“What?” you say. “I can finally get The Color Eater?”
No. It’s a different one.
“What?” you ask. “You wrote a whole other book?”
Yup, and you’ve been reading parts of it for months.
“I have?” you marvel. “I didn’t know that.”
That’s okay, neither did I—but when it’s time to put out your first book, it’s time to put out your first book. It appears now is the time. The short read, My Great Escape, is available for 99-cents on Amazon, but on Tuesday, June 21st it will be FREE!
I know more than one person is saying, “Jessica, don’t give your stuff away for free! You need to make money to survive so you don’t have to go back to an evil day job.” Don’t worry, I’ve already thought about that. See here’s the thing, many of you have been signed up for my newsletter for the past year and had access to some of these stories for free, already. I’m not giving away anything I haven’t already shared with the world. Whether they choose to read it or not is up to them, but it’s my job to make sure people have access to my writing—as easily as possible.
“But, Jessica this is just your essays. What about your uber-creepy weirdo fantasy stories?” I know some readers prefer my reality-based work to my fantasy—but these Amazon readers will be new to all of my stuff. I tried to figure out how to let readers know I’m more than a one-trick pony, and I decided to solve that problem by including a flash fiction piece and an excerpt from this summer’s novel-in-progress at the back.
I needed to learn all the behinds the scenes stuff (setting up author pages on sales sites, seeing how royalties break down, blah blah boring boring, etc.) before The Color Eater takes over the world. Here’s my hope, by putting this together as a short read people will get a taste for my work. Some of them will love it as much as you do and enroll in my bi-weekly newsletters. They’ll get to join us on this crazy journey of what happens next in Jessica’s writing career, and they’ll want me to succeed too. Then when I release The Color Eater they’ll be eager to read the whole thing, and ready to pay the cover price to ensure I write more books in the future.
If you want to help me along in this experiment there are more than a few ways you can.
- After you read My Great Escape write a review on Amazon. I don’t care how many stars you give me. The truth is what I seek. If I can make my work better it will come by understanding how my work is received. Plus Amazon cares how many reviews I get (not necessarily how good the reviews are.) The more reviews the higher they rank it and the more people see my book.
- Tell your friends about it. If you know somebody this book will resonate with, forward them this e-mail. (Or Facebook them, or tweet them, or pinterest them, or text them…however it is you choose to interact with other humans these days.)
- Leave a review on Goodreads. Goodreads is one of the top places librarians check out. I know this short book isn’t going to end up in the card catalog, (Ha! I’m old. If you have no idea what I’m talking about you are not old,) but I want The Color Eater to end up there. By having reviews on Goodreads for every book I put out I gain more credibility as an author.
And, I want to let you know of a few people who already helped me with this unexpected book in unexpected ways.
- My Dad, Conrad Conoley (I know it’s a bad-ass intimidating kind of name that’s why I call him Dad), paid for the graphic design work for this spectacular cover.
- Teresa Mandala of Bella Designs read the book and put together a fantastic, representative cover of my work. One that looks killer good on a thumbnail so people click on the book to learn more.
- My WTF partners in crime: Annie Raab, Dane Zeller, Dawn Downey, and Teresa Vratil not only edit, proof-read, and inspire 99% of my work—they also keep me sane while I’m doing it. No small feat. They are invaluable to what I do.
- You. For reading, because there’s no point in telling a great story if there’s no one to share it with.
Thank you. Because sometimes those two words are the best ones.
Jessica
ps I finally embraced twitter. If you want to find me there I’m @jaconoley