March Status Update

Release date for the next Reflections novel:

I'm incredibly happy to be able to announce a release date and an official name for the next Reflections novel, the one that had been code named 'TWB' up until now. Riven will go live July first and will continue Alec and Adri's story, taking it in directions that were hinted at in Forsaken along with introducing some exciting new developments!

Riven will have a retail price of $4.99 (or the local currency equivalent), but in an effort to reward all of my faithful fans, I'll be setting the price to $3.99 for the first week it is out. That means that you can have Riven downloaded to your electronic device of choice in time for the 4^th of July (for those here in the States) and you'll pay the same amount for it that you paid for Trapped despite the fact that Riven is ~20% longer.

In all honesty, the discounted price allows me to kill a few birds with one stone. I've covered my reasoning in my blog post entitled "The Business Side of Things". A lot of you won't care about anything in that particular post, but for those who someday want to succeed as an indie writer, or even just those of you who are interested in business, there are some worthwhile bits in that post.

Before you all run off to read "The Business Side of Things", please remember that nothing I'm saying in that post is meant to detract at all from the fact that I really am trying to give back in a small way at least to all of you fans that have done so much to help spread the word about my writing.

Dean's mailing list:

You're going to sense a recurring theme here, but I've been doing a lot of thinking over the last five or six months about just exactly how I can best move forward with the business side of my writing career. Those of you who read the business post I'm referencing above will see how my mailing list ties into all of that, but for those who don't care to read that particular post, I just want to let you know that I've made some changes to my mailing list.

I'm still committed to not spamming my mailing list subscribers with a bunch of information that they don't care about, but now when you sign up for my mailing list you'll get a Smashwords Coupon code that will allow you to download a free copy of both Thawed Fortunes and Torn in just about every electronic format known to mankind.

This means now that on most of the major retailers that you can get the first two books in each of my series for free, which means that I'm giving away almost $20 in free novels to anyone that has even the slightest inclination to try out my stuff. Obviously, my hope is that this will draw people into trying out both Broken and Frozen Prospects, and then going on to read Torn and Thawed Fortunes before ultimately buying the rest of the books in each series.

I'd love for any of you who haven't already signed up for my mailing list to go ahead and do so now and for everyone to help spread the word. More than anything else, my mailing list gives me a way to let my readers know when a new book goes live.

Status update:

Just in case any of you are curious, I thought I'd take a minute and let you know what I've been working on. The beginning of December was mostly about getting final edits and formatting done for Forsaken and Brittle Bonds. The middle and end of December was spent writing Riven, which I finished up on the first of January. I then spent most of the rest of January writing Guadel #4, which was the hardest book I've written yet.

It's hard to get into chapter and verse about why this particular book was so difficult to write without getting into spoilers, but essentially it boiled down to the fact that I made some implications about Va'del's character in I'rone, and I wasn't quite sure how I was going to make that happen. It wasn't until I was more than halfway through writing my rough draft that I really knew how I was going to get where I wanted to be for the closing scenes of this book. It will be interesting to see what my advance readers, and then ultimately all of you, think about this fourth book, but having made it through all of the blood, sweat and tears, I think it's one of my strongest pieces of work yet.

February has been spent doing a first past editing run of Riven (once Katie had finished reading it) and then in progressing the various trade paperback editions of my work that have been giving me fits for months now (more on that below).

Paperback versions of Dean's work now available:

As of right now, Frozen Prospects and Thawed Fortunes are both available on Amazon as trade paperbacks.

Links:

Frozen Prospects

Thawed Fortunes

Brittle Bonds has been laid out and I'm currently going through my quality control process to make sure that the final product is up to snuff.  I've got Splintered about 80% of the way through the layout steps and Forsaken is about 95% through layout. On both of those, revised print quality covers are the next big step before they go into quality control.

Broken and Torn (the consolidated novel) has a finalized cover (which I'll be posting a picture of in the next little while) and now is just waiting on a final editing pass before I order proofs and start my quality control process.

Any interest in an interview series?

There is a storyline in the 4th Guadel book that I was originally planning on incorporating into the book, but which I ultimately ended up leaving out because I couldn't get it to quite come together like it needed to.

As I was thinking about that a few days after I finished the rough draft, I decided that maybe the best way to get some of those tidbits of information out would be to do an interview series where some of my readers got a chance to ask questions, both before a book came out and then again after the book came out.

What do you all think? A good idea? A waste of everyone's time? If someone is interested in coming up with some questions shoot me an e-mail and we can talk it through.

Forum Mods

One of the ideas that continues to bounce around the back of my head is that of doing a forum for my readers. The biggest benefit would be that it would provide a single place for fans of either series to get together and talk about what they loved in each book.

Obviously the big downside would be that getting a forum up and running would be a big undertaking given that I don't have any experience in that kind of thing and then it would be an ongoing demand on my time to moderate it.

Given that the writing is still a ways from paying all of the bills, I have to continue to focus my time and efforts on getting more books written, but I'm still interested in seeing if I can find a way to see this happen.

If any of you have experience setting up and/or running a forum I'd love to hear from you. It's possible that we can work something out where I can make it worth your while to help me get the forum up…