Jean Marie Bauhaus

2013 looks like it’s going to be an interesting year for my writing and publishing agenda. I fear that it’s not going to be a very productive or eventful year; not because I don’t have any projects in the works, but because work is threatening to keep me too busy to market my books or write and publish new ones. Needless to say, this is frustrating, and also somewhat ironic. Out of all of the things I know how to do, writing fiction is the only one that I actually want to have as a lifelong career, and yet it’s the one I’m able to devote the least time to, because as of yet it brings in the least amount of income. It’s hard to justify setting aside something that does pay the bills to make time for something that doesn’t, you know?

Heavy sigh.

I do, however, have writing and publishing goals. I don’t know if I can call them 2013 goals, because it’s doubtful that I’ll be able to get to all, if any, of them this year. I have no fewer than four fully-formed novels in my head currently, all of them vying to be my next project. These include the aforementioned Radium Town, my Weird West Steampunk horror adventure; a romantic paranormal thriller that’s sort of a follow-up, but not really a sequel, to Restless Spirits, although it might have some cross-over; and the next two sequels to Dominion of the Damned, which, surprise, is actually a trilogy.

I keep going back and forth on which one to focus on next. Both common and business sense seem to dictate that I should stick with the Damned series until it’s done, while that world is still fresh in my mind, and also to appeal to all of the genre series fans, of whom there are many. And part of me wants to keep going, but part of me also really wants to take a break from that world. There are legitimate reasons for focusing on each of the others, too. I’m considering just powering through the rough drafts for each of them and then going back and editing them in turn, but that will pretty much guarantee that I spend all of 2014 editing and revising, and probably won’t have a new book come out until late next year at the earliest. Although I suppose I could always work on short stories if I need to write something fresh and new.

At any rate, I am hoping to pull my Faeries in Hollywood novel, The Hero Factor, out of the trunk and dust it off and polish it up for release later this year. And I’ll also be finishing and polishing Eucha Falls for e-book release in the next month or so. So it’s not like 2013 will be entirely void of new releases.

And in light of the fact that self-publishing is a lot of work (really, if you’re still on the fence about self-publishing, I’m tempted to advise you not to do it if you don’t have a budget for hiring people to edit, design your cover and layout, help out with marketing, etc. because it cannot be overstated how much work goes into this stuff if you DIY it), I’m also considering alternative routes to getting my books out there. I’m not ready to jump back on the traditional-publishing wagon yet, but I am thinking of maybe submitting to some small press indie publishers, just so someone else can do all of that other work and I can focus mainly on the writing.

I’m also thinking about entering Dominion into a couple of contests. There’s the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest, which seems basically to be American Idol for indie writers; and the IndieReader Discovery Awards, which doesn’t guarantee a publishing contract for the winner, but looks like great exposure regardless of whether I won. The latter contest has an entry fee large enough to be potentially prohibitive, though, and the former looks like a lot of time and work just to prepare my entry, and as things currently stand I don’t know if I’ll be able to make the time to prepare an effective pitch. So we’ll have to see.

At any rate, that’s more or less what I’ll be working on for probably at least the next two years. Do you have an opinion on which book I should write next? Feel free to share it in the comments.