But none of that really matters here. What does matter is that after nearly ten long years of labor, I've just published my debut novel.
Now, as you might imagine, after such a span of time this was something very much akin to taking in a long, deep breath of air after nearly drowning. How this project came to consume the better part of a decade of my life is a story in itself and already dealt with elsewhere (see www.fantasycastlebooks.com/saganotes01.html for the low-down), although I'm sure I'll go into it to some extent here in future posts. For now, what I want to do is briefly introduce myself and give some sense of where I am and what I hope to do here.
But first, since graphics say so much, let me introduce my book:
This is the final jacket layout I did for the cover. Now, I have to say right up front that I'm not a full-time artist. Heck, I'm hardly even a part-time artist. This is, in fact, the very first piece of purely digital art I've ever done, and all in all I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. For the most part I did it in Corel Painter, with heavy reliance on Photoshop for composition and titles. I'll probably go into this more later as well, but for now you can scope out some early developmental art here: www.fantasycastlebooks.com/beowulf-art.html.As you might well have surmised by now (particularly if you've followed the links), this is pretty much a one man show. I wrote the book, I edited the book, I did the artwork and the layout, and yes, I also published the book. Fantasy Castle Books is my publishing name, and this is my first self-published novel. I've always been very much the do-it-yourself type, a fan of Emerson's theory of Self-Reliance and Ayn Rand's Objectivism. So it only stands to reason that this was the natural course for a project wholly non-conformist (read: noncommercial) from the start.
For those out there interested in self-publishing, or working on it already, stay tuned and feel free to post your thoughts, as it's certainly an interesting time to be an independent author. I'll get into discussions of the POD model as I go along, and talk about the route I chose and how it's working out, as well as all the many things I'm doing to promote the book, and whether or not those are working. I suspect it will take a good long while to build up a steady readership, and to that end I'll be posting a good deal of my writing here, as well as offering giveaways and contests of one sort or another.
Which this brings me to my main intention for this blog. Although I'm still pretty well immersed in to promotion phase of my current novel, I want to start a new one soon. And what I plan to do is post each day's writing session here, so that you can follow along and offer your insights and ideas, and thereby be involved in how the work progresses. But that is still a ways off yet. I've got a lot to do on this one still, including a video trailer and an audio book recording (yes, I'll do these myself as well - check out the rockin' Flash ad I made on the... yes, you guessed it... the Fantasy Castle Books website at: http://www.fantasycastlebooks.com/).
So, the book's been out now for about six or eight weeks, give or take (in self-publishing it sort of rolls out in stages). I've been blogging on MySpace since then, but haven't really been happy with the interface there, or the focus of that site, which seems more geared toward dating than professional networking. Granted, I haven't spent a lot of time building contacts myself, although I plan to do so as time allows, but I just felt that before I put a ton of effort into a mediocre blog I should just go ahead and start a real one. So here it is.
And that's about as far as I'm going to go with it today. Nice to meet you. Have a nice day.
