Tag: The Sniper

Jake Barter, the Great Promoter

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So, I ran the promotion from September 9th to September 13th. And I gave away over 3,600 e-books over those five days.  So, there are 3,600+ readers who won’t be buying my book.  Sounds like a pretty terrible business model where you give away your product to the people who are most likely to enjoy it.  Are you mad, photog!

So, time has passed and I decided to see if there has been a meaningful up-tick in sales.  Here are the results:

Period

 # of Days Books Sold

KENP (pages)

AUG 27 to Sep 6

 10 4

873

Sep 15 to Sep 24

 10 27

2,905

Ratio of Sales (after/before)

6.75

 3.33

These are impressive changes and they seem to be accelerating.  And one of the things I didn’t expect is that most of these sales are not happening through the Amazon Ads that I have been running.  In addition, the number of ratings I’ve gotten on Amazon has increased dramatically.  So, I have to say that the experiment was a success.  Of course, I’ll have to rerun it again when I have the second book ready so that those who buy “The Sniper” have a chance to buy the sequel while they’re primed and ready.

But it hasn’t been all gravy.  I did get one really bad review by a reader.  He gave it two stars and entitled his review, “Pretty Terrible.”

Here is his review in its entirety:

“I could barely get through this one. I’m not sure how to describe the plot other than ridiculously bad. All the underground society nonsense was just dumb and the ending was laughable. There were also multiple typos and specific parts of the story that don’t add up at all. I’m totally confused by the good reviews.”

¡Ay, Chihuahua!

I’ll be honest.  That stung a bit.  But the customer is always right so I have to defer to his judgement that this book is not for him.  But luckily for me, four- and five-star ratings represent 83% of the total while one- and two-star ratings are only 6%.  That will have to be my consolation.

So here I am.  The book seems to be gaining traction and sales are increasing.  I’m especially happy about the Kindle Unlimited growth.  It’s been very steadily increasing (see chart) and this month will soon represent an average of at least a book a day.  So that’s becoming a significant source of sales.

But now more than ever I have to outline the story correctly and it’s a combination of too many ideas going in too many directions on the one hand and real doubts about the mix of action scenes versus everything else.  Information dumps, character interactions, political, social, economic and let’s call them “philosophical” plot items all have to compete for space with the more dynamic scenes that grab the most attention.

But things are progressing so I’m satisfied with the effort right now.  I’m sure I’ll run into some road blocks once I try to flesh in some of the more complicated scenes.  But there should be some effort in figuring out the balance between components.  So, there it is.

Feedback Arrives

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Someone who saw my promotion posts on X left a comment showing interest in reading the book so I asked him to share his thoughts on the story if he got a copy.  So far, he’s read the first three chapters and I find his candid thoughts very interesting.

“Hi! I am currently in the middle of chapter 3. Feel free to take my opinions with a grain of salt, by the way.

The first two scenes were excellent. I felt completely drawn into the action, and it was easy to visualize. This is Jeffrey Haskell level of quality, which is a high bar.

Once they get on the plane, however, it feels like an information dump, and the dialog becomes stilted. There are a couple of reasons for this. None of the revelations about Connor have been foreshadowed, so they feel as if they were drawn out of thin air. You don’t have to foreshadow everything, but it helps if you foreshadow something so that the reader feels connected to the exposition.

More important, there is very little feeling behind the information dump. Connor considers himself in debt to Bogey, but the rescue was incidental to Bogey’s job. There was nothing personal about it. As a result, it doesn’t seem worth a potentially $10 million gift.

The third chapter has a more serious problem. We are learning a lot about Connor’s business, but we have no idea why. To pull a reader in, you need to have some idea of what the reader is hoping to see and give a sense we are moving in that direction. Reading chapter 3, all I feel is I want the action to begin again. There is no compelling reason for me to pay attention to Connor’s business plan, since I have no idea how it fits into the story.

In any case, I thought I should give you my impressions while they are still fresh in my mind. I am hoping the action starts again soon, as you are very good at that.”

So, what I’m hearing is that the information dumps are an impediment to enjoying the story as an action story.  What I’m taking away is that stories in the various action genres have a short window between the kinetic parts of the story.  Now that is interesting because it means the author has to balance providing background information with keeping the reader’s interest.  For me that’s tricky.  With a science fiction story bringing the audience into the technical details of the “world” are sort of important.  But the reviewer has made his point.  If I put him to sleep or even lose his interest in the world-building then he’s not going to finish the book.  Now I did start the book with two scenes he really liked but both of those scenes are remote in time from the “present” action (one is years before and one is a year or so after the triggering event of the main plot).  So, in a way I paying for some of my sins against continuity.

Well, now I’m really interested in his ideas about Chapter 4.  It’s got action but it’s of a singularly depressing type.

Outlining in Progress

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So, in line with my book writing chores I was outlining the beginning of the story.  And because of the well-known story-writing dictum that the first scene should be a rip-snorting action extravaganza, I pondered how to do this.  So, I thought to myself, “Self, what better way to start the story than with a massive drone attack on Connors and his inner circle!?”  And I answered me saying, “Internal monologue alter ego, that’s a damn fine idea!”  So that’s the direction I’ve decided on.

But a problem occurred to both of us; namely, I really don’t know much about drone attacks or repelling them.  Well, that can be a problem.  But in this age of LLM’s hanging around every corner I thought, “Well, let’s do some research.”  And voila! not only am I an incredible fiction writer but I’m also now one of the world’s leading authorities on drones and defense against drone attacks.  Crisis averted!

So now visions of solid-state high-power microwave (HPM), autonomous interceptor swarms, cheap directed-energy lasers and AI directed mini-guns and missiles are dancing in my head like toys at a kid’s Christmas.  Poor Connors, with Bogey on vacation on the Left Coast how is he supposed to rest easy while his security is in the hands of lesser men?  Sure, Cutter and Mel are certainly taking the technical lead in fortifying headquarters against any rogue agents of the intelligence agencies but as became apparent in the first book practical military experience is sorely lacking at Typhon Industries.  Well, what a perfect time for a sneak attack.

So now I’m gleefully outlining the fallout from the attack including Bogey’s return to active duty with his friend Becky (former waitress, now main squeeze) in tow.  So, this will allow me to push the political story forward.  If the CIA, etc. are running rogue operations, Connors will have no choice but to begin affecting the political dynamic to advantage himself and weaken elements of the US deep state.

So, I’m going to give myself a B- so far on my first two days of outlining and since this passes (sort of), as an outlining activity I won’t penalize myself for stealing a little time for this post.  I still haven’t worked out anything about Grace and her kids.  I may have to consult with Camera Girl on that angle.  After all, with killer drones targeting Connors, Bogey might step in and forbid his family from going within several miles of that marked man.  It kind of makes sense.

As far as sf tropes and gizmos I haven’t decided what whizz bang stuff will be rolled out in this story.  I feel I have to because that stuff is so much fun it would be disappointing if I didn’t.  At the very least there is going to be lots of artificial intelligence involved because Mel’s status as an (apparently) self-aware machine needs to be explained and explored.  After all she’s Camera Girl’s favorite character and she is kind of engaging for the writer too.  Well, that’s enough for now.

Comments:

WarPig

“Please go to YouTube, search for “Slaughterbots”. Choose the DUST version with length of 7:59 That’ll give you an opening scenario.

This scared me back in 2010. The video was released in 2017. Events in Ukraine have proven it to be coming very soon. Those of us in the know have been warning the powers that be since 2010. The US can already use “Ginsu” missiles with blades instead of explosives to target and kill an individual and knows which seat in a blacked-out SUV to hit.

Darpa has been working on this “I imagine”, for over two decades, Musk’s new solid state batteries, better than lithium, has the potential to give the little ones the range and on-station time to do this. Ukraine isn’t exactly MIT or Cal Poly, yet they are halfway there already, with what “I imagine” is US help.

Slaughterbots would have to be countered by swarms of “hunter-seekers” with the ability to tell friendly minidrone from enemy. Also we’d need new and advanced surveillance technologies to find evil bots as soon as they are launched. Remember, these things in the video enter buildings and can fly along streets at a few feet of altitude. Almost impossible to trace since they are not guided from an external controller by radio waves. No bot emmissions. No way to block their controllers as there are no controllers. They are kamikaze. One set of instructions, then let them fly, do or die.

Scary.”

photog

You’re right.  That’s pretty damn scary.

 

The Great Shirking Has Begun!

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So, the promotion is done.  And the results are very encouraging.  There’s been an uptick in all three types of orders; paperbacks, e-books and Kindle Unlimited pages.  In fact, today I’ve had all three types of sales and another two five-star ratings showed up so a very good way to end the promotion and the Based Book Sale.  Bravo!

But now the real work begins.  I’ve got to go forward with outlining and writing the next book.  And to do that correctly I have to (as my father used to say) “buckle down.”  I need to devote several hours every day to writing.  And those have to be early in the morning when my mind isn’t yet reduced to the soupy mush it will become by later in the day.  And so that means something’s gotta give.  And that something will have to be my daily posts.

Some days I’ll be a ball of fire.  I’ll bang out page after page of deathless prose, take care of the chores at the Compound, grovel and genuflect to First Selectman Cthulhu and still manage to write a post.  But not always.  Some days I’ll put a song up instead.  Or maybe nothing at all.  I’ll try to keep up with the photos and quotes.  That shouldn’t overwhelm me.  But trying to produce five hundred coherent words on a topic that might interest the folks on the site is going to be beyond my powers of concentration for the foreseeable future.  I’m putting this out there to let everybody know how it is.

For most of you this won’t be a great hardship.  My mental powers have greatly diminished over the decade and more that I’ve been producing this blog and it may actually be a relief to know the ordeal is over.  But for me it’s kind of sad.  I’ve tried to be as reliable as I could be to the task.  But at the same time, I’ve got a strong desire to make this next book something special so I need to concentrate on quality and I need to finish it sooner than later because the longer I wait the fewer people who read the first book will be anxious to buy the sequel.

So, there you go.  I’m announcing the official “Shirking of OCF.”  I am AWOL and no power in the ‘verse can stop me.  I will understand if everyone deletes the web address and heads for greener pastures but I just want to add it’s been great talking to all you folks over the years and feel free to stop by whenever you feel like just in case I manage to produce readable text on that particular day.

Hasta la vista baby!

The End of Marketing

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Sunday, it rained cats and dogs so no antique car show.  Now, maybe they had the car show anyway but standing out in the pouring rain to look at and photograph old cars isn’t something I’d do without a compelling motive.  So, I spent the day staring at my Amazon dashboard deciding whether day five of the promo would over- or under- perform.  As it turned out it was a very good day.  Here it is 8:40 pm and the order count for the day has already exceeded 600 and that drives the grand total for the five days well above 3,500 books.  Interestingly, these free books haven’t slowed down the Kindle Unlimited page sales.  In fact, the count so far today is 688 pages which is the best I’ve ever had.

I can assume that the final book count will be between 3,500 and 3,700 books.  And I think that is a very nice result.  I would say 3,500+ books will be a fair test of the theory that a large promo giveaway will provide a noticeable increase in the visibility of the book.  And the fact that my Kindle Unlimited sales have increased seems to be the first evidence of that.  The other hint I’ve seen is an uptick in the rate of Amazon reviews showing up on my book page.  And by the way, the latest three have been five star, which doesn’t hurt.

I’m assuming the sale ends at midnight and by Monday morning when I awake “The Sniper” will have sunk well below the top 100 in the Kindle Store.  But the fact that it reached 60 on that list and was seen by all kinds of readers will (hopefully) convince people that even $0.99 isn’t too much to pay for a masterfully crafted book.  And $0.99 is where the price will remain for the remainder of the Based Book Sale ending Wednesday, September 16, 2026, 12:00 AM PDT.  After that I’ll restore the normal $4.99 e-book price.

I’ll update this sometime tomorrow morning with the final numbers before heading into work.  But I will say that the promo by Written Word Media (the company that controls FreeBooksy and the other lists) went very smoothly and without a hiccup.  And that is a welcome change compared with the many complicated and uncoordinated activities associated with writing, publishing and marketing a book.

Well, it’s time for me to stop tweaking my first book’s sales and start writing the sequel.  You know, after all this marketing “stuff” I feel energized to start putting together the new story.  As I told Camera Girl I want to outline this story thoroughly instead of “discovering” the plot like I did with the first.  In fact, I might even outline more than the next book.  I have an idea that I’ll be pushing separate books in very different directions within my “universe.”  I’m going to need a book just for Cutter and Mel.  And I think Connors will need a book that allows him to start a social engineering program.  And I want to figure out where Grace and her kids end up.  I’ll have to discuss with Camera Girl whether forcing Connors and Grace onto a “date” makes any sense.  Also, I need to create a few new characters.  One of them will be an extremely high IQ type with the obligatory anti-social quirks.  And I need wise guy to make fun of things.  He’ll be like me but less diplomatic and better at fighting.  And last but not least I can’t forget Bogey.  Last we saw he was headed to a country music venue with a cute waitress.  I want to find out how that went.

 

Update 8:30 AM

FINAL RESULTS OF MY 5-DAY PROMOTIONAL GIVEAWAY:

Best Sellers Rank: #60 Free in Kindle Store

#1 in Technothrillers (Kindle Store)

#1 in Political Thrillers & Suspense

#2 in Military Thrillers (Kindle Store)

(all best seller ranks maximum during promotion)

 

Overall promo total 9/14/2026, 8”21 am, 3,632 e-books

Order total for 9/13/2026 (including 25 book overflow into 9/14/2026): 717 e-books

Today is the sixth day of the Based Book Sale https://basedbooksale.substack.com/p/the-2026-basedcon-based-book-sale

my 5-day Amazon giveaway promotion for “The Sniper” https://amazon.com/dp/B0G7WRJJPH

September 9th Begins the Promotion for The Sniper

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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!

Based Book Sale

 

Image

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!

Huzzah! The Sniper Will Be Included in The Based Book Sale

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Based Book Sale

 

Image

Some might wonder what took me so long to get “The Sniper” onto the Based Book Sale roster.  Well, as with every deficiency in my biography it comes down to laziness and poor planning.  But at long last the stars have aligned and it’s full speed ahead.

The Based Book Sale starts Wednesday, September 9, 2026, 12:00 AM PDT and runs through Wednesday, September 16, 2026, 12:00 AM PDT.  “The Sniper” will be a linked free promotion on Amazon from September 9th to September 13th.  Afterwards it will be available as a $0.99 e-book purchase there until the end of the Based Book Sale.  After that it will revert to the $4.99 e-book price.  The paperback will maintain its current $9.99 price throughout.

Even for folks who already have “The Sniper” there will be lots of other quality non-woke stories to get free or at a really good price.

18AUG2026 – This’N’That

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Tomorrow, I bring some of the grandsons to see the latest Spiderman movie.  What is this, the ten millionth Spiderman movie?  Well, the oldest grandson is boycotting the film because he’s reached Marvel saturation.  And I can’t blame him.  I feel that no matter how many multiverse iterations they manage to shoehorn into the plot, I’ve already seen before what will be flashing across the screen.  But, regardless, I can’t pass up the chance to hang out with my younger descendants in their own element.  I can buy popcorn and their carbonated sugar water of choice and be one of the kids at least one more time.  What’s better than that?

And afterward, Camera Girl has promised them their favorite meal; spaghetti and meatballs.  We will gather around the dining room table and I’ll see what they have to say about Summer 2026 which ends for them next week.  And I’ll tread carefully because mentioning school would be highly insensitive.  I remember only too well how critical it is to forego the s-word this close to Labor Day.  But I am interested in hearing what they enjoyed most this year.  But I also want to just hear what’s on their minds.  They’re growing by leaps and bounds and I almost don’t recognize the little kids they were in the teenagers that they’ve become.  So, it’s important I keep some continuity in the relations so I don’t feel too disoriented by their rapid metamorphoses.

So, I’ve sold over four hundred copies of my book.  Hmmm.  Not exactly a national best seller by any stretch of the imagination.  And in the last ninety days I sold a little more than ten thousand pages on Kindle Unlimited (KU) which equals about fifty full books.  And based on the royalty data that means a book equals about a dollar of royalties to me.  Well, all I need is nine hundred, ninety-nine thousand six hundred more sales and I’ll be a millionaire.  In your face Elon Musk!  Seriously, it apparently takes a lot more than what I did in order to market a book successfully.  It’s a little humbling but I still want to pursue finding a larger audience for the book so since the ninety-day window of Kindle Unlimited ends today, I’m going to suspend KU so that I can include “The Sniper” on the next Based Book Sale.  Getting the book in front of right-leaning sf fans seems like the right way to grow its audience.  We’ll see how that works out.  But regardless of my lack of millionaire author status. I think I’ll start the sequel after the summer.  I have had some complaints that I need to provide closure on a number of plot and character situations.  I think the biggest complaint is that Mel needs to be explored to find out how this AI came about and where she leads to in the story and in Cutter’s life.  Personally, I’m more intrigued (and befuddled) about how Connors is going to stabilize his organization after the events of the nuke attack on his underground facilities.  I think I’m going to devote considerable thought to how he decides to influence the future shape of social/commercial/political life in the radically altered American landscape.

Well, that’s enough.  Enjoy Tuesday.

Have Patience Oh My Friend Polemarchus

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So, today Camera Girl asked me whether I had figured out the plot for my sequel to “The Sniper.”  I had to confess that my efforts to outline the story had so far been pretty feeble.  And this has a lot to do with work and the annoying responsibilities it entails.  But I have been thinking of late about a plot line having to do with a very, very wealthy and powerful character (Connors) trying to change drastically the way that Americans live.

And this ties in with the current state of affairs in these United States.  It’s apparent that people on the Left and the Right are turning to populist leaders and movements because the American dream doesn’t seem to be working very well lately.  Of course, the two sides of the political “binary” would attack the problem in completely different ways.  The Mamdani wing would confiscate all wealth and “redistribute” it in a way that would turn the United States into Cuba or worse.  But even the Right hasn’t managed to turn America into a capitalist wonderland.  Trump has made some moves to try and reverse the off-shoring of American industrial jobs but so far, the results have not been robust in my opinion.

So, I look at this situation and I think that this may be the challenge of our age.  And suppose the political parties aren’t up to the challenge.  And what if the corporations aren’t interested in being part of the solution.  If I want to get dystopian, I can have us descend into a rerun of the end of the Roman Republic with our own Marius, Sulla, Pompey and Caesar.  We could run that playbook and end up with an Augustus ushering in the approximately five centuries of American imperial rule by destroying the republic.

But what if I write a more hopeful tale.  Not a utopia but a technocratic attempt to find a better way to organize society.  Of course, artificial intelligence (AI) is the boogeyman of the day right now and it gets stood up as the cause of and cure for all our problems.  So, I can easily be accused of jumping on the bandwagon if I have Connors use some form of AI to help design a different framework for integrating people with an optimal result for the great majority of the population.

Now, I freely admit I haven’t the foggiest idea what that would look like or even if such a thing is even theoretically possible.  I wouldn’t want to end up looking like Plato does when someone reads through his “Republic” and the whole thing is a bunch of feeble arguments where he knocks down a bunch of straw men on his way to enthroning “philosopher kings” as his best and brightest ruling over his ant hive of an ancient brave new world.

But I think I would like to play around with this idea of a trillionaire re-ordering society along logical lines to optimize human happiness.  So that’s kind of my take on the sequel’s plot.  Of course, the first question I’m asking myself is whether the attempt is a success or a failure.  I’ll have to roll it around to see which is more interesting.  Have patience oh my friend Polemarchus.