First of all, let me preface this by saying I’m absolutely
blown away by the reception Zeal of the Mind and Flesh has received. I uploaded
the book fully resigned to never seeing a single copy sold to anyone besides
myself. I honestly thought I’d just get bragging rights and a little “author”
flair on reddit. It’s been 12 days since I’ve released the book, and as of now
you guys have bought 202 copies and read 100,000 Kindle Unlimited pages! Even
more importantly, I just got my very first piece of fan email! That was so
encouraging to read.
Amazon takes two months to pay out royalties. Once I have
that I’ll be on the market for an editor to go over book 1 alongside and I’ll
be pushing out a revised edition. You won’t need to buy anything new, it will
just update your existing copy. I’ll let you know on this blog when that
happens. My writing has improved by leaps and bounds since book 1, so you
should look forward to smoother dialog, tighter prose, and more vibrant
characters regardless of what I do for editing book 2.
Now for what you’re probably reading this for. The big
question.
When do you get book 2?
That’s the question I always wanted to know when I read a
good first book. And authors were always evasive. Readers get the evasive “Soon™”,
or even worse “It’s done when it’s done.” I always hated those answers.
Q: When is book 2 coming out?
A: Soon™.
Yeah, sorry. I finally understand why authors do this to
readers. Writing a book is messy and confusing. Words pile up, sometimes you
cut them, sometimes you need to write more. Frankly, I can’t even estimate how
far into the production process I am at any given time.
Or at least, that’s what it was like for book 1. For book 2,
I’ve done a lot more prep work and plan to be a lot more organized throughout
the project. Hopefully, that should amount to a vastly condensed timeframe. My
current goal is to have a working second draft by October, with the goal of
releasing book 2 by the end of December. But that’s just my personal deadlines.
My goals involve me finishing up a lot earlier. If things continue as
smoothly as they are currently, I might be able to move the release to November
or sooner.
I think I’m going to be looking for beta readers once I have
something I'm ready to share, so stay tuned for that as well! I’ve seen some authors
start a patreon for this. Apparently, keeping your writing behind a paywall,
even a tiny one, vastly reduces the issues of people copying your work over to
a certain site known for illegally hosting stories that I won’t name here or
getting it detected by Amazon’s bots and getting flagged as being published elsewhere
and thus ineligible for Kindle Unlimited.
