So here we are, the day after Bygones was released; it’s still too early to tell how well it’s doing, but I was exceptionally excited to see that the number of preorders for this latest Vasily Korsokovach adventure were greater than for the prior book in the series, Ditched. I don’t know if that is a good benchmark or not — I’m hoping it is, a possible leading indicator that folks are connecting with Vas and looking forward to each new outing. That seems to be the case with Sean Colbeth; my reserved Downeast Maine detective appears to have quite a following, which warms my heart to no end.
New releases are such a rollercoaster of emotion for me. While I’ve gotten faster at writing these novels, it still takes a fair amount of time to get them polished into the final product that appears for purchase; after all of that work, finally letting them go is actually a little bit traumatic. So many worries hit, literally, as I press the button to publish: did I miss a typo? Will the cover pop on the titles list? Was there enough character development? Was there too much?
My greatest fear is messing up the continuity of my universe. Back when I wrote Blindsided, little did I realize that choices I made for Sean would need to be carried through to the sequels; I cannot tell you how often I flipped through that first book as I wrote Outsider, desperate to make sure that little things like hair color, food choices and wry observations remained consistent. By the time I started writing for Vasily, I knew I needed to be slightly more organized and forced myself to start using Scrivener instead of my beloved Microsoft Word; as a tool for writers, Scrivener allowed me to keep very careful character and location notes that could be easily referenced as I wrote. That has saved me from accidentally changing Alejandro’s height (let’s not discuss how he went from 6′ 2″ to shorter than Vasily in the space of one chapter) or putting Vasily behind the wheel of a blue Camaro (it’s red, for the record).
So, what does an author do the day after a book release? I suppose, by rights, I should host a release party, but I’ve never done one before and have no clue if anyone would even come if I did. These days, I imagine something like that would probably be via Zoom, Teams or Facebook Live; I guess if there is enough interest, I could do one. Reading a few selected passages would probably be fun if not completely out of context.
I suppose I’ll be doing what most authors probably do on the day after: take a few hours to savor a job well done before diving into the next book. Because there is always a next book…