Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I’ve written for a living my entire adult life as a journalist, ad man and marketer. I began writing fiction in 2012 and have since published three dark thrillers — IDIOT’S TALE, NIKA and THE BANSHEES.
In IDIOT’S TALE a rather inept private investigator, John Rainwater, becomes embroiled in the search for something called White Stone. He learns of it when the rich and beautiful Morgana Trehane bursts into his low rent office near the New Orleans waterfront to announce that she has just escaped from kidnappers who questioned her about it. He quickly discovers that it may be the scientific equivalent of the fabled Philosopher’s Stone that turns base metal into gold. Within 24 hours they find themselves in Miami, in the company of a bitter and violent female former Mossad agent, Roni Miller, who discloses the potential horror that White Stone really represents. Now all they have to do is avoid being murdered long enough for the threat to be contained.
The latter two novels form a two-volume series around the character Veronika Voronina Wright — Nika– a beautiful young Russian woman who came to a suburb of New Orleans as the trophy wife of a loutish lottery multimillionaire. But she is concealing a dark secret that will ultimately leave a trail of dead bodies from the Russian arctic to the Arizona desert.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
My newest novel is THE BANSHEES, the concluding novel of the NIKA series . The first novel revealed Nika as the childhood victim of an unspeakable crime and betrayal, which she savagely avenged years later. She escaped Russia by marrying Andy Wright. When Wright is murdered in an exchange of gunfire in which Nika kills the assailant, she becomes rich. She meets Alanna Quinn, a fiery Irish American woman, with whom she falls in love when she learns that Alanna was also horribly victimized as a child.
The two women begin touring the world, instructing other women in how to get away with killing the men who committed heinous crimes against them. Their murder seminars prove highly effective and the burgeoning body count puts FBI agent David Lapin on their trail, leading to final confrontation one reviewer likened to “a hard punch in the gut.”
I wrote THE BANSHEES because I knew that readers would not be satisfied with the dark prophesy that ended NIKA. But I also felt that a single, 600-page novel of the intensity of this story would be too exhausting for many readers.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
Alas, yes! I typically start writing after ten p.m. and may keep at it until near dawn. I began that practice when I was caring for my terminally ill wife, and now can’t seem to break the pattern. At that time, I thought writing was keeping me sane. Maybe it still is.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
Wow! There would be scores that meet that criterion. Just in the genre in which I write the list is long: Tom Clancy, Frederick Forsyth, Patricia Highsmith, Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke, Greg Isles, Dennis Lehane, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Micky Spillane, Edgar Allen Poe, Ambrose Bierce. And that’s just scratching the surface.
What are you working on now?
I’m determined to dedicate this year to the grim task of marketing my three current novels. But I’m also mulling over a fourth suspense thriller set in the same imaginary South Louisiana parish where the NIKA novels are set. Entirely different characters and time line, however.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
Would that there were a single site, or even as few as a dozen sites through which you could market a self-published book! You’re marketing through a huge and diverse universe of reviewers and promotional sites. I just sent a printed copy of IDIOT’S TALE to a reviewer in Mumbai. Yes, there are some sites, like Awesomegang, askDavid, Bookbub that you make sure to employ. But if your list of contacts for each promotion isn’t somewhere north of thirty, you’re dogging it.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Steel yourself for being as much a marketer as a writer. Your chances of being accepted by a conventional publisher are practically nil. And even they do precious little to promote a new author who isn’t a celebrity of some sort. And only celebrities and well-established authors get more than a pittance in advances. Yeah, the occasional excruciatingly bad novel — I’m looking at you, Fifty Shades of Whatever — will make some hack writer a millionaire. You might also win the lottery, but it’s very unlikely.
Self-publishing is potentially far more likely to make you a bit of money — if you can write something people want to read, then work your tuches off at marketing.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
If you aspire to write. first read. Read the time-tested works of literature, the best of what’s current. Read nonfiction — history, science, current affairs. Read poetry. Read for content, then re-read for vocabulary and style. When you’ve read 500 books, you might be ready to write one.
What are you reading now?
I’m re-reading Carl Sagan’s THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD.
What’s next for you as a writer?
Writing and marketing until they shovel me under.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
Just four titles? Okay, Montaigne’s Essays — 900 worthwhile pages right there; thefull text, with footnotes, of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (yeah it’s five fat volumes, but it’s just one title, right?); the complete works of Shakespeare; (I have that in one volume); and the complete Sherlock Holmes. And I’d somehow smuggle aboard a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. It’s a small volume, no one would notice.
Author Websites and Profiles
Anthony Land Amazon Profile
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Goodreads Profile