Hey, you can read Priest on your Kindle now! Or the Kindle app for iPhone/iPad/Blackberry. And Mac or PC but for that you can download the PDF.

Reading a book on the Kindle app for iPhone is pretty keen, I love that app. I own a Kindle2 and I mostly use my iPhone now.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003OIBG44

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http://www.squaremans.com/Priest.pdf

If there is, as I hope, a substantive audience for this book and this series, I don’t think there’s any danger they’re all going to discover the book from my website and word of mouth. It takes the kind of promotion a Publisher can muster to get a lot of readers. So I don’t think there any downside to posting the entire book online, where maybe a couple of hundred people might eventually see it. And I’m proud of it, I want people to read it!

So here it is, in PDF form for the nonce. I’d love to get it in Kindle form, as I think the Kindle is keen, and the Kindle app (for iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Mac, and PC) is a great way to read, very well designed. Alas I think the only way to get the whole thing on Kindle is to attach a price to it. Which I’ll probably do, something like $3 or $5. Since you can read the PDF for free, you’d basically be paying for the right to read it on your Kindle, but I did spend months working on it. I’m not terribly averse to the idea of getting a little money for it.

Now that this edit is done, it’s on to book two!

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This is a good time to stop and look at how the site is doing. We’re halfway through the book, and the site has been up for two months now with pretty regular updates. I’ve promoted the book on forums I’m on, and I’ve created a Facebook page for the book.

My goal for this site remains; build an audience for the book. I feel as though Geoff did a tremendous job getting a theme that maximized readability. I have friends who loved the book and have helped me promote the site.

I planned on paying an artist to do some full-color illustrations for the book, as I feel like showcasing some great art is an effective way to hook potential readers, and I planning on recording an audio version of the book. All these things were planned for from the beginning.

But the site is not doing its job. It’s hard to tell from the analytics how many visitors are humans reading the book and how many are bots crawling the site, but it seems like the site has about 30-50 readers.

Having 30-50 people reading the book makes me happy. I love those 30-50 people. But the goal of the site was to build an audience that grew. To regularly attract new readers. It’s likely that I am gaining new readers every week, but not at a rate greater than that at which I am losing readers, and not more than 1 or 2 a week.

So in that sense, I must conclude things are not working. The Facebook page has about 30 fans, but most of those were Beta Readers and they all read the whole thing before I even created this site.

To compound matters, there’s been no response from anyone who was not a Beta Reader. Ok, so people tend not to comment, I understand that. We’d need 100 people reading each post, on average, before we got 1 comment. I think it’s safe to assume that someone visiting the site and reading each update likes what they read. But it would be nice to hear from the readers. Though silence is better than “this is crap!”

So what next? I’m not sure. I had two options in mind;

Plan A: Put the whole book up, make it as easy as possible for everyone to read everything, comment, link people back here. Build a community.

Plan B: Put the first 3/4th of the book up, then put the whole thing on Kindle for like $5 (maybe less, price points are tricky).

I’m leaning toward Plan A at the moment, as I think that’s probably the best way to maximize the number of people reading the book. And if I ever get to the point where I’m talking to an editor or agent, having not tried to sell the book myself may count in my favor.

The only problem with Plan A is that I still need to take an editing pass to the last thirty chapters. Up until now I’ve been editing 2 – 3 chapters at a time in order to get the chapters up here for people to read. So I’m considering stopping the updates for the nonce, and just finishing this “ready for the web” edit. Obviously I have earlier drafts which are readable, but they’re not ready for the general public. Even this draft will require the work of a pro familiar with the genre to get into publication shape.

I’m still planning on getting some art for the book and I’m about to try and record a test chapter for the Audiobook and see how people react to that. So the updates may stop for a few days, but the site and the book are still moving forward and there’s a good chance that soon you’ll be able to read the whole thing, all in one go, with just a click of the mouse.

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