Author Corner: 6-19-2022 (Patreon)

So this week I was thinking a lot about marketing, in my opinion the worst part of being a writer.

As a reader, before I became a writer, I was never one to comment or leave ratings and reviews. But, after becoming an author, I've realized how much they can make or break a work.

While I was on vacation, my cousin's husband was talking about wanting to try and fund a rather awesome board game he made on kickstarter, but his research told him the best way to do well on kickstarter was to get lots of his friends and family to give him a single dollar at the start to help get him on the front page and I could see direct parallels to getting a story featured on Amazon or any of the sites we all read on.

The sad fact of our modern world is that quality doesn't have that strong of a correlation with sales and that kind of sucks. Even if there is no review and ratings manipulation, stories with interesting starts and terrible middles and ends will generally do better than stories with slower starts that grow to be amazing.

It also got me thinking about something much more important, though, my own novel's cover. The saying is to not judge a book by its cover, but that is a saying because it has never been something most people do, and I'm wondering if I could have a better cover for Shadow of the Soul King.

Does anyone have any good ideas for what they think a good cover for the story could be? If I get some good ideas, I could then figure out how to get an artist to make them. And, even with the beautiful tree finally being featured in the story, I am finding the idea of a new cover exciting. I think it would especially be awesome to make a shirt for myself I could wear around, and maybe possibly release for sale in the future as well.

Thanks for reading everyone,

Thirteen Life Legion

P.S. Chapter 152 marks the end of a book. (What book I don't yet know. I haven't figured out how to split up the proceeding chapters.) And I have one more chapter of Shadow of the Soul King yet to post today, but I need to leave in a few minutes so I won't be able to edit it until I get back home.