IWSG: Short-Read Book Release; Self-Publishing Challenges

 

It's the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) blog hop! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions. I normally do the optional question for the month which this month’s is Do you use AI in your writing and if so how? Do you use it for your posts? Incorporate it into your stories? Use it for research? Audio? However, because it covers a topic I've gone over several times both in past IWSGs and in weekly posts, I couldn’t think of anything else to say about AI in time for today’s post. So, I’ll just give the short answer: I absolutely do not use generative AI, and any other type of Artificial Intelligence I do use is probably so imbedded in tools such as text editors’ spell checks that I don’t really think about it. 

Here are some of the past posts where I cover the topic of AI: 

https://faroutfantastic.blogspot.com/2024/03/iwsg-2-psychedelic-sci-fi-movie-sequels.html

https://faroutfantastic.blogspot.com/2023/03/ai-authors-competing-with-human-authors.html

https://faroutfantastic.blogspot.com/2023/02/what-we-authors-and-artists-can-do-in.html

https://faroutfantastic.blogspot.com/2023/10/iwsg-generative-ai-too-easy-to-rely-on.html

I'm going to now go over my writing accomplishments and challenges of the past month (more specifically thet past two to three weeks). First, the writing accomplishments, or one of them at least and that is that I've published my short-read book of science fiction horror, "The Trespassers"! I meant not to release it until this past Monday, but once you submit a manuscript to self-publishing platforms such as Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and Draft 2 Digital (D2D) it's hard to tell when the book will be available in stores. Maybe there’s a way to schedule a release that I haven’t figured out yet, I don’t know. So, I published “Trespassers” over the weekend to make sure it would be available for purchase by this past Monday and so you can now purchase it from a variety of online stores, including Amazon.  It’s only available in ebook format at this time but the print version should be coming out within the next week. 

So, publishing "The Trespassers" ebook has been my greatest achievement for the past month. My greatest challenge during that time . . . well I can't really say it was my greatest challenge but it made me wonder how much it would impede the distribution of the book. That challenge was that, as I was setting it up for submission on the D2D platform, I didn't realise until fairly last minute that D2D doesn't have a cover creator like KDP. So, ready to upload my manuscript to the platform, I found out that I had to basically make the cover myself. All I had was the illustration for it, but no text for the title and author name. So, I had to log into my Canva account and give myself a refresher on how to use the tools there. However, once I did that, pasting the book title and author name onto the cover image was fairly easy. So, I had the full cover made in no more than 15 minutes and then uploaded it with the manuscript onto D2D that night. 

You can purchase "The Trespassers" in ebook format by visiting the links under the book's italicised synopsis below. Or you can get it for free! To do that, simply subscribe to my free author's newsletter between now and August 19th 2024. I do, however, ask that only US residents subscribe due to the differences in nations' anti-spam laws. What if you're already subscribed to the newsletter? You don't have to do anything, just check your in-box throughout the week since I will be sending e-copies to current subscribers in the next day or so. 

 

Credit: The blogger

After crash-landing on a desert planet, astronaut and forensic anthropologist Gav Torres becomes separated from the rest of his expedition. He soon enough reunites with everybody except one person: his fiancé, Shelley Wu. Gav’s persistence to find Shelley will soon reveal to him the alien terror from beyond death that may be responsible for her disappearance, the previous expeditions’ disappearances and the likely annihilation of himself and the rest of the current expedition.

Now Available at

Amazon

and these many other stores that you can get to at this link:

https://books2read.com/u/3nQYB5 

I’ll be taking my monthly break from blogging this coming Monday. So, I’ll be back here with another post a week from then. What have some of your writing accomplishments and challenges of the past month been?

Today’s IWSG is brought to you by these super co-hosts:  Feather Stone, Kim Lajevardi, Diedre Knight, C. Lee McKenzie, and Sarah - The Faux Fountain Pen! IWSG was founded by awesome author Alex Cavanaugh, writer of the Cassa Series of novels!

Until next time . . .