It was really awesome to get two books in the mail yesterday THAT I HAVE STORIES IN, but
No, let’s just leave the sentence there; the “but” can come below. Because, truly and all by itself, it was awesome.
But.
I’m first author on both of those stories, which in this case meant that I wrote the initial drafts, and my co-author edited and embellished as needed. So they feel more like “my” stories than the collabs in which I’m second author.
But…it disappoints me a little to see that co-author’s name has gotten far more play in the publicity I’ve encountered, and is on the cover of one of the books (and mine isn’t).
Of course co-author is a far better-known author than I am, and therefore that name will sell more books than my name will. Even so…
I feel weird even mentioning this publicly. But, well, there it is.
What this says to me is that I need to get more individually-written stories out there.* Well, not out there, but SOLD. I’ve got a healthy handful of stories out at market, and a few more here waiting for me to edit/polish/fix/rewrite; but the only way to make my name bigger, to get my name on covers, is to publish more stories.
And novels.
Oh novels. Oh lordy. (sigh) So, speaking of novels…I’ve had a request to discuss Nightcraft Mother, by a small publisher, so I thought I should give it a quick reread before I do so, because it’s been a little while since I’ve looked at it…hahahaha. I’m now, after an hour, a whopping TEN PAGES into this “read”, and I’ve cut about 800 words, and…yeah.**
Well the prose will be much tighter, anyway. 🙂
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*Which is kind of sad, because I love collaborative writing–I think it often yields up something that’s rather greater than the sum of its parts, and it’s fun to do too–but collaborating with a bigger-name author is going to lead to this kind of thing. I get it. Almost certainly I wouldn’t have even had access to a lot of markets without that name (as I’ve discussed earlier).
**How many unfinished writing projects does one writer really need? Don’t answer that.