The Way Forward

A late update.

It’s been a long time since I last posted, but I’ve been very busy. My book, Intersection, came out, and I’ve been working hard getting reviews, pulling ads, and preparing for my next self published book’s release.

Today I wanted to talk about my book (surprise, surprise), but I want to do separate posts for how I accumulated reviews and my experience with ads.

I had a change of mind since I last wrote about how I’d release my books. I bought a course on how to make a book a bestseller, and one piece of advise this course gave me was to have a physical copy of my book available. The reason for this is to increase my book’s legitimacy in the mind of the buyer. It made sense.

The problem I came up against was I didn’t think my book was long enough to have a physical copy made for it. But fortunately I stumbled upon a video that talked about a YouTuber who came out with a pamphlet sized book. It clicked in my mind that if this guy could release his tiny book, I could release a paperback for my book.

So with this new information, I scrambled to put out a paperback for Intersection. It an easy process, as I used Amazon KDP for my eBook, and they are able to publish paperbacks as well. I did make a rookie mistake during the setup: I did not put a publication date, and that meant that Amazon released the paperback as soon as everything was ready. The reason I missed this was that the setup for the eBook had a similar publication date question, but this was only to be filled in if the eBook had been previously released, so I thought it was the same thing for the paperback and it wasn’t.

This completely changes my release plans for my next books. Instead of releasing only eBook formats, I’ll be releasing paperbacks as well. The good news is that Intersection is (so far) the shortest of the books in The Children of Gomorrah series. I also won’t be putting out a collection of the first phase of stories, as that would be very bulky.

I’ll be using Amazon’s KDP program to release my next book, Mesa, but I’m planning on trying out another self publishing company after that.

In other news, I finished the first draft for my newest book, Paralyzed, and the story is now going through revisions. I’ll be releasing each chapter on the site as they are finished; currently the first three chapters are out. You can read that here, but keep in mind that (1) this book is in a beta form and is out for feedback, and (2) this is the sixth story form The Children of Gomorrah series. Do you need to have read the previous books to understand what happens in Paralyzed? No. But you’d get more out of it if you did.

I’m looking forward to seeing where everything goes in the coming months and years, and I’ll keep you updated as often as I can.

Next time I want to talk about advertising. I’ve gone through a number of different advertising routes, so I’ll be sharing what’s happened with all of that.

Until then, I hope you have a wonderful day,

Colin J Switalski