Cross Promotion and Advertising with Carl Alves

This year, at the Bram Stoker Award® Weekend, Incorporating World Horror Convention in New Orleans 2013, Carl Alves and I attended an excellent workshop on how to market your work by Matt Schwartz from Random House. One of Matt's suggestions was to get together with an author friend or two and cross-promote each other's works. That's what Carl and I are doing this weekend.

I'll admit I'd never read any of Carl's work before this, but he sent me a copy of Blood Street and I've really been enjoying the story. I'm not a big vampire novel fan these days, although I loved Salem's Lot and the Anne Rice novels among other traditional vampire stories back in the day.

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This is the synopsis from Amazon:  Blood Street is True Blood meets the Sopranos set in the streets of Philadelphia. When vampires tangle with the Philadelphia mafia, one thing is certain - all hell is going to break loose. 
           Alexei chose the wrong neighborhood to claim his latest victim, a member of Enzo Salerno's crime syndicate. Now Philadelphia mob boss Enzo Salerno is determined to hunt down the man who killed his associate in such gruesome fashion in his South Philly row home and serve his own brand of old fashioned Italian style vengeance. 
           Perplexed by this unnatural murder, Salerno uncovers clues that lead him to believe that this was not a mob hit, and that a vampire was responsible for this death. Magnus, the leader of Alexei's brood, must use all of his resources to save them from both the mafia and the FBI, sparking a bloody war that plays out in the streets of Philadelphia. Who will survive on Blood Street?   

I'm ten chapters in, and my favorite part of the story thus far is the mob setup. Carl gets it right, which makes me wonder a little...Ha! But I've seen all those mobster movies and read The Godfather, and you won't be disappointed with the development of these mob characters and their crime syndicate. He's done a great job of "showing" and not "telling." I'm sure it would have been easier to do an info dump to explain it all, but Carl takes the time to weave it nicely through the story.

I've recently been introduced to the vampires part of the story, and they're the typical vampires from back in the day, and I thank him for that. Nice job so far. When I'm finished with the book, I'll post reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, and in my next blog, where I will also write about how the whole cross-promotion trial went.