This blog post was published on and may be out of date. Visit starshipsmage.com for current information on the Starship’s Mage universe.
Starship’s Mage: Episode 1 launched yesterday afternoon. It’s available for $0.99 USD on Amazon here: myBook.to/StarshipsMage1 (the link should take you to the page in your country’s store) and on Smashwords here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/388552
Obviously, Starship’s Mage, as both a serialized novel and my first e-book, is a bit of an experiment. A few lessons I learned along the way:
1. The formatting guidelines for all the e-book publishers are very similar – and are also general good practices to follow. Making full use of Word’s stylesets (and beating your style-set into submission to how you want it to look) is a necessary task to e-publish, and makes your own writing life easier as you go.
2. Read the FAQs for the publisher! This may seem obvious, but while I skimmed Amazon’s FAQ and looked at large chunks of it in detail, I missed there was an ‘up to twelve hour’ delay between my hitting publish and the book appearing online. Since I didn’t realize this, my cover artist was still working on the cover for Starship’s Mage: Episode 1 on the morning of the 15th! Thankfully, ‘up to twelve hour’ turned out to be ‘roughly three hours,’ but that’s not something I would rely on.
Smashwords also is quite up-front about the delay before your book is available on any of their secondary retailers – two to three weeks. Since Smashwords was the second site I made Starship’s Mage available on, it is unlikely to be available on Kobo, iBooks, or any other sites until January.
3. Having someone else re-read everything. And I do mean EVERYTHING. The back text for Starship’s Mage originally launched with the wrong year for the second Episode! This has now been fixed, but it’s a small amount of egg on my face that would have been missed by having my wife read that page.
The other aspect of the experiment, releasing a serialized novel, we’ll have to see how it progresses before I can really comment on.
For the curious, I am targeting to finish Starship’s Mage: Episode 2 in February and have it up in mid-to-late March.
Happy reading!
Glynn Stewart
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