Tradition would have indicated that I owed you all a status update blog post at the end of June. I’d like to blame the failure there on the fact that June ended up having a lot of family commitments (it did), but the truth is that I wrote an update post and just couldn’t bring myself to post it. I’ve revisited that post (several times) and am finally ready to publish it.

I’ll start with the easy stuff. May was a tough writing month. I finished up Marked (Alec and Adri Reflections), but it was a tricky project. I had to juggle the new timeline against what I already wrote in both Driven and Lost, and make sure that it wouldn’t be too restrictive with regards to where I’m still hoping to go with the series. Now that Marked is done, I’ve decided to pull its release date forward into December so that you can all read it between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. As always, my release schedule can be found here.

Ambushed (Dark Reflections #3) is set to go live on August 8^th. Lost (Isaac’s Reflections Book) has been through both rounds of editing and is out to my advance readers. All it really needs now is a cover and the sales copy/blurb. Once that is all finished up it will be ready to go live on Oct 10^th.

Shattered (Dark Reflections #4) has been through both rounds of editing and is out to my advance readers.

So, all of the usual stuff is going along swimmingly. I’m still on track to get 6 books written and 7 books released in 2014. We are basically done with the rebranding exercise for the Reflections/Dark Reflections books and hope to start redoing the covers on the print books sometime between now and the end of the year (so if you want to own one of the few copies in existence of the trade paperbacks with the old cover you’ll want to get them ordered sometime in the next month or two. I’m not saying that they’ll be collectibles worth tens of thousands of dollars someday, but there have been very few of them purchased so far, so unless things change drastically soon you’ll have a fairly unique piece of history.)

Now on to the problem. Making the jump to writing full-time was a real leap of faith for both Katie (my wife) and I. Both of us were excited about it, but we both also had some serious reservations. What we agreed was that we would give writing a certain amount of time and see what happened.

As I’ve reviewed our progress so far and the results from the last several book releases (Bound, Hunted, and Driven), it has become apparent to me that continuing to just write Reflections and Dark Reflections books would result in me being forced to go back to an accounting job.

I’ve tried a number of initiatives over the last few months to try and shore up the popularity of the Reflections Universe, but starting in July I felt like I had no choice but to begin another series in the hopes that it will attract more readers and provide the additional revenues that I need if I’m going to be able to continue writing full-time.

As things stand right now, July was spent writing the first book of a new series (which will be released in Apr 2015), and I’m planning on spending September and November continuing that new series (with release dates in Jun and Aug 2015 respectively). That means unless something changes, the earliest I would be getting back to writing the Reflections books would be in January of 2015 with a tentative release date of the Jan 2015 book being October of 2015.

(Incidentally, this new series is shaping up very nicely so far. It’s another Young Adult Paranormal Romance series, but less epic in scope than Reflections/Dark Reflections. I hope to have a bit more to say about these books once Katie has had a chance to read them, but I really think it’s going to be something that fans of Broken will really love.)

I want to be very clear that I’m not abandoning the Reflections/Dark Reflections Universe. I’m deeply invested in the Reflections books, and very much want to show you what’s going to happen next. Ambushed just went live in August, Lost will go live in October, Shattered will go live in December, and then with a bit of luck and a lot of hard work,  Marked will also go live in December. I will continue to write additional Reflections/Dark Reflections books as I’m able to fit them in my schedule. If nothing else changes, then I expect to follow up January’s book with one or two additional Reflections/Dark Reflections books per year as long as I’m able to continue to write full-time.

If it turns out that we are forced back into working in accounting, then I’ll continue to write and finish up each of the series that I’ve started, but realistically the pace of releases under that scenario are probably going to be about 1 book every 18 months, and possibly even worse than that at the beginning as I’m trying to get up to speed at a new job.

So why am I writing this blog post given the possibility that it will be poorly received?

More than anything else, I didn’t want it to be a surprise to anyone if I end up having to put writing on the back burner sometime in early or mid-2015. I know that there is a train of thought that says you should appear to be massively successful regardless of the actual truth of the matter, but that just felt too disingenuous to me. I couldn’t stomach the thought of posting an optimistic post about the release of Shattered in December and then posting the news that I was going back to working in accounting in March or April.

My readers deserve better than that.

Additionally, I know that I’ve got some very enthusiastic fans who have told me that they want me to succeed and that they are willing to go out of their way to try and make that happen. I’ve talked to some of them, and the consensus was that they wanted this blog post written so that they could know that now was the time for them to join together and act if they wanted me to get back to writing Reflections and Dark Reflections books now rather than in 6 months.

The Reflections Face Book page is the result of some of those dedicated fans, the teasers that we’ve started doing for Ambushed and the rest of the books are the result of another such fan.

If you’re one of those fans, here’s a list of some of the things you could do to try and boost sales of the Reflections Series to the point where I can go back to them sooner rather than later:

1. Make the release of all of the Reflections books between now and January major events. If large numbers of books are purchased within a few days of the release date, then the new book is catapulted up onto the bestseller charts and more people will see it and decide to go pick up Broken, Torn, The Greater Darkness, or Bound. (Incidentally, I’ve decided to release Lost at a price of $2.99 for the first week rather than $3.99 like I’ve been doing in the past. Hopefully that helps with the visibility spike when Lost releases. If so, I’d be inclined to continue to release books at an initial price of $2.99 rather than $3.99.)
2. Leave reviews of Broken, Bound and The Greater Darkness. Reviews of the rest of the books in the series help too, but those three are the primary entry points into the Reflections Universe. The more reviews—especially positive reviews—there are of those two books, the more likely new readers are to pick them up. Also, some advertising channels require certain numbers of reviews on a book before they’ll consider featuring it.
3. Like, pin, or otherwise share the visual teasers that Katie and Mei have started putting together—having one or more of those go viral could easily bring in enough new readers to allow me to go back to writing new Reflections books.
4. If there are one or more of the Reflections/Dark Reflections books that you haven’t tried, give them a try. You can read 10% of the book most places as a sample and you can read 20% without buying if you go to Smashwords.com. Even if the book doesn’t initially sound like something you’re interested in, my recent releases are some of my best writing yet. Driven, Bound and Hunted are all getting rave reviews from my advance readers as well as Merissa over at http://archaeolibrarianologist.blogspot.com/.
5. If you’ve read all of the Reflections/Dark Reflections books, and know someone who’s lost interest partway through the series help get them through whatever book they struggled with and enjoying the amazing, shape shifter & vampire goodness in the rest of the series.
6. Try and bring one new person into the series and shepherd them through everything that’s been released so far. One of my amazing advance readers never would have picked up the series if another fan hadn’t invited her to read Broken and then proceeded to loan her all of the books that followed (she eventually started buying the books because she didn’t want to have to wait for the friend to finish them first). She would have stopped reading at The Greater Darkness if that same friend hadn’t talked her through the book—it’s still not her favorite book in the series, but she absolutely loves the context The Greater Darkness created for A Darkness Mirrored and Driven.
7. Email your favorite indie author with a clean YA Paranormal Romance or YA Urban Fantasy and tell them that your other favorite author Dean Murray is trying to put together a promotional bundle and you think they should get ahold of me and ask to join.

This obviously isn’t a comprehensive list—and I don’t expect anyone to do any of the above items. I’m happy to continue to stand on my own feet—and continue launching new series until I find one that pushes us over the top—but I’ve taken the Reflections Universe as far as I can at a book every other month.

I’m going to need your help if I’m going to get back to writing Reflections Universe books before January and go back to releasing more than just one or two per year.

Thanks,

Dean

P.S. I hope you will all take this post in the spirit it was intended–I just felt like you all deserved an explanation for the changes to my production schedule. Stay tuned here over the next week or two for some more initiatives that I hope will let me switch back to writing the Reflections books sooner than I’m currently planning.