Sherri Cornelius

I have this story called "I Can Fly". You can see it over there in the sidebar. It's very short, like 2k words or something. When I put it on Smashwords I was hoping I'd get the same kind of closure I got with Mon Petit Ami. I did get some, sort of, but not the same palpable sense of release. I decided to take it off Smashwords and give Amazon's KDP Select a chance to earn me a piece of their Prime lending pot.

(Aside: KDP Select has been a waste of time for me. None of my three publications has ever been borrowed, so basically I'm giving Amazon exclusivity for free. Great racket they have going there. I won't use it again.)

A couple of months ago I read ICF through for the first time in a long time. I downloaded my two shorts to test on different apps, and on the Kindle app I encountered the problem, which was the damn ending! And yes, I'm really mad about it!

I hate writing endings. I struggle with the ending every time and never feel satisfied. If I have an ending in mind when I start, I'm not light on my feet enough to switch it up when the story takes me in a different direction. If I don't have the ending, that keeps me from finishing at all.

I guess that's why I got the closure with MPA. It couldn't be published until I got the ending right. It finally came around, mostly satisfying, published and BOOM, closure. "Oooh, must have been because I published it! It's out of my hair and out of my mind, because I put it out there. This is a sure-fire way to get rid of those nagging stories I can't stop editing!"

Ahem. No.

With ICF, I did fix the ending, but the pacing was bad. And this is why they say let your stories sit a while before you read them again, and to print them out. The different format--a Kindle reader app--and a few weeks gave me the separation I needed to see why I couldn't stop thinking about it.

But so once I was to that point, Skin & Scales was racing down the track. I thought, that's fine because I Can Fly is in KDP Select. It's exclusively on Amazon and at 99 cents. Nobody's borrowing, and it's highly doubtful anyone would pay a dollar for a story of only 2,000 words. ICF could wait while I focused on S&S.

So that's what I did. And then two days after I received my first real copies of Skin & Scales somebody paid a dollar for I Can Fly! Huzzah! Finally, a sale for this little story. Then I felt guilty as I realized I hadn't fixed the ending yet. Bummer. I hope they don't hold it against me.

Anyway, this lit a fire under me. If people were going to be paying, it better darn well be the best I can make it. I took the laptop to the park with us so the kids could play and I could plug in at the pavilion. I reshaped the ending to I Can Fly with little trouble, much to my relief. Only thing is, now it's pretty obvious that the title for this new story should be "The Girl for Me." Not pretty obvious, really obvious. But I already have a cover I'm satisfied with! People already know it by its old title! What do I do, what do I do??

I already changed Black Veil Angel to Skin & Scales pretty abruptly, but that was before publication. I'm glad I changed it. But I Can Fly is an established title. I guess it can be transitioned a couple of ways--maybe a subtitle, or in the description I can say "formerly I Can Fly"--so as not to confuse those who've already downloaded it.

Maybe I'm making too big a deal out of it.

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!