So today I published The Vengeance Season in the Kindle store and created this blog to keep track of what, if anything, happens as a result of that action.
This is a novel I wrote the first draft of ten years ago. It has since been rewritten and edited half a dozen times, including a few major overhauls and one page one rewrite. In the process it got me my first agent and a number of missed-it-by-this-much chances with publishers. It was a frustrating enough experience that I had abandoned the novel (and the Roy Doyle series) completely until someone very dear to me (hi, Mom!) convinced me to at least get it out there so people have a chance to read it.
I've always been circumspect about "vanity publishing" because it involved a tremendous amount of your money going to a publisher and not very much going into your pocket, but this seems to be different. Niche groups of readers are buying into the eReader phenomenon in record numbers and the incredibly low prices ($1.00 - $3.00) make it a low risk investment for them to sample different (unknown) authors.
Seriously, haven't you ever stood in a bookstore with some weighty tome priced at $29.99 in your hand and wondered to yourself how many pages you'll get into it before abandoning it on the shelf with the rest of its unread kin? I have. I have a special shelf full of them. But at three bucks, hey, why not? Download it, pop it into the reader, and see if you can't get enjoyment out of it that's roughly equivalent to the value of a gallon of gasoline.
The book will be publicly available tomorrow sometime at which point I'll link to it from this blog. At that point, I figure one of two things will happen. Either I will sell a few copies and have a few people send notes about dropped words or typos or I will sell thousands of copies and have thousands of people sent me notes about dropped words or typos.
I'm hoping to sell 100 copies before this is all over. That's a good face-saving number, right?
