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Sustenance Trope Map
Tag: book promotion
Free for Two Days Only: Sustenance (Kindle Edition)
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On 7–8 September 2025, the Kindle version of my novella Sustenance will be available free to everyone on Amazon. (It’s always free if you’re a KindleUnlimited member, but these two days open it up to all readers.)
So what is Sustenance?
It’s a novella that begins with the dust and grit of rural Iowa – soybean fields, rusted trucks, a small town where everyone knows your name (and your secrets). At first glance, it reads like plainspoken realism, narrated by a local mechanic who insists he’s just a “regular guy.” But then the ground literally shifts. A crash. Figures glimpsed by firelight in the woods. Naked, violet-skinned beings who don’t laugh, don’t sleep, don’t even breathe.
What follows is not your usual alien-invasion story. It’s quieter, stranger, and more unsettling. The encounters with the visitors aren’t about lasers or spaceships – they’re about language, culture, and the limits of human understanding. What happens when concepts like property, law, or even woman and man don’t translate? What does it mean when intimacy itself becomes a site of misunderstanding?
Sustenance is for readers who:
- Gravitate toward literary fiction with a speculative edge rather than straight genre beats.
- Appreciate the mix of the banal and the uncanny – the smell of corn dust giving way to the shock of alien otherness.
- Are interested in themes of language, power, misunderstanding, and human self-deception.
- Enjoy writers like Jeff VanderMeer, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, or Denis Johnson – voices that blur realism, philosophy, and estrangement.
This isn’t a story that offers tidy answers. It lingers, provokes, and resists easy moral closure. Think of it less as a sci-fi romp and more as a philosophical fable wrapped in small-town dust and cicada-song.
This version of the book is available in these Kindle storefronts:
United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and India
For more details, visit the Sustenance page.
📚 Grab your free Kindle copy on 7–8 September 2025.
Writing is Just the Tip of the Iceberg
I hate to be the bearer of bad news – especially if you’re still slogging through a draft of your first manuscript. You know what some people say about writing a book is the hard part.
Lies. Damned lies. That’s the frothy, twinkly nonsense parroted by people who’ve never published anything beyond a social media post, probably only a comment.
Let me tell you the truth. The actual, bloodstained, coffee-fuelled truth:
Writing the book is the easy part.
It’s the visible tip of the iceberg, smugly floating above the surface, soaking up the praise and admiration. Meanwhile, everything else – the sleepless nights, the decimal-point royalty statements, the unpaid invoices to your own soul – is lurking beneath, waiting to sink your mental health like the HMS Delusion.
So here it is, for posterity and pity:
Post-Writing Gauntlet: The Real Job Begins
1. Editing (Five Times, If You’re Lucky)
- Developmental editing – “Is your plot a plot or a pile of wet spaghetti?”
- Line editing – Making your sentences less embarrassing.
- Copyediting – Catching your consistent misuse of ‘affect’ and ‘effect’.
- Proofreading – The last defence against the typo apocalypse.
- Beta feedback – Friends who suddenly vanish when asked to read a draft.
2. Formatting and Typesetting
- Print vs digital layouts. Word crimes meet paragraph crimes.
- EPUBs that break for fun.
- That one widow on page 243 you didn’t notice until the proof copy arrived.
3. Cover Design
- DIY, Fiverr roulette, or mortgage your cat to hire a professional.
- Matching tone, genre conventions, and market expectations.
- Spelling your own name correctly. (Don’t laugh, it happens.)
4. ISBNs and Metadata Hell
- ISBN purchases (if you’re not relying on Amazon’s identifiers).
- Title, subtitle, BISAC categories, keywords, blurbs, author bio — all rewritten seventeen times.
5. Publishing Platform Setup
- Kindle Direct Publishing, IngramSpark, Kobo, Draft2Digital, Smashwords — pick your poison.
- Print proofs, bleed settings, trim sizes, the baffling difference between matte and gloss.
6. Marketing (a.k.a. Screaming Into the Void)
- Author website & blog (SEO: your new religion).
- Social media presence — the façade of charm over existential dread.
- Newsletter with a totally non-spammy freebie opt-in.
- Ads: Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Google. Burn money to test the water temperature.
7. Book Launch
- ARCs, blog tours, launch events, or at least pretending you’re doing those things.
- Coordinating reviews before anyone has read the damn thing.
- Press kits and media outreach — basically shouting “LOOK AT ME” with tact.
8. Ongoing Sales Maintenance
- Price promos, countdown deals, boxed sets, bundling — keep flogging the corpse.
- Monitoring sales dashboards like a Victorian ghost watches the wallpaper peel.
- Adjusting metadata because one reviewer didn’t understand it was satire.
9. Audiobook Production (If You Hate Money)
- Narrator auditions, contracts, studio time.
- Alternatively, read it yourself and discover your own voice is intolerable.
- Or muddle through with an AI speech companion. Hullo, ElevenLabs.
- Distribution through ACX or Findaway, both of which will pay you in dry leaves.
10. Accounting and Legal Fuss
- Tracking royalties across platforms.
- Filing taxes as an “author-publisher-entrepreneur-marketer-entity”.
- Copyright registration, contracts, intellectual property trolls under the bridge.
11. Dealing With Readers
- Responding to fan mail (both lovely and deranged).
- Ignoring 1-star reviews that say “not what I expected, didn’t read it”.
- Navigating book clubs who want a discount because they’re “doing you a favour”.
12. Mental Health and Motivation
- Impostor syndrome, burnout, elation, despair — the writer’s buffet.
- Rewriting your author bio weekly because you don’t know who you are anymore.
Optional Add-Ons (for masochists)
- Translations and foreign rights – Because English isn’t the only language in which you can fail to sell books.
- Merchandise – T-shirts nobody buys, mugs that mock your financial situation.
- Public speaking / readings – Summon the courage to read your sex scenes aloud in a room of pensioners.
Ridley Park 