I am still breathing, though the summer has been happily gutting my free time and keeping me distracted as I wait for the marks from my tax course (it is exactly eight weeks from my writing the exam to my receiving the marks).
But, in response to that, you’re getting a double post, two thoughts and ideas for the price (free!) of one.
Firstly, the last of my ‘cover blurbs.’
Jason Kilkenny came to Calgary because it was a supernatural backwater. The Changeling sought to avoid the politics and conflicts of the Fae and other supernaturals that occupied the Southern United States.
An ancient blood debt of his unknown father, however, draws him into the heart of a brewing conflict. Someone is trying to provoke a war between Calgary’s supernatural factions, and no one is sure who, how, or why.
Commanded by the Queen of the Fae to investigate, Jason finds himself facing off against vampires, Shapeshifters, and his own fellow Fae in a desperate search for answers – before the city explodes into all out war!
Changeling’s Fealty was started as a National Novel Writing Month project, and the actual course and speed of writing it is documented in this blog. It was a fun story to write, and my agent’s comment on it was that it had a ‘tone’ to it most of my work doesn’t. It’s a first person novel, written with a rather sarcastic, occasionally whiny, tone.
The second piece of thought you get today is on e-books. I would not choose self-publishing an e-book via Amazon as a first, second or even third choice of how to publish a book. In general, self-publishing comes with a degree of stigma of ‘vanity press’ – you published to soothe your ego, not to actually achieve something. E-books have the additional issue of being easy, and so Sturgeon’s Law (90% of everything is crap) applies.
So, most of the time, self-publishing an e-book is not one of your best ideas. That said? I will be doing it shortly.
Why? Because my second novel, Children of the Twain, is a self-contained piece that really has no hooks for sequels or prequels, and has made the rounds of just about every publishing house in existence at this point. I think it is decent, but obviously not what is being looked for at this point in time.
So I intend to ‘release it into the wild,’ so to speak, as a low priced (currently thinking $1.99) e-book, as much to create awareness of myself as a writer. There are a few avenues, including this blog, that I will be using to promote it as best as I can. We’ll see how it goes.
The other catch with an e-book, of course, is promotion. Amazon isn’t going to do any for me. It’s up to me to push that e-book everywhere I can, and I’m, honestly, not the best in the world at that. I have some advantages – the release is being held until I can review and re-edit the book, and until I can get a cover put together.
We’ll see where it goes from, but watch this space – I’ll be posting the cover here before the book goes live, and putting up a link once its available for purchase.
Namaste all,
Glynn Stewart
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