I’ve been trying to earn a living. Not the best of times for watching a bank account fatten, as I’m sure you all know. We also lost our companion Obie, our best buddy for 18 years. Being cat-less and sad only lasted a month, then we adopted three shelter kittens, so I’m back to up-to-my-elbows and then some.
Meanwhile, I began actually getting some notices of royalties paid on my first book, The Red Gate, which while not really paying any bills…yet…still feels better than no sales at all. For an all-too-brief time, my Amazon ranking rose to the mid-600Ks, then of course, pluymmeting like a stone back into the 1-2M, but it was a shining moment. I guess I’m easily amused. Then there were reviews…A few months back, I recieved a review on Amazon — about the same time my book turned up on Barnes & Noble — that rocked my world, but not in the good way.
The reviewer gave it 5 stars, believe it or not, then told the crowds, er ah, the one or two that happened to read it, all about the typos and writing errors in it. OHMYGODNO! I checked, and sure enough, a proof had been mixed up, and a bad re-format had been approved. Such being the lot of the unwary Indie Author, I rushed to correct it all, and got the revised copy to press in a record of late-night toothy grinding. But some damage had been done. Oddly enough, the review was closed by the reviewer stating how enjoyable the read was and that he looked forward to the sequel. Go figure. I tried to replace all the bad copies with good new coipies, but I figure there must be some old crappy ones still out there, so if anyone buys one on Ebay, it will probably be one of the early releases before I caught the…sob…reformatting issue.
What I have been doing, with all the extra time on my hands is write. I’ve been writing like a demon was sitting on my back, which is what it feels like to have three Works in Progress swimming around in your brain. Simultaneously.
To sum up, the (insert highly acclaimed, long awaited, etc.) sequel novel, The Gatekeepers — pun might be intentional — will be out towards the end of next month, and the next book after that is about 3/4 finished. This is, of course, the best of the lot, having learned the hard way the first time around! Sometimes, all the free and otherwise obtained advice in the world is not as good as screwing up in a big, ugly way. Having doe so, now I’m duly chastened and more diligent when it comes to my pre-publication checklist. It now includes several beta-readers of pre-Pub proofs.