Sherri Cornelius

Here's the real link to the interview I posted yesterday. For some reason I linked to Dane's post about the interview instead of the interview itself, on his author blog. Gotta be smarter than the Internet, Sherri.

Author Interview: Sherri Cornelius | J. Dane Tyler.

What a crazy week it's been! Most of it wasn't good, obviously, what with the Boston Marathon bombing so close to the anniversary of the OKC bombing, and the tornadoes earlier in the week, and friends going through health issues that I can only imagine. I could lose myself in debilitating empathy, which I would have done a few years ago.

What I find happening instead is extreme gratitude. My world is peaceful. I have all my limbs and no cancer. My family is healthy and untouched by violence. I finally feel I've overcome the bulk of my self-destructive tendencies.

So yeah, my life is good. It's not perfect, but at least I'm safe, warm, and fed. Oh, and I was accepted into the Bachelor of General Studies program! Things are moving in the right direction. I have to call the school now and set up my class plan. The only thing I'm concerned about is the money sitch. I can't really afford to pay more than about a dollar out of pocket. This might mean taking fewer classes to stay within the Pell grant I'll be getting. I won't be taking out any loans this time. Learned my lesson on that one.

Time for me to get my day started. I hope you all don't let the week get you down too much. Enjoy what you have while you have it.

Just a quick note to let you know about my first interview EVAR! It's up over at Dane's new place. Go check it out!

Author Interview: Sherri Cornelius | En*DANE*gered.

The first two stories I e-published, I didn’t do any promotion aside from tweeting and facebooking and blogging. And really, not a lot of that. They were short stories, and I intended them to be free from the beginning. This in itself ensured they would be downloaded. People like free stuff.

With SKIN AND SCALES I decided to go a different way. First of all, I decided to charge a book price for it and see what happened. (Very little, of course.) Second, I put it straight into KDP Select instead of offering it on Smashwords first. The benefit of KDP Select is that Amazon Prime members are able to borrow the book for free, but the author still gets a small royalty. I had no borrows on the short stories while they were enrolled, but I thought people would be more likely to borrow a book. (Apparently not my book.) Third, I intended to publish it quietly and just let it sit unpromoted, but I got caught up in the excitement, especially when my mom virtually shoved a couple of twenties in my hand for a Facebook ad. So I tried it, expecting nothing but an education and receiving what I expected. It was an interesting and enlightening experience. The results were definitive, and I quit before I hit $20.

So now I think what I need is some reviews. My theory is that any review is good for business. Even a solid 3-star review would indicate that people were reading it and it isn’t completely awful. A 1-star review would keep people engaged and on the page, though I presume I would need a couple of higher stars to counteract it.

TOMORROW only, April 10, SKIN AND SCALES will be free for download on Kindle. This serves a two-fold purpose: to allow the folks in my acknowledgements to get a free copy and to garner a few reviews. I hope everyone who reads it will at least throw a couple of anonymous stars up there. Don’t be shy! If one person breaks the ice, others will follow.

If you don’t read weird stuff but still want to support me, you can recommend the book to your weird-loving friends. If you don’t have a Kindle but still want to read it, you can download a reader for your computer or smart phone here.

Thanks for all your support!

It wasn't supposed supposed to be scary, self-publishing a book on Kindle. I wasn't particularly excited about it. I saw self-publishing as a way to get Black Veil Angel out of my hair for good. It worked so well with the two shorts I published, after all, and I wasn't really nervous about those two. It was really no big deal, and once they were published, even if by myself, they were finalized in my mind. I had struggled so long with BVA--and even after deciding to publish, the process dragged on and on.

But then it just stopped dragging.The instant I saw the image on iStockPhoto I knew it was THE ONE. I had been looking for months, but I'm glad now I didn't try to force it with another image. As the final cover started to come together I got more and more excited.

I'm really happy about the title change. "Black Veil Angel" had a couple of things about it that I thought didn't represent the book. First of all, if you've googled it, you know that the term black veil angel is a common name for a type of angelfish. It wouldn't be a huge leap for a reader to expect at least some symbolism involving a fish tank. Another is that confounding word "angel." It's used in the Christian angel way so freakin' much that I thought it would give potential readers the wrong idea. Especially with the Light on the cover.

Skin and Scales is more descriptive, fits the tone of the story, and plus I think it sounds pretty cool.

I wasn't going to do any promotion beyond a quiet link here on the blog. But once the cover was finished and I started the actual publishing process, I found myself making author pages on Goodreads and Amazon, almost like sleepwalking. I wrote a blurb and all the front matter of the book in a single afternoon. No major problems formatting the manuscript. It was just time, I guess.

I had planned not to care, based on my previous self-pub experiences. What I didn't take into consideration is the fact that this is a full-length novel. A novel I worked on for several years. A novel which ushered me through the hardest time of my writing life thus far. (Hopefully forever.) Maybe I do care, a little.

Skin and Scales will be available exclusively on the Kindle for three months. Woo!