It took a while, and there were several distractions, but Renegade is now officially available!
It’s as close to a heterosexual romance as you’ll ever see from me, which really is not all that close. I am, however, extremely fond of this novel, in many ways more so than the more “serious” ones. Kisea has a lot to say about fear and its consequences. And there’s a reason why the dedication says:
For everyone who has ever been certain that the world has no place in it for them,
and those who help to create a place.
Currently, however, it’s available only on my own site.
Why? Because the attempt to upload it to Smashwords proved, yet again, to be a massive exercise in thump-head-on-desk frustration. A novel is uploaded as a doc file, and the automatic system called the Meatgrinder spits it out in various file formats, like epub and mobi and pdf. Well… following instructions meticulously and to the letter does not necessarily mean that you get the result you want. Worse, the attempt to diagnose what in a doc file is causing undesirable results in the epub and so on is just about impossible. Honestly, I wouldn’t bother downloading, even for free, anything that looks as unprofessional as what comes out, and that includes my two previous releases. I am trying to decide whether it’s actually worth it, essentially just for the distribution, and at the moment, I’m leaning in the direction of, “No, it isn’t.” I know enough HTML and CSS that it’s actually easier to create the epub myself and convert that to mobi than to spend hours, if not days, in a battle with the Meatgrinder. In theory, I could then upload the epub to Smashwords, since that’s the only other format they allow uploads in, but then I’ll still have to give them a doc version to convert into the other formats, and I’m back at square one.
So, right now, Renegade is available in nice clean pretty pdf, in two sizes, on my writing site, and I’ll be adding epub and mobi formats as quickly as I can. Budget allowing, I’ll look into a print-on-demand version of Renegade when I do Black Wolf‘s, which I hope will be soon. I may also start looking into other options. For the record, Amazon is not a possibility, since I have personal objections to it that I won’t bother getting into.
Until then, I hope you’re forgiving enough to put up with pdf or home-made epub and mobi, for the sake of a story that surprised me when I wrote it!
