On The Road To Self Publishing

If you’ve looked at my website lately, you’ve seen that I’ve done a little overhaul of the design. It’s simpler now, and has a landing page rather than the blog featured because, Dear Reader, I’m getting ready to make you into an actual reader. Of a book. By me. O. M. G.

The Korinniad is going to be here so soon, and I can barely stand it! I’ve been working on getting it ready for, well, a long time, but I’ve been seriously preparing it for release–you know, all the fun stuff rather than the nitty gritty writing–for only about a month. I’m working with a great designer for the cover, and I’ve heard back from a few beta readers with really positive notes and thoughtful places to improve the text. I still have a little work to do, but it’s so close to release it feels like it’s already here, and I’m vibrating with energy, my dudes, like whoa.

But I do feel like I’m adding to the list of things I need to do pre-release just about every day. Collect my cover art, format the versions for print and ebook, print a test copy, record and format the audio, contact reviewers, market, get all my social medias under control, accounting and tax bullshit, the list just constantly grows. I’m hoping to get the audio version of the book ready to go out with everything else, and I haven’t even started on that yet! Oh, and of course I’m working on the next book too, the actual writing and revising stuff, and that’s a lot.

I self published a really terrible book or two many years ago, and while I’m proud of completing something and of the steps it took to make that come to fruition (and all the stuff I learned along the way), I am not proud of the quality of that story. Hopefully I don’t look back at The Korinniad the same way in six more years, but I have way more confidence in this book than I’ve ever had in any of my writing before. I just want to do things right and make them worthwhile, especially since I’m not opting to go to an agent or a publisher with this. I’ll never know if it’s good enough to have ever been picked up, but I need to treat it like the beginning to a career. Not so precious I can’t make a mistake, but still with professional hands.

Right now my target date is 2/1/20, just two weeks away. Whoa, dudes, it’s so soon! Here’s the back of the book synopsis, as a little teaser:

Korinna hasn’t been blessed by a single one of the gods, and especially not by one of the Olympians, but her life is going about as well as any servant girl could expect. That is, until she’s faced with the small issue of her village’s annual virgin sacrifice and the slightly larger issue that she has just become the perfect candidate.

She has a plan, though, and it’s simple enough: find a suitor and disqualify herself. But the gods have, as they say, enigmatic methods, and a very different plan is thrust upon our reluctant heroine. With the help of a winged demigod and his arrows of love, Korinna is sent on an epic journey to seek out her soul mate—not that she believes in such foolish things. But when faced with monsters, the Underworld, and her own untimely end, true love might start to look a little less ridiculous.