I’ll drop this at the beginning before explaining: If you’ve read and enjoyed my books, please consider posting a review on Amazon. Short is fine. It’ll help me out a lot.
So, let’s start it up. I hate review begging, I really do. Sadly, idealism meets reality fairly often and this is one of those situations I can’t really escape. Being independent, I have to be the one marketing my books. I don’t have infinite money to do that, so I do need a little help from anyone who’s read them.
You might be saying, hey, how does an extra review help? Well, a few ways.
One: At 50 reviews, Amazon will actively promote your book if it’s over a certain star rating. I expect I’ll get nowhere near that number so it’s fine.
Two! Book sites that I could advertise with often require 10+ reviews and a 4 Star+ rating to be featured there. The reason for this is…
THREE!!!! People don’t like to waste their time buying books that other people haven’t vetted somehow. The more positive reviews a book has, the more willing they are to risk wasting their time and money.
And that’s it. There’s nothing dire going on and I’m not on the verge of not being able to write. I’ll do that until I’m dead either way. But I want to be able to get my books in front of more people and to do that I need reviews from the few who’ve read them. So help me out just this little bit if you enjoyed my books. I’d really appreciate it.
OKAY! Let’s talk about the new book a bit. Planning is ongoing at the moment. I’ve got the rough idea sorted. No title in place, but the real work right now is in researching Old Norse and Germanic mythology so that I really have an idea of how to angle myself into the story in a way that’s going to make it interesting. There’s a lot of great history I’m reading and that’s always exciting for me. It’s helping the story fold into place, but there’s still a long way to go before I have anything approaching my quality standard.
Since I’m a sucker for being extremely vague, the current work is on character motivation, overall plot framing, and developing gods into something less typical than we normally see. I’m certainly spoiled for choice as characters go, but that presents its own problems when trying to create a focused narrative. The story can’t be allowed to become a spectacle of Norse mythos jerk off material. That does a disservice to too many things. But, that said, failing to develop the world by making good use of those characters is equally horrible. So, I end up looking at just a ton of work. The basic state of things is that I have a series of very, very rough waypoints that seem like good places to work toward, storywise. But I don’t have enough. There are massive gaps to fill in between good inklings of an idea here or there. I’m hammering on it and hopefully I’ll have put it together into something reasonable in a week or two.
Back to work for me. These stories won’t tell themselves.