C.R. Lloyd, Author of "The Second Shot"

I love being an instigator.
Case and point: Last November during a very rainy month-long writing retreat in Florence, Italy (I'm writing this from the same apartment), I found myself spending as much time in a local pub as I did behind my desk. Anyone who knows me well enough won't see anything strange in that. Just ask my ex-wives. But I ended up chatting it up with some very cool ex-pats who work the place and one in particular from London who eventually got around to asking me about acquiring an agent. A couple of beers already swimming in my brain, my reaction was thus: If I had to do it all over again, I'd self-pub on Amazon. Forget the agent and forget about wasting time. Go for it now! Or something like that. Now mind you, I'd never self-pub'd a thing in my life and still haven't. It was the old hubris talking I guess. Or beer muscles. But I was speaking the truth. Kindle Direct Publishing is precisely the route I would take if, like London's newest best-seller to be, C.R. (Rebecca) Lloyd, I was young, super-talented, charming, attractive, and just plain fun to be around. Methinks my meeting with C.R. that rain-soaked November will turn out to be not only serendipitous, but also fortuitous. Indeed and jolly good show!

Rebecca, please take it away:

How to court a writer – in the ‘God people must ask you this all the time but please help me with my writing’ kind of way

I met Vincent Zandri at the pub where I worked. An Irish pub in the centre of Florence. I was working in the pub so that I would have the time to write, but so far I had had no luck getting a literary agent for my book.

My colleague Steve told me about Vincent. ‘Hey, there’s this American dude. He writes thrillers. I googled him. I think he’s pretty successful. He’s in town for the rest of the month. You should so speak to him.’ I met Vince a few days later. But I didn’t tell him I was a writer. I was embarrassed. And when he told me that every time he met someone in Florence they turned out to be an aspiring writer needing help, I knew I couldn’t say anything.

But then I bumped into him at the pub after I’d worked the day shift. I’d had a few drinks already and with my shame levels lowered by the beer I brought it up in conversation. Well we talked about everything that night from our relationships with our parents to our love lives to our favourite books. He came into the pub one more time before heading back to the States and gave me his email address and offered to read some of my stuff when it was ready. I blushed to my toes, feeling as though I had manoeuvred him into offering to help but I was very pleased. You need all the help you can get when you are starting out.

So the following March I emailed him the first three chapters of my book – a political thriller set in Italy. He paid me some great compliments, but even more importantly he advised me to publish it myself on Amazon for Kindle. Kindle devices had been on sale in the UK for less than a year and I still saw self publishing as vanity publishing. And Amazon had only just reached Italy at that point – Kindle was unknown – I hadn’t realised that ebooks were becoming such a big thing. But Vince’s books were selling strongly in their electronic formats and he felt that there were real possibilities out there for new writers to get read and noticed. He told me to get myself an editor, a cover and go for it. I did. And my book, The Second Shot, is now available on Amazon. And if you’re interested here’s what it’s about…

Pietro is a typical Italian: angry, disappointed, resigned to the state of things. But one drunken night he gets an idea: why have one man kill the president when you can get half the country to do it? And his idea becomes a plan, a plan to assassinate the president, using donations from Italians who feel the same as him.

The next six months of his life are a battle to put his plan into actionhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif and avoid arrest. His plan will force him to go into hiding, will put his friends and family in danger, and will bring him into contact with the criminal underbelly of Russia, France and Italy.

And after it’s done? Well if half the country are involved in killing the president, it means they have to be involved in what happens next...

The Second Shot by CR Lloyd is available on Amazon for Kindle priced $3.50