I met up with a friend yesterday and he asked me about my absence. He had enjoyed the hoopla about the book, Vacationland.  He bought the book and thought it was really good.  My social media disappearance had him wondering if I’d given up on promoting the book, and if I really cared.

His observations were telling, but I assured him that I was serious about getting the word out aboutVacationland, and in fact was just beginning a major push to catapult the novel to best seller status.  That goal is no small feat, but it’s time to think BIG.

Though I haven’t fallen off a cliff, I do find myself huddled beside a baseboard heater after enduring a 36-hour snowstorm and shoveling out this morning in 10 degrees below zero with wind chill @ minus 20 degrees.  I’m in Maine with the family until the end of February and then a trip back to Ecuador.  My work for these next two months all revolves around my writing and promotion of my novels.  Novels?  In the next several weeks I’ll be pre-selling copies of my upcoming novel Once Upon a Nightmare. It’s in the final edit stage and will be published this summer.  Briefly, it’s a story about one man’s descent into the drug trafficking world in the late 1980s, his growing internal darkening, and his ultimate desire to “retire” from the business.

While I polish that book, I’ll be pushing Vacationland and my comfort zone and scheduling lots of book signings here in Maine.  I’m mailing books to every reviewer I can think of.  I’ll be offering the book to marine supply stores, airport book stores, LLBean, boat yards and marinas, statewide and national publications for review, and obviously book stores.  I’m also working on a neat promotional video that I’ll put on Youtube.  I think it’s so cool it could go viral.  (Thinking BIG again, so shoot me.)

As I dust my hands from all that work, I am looking forward to writing my next book, A Maximum Mistake.  It’s partially set in Cuenca, Ecuador, where a courageous police chief is under fire, literally and figuratively, for fighting the spread of drug cartel violence into his quiet city.  There are four other independent stories that come together in the end, the unifying theme being how narco-trafficking and the War on Drugs are impacting the culture of South America.

So what do I need to do to get Vacationland onto the bestseller lists?  I believe I’ve satisfied the “great product” aspect.  The rest is up to me (doing the above) and you.  It’s simple really:  buy and read, write a review for Amazon (could be as brief as thumbs up or down), then, if you like the book, recommend it to friends who then recommend it to their friends and so on, down the line.  Think of it as a wave, a stadium wave.