and Amazon AU
“When a new virus emerges, one man is set to change the future”.
The Australian agent Jared Pond is sent to investigate the rumours of a new Chinese bioweapon, the Hei Bai virus. During his assignment, Jared meets and falls in love with the Chinese civil rights activist Eileen Lu, the enemy of the CPOC. Together, Jared and Eileen try to uncover the dark secrets of the villainous dictator Chairman Jing Xi, and his assistant Tzi Cheng. But who is Pierre Beaumont, and what is the connection between the spread of the virus, and the World Bank's CEO?
I'm pleased to welcome multi-genre author Martin Lundqvist to The Writing Desk:
The Banker and the Dragon is the first instalment of The Banker’s trilogy. The main plotline of this book is focusing on a character by the name of Pierre Beaumont, who also appears in my previous books, The Fall of Martin Orchard and Sabina Saves the Future.
I wrote The Banker and the Dragon during the time of lockdown in April-May. I chose to write this book as a novella as I find that readers prefer to read novellas than reading full-length novels. The time to make novellas is also shorter, I can produce a novella in about a month’s time, including story editing and narrating the audiobook. Producing a novel takes a lot longer time to create, and it may not get my messages through to readers, so by creating trilogies in novella style, I find that readers have something that they can finish reading in an hour or two, and my messages get across to my fellow readers.
The main premise of The Banker and the Dragon is that the Chinese dictator Jing Xi develops a controllable virus in order to assassinate his political adversaries. The CEO of World Bank, Pierre Beaumont then steals the top-secret bioweapon and causes an outbreak to make massive amounts of money from the crashing financial markets.
What is your preferred writing routine?
I tend to write my books in moments of inspirations and epiphanies, as I believe that it is during these moments that great ideas and fascinating narratives can be made.
My preferred writing routine is to first write a chapter in great lengths, then use an editor software called Hemingway to reduce repetitive sentences, passive writing and adverbs. Another software that I use a lot is Grammarly app, which checks for any grammar errors. Once I am done finalising a chapter, I publish it online on my blog and other websites. As I live in Australia, I use a local publishing site called IngramSpark for printed books as it gives me the opportunity to use my own ISBN, over other sites such as Amazon’s proprietary ISBN numbers.
Once I am done with writing the manuscript, I make the audiobook version of my storyline. Making the audiobook is a great way to get followers to listen and appreciate my narratives, amongst their busy lifestyles.
What advice do you have for new writers?
My advice is to ultimately write for your own enjoyment. Writing is a journey, and as it always is the case, your first book is sadly not going to be your best. With that being said, try to keep writing what you love, before searching for world-wide recognition. Since book promotions are most often than not, time and money-consuming, the more books you have written, the more you will gain sales potential. I would also advise you to reach out to your friends and family initially, then to social media. As a side note, you can mention your writing to people you know, but don’t push it too hard as it could drive them away from reading your books instead.
What have you found to be the best way to raise awareness of your books?
The easiest way to raise awareness is to make audiobook narrations of your writing and publish the book for free for a couple of months, which will get you a lot of downloads and reviews. Searching for a good speaker, if you could not do it yourself, is also a good way of promoting your books to the mainstream society. As I was able to get a good Spanish narrator to read my books in Spanish, this has surprisingly led to my Spanish audiobooks performing better than my English audiobooks, due to my chosen Spanish narrator having a pleasant voice. I use Findawayvoices for my audiobook distribution, and I would recommend the platform as it is easy to use and they pay royalties monthly.
What was the hardest scene you remember writing?
The last chapter of The Fall of Martin Orchard was pretty hard to write, as the character is based on my evil alter ego, Martin Orchard, and it was quite difficult to picture his failures and death. It proves to be quite a challenge for me; however, I took this in stride and I am quite happy with the outcome.
What are you planning to write next?
I plan to write the second part of The Banker’s trilogy, The Banker and the Eagle. In that book, the plot converges with the assassination of the US president by Pierre, which is mentioned briefly in a chapter from The Fall of Martin Orchard.
Martin Lundqvist
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