It's been a long, difficult road to get to this point in the journey to have SCRAPPER find its way into your hands. I started writing it way back in 2008, I believe, with the plan for it to be a single, stand-alone book to throw into the calm, silent waters that hides the Promised Land of a hopeful author: agents and publishers, of course! When the book kept swelling in size to eventually become a near 800-page behemoth, I made the difficult decision to split the book in two. This was slightly more than a teensy little wrench thrown into the works for my plans for traditional publishing. After all, few agents or publishers will give a second glance to a book from a first-time author that doesn't conclude in one volume. The only other option was to keep it at a whopping 200,000+ word monstrosity, which also is (not always, but more often than not) a death knell for one's chances at publication the old-fashioned way.
So, self-publishing was the way to go.
When I whipped together that little promo piece above, both books were ready...I thought. Until I shot a sample chapter off to a professional editor to see just how well my many exhaustive passes over the material had fixed things up. The returned sample chapter was what I expected, peppered with notations and suggested changes. Every work can use a second set of critical eyes, and mine was no exception. So, to give you the best product possible, I ponied up the dough to hire the editor, and let my hopeful "Early 2014" release date slip away like Kansas' old "Dust in the Wind." I spent quite some time with approvals and fixes to SCRAPPER alone over the next few months, and started work on tweaking up this here fancy website. Again, I was nearing readiness to send SCRAPPER out into the world. So for Halloween, I figured I'd do my annual pumpkin carving and do some promotion for the impending release as well.
Halloween passed, and shortly thereafter...SNOW. Not a ton of it, but enough to get me to reconsider the timing of SCRAPPER's release.
Now, for most people, that would be a minor inconvenience. Even more so, snow is certainly a small hindrance for what we all imagine writers to be: hermits quietly tucked away in isolation for so long that they have to look up pictures of what the outside world looks like so they can accurately describe it in their writing.
For me, the first snowfall means the inexorable shrinking of free time, a ticking clock that signals the death of any and all extracurricular activities. See, since I can't afford to be that stereotypical writing hermit just yet, I have to work...and my work happens to be driving and delivering all the stuff that people like to get in those boxes that magically appear outside their doors. And this time of year, those mysteriously materializing packages start to multiply--A LOT. You get my drift. And by drift, I mean the giant snowdrift that I inevitably get stuck in at least once or twice a winter.
Raise your hand if you can see where this is all heading. Bueller? Bueller? Yes, it means I've pretty much made the hard decision to delay one more time. Why, you might ask? As a self-publishing author, I am my own marketing team, and I'm kind of thinking my marketing team might want to have more than a drowsy hour or two before bed in order to push my book as much as I can. So after the holidays, I should have a more definite timetable for releasing SCRAPPER.
However, this decision does have some positives. First, most of the pieces will be in place for release near the beginning of 2015. I'm still planning on having the book formatted in the next couple of weeks, so once the avalanche of horribleness that is my December passes, all systems should be GO. Second (and perhaps even better), I'll have a much better shot this way of having a simultaneous launch (or at least a shorter gap between) for e-book and print formats. E-book launching will be the easy part, but there's a lengthy and tedious approval process to make sure everything is just right for the print version--and I've had a good few people tell me they'd wait for the print version rather than snap it up in e-book format right off the bat.
And that should just about wrap up this little bloggie thing for today. Thanks for reading, and thanks for your patience! Though I can't give a firm release date on SCRAPPER just yet, "Chinese Democracy" this is not! And once SCRAPPER's out, I'm going to bust my booty to make sure the second half of THE 13th PARAGON, FROM ASHES OF EMPIRES releases within the space of a few months. Any questions, don't hesitate to drop me a line!
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