Writing Blog: Giving it Away
Jan. 19th, 2016 07:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjThis is going to a bit of a hodge-podge today.
Mother of Souls is still getting its first light pass-through, in preparation for diving into the serious editing.
The Mystic Marriage received a very lovely review at The Lesbian Review. Pull quote: … an entrancing world where magic is something you work at and is bound by its own laws…Heather Rose Jones is a superior author. Her world building is brilliant and her characters are imperfect, real and so different from each other.
I confess that I've been feeling very down about reviews for The Mystic Marriage. There have been very few on Amazon and Goodreads, and while a few people have reviewed it on their personal blogs, this is only the third "professional" review it's gotten (the others being Liz Bourke's, when the book was first released, and the pre-release review in Publishers Weekly). In theory, attention is supposed to build across a series. Mind you, it doesn't necessarily help that I get reviews that say things like, "I really loved this book, but I don't think I'd recommend it to very many other people because I don't think they could appreciate it." Um…ok. *whimper*
All of which brings us to the subject line of this blog. I've finished my fluffy little female Musketeer novelette. (Why yes, I am deliberately being self-deprecative so that people aren't scared off thinking they "won't be able to appreciate it.") I'm currently working through revisions and expect to have it ready for readers in the next couple of weeks, depending on finding the time to write up the back matter and format it. (It will have endnotes and possibly a bibliography. Because.)
And then I'm going to give it away. I might hold off long enough to use it to promote the new version of my web site, if I get my act together and make the time for a couple more work sessions with my web designers. And even for free short fiction I like to take the opportunity to do a properly formatted e-book with cover art and all the bells and whistles, simply because it's good practice and might mean people take the result more seriously.
I have mixed feelings about giving away stories. A lot of free fiction online follows the principle that you get what you pay for, and as a reader I tend to be wary of free stories outside the context of online magazines. In addition, placing stories in publications means automatic exposure to people who wouldn't otherwise encounter my work, whereas something I'm giving away on my website won't be read by anyone who doesn't visit the website for some reason.
But there are three reasons why I'm going to make The Mazarinette and the Musketeer available for free. One is that it was written on a whim based on a request from someone I know on Twitter, and I've always had a vague principle that if I create something as a gift for someone I don't also treat it as a commercial property, at least not primarily. Another reason is that I desperately need more mechanisms for convincing people they'd like to take the plunge and try reading my novels. Whether the bar is cost (and books from Bella aren't exactly cheap unless you catch one of their random sales), or whether the bar is length (yeah, ok, I write doorstops), or whether the bar is something else entirely, the bar is there. And the third reason is that there are a lot of online spaces where I feel uncomfortable doing too much promotion of commercial properties but where I would feel less uncomfortable letting people know I have a free story available.
At any rate, watch this space for more details!
Mother of Souls is still getting its first light pass-through, in preparation for diving into the serious editing.
The Mystic Marriage received a very lovely review at The Lesbian Review. Pull quote: … an entrancing world where magic is something you work at and is bound by its own laws…Heather Rose Jones is a superior author. Her world building is brilliant and her characters are imperfect, real and so different from each other.
I confess that I've been feeling very down about reviews for The Mystic Marriage. There have been very few on Amazon and Goodreads, and while a few people have reviewed it on their personal blogs, this is only the third "professional" review it's gotten (the others being Liz Bourke's, when the book was first released, and the pre-release review in Publishers Weekly). In theory, attention is supposed to build across a series. Mind you, it doesn't necessarily help that I get reviews that say things like, "I really loved this book, but I don't think I'd recommend it to very many other people because I don't think they could appreciate it." Um…ok. *whimper*
All of which brings us to the subject line of this blog. I've finished my fluffy little female Musketeer novelette. (Why yes, I am deliberately being self-deprecative so that people aren't scared off thinking they "won't be able to appreciate it.") I'm currently working through revisions and expect to have it ready for readers in the next couple of weeks, depending on finding the time to write up the back matter and format it. (It will have endnotes and possibly a bibliography. Because.)
And then I'm going to give it away. I might hold off long enough to use it to promote the new version of my web site, if I get my act together and make the time for a couple more work sessions with my web designers. And even for free short fiction I like to take the opportunity to do a properly formatted e-book with cover art and all the bells and whistles, simply because it's good practice and might mean people take the result more seriously.
I have mixed feelings about giving away stories. A lot of free fiction online follows the principle that you get what you pay for, and as a reader I tend to be wary of free stories outside the context of online magazines. In addition, placing stories in publications means automatic exposure to people who wouldn't otherwise encounter my work, whereas something I'm giving away on my website won't be read by anyone who doesn't visit the website for some reason.
But there are three reasons why I'm going to make The Mazarinette and the Musketeer available for free. One is that it was written on a whim based on a request from someone I know on Twitter, and I've always had a vague principle that if I create something as a gift for someone I don't also treat it as a commercial property, at least not primarily. Another reason is that I desperately need more mechanisms for convincing people they'd like to take the plunge and try reading my novels. Whether the bar is cost (and books from Bella aren't exactly cheap unless you catch one of their random sales), or whether the bar is length (yeah, ok, I write doorstops), or whether the bar is something else entirely, the bar is there. And the third reason is that there are a lot of online spaces where I feel uncomfortable doing too much promotion of commercial properties but where I would feel less uncomfortable letting people know I have a free story available.
At any rate, watch this space for more details!
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no subject
Date: 2016-01-20 11:34 am (UTC)"I like to take the opportunity to do a properly formatted e-book with cover art and all the bells and whistles"
How do you go about doing a "properly formatted e-book"? I formatted my book in PDF to the publisher's specs, and when I took it shareware I just kept the formatting, without adding so much as TOC links. Can you recommend some software?
no subject
Date: 2016-01-20 02:48 pm (UTC)I haven't used it for an entire book-length work yet, or for a non-fiction work, but I've done a couple of short stories just to get the hang of things. The Musketeer story will be interesting, given that I want to add a bunch of back matter. I also think they should come up with an "anthology or collection" template that will automatically take care of handling the previous publication and/or multi-author aspects of that sort of work. (I haven't gotten around to suggesting it, and for all I know, something of the sort may be in the works.)