Updating My To-Do List

I hit the tail end of a long to-do list today, and had to take a step back to reassess. I’ve accomplished a lot of behind-the-scenes, sometimes boring, but very important work for my books. I’ve been so deep in the throes of the business of publishing for the last several months, that I thirst to write again. Before I dive into the deep and wrap up the fifth Angst book, I wanted to share some of what I’ve been working on for several months, and why I’ve been doing it.

Throughout 2017, I’ve been working with my artist, Alessandro Brunelli, to replace the covers of my Angst novels. I found Alessandro through 99designs.com and will continue pestering him for more covers until he’s sick of me. The reactions I received from his first cover, Drowning in Angst, were so good that I commissioned him to do the rest. If you saw the original, drunken pencil sketches I sent him to start from, you’d call him a genius and a mind reader. I certainly do.

I also completed a middle grade / young adult fantasy novella this year. This went through a more extensive editorial process than anything I’ve done. In addition to input from my amazing, and patient editor, Danielle Fine, I asked Hugo-nominated editor Bryan Thomas Schmidt to take a look. He said lots of nice things (hopefully not just because I gave him money). To paraphrase, he also said, “it’s really good, get it published.” I considered this, but I have the patience of a fruit fly in a grocery store, so chose not to pursue that path. I will tease that I’ve shared with some advanced readers, and the initial feedback has been excellent.

In 2018, Angst, and everything else I write for the foreseeable future, will be published under the imprint Odysia Press. As a part of this, my books, and the upcoming novella, will be available through Ingram for wholesale distribution. I did this for a lot of reasons, the biggest being my commitment to publishing a quality product. My books are edited by industry professionals, and then reviewed by multiple teams before publishing. As mentioned, all of the covers are done by a professional artist. This imprint seemed like the most natural step in the evolution of my writing. It was also a lot of work. You can check out the new Odysia Press website here: www.odysiapress.com, and look for the novella in March 2018.

This week, Angst, and for the first time Buried in Angst, ebooks will be available online for only .99. I’m running this promotion through manybooks.net and they were kind enough to interview me. The interview should be up on Friday, 12/1, so please give them a visit. You can find links of where to purchase Angst here: https://books2read.com/u/mZwpVe and Buried in Angst here: https://books2read.com/u/bWK8xG

So, that was 2017, and my to do list was mostly done. Today I put pencil to paper and laid out an aggressive plan for 2018, because I’d hate to be bored. In addition to the novella, a few audiobooks, cons, and some heavy promoting, I’ll be completing the fifth Angst novel, “Something something beside Angst.” The cool thing is that most of the business side is now in place, so I can go back to that writing thing I enjoy so much. Which I should probably get back to.