One Writer's Favorite is Everyone Else's Dud

A few hours ago, I decided to pull Banshee off the shelf and reread it (or at least reread a few random chapters). I pretty much relived the writing process and called to mind the reasons why, of the three books I published to help launch Prizm, it was (and still remains) my favorite even though it appears to be everyone's least favorite of my books.

Odd how things work out, eh? What might be your best or most favorite effort turns out to be a real dud when tossed out there in the big, bad world of general readership. :D I mentioned this to friends before, but to summarize, I hold Banshee closest to my heart because it's the book that best represents the kind of fiction I enjoy reading the most. I certainly would love to write more of the same in the future, but if readers are turned off by the subject matter and the general approach to a character's coming-of-age, it's important to keep those in mind while planning out the next novel.

Does that mean that I'm selling out by not pursuing a similar road for my next book? I really don't know. I enjoyed writing Icarus in Flight, and I enjoyed writing Masks: Rise of Heroes, but each has its own high and low points that I really shouldn't compare them. Masks comes second to Banshee because in many ways, it also follows the kind of character development that the ghost story has even though it's a contemporary fantasy as well as a comedy. And I'm not really inclined to write something like Icarus again (unless I'm so inspired that I just can't ignore it) even though it seems to be everyone's favorite of my three books.

Curioser and curioser. But I guess I shouldn't dwell on mysteries and just soldier on.

I finally finished going over my galley for Masks: Evolution and happily sent off the few corrections back to my editor. I'm certainly much more confident with this book compared to Rise of Heroes because of the much longer time it took me to go over edits and so on (I learned a pretty hard lesson from last time). This is it, then. It's do or die now, since the next step is to forward the corrected galleys to the printers. Come January, I'll be turning my attention to Masks: Ordinary Champions, and that's that (at least for now). I'll have to say goodbye to Eric and the gang till I've got a plotbunny for a sequel.

When my books were released in the summer, I went on a massive email campaign, contacting different bloggers/reviewers in hopes of getting a few of them interested in reading and reviewing my new releases. Then marketing had to be set aside for a while because I needed to work on (and finish) my Masks trilogy.

Now that I'm pretty much done with everything for that series, I'll be back on the marketing trail, doggedly knocking on cyber doors for promotional opportunities. Ouch. It's a long, painful, and pride-battering process, but needs must.