"Baroness Sells Books" UPDATE

New year, new and improved cover for Baroness Sells Books: A Tom Lingquist Mystery, available only at Amazon:

   

              The cover to the 

   Hardcover & Paperback editions.    

    Cover to the Ebook on Kindle.

You may recall, my first attempt was to have the cover be the cover of Baroness Holly, the novel written by the unfortunate first-time author, part-time movie theater employee, Adrian Hernandez: 

The Ebook cover used a simple black-and-red design, a riff on having a character named Baroness:

    This one's for the G.I. Joe fans.

The next attempt is what I call the grainy photograph cover. It's supposed to be an image of Melody Valle, one of the characters in the book. My issue with it was that I could never get it to look sharp enough without making it more grainy. Another problem, similar to the Barones Holly gimmick cover, is that it could be confused with being erotica, rather than a private eye novel.

                 Melody Valle.

One thing that stuck around after that iteration was the design and colors I used for the titles.

         Almost there. Nice try.

And here we are. For the first time, the movie theater setting at the heart of the book gets it's turn on the cover, while the initial illustrated Baroness Holly novel-as-the-cover concept gets to stay in there. The debut of part-time movie theater employee, full-time private eye Tom Lingquist now has a cover that's a keeper. I'm sticking with this one. Once again, it's only available at Amazon

"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  in 3 formats: Hardcover, Paperback and Ebook on Kindle; the ebook is FREE for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

What's the book about?

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

      I see you, "Top Release" bar.

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. 

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

  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.