Living the Dream.

by Louis Bertrand Shalako

c2010

All Rights Reserved


The best thing I could do for myself now is to publish my third novel and just quit for a while. But these books now give me a product, and I can learn how to market them and promote myself.

I can hold onto 'Time-storm,' and 'Shape-shifters,' and 'Horse-catcher' for a while and maybe market conditions will improve. Honestly, to scrape up five or ten bucks to make a submission of the first three chapters is not beyond my abiliities. As for publishing houses that demand agented submissions, or full-manuscript subs, I wasn't subbing to them before. So nothing has changed.

The thing to do is to take a week off, and that still leaves me a week to go through 'The Case of the Curious Killers' a couple more times. As for the cover, maybe I could make the text slightly larger, and use a blue just a little lighter in shade.

I am looking forward to getting back to writing short stories. After editing three books, for a total of about 380,000 words, re-writing numerous times, to polish a short story of five or six thousand words should not be a problem. When submitting, I will be sure to put a URL to my site in there and talk up the books a little.

The micropublishing business model originally visualized small numbers of paperbacks, printed locally. Yet with 'createspace,' I can use POD (print on demand,)for about $300 US (per title.) This way if someone really wants one, they can have it in a paper and ink edition. Before I do that, I want to see some traffic and some sales, otherwise at $11.99 I would have to sell about twenty-five books just to make the fee back. The customer would also have shipping charges and stuff like that on their bill.

In the meantime, I'm having a hell of a lot of fun.

It really is a unique kind of wish-fulfillment. The key thing is not to be too easily satisfied, and to continue to improve the skills and the product.