Beasts and Dragons
And a discussion about the Shadow Serials.
Yes, it’s about those Titles.
Speculations of a Dark Nature, vol III, Beasts and Dragons, is going on the Free list at Smashwords for a few days (resets to normal price on Sunday [Australian time]), so get in while you can. It’s a collection of short stories (yes, some may very well become novel pieces at a later date – in discussion with musae at this very moment) about – you guessed it – beasts and dragons.
The new novel, Unknown Sins, is in pre-order release state, so you can order it now and get it on the day of release. Another pre-release is The Third Moment, so watch for that about Christmas.
And the serial: The Journey of Shadow – A week by week serial? The final version of that story is now:
The Narrung Sagas Book I – The Journey of Shadow (which is not free, at least not until Book II A Dragon Dream is released [March 2017?]).
The serial will be unpublished (oh, how I hate that word for some reason – can’t imagine why) on 1 December 2016 [once again, Australian date and time].
Why? It’s that ‘mask’ issue. I wanted to write under three of my names [oh, you want to know what they are: Cage Dunn, the darker side of life stories; CS Dunn, the younger world stories for YA and similar; and Cas Dunn, the softer and more romantic side of me], but it was not to be. If I want to use all my names (and these are some of me, but not all of me) I have to create a unique ‘user’ on each of the epublishing sites, OR, put myself up as a publisher. It looks and sounds easy to create a publisher profile, but when I looked into it, in a careful way, I found it a bit more scary than I want to deal with.
Register the name (in every country? or just the countries where I put the items up for sale? eeeeekkk!! scary – how do I know? I’m not the distributor) after ensuring the name doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world (very important, and it should be obvious why it is important). Next, and only after that little bit of work, do discovery on all the tax laws associated with being a non-individual entity within the countries (can I swear here?). This is the point where I stop.
I am happy to pay tax on money I earn. I’d like that process to be as simple as possible. However, if I am three entities within a holding entity, it becomes a nightmare just to do the secondary research, let alone the paperwork. I’d rather write.
So I leave it, until at some later stage, where I become brave enough (or stupid or desperate or crazy enough) to reconsider my position. First, of course, I might have to complete at least seven titles for each of those names – because in the eworld that drowns in titles, one name doesn’t get noticed until it has a good list of ebook titles attached to it. At least seven.
So, I continue to write, in all the hats and genres, and stick them all under the one mask, until . . . well, until I decide one way or another.
And now that I’ve explained the ‘why’ for un-publishing the serial – here’s the next kick: if I want to update the free serial with the ‘better edited’ versions, I have to change the name of the author, inside and out – frontmatter and cover! How many versions of the cover are there? 24, because it was serialised. How good am I with covers? Crap – it takes a whole day to do each one – and I don’t have the original ‘blanks’ I used to start the process!? Add a week or so. Crap!
So, see prev para – I continue to write (and dream of selling enough stories to get an assistant to do . . .) Big, deep, loud sigh!
