Today is The Dangerous Type’s 4th birthday. Four years ago today, the book came out from Night Shade Books.
There were things I loved about the book release: that cover image is one. It captures the attitude of the main character, the sense of danger in the books, the amount of violence. I loved working with my editor, who pushed me to up the level of tech in the story, which led to some of my favorite bits. Even though it was brutal to write under those conditions, I loved having all three books out in the same year, so people could binge through them.
Unfortunately, the publisher (an imprint of Skyhorse Books) didn’t support the books very well. They didn’t put any emphasis on the binge-ability of the series. There was no promotion that all three would all be out in a six-month span. They didn’t put ads in the back of the first book, touting the second one would be out two months later. They didn’t even list the other two books’ titles in any of the trilogy. In other words, I worked myself into pneumonia to get the books written on time, then the publisher simply put them out without comment.
Over the 18 months I worked with Skyhorse, I had four publicists. That made it hard to get any momentum going with any of them, but they did score me a guest shot on Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog, which got my book in front of more people than I’d ever reached before. I wrote about my experiments in persona for her My Favorite Bit blog feature: http://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/my-favorite-bit-loren-rhoads-talks-about-the-dangerous-type/
Related to that, I wrote on Lisa Lane’s Cerebral Writer blog about how point of view affects The Dangerous Type: http://www.cerebralwriter.com/blog/loren-rhoads-shaping-your-story-through-point-of-view
At Tracie McBride’s Exquisite Corpse, I answered Publishers Weekly’s charge that I’m trying to bring grimdark to space opera: https://traciemcbridewriter.wordpress.com/2015/07/24/guest-post-grimdark-and-the-dangerous-type-by-loren-rhoads/
HorrorAddicts.net invited me to talk about where my claustrophobia came from and how it inspired The Dangerous Type: https://horroraddicts.wordpress.com/2015/07/28/claustrophobia-and-the-dangerous-type/
The Dangerous Type also made a couple of must-read lists:
9 Space Operas to Read while you’re waiting for Ancillary Mercy: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/9-space-operas-to-read-while-you-wait-for-ancillary-mercy/
io9’s Must-Read Science Fiction for July 2015: http://io9.com/there-are-too-many-must-read-science-fiction-and-fantas-1715535068
B&N Bookseller’s Picks for July 2015: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/bn-booksellers-picks-for-july-2015/
The Dangerous Type is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indie Bound, or at Borderlands Books in San Francisco. The audibook is available from Amazon or on Audible.
You can read a sample of the book here. I hope you’ll check it out.
