There’s about six weeks to go before Human Game is thrust upon the reading public—whether said public takes notice is now the issue at hand. My publicist at Penguin has started pitching long-lead publications (primarily magazines), hoping to score hits in issues that come out near the time of the book’s October 2 release. Wired Magazine, which is doing an escaped-theme issue in October, has already confirmed they’ll include a write-up on the book. I’m hoping other publications take the bait. Near the time of the book’s release, newspapers will be pitched. Scoring book reviews in papers like the New York Times and Los Angeles Times is no easy task. To date, the San Francisco Chronicle is the largest publication to feature a review of one of my books. Fortunately, it was a positive piece!

This, to me, is one of the real nail-biting phases of the publication process. You can spend three years researching and writing a book, anguishing over every sentence—but that effort doesn’t guarantee you an audience. It’s been seven years since the publication of my first book. With subsequent books, I always wondered, “Will this be the one?” With Human Game, however, I’ve taken a more grounded approach. I’m incredibly proud of the book; I think it’s an important book—but I’m not approaching the publication date with overblown hopes that it will suddenly takeoff and score massive sales. I learned with my last work, which my publisher at the time said was going to be huge, that fostering such hope can bring you crashing painfully down to earth. That’s not to say one shouldn’t dream of success; it’s just important to hold firm to a healthy dose of realism.

I walked into a Barnes and Noble in the Bay Area last week and took a look at the “New Releases” table(s). It’s almost overwhelming when one considers how many new books are released on a weekly basis. Then, of course, there are e-books and the countless self-published works one can find on Amazon these days. The market is utterly swamped. It makes you wonder how any book can rise above the din and distinguish itself in the crowd.

As Human Game’s publication date draws ever closer, I do find myself falling off the wagon and surrendering to an old addiction: Sales Rank Checking. This is a syndrome defined by the chronic checking of one’s sales rank on Amazon. At the time of this writing, Human Game is hovering around the 300,000 mark. The highest I’ve ever had a book reach is 1,000. The Amazon sales rank is an albatross around many an author’s neck, for it’s the one real indication we have—albeit, a vague one—of how a book is doing. While maintaining realistic hopes about the book’s success, I’d love it if it cracked Amazon’s top 100.

I can only wait and see what happens. In the meantime, here’s the jacket copy to Human Game.

In March and April of 1944, Gestapo gunmen killed fifty POWs—a brutal act in defiance of international law and the Geneva Convention.

This is the true story of the men who hunted them down.

The mass breakout of seventy-six Allied airmen from the infamous Stalag Luft III became one of the greatest tales of World War II, immortalized in the film “The Great Escape.” But where Hollywood’s depiction fades to black, another incredible story begins . . .

Not long after the escape, fifty of the recaptured airmen were taken to desolate killing fields throughout Germany and shot on the direct orders of Hitler. When the nature of these killings came to light, Churchill’s government swore to pursue justice at any cost. A revolving team of military police, led by squadron leader Francis P. McKenna, was dispatched to Germany seventeen months after the killings to pick up a trail long gone cold.

Amid the chaos of postwar Germany, divided between American, British, French, and Russian occupiers, McKenna and his men brought twenty-one Gestapo killers to justice in a hunt that spanned three years and took them into the darkest realms of Nazi fanaticism.

In Human Game, Simon Read tells this harrowing story as never before. Beginning inside Stalag Luft III and the Nazi High Command, through the grueling three-year manhunt, and into the final close of the case more than two decades later, Read delivers a clear-eyed and meticulously researched account of this often-overlooked saga of hard-won justice.