ratings. You dust yourself down, and turn up at your desk the next day and get right back to work. As I’ve noted elsewhere, The Kill Chain is my eleventh novel in as many years. Writing is a long game and overnight success, although it does happen, is pretty rare and not a strategy to rely on.
The Kill Chain was the most difficult to write and it took me a long time to initially draft and then realise I needed to rewrite in the first person to make it come alive. Sue Barnard edited the drafts and without her expertise, the book would have been readable only to geeks like myself. Sue pushed me to make it understandable, and what I’m hearing back from readers this was achieved. I’m writing a sequel just now, The Kill Switch, and I imagine what Sue would make of some of the paragraphs as I’m drafting them. This is making me do the appropriate changes as I go along in the hope that should the draft be selected for publication, it may make it an easier edit. We will see.
It’s slowly beginning to sink in what I have achieved and although I did open an 18 year old Bowmore single malt Scotch whisky for one celebratory dram, it’s very much business as usual from here on. The book won’t sell itself, and the next novel certainly won’t write itself. I have a number of projects on the go and with those plus a TBR pile that is beginning to tower over me, I have plenty to be doing.
The Fiction Factory 