"Baroness Sells Books" - One Month Later

Where to begin?

        With the book, of course!

Baroness Sells Books: A Tom Lingquist Mystery by Joseph Adorno is currently available only at Amazon.com in 3 formats: Hardcover ($17.99), Paperback ($9.99) and Ebook ($5.99) on Kindle; the ebook is FREE for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

What's the book about?:

              Quien es esa nina?

After a few weeks, the book has appeared on lists:

      I see you, "Top Release" bar.

                    Ah.."So far"..

And while attempting to self-promote across social media, I often cross paths with "people" who, by way of introducing themselves, will either like a post or reply with a quote that reposts my post, in hope that I would be interested in paying them to promote Baroness Sells Books on my behalf. It sounds pretty nifty in theory, but I would be more impressed if they had purchased a copy of my book and then tease what they could bring to the table by knowing something about it.

By the way, as an aside, I find promoting a book on Reddit akin to walking into a motorcycle bar the day after you purchased a motorcycle for the first time...

    He's lucky they didn't eat him 

                        alive.

These were the best efforts at currying favor, though:

      This tweet reads as if they 

      had read the screenshot of

      the summary on the back

      cover...with one eye open;

      Tom Lingquist is a private

      eye who has been working 

      at a movie theater; he's not

      an amateur sleuth - he's 

      acting on behalf of an attorney 

      and her client, the grieving 

      mother of the murder victim.

It's also made clear on the back cover-description that "Baroness" is a fictional character in a book, which, upon publication, became the catalyst for the death of the author. 

     And that's me, making the               most of it.

Nice try. Next!

This one gets Grok, Elon Musk's work-in-progress a.i. interface for X/Twitter, into the act:

     First, they noticed my tweet..

  Holmes and Poirot are bad guys?

Almost there..and then they did this:

    A.I. fan art! So soon? Why not.

Um..let's start with my immediate reaction:

He also looks like he might be displaying signs of burning out, which is kind of interesting; there's hints of that in the text, but I don't believe they've read it..I'd say it was interesting at how much they were able to adapt on a guess..Grok seems to believe he doesn't have thumbs, which is incorrect, though it could explain why this depiction of Lingquist appears so beleaguered..

Can't hold a baseball...

I decided to post my casting choices for some, but not all of the characters in Baroness Sells Books; I thought of them after, not before or during the completion of the book; they did not influence my writing, but I thought maybe I could give those art-generating algorithms that dwell in cyberspace a little push to influence subsequent a.i. art:

No plot spoilers from me..having said that, I'm aware some of the faces featured may not be household names - that's Rachel Ticotin as Norma; Josh Segarra as Rob; Finn Wolfhard as Mike; Melanie Martinez as Esther; Raquel Castro as Kira and Katerina. All of these choices might not match the characters as they are described in the book, but they can play them very well, I assure you.

I'll post more updates as they occur, but for now, if you haven't ordered Baroness Sells Books: A Tom Lingquist Mystery from Amazon, I recommend that you do. Give it a try. Grab some popcorn, have a seat and check it out! Tom will sweep up the popcorn.

Baroness Sells Books: A Tom Lingquist Mystery by Joseph Adorno

My private eye novel, Baroness Sells Books: A Tom Lingquist Mystery is available to purchase at Amazon.com in 3 formats: Hardcover, Paperback and Ebook on Kindle. Kindle subscribers can read the Ebook for free.

The black cover was created for the Ebook, while the cover with the girl appears on the paperback and hardcover editions.

              The official cover.

              The Ebook cover.

The Plot:

Baroness Holly is a self-described wallflower who decides to throw caution to the wind and sow her wild oats with some of her co-workers at a movie theater. She is a fictional character in a novel written by the late first-time author Adrian Hernandez, who may have taken inspiration from one of his co-workers, and whose sudden death from a Fentanyl overdose has put a halt on chronicling Baroness Holly's further misadventures.

When Adrian's heartbroken mother refuses to believe her son was a drug addict, her lawyer enlists private eye Tom Lingquist to investigate. Lingquist has some surprises of his own, as he's one of Adrian's co-workers at his job - a movie theater!

Lingquist didn't expect a mystery to be included with taking a part-time job, but he'll accept the challenge and solve the puzzle: who would murder an unknown author, all because a character like Baroness sells books?

 Those among you who have read my blog posts over the years, particularly the posts in the past that dabbled with short fiction, will enjoy getting a larger dose of my writing ability, as I juggle a cast of characters, twists and turns. There's a clever detective, attractive women, sleazy men, workplace humor, drugs, deductive reasoning, clues, a cat, a Fiat, cartoon character references, some "What was he thinking when he wrote this?" moments..and more.

 As for that cover with the attractive girl, that's the cover image to Baroness Holly, the book that poor Adrian Hernandez thought would be a good idea to write up.

  Baroness Sells Books: A Tom Lingquist Mystery (aka, Book 1 of The Tom Lingquist Mysteries) is available only at Amazon  (type "Joseph Adorno" in the search and the ebook cover comes up first, with links to the hardcover and paperback in the "available in other formats" section; when I tried typing a direct link, it didn't work when I tested it, so I didn't want to roll the dice on that).

Happy reading!