Friday, October 11, 2013

The Hope of Memory [Update 16] The Distant Released!

After many years, I've finally released The Distant, Book 1 of The Hope of Memory.  Yay me!  It's now available in trade paperback and eBook formats.


The trade is through CreateSpace.  It's available both through the CreateSpace site and Amazon (US and many of their international sites).  I'll add international store links to the Novels page eventually, but for now, here are the US ones:

CreateSpace - Trade Paperback | $11.99
Amazon US - Trade Paperback | $11.99 (though they already dropped it to $11.40)
Amazon US - Kindle eBook | $2.99

You're probably wondering... why bother buying it through CreateSpace?  Amazon is better!

Yes, it's better in terms of what you can get, but I will make a higher royalty through CreateSpace.  So if you don't care about eBooks or Prime shipping, etc, then feel free to go that route if you wish.

For the Amazon version, I've enabled most of their features, because I can.  The book has:

Matchbook = If you buy the Trade paperback, you can get the Kindle eBook for FREE
Kindle Lending Library = If you have Amazon Prime, you can borrow the eBook for FREE
Lending Enabled = You can lend your copy of the eBook to other users
KDP Select = Occasionally Amazon may offer the eBook for FREE for a limited time as part of a promotion
No DRM = I don't care about DRM anymore

To use some of these features I have to make the eBook exclusive to Amazon for at least 90 days.

The New Cover

You may have noticed the cover is slightly different than what I previously posted.  When designing the full wraparound cover for the paperback, the original format simply didn't work when it was right next to the spine.  It worked for an eBook, but not a physical book.

So I played around with it a bit and came up with a new version I'm happy with.  I also changed the background texture... I had to go out to the park and take some high resolution pictures of tree bark and stone that would fit the new size.

The Other Books

Update on the status of the other two books in the series.  As I've reported before, the initial draft of Book 2, Wilders, is complete.  Any further work on that has been put aside while I write the initial draft of Book 3, Rom Tar, which I started last month.

I haven't decided whether I'll do all of Rom Tar before going back to Wilders or not.  I really only need to first half written to feel comfortable finalizing Wilders.  We'll see.

For Rom Tar, I am trying something different when writing it.  I'm still writing longhand, but instead of waiting for that to be complete before typing it up, I'm typing it up after every chapter or so.  This makes me think about what I wrote and make any edits right away, rather than trying to figure that out with the whole book already written (which can be a pain, since changing something can have a domino effect... I had problems like that with The Distant).