I finished the first draft of Part 3.5 of my Mythical Menagerie series on 30 November 2018. I planned to take a week off and then dive into edits, but then December happened and I found myself consumed by a reading frenzy. Apart from my monthly flash fiction piece and the odd blog post or two, I didn’t write anything!
Now it’s January, a new year, and I want to get cracking again. The plan is to finish the edits by the end of January, have my betas review it in the first two weeks of February, another round of edits, and then hopefully have it ready for release by end of February or early March, at the latest.
While all of that is happening, I also need to decide on the title (I have something tentative in mind, but I’m still unresolved) and come up with a cover idea, which is going to be tricky this time around (not a lot of photo-realistic images of griffons available, as far as I can see. I wonder if my cover designer will be able to photoshop an image for me..?).
You’ll notice that the story is Part 3.5, and not Part 4, and this is because it’s not told from my main character Ambrose Davids’ viewpoint, but from Amari Kerubo’s, the current Keeper of Exotic Animals. It’s not part of the main storyline (although what happens in it will give some background that informs the plot for Part 4) and therefor I won’t put it up for sale on Amazon either. The idea is to give it away as a freebie to my newsletter subscribers. There’s just one catch: it contains massive spoilers for Asrai’s Curse (Part 3), since it takes place during much of the same timeframe. I really don’t want anyone to read it unless they’ve read the previous three installments first.
So, I’ll probably make it available to anyone who is subscribed to the newsletter and who can give proof that they’ve bought Asrai’s Curse. Or maybe I’ll just place a huge spoiler warning in the front that will urge readers to read the rest first. I’m not sure what would be best.
In the two weeks that the betas are busy reading, I’ll also start plotting and planning Part 4. I have a broad idea of what needs to happen, but the finer details still elude me. I’d also like to finish planning the rest of the series – another two installments should do it.
Do you have any ideas on how I should make this story available to my readers? Should I ask for proof of purchase first, or provide it to all of them with the spoiler warning and hope that will suffice?
