The other image that shocked me, and far more so than the above, was of Mark Hamill. I was aware that he turned 63 yesterday (or was it the day before?), which was shocking enough. But this really brought it home:
I KNOW!!!!! On that note, I have realised that it is now 13 years since I wrote Keeper of the Atlas and Twin Heirs of the Prophecy. I think it is more than time that I started on Animals of the Menagerie. To be fair, I haven't sat on my laurels all that time ... I've been trying to get the first two novels off the ground (see my last post). But an interesting discussion happened this week in a closed Facebook group I belong to for indie authors.
The questions was: "I have completed my first novel in a proposed series of four. Should I publish it now, or wait until I've written the rest?" The general consensus was that you shouldn't publish your first novel until you have at least three written ... that way you can publish a novel every two months to build momentum. Indeed, I have probably lost many readers who read the original manuscript over a decade ago.
Ohhhhhhhh - Alan Rickman .... THAT VOICE! (Sorry, Potter still on as I'm typing.)
Where was I? Oh, yes, so, when writing a series, you shouldn't wait til the first one is a success before writing the rest of the series. Write them all and get them out there. The other thing that's held me back from starting book three, aside from wanting to wait till the first two took off, is cost. Books two and three cost me a lot of money. A LOT. I had them professionally edited and professionally proof-read at a cost of $4980, threw away $1500 on cover designs that were eventually scrapped (I re-did them myself for $4), paid $870 for "professional" formatting, which looked awful, before getting them reformatted for $50, and spent around $4000 in promoting, marketing, and advertising. As of today (27 September 2014) I have spent around $12,000 on polishing the two books to a very high standard, and have earned back $688 in sales.
I recently completed the Mageborn series of novels by Michael G. Manning, a wonderfully captivating series of fantasy novels that I enjoyed thoroughly, and can't wait to read again.
It is obvious very early on in the first book, and for the next three, that the author spent nothing on editing, and even less on proof-reading. Words are missing, mispelled (<< see what I did there?), or end in -ing when they should end in -ed, and the goddess "Millicenth" is sometimes called "Mellicinth". But the story is so good, I kept reading. According to the author's Facebook page, so did hundreds of thousands of others.
The last sales update on his FB page was that he had sold 400,000 copies. He has hundreds of reviews on Amazon for all five books, with an average rating of four and a half stars, and almost no complaints about spelling or grammar mistakes. So, the reading public is obviously forgiving of those errors that I paid nearly $5000 to alleviate. For book three, I shall edit it myself, and give it to Mum to proof-read. And with self-publishing, if I do notice a mistake after the book is published, I can easily change it.
So, the cost is no longer holding me back. What else is? Well, procrastination. I excel at that. I had an allergic reaction to Amoxyl (a penicillin) that nearly killed me in 1985. The doctor told me to order a Medic Alert bracelet urgently. I put it on my mental "To Do" list. I got one in 2009.
The other thing is fear. I started the story so long ago, I'm scared that I won't know what to write next. But at time marches inexorably onwards, I guess with cost no longer an excuse, I really do need to get back on that horse, and find out what happens to Briana and Hamish. Don't ask me ... I don't know what happens until I write it. I just hope that when I do sit down at the computer, the Riffleshot Projector is working!
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