March is Upon Us. This Year is Already Moving Fast.

Hello Campers,

I can’t believe it’s already March. I’m starting to think I'll blink and the year will be winding down. I don’t know about you, but I have way too much stuff to do before that happens. So, what is happening?

Well, glad you asked. Let’s see…

I am waiting for the Amazon Audible release of TRESSELL 113. Anthony ran into a couple of technical snags that he is working through. I really hope to have it out very soon, fingers crossed.

I am over twentyfive-thousand words into HUMANITY SHATTERED BOOK 3, DEMETER-9. So far, the working title is sticking; I think it’s here to stay. I don’t know if any of those words are any good yet, but I have to get the story out of my head and down on Google Docs. After that, I will start editing and send it to beta readers for feedback. Then comes the inevitable rewrites to tighten the story up a bit. I hate to put a timeline out there, but my hope is to release mid-year.

Then it will be off to Anthony to see if he will have me again for the Audible version of DEMETER-9. I hope so, I like the continuity. I’ve been trying to figure out how to shorten that process, because I don’t love the lag between print release and audio release.

I hate things I can’t control.

Oh, I have also formalized my writing a little more, and it makes me very happy. This led me to make some adjustments to my day job, working with couples in our therapy practice, and to carve out a big chunk of Wednesdays for formal writing and book development. It has become my favorite time of the week. It makes it feel a little more legitimate. I also write as much as I can over the weekends.

Over the last six or seven months, there has been this slow development of another series. I mentioned it as a second project that crosses over to the high fantasy genre in previous newsletters. I’m really trying to lean into efficiency when executing this other project. I have written and compiled a series bible that is currently 437 pages long. Crazy, that is a whole book! It’s just random notes, really. It includes details about the world the story is set in, its history and lore, the creation of the world, races and creatures, politics, governments, chronolgy and much more. It’s a living document for the series. There are some great resources on world-building, and, of course, I had to read as many as I could.

Over the last couple of months, there has been some more progress on that front. I mapped out a ten-book series arc with outlines for each book. That took some time. I kept worrying that I was taking time away from writing HUMANITY SHATTERED, but creativity sometimes needs room to breathe. What it has allowed me to do is move between my science fiction/horror series and this high fantasy series in a fresher way. I work hard to spend equal time on each. When I move from one to the other, I can step into it pretty quickly and start writing rather than mentally chunk away at one project for a sustained period. That can get a little painful at times. Even with an outline. Especially in the messy middle of a book where you are trying to tie together the beginning and get to your flashy ending. I get impatient at times…

All this being said, the high fantasy series book one is in creation now. I am over thirty thousand words into it. Just like with DEMETER-9, I have to get it out of my head and put it down in Google Docs. It’s actually flowing pretty quickly because I was so methodical about doing all the work up front. There have been some real lessons learned from HUMANITY SHATTERED that I believe have allowed me to be much more efficient. It's nice to see progress in my writing process.

Storytelling is a lot of fun; it's rare that I am not thinking through some aspect of one of my stories. At times, I even pick up my phone and write or dictate a scene I am envisioning. Otherwise, I may lose it, and I don’t want to.

When will this other series release? I have no clue. I am so on the fence about how to roll it out. I still have not decided whether to write it under Shamon Harper or a pen name. I am leaning toward Shamon Harper, mostly because I feel like maintaining two presences is too much of a pain in the ass.

Also, there is this burning desire to wait until I have two or three books from that series complete before I even start releasing them. That sounds insane, right? Why would I do that? Well, there are some business reasons for it. Momentum is a big thing, and doing it in that form would allow for some pretty good momentum. It would be more efficient on the marketing front as well.

When it comes to marketing a book series, the conventional wisdom seems to be: run ads on the first book, and if it is good enough, you will get what is called read-through for the rest of the series. It basically makes your first book a lead magnet where you don’t make much, if any, money on it, and then you start making money as people invest in the series and move through it. I didn’t have that luxury with HUMANITY SHATTERED. Hell, I didn’t even know if I could sell HUMANITY SHATTERED to anyone. At the time, investing any more time to write a second book seemed impossible and counterproductive.

Now, it seems a little more reasonable to be more strategic in how I write and release a different series. If I release two books, or maybe even three, in very short order, most of the money from the first book will be reinvested in ads, supporting marketing growth and hopefully more sales. Money from read-through can be realized more quickly, rather than over the course of years. It’s just something else I am playing with in my author business. We will see how it goes.

Anyway, it’s safe to say that there will be one and hopefully two releases in the HUMANITY SHATTERED series this year. As soon as I finish DEMETER-9, I will be starting the fourth book in the series.

When I stop and think about all this writing, it blows my mind. I talk about it now like it is not much of a big deal. When I wrote DEAD STATION, it took me a year and a half. Everything seemed so impossible. Now, here I am talking about writing multiple books at once across two different series. It’s just nuts.

Anyway, I hope your March is awesome!

Shamon

P.S. Pictured is Hobbes, one of my golden doodle therapy dogs, hard at work.