What's up next

The Disciple Half-Omnibus is making its way onto electronic shelves now. Disciple, Part IV has gone to the editor. Received preliminary sketches from Faiz for the cover artwork -- the readers on my mailing list got a sneak peek of that.

Blog tour starts Saturday and will last two months. This is looking a bit more insane that it did around New Year's, lol...

I did a light revision pass through Disciple, Part V and am currently red-penning a paper copy of Disciple, Part VI (the end of the series.) It's interesting how you remember earlier drafts more clearly than later ones. I need to cement these in my head.

The Rafflecoptor giveaway for the Half-Omnibus also starts on Saturday.

  a Rafflecopter giveaway

I may not be posting here much during the push to get Disciple, Part IV published. There will be updates over at Disciple of the Fount, though.

Cover reveal in the midst of insanity

Well, insanity is my story and I'm sticking to it for now. A word of advice to self-publishers: trying to organize a tour blog less than a month ahead of time is not recommended.

I'm publishing the Disciple Half-Omnibus on February 1st. As the title indicates, it's half the Disciple series collected into one ebook. Price will be $6.99.

Back cover
War is coming. Kate Carpenter is only a peasant girl, but she’s determined to help defend the kingdom and its bound saints against the invading empire. Her healing magic earned her a coveted apprenticeship with the master healer; now she must prove herself ready to stand in the front lines and save lives.

She’s not ready for the attentions of a ne’er-do-well knight and the kingdom’s only prince, though. This is no time to be distracted by romance — the empire’s monstrous army will tear through anyone standing between them and the kingdom’s magical founts. All disciples must put aside their tangled feelings and stand in the homeland’s defense.

Why? 
There's some evidence that compilations are convenient for readers who want to catch up on a series. It's one thing to buy rather than several. Since I already had ebook files set up, it was pretty easy to assemble them all into one big file. Three books, all the appendices, and I combined the character indexes too.

The cover art is the wonderful landscape that I commissioned way back before Part I and has only seen use in a few banners. If you're on my mailing list, look for a special announcement about art prints soon...

So, near-zero overhead to produce this. I'll promote it of course but I'll be putting more effort into Disciple, Part IV. Which will be published on March 1. The universe is, of course, trying to align itself to make this challenging.

Other plans
I will be participating in the BBF Writer's Workshop Feb. 7-9 -- my presentation about self-publishing will be on the 9th. I will be interviewed by Tara Maya as part of her Fantasy Author Post Swap series. And who knows what else will come up...

Indie Life: Self-publisher's housekeeping

Welcome to Indie Life -- the second Wednesday of the month! Time to talk about the realities of self-publishing in the middle of the ongoing sea change that ebooks have wrought.

So I did it. I self-published my novellas -- three of them and counting. There might have been a few bugs in the formatting, but I've fixed those and uploaded clean copies. They'll be available forever on Amazon's virtual bookshelves. I'm starting to prep for my next publication, number four.

Thank goodness I don't have to worry about those first three anymore. Right? Well...

My "Other Books By..." page
As I publish more books, it's in my best interests to update this. It's the cheapest form of advertising I can get! Besides that, the number one reason that a reader buys a book (any book) is because they liked the author's other work.

Next book link
Disciple is a series, so when readers get to the end of one part, the first thing I want them to know is that the next part is on sale. The cover's right after the last paragraph, with a link to my sales page.

Where does the link go? To my sales page, because online retailers don't want books to contain links to their competitors. That's fair enough, but I don't want to create a separate ebook for every single retailer. So let the readers choose.

At the end of Part III is a note about when Part IV will be published. I'll have to update that with a cover and link when that's available. There's also a link to sign up for my newsletter.

FREE at Amazon
& Smashwords

Promoting previous books
Even though I'll be promoting Disciple, Part IV soon, it's in my best interests to keep promoting Part I. It's the gateway into the series, after all. But even if all my books were one-shots, promoting one can lead to carry-over sales when new readers like one book and want to buy more that I've written.

Updating links to my blog/webpage
I do, of course, have a link to my book blog in the back of all my books. There are reader goodies and nice, big maps (I write fantasy) there. If any of that should change, I'll need to update it in all my ebooks.

Housekeeping
These updates take a little time and then I have to re-upload them to all my sales channels... but anything that makes it a little easier for readers to find me is worth it.

What sorts of maintenance have you been doing on your self-pubbed titles?

Guest posting!

I've been talking about my self-publishing journey here since day one -- but if you'd like a general overview, see my guest post over at Daniel's Literary Endeavors. Hat tip to Daniel for inviting me to post!

See you on Wednesday for Indie Life day!