Well friends, it’s time to wrap up my first year as a published author. Considering Tantalus Depths only came out a bit over three months ago, we sure crammed a lot into the tail end of this year.
We began this month with GalaxyCon in Columbus, which was an absolutely magical experience from beginning to end. I met so many amazing people, and was able to introduce Tantalus Depths to a whole new audience. I’d never been to a convention before, even as an attendee, but I always knew it would be something I’d love, and I was not mistaken. I made some new friends there, learned a lot about the business end of things, got to socialize with other authors, and even had one person recognize my book from an Audible recommendation after listening to Project Hail Mary! That’s right. Someone recognized my book in the wild because an algorithm compared it to Andy Weir’s writing. You could have knocked me over with a neutrino after that one.
I’ve spent the rest of the month making plans for the new year, and let me tell you, I have some big ones. I’m going to do a LOT more conventions next year, along with some other events. I’ve already lined some of them up, so expect a proper event schedule announcement for my 2023 Book Tour very soon.
With New Years being a time for resolutions, I want to share with you my goals as an author for 2023. I’m famously bad at adhering to timelines, but I’m hoping some public accountability will help keep me on track. I have three main goals for the year; all three ambitious as well as important.
1: Get Tantalus Depths up to 50 reviews on Amazon (if y’all want to help out with that one I sure wouldn’t mind)
2: Attend at least ten promotional events (hopefully many more than that)
3: Write and submit Proteus to my publisher. Tantalus Depths took eight years from writing the first word to publication day. I don’t want Proteus to take longer than three at the most.
Those are most of my big plans for the year, but I also have a bunch of other surprises coming up. My fifth short story, Neurophage, will be coming out this year in Writing Bloc’s next anthology collection, Passageways: Mythos. I also have a guest appearance coming up on a wonderful authors’ podcast later this year, which I’ll tell you more about when it gets closer.
All in all, 2023 is looking to be a really big year, and I cannot wait to share my experiences with you all. Have a happy New Year, everyone, and get ready for a wild ride!
Happy Halloween everyone! I hope you’re all having a great time filled with all the best kinds of dread.
It’s been a full month since Tantalus Depths launched, so an update is definitely warranted. Things have been a bit chaotic on my end, with some pretty drastic unexpected shakeups in my personal life that really threw me for a loop. But if Mary can keep getting up again every time she gets knocked down, so can I. I’m finally bouncing back, and things should reach a new level of normality soon (fingers crossed).
Unfortunately this obstacle has definitely disrupted my post-launch plans for Tantalus Depths. I had hoped to have multiple signings and events booked by now, but so far Galaxycon is all I have on the agenda. Hopefully I’ll be able to line up some more opportunities soon, but I’m definitely not where I’d hoped I’d be at this stage.
But one area where we have made pretty solid progress is our reviews. At the time of writing this, we have 22 reviews on Amazon and 26 on Audible, which is not shabby at all. The algorithm starts to notice and promote books when they hit 50 reviews, so we’re nearly to that first goal! So far our reviews are overwhelmingly positive, and I am beyond thrilled to see such a strong positive response from the community.
If you haven’t left a review yet, please consider doing so soon. Even the simplest reviews are tremendously helpful, and each one serves to elevate the book’s success and increase the potential of my career as an author.
Follow this link to leave your fair and honest review on Amazon. Every review makes a difference!
That’s all I have for an update today, but hopefully there will be a lot more exciting news very soon!
It’s been a full week since the launch of Tantalus Depths, and it already feels like the whole world has changed. Our launch event was a fantastic experience; I loved the chance to spend time with so many of you and revel in this amazing experience with so many of the people who made it happen. Bookstores and libraries are beginning to carry it, glowing reviews are coming in from all over the world, and we’re right on track with where I wanted to be.
So what comes next? Well, the official launch day of a new novel is only the beginning when it comes to determining that book’s overall success. Technically, I could just forget about it and move on to the next project right now, but as far as launching a career as a published author, that would be the equivalent of sitting down to take a nap ten feet away from the finish line in a marathon. Many people have now read, and enjoyed, Tantalus Depths, but this still mostly consists of those of you who preordered it years ago. In order for this book to truly take off and become successful, it must be able to find new readers. It needs to build momentum, gather attention from outside my personal social circle, and start catching the attention of complete strangers. It’s a challenging, but necessary phase in launching a book, and right now the best way to achieve it will require your help once again.
We need reviews!
Reviews are absolutely necessary for a book to find its full potential. Amazon reviews are especially vital: it’s the primary driver of book sales in the industry, and it takes at least 50 reviews for Amazon’s automated algorithms to start recommending it to new customers. Fifty reviews just to get noticed, a hundred to be actively promoted, and at the time of writing this, Tantalus Depths has...four.
Those four reviews are incredibly valuable in their own right, but we’ll need far more to get the attention Tantalus Depths needs to find its best chances of success. With Tantalus Depths in all of your hands now, I must ask for your help one more time. If you can spare a few minutes of your time to leave a fair and honest review of Tantalus Depths on Amazon, or another site such as Goodreads, I would be eternally grateful.
Amazon can be a bit of a pain. Sometimes it takes several days for a review to go up after you’ve submitted it, and sometimes they will reject a review for no obvious reason and not tell you about it. That’s all the more reason why every review is vital and precious to Tantalus Depths’ survival, so please don’t underestimate how much of a difference your review will make.
I’m optimistic that we’ll get there eventually. Early reviews are very positive, and I suspect we’ll keep getting a lot more in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, thank you all again so very much for all your continuing support, and I hope you’re all enjoying your experiences reading Tantalus Depths after such a long wait!
To leave a review on Amazon, follow this link here:
The wait is almost over, my friends! For some of you it IS over, since I’ve heard from a lot of you that your copies of Tantalus Depths arrived a day early! All across the country, people other than me are finally getting to hold a copy of Tantalus Depth in their own two hands, and I am absolutely freaking out about it!
There’s so much still to do in the final hours before launch, so I can’t take much time to post a lengthy update. I’m hoping to see many of you at my big launch event in the auditorium of Kent State Trumbull tomorrow evening at 7. Please come out and see me! I’ll be signing books, taking pictures, and doing a little reading for you all. Let’s come celebrate this launch together!
Okay, here it is: the final two characters in our Tantalus Depths lore series, and naturally I saved the most important for last. I give you the stars of the show: the esteemed starship pilot Mary Ketch, and the cunning artificial intelligence, SCARAB.
Mary’s had a rough time of it lately. She signed on to pilot the XIS Diamelen for Exotech’s survey mission to Tantalus 13 in hopes that some time away from her troubles at home might give her a sense of clarity or purpose. It wasn’t supposed to be more than that, but it wasn’t long after landing that her expectations of what this mission was going to be flew completely out the airlock. Now she’s been dragged into a cosmic mystery millennia in the making, and the stakes are life and death. When things get bloody, will she have what it takes to get home in one piece?
SCARAB is the ultimate AI assistant. It can build anything out of anything; its sole purpose is to turn a lifeless world into a home away from home for its human crew. At least, that’s supposed to be its sole purpose. The SCARAB unit sent to Tantalus 13 seems to have found another one, and it isn’t keen on letting anyone know what that purpose is. One thing seems perilously clear, however: the safety of the Diamelen’s crew is not its top priority.
Read all about Mary Ketch and SCARAB on my website now, and in the pages of Tantalus Depths everywhere tomorrow!