Guild of Magic drops May 23
Details on how to get your copy!
Marketing a book is a weird feeling. It’s a constant vacillation between “I can’t believe no one is reading my book” and “I can’t believe I convinced someone to dedicate seven hours of their free time to reading my book. I am the greatest marketer in the world!”
There aren’t too many products where you ask so much of your customers, most of whom have never even heard of you. You could probably get a Ph.D. in marketing and still not be confident that you could sell a book. Heck, even the Big 5 publishers admitted as such during the antitrust trial last summer:
“Everything is random in publishing,” Mr. Dohle said on the stand, recounting the company’s origin story. “That’s why we have that name. So the founder thought: Everything is random. Success is random. Best sellers are random. So that’s why we are the Random House.”
I’m a decade into being an indie writer and while I know so much more about the publishing world than I did when I wrote my first flash fiction story, apart from “write a compelling and fun book,” “focus on finding your next reader,” and “repeat steps 1 and 2,” I cannot guarantee myself that anything else will work.
Now, we’ve all seen stories of word-of-mouth, out-of-nowhere hits. Publishers would love to be able to reverse-engineer that phenomenon, but sadly other than paying boatloads of money to tell as many people as possible about a book, it’s hard to manufacture that spark (and even this approach doesn’t always bear fruit).
Anyway, that’s a long way of saying that if you’ve been enjoying reading Guild of Tokens and Guild of Magic, tell a friend! Or, if you haven’t gotten a chance to read them yet and you are a Goodreads user, just by adding the books to your Want-to-Read shelf will help spread the word. You can do that by visiting the Guild of Tokens Goodreads page and the Guild of Magic Goodreads page.
Finally, speaking of book marketing, Guild of Magic is releasing this coming Tuesday, May 23, exclusively through my online store! If you didn’t back the Kickstarter campaign, this will be your first chance to get a copy of the ebook. And by being an ARC Worlds subscriber, you’ll get an exclusive discount.
Be on the lookout for an email from me on Tuesday with the details and the discount code.
And, to get you amped up for the release, I made this fun trailer. See you Tuesday!
Fun things!
Artist extraordinaire Jen Bartel is doing us all a great service by collecting all the best Zelda fanart in a giant Twitter thread in the wake of the release of Tears of the Kingdom
I’m pretty sure 2014’s Edge of Tomorrow was the last non-IP sci-fi movie I saw, and Hollywood seems to have mostly abandoned making big genre blockbusters that aren’t tied to an existing IP or franchise. So I was especially excited to see the trailer for the new movie The Creator drop earlier this week:
Guild of Magic, Interlude
A new chapter of Guild of Magic is now unlocked. And because we’ve reached the end of the second arc of the book, it’s not a chapter, but another interlude! This one was particularly fun to write.
And while Guild of Magic crescendos toward its conclusion for free subscribers, if you are a paid subscriber, it’s time for the first chapter of the next book in the NYC Questing Guild series:
Per last week’s post, if you are a paid subscriber and are wondering where your weekly chapters in your email is, going forward, the link to the new chapter will be in this weekly post.
Comics!
If you’re a comics reader, head to my weekly comics release post below. We’ve got the relaunch of one of Marvel’s flagship titles, friend-of-the-Stack David Pepose with a new one-shot, X-Men villains doing villainous things, plus a new series from Ram V!
Question of the week!
What summer movie are you looking forward to? For me, I’m looking forward to taking my kids to see Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Elemental, and checking out The Flash and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
Call me sentimental but its all about Indiana Jones for me. The guy is like 80 years old - this has got to be the last one, right?