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’!
