THE BOOK IS OUT!
(this is all part of the One Novel Three-Month challenge. Click here for more info)
ITS OUT!
I am so psyched. I've had some comments already, and some of it has been quite positive. Which isn't bad considering how rough it is. For those that have been reading it and noticed the plethora of issues, I am sorry. I'm currently working on a new edit to upload by Friday.
From what I've been told, the errors seem relatively minor in the grand scheme of things.
It's been four days since the pre-order ended and the book went live on Amazon. Throughout this journey I've had all sorts of feedback and comments from people-- 95% of which has been positive.
I’ve been selling it on pre-order and promoting on social for .99 USD and some people have told me that I ought to have charged more. It might even seem like this was my poorly thought out strategy to sell more copies than my rival.
The real reason I’ve set the price at 0.99 is because that’s the promo price for a new author selling an e-book in my genre. It's what successful indie authors do, according to my research and well, a best-selling indie author who has generously been giving me advice— massive thanks, Jordan Rivet.
I've put it up to 4.99 because again, that’s the price in the market for the first book of a series from an indie author in my genre.
Because it's going to be a series.
The reason I’ve done all this isn’t so I can talk smack to Angus— that’s just a perk. It’s because I wanted to jump start my journey as an indie author. I have two review sites I’ve signed up for that are going to provide me with reviewers— not bullshit positive reviews but objective ones that might very well pan my book. After that I’m using Amazon ads and FB ads to promote it, along with capturing more subscribers for my newsletter, putting up new editions of the book (assuming it doesn’t blow) and previewing future chapters at the end of it. I’m doing print on demand and hope to have that ready to go inside a week or two— you can’t do pre-orders for POD, hence why there is no hard copy for those that have asked, yet.
I have never been so inside a story as I have with Empire of Others. Every time I look at the novel, to be honest, I worry it’s garbage— I know it’s subjective, but I can’t help but imagine all the issues someone might have with it, and my only defence being ‘hey, I wrote it in three months.’
But I also kind of love the novel.
Abel Trius is a very flawed man in a very flawed world. Maybe, by the end of the novel you might consider him as heroic, if not a hero. I’ve never written a character like that before, who has a real arc, and who might be likeable without being worth defending, or backwards and ignorant while still, by some definitions being a good man.
“You’re a good man pretending he isn’t,” Katreya Hastings says to him half way through. But is that true? Or just what she wants to think?
Abel has gotten under my skin, like how he wears the skins of animals throughout the novel.
The first person I thank in my acknowledgements is Angus Cheng. Because without him, this wouldn’t have happened. And one of the best things that happened is I learned, for real, that I love to write novels.
I love to tell stories, and I love to write weird poetry, and run role playing games and world build but until this challenge I didn’t know if I truly loved writing novels.
A friend of mine recently said writing is hell, its just pain and it sucks, and I think a lot of people, in reality feel the same way if they’ve ever attempted to write something seriously long.
But I’ve loved it. I love writing 30k words in three manic days, I loved being in this world that I kind of made but kind of also just made itself. I love hearing what my made-up-dolls say and once and awhile, writing a sentence or a plot twist that makes me fist pump.
And it doesn’t make me feel like crap, that I’m not amazing or that there are much better writers. Not always at least. On just the right day it makes me feel like I’m playing a video game that doesn’t have a level cap. There’s so much to learn and so many places to go, and so much more time to hone my craft.
Thanks to Angus though, it’s the first one novel I'm actually sharing with a huge number of people. So thanks for buying it if you did, and go easy on me, the next one will be much better, I promise.
And by the by, I won the challenge.
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