First… pardon the website insanity.  I’m fiddling.

Okay…more on the Hunter books.

Again, Hunter’s Rise is the last one.

I had several people ask me if there wasn’t any other way to keep it going.  And more than a few…ah, outright tell me that I just had to do more.

So…here’s the deal.

The sales are dropping.  That’s why the publisher ended it.  I’m going to go ahead and address the questions I’ve been asked on twitter, in email, and several times at RT.

Could I self publish it?

In theory… yes.  But people need to understand that writing is my job.

It’s my paying job… it’s how my bills are paid.  It’s how we buy food.  How I pay for medical bills. How we pay the utilities, etc.  In short…it’s my job… I quit my nursing job to write and if money isn’t coming in steadily from writing, I go back to nursing.

It’s how I provide for my kids.  Generally, my longer length books go to New York and they pay me an advance.  That advance is money that covers bills, food, etc while I’m writing a book.  If I self-publish…that money isn’t there.

Self-publishing the right way is expensive and don’t let anybody tell you different.  I’ve spent hundreds of dollars getting just one story edited.  That’s just one phase of editing.  Books go through several phases.  That was also a shorter story.  Longer stories will cost more and I will never ever publish a book without getting it edited.

Costs included would be:

• editing for the plot/content, etc
• copyedting for typos/misspellings/consistency
• cover art
• formatting (I’m done doing it myself.  It’s too much)
• all promo…usually the publisher does some to get in front of the eyes of booksellers and that doesn’t happen with self publishing.  It’s all me.

This can add up to hundreds of dollars and if you want to do it well?  It’s probably going to be a lot more, into the thousands.  If I’m serious about selfpublishing, I had to do it the right way.

All of this with no promise of a return.  One of my selfpublished (and I’m not talking a backlist book or a short story…I’m talking an original book) earned under $500 in one year.

I can’t make that kind of gamble.

All of this expense must be paid before the writer will ever see a red cent. And…all of this is done when I should be working on the stories that I can sell, guaranteed to publishers who have proven to me that they will help me bring in the money that I need to meet my responsibilities.

I’m not trying to sound mercenary.  But just like you, I’m a person…I’m a mom, I’m a wife.  My husband and I each carry out fair share in this house and it’s too big a gamble to take months of time on several books that haven’t been selling all that well anyway.

Writing is a craft and it’s an art…but it’s also a business.

Could I take it back to my epubs?

Again, in theory… yes.  But I’m already writing a series for them that’s fairly profitable.  I can only logically work in so much.  I’m thinking about a light RS series that would be novella length with them.  I can’t do three different series for them.  It’s too much.

I also have issues with the fact these are longer books.  I can’t 4 months out of my writing schedule to spend writing on books that just aren’t doing well.

People often think that writing is all about the book, all about the art of creating a story.  That is very much a part of it.

But we also have to look at the business aspect.  The writer who doesn’t do that is often the writer who doesn’t keep writing.  I don’t plan on being on those writers.

All series have to end at some point.  Hunter’s Rise was probably one of the best Hunter books I’ve written in a while, if not the best one.  It had two unique characters.

I also had two stories I really wanted to tell… Nessa’s, and Toronto’s.  If it had to end, maybe this was a good time to let it end.

I wish it didn’t have to come to this point, but with sales slumping off, people and business have to make hard decisions.  The publisher had to make theirs… I’m making mine.

I hope you understand.