Mark T. Sullivan's Blog

WHY FREE?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:25:00 +0000

I recently decided to give my books away for free.

I’m not kidding. You can now download The Purification Ceremony, the first of six novels that will be freed through my website in the coming months.

And here’s the deal: I expect nothing in return except for your e-mail address and the knowledge that you may have enjoyed one of my stories.

If you read one of my stories of suspense and intrigue and do not enjoy it, you have not spent a dime, and I hope you’ll try another. They’re all different.

And if you read another one and like it, awesome. You are still under no obligation to pay me anything, nor do I expect it.

But if you do like my books, and if you feel so inclined, you may return to my download page at www.SmashWords.com --my very cool partner in this experiment in new media publishing -- and send me a donation equal to what you think the experience of reading the novel was worth. Half of every donation will in turn be donated to non-profits that promote reading and writing.

Now you might give a plug nickel for my writing or my plotlines and that’s cool. As my grandmother used to say, “One man’s honey is another woman’s vinegar. “ But if you do like my stories and want to help promote literacy, I suggest a donation somewhere on a sliding scale of between $5 and $10.

Think about it: I am, in effect, guaranteeing your reading experience. You pay me only if you thought the story was good enough, and you feel great knowing that part of what you pay goes to get other people reading and writing.

You think I’m nuts, don’t you?

You’re asking: What is there to stop me from downloading one of Sullivan’s books, liking it, but then not sending him a donation?

Nothing. And you know what? That’s cool too. I’m just happy you enjoyed my storytelling, and I hope you come back to read another free book next month.

Think about it: This is a no-lose deal. The books I’m offering you for free have appeared on national and international bestseller’s lists. These are high-quality tales that have been incredibly well reviewed.

Both the New York Times and The Los Angeles Times have named my novels to lists of the best fiction of the year. The London Literary Review says I write “superbly” and offer stories that are “uniquely scary.” The Cincinatti Plain Dealer calls my novels “almost addictive page-turners.” Publisher’s Weekly raves that my books are “exciting . . .expertly-crafted . . .brilliantly-told and realized.”

Still unconvinced?

If you were to pay the hardcover price for The Purification Ceremony, your total at checkout would be roughly $29.50. If you bought it for your Kindle at Amazon, you’d be out $11.00

I’m offering the novel to you for free. No strings attached. If you chose to donate afterwards, I thank you and so do the reading and writing charities I support.

If you don’t donate, I hope my story made your day a little more entertaining and urge you to keep reading!

Still not sure how this works?

Simply click on the Free Bestsellers! button on my website, www.marktsullian.com. You’ll jump to my page at SmashWords.com. You’ll see a price named to download the book, usually $6.95. But you’ll also see a Free Download button. Click it.

You will be asked for your e-mail address so I can contact you about future free novels and stories. Your e-mail will not be shared with any third party, and I won't abuse the priviledge of being able to contact you from time to time. Then you’ll choose the format you want for your particular reading device, and the download of the novel will take place in a matter seconds.

That’s the whole deal. Free book. Happy reader. Happy writer.

If you chose to donate later, simply return to the book site at SmashWords.com and click “Applause.” From there you’ll be linked to an ultra-secure PayPal system, where you can use your credit card to enter any donation you see fit, knowing that half will go to help literacy programs.

Okay, so what if you are dead set on having one of my novels in paperback or hardcover, the tried and true hold it in your hand and thumb the pages format?

In the very near future I will also have new editions of the books on the shelves. But they will cost. Sorry, I have not figured out a way to make a real book free. Nor has any publisher I’m afraid.

I’ll bet there are a few skeptics still reading and wondering what my angle is, what I hope to gain from giving away novels that took me years of hard work to research and write.

The answer is two-fold:

When it comes right down to it, the most rewarding aspect of my job is not lunching with editors in Manhattan or jetting off to Europe to do interviews and make appearances. The thing that thrills me the most is hearing from someone who started reading one of my tales, and got caught up in the story, compulsively turning the pages until the early hours of morning.

That’s what turns me on. It is what makes me feel best about what I love to do. So I decided to maximize the potential for that rewarding feeling by giving my older stories away free, to as many readers as possible, in as many languages as possible.

At the same time, Internet experts these days say we are entering a digital economy for certain services such as entertainment where you will no longer be able to set some arbitrary value on your goods or your services. It makes perfect sense to me. I believe that the future of storytelling lies in giving work away for free, in effect guaranteeing whatever experience you’re offering, and then letting the real free market decide what the experience was worth.

Fair enough?

Okay, then. Download The Purification Ceremony today. It won the W.H. Smith Award for fresh talent, was nominated in the best novel category for the Edgar Award, appeared on bestseller’s lists around the world, and has been called one of the great locked-room mysteries of all time.

I hope you enjoy The Purification Ceremony and my other novels that will be freed in the coming months. Drop me a line through my fan site at Face Book, or through the website.

Keep reading! I promise I will keep writing!

All My Best,

Mark

Chasing The General

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:06:00 +0000

I've chased my share of ghosts in my life as a writer. A serial killer. A corrupt and powerful judge. The innocent victims of addiction. The last ghosts I caught. The killer got away.

For a good long while there, I thought the General might too.

The General was a high-ranking Nazi in Italy in the last two years of World War II. I first heard tell of him at a dinner party in Montana where I live. The General, it turned out, had played a powerful part in the extraordinary life of an Italian boy becoming a young man.

His name is Pino Lella. For fifty years Pino had kept the story of his life in the last two years of the war secret. But then he told some of it to an entrepreneur and social activist named Robert Dehlendorf, who told it to a guy named Larry Minkoff, who in turn, at that dinner party, told fragments of the story to me.

But those fragments were enough for me to know that if they were true, they might form the spine of what could be the last great untold story of World War II. Three months later, I landed in Milan. Pino met me, 80, tall, brawny and utterly charming and welcoming. He spent thirty years teaching skiing in the U.S. and speaks beautiful English, and had the energy of a man half his age.

Over the next two weeks Pino and I crisscrossed northern Italy, visiting the scenes of his remarkable coming of age tale of courage, of selflessness, of romance, of grief, of heartbreak, and mysteries that haunt him to this day.

Chief among these mysteries was the identity of the General. Pino did not and does not speak German. He communicated with the General in French. He claimed the man was the commander of the Organization Todt, the armaments and construction arm of the Nazi war machine.

He said he believed the General's name was "Kaufmann" or "Hoffman."

For the next three years after my visit to Italy, I worked to corroborate other aspects of Pino's amazing story, an epic tale that leaps from the fashion salons of Milan to a Catholic boy's school high in the Alps that served as a last way station for Jews wanting to escape the Nazis by climbing over the mountains into Switzerland in the winter of 1943-44. The boys were the guides. Pino was the original guide, responsible for saving dozens of refugees, Jewish and political.

That enough would have been a fascinating book.

But in April 1944, on the verge of being drafted, Pino was forced by his father and uncle to join the Organization Todt as a way of avoiding combat. Through serendipitous events, he became the driver for the General, and so became a spy inside the German High command in Italy, feeding his information through clandestine shortwave radios to the Allies listening in Switzerland.

Along the way, Pino met and fell into a tragic love affair with the maid who worked for the General's mistress, and became caught up in events that led to the surrender of the Germans in Italy in May, 1945.

Those events culminated with Pino being asked by an U.S. Army Major to conduct one last escape from Italy, a suicide mission that seemed designed to save and protect certain high-ranking Nazi officers at the very end of the war.

It took me three years of research to find evidence to corroborate most of the story. Indeed, I had virtually all of it except the identity of the General and the reasons behind the escape mission at the war's end. I consulted historians. I went to the National Archives of the United States and read every piece of paper I could find about the Organization Todt, and about the Italian resistance and the short-wave radios they used to contact the Allies.

But nowhere did I find mention of a General named Kaufmann or Hoffmann in the Organization Todt in Italy. I got to the point where I thought I was chasing a ghost that I might never see clearly.

Finally, last month, I went to Germany and spent eight days in the Bundesarchves in Berlin and the military archives in Freiburg. I discovered more and more mysteries, including documents that detailed a mass burning of top secret Organization Todt files in Milan in the last two weeks of the war.

Again, nowhere in those files did we find the General, or even someone remotely like him. The night before my last day of research, I was feeling glum. The translator I'd hired to help me was feeling glum. The General was a ghost, perhaps lost to history.

But then, around three in the morning, it hit me. Maybe the General did not work for the Organization Todt. Maybe he ran the Nazi agency that ran the Organization Todt.

Following this line of reasoning, we found the General around eleven that morning. We also found documents that hugely supported Pino's description of the General and the events in which he was involved in the last year of the war. We also discovered why Pino thought his name was Kaufmann or Hoffman, though it was not. I got a picture of him and sent it to Pino. Over the weekend he confirmed that this was the General he drove for and helped escape.

Sorry to be grinning, but I just caught a ghost!

Triple Cross in stores today

noreply@blogger.com (webmaster) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 20:38:00 +0000

TRIPLE CROSS came out today after a week of great advance reviews!

The St. Louis Post Dispatch called the novel, "splendid," and said, "If you're watching your real-life stocks tank because of the real-life greed of some investment bankers and mortgage brokers, you'll take malicious pleasure in sitting down with "Triple Cross" for the fictional payback."

My hometown newspaper, The Bozeman Chronicle, called TRIPLE CROSS "a scathing indictment of corrupt politicians and Wall Street kings."

And Dianesbooks.com raved, "Wow! The best thriller of April 2009. Wow!"

Several people have asked me today what it's like for a new novel to come out. I've told them it's kind of a scatter-shot experience. It's still exciting to go into bookstores and see what you've worked on for years finally on the shelves. It's fun to hear from old fans and dear friends.

Good reviews are soul supporters. Bad reviews are a thorn I try to pull out of my backside as quickly as possible. If you dwell on them you never get a thing done, so I don't. Some people will never like what you do. It's part of the experience of being a writer. One trick is to focus on the fact that your fans are far more numerous than your detractors.

The other trick is to sit down on the day a book comes out and take some time out to write. It helps keep me grounded. A book gets published, but a writer writes. I try not to forget that. Ever.

Also, if you get the chance, take a look at this: www.thewashingtonwatch.com/montana/massacre

Five Years

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:35:00 +0000

I haven't published a new novel in almost five years and I know some of my readers and fans have been asking why.

Some of the reasons were business related, painful and not worth getting into. But after the publication of Serpent's Kiss, I was burnt out for a while and spent a few months wandering around in the woods and along the rivers near my house in Montana, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. The answer after all that therapeutic navel gazing was that I wanted to continue to write. I realized that writing is one of my favorite things to do, and that got my butt back in the chair and my fingers on the keyboard.
Here's a brief account of the last five years.

I was still burnt on novels, so
I taught myself to write screenplays. I wrote three scripts the first year, and then I wrote a novel that I loved but nobody else liked. Then Serpent's Kiss became a huge bestseller in Germany and that gave me the ability to fly to Italy and research what I believe is the last great untold story of World War II.

I returned to the United States, and at the same time wrote the first drafts of both TRIPLE CROSS and the World War II screenplay called THE FORGOTTEN FRONT.

Then I wrote a novel under a pseudonym that my agent's trying to sell.

And

I'm about 90 percent through the writing of my new, new book, tentatively entitled THE 18th RULE.

Along the way I wrote twenty full length magazine articles, founded a business that offers eco-friendly alternatives to asphalt, and became president of a non-profit foundation dedicated to alpine ski racing.

In short, it's been a busy five years even if there hasn't been a lot to show for it on the bookshelves.

I learned a lot in five years and had a heck of a good time for the most part. I try to live every day like it's my last. I laugh a lot.

I go on adventures as often as possible. I spend most days writing down my dreams. I can look out the window of my office and see the Bridger Mountains cast in snow. I'm healthy.

I'm the proud dad of two great boys, and the loving husband of my wife of twenty-five years. I'm a lucky guy. I know it and I thank God for the blessings he's given me every day since I last published a novel.

With his help, I can assure you that it won't be five years until I publish another.

So I'm new at this

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 16:41:00 +0000

I've written nine novels, half a dozen screenplays, twenty short stories, hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, but never a blog. I'm a stickler for form, but this is a writing form that seems to have no form, from letter to shout out, from column to compendium. The point being that after reading hundreds of these things, you realize a blog can be virtually anything you want it to be. Which is cool and scary and creative and daunting.

So, what to blog about, on this, my initial foray?

How about limbo?

I'm not talking the dance. And I'm not talking the Catholic version, which I was introduced to via a disturbing illustration in my second grade catechism book -- a blue whirlpool with black human silhouettes being sucked into the void.

No, I'm talking that limbo between the time you finish a manuscript and when you hold the actual book in your hand. Prior to entering limbo, the manuscript is life consuming, six or seven hours a day, six days a week for a year or more. You spend all this time and you dream, you doodle, you draft, discover and redraft and dream again, until it feels whole to you and your editor.

You've given birth to something, but then, like some scene in Dickens, the baby disappears.

You get to see the baby now and then as it goes through copy editing, galleys and proofing. But it's no longer there every day. You're disconnected and cast into that limbo between writing and publishing, creativity and marketing.

I'm in that limbo right now with TRIPLE CROSS. It been done for almost a year. It comes out in mid-April, three months from now, and I've seen the cover, and read the blurbs other writers have graciously given me. But I've forgotten the experience of writing the novel because I'm so far into the next one, less than fifty pages to go until I have a first draft.

After nine novels, I find that that's the only way to fill the limbo between writing and publishing. I keep writing. I invent something new and it becomes entwined in my life and eventually dominates my thoughts until my editor says it's done; and I'm childless once again, spinning around in that blue whirlpool, looking at the silhouettes that have joined me in limbo, and trying to tell their stories.