So remember a while back when I said I was waiting for the artwork for my new novel Father’s Books as well as for my reissue of Night Watchman, which became orphaned after Mundania Press abruptly shut down operations last year? And how I said I wasn’t going to release the books until I had the artwork, so as not to have to bother doing it twice? And how, a little while after that, I said, well, okay, maybe I’ll release the eBook versions with the placeholder covers, but that I wasn’t going to release the paperback versions yet? Wellllll, if I may quote Spike from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”:
Spike: “I had a plan.”
Angel, “In the Dark”
Angel: “You, a plan?”
Spike: “A good plan, smart plan, carefully laid out. But, I got bored.”
[Spike pushes Angel against a wall]
Spike: “All that watching, waiting. My legs started to cramp.”
So okay, my legs didn’t start to cramp, and I didn’t really get bored, but I decided … hey, what’s an extra revision or two? And thus was Father’s Books released in paperback, featuring, temporarily, the blue cover I put together myself as a placeholder while waiting for the real artwork:
As it turns out, despite going through an endless series of revisions and reviews, I also released Father’s Books with at least two small typos that were caught by a sharp-eyed reader who isn’t me (i.e., my dad). Those have of course been fixed, and the corrected edition is currently being processed for re-release and should be available by the time you read this. And then there’ll be another release once the final artwork is ready. Hey, you know, making revisions helps pass the time here in Pandemic-Land*. Anyway, the paperback version of Father’s Books is now available from Amazon here.
In related news, I actually do have the final artwork and cover for my re-release of Night Watchman, and after looking at a couple of different layouts (vertical or horizontal text) and differengt colors (white text, white text with shadow, red text), and getting feedback online from some reader and writer friends, I decided to go with this:
And so, Night Watchman is also available in both paperback and eBook from Amazon! I’m still waiting for my proof of the final version of the book, but since I accidentally clicked the “Publish” button on it, I figured, what the heck, let’s just make it live, and if I see something wrong with the proof, I’ll fix it. That’s how I’m rolling these days, apparently!
Now, if you already have a copy of the original Night Watchman, there’s not much reason to pick up this one; nothing has changed in the book itself, other than the new spooky cover art from Emilie Léger. But if you haven’t read it, and you’re into the sort of book that various publishers and agents referred to as “unmarketable horror” before I finally sold it to Hard Shell Word Factory some 20-odd years ago, here’s your chance to get it for a little less than the two grand that some crazy scalper been listing it for online.
Incidentally, both Father’s Books and Night Watchman are currently enrolled in the Kindle Unlimited program, by which subscribers to that service are allowed to read enrolled books for free, and authors are paid based on how many pages have been read in their book(s) over the course of a month. The main catch with Kindle Unlimited is that Amazon requires an eBook be available exclusively through them in order to enroll it in the program, and they really do mean exclusively—you aren’t even allowed to sell it from your own website, and they don’t even really want you giving it to anyone, either, except for reviewers. Now, I would be happy to include all my books in this service, except that I’m reflexively opposed to limiting distribution channels, despite the fact practically no one buys my eBooks anywhere other than Amazon. But, as with Television Man, since I didn’t actually have the eBooks ready anywhere else yet, I figured, why not enroll these two in the KU program while I’m working on the Ingram versions of the eBooks and see what happens? Imagine my surprise when, a few weeks later, it turns out that people are actually reading them on Kindle Unlimited, and not only that, but Amazon is actually going to send me a royalty payment this month! It’s not a large royalty payment, mind you (only about $20), but they’ve only been available for about two weeks, and even so, that’s more than I’ve received in a month in quite a while, although, obviously, nowhere near as much as I got back when Dragon Stones mysteriously went to #1 in the UK epic fantasy category in the Kindle store for a while. But still. Last month, my Amazon royalties amounted to thirty-five cents; and because the goal is, in the end, for people to actually read these books, I am at this point seriously considering pulling my eBooks from Ingram for a while and enrolling them all in Kindle Unlimited, just to see what happens. Who knows? Maybe this month was just a fluke and no one will read the other books in Kindle Unlimited, in which case, as Juliana Hatfield** once said …
Then again, if I can get $20 a month in royalties, that’ll cover our Netflix subscription. Or, these days, buy enough gas to last us a year. For both cars!
* Formerly California.
** That’s two twenty-year-old songs referenced in two weeks—I’m on a retro roll!
