Roger Mantis is being released today!
More on the book at Rogermantis.com.
Thanks to my family and Month9Books for all their support! It’s been a long road.
(Mantis and cake image by Natalie Truman at ArtStation)
The schedule for the Roger Mantis blog tour, at the Chapter by Chapter blog!
The author photo in the interview is kind of an old one, though. I only wish I still looked like that.
Seen at Month9Books Instagram today. Coming soon!
The publication date is still April 2.
Just a reminder for anyone publishing using Amazon’s Createspace: they will be automatically moving your Createspace account over to Kindle Direct Publishing in the near future as the two services merge.
More info here:
https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GSJULX3WGP36HQ3R
This probably won’t affect me much since it just moves a completed book, but if you are in the middle of the publishing process, pay close attention.
My last post was over a year ago. I’m not proud of it.
I have been dithering with self-publishing my third book, Zorya. That last post long ago involved the leap of faith needed to purchase the expensive stock image I wanted in order to build a cover image on my own.
I did make that purchase some time later (at least it’s deductable), and I did do some work on a cover. Mostly I procrastinated. My biggest obstacle to self-publishing, other than cover art, is marketing. It’s the thing I’ve seen most self-published authors stumble over, and I am no exception.
This past March, I attended the 2018 SCBWI Golden Gate Conference, which gives attendees the opportunity to submit to agents and publishers also in attendance. They pay special attention to submissions from attendees, and the opportunity was too good to miss.
So I sent several Zorya submissions out after the conference, the latest this evening (she didn’t want to see submissions until after the middle of July.) I have gotten one rejection so far. Some response times are as long as six months (not uncommon with submissions directly to publishers).
So. Here I am.
In other updates, the conventional publication of my second book, Roger Mantis, is proceeding, although the publication date was postponed twice. I’m still okay with the process, even the editing, but it’s an education.
When you are dithering over finally self-publishing that finished book, and find out that the cover idea you really like would cost you over five hundred bucks for the proper stock photo license …
Just checked out my first Kindle book from my local library!
It works through a site called Overdrive.com, and you link your public library account to it so you can borrow e-books. It works on many devices, and was easier to set up than I thought.
I plan on using this a lot, and it’s embarrassing that it took me this long.
I wrote a post a while back on the physics of “Editing Half-Lives and the Decay of Typographical Particles”
Basically the theory goes, if you’re editing a manuscript and find half the typos in the first edit, the next time around you won’t get them all, just around half the ones that are left. Third time, half again. And so on.
At some point you think you’ve reached the end of this, since of course you can’t have half a typo, and so it’s off to the publisher.
But theoretical writing physics has advanced!
It turns out that at the end of the editing sequence, there will always be one typo left that nobody at all will find.
It can’t be observed, but the new equations say it’s in there somewhere. It’s a quantum thing.
I’ve been picking up some Kindle anthologies that were recommended to me based on one of my favorite authors being a contributor.
One plus, of course, is that I usually get a new short story by a favorite author. This is particularly nice since my favorite authors can’t seem to turn out the number of books I need to handle my reading requirements.
What do you mean, a new novel every month is unrealistic? I have quite a few favorite authors to pick up the load, so it’s not like they’d have to write one every four days or something!
Another plus is that I get introduced to writers who can become new favorite authors. I’m kind of fussy about my reading tastes, but it’s happened more than once.
There’s nothing like finding a new author in an anthology (or anywhere) and discovering they’ve written a whole pile of books. It’s like fishing for change in a couch and finding a hundred-dollar bill. It’s particularly great if they have one or two completed series, and you can binge-read it like a Netflix show.
Thank God I discovered Tolkien long after all three books of Lord of the Rings had been published. It was almost a year between the last two books. Imagine closing The Two Towers back then on “Frodo was alive but taken by the enemy.” The wait probably would have killed me.
