Spooky Season Marketing

Do you know what love doing for people? Marketing

Do you know what I am good at doing for people? Marketing

Do you know what I hate doing for myself? Weirdly, also marketing.

As A GHOST CHASES THE HORIZON nears release, I need to buckle down and figure out how to convince people it's worth reading. How? There are an infinite number of options. Most aren't cheap.

I spent $1,000 on marketing IN THE COUNTRY DARK. In the end, what made the difference was word of mouth, and massive signal boost from both The Charleston Gazette-Mail and Appodlachia.

A GHOST should be a layup. There's already a built-in audience of people who are fascinated by the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum.

Plus, it's spooky season. I never set out to write a horror novel. That was never my intent. But there's an inherent horror with what I wrote. It's scary because these were things that really happened. Even though the characters' stories are fictional. Every non-spectral event in the story is almost guaranteed to have happened in some asylum in America. I've already been told that some events in the book sound similar to X and Y. There's real horror in knowing the truth isn't far away.

I'll make another post with the details on how and where to get a copy of A Ghost Chases the Horizon. For now, enjoy the final cover, which trades a standard font (Century Gothic - an inside joke if there ever was one) with handwriting. You'll notice there is writing over the cover image. This is from a consequential letter that appears later in the story. The title of the book is pulled from that letter, exactly where it is written on the page. Rather than rely on a standard font, I decided to let the handwriting from the letter itself do the talking.

As I sit here looking at the physical edition, I find something jarring about seeing my own handwriting on a book cover. It puts a perfectly appropriate cap on the story behind this book's creation. I had control over everything – why not sign it as such?