The Thing Is Done!

I am now an official self-published author.

On Sunday I posted Jack Manley and the Warlord of Infinity up on the Kindle store, and it became available for purchase early Monday morning.  It's a pretty exciting experience, and I spent all day at work with one eye on my Kindle profile page.

Sales have been sluggish so far, but I'm not particularly concerned about that yet.  It's early days, and my marketing has been somewhere slightly above zero.  I'm currently perusing sites like Goodreads and Bookdaily, to see if I can use them to spread knowledge of the book's existence.  Mostly I'm happy that somebody - anybody - is going to be reading the thing.

Uploading the book was a mostly painless experience.  All I needed was the cover as a JPEG file and the book as a Word document.  Then I filled in a few fields, set the price, ticked a few check boxes and it was done.  Choosing the categories that the book would be listed under was a bit of a head-scratcher.  I opted for Action/Adventure and Sci-fi - Action/Adventure; a bit of an overlap, but there weren't many other categories that seemed appropriate.

The most time-consuming part of the process was checking what the book's format looked like.  There's a preview option, which supposedly shows how the book will appear on various Apple devices.  It's a bit finicky and inconsistent: if you look at a page, then go back to it later, chances are some bit of the formatting will look different.  In the end I threw my hands up and declared good enough.  If there are problems, I trust my people to notify me of them.

The book is currently selling for $2.99, which I think is very reasonable for a short novel (a bit over 200 pages).  You can find it here; I'd appreciate it if any of you went over there and at least checked out the free preview.  As a friend of mine pointed out, Jack Manley does rocket-punch a giant dinosaur in the prologue; you'll work out very quickly if this book is for you or not.

WHAT ELSE I'VE BEEN WORKING ON

Last night I started work on my second novel, The Lightless Labyrinth.  (I can do this now that the weight of Jack Manley has been lifted from my conscience.)  The premise is simple: ten sociopaths go into a mine together looking for treasure.  More accurately, it's the average Dungeons & Dragons set-up, which I think has a lot of story potential when you boil it right down.  What would happen if you took a bunch of social outcasts who barely know each other, and put them in a dangerous labyrinth where their goals may or may not match up?  Murders is the obvious answer.  I'm about 2,000 words in and it's all progressing quite well.  The major difficulty at the moment is introducing the characters.  There are a lot, and they're all in it right from the beginning.  It's a challenge, and I don't think I'll know if I've succeeded until I'm a few more chapters in.

OTHER TIME-WASTING ACTIVITIES

What I'm Reading
Doctor Who and the Claws of Axos by Terrance Dicks
Arounf the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne
Marvel Comics circa 1964

What I'm Watching
Hulk (the movie that starred Eric Bana)

What I'm Listening To
Number of the Beast by Iron Maiden

What I'm Playing
Hot Wheels: Beat That! on the Nintendo Wii