Back to Sequels
If you are an author trying to determine whether you should traditionally or self-publish, I encourage you to be intentional about this choice and do your research before you make any decisions.
I do not regret my choice to self-publish. Full stop.
However, I do wish I had been a lot more mindful of what self-publishing entails before I made the choice. Because it’s not just writing the thing, uploading to KDP, and hitting Publish. There’s so much more to it, especially on the marketing side. And the issue I’m facing now is that I need to keep my newsletter going, but I am absolutely horrible with technology I’m not familiar with, and setting up the newsletter was bad enough, but now I actually have to write the newsletters and send them out and make sure my newest subscribers also get the older letters. It’s a fucking nightmare that absolutely fucking drains my soul.
Some people have suggested I move to Substack or Patreon, but I don’t want to charge my subscribers for the content I’m releasing. See, the magnet for my newsletter is that everyone who subscribes will get exclusive access to content not available in my novel: deleted scenes, more smut, letters written between characters, journal entries, scenes written from a completely different character’s perspective…These are all great ideas that I’ve been working on and I want them to reach people, but I also want to make sure that I’m not hopping around to different platforms because that’s one of the fastest ways to lose followers. Marketing requires consistency.
Another thing I’m considering is using the privacy settings on my blog posts to limit access to the exclusive content. If the mailing list doesn’t work for me (and it genuinely doesn’t for some people), why take content away from the people already following me? There are so many of you here that have been following me since I created this blog, and I feel like taking the newsletter things out of this space would be unfair to you all.
How would the limited visibility work? I’d create a post with the exclusive content in it, I’d limit the visibility so that it can only be accessed by those with the password, and then, those of you who not only subscribe to this blog but ALSO subscribe to my newsletter, would be sent the password, allowing you to access the bonus content. Which, ya know, I think is kind of fun. Like a minor scavenger hunt of sorts.
Anyway, I’m still trying to figure all of that out.
Now, for the good news: I am back to working on my sequel!
I’m sitting at a little over 40,000 words in this sequel, and my final goal for the book is to be around 110,000. That’s very close to what my debut novel was, and I think it’s a good length for these books. My current goal is to complete the rough draft by October 28th (ish), and to finish the first draft of revisions before the end of the year. I shouldn’t need as many drafts for this book as I did for A Kiss of Glass, so I might even meet my original goal of publishing this book next June instead of next December. Of course that might change once the school year gets going in full, but we will see.
Worst case scenario, the sequel is published in December of 2024. Which, honestly, wouldn’t be a bad thing anyway (yay, Christmas rush! Buy books for your loved ones!).
One thing I am loving this time around is how the main character of this book, Scarlet, is already actualizing on the page. I know part of this is due to the fact that she was the primary side character in the previous novel, so her character has already been developed to a certain extent. But there’s still a magic in learning her intricacies of personality, the things that make her conflicted, and how she handles situations she can’t control. I’ve been having to force myself to keep focused on this novel and not write the end scenes of the whole series because they’re going to be so emotional and I keep almost crying when I think about them. But I can’t actually get to them if I don’t finish the books I need to be written beforehand.
