We are just one week away from the release of my latest book, Creepazoids: And Other Short Tales. Book releases are equal parts exciting and strange for me. Exciting because writing a book is hard, and editing is hard, and getting a good cover made is hard, and doing the layout is hard, and marketing is hard, and at the end of that very difficult journey, you finally get to share this labor of love with the world. You inhabit those words and that particular book for so long that it feels like a great relief to release it. For better or worse, the book is now done, and it’s out there for all to read. It’s a feeling that I don’t think can be replicated, and one that I really love.
The reason releasing a book feels strange to me is because it’s such a long process that by the time it comes out I’m usually neck deep in creating the next book. I’m about 70% done with my next release already. You almost have to remind yourself to pause and just enjoy your book release, to celebrate the thing you last created before returning your focus to the next thing you’re creating.
Being a self published author is hard. Anyone who says otherwise is either a liar or some sort of genius who’s discovered a secret that they aren’t sharing with the rest of us. In a weird way, I’m glad that it’s hard. It means I don’t take the readers that I get for granted. I don’t take the work for granted, because I know that a reader has millions of choices on what to read. So for the ones that somehow find themselves reading my stuff, I want to make it as good as I possibly can. I want to make you laugh. I want to present you with something so imaginative that you’ve never seen anything like it before. Mainly, I just want to entertain you for a bit. I’m really happy with Creepazoids because I think it does that. I’m so excited to get this book out into the world next week and should you be one of the people who gives it a chance, I’d like to say thank you in advance. I worked really hard to entertain you, and I hope my particular kind of storytelling and absurdity gels with your particular kind of taste in fiction.