Talk to Me in a Different Setting

Not that you talk to me much here. Would it hurt to call now and then?

That of course doesn't apply to those of you who do, in fact, talk to me here. And elsewhere. Love you guys.

In any case, I'm the Reddit Fantasy Writer of the Day over at /r/Fantasy. Basically it means I get to shamelessly self-promote for a day and answer some questions. Stop on by if you'd like to ask me something!

Pseudonymception

As I crawl towards the halfway mark on the first draft of Clanless, I've begun to spare a bit of thought for thinks like cover art - and marketing. It seems the prevailing wisdom is to make sure your name is associated with one genre and one genre only - in which case I'd want to publish Clanless, and any future works of science fiction, under a different name than Tristan Gregory. Which is itself a pen name.

No doubt keeping things simple for my readers is worth making them confusing for me.

I'm still not sure I'll follow the prevailing wisdom in this case, though. Most of my very favorite authors have published work in several genres, and I like to think that readers are pretty smart. Certainly they can clue to the face that certain books  are unrelated to each other unless specified... right? I can always start including a "other books by" section in my front matter which breaks my titles down by fantasy and science fiction, I suppose...

Still, all the talk about "building brands" is fairly influential. I don't have a lot of marketing clout to leverage, and so any trick I can use to keep  my efforts focused on my most likely readers is a good thing. Then again, I kinda hope that even readers who find me through my fantasy novels might want to try out my science fiction. Personally I've always seen it as one and the same, as summarized by The Third Law and it's corollary.

I suppose it's comforting to know that I can always change my mind and switch the name on the cover. Unless of course I get successful enough that people would notice that kind of thing. In which case... mission freaking accomplished.

Making Some Marketing Noise

While I'm still far more concerned with writing new books rather than promoting older ones, I'm going to be rattling a few cages this summer in hopes of stirring up a few more reviews for both Twixt Heaven and Hell and The Wandering Tale novellas.

To that end, I'm giving away a few copies of Twixt to folks who think they might be interested in reviewing it. You can get more details in this post I made on reddit, but the long and short of it is: If you want a free eBook of Twixt, email me at tristan.gregory.author@gmail.com and tell me what format you'd like it in.

Offer is open for a week or so, or until I've given out twenty or so copies. Response so far has been decent, so I'm not sure which will come first!

Edit: I'll also mention that I've pulled Twixt from publication on Smashwords and downstream channels for awhile in preparation for trying out the KDP Select program. Despite my dislike of the exclusivity thing, I'm gonna be doing a lot of experimenting this summer and this is one experiment that was too obvious not to try.