Step one is done

Over the last couple days, I put a novelette up on both the Nook and the Kindle site for $1. This was an attempt to see if I could get the formatting right for epub stuff and actually get it up on the sites without totally messing things up. I wanted to know before I went on with other, longer material.

Nook version: http://bit.ly/gdM0av  and Kindle version: http://amzn.to/faegvd

No Beast so Fierce is the story of two shapeshifters in the far future as they battle a group of dangerous vampires. The story was originally published by Darwin's Evolutions.

The majority of material I have scheduled for the Nook and Kindle are previously published books, though I do intend to try a few new pieces as well. This is an attempt to pick up just a little bit more income to help in my private life as well as with Forward Motion and Vision. I might as well do this and have fun and still be writing new material. It's an experiment, and I have a couple other people watching on who are close to dropping into the ACOA game as well.

ACOA = A Conspiracy of Authors

This is an invitation only publisher, with an editor on staff and a block of ISBNs. There will be print and ebook versions of the work once things get ironed out -- and yes, I am doing the majority of the work to help get things moving. I'm also volunteering a lot of my work for the experiment before anyone else joins in. I can afford to play around with some of my books. I have books to spare, and even if I started publishing one a month it would be over five years before I would have to worry about running out -- and that's providing I never wrote another novel again. I do not plan to put out a book a month, by the way. I'm just saying I have enough books (and never mind the shorter work), that I can do this without fear of ruining any chance to submit to other publishers and agents.

A book a month. Zette's Book of the Month Club. Why does this make we want to laugh hysterically?

This is where being prolific actually starts to pay off in more than entertaining myself with tales. It is not, of course, quite where I saw myself going a decade ago -- but a decade ago, the market started to change so much that I started finding it harder to locate things I wanted to read. That meant, of course, that what I wrote wasn't really in line with what was being published. And now, over the last couple years, the changes in the publishing world have been so drastic that yeah -- I'm ready to try something new.

Very early on, I submitted to ebook publishers and ezines -- long before Kindles and such. I loved it. I still make sales on a number of those original novels, almost a decade later. I've never been afraid of trying something new in the writing world and this entire ACOA project is going to be my experiment for the year. It's something I probably should have considered before now, but I've just been so busy with Vision and Forward Motion that I let just about everything on my writing front go except for the writing itself.

Ah yes, writing. I am working on outlines for next year and finishing up my last little bit of work for this year. I am also working on Vision, which should be going to a Joomla! set up this year, if I get it all worked out. That will make back issues far easier to deal with once I get them all in hand. That's going to be a project from hell -- ten years of articles to copy over and tag. But I'll get there eventually!

My tea machine is beeping at me to let me know I have another wonderful pot of tea done. And it occurred to me that it was, in part, the triniTEA that pushed me into this little change in plans in my writing life. I bought the tea maker and felt guilty about it. (It has, actually, cut so far down on my Diet Pepsi consumption that it's good for both money and health reasons -- but that's something else.) Then, as I started getting used to it (addicted, probably), I realized that I want to be able to buy myself little things again and not have to worry. Not a lot of things, not big things -- but things now and then and not have to remind myself that I need to pay for websites, Vision articles, food, cat food, etc. None of these is all that expensive. I don't need a lot of money.

But I have something like 80 novels completed in at least the first draft. Why should they just be sitting there? There are people who like my writing. I hear from them now and then -- but since I don't put a lot out, I lose track of them and they forget about me.

Time to put stuff out and get back to work on marketing -- but do it professionally, so to speak. Nothing will go out that hasn't gone through at least one editor other than me. This doesn't mean perfection, of course, but I won't expect readers to have to report easily corrected mistakes at every turn. Problems with formatting -- yeah, I'll want to hear about those because the whole epub thing is new to me.

This also means, of course, that it's time to start submitting to other places again, too. Forward Motion and Vision will do fine without me hovering over them every moment, and if I do actually make a little extra money, then it will help even more.

But even more than the money, the idea that I might go out and find readers again pleases me. I've missed that these last few years while I fretted over home, work and FM/Vision. I have not fretted over writing. I refused to let that whole attitude slip into that part of my life.

Which means, of course, that I wrote over a million words again this year. Just so you know.

That includes seven novels.

Maybe that Zette Novel of the Month Club isn't so bad an idea after all.