So, here it is Thursday, and some of you readers may be like “Hey Zoe, what have you done for me lately?” Well it’s funny you should mention it, because I just sent another print book to Lulu. Due to space requirements, I had to pair up Wake Up With the Kimellians with Haunting Sins. While one is a dark sci-fi alien invasion story and the other is a mild horror story about a haunting at an adult web hosting company, both are about ordinary men caught up in extraordinary events. The print book is $7.95, but if you prefer ebooks, you could already get Haunting Sins at Smashwords as of last week. Now you can also get Wake Up With the Kimellians as an ebook too. And, since I had to update Haunting Sins for the print edition, I fixed the same mistakes in the ebook. If you’ve already bought the ebook at Smashwords, just erase your old copy and download the file again. You’ll have the update free of charge.
If you’re not keeping count, my Smashwords store now has 22 books. This includes multiple complete trilogies and a number of standalone stories that have all received positive reviews. Yet they’ve garnered very little attention from anyone else. I get the feeling that if Stephenie Meyer released this many books all at once, there’d be a huge media storm. I think Stephen King probably already does write as much as me, so him releasing 8 books in one month isn’t so newsworthy. (Heh) But, I did release 8 books in May, and I’ve raised my little promotion flags to say, “Hey, not many people could do this much on their own, you know.” It remains to be seen if anyone else notices and starts mentioning “Holy shit, did you know that crazy bitch released eight books in one month?”
With all that work in May, I’m now up to 10 print books on my Lulu storefront. So now I think it’s time to start pushing people who don’t like ebooks toward Lulu using the http://stores.lulu.com/zoe_w address. If they also don’t like Lulu or self-published writers, I’m still screwed. But at least I made print an option, and some folks claim that’s what they want. So far though, no one besides Becka has chipped in for anything in print. Which is not to say there were no sales. I sold a few copies of Dead End: Omnibus already, and a few copies of the new vampire stories. Poor Sandy Morrison still hasn’t moved any more units in print or ebook. If people don’t respond to her, I’ve got little hope for how they’ll respond to Peter’s book coming out later this summer. And then there’s this new book premise, which I’ll get to in a mo’.
But so far, my performance at Lulu is like my performance on Mobipocket: both are FUBAR. As I said in a previous post, this is totally because nobody knows I have a Lulu store. I never used it, never promoted it, never linked to it. So if people didn’t know about it, we know who to blame right?
That’s right: you lazy fucking readers. I’m kidding! Come back!
Okay, changing topics to other writing news,two nights ago, the muse hit me with a time travel story. The working title is Red, Redefined, and the premise is, Charles Verne, descendant of the famous writer and inventor, invents a time bridge and goes back in time to steal the real Little Red Riding Hood to be his child bride. I’d love to tell you it isn’t what you’re thinking, but yeah, it totally is. So for like a whole day, I put my muse off. I was using the excuse that we are in the middle of writing Bran’s book, but she insisted we can finish that later. (And anyway, the muse is still in a heated argument with Orrin about his pre-sex scene dialogue. Don’t ask.[even if you do ask, I’m not answering!])
And so yesterday at 6 AM, the muse shoved me out of a deep sleep and sent me to the computer. By 10 AM when I had to stop and start working on my paid editing job, I had 5,000 words. So Charles starts off the book by molesting Little Red Riding Hood. *Whimper.* And yet, a few hours later, I went back and wrote another chapter to get Charles attacked by a pack of rabid wolves, and then send both of my battered protagonists to the future by walking to the moon, and then walking to the year 2525. Why that year? Because that’s the year of Cleopatra 2525, which had the single worst opening them of all time. Ever. (Isn’t it fascinating to learn how these stories are cobbled together from a thousand bits of useless information? No? Dang.)
Ahem, after that writing frenzy, my word count for one day was 11,707. No shit. Not surprisingly, I collapsed from a fatigue attack and woke up at midnight. I hadn’t eaten all day, and the muse was already back on my tits. Well first, I got some glasses of milk and a few snacks down, and then I went back to be a slave at the grindstone. And I’m now demanding a rest break at 11:00 AM…to write a blog post. Why? Because I’m a fucking idiot, that’s why. And now the word count is 16,421. What I’ve learned so far is, Charles is a bumbling wanker, and Greta (Red’s real name) is just a little morbid. But to be fair, Charles told her that the pollution in his world could kill her if she was exposed to the open air suddenly, so now she’s worried that everything in the modern world can kill her. After the point when my protagonists discuss killing kisses, it’s turned into a running gag that I can’t decide if it’s idiotic or brilliant.
So, it looks like I know what the theme for 2011’s writing schedule is: “How many sexual deviants can the muse come up with before someone gets offended and calls for a book ban to grant me some form of marketing infamy to parry into profits?”
…I should probably find a way to simplify that theme…and also maybe not make it so blatant.
