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Linda - Thanks for the input re your personal experience, though it surprises me that agents would advise altering a chapter based solely on word length. My experience differs, having dealt with editors of three different traditional publishers. In no instance was chapter length an issue, and my chapters have ranged from ~ 1000 words to well over 3000. I've yet to deal with agents though, and your experience makes me think that's been a good thing.

JP - Was this supposed to be a chapter contest you entered? Then I could see that requirement. But otherwise, I can't. A chapter is what it is: you have a beginning and an end. If it doesn't have an "end," then it doesn't constitute a chapter, in my view. There has to be at least a pause at the end, hopefully a hook, to prod the reader to the next chapter. I've seen chapters of two pages in bestsellers and chapters that are longer than 3000 words - in the same novel! If anyone tries to tell you what chapter-length limits are, you can disregard that so-called advice.

Predicting is hard, especially about the future, but I bet anyone who doesn't go to Yogi's funeral will not see Yogi at theirs.

Way to go, Janet. I left you a Contact message. E-mail me, and as Joan Rivers used to say, "We'll talk."

Tell me if the countdown thing works for you, Janet. I'm running out of new ideas!

1. We're No Angels
2. Night of the Hunter
5. Sounds like Cape Fear, but the bad guy in that was released, and didn't escape, from prison.
9. The Great Escape
10. The Fugitive

I'll do some thinking on the rest.

I'm impressed, Mike. Nice.

I just finished a blog tour - that cost me nothing except time spent in interviews and blog posts. No giveaways were involved, though some of the bloggers ran contests in conjunction that had nothing to do with me or my book.

The deals Wal-Mart makes are not author-driven. Publishers have had to bow to the giant retailers like Wal-Mart- still another reason the BIG Five are loath to take a chance with unestablished writers, since their bottom lines have been hurt seriously in recent years. I have yet to see a current bestseller offered with deep discounts, but maybe they exist. Anyway, my publisher sets the price without my input, anyway, so even if I wanted to boost sales - and thus ranking - by offering deep discounts, I couldn't. I did do a Riffle promotion after getting permission from my previous publisher, and this did result in a big sales uptick, so there's no question it works. But I still think it's gaming the system.  Not as blatant as getting PACs to buy thousands of copies of a politician's book to get on the NYT bestseller list, but it does use the system that's in place to manipulate ranking. Gaming, manipulating, marketing, what's in a name?   Anyway, a self-published author can do more to "market" in this way, and I've got no objection, other than my above concern that the practice will tend to devalue the output of indie authors. If you can find me an example of a new Coben, Child, DeMille, Connelly, Sandford et al e-book being offered for 99 cents, please let me know, and I'll download forthwith!

Indie musicians are seeing their work offered for free or almost so all the time, and this new streaming venture by Apple will likely make this worse. Michael Smerconish had a guest on his Sirius radio show last week (I can't recall his name) who was touted as being an expert of the iTunes world. Smerconish said, "That sounds great. But how do the musicians get paid?" He asked this question at least three times and never did get a satisfctory answer.

Bottom line, if it works for what you want to get out of the bookselling business, by all means do it. But if landing a top literary agent and then a contract with HarperCollins is one's goal, giving away and selling for 99 cents thousands of books is not likely to accomplish it, Amazon ranking notwithstanding.

Ha! Good one, Max!

You're right about there being a fine line between a "Prologue" and a "Chapter 1." I used Clive Cussler as an example above. The Chapter 1s in his books are prologues, in my understanding of the term, though I can't remember if he calls them such. But they usually are about something that happens in the past that will play a role in his story, but not be a part of it, if I'm making any sense. It sets up the adventure which will start sometime in the future. It happens, it's over, and then we go to the present day. To me, that's a prologue, regardless of the nomenclature. But I have no problem naming such a setup Chapter 1. And what difference does it really make? The reader knows it's a prologue as soon as he starts to read the next chapter. So this is much ado about not much, in my opinion. If your agent/editor/publisher frowns on prologues, for whatever reason, make them Chapter 1s instead.

1. Social media.  Show folks who you are and what you write. Tweet a lot and get followers. Avoid the constant "Buy my book" tweets, but get your name out there in other ways by retweeting others and tweeting on non-book-related topics. Get an author page on Amazon, then post a link to it and your website on your Facebook page.
2. Reviews. Solicit book bloggers to review your book. Some bloggers do interviews and offer guest posts in addition to reviews. There are websites that will solicit reviewers for you for a fee, like Choosy Bookworm and Net Galley. Review swaps are tricky, now that Amazon is looking hard at reviews between writers with a professional relationship or know each other personally, but possible if done right.
3. Creativity in tagging your book on Amazon. If you can make the genre of yoor book narrow enough, wherein there aren't thousands of books competing with it, you would have a shot of being in the top 100 of books sold on Amazon in that category. And that would make you an "Amazon Bestseller" which you can use to promote it. Amazon has recently changed its book classification descriptions, making it easier to carve out subgenres. Say you have written a historical novel. Is there crime, adventure, or romance in it? Does it take place in an exotic location? Adding these tags can help your book stand out. Take a look at some books for sale on Amazon, and you'll see what I mean. 

I'm certainly not an expert in marketing, but the above are things I've done and am doing for promotion. Good luck!

Here's a link to an examination of the omniscient POV: www.scribophile.com/academy/using-third-person-omniscient-pov.