Sunday, March 21, 2010

eBook Experiment - Sequels

I ended up swapping some of my tasks. I started reading the sequel this weekend, rather than doing my editing. And again, I couldn't stop reading, although this one is far from ready. I will not be able to set a publication date for it that I can put in this book right at the start.

But I do see that I not only have one sequel, but two. The second book, called Test of Freedom, is much longer than the first. And the first third of it can easily be a story unto itself, and it is kinda sketchy in parts. The second part is kind of a mess, and might work better if it were to stand alone.

This is very cool, because the very best possible promotion for a book is another book. That's what you need when you're marketing via something like Kindle or any other "bookstore" - you want to take up shelf space to be noticed. And a trilogy is always better than a duology.

If I do nothing else with this experiment, getting three books up in a series over this coming year would be a great way to accelerate the test. It should not affect my schedule on my mystery writing, but it will affect my short story writing.

The cool thing about this is that if the project doesn't fly, it's okay, because I wanted to get these stories out there. But if it does fly, I have at least one more story I'd like to write in this series, and I have another possible series set in a different stagey, pulpy world that I don't want to put into traditional publishing, so I've just never written it.

(That one could potentially be the same world 150 years later, or it could be a world with some fantasy element, like maybe zombies. I'm not a big zombies fan, but the characters need to be fighting something simplistically monstrous, although I'd rather it not be horror. We'll see if I ever get to it.)

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