Deep Fury, my seventh Cordell Logan mystery, debuts today. The publication of a new book is always a thrilling if not tremulous occasion for any author, regardless of how many titles they’ve already put out there. Will readers enjoy what I’ve written this time? Will the critics be kind? Will I sell enough copies so that I don’t have to go out and find a real job somewhere, like Home Depot?
Fingers crossed.
New books come with plenty of responsibilities, not the least of which is remembering to acquire enough copies for your freeloading buddies who are too cheap to buy their own. But perhaps the most important obligation these days is the necessity of promoting your own book. It’s a function that, frankly speaking, I find uncomfortable and usually have to be arm-twisted into doing.
Back in the day, your typically introverted novelist (read: pretty much all novelists) could sit back with the doors locked and shades drawn, box up their new manuscript, and send it off to their editors laissez-faire, never having to trifle much with tooting their own horns once the book was released.
These days, publishers expect authors to be self-motivated, marketing whizbangs. It’s all about “building your brand” and “extending your reach” on social media with blog posts like the one you’re currently reading. We’re talking search engine optimization, dear friends, not to mention meta descriptions, backlinks, keyword density, and a myriad of other Digital Age terminology, much of which my old-school, analog brain simply fails to comprehend. The good news is that I have some wonderful experts in my corner willing to hold my hand as I navigate this largely bewildering process. These include, most notably, my website guru, Blake O’Ruairi, who is as Irish as his name sounds, and my lead publicist, the ever-charming Tatiana Radujkovic, who works for Blackstone, my publisher.
If there’s anything I do understand about the art and science of self-promotion, and one that I do enjoy, it’s the need to get out there and get together with the folks who like reading mysteries. Toward that end, though the details are yet to be worked out, I hope to be appearing in 2025 at a bookstore somewhere in your time zone. Meanwhile. I’m already anticipating questions I’ll get from interested readers, mainly because I’ve been asked many of them before. The one that always seems to come up is the one I can never adequately answer: How do you come up with your ideas?
I’m not trying to be glib here, but the process is a mystery in itself.
I’ve asked other writers the same question, and their answer is always more or less the same. “The idea usually finds me, not the other way around,” they’ll say, or some iteration thereof. That’s definitely how it works with me. I’ll be taking a shower, or playing catch with the dog, or snoozing at 3:30 in the morning, and, shazam, some random synapse will fire deep inside my skull, and the fundamental notion for a book will come bubbling to the surface. Wow, I’ll think to myself, this could make for a terrific plot! Then I’ll typically chew on the concept for a few days, do some snooping around on the internet, and almost always reject the idea. Often, it’s because it or some iteration of it has been done before, and well, by another writer. Sometimes I’ll conclude that the idea is too simple or too complex, or that I’d have to devote the next two years researching the subject before I could achieve the kind of verisimilitude that would
permit readers to maintain their suspension of disbelief, which is key to all good fiction. But every once in a while, an idea will stick. Such was the case with what ultimately became Deep Fury.
I was sipping coffee and reading the news online one morning about three years ago when I stumbled across a bizarre story. A British soldier practicing high-altitude parachute drops with his unit had crashed through the Spanish tile roof of a home in central California, not far from where I live, after his main chute failed to open. The soldier was forced to deploy his reserve parachute and fortunately sustained only minor injuries. No one inside the home was hurt. I immediately thought to myself, This has potential! What if a guy falls out of the sky to his death, only naked and without a parachute, and crashes through the roof of a mobile home where an elderly couple lives? What if the guy once served as Cordell Logan’s wingman, back when they were both Air Force fighter pilots flying combat missions during Operation Desert Storm? And what if plenty of people had reason to want the guy dead?
Three hundred-plus pages later, I finished Deep Fury.
I hope you like it. If you do, please help spread the word by posting a brief review on Amazon or Goodreads. And also, if you have a good idea for Logan’s next adventure, I’m all ears.