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Kingdoms & Curses Author Blog

Much Anticipated Update

Several months have passed, but not without detours, reprieves, and much thought.

In the last few weeks, I've ramped up my knack for working on the book and it's marketing, just in time for my computer's hard drive to die; Ah, delays.  No material has been lost, thank goodness, not even incoherent notes taken on Notepad. The writing has passed Editor Gina's approval, and soon I'll send it off to my spelling mistakes and grammar editor to get a final polishing.

 

In terms of the novel's development, I may have added another story, one that absolutely did not want to be left behind. I'm uncertain whether I want to include it in the actual book, or more as an extra feature on the website, which means I don't have to polish it as much. 

Name Lift

One issue I've wrestled with the entire existence of the book, since the beginning, is it's name, Cursed Kingdoms. It's a wonderful name, full of "K" sounds and vagueness, however so wonderful was the name that another author published a whole, three-book series under that same name just a few years ago.  I've thought of adding beginnings, "Chronicles of the Cursed Kingdoms" and endings "Tales of blah blah blah", but ultimately, if I'm going to be marketing a book to an audience who will only remember so much from a commercial, I don't want to be losing half the revenue to an author of another book, who may have a great book, but not my book, non-the-less.

So, I've changed the name, finally, to something just as fitting and satisfying.  "Kingdoms and Curses"!  Ha, take that video game quest, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, or Emily, author of The Cursed Kingdoms Series. But now, I must buy domain names, change names on Facebook and Twitter accounts to match the NEW name.  Just a little work, but work, none-the-less.

Marketing

Additionally, I've updated the website and chosen a new template. I've found a nice graphic on iStockPhotos that was actually cheap (as iStockPhotos has gotten ridiculously expensive these days.)  I'm not sure if I will make it the cover, but it sure looks nice.

I also decided to market the book as a serious piece.  For the last several months, I struggled with marketing it as a Comedy or Serious.  The problem I had was that the majority of the stories were serious, however, the very long story, which took up half the novel pages, was a comedy. The crux of my decision rested on this idea: if I market the book as a comedy, and the reader reads several pages without laughing, the reader would feel more betrayed than if the book was marketed as serious and ended up laughing at one of the stories. Huzzah. Serious it is then.

Next Steps

I'm going to reread that piece I just wrote and see if it makes the grade. Once I make that decision, I'm sending the entire work off to a grammar and spelling editor to get the final copy before laying it out.  I'm also going to be contacting my artist, Diana Hartman, for commissioning drawings for the book interior.

On the marketing front, I'm going to look into crowd sourcing to fund the publishing and marketing of my book. BUT before I launch anything, I have to change the name everywhere, of course.

PS

I will be posting the much-anticipated conclusion to the "Five Self-Publishing Obstacles", written up months ago, however, as a mother, I really only have so much time, and these other steps are currently more important.

Until next time, adieu.

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