Hello there.

First off, I want to thank everyone who took a chance and purchased my story. You're incredible.

Hopefully you didn't hate it.

So, news. My time in KDP expired a little while ago and I did not renew it. This means three things:

1) No more free giveaways. This is bad since the free giveaways were essentially my only form of advertisement. I'll need to figure something else out now.

2) I can put Empire Zero in places outside of Amazon. The other day I uploaded a copy to Smashwords and I'm now waiting for them to approve it. Once they approve it, it will go out to Barnes & Noble, Apple Store, and other electronic-y store-y places.  Places-y. 

3) I can drop the price. The lowest you can price in KDP is $2.99; the book is now $0.99.

Ok, enough boring business stuff. Onto slightly-less-boring progress stuff.

Writing the next “Act” is going well enough, all things considered. It's shaping up to be very similar to the first in terms of layout and length—around 70K words and 30ish chapters.

So, how much work have I completed? Well, the chapter-by-chapter outline is ~90% complete. The only “iffy” areas are a few middle chapters in the Brother storyline. Other than that, though, I think I've got a pretty solid plan. Act I set up a bunch of questions and seemingly unconnected events; Act II will draw the curtain open.

The rough draft of the Thief storyline has been completed. That said, I'm not happy with some of its early chapters. I'll probably end up changing some pretty significant things. That's the way I write, though. Or edit, rather. More time is spent editing and refining than actually writing. There were around eight or nine drafts of Act I; I imagine Act II will end up following a very similar path.

Ok, well, that's all. I'm not really a blogger. I wish I could wrap this post up with some witty and relevant comment. 

The First Three Weeks

Act I of Empire Zero has been on Amazon for three weeks now. In that time, I've made a total of one sale. I guess that's what no advertising will do for'ya.

When I put the story on Amazon, I enrolled in the KDP program. This program lets you put your book on "sale" for free on five days of your choosing in every three month period. So far, I've been putting it for sale on every Saturday of June (including yesterday).

This is what my free distribution has looked like:

June 2nd: 263 free copies downloaded
June 9th: 39 free copies downloaded (302 total)
June 16th: 25 free copies downloaded (327 total)

My original plan was to have the story available for free on every Saturday of June, but now I think it may be a better idea to hold onto my last two free days. Hopefully some of the people who've downloaded it for free will enjoy and review the book. Once it has a couple of reviews, I can try another free day and see what happens.

So, if you've come here because you've read Empire Zero, please go ahead and review the book on the Amazon webpage (you can click the cover in the right sidebar to go directly to the page). If you didn't like the book, still go ahead and leave a review but make sure you explain why--if it's something that is fixable in the sequel, I'd like to know now before I devote too much time traveling down the wrong path.

This is the first post in the blog. For testing, natch.