September 2021. I’ve finished Zanzibar’s Rings. Well, enough to send it off to the editor and beta readers. I’m really honoured they should give up their time for this.
The rest of the plan
I hope to have all the comments on the manuscript back by early November, and work on rewrites until Christmas, and send it for checking again if necessary in the ealry new year.
If that goes to plan then we are on schedule for a launch date of 22nd February 2022. In English, that’s 22.02.2022. I couldn’t resist it when I realised.
Before that, I expect to have a cover reveal in early December, to start to raise awareness, if that’s possible. Although it has slipped out in a couple of places (will a couple by the time December comes, I hope not more than that). The monochrome ringed planet on the draft cover is just for now. More colour is coming! I will need people to host cover reveal (and/or launch) posts, so let pme know if you can help.
Then the launch plan. I don’t know whether to do very much. The last in series launch seems relatively low-key, since if most people haven’t read the first two… well, I suppose it’s an opportunity to grab new readers for the series, and that can only be good.
- Launch post
- Guest appearances
- Possible virtual tour during February and March 2022
- Giveaway
Those seem to be the things I’ve always done, and I still wonder whether they work nowadays. I probably should be doing video launches and podcasts. But I think I should stick with my skill set for now, and see what happens.
You can pre-order Zanzibar’s Rings!
You can–if you’re really keen, you can pre-order it already. That would be wonderful! Here are the links:
Amazon ~~~ Apple iBooks ~~~ B&N(Nook) ~~~ Kobo ~~~ Scribd ~~~ Smashwords
And, yes, there will be a paperback version. More news of that in the new year.
What comes after…?
I have some ideas for a new setting for a science fiction novel. It might give me scope to try some new ideas (to me, not to the scifi world, I’m afraid.) I may well keep this website as the showcase for all my scifi work, though. I hope that will make sense, in the long term.
Some of the Viridian characters appear in my short story collection Snowflakes and Shivers, due out in October. I have some other pieces written about the Viridian world, and as I’m planning to remove the VS Sampler from the Smashwords shelves, there may be room for a more organised library here.
And I was planning at one stage to put the Cavalieri-Chang Universal Word Usage entries here (the snippets beneath each chapter heading.) I’m not sure whether I will or not. It seemed a suitably offbeat thing to do in 2013, but now? Well…
Plenty to think about!