One of the strangely little known sales strategies for Indie authors is advertising your books through the many daily discount and free eBook newsletters that abound on line. While there are scores of them, only a small number produce lots and lots of downloads and subsequent sales. Today, I’m using several of them to offer the first book in the Frank Adversego thriller series, The Alexandria Project, for free. At one of the newsletter sites, you can also find my interview as Author of the Day.

Here are a couple of out takes from the interview. If you go on to read the full text, I hope you enjoy it. And if you want to follow along as Book 5 takes shape, don’t forget to become a Friend of Frank. We’re up to Chapter 7 now.

Your book contains a couple of twists. Did you plan these out before you started writing?

Until not too long ago I thought I didn’t have the imagination necessary to write fiction. But I do like solving puzzles. One reason I ended up writing technothriller/mysteries is that a mystery novel is mostly a series of puzzles that the author has to construct and then string together to make a plot: “if I want this to happen, then I’ll need to have this happen, and for that to happen, I’ll need a new character…” When I start a book, I know how it will end, but almost nothing else. I just head off in the general direction of the finale and let the characters tell me what has to happen in between.

The Alexandria Project contains quite a bit of satire – why did you take this approach?

I’ve always had a sense of humor, and I’ve enjoyed bringing that into my writing. I also believe our current political system is totally absurd. Each of my books has a political subplot, and Washington is a boundless source of new nonsense to lampoon. One benefit to being an Indie author is that you can design your own unique genre – in my case, cybersecurity political technothriller satires, and then (hopefully) find an audience that thinks that’s a cool idea. Happily, a lot of readers have.

Your book also raises some questions about modern warfare and military preparedness. How safe, do you think, are we?

In the military, they speak of “asymmetric warfare.” That’s where (for example) a technologically backward country takes advantage of an advanced nation’s dependence on high tech weaponry. Right now, the US has a bigger military budget than the next 20 nations combined. If you were North Korea, Iran or ISIS, would you go toe to toe with our military might, or attack our computer systems? I think the answer’s pretty clear. The next war we lose won’t be on the battlefield, and the targets will be civilians.