I'm Having a Book for Launch!

It's 6:59 pm on a Wednesday evening and asside from getting married and being present for the birth of my four children, I'm about to do the biggest thing in my life: an honest-to-goodness book launch, starting with a 45-day blog tour. After spending over three months preparing for April 1st, I am one day away from sharing my labor of love with tens of thousands of book blog followers and lovers of supernatural, horror, paranormal, romance thrillers. For a regular guy like me, that's frickin' scary!


The process started two years ago when the concept for REUNION flooded into my head. Like most book ideas, they seem to come out of nowhere. A year later, I had a rough draft, but was advised by an editor to put the book away for a while because I didn't write it according to the common rules of fiction.I did. 


Over the next year, I wrote my follow up thriller, Act of Vengeance (coming late 2011). When I turned my attention back to REUNION, I was also advised to focus on one protagonist, and that he mustn't be a wimp.


I couldn't do that.


REUNION is not about one brilliant superhero; it's about the suffering and recovery of a group of flawed and changed individuals - survivors. This book is not a cliched paranormal romance, there are no vampires, there are no werewolves,  no zombies and it overlaps genre boundries as if they didn't exist. But that's okay. I had to tell the story as it played out in my mind, rules or no rules.


That was work. Writing, in my opinion, however, is enjoyable work. Crafting and molding the rough story into a fully developed novel is the best part. But I didn't want this book to get stuck in literary mud, read only by surfing internet shoppers. It needed to be read and I needed to do something different with REUNION, because when I launched my first novel, I had no idea what I was doing. I still don't have it all down, but I stepped out there and worked the blogosphere and put a tour together so I could share this story with as many readers as my life could practically allow. It's not a 90-day, shoot-me-when-I'm-done Scott Nicholson Blog tour, but it is a fairly modest blog tour for a rookie. If you want to know the details about how I put it together, you can get the skinny at IndieHorror.org. I wrote a guest blog there today outlining each step. I will also write a post-tour article as a follow up sometime in late May, after I take a break with my family.


I still have several guest blogs to write, and I imagine I'll spend way too many hours obsessing over book sales the next thirty days or so, but I kind of think that that's pretty normal. I'll spend some time each day reading the blog comments and answering questions, trying not to forget what day it is, because I have to do all this while working my regular job. But WHO CARES! This is such a cool experience. I really don't mind losing sleep for the next month. I want to savor the excitement, taste the fear, and enjoy knowing that at least a few people enjoyed my work.


I think new authors believe that all you have to do is write a book, get feedback from family and friends and if everyone likes it, then it's ready to be published. In the words of Dwight Schrute from The Office...False! Getting your book uploaded into the Kindle DTP is easy. Making your book the very best it can be and creating a sturdy platform, a launching pad if you will, takes a lot of work. In my case, it took two years. But what are the results? I don't know. Time will tell. So far, REUNION has not been reviewed by any of my family members or friends, and it's getting great reviews. 


I'm nervous about reviews, but more than anything, and I mean this wholeheartedly, I want this book to impact the reader in a way that other books don't. My greatest ambition for REUNION is not book sales, but that the reader walks away from my book, shaking their head, wondering why they can't seem to forget the message, the story and the characters. Be sure to follow the tour and try to win a FREE Kindle or one of two signed copies from my Goodreads giveaway that starts on April 1st!



You can get REUNION now at most online retailers, but I'd love it if you'd wait until April 15th...TAX DAY. Why? Because I'd like to skyrocket REUNION up the Amazon ranking system to take advantage of Amazon's exposure algorithms. BOOM!