Publishing my first book was a backward journey. For more than two decades, I’ve been publishing stories or parts of stories on various websites. In 2020, I found myself with significant downtime. I started wondering how many words I’d freely offered to strangers on the Internet. Over a few weeks, I went through every place I could remember publishing, copied and pasted the content into Google documents, and counted. It was more than a million. Putting that number in context, George R. R. Martin’s A Dance of Dragons is nearly 415,000 words.
It was likely during several dog walks, which is what I did for fun in 2020, that the idea started to form: “You should turn these stories into books.”
It was a fun idea to flirt with, but there were several problems. One problem was that I vomited most of these stories. I was writing for myself, so there’d be little outlining and only the soft brush of editing. It would be a Herculean effort to whip these stories into shape.
Another issue was that most of these stories were unfinished. There was rarely a plan. In my mind, the story would end when it wanted to end. The problem was that they never finished because there’s always a shiny new story idea. I’d be extremely excited about a concept, start grinding it out, and publish chapters as soon as they were finished. A new idea would start worming its way into my brain. I’d say, “Hang on, please wait,” and it would say, “No, my turn! Pay attention!” I’d need a new dose of serotonin, so I’d relent with the full intention of returning to the other idea, but it would rarely happen.
The problem contained the solution. Converting these stories into books had to become the shiny new story idea. And that’s what I did.
I went through those stories, culled the weak, identified common themes in the remnants, and built a shared universe to contain them. Did I need to create a shared universe? Yes, absolutely. It was the only way I could trick my brain into making this happen. I can’t explain it, but that’s how it works.
I’m doing my best to hammer out the structure of that universe for public consumption through a wiki called House Subconium. It’s messy, but if I continued to focus on the wiki, I would have never finished the first book by my deadline.
The first book is Kelly’s Unveiling, the first in a series called Making the Grades. You might click that link and say, “Wait, Kelly’s Unveiling is a series, too.” True! I divided the 120,000-word novel into three parts. The plan is to publish those three parts, followed by the Complete Edition. Primarily, I’m doing it this way to buy myself some time. I’m nearly finished with the second book, Allie’s Descent, but I didn’t want too much time to pass between the two books.
Secondly, it’s a marketing experiment. I’m new to this concept of publishing with a strategy. Usually, I just throw the chapters out into the wild and let them fend for themselves. Now that I’m going legit, I thought researching would be a good idea. I determined that readers like a series and usually buy book one when they see you have book two.
Will it work? I don’t know! I suppose the book must also be good and appeal to an audience. I like it, but will anyone else?