This post was supposed to have been uploaded on June 4, but though I wrote it, edited it, and started the new post, somewhere along the way I failed to take a critical step, and it never appeared. I’ve edited it slightly to be more in tune with the late upload.

The promotion for Slaves of War started on May 2, 2023 and ran through May 5. When I checked on the results on May 27, I found that 2,487 people had visited my Amazon page, and 1,580 orders had been processed, including the free books offered during the promotion. It’s hard to get precise numbers, but by dividing my estimated royalties by the actual price of the books, I may have sold six copies.

If I were to try doing this again, it wouldn’t take so long to learn how, but the promotion service refuses submissions which have too many errors or typos. Though I edit my work quite thoroughly (I have read professionally edited books published by standard publishers which have typos and homonym errors), I still would need to use text to speech to find anything I had missed, and that could take a week or two, or a lot more, if it’s something as long as Dead Hand (160,000 words, 350 pages).

As of June 3, no books were actually sold, and none since then.

I have continued working on The Empty House, which I posted about previously, a Lovecraftian cosmic gothic horror as if written by Shirley Jackson. It consists of sixty seven semi-independent stories, each climaxing with a moment of horror only implied, or the realization of some equally horrific truth. 

Some of the stories which I had already worked on were in first draft form, others in rough draft, some were well-developed sketches, others were brief sketches, some were preliminary text, many were just two or three lines of what the story would be about. Some had no story lines, and some did not even have titles. But they were on my story list for reasons which were clear to me in 2015. I had to trust myself.

I started at the beginning, taking each story to the next level, instead of trying to do a full final draft all at once of each one. The pause until I get back to those stories will let me see them fresh, and I’ll understand more about what needs to be developed or tightened or even changed. I did two good if brief sketches, a day or so ago, when the story idea lines told me only a person and a place. Doing those sketches was pretty good for starting from almost nothing. I have done full roughs, extended sketches, and brief sketches some of those stories for which I had no information. It’s going well, but will still take some time.