eBook Experiment - Still Editing

Still editing away. I think I got one rewrite sequence done but I'll have to look at it again later to be sure. I think I only have one more bit that will need more than editing, and I hope to get through the rest tomorrow.

I still have some stuff to fix on the cover, and hope to do that and the catalog copy by the weekend.

In the meantime I've been looking through my trunk stories, and I have found a few others that got good responses when I was marketing them, but they weren't really the direction I wanted to take my career. I have also rediscovered a few old series and ideas I never wrote because they didn't fit the market. (Some of them might actually fit the market now. Others are just for fun.)

And it's got me to thinking why this is appealing (aside from the obvious). When you are writing, you are taking a huge leap of faith. The truth is, if you're like me, you write a whole lot of things with the understanding that most of them won't "hit". Not because they aren't good enough, but because you're finding your voice, and you're finding your niche, and in the end, your niche is going to be chosen partly by luck.

And somewhere in the back of your mind is the idea that after you've established yourself with whatever turns out to be your Main Thing, you'll be able to do something with those little things. Maybe a small publisher will take them or maybe you'll self-publish them as a "curiosity." In other words, you do a huge amount of work up front so that you can do something else later that will support you eventually going back to the stuff you did up front.

But it's really hard to keep up your best work on a gamble that will be so long delayed. Several years for the stuff that DOES make it, longer for your little oddball favorites. It's even harder when you love series fiction and each of those oddball books really represent a series that you never wrote.

The attraction of Kindle publishing for me right now is that it's a chance to reverse this pattern. To let the little experiments get out there and start supporting the later work. It's like short story publication - you get some minor payoff to your efforts earlier. Delay saps your energy. This gives it back. It makes you work harder when you've got something to show for it.

Anyway, the more people I meet who are doing something similar, the more interesting I think this experiment is going to be.