If you’re gonna fly, you’ve gotta get off the ground, right?

For the last six days, my book has been languishing in the Amazon Kindle bookstore, unread by anyone. So I decided to shake things up a bit and run a free promotion; if people don’t read the book, I’ll never know if it’s any good and that’s what I want. I’ve done the best I can with it and now I want a public critique of my work. This is to answer the big question – do I quit my day job?

It’s what I’d like to do. I’m working on the next book already, and there are several more I’d like to finish and publish before I have to make the one-way trip across the Styx but I’m not going to be able to write any of them if I can’t develop an audience. I’m not independently wealthy and it does cost money to write and publish a book. That’s in spite of using free software and doing nearly all the work myself.

So the adventure continues, now with the book getting some downloads, and hopefully some readers. Right now, it’s all about feedback – the money can wait; I need to know what people think of the writing and of the story.

I tried to make the characters, at least the protagonists, sort of ageless (think adventures of Tin-Tin) and I’d like to know if I succeeded. As I think about it in retrospect, that’s the one thing that bothers me most about the book – I still can’t describe the ideal reader and every schoolboy knows how important that is.

So far I’ve had thirty downloads, and no reviews yet. I’m waiting. I wish I could know something about the demographics of the downloaders. (Is that even a word?)