Austin S. Camacho is the author of four detective novels in the Hannibal Jones series and two novels in the Stark and O’Brien adventure series. Active in several local writers’ organizations, Camacho is the current president of the Northern Virginia Chapter of the Virginia Writer’s Club. By day, Camacho is a public affairs specialist for the Department of Defense. For more than a decade the American Forces Network carried his radio and television news reports.

Today, June 13th, is the day of my first book signing. With the release of my new novel, Russian Roulette, I feel as if I’m poised on the edge of a knife with spectacular success on one side and abysmal failure on the other. I’m not worried, exactly, but there is a certain amount of uncertainty. Anxiety? Maybe apprehension. A lot of time and effort has gone into getting to this day but now we’ve reached the point where it’s too late to do more, too late to make a difference. Nothing left to do for now but wait. Will the world cheer my successful book launch, or will I be listening to crickets chirp, withering under a bookstore manager’s doleful glare?

This event at a Borders Superstore in Maryland will be a bellwether, an indictor of the life Russian Roulette will have. Russian Roulette is the fifth novel in my mystery series about Hannibal Jones, the African American private detective working in Washington DC. In this book, Hannibal is forced to take a case for a Russian assassin. He must investigate Gana, the wealthy Algerian who has stolen Viktoriya, the woman his new client loves. Evidence connects Gana to Russian mob money and the apparent suicide of Viktoriya’s father. More deaths follow, each one closer to Viktoriya. To save the Russian beauty, Hannibal must unravel a complex tangle of clues and survive a dramatic shootout side-by-side with his murderous client.

Russian Roulette was a labor of love and I want to share that experience with as many people as possible. Goodness knows I’ve done all I could think of to make the book explode onto the scene. After mailing out review copies to all the usual suspects I gave away another stack of books to anyone who would promise to post a review in four different places on line.

I got some very kind advance comments from friends, and reviews, some of whose names you might recognize. - Libby Fischer Hellmann, JoAnn Ross, Robert J. Randisi, and John Gilstrap. Not to mention nice write-ups in Crimespree Magazine and Midwest Book Review. (They’re all on my website )

I got print ads in Mystery Scene and Crimespree Magazine. I got a list of 5,000 mystery readers and sent each of them a postcard announcing the new novel. And I sent personal letters to each of the 47 bookstores in this country that specialize in mystery fiction informing them of the imminent release of Russian Roulette and respectfully asking (alright, begging them) to order a few copies. I also promised them a pizza party for their staff if they sell 50 or more copies of Russian Roulette. Yeah, I’m shameless.

For the on line audience I got a book trailer produced and made a promotional video for Russian Roulette myself. I launched a blog tour, and I’ll be on at least 16 mystery and literary blogs like this one this month. This isn’t my favorite kind of writing, but it is essential in the 21st Century to get the buzz mill running. And I’ve arranged for a dozen personal appearances in bookstores. That’s the easiest part for me. I love being face-to-face with readers, explaining my books and discussing their favorites to find if my work is a good fit. Writing aside, this is the best part of being an author. And every hand I shake is another potential fan for the whole series. Someday, that could even make this writing addiction evolve into a decent living.

Sometimes I feel as if marketing is the tail wagging the dog. I don’t get discouraged if a book doesn’t sell a million copies because it’s not about the sales. It’s about the writing. It’s about that process that spins random straw thoughts and ideas into golden chapters. I know I won’t get rich from sales of Russian Roulette, but the book deserves its fair share of attention. It isn’t simply a good story with a social conscience, putting good characters into a complex puzzle of a plot. It is the distilled embodiment of all the hours I could have spent with my lovely wife Denise but instead chose to give a keyboard my attention. It’s also the concentrated essence of her hopes that I will one day achieve my dream. At its core are the lunch hours I spent creating instead of relaxing, the early mornings, the late nights, the surreptitiously stolen moments when no one was looking. It deserves the eyes of an appreciative public, and I want so badly to give the book what it deserves.

But the ugly truth is that a book doesn’t become popular just because the author wants it to be. No matter how good it is, you can’t force a book into buyers’ hands. You can’t will a novel onto the best seller list. You can only do your best to draw attention to your baby and hope that you stumble upon that magical combination of writing quality, buzz, distribution and timing that will raise your literary voice above the din of the thousands of worthy contestants whose fiction enters the lists every year. So here I sit, just hours before the kickoff of my own big game, poised on the edge of night. But is that dusk I see approaching, or the glow of dawn?

BTW, you can order Russian Roulette from Amazon.com, and if you have a Kindle you can download it and read it today, but I would rather you support the people who support us. So please visit the Foul Play Mystery Bookshop over in Westerville and pick up your copy of Russian Roulette there.