Good morning! Or afternoon, or whenever you are reading this. This week’s update will be quick!

Failed Technomancer—Author Copies

Last week I talked to you about author proofs, and this week my update is about author copies. (Proofs exist to let me double-check that the book is printing right [and looks good], but author copies are just normal copies of the book that I [as the author] can buy at cost.)

Well, it took a bit of hair-pulling to order author copies from the ‘Zon. For some reason there was a glitch in the system that wouldn’t let me—and many other authors, according to the support team—order author copies in Amazon US, and if I tried to order from another country I couldn’t ship it to the US, so I was left high and dry for a while. This story doesn’t have a dramatic or even particularly amusing conclusion—I just got lucky one day and the option reappeared, so I ordered a bunch!

As soon as these author copies get in I’m going to turn around and ship them out to various book reviewers who agreed to read my book. Most of them are BookTubers, so I’ll share the links here once the reviews are up. (A few of them have copies of the book already since they requested ebook or audiobook only, no print, which made my life a bit easier, and I hope theirs.)

Sending copies of The Failed Technomancer to reviewers is my big marketing push for this book. I’m still learning to market effectively and I hope that with each book I can learn a new trick or strategy while refining what I did with previous books.

Just an FYI to anyone reading this that is interested in The Failed Technomancer but hasn’t bought it yet: I’m planning on upping the price to $2.99 or $3.99 in the nearby future, once I have the time and finish up a few more projects. Buy it cheap while you can. (You can find all of the purchase links in last week’s blog post.)

Inner Demon

Developmental edits are finished! Well, I managed to go over the book twice and made (I think) very meaningful edits each time, then I sent the book back to my editor. Once I get it back one last time, it’s on to minor tweaks, copy edits, and then publication! We are racing toward the finish line with this one.

Website (and Other) Updates Incoming

This week I’m going to start updating the various websites I have a presence on, starting right here. I have a new headshot, I need to add The Failed Technomancer information (and make a page for it), I need to make bio pages and claim the book I wrote, and so forth. If something seems really wonky about this website, that’s almost entirely the fault of me not being experienced in WordPress.

“Bloggyness”

Have you ever heard of Mason in the Dark? He’s a blind BookTuber! And I don’t point out his blindness to single him out: he makes it a pretty central point in his branding. (Despite this, he’s got some really well-designed visual aspects to his thumbnails and logo, and I’m curious if he does it all himself or if he’s hired a good visual designer. There’s a lot of really excellent accessibility apps out there, so it’s entirely possible that he does everything himself.)

Anyway, I’m not here to review Mason’s reviews. I’m here to review a audiobook short story he’s been posting on his YouTube channel! It’s called The Bleeding Ground, and he’s been updating it serially for about a year now, maybe more. I haven’t reached the last addition to The Bleeding Ground yet, but I enjoyed the first two entries enough that I felt the need to share the overall project here.

Mason has really excellent audio and sound work in The Bleeding Ground. He voices everything himself, and he just punches emotion into each word. Honestly, I found myself more mesmerized by his reading and background sound cues than anything else, but don’t get me wrong—the story is still really interesting, and chilling.

Fair warning: The Bleeding Ground is a series of horror shorts. Mason is normally a really funny guy, which led to another BookTuber (Lezlie at The Nerdy Narrative) to tease him that he couldn’t write a scare story if he tried, it would inevitably end up humorous. Well, Mason has absolutely proved he can do chilling, and done so in a very entertaining manner.

Anyway, I’ll just give you the synopsis of the first entry in this serial. Simply titled The Bleeding Ground: Volume 1, we begin with an introduction to our villain, Valdus Doyle. He makes me think of good old-fashioned villains, evil for the sake of evil, like Ganondorf in Legend of Zelda. (Perhaps he’ll be given a backstory “justification” for his evil later on, but it’s certainly not necessary in this prologue.) Anyway, we learn that Doyle has been locked in prison for a very, very long time for crimes the narrator shudders to think about, let alone recount, and today he is being taken to his execution. Despite this, Doyle is very, very excited about what’s going to happen today… and not to him.