Trey Stone's Blog, page 46

Free Book!

You’ve read that correctly! My book The Consequence of Loyalty is free to download today! Get it here http://amzn.co.uk/dp/B071P19HV6 

If you do find time to read it, I’d love if you’d also found time to leave some words on either Amazon or Goodreads! Or just tell me!

I’ve heard the book is absolutely fantastic, the best thing to happen to writing since ink (Highly biased sources.)

Check out the blurb here:

“Agent Greer. Earlier this evening your supervising agent Sean Callaway was shot.” Greer listened wide eyed, why was he telling him this again? “He was shot inside this building.” Greer did not know how to react. “He was shot inside his own office agent Greer.” Jordan Greer’s jaw dropped. “By FBI field agent Gerard Martin.”

FBI agent Jordan Greer is dragged into the office with news of his boss having been shot. The shooter? His friend and colleague Gerard Martin. Everything seems crystal clear, except for Martin’s motives. After immediately disarming himself and surrendering, Martin is taken away by Internal affairs, but he isn’t saying a word to anyone. It is up to Jordan Greer and his colleague Dana Norman to put up a race against the interal affairs investigation and prove that Martin is, at least to some degree, innocent.

Check me out on Facebook!

I’m writing a sneaky Saturday blog-post to inform everyone that I’m finally on Facebook! I’d much prefer Twitter and my blog for getting in touch with readers and writers alike, but I know it’s not good to restrict oneself when you’re trying to get out there!

So please, if you have the time, do check out my page on Facebook

Also, legends has it my book might be free tomorrow

Don’t forget to write!

So, if you’ve found your way here, I assume that you’re either an author/writer, reader or blogger. And if you’re not, well hey, thanks for checking in. But I assume you are, and I assume you are either interested in writing, reading or blogging.

And as an author I’m very interested in writing, and as a, more recently, self-published author, I have also had to do a lot of other things as opposed to just writing.

Self-publishing in itself, is easy. It’s very easy in fact, so easy that you could be published in hours as long as you have something ready to give to the world.

But it does bring a lot of other things with it, a lot of other things that require a lot of other work. Because presumably, when you’ve published, you want someone to read it. You want people to find it, to look at it, be interested in it, and to make it known. And that requires a lot of work.

I’ve been doing a lot of that recently. And I’m not here to tell you how to do that. You can google that, and find a million other blogs and websites that will give you step by step guides to have to be seen on social media, how to build a blog, or to gain followers on twitter, how code your author website, and much much more. There’s really nothing I can say here that hasn’t already been said a thousand times over, everywhere else online.

Except for maybe one thing. One thing that it seems people are forgetting.

Don’t forget to write. Don’t forget to keep writing. Tell more stories, make up more characters, try a new genre, write a horror short story.

Because in the end, that’s what makes you a writer and an author. Not how many followers you have, or how many promotions you do for your recently self-published debut novel.

So unless, your goal was to produce exactly one book, and nothing else, then don’t forget to keep writing. Inbetween tweets and pictures on instagram, and updating your blog with advice and tips to new author (just like this?). Remember, keep writing.

Jordan Greer

So I’ve just finished writing an origin story for my main main character Jordan Greer. Check it out here, or on the dossiers and origins story page.

Jordan Greer was the first member to be recruited into the CRU by special agent Sean Callaway, and as such is kind of the main character in The Consequence of Loyalty, though this is a role he shares with Dana Norman and Gerard Martin.

Greer was hand picked by Callaway firstly due to his work in behavioural psychology, which proves very handy when it comes to tracking and catching criminals. After being employed by the FBI it turns out he makes an excellent undercover agent, and investigator as well! As long as Norman and Martin can keep his cocky attitude in check.

Why do you write Crime?

My wife asked me this the other day, “why do you write crime?”

“Because I love crime” I answered, obviously.

“But you read a lot more fantasy than crime?” she asked.

I thought about it, and she’s right (about everything I mean, not just this), I do read more fantasy, though I love crime thrillers as well.

So why did I end up writing a crime thriller first? Well let’s get a thing clear, the first story I ever wrote was fantasy. It was never finished. And I’m currently working on a fantasy project, parallel to my crime thrillers, and various other stuff.

So maybe it’s strange that I started out with a crime thriller. Frankly, I just thought it was a good idea I had, for the plot I mean. I remember it coming to me a day I was bored at work, and I was just making stories up in my head. It became more and more interesting to me, so I decided I need to put it down in words.

Frankly, I find genres to be… restrictive, both as a reader and an author. It’s not like I decided that I had to write a crime thriller, when I started writing. It was all about the story. It’s the same when I read, I tend to focus on the plot to see whether or not I’d like to read it. The only times “fiction” and “crime” are useful to me, is when I’m choosing where to browse in a bookshop. I’ll read anything as long as I find the plot interesting. When I was younger, I read lots of books in a series called the Black Dagger Brotherhood. I found them amazing. Turns out, they’re paranormal romance books. Not a genre I particularly ‘identify’ with. But the books were great.

So why do I write crime, a genre that I read much less of than for example fantasy? Because it’s about the story, not about what box you put it in.

Dossier and Origin stories!

So most writers, as you might have noticed, tend to give away some or a lot of their writing. Whether it is their first Ebook, a few unpublished short stories, or anything else, it’s usually a great way to get people interest, and make people want to check the author out, because hey, free stuff!

So obviously, I wanted do a similar thing! But I don’t have a large collection of Ebooks that I can give away at the moment. But then again, is a whole book necessarily the way to go? Do people have time for that? I know I don’t, I have so many things I am reading at the moment that everything else is just added to an endless list of future projects.

So I thought I’d change it up! I’ll give people some free stuff, because as most writers do, I know I have a lot more stuff than I am going to be using in any books! I have so many chapters and paragraphs that don’t make it past the final edit, so I figured I’d start with those!

Which is why I’ve created a Dossier and Origin story page for my main characters here on my blog! Go check it out! You’ll get to know the three main characters in my book The Consequence of Loyalty, and you can download their origin stories for free!

The first one that’s up right now, is for ex-NYPD officer, Dana Norman! The rest will follow.

Find it on the Dossiers and Origins stories page, or here!

When to Write?

For a while I’ve tried to organise how and when I write, to make it more efficient and productive.

One of the big downsides with art though, and this goes for all art, is that it rarely cares whether or not you have time do it. Actually, it tends to hit me most often in the most inconvenient places. On the train, at work (usually in an important meeting), in the shower – when I don’t have anything to write on!

Or like right now, in the middle of the night. I didn’t get up to write a lot, but it was good. Like really good. That’s why it’s so important. Keep writing those small keywords and sentences, dialogues, character descriptions, whenever you can. If I had a dollar for every post-it I have with some scribble on it, I’d have – many dollars.

Point is? Don’t force it. At least not too much. If you feel inspired and have a few hours, by all means, sit down and try. Nothing comes around by itself. But please, take time to stop whatever it was that you were doing, and write down those ideas you just had.

So I’ve published

That’s it then it seems. I finished my book over a year ago, and spent the time from then till now sending it around to agents and publishers. I don’t think I’ve ever done a more depressing thing in my life. Now, to be fair, I probably didn’t send it to near half as many as most published authors do, but every time I got an answering saying, “unfortunately this does not read like something we could publish, all luck in the future”, it only took me soooo much more time until I could bother sending it out again.

Then I decided to self-publish, and within two, maybe three weeks of that descision, it was done. I’ve even sold my book in that amount of time. (Yes, to people who aren’t friends or family! (…not many, but some..) )

And now I just don’t understand why I didn’t do this before. This is clearly the way to go. Unless you’ve written the next Harry Potter, and agents are throwing themselves at you, you’re probably much better off with self-publishing. (Hey, as far as I know, even Rowling had some issues getting out there to begin with).

Of course, there’s a lot more work to be done now. There’s the publicity, getting my name out there, writing the blurbs, picking the keywords. But that’s much more rewarding work. And not least, it makes me feel that when I take a saturday off focus on my books, I can actually start to write something new, not keep writing cover letters and sending emails.

Advice? I’m not sure I’m capable of giving any, but try self-publishing. It’s not as bad as you think, and it’s definitely not a cop-out!