Stripped, the first novel in my California Gothic series, is currently with my editor. Whilst it’s having the finishing touches put to some of the later chapters, you can start to read it through Amazon’s Kindle store; the first six chapters being made available as Stripped: Down to the Bone for just 99c!
99c for the beginning of the story! That’s the price of a single on iTunes, what do you have to lose? The subsequent two parts of the story will be available at $2.99 each, meaning the cost of buying it separately will be a few cents cheaper than buying the whole book. If you don’t like it you’ve only lost a buck, and you can take revenge by leaving really bad review!
You can try it out and see what you think on Amazon US here:
And Amazon UK here:
For reasons best known to Amazon the book’s description isn’t showing up on the US site, but doesn’t that only add to the suspense of the reading experience!
When I started writing Stripped I had the idea to put up my first draft (read through for spelling mistakes and such) online so that people could read it as it was being written. It seemed like an interesting way to get people’s opinions on what I was writing as I was writing it, but it quickly became apparent that there were a few inherent flaws with this.
First drafts get revised into second and third drafts for a very good reason. There are sections where, having written it, you know you have to go back and make more explicit ‘that idea or plot point that you know in your head is so important but which really only has a placeholder in the first draft’. Your characters start off rough sketches as you work out who they are and what they want. You don’t necessarily write the chapters in order, and will probably have a few key chapters missing until right towards the very end of the process.
None of this makes for especially good reading, even for sympathetic friends / relatives / editors who are just taking a look to see where you’re going and offer a few opinions. So that idea was abandoned, but it has re-grown in another form.
My last post was about how incredibly impatient I was to get the book up somewhere that people could read it and, if they liked it, buy it. Through cajoling my editor I’ve been able to prepare the first six chapters of Stripped (about the first quarter of the novel) for publication. After Stripped: Down to the Bone the subsequent parts of the novel will be released as Stripped: Personal Jesus and Stripped: The Darkest Star. The whole novel will be available as on book (and on formats other than the Kindle) after that.
So go ahead. Drop a buck and let me know what you think.
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