I've been reading John Locke's (on twitter @donovancreed) book on how he sold over a million ebooks on Amazon in five months and have been trying to determine how to proceed toward a goal of my own. The major points of his book have to do with setting out a plan, involving, among other things, blogging on a website and establishing yourself on twitter. These two things are supposed to feed each other to create more buzz around your books. Looking at twitter these days I would have to guess that a lot of authors have read his book and are working to get themselves out there.

Another thing that he suggests is to write a blog entry that will serve up what he calls a "Loyalty Transfer" which seems to be another way of saying write about someone famous whose fans and admirers will flock to your website and then follow you on twitter. Which might lead you to assume that I'm trying to attract John Locke fans to my books. But you'd be wrong. I don't write like John nor do I plan to.

The question is: Who should I write about to transfer loyalty? Patterson? Brown? Sanford? Deaver? Higgins? I do like all of these authors and more. Tough call. Any thoughts?

To me there are two aspects to writing a book. The first and most important is the story and the characters. Who are these people and why are they doing these things? I try to generate characters who may be an amalgam of people that I've known but also such that no real person is represented. I'd hate to have someone say "Hey, that's me in your book." And as for the story, those can come from anywhere, but I like to imagine how things could be rather than how they actually are. Even when there is some basis in reality such as discussed below, I like to carry it to an extreme. I think most people's imaginations like to go far afield from reality. For instance, in The Controller, our hero is on his way to being wealthy. Owns a very nice house and drives a hot set of wheels. In The Virtual Thief, our hero hits bottom but gets rich by taking money from the corporation that caused him to hit bottom. In both novels, the hero is a computer geek and the heroine is strong and knows things that the hero doesn't expect. (Type casting?)

The other important element is what I call the mechanics of writing. Not just the spelling and grammar, but making the elements of the story fit together. If someone has a gun in chapter 10, it had better have been mentioned in an earlier chapter. If someone steals an airplane, someone should have commented earlier on how well or poorly he flies. Of course a character can surprise but the explanation had better be good.

In the late 70's I was deep in the middle of an FBI case involving a European, who was working for the Russians, attempting to steal a major commercial software package from a prominent US company. The chase went on for months and I was right in the middle, being the communications link to each side. This lead me to think about the possibility that foreign nationals might be interested in other such attempts. I have heard that a lot of that went on and still does.

That led to the the idea of a book about a group of such people using modern technology to steal commercial software. But a book that was just about the technology, might be less than exciting unless we added the element of pure gangsters. While I have no knowledge that any corporation has used such tactics as described in the book, I would not be at all surprised to hear that bad guys had taken over a company and begun to use their basic tools, threats and intimidation, to acquire others.

This novel is about a guy to whom all that happens in spades. The Russians are after the software his company is developing. And people whose tactics give new meaning to the term "hostile takeover" are after his company. Our reluctant hero, John Packard, must play the game well.