My off months are always a little surreal, and this one has been even more so than normal. There is always something that I can be doing, everything from laying out a new print book to trying to arrange an advertising promo to cleaning up various bits and bobs on my blog that aren’t quite how I would like them to be.
It’s always good stuff, stuff that wouldn’t hurt to have done, but I’m not always sure how much value those kinds of tasks really bring to the table. I read an article a while ago that indicated one thing that incredibly successful people do really well is pick and choose between the things that produce the highest value. To put it another way, really successful people tend to be really good at saying no to most of the opportunities that come along—they only say yes to the most important opportunities and tasks.
We’ve had to do some of that this month. I haven’t done any work on print versions of any of my books in April. Instead that time has been largely shifted around to free up more of Katie’s time so that she could work on rebranding all of the Reflections and Dark Reflections books with new covers.
If you’ve been following my blog and reading my recent posts you’ve already seen the new covers. If you haven’t, then I encourage you to go back and take a look at our rebranded covers. We were given the new cover for Bound, but in the last few weeks Katie has finished new covers for Broken, Torn, Riven, Numb, Trapped, The Greater Darkness, A Darkness Mirrored, Driven, Bound, and most recently Bitten and Hunted.
Katie has been incredible and I’m very grateful to have a wife that is willing to jump in and work so hard to help make this dream come true!
In March I finished up the rough draft of Dark Reflections #4, and since then I’ve completed two editing passes (my own editing pass and then an editing pass with Katie) on Lost (Isaac’s Reflections book). Lost is now with RJ, which means that I’ll be running through her finds towards the end of May or beginning of June.
Dark Reflections #3 came back from RJ at the beginning of April and I was able to get her edits in and the book off to Amy quickly enough that Amy was able to get edits back to me earlier this week. Those edits are now in and Dark Reflections #3 is off to Jenine and Janelle. Knowing how fast the two of them read, it’s entirely possible that they’ll have their comments back to me soon enough that Dark Reflections #3 will be able to go out to the rest of my advance readers before I get buried in my next writing project at the start of May.
Driven has been loaded up for pre-order at Kobo, Smashwords, and iBooks already, which I’m pretty sure is a record for me. That’s nice because it means that I won’t have to take time off from writing in the middle May to work on formatting and sales copy. It also means that there is plenty of time for people to pre-order Driven, hopefully pushing it higher up the sales charts than any of my other releases so far.
I mentioned that Katie finished up the cover for Bitten without actually indicating what Bitten is. I seem to lose some readers between Splintered and Forsaken, so I decided nearly two months ago that I wanted to try and put together a bundle of most of the early Reflections books so that my readers would be able to pick up Splintered, Intrusion, Numb, Trapped, Forsaken and Scent of Tears all in one go.
Along the way I decided to throw in a copy of Longing as a bonus. It’s a non-Reflections short story that I’m particularly proud of, and that brings the total up to 7 stories (3 novels and 4 short stories) all for the price of $9.99—that’s 37% off of the normal price, and it means that as of right now, when you add in the books I give away for free or for joining my mailing list, I’m letting new readers pick up more than half a million words of Reflections fiction for less than ten bucks.
Half a million words is more than 30 hours of entertainment for the average reader and it’s all for less than what you’d pay to buy a new DVD. I know that might not be incredibly exciting to someone who has already purchased all of the books in the bundle separately, but I’ve got something in the works that will take care of many of you. In the meantime, I hope that you’ll keep the Bitten Story Bundle in mind when you run across someone who you think might enjoy the Reflections books.
Beyond that, I’ve spent a large chunk of time this month uploading the new covers up to the retailers, trying to clarify the series order in the sales copy, and pointing people who have finished Broken and Torn in the direction of Bitten.
In that same vein, I’ve created a Reflections Reading Order Diagram that I hope will help everyone understand how the various books in the Reflections/Dark Reflections Universe all fit together.
As always, thank you for everything you do to help spread the word about my books. Every new reader makes a difference!
Dean