This weekend was planned as book release weekend. On Saturday night I did it, releasing two novels, The Deep Dark Well (science fiction) and The Hunger (urban fantasy) on Smashwords, Amazon Kindle and CreateSpace. After several false starts they are all up and running, with the exception of Deep Dark Well on CreateSpace, due to issues with the cover. Still a lot to do, finishing and publishing the website, editing and finishing the cover on a freebee I hope to have out by next weekend. Correcting mistakes, linking everything together, making sure the word gets out. Hopefully when I publish two more novels in February everything will be much easier, if I remember all of my mistakes. No guarantee of that. Still, the hardest part was releasing the damned books in the first place. Even though I knew they had merit, it is still difficult to put the work out there where many eyes can see it, and anyone can write a review. Soon I think I will join the ranks of many best selling authors in at least one respect. I will receive a scathing review, one that will make me question why I ever decided to put out a book in the first place. All part and parcel of putting anything out for public consumption, be it a novel, a poem, a song or a work of art. Not everyone will like my masterpieces. That is just another thing I will have to live with, to learn to deal with, to develop a hard skin and move on.
One thing that really consumed a lot of thought was the pricing of the books. I read recently that one author decided on $0.99, saying that he didn’t think the works of well published authors were really ten times better than his, and he would make his book a bargain. I decided on $1.99, still low. The Deep Dark Well is a hell of a book in my opinion, as well as the opinion of several publishers. The only reason it didn’t sell is publishers, in their infinite wisdom, decided that there was no market for the kind of story that propelled Larry Niven and Poul Anderson to stardom. I disagree. I still love that kind of story, setting, characters. I believe that others do as well. And while editing the book for submission to epublishing format, which is very different than that used for submission to traditional publishing, I thought that The Hunger, while a very different book, was just as good as Deep Dark Well.
So the books were first offered on Smashwords. I went to bed on New Year’s Eve and awoke the next morning to find that Deep Dark Well had sold two copies, and I had made a whole $2.50 in royalties. Whoohoo. I was able to get a coffee on the promise of that royalty in the near future. It’s a start. A small start. Now I can’t wait to see what my pair of readers think.
