Author's Blog:
Website: Jake Needham
Twitter: @jakeneedham
LinkedIn: Check Out LinkedIn
Facebook: Check Out Facebook
Author Description: JAKE NEEDHAM is an American screen and television writer who began writing crime novels when he realized he didn't really like movies and television very much. He is a lawyer by education. Prior to becoming a screenwriter through a series of accidents too ridiculous to be believed, he held a number of significant positions in both the pubic and private sectors where he took part in a lengthy list of international operations he has no intention of telling you about. Mr. Needham has lived and worked in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Thailand for over twenty years. He, his wife, and their two sons divide their time between homes in Bangkok and New York. You can read excerpts from Jake Needham's other books as well as his weekly column, 'Letters from Asia,' at his web site: www.JakeNeedham.com.
SPOTLIGHT Questions and Answers with the Author
Do you have a new Inspector Tay or Jack Shepherd novel coming soon? When will it be released?
THE AMBASSADOR'S WIFE introduced Inspector Samuel Tay of Singapore CID and Sam proved so popular with readers that a second Inspector Tay novel is coming very soon. It's called THE UMBRELLA MAN and it will be available in December, at least it will in its e-book editions.
I'm not certain whether there will be a print edition of THE UMBRELLA MAN at all, however, or when it will be available if there is one. The print editions of all my previous novels have been published by Marshall Cavendish, which is a UK publisher now owned by a Singaporean media group. Sadly, THE AMBASSADOR'S WIFE annoyed some people in Singapore -- particularly a few people high up in the police and the Ministry of the Interior -- since it didn't portray the cops in Singapore as unfailing wise, determined, and successful. Singaporeans are notoriously thin-skinned about criticism from foreigners, whether it is actual criticism or simply perceived criticism as a result of a lack of praise. Remember, these are the same fine folks who put a seventy year old British author in prison for writing that the Singaporean judiciary was sometimes influenced by politics.
The unhappy reaction to THE AMBASSADOR'S WIFE from some government and law enforcement heavies there in Singapore left my publisher feeling very insecure and now they're not particularly enthusiastic about having a continuing association with Inspector Tay. So there are no plans right now for a print edtion.
How important is social networking in your marketing effort, being based in the Far East?
I have over 25,000 followers on Twitter now and I get 20 or 30 communications from readers through it every day. Happily, not a small number of those communications are from readers who tell me they are happy to have just discovered my books through something that somebody said on Twitter.
Facebook is a completely different story for me. it's been absolutely useless as a communication tool. I hear from virtually no one on Facebook. I have my account set to cross post anything I put on Facebook onto my Twitter account, and I do post something on Facebook every now and then just as proof of life if nothing else, but the original Facebook posting almost never draws any response at all, while the cross posting on Twitter draws dozens of responses and dozens more re-tweets. Go figure, huh?
Did ebooks change the way you market your novels? How did you handle that?
E-books have been an absolute game changer for me. My titles have been available as e-books for less than a year, but they are already selling at a rate of 20 times that of my print editions.
Part of the problem I have always had is that my readership is very international, and that usually makes it tough for people to locate and buy titles that they haven't already read. Without a huge international publisher's support -- and that's something I have never had -- it's simply impossible to push out enough printed copies into enough countries for all my titles to be readily available to an international readership. Suddenly with e-books, that's no problem at all. Anyone who wants one of my books, no matter where in the world they might be, can find it and download it in a few seconds. My print publisher never shipped more than a couple of hundred copies of any of my titles to the UK, but more than 50,000 copies of THE AMBASSADOR'S WIFE have been download there in its e-book formats. THE AMBASSADOR'S WIFE even went to #1 on the Kindle best-seller list in the UK back in the spring and for a couple of months there I had four titles in the top dozen legal thrillers on Amazon UK. I wouldn't have gotten within a thousand miles of that kind of success just relying on my publisher to ship and sell my print editions.
Do you have a schedule that you go by to try to deal with your novel writing, your blog, your marketing and living your life?
Of course I have a schedule, but have you ever heard the military maxim that no battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy? That's pretty much the way it is around here every day…
Author's Book List
A WORLD OF TROUBLE(A Jack Shepherd crime thriller)
Jack Shepherd was sick of Washington politics, sick of corporate law, and even a little sick of himself. So he hit the road looking for a new start, made a couple of wrong turns, and somehow wound up in Hong Kong. Now he needs a job, and being General Chalerm Kitnarock's lawyer is a job, so he takes it. Shepherd could certainly have done a lot worse for himself. Charlie Kitnarok is the world's ninety-eighth richest man. But he's also a former prime minister of Thailand now living in exile in Dubai. When he's not making money, he's plotting his return to political power. For Shepherd, that could be a real problem. Thailand already has a prime minister, and she's a woman with whom Shepherd once had a brief relationship. It will get particularly messy if, as Shepherd suspects, Charlie is smuggling arms to his supporters and intends to use the Thai army to seize control of the country. Can Shepherd keep his two friends from destroying each other and prevent Thailand from sliding into chaos? Thailand is hurtling closer and closer to a bloody civil war. And as unlikely as it may sound, Jack Shepherd is probably the only person on earth who can stop it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Amazon Buy Page
-- Barnes and Noble Buy Page
-- Smashwords Buy Page
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KILLING PLATO(A Jack Shepherd crime thriller)
Plato Karsarkis was an international celebrity straight out of Vanity Fair until a New York grand jury indicted him for smuggling Iraqi oil and charged him with racketeering and espionage. There was also the matter of a woman he may or may not have murdered to cover it all up. When Karsarkis flees the United States just ahead of the FBI and promptly vanishes, the world's media whips itself into a frenzy. Jack Shepherd was a politically connected American lawyer until he traded the fierce intrigues of Washington for the quiet life in Bangkok. Then one day he walks into a bar on the jet-set island of Phuket and finds the world's most famous fugitive waiting for him. Karsarkis wants to hire him. He wants a presidential pardon so he can return to American and he knows Shepherd's connections to the White House just might get it for him. But the U.S. Marshals are in Phuket as well and they want something from Shepherd, too. They're there to kidnap Karsarkis and take him back to the US for trial and the Marshals want Shepherd to help them set a trap. What Shepherd wants is for everybody to go away and leave him alone. At least he does until he discovers a chilling secret, one that plunges him a violent spiral of friendship and betrayal and pulls him straight back into the life he thought he had left behind in Washington. The Marshals aren't really in Phuket to arrest Plato Karsarkis. They're there to kill him.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Amazon Buy Page
-- Barnes and Noble Buy Page
-- Smashwords Buy Page
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LAUNDRY MAN(A Jack Shepherd crime thriller)
Once a high-flying international lawyer, a member of the innermost circles of government power, Jack Shepherd has abandoned the savage politics of Washington for the lethargic backwater of Bangkok, where he is now just an unremarkable professor at an unimportant university in an insignificant city. Or is he? A secretive Asian bank collapses under dubious circumstances. A former law partner Shepherd thought dead reveals himself as the force behind the disgraced bank and coerces Shepherd into helping him track the hundreds of millions of dollars that disappeared during the collapse. A twisting trail of deceit leads Shepherd from Bangkok to Hong Kong and eventually to an isolated villa on the fabled island of Phuket where he confronts the evil at the heart of a monstrous game of international treachery. A lawyer among people who laugh at the law, a friend in a land where today's allies are tomorrow's fugitives, Jack Shepherd battles the global tide of corruption, extortion and murder that is fast engulfing the new life he has made for himself in Thailand.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Amazon Buy Page
-- Barnes and Noble Buy Page
-- Smashwords Buy Page
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE BIG MANGOFrom the Big Apple, to the Big Orange, to the Big Mango. It does have a kind of nutty logic to it. Bangkok is about as far as Eddie Dare can go without falling off the edge of the world, although at times Eddie wonders if that isn't exactly what he has done. $400,000,000 is in the wind, the result of a bungled CIA operation to grab the Bank of Vietnam's currency reserves when the Americans fled Saigon in 1975. A few decades later, the word on the street is that all that money somehow ended up in Bangkok and a downwardly mobile lawyer from San Francisco named Eddie Dare is the only guy who can find it. The problem is, Eddie knows nothing at all about the missing money. At least he doesn't think he does. But so many other people believe he's got an inside track that he and his old marine buddy Winnebago Jones figure it's worth a shot to head for Bangkok and try their luck. But first Eddie and Winnebago have to battle the jagged netherworld of modern-day Thailand - a corkscrewed realm where big-time dealers tango with small-time hustlers, criminals on the lam mingle with politicians on the take, and the merely raffish jostle with the downright scary for center stage in the big leagues of weird. If they can overcome all that - as well as outmaneuver a freelancing CIA man, a pack of angry Secret Service agents, and a ruthless Vietnamese intelligence woman - maybe they can find out what really happened back in Saigon all those years ago. And where those ten tons of money are.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Amazon Buy Page
-- Barnes and Noble Buy Page
-- Smashwords Buy Page
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Ambassadors WifeThe first body is in Singapore, on a bed in an empty suite in the Marriott Hotel. The second in Bangkok, in a seedy apartment close to the American embassy. Both women. Both Americans. Both beaten viciously and shot in the head. Both stripped naked and lewdly displayed. The FBI says it's terrorism, but the whispers on the street are that a serial killer is stalking American women across Asia. Inspector Samuel Tay of Singapore CID is something of a reluctant policeman. He's a little overweight, a little lonely, a little cranky, and he smokes way too much. Thinking back, he can't even remember why he became a police detective in the first place. He talks about quitting all the time, but he hasn't. Because the thing is, he's very, very good at what he does. When bodies of American women start turning up, Singapore CID calls in Inspector Tay. It's a high profile case, and he's the best they have. Then why is it, Tay soon begins to wonder, that nobody seems to want him to find the women's killer? Not the FBI, not the American ambassador, not even his bosses at CID. When international politics takes over a murder case, the truth is the next victim.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Amazon Buy Page
-- Barnes and Noble Buy Page
-- Smashwords Buy Page
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Author Recommended by: HBSystems Publications
Publisher of ebooks, writing industry blogger and the sponsor of the HBS Author's Spotlight plus the blog: eBook Author's Corner
No comments:
Post a Comment