Amazon paid my royalties from Travelers Road, now I can buy two or three gallons of gas. I'm rich, I tell you. Seriously though, the whole reason for putting the book out there wasn't to make money, (okay, it was, but the odds of it making more than triple digits were long indeed.) The point was to get my name out there, and to a certain extent, it did. Not knowing anything about the writing industry, this was an exercise in learning the ropes. It also taught me about marketing.
To many aspiring writers who put their feet in the water, this would be discouraging, not me. This year I learned agents don't really know any more than you do. There is no big red button to push and a magic marketing machine springs to life. This is an organic process that grows with every book, each chapter. If words were snowflakes, then snowballs would be novels. Conditions have to be right for that snowball to be cohesive enough to roll down hill and become an avalanche.
With that in mind, I've finally come up with the title of Daniel and Charlotte's next adventure. Incidentally, that was the working title I used when saving my work. A picture forms in my mind of our two wild west detectives standing beside a phone booth, but I digress...
The title was going to be two words and would have some connection with the first book. The word 'Traveler' would refer to Daniel's journey, not only through time, but his wanderings through the desert and his current living arrangements.
The first adventure was basically land locked. In the second novel, the Brazos, Trinity and Colorado rivers figure into it, so I thought one of the words would be 'River', or have something to do with water. The trouble was, this amphibious adventure also held the paths between the rivers, the trails alongside the banks. How to include them?
I narrowed it down to five or six choices. As circumstance would warrant, a second opinion helped me make the final choice. My good friend Mike Walters suggested the title of what would become Travelers Road.
Today my wife helped me pick from the finalists. The layers of suggestive context in the title appealed to my creative endeavor. Remember: The story is a growing narrative, I have the good fortune of chronicling these events. Flowing from my fingertips to the keyboard, the adventure unfolds. The author doesn't say; 'go do this,' In this case, the tail wags the dog. I'm simply writing events down as they come.
The next book will be titled Crossing Paths. Not only is it suggestive of the friends and adversaries we meet, the descriptive nature alludes to the journey down the road of life as well.
To many aspiring writers who put their feet in the water, this would be discouraging, not me. This year I learned agents don't really know any more than you do. There is no big red button to push and a magic marketing machine springs to life. This is an organic process that grows with every book, each chapter. If words were snowflakes, then snowballs would be novels. Conditions have to be right for that snowball to be cohesive enough to roll down hill and become an avalanche.
With that in mind, I've finally come up with the title of Daniel and Charlotte's next adventure. Incidentally, that was the working title I used when saving my work. A picture forms in my mind of our two wild west detectives standing beside a phone booth, but I digress...
The title was going to be two words and would have some connection with the first book. The word 'Traveler' would refer to Daniel's journey, not only through time, but his wanderings through the desert and his current living arrangements.
The first adventure was basically land locked. In the second novel, the Brazos, Trinity and Colorado rivers figure into it, so I thought one of the words would be 'River', or have something to do with water. The trouble was, this amphibious adventure also held the paths between the rivers, the trails alongside the banks. How to include them?
I narrowed it down to five or six choices. As circumstance would warrant, a second opinion helped me make the final choice. My good friend Mike Walters suggested the title of what would become Travelers Road.
Today my wife helped me pick from the finalists. The layers of suggestive context in the title appealed to my creative endeavor. Remember: The story is a growing narrative, I have the good fortune of chronicling these events. Flowing from my fingertips to the keyboard, the adventure unfolds. The author doesn't say; 'go do this,' In this case, the tail wags the dog. I'm simply writing events down as they come.
The next book will be titled Crossing Paths. Not only is it suggestive of the friends and adversaries we meet, the descriptive nature alludes to the journey down the road of life as well.
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