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Thursday, October 20, 2011

Why You Won't See "What I'm Working On"

Tuesday on Twitter, people retweeted a link to what authors must have on their websites. The items I remember off the top of my head are: A printable book list. I have this. A list of all books. I have this. A coming next page and a works in progress page. I have the coming next page, but don't have the work in progress page and I'm not sure it's something I want to do.

For one thing, not every proposal for a book sells. If I talk about an idea and never write more than three chapters of it, will readers be disappointed? After all, if I talked about it, people should expect me to write it. If it doesn't sell, I'll be onto the next project.

The second thing is that I don't necessarily sell my projects in the order I work on them. In 2004, I wrote the proposal for In the Midnight Hour and In Twilight's Shadow. Then I wrote the proposal for Eternal Nights and finally the proposal for Through a Crimson Veil. I sold them in the reverse order. In fact, it took 18 months to sell Midnight Hour and by then I'd finished my Crimson story and was working on EN. It was another six months after that before I actually wrote Midnight.

In this set of circumstances, I can't see where it's beneficial to officially talk about my stories in progress. The coming next page, though, is a different case. Anything I post there is contracted work and will be released.

It was nice to know that I'm doing stuff mostly right. I do have all my books listed on one page, but with links that breaks them into either subgenre (in case someone wants paranormal romance, but not science fiction romance or vice versa) and also into series (so if you read one Light Warriors book and want more, they're all available). I also saw in the comments that publication dates with the books is a good thing. I've done that as well, at least the year, if not the month and year.

Reading the comments to the blog post highlighted something interesting to me--there are still authors without websites or authors who don't bother to update their websites for years. I knew a bunch of older authors didn't have sites because I've tried to find them after I talked about their books, but I didn't think authors publishing now didn't have sites. Wow.