Steven E. Wedel's Blog, page 5

February Report Card

I set pretty lofty goals for February, and I failed miserably. There were a couple of weeks with a nasty cold and all I wanted to do was sleep. Most recently, the depression crept back in, and I’m trying to get receipts collected for 2022 taxes. I’m not a good recordkeeper and I hate tax season.

Let’s just lay them out and I’ll comment on them.

Finish copyediting The War Lord and make a decent cover, then publish it. This is the first novella in my Tarod the Nine-Fingered sword-and-sorcery...

Forever Young Promo

My post-apocalyptic young adult novel Afterlife is part of a cool new promo at BookFunnel.

This is the story of Cody Treat, an Oklahoma teenager who is able to see the millions of ghosts trapped in this plane after an apocalyptic meteor event. He has to join forces with others to attempt to open a portal for the ghosts before they are harvested by an evil force from the East.

The promo is called Forever Young and features my book and several other young adult titles. You can click the ba...

Second Chance Romance

One of the cool things about joining BookFunnel is the opportunity to participate in big promotional events with other others in the same genre. With the release of Dust in the Wind earlier this month, I got to sign this contemporary romance up for the Second Chance Romance promo.

You should check it out!

Remember, you’re looking for the book by Adri Amanti.

February Goals

January was a month of writing. First Born, begun on November 1, had to be finished, and then Dust in the Wind had to be written (I’d only written the first chapter beforehand). February will be a month of editing.

One thing I forgot to mention in my last post was the OWFI contest. A couple of months ago I got talked into being a contest judge again. Then my old friend Vickey came at me in the middle of January urging me to enter the contest. I haven’t been a member of any writing organizatio...

January Report Card

The first month in the year I hope to go full-time as an author has passed. It was not the launch I was hoping for. Despite my preparation, things just didn’t pop the way I’d hoped.

You’ll remember a couple of weeks ago I posted a list of things I wanted to accomplish in January. Let’s see how I did…

Subscribe to and set up a BookFunnel account and upload some content, then join at least one promotion event.

Success! I paid the $100 for BookFunnel and have been offering the first chapte...

January Goals

I’m writing this on January 18, so it might be cheating. Mostly it’s procrastinating. One thing I’ve learned on this quest to become a full-time author is that the non-writing stuff is tedious and takes a ton of time. Nonetheless, here are the goals for this month.

Subscribe to and set up a BookFunnel account and upload some content, then join at least one promotion event.Establish a Patreon with a few layers of support.Set up my Amazon Ads dashboard and run at least one ad for a...

2022 Books in Review

I set my 2022 reading goal to the usual 50 books, but fell well short. I might have forgotten to record some, but if so, not many. The total books read on record is only 25.

The end of the year was dominated by books about marketing novels. This is where I think I lost some titles I read. But, some of the ones I remembered to list on GoodReads include How to Make a Living with Your Writing: Turn Your Words into Multiple Streams Of Income and Successful Self-Publishing: How to self-publish and...

NaNoWriMo2022 Completed

About 20 minutes ago I reached the end of chapter 29 on a novel I’m not calling First Born. That put me at 50,258 words, which made me a winner of NaNoWriMo for the third straight year.

It’s been an interesting and enlightening month of writing and reading and listening to podcasts about marketing. When Shara came out, I insisted it was a horror novel despite the fact the protagonist was the werewolf. After Ulrik was released the first time, the whole “urban fantasy” genre was taking off ...

NaNoWriMo2022

Last November 17, I crossed the 50,000-word mark on a literary book I call Yes or No and won NaNoWriMo for the second year, giving me a perfect 2-of-2 record. (I wrote Mother for NaNoWrimo2020.) Tonight I reached 26,647 words. There are a few reasons for the slower progress.

The biggest one is the day job. I was still teaching high school the last two years and we were reading novels with the audiobooks. Students read (or slept) and I wrote. Now, teaching middle school, every moment is devote...

I miss the SASE

I began submitting manuscripts in the mid-1980s. It was all horror. Mostly short stories; novel submissions didn’t begin until the early 1990s. I think. But it’s been a while, so maybe I was sending out The Prometheus Syndrome in the late ’80s. Anyway …

I’d put the story (or sample chapters) into the big tan envelope with my query letter telling the editor I didn’t have any publishing credits, but hopefully you’ll be my first. Be gentle. Then off I’d go to the big post office in Enid, Oklaho...