My debut novel, Rise of the Red Hand, is now available on Amazon. Yes, that’s right. I finally did the thing. There is a little more to this post, but if you feel like you’ve already read enough of this blah blah blog, and you’d prefer to get on with reading the book instead, here is the link…

But first, a little background. I began writing a novel back in the year 2000. It was mostly finished within a few years. (Or at least I thought it was.) In any case, life got away from me, and I only picked at it every now and again; sometimes as much as 3 years would go by without me even thinking about it. Here comes 2020. Pandemic. Lockdown. Pathogen awareness year. Stay and home and occupy yourself, they say. Once it became clear that the “two-week break” from work was going to be a lot more than two weeks, I decided to actually finish the book. I was able to knock the dust off of the poor thing and get it finished. (Or so I thought.) (Again.) After smashing my head on the desk repeatedly, I landed on the title Storm Cloud Rising.

After doing a rather exhaustive analysis of publishing options available in the year 2020 to a fellow in my position, I opted to go with Amazon Direct publishing. I’ll spare you every step of the thought process, but in my estimation, it seemed the best choice for me. Now that it had become apparent that I’d be doing my own marketing, I dove into some more research and became aware of a concept known as the “reader magnet.” This is a smaller thing, usually a short story or some such, meant to be given away for free, to attract and entice readers and hopefully future fans.

With the idea of “Short Story” (17,000 or fewer words) in my head, I set out to create what has become Rise of the Red Hand. I kicked around a few ideas, and finally settled on a prequel of sorts – highlighting a character from my primary work. (Though, one could argue that because the so-called “prequel” is published first, then it’s not actually a prequel per se. I’m not obsessed over the terminology here.)

I sketched out the bones of it with that in mind. However, as the story unfolded, I blasted past 17,000 words fairly quickly. Well, a novella is 17 – 40,000 words. Looks like I’m writing a novella now. I crested 40,000 before it was all finished and decided to keep the final word count where it landed at just under 48,000. I felt I had kept things concise and didn’t see much logic behind trimming 8,000 words simply so I could refer to it as a novella.

Now that I’ve got an actual novel, I have come across the phenomenon where just about every marketing tool that I’ve come across only works if you’ve actually got something to market, that is in an actual market. So, I decided to publish Rise of the Red Hand, on Amazon rather than give it away for free in exchange for a place on my email list. I’ll utilize the marketing tools that I had discovered to push this novel, keep the price low, and use the entire thing to get people interested.

Now, I’ve got a long novel, Storm Cloud Rising (which is actually now the first of two mostly finished novels in what will likely be a series of four) and I’ve also got a short novel, Rise of the Red Hand. But still no reader magnet. So… I’m planning on writing a short story. A bit of a prequel for another character from Storm Cloud Rising. I’ll offer it as a freebie to anyone who wants to be on my mailing list. Sound familiar? Until that is ready, the free items that one can receive in exchange for a place on a mailing list are limited to sample chapters from my finished novels. A short story is on the way.

Enough chatter. Check out my Published Novel and if you’re feeling particularly generous, drop me a review once you’ve finished.

Thanks!!!