Katrina's Prey

I have just begun another novel. Why, you might ask, have you done that when you have seven completed, with three of them published? Why don't you try to sell what you have? Isn't that what this publishing business is all about, getting people to read your work?

What can I say? I have found out that writing novels, as hard as it is sometimes, it is a hellofa lot easier than hustling them. Especially if you self-publish which is something I always said I would not do, but look at me now? A few years ago I finally decided if I was ever going to hold a novel I had written in my hands before I went on to the old novelists home for the infirm, I was going to have to self-publish.

And so I did. I looked around. Everybody wanted my money. I wanted my money also. More than these shyster POD publishing companies. I found that http://www.lulu.com/ did not want my money. Well, actually they did, but they just went about it in a different way. In other words, they didn't want upfront money. The way that works is how they have the system set up. The writer does everything! I mean everything. You have to format your novel for a 6x9 book (they have hard copy now) and use their mechanism to put it online. Then they take over and convert it into book form.

Now! Here is where they make their money. By authors buying their book, at a substantial discount, to sell at book signings, etc. People can also buy your books from Lulu, or if you purchase an ISBN $50.00, from Amazon.com, et al. Back to the question of me and how I go about selling my product. (I have a hard time thinking of my book! as product.) I don't, I have discovered have the time, the money, nor the will to "get out there and sell" that you have to have to become somebody in the literary world.

So I write and I publish and I sell here and there, but my heart is not really in it, for a lot of different reasons I won't go into here. My newest novel, Katrina's Prey is about a man, Joe John Jefferies, reporter for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans and what happens after Katrina left the city devastated. It is a modern-day tale of Frankenstein I suppose. Or possibly a strange take on The Three Faces of Eve. I have assimilated some notes, and have worked up a pretty good bio of three of the main characters, and managed to write the first two chapters. My writing has been halted because of something that happened to me a few weeks ago which I shan't (love that word) go into now. Only to say it is a good thing.

Okay. Enough for now . . .