Just before the Christmas, I decided to
offer another one of my books, ‘Four Degrees’ for free on Amazon. The promotion
lasted five days and I must admit that I was fairly confident that the number
of downloads would exceed those of the previous promotion I had run with ‘Muscle for Hire’. After all, I reasoned, it’s just before the holidays and people will
be buying gifts for family members or looking for an interesting book to read
during the downtime before they go back to work. I was wrong. The previous promotion
clocked up over 8,000 downloads in the US alone. This time it was only 640 or
thereabouts. Nevertheless, that was still another 640 people who would be
exposed to my book who wouldn’t have been otherwise. Who knew what would come
of it?
Witness my surprise therefore when, after
the promotion finished, ‘Four Degrees’ continued to sell in Canada. Not only
that, but it rose up the rankings to become number 88 under the ‘Thrillers’
genre and – wait for it – number 6 under the category ‘Single Women’. Quite why
the book should have any ranking under ‘Single Women’ is a bit of a mystery to
me, since it was filed under the two genres ‘Thriller’ and ‘Humor’, instead.
The book’s blurb goes like this:
Clean Weiss thought it
was a simple matter of visiting a shrink for an honest assessment of his state
of mind. But when Clean is invited along to group therapy, the shrink in
question turns out have other plans besides guiding his patients through the
labyrinths of their psyches. Why is Dr. Wright so secretive about his
“extra-curricular activities”? Is there something sinister behind the cryptic
messages he keeps writing in his notebook? As Clean precipitates headlong
towards a final showdown with his nemesis, the stakes become impossibly high
and in the end may cost him his life.
This
laugh-out-loud hilarious novel has a gem on every page, a villain round every
corner and a girl in every port. Smart, funny and deliciously complex, Four
Degrees grabs you from page one and takes you on an exhilarating white-knuckle
ride through the windmills of a mind on the verge of collapse to the surprising
and devastating twist in the tale.
The only thing I can think of to account
for the single women reference is that the book sounds - and indeed is - a little bit like a male
version of Bridget Jones and that there is some romance in it. Well, whatever
the reason, I’m delighted that my book rated so highly among single women, however
inadvertently.
My next book, ‘Milano’, is just about to
be published. It’s a novel about a heist that takes place in an art
gallery in Milan, Italy. Who knows? With Amazon’s baffling categorization algorithms it may
become a number-one bestseller under the genre ‘Gardening’!
Labels: categories, downloads, Four Degrees, genres, humor, Muscle for Hire, promotion, single women, thriller
