Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Elgon – An Update

Ambitious title, I know. But since there’s not that much to tell, I think I can pull this off.

What’s going on in my publishing life?

Fried Windows is doing fine. There were a couple of free ebook promotions that created more awareness of the book and a Goodreads Giveaway I did last month. There will be some more things coming down the pike. So look for them. I still need for everyone who has read the book to post a review to Amazon and Goodreads. I realize that’s a challenge for every author out there, getting readers to post reviews. Readers aren’t writers, after all. But it only takes a couple of minutes to write two lines about what you liked or didn’t like about the book. What you may not know is how important total number of reviews are for promoting a book, especially receiving some gratis attention from Amazon. I’m told you must have a minimum of fifty reviews posted to receive a serious push. I have seventeen.

Becoming Thuperman, my next project in the pipeline, is in revisions right now. I have about a day or two left on that before sending the new and improved, latest version to my publisher so it can be reviewed for subediting. The tentative release date on that book right now is the end of January 2015.

Once I finish the revisions on BT, I have committed to reading and reviewing a couple of new books, one a fellow Pandamoon author named Jeff Messick whose debut novel, Knights Of The Shield – a paranormal cop thriller – comes out in mid-November. The other book I just received and it looks interesting. It’s called Stealing Destiny and is in the paranormal genre. Its author, J. D. Selmser contacted me kind of out of the blue. I happened to have a gap in my schedule so I agreed to give it a read. It’s the first book of the Immortal Obsession series. I seem to be reading a lot of paranormal books lately.

In my publicist gig I’ve been promoting Steph Post’s A Tree Born Crooked which launched yesterday. Readers of this blog know I’m very high on this book. It’s different in a great way, paving a lot of new ground in gutsy, gritty realism. It’s seriously a great piece of literature and deserves all the critical attention it has already received. Also, Steph is a sweetheart. I’ve only known her for a little more than a year but she’s a great friend and amazingly talented writer.

Christine Gabriel’s Crimson Forest launched at the end of August and it’s been doing very well in sales. It’s another paranormal book but with a few twists and a lot of differences from the usual fare of vampires and creepy things. It’s a first novel for Christine and also the first in a series. She is nearing completion of the sequel work, Crimson Moon, that will launch sometime in March 2015.

Remember The Wolfcat Chronicles, that ten book series I penned between 2000 and 2005? Well, I’m going to be doing a new revision to the first book of the series and submitting it to my publisher. I have submitted a version previously. The problem is scheduling the editing required to release ten books in a fairly short time interval. Also I need to revise the entire series in a narrow window as well. The first seven books are pretty close to being ready for prime time. The last three could use another revision and I want to rewrite the ending because some of the plot ties into Fried Windows. Yeah, imagine that. I’m hoping Spectre of Dammerwald, the first two books of the series, can be released this summer and fall with One Pack, the next five books, coming out in 2016.

Other projects I’m working on: a sequel to Fried Windows tentatively titled Ninja Bread Cookies and a sequel to Becoming Thuperman titled Being Thuperman. On the back burner is a book I started last year titled Bongwater Moses. Those books will make it into print eventually, perhaps in between the individual Wolfcat books. Although there are a few threads of continuity between them and the Wolfcat books they are intended to stand alone.

There are a couple of other books kicking around that I’d like to publish. One is a background book about Brent Woods, the lead character in Fried Windows, titled Fifteen Days of Danielle. Another is a book that I haven’t decided what to call. It is loosely based on my experiences growing up around South Charleston, Ohio in the sixties. There is also a book I want to revise one more time before submitting it titled Selling The Morning Calm which is loosely based on a couple of years I spent in Korea while working with the military. And there is a supernatural book about text messaging that I wrote in 2009 and another supernatural one that has Brent Woods as a character that is set in a haunted house. Add to those a couple of books that sort of provide some backstory for The Wolfcat Chronicles that need to be revised and another book about Brent Woods and how he got involved with The Program that is mentioned in Fried Windows…busy, busy.

Later on I plan a rewriting of the One Over X series which I began last summer with a revised new edition that split the first book into two books. I self published that and posted it to Amazon back in August 2013.

All told there are some twenty books that will see their way into print over the next three or four years.

In my personal life, my nomadic nature continues. This time I moved only a few miles from where I had been staying. It’s a longer commute by bike to where I work part-time but it’s good exercise riding four and a half miles each way. Over the past year or so I have dropped over sixty-five pounds. I’ll probably shed a few more in the process of biking to and from work, now. I may pick up a second part-time job for Christmas season as I am closer to a major shopping area in East Orlando and those stores are only two miles away.

#writing #publishing