Five of my favorite books are War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy; Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Resurrection, by Leo Tolstoy; A Movable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway; and Night, by Elie Wiesel. There are many others I could substitute for one or two of the listed top five. It's not a realistic choice. I would have a hard time sequencing the ones named into #1, #2, #3, etc., - they're all so great and so different from one another. Those particular novels are not just books I read but books I read in my early days when I was highly impressionable and trying to explore the world in the largest way I could manage. They were formative. When I think of those novels I think of not only the work but in the context of who I was then and what my life was at the time - basically, a young writer trying to make sense of the world after experiencing the indoctrination of Catholic school in Groton, Massachusetts, over eight years.

I had decided that trying to get a contract through the New York gatekeepers would be a massive waste of time. I have always been fiercely independent and the thought of obtaining approval of my books by major publishers was distasteful. Thus I opted to self-publish and promote on my own. I must say that Smashwords has been hands down my best friend as an indie author as the amount of great advice - especially via Mark Coker's podcasts - is nearly overwhelming - a veritable goldmine for any indie, in my opinion.
Herman Melville's Moby-Dick was published exactly one hundred years before my birth and was considered a commercial failure until years after his death. This was illustrative to me - that getting a major publisher to underwrite one's book is not necessarily a formula for success. Considered by many today to be one of the world's greatest novels, Moby Dick was published in 1851 and received mixed reviews. According to Wikipedia, it "was a commercial failure, and was out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891. Its reputation as a "Great American Novel" was established only in the 20th century, after the centennial of its author's birth. William Faulkner confessed he wished he had written the book himself,[1] and D. H. Lawrence called it "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world" and "the greatest book of the sea ever written".
According to many book marketing experts, most books wallow in an ocean of obscurity. If that is the case, then it seems to me that captaining my own ship publishing-wise puts the fate of my work in my own hands. It's a challenge I have actively accepted as I have vigorously studied book marketing since I began seriously writing in 2000.

Smashwords has given my books the widest exposure as it distributes my ebooks to all major book retailers and public libraries globally. Smashwords Founder Mark Coker has gotten indie book publishing advice and procedure down to a science in his free podcasts. He's my #1 book-marketing expert.

I basically write when I feel the urge. Often I am gestating which I consider part of the writing process. Often in my books, I encounter what I refer to as a crossroads whereby I must make a choice about which way the plot will go and how events will unfold. I do not map out a script, which many writing coaches advise. I find that some of my best writing occurs when I have to plow my way through a difficult part of the writing. If I cannot see my way through it, I stop and gestate, even for months such as what occurred with my last project - American Jihadists. I almost decided to end that novel due to the roadblock I had come to. After several months, the next part of the plot just came to me. It had to do with my longstanding interest in slavery (The Jack Trilogy written over 17 years explores that human condition) only, in this work-in-progress, the main characters who are fleeing the ISIS terror group in Syria, are to encounter a woman and her children on a boat crossing the Aegean Sea who are refugees escaping from the Syrian civil war but the pair suspect are victims of modern slavery and are at odds with one another whether or not to intercede.

Without readers, the act of writing would be futile because more than anything writing, for me, is about communicating. Thus, it follows that, if nobody is reading, what is the point of writing? I don't see my 'audience' as 'fans' as I do not consider myself as any kind of celebrity. I'm a writer, not a rock musician, or movie star. If I am essential as a writer of books, then my audience is essential for being readers of those books. For me, either the two-way street exists and is healthy, or the writing would be lost in the great ocean of time and oblivion. These ideas do bring to mind the great poem, Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Ozymandias

"I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

I am continuing to write a book that I started a few years back called, 'Inferno', a work of fiction that has some historical figures - Jerry Garcia, John the Baptist, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and Hitler, among others - meeting one another along the way of the Baptist's quest to find the lost Jesus and the answers to his questions, 'Why hasn't Jesus come back'? and 'why has he isolated himself for ages in the desert?' The book currently is conceived as a trilogy. I completed Part One in November 2020. Dante's INFERNO has long been a favorite for me, having been indoctrinated as a Catholic at much too early an age. That indoctrination, as one visiting UK professor, many years back had noted, fed my rebelliousness and helped make me the person I was.