My New Book

Before I begin this post in earnest, here's a link to the Smashwords page for the book: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/177165

It's set five hundred years in the future, on a colonised planet where a war early in the colony's history has resulted in the loss of most technical knowledge. That's all I'm going to say about it here; for more check out the link above. Download the free sample. Then buy the book - it's a snip at $2.99 - and write a review. I'd love to know what you think.

Now, the tale. At the start of May I sent my manuscript of Pavonis, my first full-length book, out to several UK literary agents, then settled down to wait for responses.

Most of them replied pretty quickly - with rejections, unfortunately, but I didn't let that get me down; there was only one that still hadn't answered after eight weeks (the usual period most of the agents say to allow before following up). That eight week wait was up last week so accordingly I sent an email to that last straggler and gave them 24 hours to get back to me; they didn't, so I decided it was time for Plan B.

The only thing was that I hadn't really decided until the last minute what Plan B was actually going to be.

I had several options. I could try to find an agent in the US, but to be honest from what I've seen and been told about the US publishing industry I didn't like that idea much. Another option was to try to rewrite the book, or at least parts of it, to try to make it more agent-friendly, but since I'd had no feedback from any of those agents telling me why they'd rejected the manuscript there was no way to know what changes I'd have to make.

So I settled on the option that in hindsight I should have considered almost a year ago, when I submitted the manuscript to the very first agent (the one that I mentioned in the May 4 post - see below). I decided to self-publish Pavonis as an eBook on Smashwords.

So I reformatted the 'script in line with the guidelines (they publish several books specifically to help their authors, all available as free downloads), created an account, and published.

I've done all I can to make sure Pavonis goes to Smashwords' premium channels - that way it'll be made available through Apple, Barnes & Noble and other major booksellers. It has to go through a review process before that happens, though, to make sure it fits those companies' rules regarding formatting, pricing and some other things. To be honest I'm not certain that it'll pass that review first time. Amongst other things I write using OpenOffice, but Smashwords requires submissions as Microsoft Word documents; OO can save in Word format but I've never been convinced that it does it 100% correctly, so until I actually see the review results I'm in a fingernail-nibbling hold.

While that's going on I'm thinking about the next writing project.

I have another book that I've been working on, which would actually be three stories involving the same characters and settings; the storyboard for the first story is complete and I have some scenes written.

On the other hand, I wrote Pavonis intending to follow it up with a sequel at some point, and I quite like the idea of starting that sequel sooner rather than later.

And then I have a third option, which at this moment is no more than some vague ideas about a fictional place and some characters and an 'atmosphere' that I'd like to create.

So, which way to go? All three ideas have their merits and I really can't decide for sure which one I want to start on. For now, I think I'll continue biting nails and see what happens with Pavonis.