Iron Canuck Reviews & More: Book Tour: The Anchor by Kevin R. Doyle with a guest post, an excerpt, and a giveaway

The Anchor

by Kevin R. Doyle

GENRE: mystery

BLURB:

The Anchor: Jen has toiled away in television news, just waiting for a big break. And at the same time she finally gets a shot at the promotion opportunity she’s waited years for, head anchor for the nightly newscast, an unseen, shadowy man is desperate for her to notice him. When messages and well wishes don’t do the trick, her mysterious admirer intends to do anything necessary to make Jen a success and snare her attention, even if it means attacking her fiancé and killing off her competition.

Guest Post

Kevin R. Doyle

12/18/22

Reflections After Ten Books

The Anchor, released earlier this month, is my ninth published book. It’s not my ninth written book as there were actually four complete novels written before my first book saw publication. And Anchor is not my ninth published novel as my first “book” to appear was an e-book novelette titled One Helluva Gig. This coming March will see the release of my tenth published book Clean Win, the fourth in the Sam Quinton mystery series.

I say all this not merely to brag, well not only to brag, but to point out that after (assuming March goes okay) ten published books, including two series and a handful of standalones, it may be time to pause and reflect about what I’ve learned, good and bad, over the last ten years of this little venture. In no particular order, here are five basic truths I’ve learned over the last decade.

Please note that all of my work has been released by small, traditional publishers, so what I have to say more or may not relate to self or hybrid publishing.

1) “Writing novels is much more difficult than writing short stories.” While this may seem an obvious point, I’d like to elaborate a bit. When I say doing one is more difficult than the other, I don’t simply mean that one takes a longer time and is more complicated when it comes to plotting, character development, et. al. I spent a number of decades writing only short stories, so when I shifted over to book-length material, I wasn’t prepared for all the work that comes along after the book is finished.

Once you’ve finished a short story, you submit it around and either it sells or it doesn’t. When it comes to a book-length work, once it’s picked up by a publisher the real work begins. As a newbie, I wasn’t prepared for edits, line edits, proof edits, galleys, cover info forms, book info forms, and on and on. In hindsight it looks obvious, but at the time I was “what’s all this? I thought my work was done.”

2) “This book’s great, it’s going to sell a ton of copies.” Uhm, no. The first part of the statement may nor may not be true. The second part? Only if one is really, really lucky. The old line about “don’t quit your day job” is beyond accurate. And even if you do sell a lot of copies . . .

3) “My contract entitles me to X percent of each sale.” Absolutely and one hundred percent correct. Harrumph – after the distributor, most often Amazon, takes fifty percent or more, leaving the author with X percent of fifty percent, or less.

4) “Publishers deserve far more than they will usually earn out of your work.” I cannot stress enough how ridiculously hard and demanding the publisher’s work is. The main reason I’ve stayed away from even considering self-publishing is that I don’t have it in me to do all of that labor, not to mention all the required skills. For the most part, I’ve been fortunate in lucking onto awesome people who wanted to bring my words out in print, and I can’t thank them enough.

5) “Success” all depends on perspective. After so many years working in the short story market, selling my work to small magazines, I had some idea of the realities of the writing/ publishing life. So when I couldn’t quit my job and move to the beach two months after the release of my first book, it wasn’t exactly an earth-shattering surprise. I tend to consider my books as my babies, rather than commercial products, and my writing income not as something to live on, but as extra little splurge money, a sideline that will allow me to indulge myself a little bit from time to time. All in all, considering things in those lights has worked out fairy well.

Those are five things I’ve learned over the years, and while most of them are pretty basic, I figure they can’t be stressed enough. After another ten years, this list may change, but somehow I doubt it. They’re fairly universal concepts.

Though I’m still holding out hopes of someday moving to the beach.

EXCERPT:

One of the first pieces of advice Lew Jacobs had given her upon promoting her to the morning desk had been to toughen up as much as possible.

And to do it right away.

“You’re going to get people calling, e-mailing, and tweeting in. Hell, we still have a working fax machine in the office for people to complain that way. Don’t worry about the Contact page on the website. The only folks who use that are the ones who want to say how much they like what you’re doing. But you know the old saying about restaurant service, right?”

Jen had given him a blank look. The boss had continued.

“A satisfied customer will tell one or two people what a great meal he had at your place. A dissatisfied one will tell everyone he knows what a shithole operation you have. Sorry for the profanity, kid, but that’s the best way to put it.”

Jen had nodded, still not sure of his overall point.

“When it comes to the station website, the ones who take the time to type in all those required fields, plus muck around with matching those damned security words at the bottom, are so patient because they want to go on and on about how much they love your show or a story you did. But the ones who are pissed at you, and that’s going to be the overwhelming majority, they can’t wait that long. They have to fire off their opinions as quick as possible. And believe me, they will. You could do an entire broadcast around the theme of puppies and rainbows, and some nitwit will call in, complaining that your material is too dark.”

Before her promotion to the desk, Jen had worked as a general assignment reporter for a little over three years. She’d thought she understood the phenomenon of irate, dissatisfied viewers venting at the station. But listening to Jacobs, she’d realized that what waited for her was a whole new level of said phenomenon.

And she assumed he knew what he was talking about. Jen wasn’t sure how old her boss was, but considering that he’d begun with the station as a reporter himself back in the mid-seventies, he had to be somewhere up in the higher range of his sixties.

Jacobs was a dinosaur in more ways than his age, however. A legend both at the station and in the Riverside community overall, he was one of those rare news people ending his career, decades later, at the same place where he started. He was damned good at his job, and Jen figured that somewhere over the years, some bigger stations must have recruited him in larger markets, but for some reason, he’d elected to stay here in central Kansas.

It took no time at all for her to realize how on the nose Jacobs’s cautions had been. Sometimes, people would call in or tweet, full of umbrage that Jen had dared to include on the Monday morning news the results of the NFL game the day before when their favorite team had been shellacked.

The tone something along the lines of how dare she perpetuate such a demoralizing story.

Now, seeing a message appear five minutes after the show closed, she hurried to trace back over every story and segment they’d done, even the ones piped in from the national network, looking for something she’d done wrong. With the possibility of Karyn’s nighttime slot opening soon, Jen knew she couldn’t be doing anything that would cause her to lose points in management’s eyes.

Her initial mental scan not uncovering anything, she mentally said the hell with it and opened the message. She didn’t recognize the sender’s address, but maybe it was something innocuous.

Even congratulatory.

Then again, maybe not.

The message contained a single sentence, done in all caps.

I THOUGHT I DID YOU A FAVOR. DID YOU REALLY HAVE TO SIC THE COPS ON ME?

AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Author website: www.kevindoylefiction.com

Biography:

A high-school teacher, former college instructor, and fiction writer, Kevin R. Doyle is the author of numerous short horror stories. He’s also written three crime thrillers, The Group, When You Have to Go There, and And the Devil Walks Away, and one horror novel, The Litter. In the last few years, he’s begun working on the Sam Quinton private eye series, published by Camel Press. The first Quinton book, Squatter’s Rights, was nominated for the 2021 Shamus award for Best First PI Novel. The second book, Heel Turn, was released in March of 2021, while the third in the series, Double Frame, came out in March of 2022.

Email: kevinrossdoyle@gmail.com

Facebook address: www.facebook.com/kevindoylefiction

Amazon paperback and Kindle

https://www.amazon.com/Anchor-Kevin-R-Doyle-ebook/dp/B0BKH7JSZ6/ref=sr_1_1?crid=20FM1CIE0XGTP&keywords=kevin+r.+doyle&qid=1668448273&s=books&sprefix=kevin+r.+doyle%2Cstripbooks%2C71&sr=1-1

Smashwords:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1177954

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-anchor-kevin-r-doyle/1142687593?ean=2940165965500

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-anchor-9

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GIVEAWAY:

Night to Dawn Magazine and Books LLC will be awarding a $10 Amazon or Barnes and Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/28e4345f4455/