publishing

writing update

It’s been a while since I did a State of the Writing update.

So.

Flare, Book 2 of The Sunless World series, has been handed over for proofreading and formatting. This is the last planned book in the series, though I have left a smidgen of an opening in case there is demand for more.

I’m planning a cover reveal for July 20th–but it won’t be on this blog. A number of other authors and readers have kindly offered to host a cover reveal on their blogs, so I’ll direct you to theirs on that day. It’s a fabulous cover featuring Isabella, and I can’t WAIT to share it with the wider world!

(My mailing list has already gotten an exclusive first look at it. So, if you want to be in the loop for the future, go ahead and sign up now!)

Now I’m in the middle of editing Ghostlight, Book One of a completely different project. Whereas The Sunless World is a steampunk-flavored epic fantasy series, Ghostlight is a paranormal fantasy set in a Regency-inspired world. Think magic in a Jane Austen or Georgette Heyer setting and you won’t be too far off!

Allow me to share a snippet:

Arabella gave a merry laugh as she glided in behind him. “I should dearly love to see it. Perhaps I can breathe down his neck till he relents. That sort of thing always unnerves people in books.”

“I shouldn’t encourage you to haunt people, but I’ll make an exception this time.” Trey peered into an interior so gloomy, it looked like the place sunlight went to die.

It was also spectacularly cluttered, rather like the drawing room of an aristocratic emigree goblin family. He knocked against a table with slender gilt legs. The china on it rattled alarmingly and a cloud of dust flew up. Trey sneezed.

“Bless you,” said Arabella. She was already halfway across the room, examining a display cabinet entirely full of cross china cats.

Trey turned his head and found himself staring at a bedraggled stuffed owl with glass eyes. “I know how you feel,” he told it. “I’m the same way in the mornings.” The owl didn’t respond.

Fellow writers, what are you working on now? Any upcoming or recent releases? Please share!

Happy Mail Day and other musings

I got an unexpected royalty check in the mail today. It’s not huge, but it’s not peanuts either, easily matching my best selfpub months.

I joke to my husband that my tradpub sales pay for my selfpub hobby. It’s funny, but it also stings. A little.

A large part of it is that I treated the selfpub hobby like, well, a hobby. Going over a year between releases is not a great thing. Nor is publishing a sequel two years after a first book. Oy.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the business aspect a lot. Especially about that overlap between what I want to write and what my audience wants to read. That’s the sweet spot I’m aiming for when deciding what stories to write.

The other thing is taking a cold, hard, and realistic look at my process, ie: the time elapsed between concept and bringing the product to market, and all the steps in between. My husband threw out an MBA term for it a couple nights ago. Pipeline flow, I think it was?

I haven’t done a lot of detailed tracking and analysis, but from my informal, back-of-the-envelope calculations, I’ve come to the conclusion that writing novellas or short novels in a series are my most profitable option.

This is not something I can shift to right away. I’m locked into The Sunless World series for the time being. It’s not a big commitment–I can wrap up the series with the book I’m currently writing. It may end up as a long book, but it’ll do the trick.

I have a couple of series concepts already. But if there are worlds or characters or stories of mine that you love and want to see more of, let me know in the comments. Feedback is super-helpful, because writing for publication often feels like shuffling about in the dark, stumbling over scattered toys and bumping into furniture as I lose all sense of direction.

And my sense of direction wasn’t all that great to begin with!

writing & publishing update

It’s been a while since I did one of these.

It may not look it from my blog posts of late, but I have been a busy worker bee behind the scenes.

I just finished the final copyedits on Quartz, Book One of the The Sunless World (yes, the series finally has a title!). Copyediting requires a different kind of mindset from writing/revising, and honestly, I spent way too long dithering over things like when to capitalize a person’s title (in this case, Ambassador) and how I really, really felt about the Oxford comma.

Not to mention having to continually resist the desire to rearrange sentences and add new little details.

I was able to break out of the endless tinkering mode last night and email the manuscript to my Most Excellent Spouse, aka the Formatting and Layout Guy. In July, I’ll be working with a cover designer for the book.

I haven’t decided when I will publish. Usually, I upload as soon as a book is done, but I’ve heard summer tends to be sluggish in terms of sales. I’m thinking of utilizing my pre-order options (and, yes, part of me wants to do it just because :D) and spending some time getting the word out before publishing early fall.

Any opinions on this would be gratefully considered.

On the writing side of things, I’m working on The Sunless World 1.5, a novella set in the gap year between when Quartz ends and its sequel, Flare, begins. The novella is set in another part of Rafe’s world, which I’m thrilled to play in, and told from the POV of a character who, sadly, isn’t slated to get much (if any) scene time in Flare.

I’ve also written some shorter stories. I’m still plugging away at the Planets Project: I just finished the Uranus fic. Two more–Neptune and Mercury–to go!

I’ve decided to make Friday Fiction a regular feature of this blog. On the second Friday of every month, I will post a for-fun flashfic. These days, I’m breaking classic children’s picture books (revenge for all those times I read them out loud over and over and OVER again? Hmmm!). The first two are The Feline in the Fedora and Goodnight, Celestial Object. Should be obvious from the titles which stories I’m alluding to!

How about you? What are you writing these days? Published anything recently?

3 Self-Publishing Mistakes I’ve Made

A little over a year ago, I published–with much fear and trembling–my broken fairy tale collection, Shattered. (I felt sick to my stomach after I clicked the Publish button. If it hadn’t been for the fact I’d had other people working with me on it, I’d have unpublished it within the first few minutes.)

Since that time, I’ve gone on to self-publish a few more books and made some mistakes along the way (which I did so you don’t have to!). So, without further ado, I present my top 3 self-publishing mistakes (cue the trumpets).

The Downside of Diversifying

Earlier in the year, I talked about putting my eggs into lots of little baskets rather than the one big one (*cough* Amazon*cough*). To that end, I’ve started serializing my science fantasy novel, Quartz, and written short stories for specific anthologies and magazines. Unfortunately, this meant that I haven’t published an e-book since the launch of Mourning Cloak, at the end of January. Once Mourning Cloak fell off the recent releases lists on Amazon, sales dried up (Ouch, April. Ouch.)

Solution: I should be publishing an e-book (novel, novella, short story, collection) every 2-3 months. Right now, I’m working on a follow-up to Shattered. The fairy tales I’m breaking? Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid.

Scared of Sequels

I’m not a sequel writer.

There, I said it.

I know, I know. I’m a fantasy writer. But still.

I write a novel or short story or novella and instead of reusing my world or my cast, I simply move on and build another world and cast from scratch. Barring a handful of short stories featuring the same character, I don’t do sequels.

But readers like sequels. They ask me for them. I’m thrilled that they’re so invested in my characters that they want more of their story, but I’m terrified of breaking the first story or disappointing my readers’ expectations.

That’s a block I need to get over.

Solution: I wrote the first draft (zero draft) of a follow-up novella to Mourning Cloak. I’m determined to get Ironhand into shape and out to the world by late summer/early fall. After that, I’m going to write Flare, the sequel to Quartz. Once the sequels are out of the way, then I’m going to give myself permission to play in a new world (looking at you, Riven!).

Low Productivity

It’s a rare author who hits it out of the ballpark with their first book. In the indie world, especially, most writers are successful because of their big backlists.

I mentioned at the beginning of the year that I was tracking my raw first-draft numbers. They aren’t impressive.

Look, I’m going to be brave and post them up here:

January: 5,661 words (really pathetic)
February: 16,683 (much better)
March: 13, 817 (okay, why’d I backslide here??)
April: 15, 533 (and this after being sick and undisciplined for the first half of the month!)
May: 10, 548 (better than January, in spite of going to a con, testing for school, and getting ready for vacation).

Ideally, I’d like to write 25K worth of raw first draft words a month (a half-NaNo).

Solution: All right, this is the tricky part, isn’t it. Sure there are all sorts of motivational tricks to get you writing, but what it all comes down to is this: How much of my other activities am I willing to give up to make this happen? How much is writing worth to me right now?

Is it worth giving up sleep over? Worth giving up the time I spend researching, thinking about, and doing school with my children? Worth giving up my RSS feed and Dr. Who episodes for?

It’s a decision that’ll be different for everyone. For me–well, I’ve done NaNo. I know what it is to breathe, eat, sleep your story. I know what it’s like to have it spin through your head constantly and how hard it is to emerge from the story zone. And that’s not what I want in my life right now. I have young kids who deserve a mom who’s not checked out for most of the day. I can give a few hours a day to writing, but I can’t let it take over my life like that.

Simply put, writing isn’t my day job. Mothering/homeschooling is. It’s within these limits that I need to work on increasing my productivity (which I’m not doing too badly with now that we’re back from Disney and it’s summer vacation).

What about you? If you’re a self-publisher, what mistakes have you made? What mistakes have you seen other self-publishers make?