Another year in the bag—2018 here we come! Drop me an email, tweet, or FB message and let me know what you have planned for the year ahead.
Here’s a list of what I have going on writing-wise right now or in the works for the near? future.
I’m still working on Heat Seeker, Jake Mudd Adventures Book Three. That’s at the top of my list to get completed, edited, proofed, and published. No publication date yet, but it’s coming. (see comment below about job situation; writing production should vastly improve this year)
I plan to continue submitting Deadly Cargo and Forced Vengeance each month to BookBub in hopes they will choose one of the two for their featured science fiction deal. That’s an always-do-every-month task. Odds are slim, since BookBub only chooses a handful of books out of thousands of submissions, but the visibility a featured deal would give to the series makes the regular submission task worthwhile.
A prominent science fiction author may write a short story or novelette or novella in the Muddverse this year. I discussed this with him, as did several other scifi authors. So, no guarantee he’ll get to doing one for the Muddverse, but fingers crossed. I can’t reveal who the author is, but if you read scifi chances are you know the name.
I plan to write a short story to submit as a candidate for inclusion in Alasdair Shaw’s upcoming scifi anthology entitled Renegade. It’ll be the third such anthology by him, and I am excited to get this done. If the short story doesn’t get chosen for the anthology, I’ll send it out to mailing list subscribers. The submission deadline for this is April of this year. So, this won’t affect me getting Heat Seeker and another novel (probably Broken Solace) out before then. The anthology contract is for non-exclusive rights. So, I’ll offer the short story to mailing list subscribers too at some point even if it does get included in the anthology, but not before it has a good run in the anthology.
I’m in the brainstorming and sketch outlining/character development phases for the two new series I’ll be working on this year, in addition to keeping the Jake Mudd Adventures series and the Jake Mudd Tales stand-alones going. One of the series, Starshot Chronicles, is in the Muddverse, but at least the first few books’ stories take place in a distant part of the galaxy from Jake’s stories. There are a few tidbits related to this series buried in the Bonus Content section of the website. The other series is altogether separate from the Muddverse. It’s a superhero series, the first book of which is Superheroes Incorporated. I won’t discuss the storyline yet, but it will be a fresh take in the genre and will be awesome.
Without getting into the weeds on this, I am happy to say I landed a new very solid day job which will alleviate some of the stress which has slowed down my writing production over the last half of 2017. I have yet to work out my year-long production pipeline in detail, but, off the cuff, I’m looking at getting books 3-5 of the Jake Mudd Adventures out in 2018, along with the launch of both of the other series mentioned above. This should be a solid production year. I’m looking forward to it.
I have bookings with my cover designer for February and April. Those will be used for the new series, since I already have covers done for books 3-5 of the Jake Mudd Adventures series. I haven’t decided whether to stack both cover bookings onto one or the other of the new series or split them up. This is because I haven’t decided whether to write back and forth in each of the two new series or two write the first three of one new series and then go on to write the first three of the other new series. I want to have three done in each series before launching that series. In either case, I’ll need to get four more cover slots booked for this year, which means I need to talk to my cover designer asap—they book months in advance due to demand.
I am considering going ‘wide’ with some or all of my books this year. For those who don’t know the term, going wide means distributing my books for sale on other platforms in addition to Amazon. If I do this it would mean my books would be removed from Kindle Unlimited, but not from the Amazon Kindle store. I won’t pull the Jake Mudd Adventures series from KU (Kindle Unlimited) without first polling my readers via the newsletter. If they strongly disagree with the move, I’ll consider keeping those books in KU. If I go wide with the Mudd books &/or the two new series, that’ll mean the books will be available on Amazon (not KU though), Apple’s iBooks, Kobo, B&N, GooglePlay, and many other stores worldwide. It’s a long-term strategy which may reduce initial sales (since Amazon’s KU accounts for a sizable part of the market), but it would provide diversity of income/financial security, in terms of guarding against one player (Amazon) potentially draining my income through some unforeseen policy change. Again, I’m just thinking about this move, at this point. I’ll discuss this further with readers before I make the change, if I come down on that side.
I will blog on the website more regularly and send out the email newsletter to subscribers more regularly, providing behind-the-scenes updates in addition to the usual news about new releases and sales. I’m working on my formal production schedule this week, so I’ll post that once I have it done.
That’s enough for this hodgepodge list. I hope you all have a wonderful 2018! I look forward to hearing from you and to sharing my stories with you. Thanks again for your interest, and happy reading!
-Hal