Welcome To The Dark Side

The clock is counting, literally, I have downloaded an app on my desktop that counts down to various events, but the big one is 416 days until the Darker Side of Fiction 2017. You have joined me on the process of publishing my first two short story collection but now it is time for you to join me on a longer journey, one that will see my full length novels sent out into the world, all into the lead up to my first major book signing event.

This journey will see me not only publish more books but also try to get a grip on all the things that go alongside signings and appearances, what swag to give away, what you can sell alongside your books, banners, blogger packs and setting up order forms.  For a lot of people further along in the process a lot of those things will seem like things you should know but I want to share the whole process here and more. I will be doing Q & A sessions with other authors who will be attending the event, most of whom are well versed in making a living from writing and have impressive bodies of work behind them.

For the next 14 months each Tuesday there will either be some sort of an interview or an update on how things are going, I mentioned previously that one author has been making her own character pop funko’s so I hope I shall get a few lines from her regarding how she found that process, I have ordered a couple of product samples to discuss the promotional stuff available out there, and of course there is a whole issue there with costs, who much do you invest and what can you do DIY. Other things to consider is the table itself, and by that I mean how it is going to look, do you buy display stands, if so what type.

Now obviously, these are not all things I am going to need to do now, some stuff may not even be needed for a first signing but it is all a learning curve and that is what I want to look at, but along the way I hope to pick up some hand tips from other authors that I can share here for anyone else just starting out on the road to self publishing, I am sure I will make mistakes, but if I do I will share those with you here as well, I may even find I have to try to fit in a few extra hours at the day job to fund some of the experiments, but however it goes I know we are heading on a very exciting leg of our journey together.

So if you are ready let us begin our descent into the darker side of fiction, but be careful not to wander from the path…