Writer's Grove

Year-end thanks

Hey: Thank you. For lots of stuff, but mostly for reading & telling your friends about the series.

You put SHATTERED on the New York Times list and it has more reviews than any of my other books except HOUNDED—I’m turbo grateful and so very glad you liked it.

Thanks also for coming to see me when I ventured out of my cave to squint in the bright light of the public sun. Some of you cosplayed or brought me potables or wanted to take a pic or just say howdy and all of that was rad. It was truly delightful to meet you.

Wanted to say thanks especially for your help with an experiment. Prior to this year I hadn’t self-published anything; the traditional route was working out fine and I didn’t really have a story available in any case. But once “The Chapel Perilous” became available to me, I thought, why not? Let’s learn the process.

I originally wrote “The Chapel Perilous” for charity and never thought I’d make a buck from it anyway. But once it had served its charitable purpose it looked like an opportunity to learn the self-pubbing side of things on the super easy setting—it had already been  edited and copy edited after all. So my costs were essentially art and formatting. A $500 investment.

(Galen Dara did the haunting rain-soaked cover, by the way, and it is still my favorite thing. It hit all my geek spots and she is a dream to work with.)

I published in the US/Canada with Amazon, B&N, and iTunes/iBooks. Kobo was difficult for some reason; I was using the exact same file that uploaded to the others just fine but Kobo kept rejecting it so I gave up because I had books to write. Apologies to Kobo readers for my lack of patience.

From January to November across those three platforms I sold a bit more than 20K copies at 99 cents and earned a bit more than $7K. That was far more successful than I expected since I’d basically hoped to get my $500 back. I had no idea what to expect since “The Chapel Perilous” had already been published in the UNFETTERED anthology (and that’s still where UK/AUS/NZ readers can find it) and short stories in general don’t sell as well as novels. But it took off for some reason and even has quite a few kind reviews. Thanks again!

So I guess I’m a hybrid author now? Going to self-pub something bigger in the spring. It’s a mini-anthology called THREE SLICES. It’s three novellas: An Iron Druid one from me, a Blud novella from Delilah S. Dawson, and a Miriam Black novella from Chuck Wendig. Edited by my brilliant Metal Editor & art once again by Galen Dara—a cover plus an additional illustration for each of the three stories. Because Galen is absolutely spiffing. (She did the portrait of Oberon you see on the site as well.)

THREE SLICES will be out worldwide sometime in the spring—we’ll get you a solid release date once all the editing and such is done. There will be audio too. :) I wouldn’t have attempted anything so ambitious if you hadn’t supported “The Chapel Perilous” the way you did, so…thank you! And happy Solstice!