I am finally ready to publish something new! I’ve finished up a 25,000 word novella called THE CAVE and we are putting the finishing touches on the cover. When the cover is done, I will be publishing it as an ebook for Kindle. This is probably the first book that I’m going to try for a wider release. I’m also planning on publishing it (not immediately but as soon as I have time to do the extra work) to the other ebook platforms, either through Smashwords or Draft-2-Digital. I hope to have it eventually available for Nook, iBooks, and Kobo.
The story has been through my personal editing wringer (for what it’s worth) and a first reader (Tom McAlister) who gave me some very good input. To me (and to Tom), it reads nicely. But then today I had my confidence shaken as I looked at the notes that one of the editors of QUANTUM ZOO sent me on my story. Most were copy-edit types of corrections, like repetition of a word too close together or wrong use of an m-dash. But some were just clarity edits, and when I read them, I realized that her suggestions (the copy-editor was J.M. Ney-Grimm) did clarify the writing in those areas.
But then I remembered Dean Wesley Smith suggesting that you can be paralyzed by such doubts, and I don’t intend to allow it to paralyze me. So here it comes. Maybe by the weekend, more likely sometime next week.
I’m working on the blurb right now, but here’s a bit about what the novella is about. Four boys discover a cave in a forest preserve/park near their homes. They decide that they are going to explore it by themselves, because they know that if they let the authorities know about it, no one will let them go into it. So they start to excavate the entrance out, and are joined by the cutest girl in the neighborhood, who, to their surprise, is very interested in caves. But the cave has dangers — not all from the physical challenges presented by their exploration.
It’s a story about young love, about trust, about learning to care for others, and about friendships. It’s also a story about something strange that has it in for them and wants something from them that they’re not really prepared to give.
While I’ll classify the tale as horror, I don’t know if it is strictly horror. There isn’t a fright around every corner. Mostly it’s just a story about kids discovering the world around them, and discovering themselves.
It was inspired, in part at least, by Richard Laymon’s THE TRAVELING VAMPIRE SHOW, and I tried to create the feel of the kids’ experience with something very strange that I found in that novel.
I’m thinking that I’m going to make some pricing moves with all of my works. The short fiction can’t go any lower, but I think I’ll probably lower the price of all my collections to $0.99 for a while. See if I can lure any new readers in.
As soon as this one is out there, I’ll move on to working on my band trip horror novella, a 35,000+ word story with the working title THE INN. And a second, short novel called RECIPROCAL EVIL, clocks in at about 45,000 words and is currently being read by a first reader. I would like to get them all out before fall. Hopefully my dental mystery, tentatively called DEATH BY APPOINTMENT, will get finished up and I can look into editing it and polishing it.
More information to follow. Watch this space (and Facebook) for release notes…
*****
Great! I’ll be looking for it.
I was looking into No Amber Waves of Grain the other day for a detail about old Vladimir Kalinin when I spotted a content editing glitch (more difficult to pick out because it often boils down to a stylistic question, or mixed up with one), but I’ve caught copy editing mistakes too.
Long ago, in my old day job of writing data analysis code (finding the answers for the implicit questions in “Gee, that’s odd!”), I learned that there’s always another code bug. Editing mistakes are like that. You never finish a story or novel; you just reach a point where making a few percentage points of improvement requires an inordinate amount of time.
Bottom line: you shouldn’t lose sleep about getting that last edit correct. I’ve seen some real gotchas from Big Five books, and their authors supposedly have run an extensive editing gauntlet. One of the problems with hiring an editor is that the author is (or should be) the person most aware of her/his writing quirks (if that isn’t the case, something’s wrong).
r/Steve
Thanks. I’m figuring on revealing the cover here today or tomorrow, and I’m hoping to publish on Saturday or Sunday. I have some other things I want to do as well…lowering the cost of my collections and changing the blurbs and maybe even run a Kindle Select promo. The new book isn’t going into KS, but I might put all of the collections in it.
Interestingly, I read a comment that said if you want success with Kindle Unlimited, raise the price of your books. When I thought about that, I realized that it makes some sort of sense. You’re likely to get more downloads if people think they’re getting something MORE valuable for “free.” So maybe I won’t put them in KS quite yet.
If you see this, do you have any thoughts?