Launch day for the box set was a “success” yesterday, in that I actually made back expenses for once! And remember guys, the sale is on until September 8, after which the price will increase back to $9.99. So if you haven’t had the chance to grab all 1900+ pages of this weird ass character-driven adventure, now’s the chance!
This has given me a bit more confidence to get my ass into gear and promote my YA Horror book, Birthplace. When I released Birthplace last year, I did nothing more than talk about it in my blog. I didn’t attempt to chase down reviewers–I was in the middle of writing down Sapphire’s Flight and felt like shit about myself. Birthplace, like Jaeth’s Eye, is a hard sell for a different reason: a very unlikable protagonist from a first person POV. If you read this book without wanting to punch Pablo in the face after the first chapter, you’re a good person.
That’s the thing, though. I’ve never written stories for anyone but myself, and I wrote Birthplace to explore the life and emotions of a young man with a lot of anger and self-loathing in his heart. I may have dropped more than a bit of myself in it, too–I always do with my novels. I wrote it after giving birth to my daughter in 2009, after failing my second semester of college (it was a magnificent failure, I think I fucked up over half of my exams in Civil Engineering).
So I owe more to this book than I’ve given it credit for. I think part of the reason for my negligence of it was that I knew it was a hard sell from the beginning–a friend who beta-read it hated the main character from the first chapter, and then later on, I entered the thing in the 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, wherein it managed to get past the blurb stage. I got two reviewers who tore the novel to pieces: one got the main character’s name wrong, which made me suspect they even read past the first paragraph. I forgot what the other one did, but I know it was bad enough that I reported it to Amazon as low quality reviews and they surprisingly enough agreed with me.
After it was published, I posted the story on Wattpad (which I’ve since taken down), where it didn’t really get much reads despite heavy promotion. I got a total of two positive comments–strange for this site, but it tells me at least that I’m not reaching the proper audience, and I just didn’t have the time or energy to do anything more.
But a lot has changed since then. Acceptance of my novel Jaeth’s Eye–arguably more flawed on a technical scale because of epic fantasy growing pains–has made me go and take a second look at this forgotten child. An unlikable character is not the worst thing in the world, and it’s not like Pablo doesn’t go through any character growth whatsoever–he does, and I think he does it wonderfully, as characters go. Pablo is one of my few characters that go through a real “redemption” arc, and I’d love to see his story through.
So maybe I’m going to try to give it another chance, to figure out if the world will give it another chance. And then maybe I’ll convince myself to find time for the sequels, Birthright and Rebirth.
