Just a reminder for those who missed it (due to the information being tacked onto the end of my last long post) because it was released on November 29/30, Acceleration DOES qualify for the Members Choice awards at the GoodReads M/M Romance group. You can read about it down at the bottom of this post. I would really love to see my cover artists’ hard work rewarded by getting a nod for this gorgeous cover you see here. Anything else is just gravy.
If you’re looking for fun stuff, I think I have at least one guest post going up at Eden Winter’s blog this week. Possibly two. It was a two-part series dealing with some of the music types and songs I referenced in Acceleration and I’m not sure what the posting schedule was supposed to be, but be sure to check it out for some really great insight into Derrick and his musical tastes.
The rest of this may be boring to readers who just want to know about the book and/or the author. This is mostly diary stuff about the self-publication process for other authors who want to know, so I’ll put it under a cut.
Acceleration hit the virtual shelves at Amazon mid-afternoon on Thursday, about a half-day at which point I went ahead and released it on all the other sites that didn’t require processing time. B&N finished processing and went live on Friday. I’m still waiting on Kobo (the link you see on my side-bay and to-buy page is the link that will be used once it goes live, it just hasn’t done so yet) and Itunes is apparently very backlogged and could take up to a couple weeks. The downside of this self-publishing process is that there is really no way to set a day and time at which the book will go live everywhere. It just all sort of… trickles in.
So, how’s the book doing, you ask? Well, if you include the pre-orders from ARe, I’ve sold more copies in the first weekend than I did in all of July (I released Inertia on July 18th.) Last night I was (very briefly) in the 100th slot on Amazon’s 100 Hot New Releases list for the Fiction -> Gay & Lesbian genre. I dropped off within an hour (the list is updated hourly) but it was a thrill just to make it onto one of the lists. Needless to say the exposure would be incredible for my sales if I were to make it onto one of the Top 100 lists at Amazon for an appreciable length of time.
So far there have not been any reader reviews, only reviews of the ARC copies I sent to book bloggers and reviewers. Those have been overwhelmingly positive, but I’m really looking forward to seeing what the reader-reviewers think.
What would I do differently? Well, I would release the book on ARe at a different time and not do pre-orders. I saw a tremendous jump in sales in October when I released Inertia on ARe, but putting it through the pre-order process means I’m not on the New Releases list while the book is live the way I was with Inertia. Not enough people pre-ordered to make it worth the loss in sales that comes from interested people seeing the book on the New Releases list but deciding it’s not worth it when the realize they can’t actually buy it yet.
And yeah, I know it’s not advised for indie authors to monitor their sales too closely. I was actually getting out of the habit, but it’s release weekend, so I can’t help but check in.
I’m hoping to do a cover reveal of Velocity by mid-January, and get ARCs out in early February for a March release. I’m very excited about that, and yet also stressed because I’ve hit a little writers block in the revision process as I try to get the manuscript ready to send to my editor. I know what I need to revise, I’m just not quite seeing a way to the end result that I like. Something feels off, which usually means the characters don’t like what I’m trying to do. I need to figure out what they DO want so I can give it to them, and then they’ll get out of my way and unblock me.
The fiction of Amelia C. Gormley 