Review: A useful lesson in book promotion
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 01 10, 2013
When Vince Flynn released the Kindle Edition of Kill Shot (Mitch Rapp) in February 2012, readers of the US edition were surprised that the book itself ended 72% through the digital document and the rest (28%) was promotional excerpts from previous Mitch Rapp adventures. Early reviews of Kill Shot downgraded overall ratings of the book because of this content. In early March 2012 Vince Flynn and his publishers realised that this was seriously affecting acceptance of the book in digital format and issued an official comment apologising for this and released an update without the promotional excerpts.By mid March this free Reader's Companion was released containing the excerpts and an excerpt from Kill Shot. I commend Vince Flynn and his publishers for this sensible action. I have read all of Vince Flynn's books and this Companion is a handy reminder of the Mitch Rapp history - the 5 stars is for the content of the Companion and for Vince Flynn's books which mostly deserve that rating.A few weeks before Michael Connelly released his latest Harry Bosch book "The Black Box" a free copy of the first 6 chapters was made available - this seemed to me to be a valid up-front way of promoting the book. However about the same time he released a novella, "The Safe Man", which only took up 40% of the digital content with the rest being a repeat of the free 6 chapters of the next book. My review title at the time was "This is a con for promotional material" and I commented that Michael Connelly and his publishers had not learned from Vince Flynn's experience.I do expect that some self published authors will include excerpts of other works at the end of their books, but these seldom take up more than 10-15% of the content. I think that it is fair that SFA's do this as they don't have the publicity resources available to successful authors supported by major publishers.