My forray into Vampire Lit!
Things are going pretty fucking good. Sorry to be blunt and crass, but it’s the truth. It turns out that self-publishing was a good idea after all!
Late last month, I released Deadlocked 3. It is much more plot heavy than the first two and sets up the final story, where all the secrets will be revealed. The responses I’ve gotten to it have been great, and one even moved me to tears. I am humbled by the kindness of my readers!
Deadlocked 4 is going to come out in March, and I’ve suddenly got a really exciting reason to hurry up and get to work on it, but we’ll get to that in a minute. With the 4th book in the series being the finale, I need to put some energy into a new series of books. The idea for Deadlocked came from taking a popular genre and trying to craft the best story possible within it. I decided to do the same thing for my next series, and I think people are going to love it.
Right now I am deep into the first book in the Vampire’s Prey series. We’ve been inundated with vampire stories in this country, and I wanted to jump into that genre and do everything I could to rip it apart and tell the best damn story I could with it. The first thing I knew I wanted to do was utterly obliterate the weak female lead stereotype that so many vampire books cling to. The main character of my series is about as tough a girl as you can imagine. She has been victimized, and she’s not going to take it anymore (thus the title.) I can’t wait to get the first book out there for people to check out. I think it’s going to be very, very popular.
As soon as I release Prey No More, I will get to work on Deadlocked 4. I’m excited to delve back into that world, and to bring all of my plans to fruition with the conspiracy theories laid out in part 3. Also, I’ve got a pretty tremendous reason to get back to work on those books: Deadlocked is going to be traditionally published (as in real physical books) in Italy!
An Italian publisher is going to translate the book and release it in Italy. While I no longer carry any stigma about ebook sales not equating true authorship, it’s still fun to think about my book being in print! That being said, this has helped me take a good look at the world of traditional publishing and debate my options.
A normal publishing contract in the USA comes with a $5K advance on royalties. Once that is exceeded, you can expect to receive about 10% royalties, but the average first time author’s book rarely earns back more than the advance. I don’t want to get into sales numbers, but Deadlocked is set to earn me a lot more than that over the course of the next few years. I’m not going to make any grand statements about traditional publishing versus indie publishing (at least not now), but I’ll just say that I’m very happy being labeled just a “Self-Published” author. That title suits me just fine!