Tag: publishing

The Value of Encouragement

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I mentioned last time that something interesting happened while I was working on the revisions for Black Wolf. This needs a little backstory, so here we go with a flashback scene. Go back twenty years. I finished the first complete version of Black Wolf (then, the full title was Black Wolf, Demon Wolf – I got tired of typing that). It wasn’t my first novel, but we don’t talk about the first two; this was the first one I had hopes for. A very good friend and mentor, a local mystery author, read it for me and gave me her…

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Black Wolf and Yin-Yang

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So… yeah. I’ve been madly and obsessively working on a heavy-duty edit of Black Wolf roughly since my previous blog post. First a detailed comb-through by myself and repairs on all the things I flagged, then reading it aloud to my patient Jackie and repairs on all the things we noticed that way. It’s now reached the point where anything else I try to do myself will be more harm than good, so I’ve sent it off to my wonderful test readers. Based on their feedback, I’ll make whatever further changes are needed, and I’ll release it this summer –…

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Self-publishing updates

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It’s been a tiring few days, but I think it’s been reasonably productive. I’m happy with Smashwords and the response so far. At this point, the combined sales and sample downloads have doubled what I had through this blog alone. The sample downloads of the first 30% are at least giving it a chance; if someone tries that much and dislikes it, fair enough, but I’m hoping at least some will get that far and want to see what happens. Whether I make any money off it is irrelevant; the whole point is simply to be more visible. I do…

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Here we go: It’s Official!!!

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So… as I mentioned in a recent previous post, it’s a tough balance between writing for yourself and wanting an audience. After all, once you’ve put hundreds or thousands of hours into something that holds a slice of your soul, there’s an urge there to have people actually share it with you. While I’m not particularly good at social networking to begin with, let’s face it – having my work available via two sites only, one a WordPress blog and one an independent site, really doesn’t help. So, I’ve finally decided to take the steps into official self-publishing. I decided,…

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Who Am I Writing For?

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Well, I did it to myself again. No matter how many times it happens, no matter how many times I learn the lesson, it still creeps back up and ambushes me again. Write what you want to write, write what sings to you. Forget what you can complete and present to the world; if it isn’t singing to you right now, this moment, then any work you do on it will be poorer quality and at best not worth it, at worst discouraging enough to interfere when it should be singing later. Don’t ever, ever try to modify the content…

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