A True Milestone (Patreon)
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I did it. After three months of waiting patiently it finally happened: I got my first rejection letter for my unpublished Sci-fi novel, Re-entry.
I don't say this with a trace of irony or self-pity. Rejection letters are an important part of the author's journey, and I'm happy to have started. Sadly, I have a friend when publishing contacts who reached out to submit it to some people he knew in the industry and their response was basically, 'there's no money to be made in Sci-fi/fantasy right now,' so I will count that as my second rejection.
I promised myself three before I tried to self-publish it, so I will do another draft over the month of July to fix the issues pointed out to me by my beta readers (you know who you are, thank you) and I will then submit it to the old school sci-fi publisher Baen in August, and plan for a self-publishing launch in November after my third rejection.
So, no matter what, I plan on publishing my first book sometime this year. Though pulling long running serials down and immediately publishing them on Amazon doesn't make a lot of sense to me (it would be a dick move), I do plan on putting more of my stuff up there eventually, and I will make a post about this one day to solicit your feedback. If it is possible, I plan on launching it with coupons to make it really cheap to my patrons and slightly less cheap but still very affordable to my readers on RR/SH.
Ideally, I would like to do something like $7 cover price, $5 preorder price, $3 public reader's discount, and $1 token price for Patreons for the ebook. I will do physical books too, but I doubt the math will let me discount them so steeply.
I have no idea if Amazon will let me do that yet though, so please don't hold me to that until I do more research. The point of launching books like that is to get positive ratings and sales from my core readership to encourage those that have never heard of me to give me a try. I will give you all another update on this when/if I receive my third rejection.
Also, I finished a couple more shorts, so for those that like horror, I give you:
Red Eye - The Telltale Heart at 40,000 feet
The Ones that Got away - The tale of a jilted mad scientist