Kat Mellon: ◎ Creation Giveaway + A Word of Encouragement

Putting a new book out on the self-published market means that to get anyone to care, you have to literally hand them your book. Correction: you have to do the internet-land equivalent of handing them your book by letting them download it for free. It hurts my heart to give away the fruit of my labor so liberally, but it's a necessary evil for people like me who are just starting off and attempting to build a name for themselves. (There's a shit ton of competition out there!)

While giving away e-book copies is much more cost-effective (because hey, emailing someone a PDF or MOBI doesn't cost anything!), it's good to give out a physical book once in a while. Therefore, I'm doing a giveaway on Goodreads. It runs from December 8th to December 20th, and there are two paperback copies of Creation up for grabs. You need to be a Goodreads member to enter. (If you aren't a member but love books, join. It's a great website!)

Without further ado on my part....

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Creation

by Kat Mellon

Giveaway ends December 20, 2012.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Now, I'm going to share something I posted on Facebook because I think it's important that people realize this.

After pouring countless hours and a fair amount of money into the Creation re-release, I have sold a grand total of two e-book copies. This is why it's important to really love and have a passion for whatever it is you want to do with your life. I tell stories, and whether anyone will pay to read them or not is not what matters to me at the end of the day. (Mind you, I'm talking about the part of the day that comes AFTER I've cleaned up the cups and leftovers from my pity-party!)

Am I sad that my book is not doing as well as I thought it would? Yes. In fact, I'm pretty damn depressed about it. But will I stop writing novels? Uh, no. I will never let stuff like this keep me from writing books because there's nothing I love more than finding a quiet (or not-so-quiet) nook, plopping down a keyboard or laptop, and letting figments of my imagination do their crazy little things in their crazy little worlds.

Tl;dr: Shit happens, keep your head up, write (or sing/act/dance/program/etc.) because it makes YOU happy.

My first two books sold relatively well (those being Darkness Surrounding 1.0 and the first edition of Creation), so it was a bit of a burn to sell only two copies over the first few days. To be honest, that number has only creeped up to seven sold copies in total so far, and even that number still hurts. Don't get me wrong: I'm grateful for the sales I have made, but when your great aspiration is to at least, like, break even on all the expenses self-publishing can incur, low sale numbers can wear down on the soul and the pocketbook. Besides, humans are inherently kind of greedy and are always aspiring for bigger and better things. But I digress.

Like I said, though, I will never get beaten down enough to stop writing. I don't think I could ever not write. I have too many weird dreams (literal weird dreams!) and characters in my head to not write. If I stopped writing, all those crazy dreams with Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner (yep, that went down last night) that usually get turned into books would undoubtedly exact their revenge for being kept bottled up like that. I'm quite sure I would spontaneously combust from the pressure.

Anyway, here's my novel-writing/editing/releasing/partying timeline. (You know, in case you were wondering.)

December: Edit "How To Survive NaNoWriMo and Other Self-Imposed Atrocities." This is a short (10,000 word) non fiction thing I wrote for my graduate school application that I will be distributing for free right before Christmas. You're welcome.

December/January: Edit and get beta readers on Flowers When You're Dead in time for the ABNA (Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award) 2013 contest.

February/March: Finish draft/edit/release short story titled Noise. It's in the same vein as Creation, but shorter. This'll be a 99 cent e-book that I'll set to "free" as often as possible.

March-May: Finish/edit/publish Don't Let The Sun Fool You. May or may not develop script co-currently, as it would make an intriguing film. (It's inspired by the movie Dredd, so there you go.)

May-August: Sort out the disaster that is Darkness Surrounding and The Atavists Trilogy. (More on that later. There's a price to pay for developing a seriously complicated storyline as a fourteen-year-old. My twenty-year-old self has a lot of work to do...)

Tl;dr: There be shit to get done.

Anyway, I love you all, and I love you all the more if you actually got all the way through this post. Just for that, I'll bestow upon you an extremely entertaining GIF that sums up what I do when I'm not writing. Toodles!