Just a quick note to mention that I've uploaded minor updates to all three books. I'd done this last month for the Kindle editions and have now updated the Smashwords versions as well. Just a few small typos and largely inconsequential changes. I will continue to update any book so as to eliminate any remaining mistakes as I find them or you point them out to me.
In addition, I tinkered with the categories for A Summer in Amber and Some Day Days. I don't write my books "to market", which is to say that I don't identify a specific type of story and then write my story as a close imitation. I write my stories just to please myself, so my books tend to fall between the cracks when it comes to genre. For example, while I've always considered A Summer in Amber to be a steampunk story, even if it's not set in pseudo-Victorian England, it doesn't have clockwork robots, air ship pirates or zombies, and thus lacks many of the cardinal features of the usual steampunk novel. The upside of this is that I can describe my novels in various ways. For A Summer in Amber I've replaced "science fiction adventure" with "science fiction apocalyptic", since it is set in a post-apocalyptic society, even if it also lacks many of the cardinal features of that genre as well. In a similar vein, I've moved Some Day Days to straight up "literature" and "new adult romance" from science fiction and romance, which it probably was a poor fit for anyway. Really, it's a story that's hard to fit it into any specific genre, so I can pick and choose and still justify any I do choose. I'm curious to see what, if any these moves have on downloads.
It's closing in on one year since I started this experiment. I've been very pleased with the result – thank you, dear readers! – but truth be told I didn't have any great expectations, so that bar was modest going in. I am planning to post a complete report of how my books did in their first year – all the numbers and such – early in May (2016) so that my readers and any other indie authors that might look in can see the results of my experiment of releasing three free books in a year with a business plan that solely consisted of releasing them and waiting for lightening to strike. (Which, by the way, isn't a business plan.)
Currently I am working on the last part of The Lost Star's Sea and hope to have the first draft of that novel done within the next several weeks. My fantasy novel idea is slow to take shape and being cooped up in the house by winter is simply too productive of a time for writing to waste trying to come up with a story. It's prime time for writing, so I'm writing the story I do know, though I keep bumping up to what I don't know while I push the story to its ending. It changes several times a day. As usual, I know the ending, it's just getting there that's work. Stay tuned.
