In addition to being a plural noun, PROLOGUES is a collection of short stories of mine published in January 2024. The collection consists of the four reader magnets I had for each of the four novels in my series, Meeting the Enemy.

What, You Ask, is a Reader Magnet?

It’s a short chapter or scene designed to attract readers to your book. The most common usage is to offer a reader a free download of something related to your work in exchange for signing up for the author’s newsletter or Substack.

It can also be a piece of art related to a book, a map, a glossary of names, etc., anything to get a reader to purchase the book it’s associated with.

I first learned of them about a decade ago at the Virginia Festival of the Book when I found thin paperbacks offered for free at a fantasy writer’s table. She and I discussed how she’d come up with the idea (borrowed from another writer), and I asked if I could borrow the idea myself. She said, “Go ahead!” She called them giveaways because, well, free, but explained that in the publishing industry they were known as “reader magnets,” i.e., to attract readers.

I was in the middle of editing what became my first series, A Perfect Hatred, and I had lots of scenes and several chapters that I’d cut because they bogged down the story. I re-read them and realized that with some rewriting and transitional scenes, I had reader magnets for each of the novels in A Perfect Hatred. I offered free downloads for signing up for my newsletter, and I also had copies of each story published as paperbacks. When I went to book events, I gave the reader magnet associated with the novel to a purchaser of the book.

Most of the reader magnets I’ve produced have been deleted chapters or scenes, but they still tell something useful about the novel they’re associated with. Big hit. Of course, anything free is a big hit.

But, Back to PROLOGUES

My Meeting the Enemy series is about 9/11 and its aftermath, told over four novels:

1. TERROR – about the day of 9/11 and several weeks past it up to the invasion of Afghanistan.
2. REVENGE – about the 2001 Afghan War.
3. TREACHERY – about the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.
4. RENDITION – about the controversial use of extraordinary rendition post 9/11.

Each of those novels had a reader magnet published several weeks before the novel came out. The reader magnet for the first novel, TERROR, was actually two or three chapters from an early draft of the novel, a prologue if you will. My editor and I decided that though those chapters had merit, if I’m writing a novel about 9/11, I should start with that day. With some rewriting, more editing, and added material, the old prologue became “Prologue to TERROR.”

“Prologue to TERROR” begins a few months before the novel TERROR at a flight school in Minnesota where my character Mai Fisher, now retired from espionage, is taking recurrent training with her personal pilots. An instructor there mentions to Mai that a student had arrived only with a student pilot certificate and a desire to learn to fly but not take off and land. Despite being retired, Mai’s curiosity is piqued. Let’s leave it there. Spoilers.

“Prologue to REVENGE” is from some vignettes I wrote in the 1980s and 1990s as I was fleshing out the backstory of my characters Mai Fisher and Alexei Bukharin. Those vignettes were based in 1982, at the height of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the events described had implications for events in the novel REVENGE, which I didn’t realize until after I began to edit the older material.

“Prologue to TREACHERY” is the only one of the four not based on backstory material, i.e., it’s an original story whose sole purpose was to show the treachery of a character who becomes Mai’s nemesis in the novel TREACHERY. Plus, it gave me an opportunity to go back in time and feature a character I’d had die in the novella, My Noble Enemy, Edwin Terrell Jr. When he goes on a job interview at a private security firm he meets someone who reminds him of a Vietnamese woman he loved and lost.

“Prologue to RENDITION” again goes back to some backstory vignettes, dealing with a special test Mai Fisher is subjected to before she’s allowed to be a full-fledged Directorate operative. For several days, she’s interrogated and tortured using methods that became “enhanced interrogation techniques” after 9/11. Again, a tie-in to the subject of RENDITION and why Mai reacts to those techniques the way she does.

The Point Being?

PROLOGUES is my featured January sale book. The eBook containing the four full-length short stories is on sale for the entire month for only 99¢, but . . .

Today through January 23 it is FREE to download. Sort of a bookversary, Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration. Mainly, though, I think the stories are good and that they are intriguing enough to pique your interest in the books in Meeting the Enemy.

So, head over to my Amazon Author Page to grab your freebie. Or use the direct link HERE.

Most of the country is supposed to have snow this week end, so download a free book and you’ll have reading material to relax before the fireplace with.