Updates:
| Time | Orders |
| 9:30 AM | 100 |
| 11:00 AM | 212 |
| 2:45 PM | 400 |
| 8:00 PM | 604 |
| 11:30 PM | 700 |
At 9:30 a.m. I broke through the 100 order mark. Not bad. So far, all have been e-books but that’s the point of this exercise; visibility. Excelsior!
September 9th is the beginning of the Based Book Sale and also of a promotion I have set up on Amazon for five days of free e-books for “The Sniper.” And this is the perfect audience for my book. These are the people who the book was written for. These are people who won’t be shocked that my protagonists’ enemies are antifa thugs and leftist color revolution spooks. In any other “science fiction” book sale, the number of blue-haired feminists in the audience will be considerable. But not here.
And as a great kickoff, the leader of the sale, Hans G. Schantz, bought a copy of my book and wrote a five-star review that was extremely fair, well-written and cogent (see below). In fact, it makes me wish I had involved him in the early marketing of my book!
Hans G. Schantz
5.0 out of 5 stars A Satisfying Vigilante/Revenge Thriller
Reviewed in the United States on September 5, 2026
Format: Kindle Verified Purchase
“The Sniper is an unapologetic vigilante thriller built around a simple and satisfying premise: what happens when the system fails completely, and men with the means to do something about it decide they’ve had enough?
Joseph Boghadair begins with a deeply personal grievance: the murder of his son and the failure of the authorities to deliver justice. But his private vendetta soon expands into something much larger as he and billionaire Paul Connors uncover corruption reaching deep into the federal government. Revenge becomes resistance, and resistance ultimately becomes armed revolt against a government that has forfeited its claim to obedience.
That escalation is the book’s great appeal. Boghadair isn’t waiting for another investigation, another hearing, or another election. He is a former Army sniper who knows exactly what he can do with a rifle, while Connors possesses the wealth and resources to turn one man’s vendetta into a genuine challenge to entrenched power. There is something viscerally satisfying about watching supposedly untouchable people discover that they are not, in fact, untouchable.
Does it get far-fetched? Certainly. The conspiracy is enormous, the resources brought to bear are extraordinary, and events eventually operate on a scale well beyond the plausible consequences of an ordinary vigilante story. But realism isn’t really the point. The Sniper is political wish-fulfillment in the tradition of the revenge thriller: a story about what might happen if decent men confronted tyranny not with petitions and procedural niceties, but with overwhelming force.
Taken on those terms, it works. Fast-moving, cathartic, and refreshingly willing to follow its premise to its logical extreme, The Sniper delivers a satisfying tale of revenge escalating into rebellion, with bad men finally discovering that actions have consequences.”
Simultaneously I have five days of promotion of the Amazon giveaway with a company called Written Word Media that maintains a number of reader lists among which is something called FreeBooksy which (as you can guess) sends notification to its hundreds of thousands of users, the names of books that are free on Amazon that day. And they have a package with five different lists to cover the five days of my giveaway.
So theoretically hundreds of thousands of readers can see my promotion and get my book from Amazon. What will it actually turn out to be? Well, we shall certainly see soon enough. As an absolute minimum there will be at least twenty or thirty downloaders. I’ve previously done a promotion and without any outside notification that number of Amazon readers will download the book every day. But if that is the extent of the interest, I will be extremely disappointed. Realistically, I’m hoping for several hundred downloads. That would be acceptable. But I’ll be honest. What I’m really looking for is something north of a thousand total downloads. That I believe would qualify as a real success for the promotion.
So, for the next five days I’ll be clicking on my dashboards on Kindle Direct Publishing every thirty seconds trying to psychically persuade everyone on the Based Book Sale, the Amazon site and FreeBooksy to download my book and then write breathless glowing reviews about the incredible plot, unforgettable characters and general literary splendor of this inimitable masterpiece.
Out of the way peons! World famous author walking by! Please no free autographs!