Darlene's Book Nook: The Guilty Blog Tour: Guest Post and Giveaway with Vincent Zandri

Friday, September 27, 2013

The Guilty Blog Tour: Guest Post and Giveaway with Vincent Zandri

Hi, everyone!

I am pleased to participate in Vincent Zandri's The Guilty Blog Tour hosted by Pump Up Your Book.

About Vincent:

Vincent Zandri is the No. 1 International Bestselling Amazon author of THE INNOCENT, GODCHILD, THE REMAINS, MOONLIGHT FALLS, THE CONCRETE PEARL, MOONLIGHT RISES, SCREAM CATCHER, BLUE MOONLIGHT, MURDER BY MOONLIGHT, MOONLIGHT SONATA, CHASE, and more. He is also the author of the Amazon bestselling digital shorts, PATHOLOGICAL, TRUE STORIES and MOONLIGHT MAFIA. Harlan Coben has described THE INNOCENT (formerly As Catch Can) as "...gritty, fast-paced, lyrical and haunting," while the New York Post called it "Sensational...Masterful...Brilliant!" Zandri's list of publishers include Delacorte, Dell, StoneHouse Ink, StoneGate Ink, and Thomas & Mercer. An MFA in Writing graduate of Vermont College, Zandri's work is translated into many languages including the Dutch, Russian, and Japanese. An adventurer, foreign correspondent, and freelance photo-journalist for Living Ready, RT, Globalspec, as well as several other news agencies and publications, Zandri lives in New York.

His latest book is the thriller, The Guilty.

CONNECT WITH VINCENT ONLINE:

Website

Welcome to Darlene's Book Nook, Vincent!

Vincent has written a guest post, so I will now turn the floor over to him.

15 Books and Counting
By Vincent Zandri

I've finally gone and done it.

Come October I will have fifteen books in print with the publication of The Guilty, The Shroud Key and Moonlight Sonata. So why is this number so significant? What's the big deal?

Fourteen years ago, almost to the day, I published my first "big" novel with a Random House imprint. They gave me tons of money, wined and dined me. I even played drums in my editor's band and ummm, dated my publicist...If you want to call it that. I was fresh out of writing school. Young. Pretty good looking (Not Barry Eisler good looking, but passable). Newly divorced and living the life of the rock star.

I remember tossing twenties around to the hotel clerks asking them to bring bottles of booze up to the room so that there would be plenty on hand when the guests came. The guests usually consisted of literary agents, writers, artists, musicians. The room was so full of cigarette and pot smoke you could hardly see. The booze flowed like a river and it just happened to snow during the warm weather, if you catch my drift. I found myself living the dream, and living it hard. It was everything I always wanted. Bright lights, big city, big ego, big books, big future...

All I had to do to maintain the life of the rock star was write one book per year. My hot shot agent would take care of the rest. My lifestyle wouldn't be supported by sales...Sales?...What the hell are sales? It would be supported by big advances. Sales weren't sexy in the eyes of my then agent. It was measured in the amount of advance money he could demand. Six and seven figure advances were what made him happy. Not sales figures typed out on spread sheets. Advances caused headlines in Publishers Weekly. Sales trickled in and never made up for the big advance. Well, almost never, anyway.

Somehow I wrote the second book. But something happened along the way. My imprint got sucked into another. The new imprint editor looked at the advance money owed me and compared it to real sales and nearly puked. The firm honored their contractual commitment and paid me, but as soon as the second book was published, I was shown the door. Goodbye publisher. Goodbye parties. Goodbye rock-star status. Goodbye New York City. Goodbye ego. Goodbye hot shot agent.

I went broke.

I lost my house, my car, my self esteem. I nearly lost my mind, and at one desperate point, I pulled out the twelve gauge double barrel and sat on the end of the bed staring at two black barrels that kept whispering the word "Eternity" into my ear. But then I remembered my little boy needed to be picked up from soccer practice and I packed the shotgun back up and decided death could wait for a while longer.

I went back to work writing a new novel. I found a small press publisher for it, but not after two years or so of trying. I wrote another novel, and again a small press took that one. But again, a couple more years had passed. Now I wasn't so young anymore. And I still wasn't making money from my books. Instead I was living as a freelance journalist who published crime novels on the side.

Enter E-Books.

My new agent convinced me to publish with an indie publisher who did something incredible. They published E-Book editions prior to the trade paper. I didn't believe it could work. But I gave them my newest novel. A book called The Remains. It went on to sell one-hundred thousand copies in Kindle alone. At the same time, my new agent somehow managed to get the rights released from my first two novels and those went on to sell like snow cones in hell (Bet Random House could kick themselves now...). I kept writing more and more words until my pace allowed me to produce a couple of novels per year. By the time Thomas & Mercer took me on for seven of these books, including my newest, Blue Moonlight, I had twelve books in print.

So far this year I've written three books. I'll probably write one more before the New Year tolls.

I'm older now, in my late-forties. My hair is thinning a bit. I don't party like I used to. I don't smoke or pop it or snort it anymore either. Like the great drummer once sang, "I'm tired of waking up on the floor."

But I have caught up with myself.

It's been fourteen years since I first entered into this crazy business and I now will have fifteen books to show for it. Come spring 2014, I will see sixteen with the publication of Moonlight Weeps. Come the Summer, Seventeen with Moonlight Runs. I could blow the bank and call for a celebratory party. But I'm just happy to be alive to see it all happen

Thanks so much for joining us today, Vincent!

One lucky winner will win a digital copy of Vincent's latest thriller, The Guilty.

Title: The Guilty
Author: Vincent Zandri
Publisher: StoneGate Ink
Genre: Thriller
Pages: 465
Format: Ebook
Language: English

Jack Marconi is back. In The Guilty, Jack finds himself investigating a local restaurateur who’s not only obsessed with the sexy, dark romance novel, Fifty Shades of Grey, he’s accused of attempting to murder his school teacher girlfriend. As the now brain-damaged young woman begins recalling events of that fateful winter night when she was allegedly pushed down the front exterior stairs of a West Albany mansion, she becomes the target of the angry foodie/sex-obsessed boyfriend once again. Only this time, he’s cooking up a plot to keep her silenced forever.

Buy Link:
AMAZON

To enter the giveaway, please complete the Rafflecopter entry form below.

This giveaway is open worldwide and will close at 12:00 AM
on October 4, 2013.

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