It took me two years to write The Son of
Perdition. Editing it afterwards took another chunk of my life. In-between
feedback and applying the changes/fixes, I decided that time would be best
spent writing another novel. I then jumped into The Incubus (to hit Amazon.com
soon) and finished it about a year or so later. At more or less the same time,
I had implemented all the suggestions (those that I agreed with, at least) of
my proof readers and started sending SoP to all the local publishers we had
here. At three months per response, it took me 9 months just to get feedback
from the three major ones here. All of them shot me down.
Not deterred, I somehow managed to land an
agent that was very excited about the book. She sent it to the UK, Australia,
and the USA. Every publisher sent it back with a, ‘not for us’ letter attached
to it. During this time, I managed to finish The Succubus as well.
After being rejected more times than I
bothered to count, my agent decided to rather call it quits. It seems that no
publisher wanted to touch a book the size of Son of Perdition written by a
nobody. Printing costs alone would be through the roof and there was no way
that they could determine whether the book would sell or not.
I then tried an experiment and uploaded the
first few chapters to a blogging site and then offered the rest of the eBook at
a cost. I managed to sell a whopping three or four copies, but the feedback
from all of them was fantastic. I knew in my gut that people would like the
book if I could only find a platform through which I could reach more than just a handful of people.
A local entrepreneur started his own
publishing firm and I offered him The Son of Perdition, The Incubus, and The
Succubus as a means to help him, help me. He asked me to remove the chapters
from the site, which I promptly did. A few days later I found out that I won
the blog page’s 2007 Best Fiction Writer’s award for The Son of Perdition, much to the
dismay of the other contenders. They argued that since I removed the book, I was no
longer eligible to win. The admin guy came back and said that the decision had
been made before I removed the chapters and so the award stood.
The publisher guy never got off the ground,
so I pulled my books and shelved them while I blogged around a bit, during
which time I got halfway through two novels. I’ll tackle and finish them both
later this year.
A friend of mine recently called me and
said that he heard an interview with an author over the radio and that this
author made him think of me. He then told me about the Kindle thing on Amazon
and I decided to check it out. After some research and a final polish-through
of The Son of Perdition, I felt that the book had found its long-awaited platform
and was finally ready for upload.
Those 10+ years had been part of a LONG and very, VERY lonely
road, but one I would be happy to trudge through again and again.
If you haven’t done so already, grab your
copy of The Son of Perdition over at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0079II88M
- Amazon Prime members can borrow the book for free. Your support would be
appreciated more than words would EVER be able to describe.
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