Publish and Be Damned Part 2

That's it. Part 2 of The Great Project - City of Fire and Ice - went on to Amazon yesterday. I've published the whole thing now, all three hundred thousand or so words. Phew!

It feels good, getting part two out there. Getting a good cover was a little more tricky this time. I used the same designer, but we had to do a lot of backwards and forwards discussion before we got it right. I'm very happy with it now though. It hints at fire and ice, it uses a photo of Edinburgh Castle that I took, and it incorporates an angel, which is a key component of the story. So I'm pleased with it.

I've also priced this second part of my book less competitively - it's dearer. That way I would hope, eventually, to make a good return for all my two years of effort on the two books together.

The key thing now is to concentrate more on marketing/selling. And to do that I need to get my current book finished. I'm close, but like the sea it keeps receding. I'll get there soon though. Then it's sell, sell, sell.

Resolving to Be Brave

I've just finished reading a so-so fantasy book, The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. Again it's one of those which puzzled me, because some of the reviews online were stormingly good, and yet when I read it myself I was disappointed. It was okay, the central story was fine, but it was so full of the most undisciplined digressions and 'world-making' descriptions, that the pace became tediously slow at times. I was puzzled again by the high praise some readers seemed to give it. So I delved deeper into the reviews, past the first few. There I found others which agreed with my assessment. And one I read made me think about my own writing.

The review said this:
'On the one hand, Lynch's technical talent clearly elevates him above the great gormless herd of modern fantasy writers already. And there's no denying that the book is very likeable indeed, while it seems unfair to fault it based only on what it could have been. On the other hand, it's just 'too damn safe'. Lynch is going to be a major player in the genre - that much is obvious already - but he has it in him to do something Seriously Good rather than settling for being the next RA Salvatore. But it's not gonna happen until he gets over his fear of failure. PERDIDO had parts that worked and parts that didn't but Mieville wrote his ambition on every page in letters of fire, and the excitement swept me, the reader, away with him. Whereas LOCKE LAMORA felt like Lynch was parceling out his ideas and his talent and calculating every story beat based on whether it would make a good start for a franchise.'

Apparently the book has already been optioned for a film, so the safety-first claim rings true. Now, I've read one of China Mieville's books, and while it puzzled and annoyed me in places, it gripped me. This one didn't. And it occurred to me that the willingness to get things wrong is exactly what makes the difference between the two. In other words when writing you need to be brave, to risk failure, to try something and not necessarily expect it to work, but to try it anyway. That idea has really resonated with me, and I'm wondering now how I can put it into practice. Have I been safe in my writing? I'm not sure. I didn't think so, but I wonder now. What this review has done is to make me determined to think through what I'm writing and look for the unsafe options. Have I considered and discarded them sometimes? I'm not sure. But I know I don't want to write a book like Locke Lamora. So, definitely not safety first from hereon in.