A few weeks ago I came to a bit of a strange decision considering the path that I had chosen for my career and my books. That decision wasn’t the easiest and really, I’m not sure that posting about it is the smartest thing because, well, things don’t always work out in the end, right?
Anyway, that decision was to take a long, hard look at Andlios Book Two and decide where I wanted to go with it. As most of you reading will know (or should know), I finished the rough draft of Andlios Book Two in late August and since then have been working on fine-tuning it over the past few months. I took about a month and a half away from it as well to start a new project, but I’ve been back at it for a few weeks now. I’m reaching the point with Book Two to where I’m understanding that there are a lot of things that I’d need to get moving on soon to get it ready for release, mostly being commissioning new artwork and then finding and paying an editor to run over it with a fine tooth comb to catch my [mostly] embarrassing mistakes that I still make after writing professionally for ten years now.
So I jumped back for a second and looked at Terminus Cycle, which included looking at what I did right and what I did wrong. I learned a lot from the release of Terminus Cycle, especially compared to what I learned between the release of Godslayer and Terminus Cycle. What’s funny is that there were years in between the release of Godslayer and Terminus Cycle, but Terminus Cycle was only released in late March and I only have seven months of sales data to sift through. Yet the muscle, money and time that I put into marketing Terminus Cycle and being able to figure out what works and what didn’t work has been invaluable. I also learned just how valuable being meticulous with revisions can be.
I’ve talked about this at length before, but I’m not sure that I put enough time into revising TC and after release I’ve found a myriad of things about it that I wish that I had done differently. There have even been moments where I’ve considered going through and doing those things that I didn’t do to it to jazz it up a bit, but for right now I’m letting sleeping dogs lie.
One thing that I did do for Godslayer and didn’t do for Terminus Cycle was working to get it published through traditional publishers and working through the whole system that is publishing. That means querying agents and trying to get my foot in the door that way. I made a conscious decision with Terminus Cycle to go the “indie author” route with it, and when looking back through the numbers, I’m not so sure that everything worked out the way that I wanted it to. I moved thousands of copies, which is really, really cool and I’ve amassed a decent number of reviews on both Amazon and GoodReads, working out to a 4.0 average on each site. Really, that’s pretty cool, considering Godslayer has zero reviews on GoodReads and 11 on Amazon after a number of years. Hell, I’ve seen books released by major publishers who have less reviews.
I’m tremendously proud that I’ve been able to reach people and stir up enough in them to leave a review of my book, good, mediocre or bad. I’ve been approaching “Book Two” a bit differently and upon reflection, I think that it’s a pretty damned good book at this point. The idea of sinking a whole lot of time and money into breaking even (or losing money) against is a hard pill to swallow at the moment. While I make enough money off of LiverKick right now, the idea of working as a novelist has always been to make it sustainable.
The vast improvement in quality (or quality control, I guess you could say) and how I wrote the book drove me to decide to pump the brakes a bit on publishing this book right away and instead feel through the waters of literary agents and give myself a chance to get this published traditionally. Now, I know what you are saying; isn’t this book two? It is and it isn’t. While this is the continuation of the lore and even some of the characters from Terminus Cycle, I wrote it in an accessible way to where if someone went into it without reading Terminus Cycle they not only wouldn’t feel lost, but would feel entirely comfortable using it as a jumping off point.
I went as far as to rename Terminus Cycle on Amazon from Terminus Cycle (Andlios Book One) to Terminus Cycle (Andlios Origins). Is that a cop out? I’m not sure, but it treats the journeys of Jonah Freeman and Peter O’Neil with respect and helps to establish the Andlios universe for those that are interested. For those that don’t feel like they need to go there? That’s cool as well, you’ll still hear about their stories and the history of Andlios and the Earthers in this new book as well.
If I do find an agent and do start working on the process of getting this book released through a major publisher it might take a while, which is kind of a bummer for those that are actually waiting for it, but I felt like it had been four years since I made an attempt at working through the traditional publishing industry and have come so far since then. It’s worth a shot, right? If things don’t quite work out over the next few months and every agent I queried shoots me down or simply isn’t interested then I might just move forward with releasing it on my own, but I feel very strongly about this book and that my time and efforts are worth money at this point.
Changes on Amazon and the crazy deluge of self-published works hitting the market are difficult to deal with right now and, in a way, Terminus Cycle got lost in the shuffle. This upcoming book will most likely appeal more to a wider swath of readers and might even be received better, which could mean more success, but having help in promoting the book and distributing it could go a long way to do it the justice that I believe that it deserves.
I do have a novella that I’ve been working on with some of the backstory from the planet Andlios that I wrote in a manic daze back a few months ago that I plan on returning to shortly and running through a few phases of revision. I’ll most likely be releasing that on my own within the next few months once I have it in a place that I want. So hopefully I’ll have a bunch of cool news over the next few months. Until then? Back to revisions and working hard every day.