Big news by way of a riddle;
Who's got two thumbs and just signed a publishing deal for this story?
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This guy! (insert meme of the guy from the office pointing at himself).
That's right everyone, ITSOM has been picked up by the legends over at MoonQuill for publishing! I'm stoked, it's awesome news. I've signed for ebooks, physical books and audio. The physical books will be via Amazon print on demand (Jouba - your dream will be fulfilled!), and the ebooks will be on kindle unlimited. The audiobook is still up in the air, but i'll get to that in a bit.
ITSOM will be turned into a trilogy, and i'm currently hard at work re-writing/editing the story. Once i've got book 1 sorted, i'll send it over to MQ for professional editing, and they will approach audiobook producers to pitch it. I'm hoping we'll get one, but i simply don't know how these decisions are made, so we'll have to wait and see.
So what does this mean? Well, for most of you - nothing. I will be slowly updating the story with the newly edited/rewritten chapters as i go, but i will make sure that current followers aren't getting notified each time so no worries for you on that front. I'm doing my best not to change too much, but i'm 20 odd chapters into the re-write and i've already added 5 new chapters, so we'll see how that promise goes!
In terms of timeline, i hope to have book 1 sorted on my end by end of June at the latest (some personal stuff means i have less time than planned in spring this year), with book 2 and book 3 sorted a few months after, respectively. The books will hopefully be dropping within a few months of each other, but the launch of book 1 isn't expected until late this year or perhaps early next year. Maybe even later, who knows?
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
I will of course update you all once launch day approaches, but i'll be very careful not to spam you all on here.
As for the sequel that many of you are no doubt wondering about, the long and short of it is that i don't yet know. There's no point writing one right now while i'm still re-writing the original trilogy, since things are liable to change a little and i don't want to have to rewrite the sequel, too.
I'd also be keen to see how ITSOM does on amazon before really committing to anything 100%, because if it is just a total flop and doesn't even sell a hundred copies, i will definitely struggle to justify the time and effort on a sequel. Conversely, if it does well it will be a lot easier. I have a solid idea for the sequel, but it might be a little weird having a (hopefully) satisfying 3 book arc, just to have a book 4 that starts and ends on its own. So if TISOM does really well and i can do another trilogy that would be awesome, but again, we'll just have to wait and see.
I'm still determined to get the new story (the zombie apocalypse in ancient egypt cultivation story) out of my brain and onto the page as well, so i'll have to work that in somewhere. Lots of work in the near future.
For now though, just thank you. Really. I wanted to get 10k views, 100 followers and to finish the book - those were my goals for uploading on royalroad. Now i'm at 1250 followers, nearly 500k views, and i've got a publishing deal for a trilogy that i've already finished! it's crazy, and magical, and awesome, and i wouldn't have been able to get anywhere without your generous interactions and energy. So thank you from the bottom of my heart.
As i'm re-writing/editing, i'm combing through the comments of each chapter and stealing little nuggets of wisdom that you all left lying around for me, so thank you for that. The reviews have helped guide me as well. Honestly, it's shocking how long it took me to work out how commas in dialogue worked - i thought it was only the first 20 or so chapters that suffered, but i'm pretty sure i only figured it out at like chapter 90 or something!
Either way, thank you! happy to answer questions on anything in the comments :)
All the best,
OCRAuthor
