I have changed my mind about the Caina book

You might recall that back in March, I finished “Nightfighter”, a book about Caina Amalas’s early adventures, and contemplated e-publishing it, but ultimately decided against it.

In the subsequent two months, I have changed my mind. Why? These are my reasons:

-Realistically, “Nightfighter” has only a 1 in a 1000 chance of attracting an agent’s attention.

-Even with an agent’s backing, “Nightfighter” has only a 1 in a 1000 chance of obtaining a book contract.

-Even with a book contract, “Nightfighter” would have to wait 1 to 2 years before it saw print.

-Even with a book contract, “Nightfighter” still might get delayed or canceled, depending on economic conditions.

-Even if the book survives all these obstacles (and the others I haven’t mentioned) and reaches shelves, it could still tank. And that would kill the Caina series right there and then. One and done is good for marriages, but not so much for writers.

-If I e-publish the book and it doesn’t sell well the first week or month – that doesn’t matter. It’s fun to watch print-published writers do their first ebook, because they tend to freak about the first week sales like it’ll go out of print if it doesn’t do well (and no doubt hit the Refresh button on their sales reports like crack-crazed lab rats in a Skinner box). The point of ebooks, I think, isn’t to do well the first month – it’s to do gradually better over time. And I know of what I speak. The first month I started writing about technology on Help Desk Screeds (June of 2008), it got about 900 hits. In April of 2011, the site got 93,000 hits. See what I mean about gradually doing better over time?

So, I thought over all of this, and concluded that by trying to get “Nightfighter” published conventionally, I was waiting for the Magic Publication Fairy to solve all my problems.

But here’s the problem – there’s no such thing as Magic Fairies, Publication or otherwise. You see someone who has say, a good career, or a working small business, or a reasonably happy marriage, and you assume they won the lottery or got lucky or made a pact with Satan. And there’s an element of luck involved in everything. But what people don’t see is the work – the endless, endless work – that goes into making these successes.

Hard work only creates the illusion of Magic Fairies.

And the thing of it is, I already wrote three Caina books before I’d even heard of the Kindle or the Nook or the iPad (three Caina books before the iPad even existed, after all). I could have the first two ready by the end of the year. The third would take some rewriting (due to Continuity Drift), but not all that much.

So, in the end, I asked myself – do I want to put these books out there and start attempting to build an audience now, or wait for my 1 in a 1000 chance of print publication first?

Time to go all in, friends and neighbors. So watch this space for “Nightfighter” to appear sometime in June.

-JM