Novel Writing Updates!

I submitted The Country Girl and Noblewoman to Amazon Kindle today. It'll hopefully be up for pre-order and come out July 27th.

I still have my worries about it, but I am gonna cut this one loose. According to my notes I started work on revising this novel around June 4th and I finished it today, so a month and a half. Of course I had a week away from it for Anime Expo.

It sure hasn't felt like that -- it's felt longer. I had revisions from a year ago when I first moved to LA, but I ended up doing a second and third round of edits, and I'm sure there's a thousand things I've missed. I could probably keep reading and editing in an endless loop, but that's definitely not worth the effort and time. Anyhow, that's self-publishing on a shoestring for ya... I also redid the covers for book 1 and 2 in this time period, so yeah... there's that too.

And, I'm not done either.

Now the fun part starts: marketing the book. I have an old newsletter for Mechanical Bird from early 2017. I built it through giveaways for a preview of Book 1 on Instafreebie. I don't really think the list helped me much since it was people signing up for a freebie, but I'll send that list an email about the new book's pre-order. A goal starting with Book 2 is to build a newsletter of people who have read the novels, but an NL won't be a huge focus. I'll also start playing with FB and AWS ads.

The real goal is to build The Mechanical Bird out as a series, as I meant it to be, and then see if it sells as a serial, which is something the 20BooksTo50K guys talk a great deal about. I know there's also things like building an ARC team or a street team for reviews, but I'm not going to invest in those. I'm going to put out books, sell them at $2.99 (or more based on word count) and build a series and see how it works. I also want to tap into bigger genres and move this story out of the Steampunk one -- I don't think there's any traction based on what I've seen with AWS ad searches for Steampunk.

And then... I want to start on Book 3, which is probably going to be an even bigger undertaking cause it's not finished yet. So I have to write it to some kind of conclusion and then revise. I need to work on this a bit smarter cause the revision process felt like a long slog. Maybe I should inviest in a copyeditor...

Oh, and I guess I should also prepare for Krakenkon... Maybe I can throw together my artbook this week. There's a bunch of things I need to prepare for that which also leads into selling physical copies of my graphic novel online.