The Long and Winding Road to Publishing

You have a ticket to write and want to be a paperback writer.

Okay. Yeah, I stole those words from the titles of songs by my favorite composers in the whole wide world. Please don't sue me!

While my husband and I were driving the hour or so it took to get to the White Pines State Park, last week, we played the old Beatles tunes, and I just automatically revised them for a possible post--this one--I thought I might do later on. But I was planning on using more titles. . . but thought I shouldn't push my luck.

So, here I am, as you know. I'm between books--waiting for second one to come out to bolster the sales of the first one. I hope that works. And have the third one done in first through 5th draft. (I kept on rewriting the first chapters while I waited for brilliance to shine on me for the rest of it--which, of course, it did and felt like a mule kicked me--er, that's a whole other story)

Meanwhile I've been in contact with another author and we sort of went back and forth about self-publishing some sort of work that might help sales of my first book. This is what she did, she told me, and it worked really well for sagging sales of her first book. She suggested I look into doing the same for my book. She made suggestions; Amazon, Barns & Nobel and Smashwords. All free for the work of formatting by you, and downloading and the whole wad. I wonder what sort of cover I'll be able to find. The whole idea I'd be in absolute control over every part of this has me somewhat ecstatic, but I may have to get a faster Internet connection before I do this. Well, all in good time.

I went to Smashwords first to see their site and how things work there. I was glad to see that they've updated just this year to accommodate Open Office users. I'm still checking things out. It looks rather easy and affordable--nothing--so that I could just get something out there without putting money up for it. I see that a lot of authors out there are doing things this way, some exclusively, and some as a side venture to help bolster sales.

You see, I've done the self-publishing thing before, so I know that you have to do the formatting--been there done that. But it cost me, and I'm just not sure I want to do that any more. The cost of going with a self-publisher who does all the work for you can get up there, and once you get all your friends and neighbors to buy it, the sales just drop out of sight. Spell of the Black Unicorn is somewhere at #10,000,000 something on Amazon right now. It has nothing to do with how good or bad it is, it's mearly that I have no way of advertizing it, I have no platform, and at the time, I didn't have a presence like I do with my vampire novels. Plus, it's not in ebook format, thus the $17.95 price probably puts people off, and I have no control over that at all.

When I went into writing my Vampire Ascending, it turned out I had a bit too much going on, it was way too long. I had to cut something from it. It was, I realized, a book unto itself, what I did cut out. I had thought of doing something with it. It would have Sabrina and Dante in this, and be a murder mystery. Yes, I thought last night, I could easily find the bits an pieces, and then work on patching them together. It would probably take me all summer, but maybe I could do this. I'm still in the "can I, do I want to" stage.

Also, I'd have to figure out if Dante is who he is in Vampire Ascending, or a little further up the development line character-wise. I'm thinking I could play with ideas for a while before I decide one way or another.

My working title is "The Werewolf and the Windego". Whatever a Windego is, my hope is that it will gnaw at you and you'll have to read to find out.

I'm playing with the idea of whether I want to bring Vasyl into this. I'm not sure. Do I want to put him in here as Sabrina's lover? I could do that. As a matter of fact I've got some scene or two that were rather hot, that I took out of second book. Hmmm.  Vasyl as Sabrina's vampire lover with a few hot scenes thrown in for good measure?What do you think?