I have four or five books that are ready to be published. I really need to work on publishing them. Instead, I’m just going to write about them here. Only one of those books, a thriller, has any commercial potential IMO. I sent it to my agent several times and revised the fuck out of it, taking out like a hundred pages. It’s so fucking tight now. It’s basically The House Maid—a very successful novel about a homeless girl working as a maid for a rich family—but with a few twists that I’m not going to reveal here. I told my agent that I would revise it one more time and then send it to him, and if he still didn’t like it, I would self-publish. I’m afraid to send it to him again because self-publishing is seemingly like the graveyard of novels, at least my novels. I want to listen to this book one more time. (I use an app to read my books to me so I can go through them slowly, catch mistakes, have a new perspective.)
I also have two historical fantasy novels in a trilogy. I published the first book in this trilogy. It had a professional cover and even an audiobook, but I was disappointed with the results (it didn’t catapult me to riches and fame). These two other books in the trilogy are both super long, like a thousand pages each. I love them and they deserve to be published, but professional covers alone cost hundreds of dollars each and there’s just no way I’m going to make the money back on that investment, like that’s how bad the sales were. (“Why don’t you advertise?” Because advertising on amazon is like playing a slot machine. “Why don’t you send your books to booktokers?” Because they probably won’t care or will charge lots of money that I don’t have to talk about my books.)
I also have a novel which is basically the story for the OG Starcraft, but more communist, and the characters have real motivations, and their motivations aren’t “heheh I’m just evil,” like Mengsk and the Zerg. Also something I learned from going through the OG Starcraft cinematics and in-game story: men with southern accents must suffer. Anyway, this novel is ready to be published and I found a good premade cover (not AI) for about $80. I just need someone to make an audiobook. I thought of doing it myself but it’s so much work and I don’t have access to a good studio space. Hiring someone to do an audiobook costs about $2000. Doing profit sharing means the other person makes the audiobook for free and then you share the profits (audiobooks sell for a lot more money than ebooks or paperbacks and people really seem to love them), but that person might not be as great as the ones charging $2000. Also this book is too long. It’s about 700 pages.
And I have a science fiction historical novel about discovering another Earth orbiting the sun in our Earth’s orbit in the present day. This book is 99% finished. It needs sensitivity readers, as it features two Muslim main characters (I’m not Muslim) and lots of Maya / Aztec stuff (I’m not Maya or Nahua). I had the idea for this book almost twenty years ago and I’ve never been able to finish it, until now. This book needs a cover (difficult to find one since it’s really a blend of genres (a fifteenth century caravel on the ocean beneath an Apollo-style space capsule falling out of the sky???), and these kinds of blends usually don’t sell well), and it also needs an audiobook reader. It’s also too long at more than 200,000 words, longer than the first Dune novel. There is however a war between China and the USA in this novel. And a Mad Max USA. And Aztecs and Taíno with iron armor and arquebuses. And multiple Apollo- and Soyuz-style rockets. There was going to be a nuclear war at the end, but my kids told me not to do that.
I also have a journal about what it was like working as a blue collar worker for two years. It’s hundreds of pages long and needs a lot of editing or should probably just be used as the basis of a much tighter book that hasn’t been written yet. A similar kind of book is the extremely excellent An Honest Living by Steven Salaita which I can’t recommend enough.
I just finished my seasonal job so I’m finally free / unemployed for a bit, this is also why I’ve been posting so much on hexbear lately, and I usually write in the mornings, but I have to work on publishing because I already have too many books. This is the result of writing every day for two years without doing any work on publishing at all.
If any of you have read this far and are interested in checking out any of these books (except the fantasy historical novels because one has been published already and it uses my real name), message me and I will send you the ebook versions for free.