Monday, May 20, 2013

The Dragon Gem 2nd Ed . . . A Work In Progress

Well, I've gotten the edit/partial rewrite of The Dragon Gem up to 13% over the weekend.  That may just be a result of my wife and son being on a trip to our home state to visit family.  A pesky little thing called work has kept me rooted here at home.  Apparently teaching would have been a better field to go into, a point that I will continue to have driven into my mind over the next three months of my wife's summer break.

Back to The Dragon Gem.  So one thing I'm trying to do with this edit is decrease the chapter length.  Case in point, I'm up to Chapter 7 which actually begins with the original book's Chapter 4 midpoint.  Did that make any sense?  I'm tired enough to not be able to tell.  The point is, I've added 3 chapters to the book's total and I'm only 13% in.  I believe this version will flow much better with this change.

This will be the only book I ever do this with.  Being the first book I ever released, I was a tad naive and a little careless(or a lot naive and ridiculously careless).   Again, this will be a free update for anyone who has already downloaded The Dragon Gem, so it's not some underhanded way to try to get people to buy my book twice.

I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend.  As for me, back to editing!




Brian Beam

Friday, May 10, 2013

The Forgotten King is Here!!!

So, after over a year of blood, sweat, and tears, The Forgotten King's finally released for Kindle.

Okay, so I'm being a little overdramatic.  There was no blood, sweat, or tears.  Well, there was almost tears twice: once when writing a certain part, and once when editing it.  Oh, and I guess there was some sweat when I thought up a lot of the story when jogging . . .

But I digress.

The Forgotten King grew much bigger than I'd anticipated, which is part of the reason it took me a little longer to get it out.  I am incredibly proud of it though, and hope that any of you who read it have a great time experiencing Korin's next adventure.  There's tons of people I'd like to thank for helping to make this possible, but I'm too tired right now to even try to list them without forgetting someone.  You likely know who you are.  A general thank you to everyone who read The Dragon Gem, however.  You've made this journey more than worth it.  I can't begin to express my gratitude for your support.

Alrighty, so my next step is getting the book on Smashwords this weekend, and in print through CreateSpace within the next couple of weeks.  Now, you may notice that there won't be much marketing done for this book, and I am keeping it that way deliberately for now.  As you may have read on here, my next project is a massive revision of The Dragon Gem.  I'm not changing anything story wise, but I'm going to bring it to a much higher level of quality so it can stand proudly next to The Forgotten King.  Also, I have some awesome new cover art for it(which has been posted on here not too long ago).  I plan on having The Dragon Gem 2nd ed. out by the end of the summer.  And then, with the definitive versions of both books completed, I will tout the heck out of The Forgotten King.  Think of its release today as an advance release for previous readers of The Dragon Gem.

And then, I'll be getting out a little book of short stories, and will start the final volume of Korin's Journal towards the end of the year.  I've got some big plans for it.  At some point towards the end of the year, a couple other projects may pop up on my nifty progress bars on the right side of the screen here.

Again, thank you to everyone involved in making The Forgotten King a reality.  If you're reading this, you're probably one of them.  Thank you from the bottom of my heart(you probably deserve better than that cliche . . . I'm sorry).

So check out The Forgotten King!  213K + words for the low price of $4.99!  That's like . . . an incredibly small decimal amount per word that my caculator won't compute for me.  

You can pick it up on Amazon!

Plus, a certain someone has big plans for his share of the profits . . .