MOONLIGHT RISES Reviewed in Denver Examiner

Writer Zack Kopp reviews Moonlight Rises...



The second full-length novel in the continuing Richard "Dick" Moonlight series by Vincent Zandri has been released by StoneGate Ink in Kindle, Nook, and all e-Book forums, available via your Tattered Cover and other retailers. Private eye Dick Moonlight is really dead this time, see. Three thugs in black wearing Obama-masks and communicating with hand-held voice synthesizers pressed against their voice boxes appeared from nowhere and beat him to death in a dark alley in downtown Albany, NY. But why? And forwhat reason! They demanded a mysterious box, see, of unknown proportions the likes of which he’s never heard about. WHAT box?!! They insist he cut all ties with his latest client: a disabled nuclear engineer of Russian heritage by the same of Peter Czech. Is he really from Ruissia? Moonlight can’t be sure, see. It hardly matters, now that he’s dead. Private Eye Dick Moonlight has a blissful out of body experience, his soul floating above his ruined mess of a body inside the Albany Medical Center I.C.U. whereon his one true love, Lola, is standing by his bedside, see.

But then something happens, see. Something bad. This young punk rambles into the I.C.U, see, he takes Lola’s hand, and draws her into a loving embrace over the limp Dick Moonlight. What seemed at first like a sweet peaceful death now causes Moonlight to struggle to reenter his body so he can stare down Some Young Guy and avenge himself, see. The pain of his battery is worsened by the pain of his breaking heart. Even so, as a hardened private dick, Moonlight wants to find out the true identity of those thugs who killed him, see, and decides his bruised and broken body is the perfect place to lay low for a while and pick up information. Yeah, see. Surely he’s not really dead, given the title. Does he come back to life? Will he spring into action, clubbing down attackers with balled fists? And what about those crazy masks? Is this is a political book? Hah. Life sucks, then you die. But Moonlight Rises

To read original review: http://www.examiner.com/books-in-denver/book-review-moonlight-rises-by-vincent-zandri-review

To grab Moonlight Rises: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B005HB16Y6/ref=nosim/theplanningsh-20

"If I Were to Become a Writer all Over Again I'd..."

"The new major pub on the block!"




...self publish.
It's true. If I were to start all over again as an author I would set my sights not on publishing with the majors or even a small indie press. I would simply plan on going DIY the entire way. With Amazon's KDP program, doing it yourself is not only easy, you have nothing to lose but the time it takes to get your writing out there. Now this isn't an advertorial for KDP, it's just me being able to take a step back and look at all the possibilities, and the most obvious for me would be KDP. Amazon has the ability to reach a huge audience while pushing your book. So if you're a newbie, go for it.

However, that established, I am not a newbie. I've been at the game now professionally for 15 years. I've been published by the majors (Random House) and the minors (StoneHouse/StoneGate Ink, etc.) and I've had my ups and downs with both. As for the former, mostly downs and the latter, almost entirely up. As you all know by now, I believe that a full-time author in this day and age should take advantage of all the publishing, marketing, and audience building opportunities by engaging in three kinds of publishing:

1. Major Commercial
2. Small Indie
3. Self-Publishing

It makes sense to go with the majors at least for a couple of books since they can reach out to the masses like no other. While your audience expands they will also get you reviewed by major media darlings like The New York Times and The New York Post (The New York Post called THE INNOCENT "Sensational...Masterful...Brilliant!" That's the kind of review you can cherish for a lifetime).

Publishing with the small indie presses won't garner huge reviews from the major media outlets, but it will afford you a very personal experience that could never be achieved with the majors. If you are lucky enough to land a great small press they will become like family to you. They will ask and indeed come to rely on your creative input every step of the way. Not only about the writing, but about book design, cover, marketing, and more.

Going indie won't get you any of the above (although by investing in a virtual tour you'll nail some reviews from the mommy blogs and expand your audience. I invest in virtual tours no matter how I publish...), but it does allow you the absolute freedom to write, edit, and publish precisely how you want to publish. And in the end, the cash you earn is yours alone to keep. No publishers to pay, no agent percentages to honor. It's all about you and your work. Like I said, if I were just starting out with zero track record, this is precisely the route I would take. If I ended up selling a million copies of my e-books like John Locke, and I were to attract a major publisher like Simon and Schuster in a huge distribution deal, then I would go from happy to ecstatic.

A lot has changed in the past year. Lots of bestselling indie authors who've previously been published by the majors like JCarson Black, Scott Nicholson, JA Konrath and even yours truly have come full-circle by once more signing on with a major publisher for some of their books. The major pub we all have in common is Thomas and Mercer, Amazon's new publishing arm. The move makes sense for us all, since the outfit is new, filled with brilliant editors, open to new ideas and let's face it, Amazon has the marketing power to position your books in the marketplace like no other major publisher. I couldn't be happier about it.

But that doesn't mean I'm giving up on other publishing opportunities or lessening my marketing efforts. In essence, going back to the majors means I'll be working all the harder. Stay tuned!!!!

WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM

C.R. Lloyd, Author of "The Second Shot"

I love being an instigator.
Case and point: Last November during a very rainy month-long writing retreat in Florence, Italy (I'm writing this from the same apartment), I found myself spending as much time in a local pub as I did behind my desk. Anyone who knows me well enough won't see anything strange in that. Just ask my ex-wives. But I ended up chatting it up with some very cool ex-pats who work the place and one in particular from London who eventually got around to asking me about acquiring an agent. A couple of beers already swimming in my brain, my reaction was thus: If I had to do it all over again, I'd self-pub on Amazon. Forget the agent and forget about wasting time. Go for it now! Or something like that. Now mind you, I'd never self-pub'd a thing in my life and still haven't. It was the old hubris talking I guess. Or beer muscles. But I was speaking the truth. Kindle Direct Publishing is precisely the route I would take if, like London's newest best-seller to be, C.R. (Rebecca) Lloyd, I was young, super-talented, charming, attractive, and just plain fun to be around. Methinks my meeting with C.R. that rain-soaked November will turn out to be not only serendipitous, but also fortuitous. Indeed and jolly good show!

Rebecca, please take it away:

How to court a writer – in the ‘God people must ask you this all the time but please help me with my writing’ kind of way

I met Vincent Zandri at the pub where I worked. An Irish pub in the centre of Florence. I was working in the pub so that I would have the time to write, but so far I had had no luck getting a literary agent for my book.

My colleague Steve told me about Vincent. ‘Hey, there’s this American dude. He writes thrillers. I googled him. I think he’s pretty successful. He’s in town for the rest of the month. You should so speak to him.’ I met Vince a few days later. But I didn’t tell him I was a writer. I was embarrassed. And when he told me that every time he met someone in Florence they turned out to be an aspiring writer needing help, I knew I couldn’t say anything.

But then I bumped into him at the pub after I’d worked the day shift. I’d had a few drinks already and with my shame levels lowered by the beer I brought it up in conversation. Well we talked about everything that night from our relationships with our parents to our love lives to our favourite books. He came into the pub one more time before heading back to the States and gave me his email address and offered to read some of my stuff when it was ready. I blushed to my toes, feeling as though I had manoeuvred him into offering to help but I was very pleased. You need all the help you can get when you are starting out.

So the following March I emailed him the first three chapters of my book – a political thriller set in Italy. He paid me some great compliments, but even more importantly he advised me to publish it myself on Amazon for Kindle. Kindle devices had been on sale in the UK for less than a year and I still saw self publishing as vanity publishing. And Amazon had only just reached Italy at that point – Kindle was unknown – I hadn’t realised that ebooks were becoming such a big thing. But Vince’s books were selling strongly in their electronic formats and he felt that there were real possibilities out there for new writers to get read and noticed. He told me to get myself an editor, a cover and go for it. I did. And my book, The Second Shot, is now available on Amazon. And if you’re interested here’s what it’s about…

Pietro is a typical Italian: angry, disappointed, resigned to the state of things. But one drunken night he gets an idea: why have one man kill the president when you can get half the country to do it? And his idea becomes a plan, a plan to assassinate the president, using donations from Italians who feel the same as him.

The next six months of his life are a battle to put his plan into actionhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif and avoid arrest. His plan will force him to go into hiding, will put his friends and family in danger, and will bring him into contact with the criminal underbelly of Russia, France and Italy.

And after it’s done? Well if half the country are involved in killing the president, it means they have to be involved in what happens next...

The Second Shot by CR Lloyd is available on Amazon for Kindle priced $3.50

All Your "Moonlights" in a Row

The DICK MOONLIGHT SERIES...in ORDER


















My publisher brought up a good point: Since all the Moonlights take place in sequence but can still be read as stand-alones, perhaps it would be a good idea to give you an idea of the order in which the Moonlights should be read thus far. That is, you want to read them in order. So here goes:



1. Moonlight Falls: In MOONLIGHT FALLS, novelist and photo journalist Vincent Zandri asks the question “If you knew your life could end at any moment, how far would you go to prove you murdered your lover? ” Albany, New York, is the setting of Zandri’s paranoid thriller (in the Hitchcock tradition) about Richard “Dick” Moonlight, former APD detective turned private investigator/massage therapist, who believes he killed Scarlet Montana, his illicit lover and wife of his ex-boss Chief of Detectives Jake Montana. The dilemma ... Moonlight doesn’t remember what happened!
1.25...COMING SOON: MOONLIGHT FALLS (UNCUT): The extended and expanded edition of the bestseller, including dozens of unpublished chapters, interviews, reviews, videos links, A Dick Moonlight's Albany Walking Tour, pictures, and more.

1.5 Moonlight Mafia: In this digital short, the too often unemployed private detective is hired by an anonymous client (“John Smith”) to bring down a Mafia wise guy who’s using a used car lot as a front for illegal gambling activity. At least, that’s what Moonlight is led to believe. According to the job description, he is to answer a want ad for a salesman position at the same used car lot and thereby secretly infiltrate the illegal operation. Sounds like a piece of cake.

Problem is, when Moonlight heads over to the used car lot to answer the ad, he decides to pay a quick visit to the bar next door and have a couple of quick “Jacks” to loosen himself up. But when he opens the big heavy door on his late father’s pride and joy 1978 “Cadi” hearse, it gets away from him and dings the passenger-side of the brand spankin’ new black Dodge Ram parked beside it. What Moonlight doesn’t realize as he pretends to ignore the Ram’s damage is that the door he just dinged belongs to his new would-be boss. And his would-be boss is not only in the Mafia, he’s no stranger to torturing and killing people for fun!

2. Moonlight Rises: Dick Moonlight is dead.

Really dead this time, now that three President Obama-masked thugs dressed all in black and communicating only with hand-held voice synthesizers pressed up against their voice boxes have beat the life right out of him inside a dark, downtown Albany alley. What are the thugs after? A box. Size, weight, description unknown. They also want him to stay away from his newest and only client: a handicapped nuclear engineer of dubious Russian heritage by the same of Peter Czech.

But then, now that they’ve killed him, Moonlight’s problems seem to be over. In fact, as he undergoes an out of body experience, his soul floating above his train-wreck of a corpse inside the Albany Medical Center I.C.U., he feels pretty damned good. Great in fact. To make death all the more sweeter, his one true love, Lola, is standing by his bedside. With her long dark hair draping her chiseled face and big round Jackie O sunglasses hiding tear-filled eyes, she appears every bit the grieving sig other. Nothing could make the dead-and-gone Moonlight prouder.

But then something happens. Something bad. A man enters into the I.C.U. Some young guy. He takes hold of Lola’s hand, and pulls her into him. Together, the two share a loving embrace over Moonlight’s dead body. Now, what seemed like a peaceful death is anything but. Moonlight wants back inside his body so he can face-off Some Young Guy and find out if his true love has in fact been cheating on him. At the same time, he wants to find out the true identity of those thugs who killed him so he can exact his revenge. No doubt about it, Moonlight needs to live if he’s going to uncover some pretty painful answers and take care of business.

Like a little kid dropping down a playground slide, Moonlight slides right back inside his bruised and broken body. Opening his eyes the white light blinds him. He feels the pain of his wounds and the pain of his breaking heart.

Life sucks, then you die.

But Moonlight rises.

3. COMING SOON... Murder by Moonlight

4. COMING SOON...Blue मूंलिघ्त

MOONLIGHT RISES is RISEN!!!

"The long awaited second novel in the Moonlight series!"


“Life sucks. Then you die. Or, if you’re Dick Moonlight, first you die and then you live.”



The second full-length novel in the continuing Richard "Dick" Moonlight series has been released by StoneGate Ink in Kindle, Nook, and all e-Book forums: MOONLIGHT RISE.

The Story:

Dick Moonlight is dead.

Really dead this time, now that three President Obama-masked thugs dressed all in black and communicating only with hand-held voice synthesizers pressed up against their voice boxes have beat the life right out of him inside a dark, downtown Albany alley. What are the thugs after? A box. Size, weight, description unknown. They also want him to stay away from his newest and only client: a handicapped nuclear engineer of dubious Russian heritage by the same of Peter Czech.

But then, now that they’ve killed him, Moonlight’s problems seem to be over. In fact, as he undergoes an out of body experience, his soul floating above his train-wreck of a corpse inside the Albany Medical Center I.C.U., he feels pretty damned good. Great in fact. To make death all the more sweeter, his one true love, Lola, is standing by his bedside. With her long dark hair draping her chiseled face and big round Jackie O sunglasses hiding tear-filled eyes, she appears every bit the grieving sig other. Nothing could make the dead-and-gone Moonlight prouder.

But then something happens. Something bad. A man enters into the I.C.U. Some young guy. He takes hold of Lola’s hand, and pulls her into him. Together, the two share a loving embrace over Moonlight’s dead body. Now, what seemed like a peaceful death is anything but. Moonlight wants back inside his body so he can face-off Some Young Guy and find out if his true love has in fact been cheating on him. At the same time, he wants to find out the true identity of those thugs who killed him so he can exact his revenge. No doubt about it, Moonlight needs to live if he’s going to uncover some pretty painful answers and take care of business.

Like a little kid dropping down a playground slide, Moonlight slides right back inside his bruised and broken body. Opening his eyes the white light blinds him. He feels the pain of his wounds and the pain of his breaking heart.

Life sucks, then you die.

But Moonlight rises.

Where to grab it:

MOONLIGHT RISES in Kindle
MOONLIGHT RISES in Nook

"On Pricing" Redux and a Challenge to Myself....

"Baby, have we got a deal for you!"






It's been a few months since just about every indie author blog had something written inside it about the power of pricing. The gist of the chatter centered around $.99 being the optimum price, and authors like John Locke and Amanda Hocking were proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that books priced that low can really move. Move in mass quantities that have the potential to add up in the end to a pretty decent payday (and to book deals from major pubs!).

I had a two books priced at $.99 back in February, March, and April and while both of those hit the Amazon Top 25, one of them THE INNOCENT hit the Top 10, settling at No. 3 for nearly a couple of months. Even with paying a standard agent percentage, I still took in payday that averaged three times your normal NYC legacy publisher advance. In May my guys at StoneHouse/StoneGate Ink decided to up the prices back to more normal levels and the books naturally lost ground in terms of ranking but continued to sell very well while remaining bestsellers.

Now it's August, a traditionally slow month for publishing while everyone takes in vacation and gets ready for the upcoming school year or whatever. Sales are good, but I'm convinced they could be great again.

I'm still convinced the three major attractors to making your E-Books bestsellers are...

1. An Awesome Cover
2. A Great Product Description
3. Price, Price, Price
(4.) Great Writing
(5). Direct Marketing from online publishers like B&N and Amazon...

That said, my cats at StoneHouse/StoneGate Ink have decided to run a special on CONCRETE PEARL, my new thriller (the first in a series) starring brassy and beautiful commercial construction business owner/amateur sleuth, Ava "Spike" Harrison, and THE REMAINS, my stand-alone thriller that's been a bestseller for 15 months. Both books will be published at $.99 for at least the length of the CONCRETE PEARL virtual tour which is scheduled for September.

Having been blessed with a great 3/4s of 2011, I also want to issue this challenge to myself: if one of the books breaks the Top 100, I'm going to donate $500 to the Boston Children's Hospital which does great things for kid with all sorts of injuries, ailments, and dreadful diseases. From cancer to cutting edge operations that can make a once useless limb useful again, as was the case with my son Harrison (Bear) who suffers from brachial plexus palsy, the BCH is a Godsend to kids and their parents. It's a curing place and an emotional place and I encourage all of you to take a look at their website. We've spent a lot of time at BCH where Harrison has undergone two major surgeries to repair his left arm, the most recent being last July. If both books hit the top 100, I will donate $1,000 to the hospital.

So, like Paul Weller of the JAM once sang, "What you give is what you get!" I couldn't agree more, other than to say, better to give than receive.

Ciao, Ciao for now, from sunny Italy!!!