Update on Me

Three unique viewers last month! Wow, I'm sure they were very disappointed.

So, I bought this website last August in a panic because...I didn't know what to do next! I quit my job to write a book because I felt burned out on the corporate grind and needed to do something for me. For three months, I sat down and just wrote, wrote, wrote, and...then I had a book! Pretty much what I'd been carrying in my head since 2019 and working on in fits and spurts since then. And then...I had no idea what to do! I'd joined a local writer's organization and never felt the need to use it, I'd been going pretty well under my own steam until that point and felt good about my work. In a panic, I bought a website to establish my online presence, then did nothing with it. I made a small web page at the end of the year to host the reviews I'd posted to my personal Facebook just to get something out there, and then went back to work on my novel with no consideration to doing anything else on here. I justified this to myself by saying I didn't want to step on any marketer's toes if I eventually got a publisher, and also I had no idea where to start. Newsletters? How do I sign someone up for that? I said I'd write short stories, but about what?

That said, I've been writing down my terrible ideas from high school, just the most anime-addled brain nonsense, and trying to make it feel like something. It's probably not going up anywhere ever, but it's much easier to write those characters than Tim. Too late to change it now (no it isn't).

So, what's going on with me? Well, I finished the third draft of my novel Harmony, named after who I see as the primary character, although in the final draft Tim kind of had more to do. It's fine! It's a series, we'll build more on Harmony later, and she gets the big final battle. And everyone told me she seemed more well-rounded anyway. I'm waiting on some feedback and might soon look through it again for anything else I can do. In the meantime, I've been putting work into something I've since been told I should have done first: figuring out how to market my book.

I make no excuses that my tastes run a bit niche. I read a lot of comics, watch a ton of anime. You may think, "Eric, that's not niche anymore," but think about it. Comic book movies are a lot different than the comics themselves, and just trust me, I'm not watching the big anime everyone loves. How do I sell that? How do I sell that as a novel?

Well, I could just self-publish, and we may get there. I already have an offer for someone to run my social media accounts, so that's nice to have in my back pocket if I need it. But why settle for just that if I could get something bigger, maybe? So I have to learn how to sell my idea.

I never wanted to be a salesman.

Summarizing my book is hard enough, but I've also been told you need modern, published comp books to, well, compare your work to. That's tough when you're a niche genre fan! But uh, that's what I'm doing now, reading other people's books to see where mine fits. Just finished one similar work, some friends have the hookup for me for some other books, just waiting for them to give me their copies. I'm formulating in my head how I want this to work. I keep thinking at some point, everything's going to click and make sense, I'll know just what to do. It's silly. At every step of the way, I've felt like I was flailing around and stumbled into an obvious answer. I'm just going to have to keep trying until things work out, or they don't. In the meantime, it might help to work on here a bit more, or get some pictures up. Eh, we'll see ERM