Almost Here!!!

Anam will be available April 9th. I needed a little more time to do one last round of polishing. If all you care about is the ebook, you can stop reading now and save yourself a somewhat boring story.

Personally, I don't want to get into this, but I also don't want a bunch of angry readers. Those who have physical collections deserve an explanation. My experiences may also be of value to the other authors who are reading this, and I know you're there.

The overwhelming, not even close, majority of you are ebook readers. We're talking a few hundred ebooks to one physical. Last I added things up, which was many months ago, Marysvale had well over 100,000 downloads. Based on what was downloaded just last month alone, it's significantly more now. Maybe when I get bored, I'll go though all the reports and add them up again. What about the print copies, Southwick? Well they're so small it would render it embarrassing to tell you. So, I'll just try to look cool and move along without giving you those numbers.

Here is my very condensed story. I started out with a small upstart press. Things started with a bang, but quickly fizzled. At my initiation, we parted ways. I got my rights back all to myself. So, I decided to do Alyth on my own, but tried to keep the same experience. Turns out, I really don't have distribution channels for physical books. This time, I didn't get into Costco, Barnes and Noble, etc. Because of these two experiences, I have a significantly lighter wallet and a lot of lessons learned. Don't get me wrong, I'm extremely thrilled the way things are working out...for the ebooks.

In short, Anam will be ebook initially. As soon as I can figure out an on-demand printing service, you'll get paperback as an option. But why no hardbacks? Well, without drawing the story out any longer, it's about money. No, I don't even have to make money off the physical books, it's more about not wanting to lose money off them. They're really expensive to print, and you have to print a lot to make it worth it. The market for them is waning, they're hard to get into stores, and into the hands of readers. As much as I love, and I mean love, the ebook world, it bothers me not to have a complete set of hardbacks. Someday, I suspect I'll print some of Anam, but not now. Who knows, I may even wade back into the dangerous waters of agents and publishers with another story that I've been thinking about.