A tale of self-publishing - Launch Recap

The day has finally come! We were waiting for this for a while now, but time flows fast during this pandemic, so it’s finally here. Our debut novel Shackles of the Storm is launching today at every major retailer! 

We wanted to make this day special, but because it’s our first book, we had no idea what to expect. Publishing a book is a long journey with a lot of learning and gaining experience, especially for a self-published author. When we started to write our book baby we had never expected that one day we will publish it. This story started as a coping mechanism to our long-distance relationship and because we wanted to create something for ourselves, a whole world just for us. But when we got close to the last chapters we realized that it will really be a book, and it could be published should we want that to happen. So we dived deep into the world of publishing, the how-to videos, mistakes to avoid, and the nerve-wracking waiting period before our first betas gave their judgment. 

But since we’ve so far survived this journey, I’d like to recap what has happened.

I. The book-baby

Just in case you haven’t heard it enough already, Shackles of the Storm is the first book of a fantasy series we named Spirits of Seiran. It is set in a Middle-East-inspired fantasy world, with scorching sun, endless dunes, and ruins of a once flourishing empire people call the Old Garden. Our main character, Zaira is a djinn imprisoned into a human body for the crimes she committed against the ruling force in their world. 

Sounds thoughtful and concrete, isn’t it? Well, that’s not exactly how it started. Initially, I’ve just written a one-page scene with her smoking crystal drugs and I told Dar that she is a djinn because I don’t like to role-play humans. This is how we started writing on day 1, the pantser way. Then we just played the story like a tabletop RPG (although we did it by writing on Skype, and later Discord, since you can’t really turn spoken words into a book), writing the chapters from the chatlog. It was fun – or still is, since we’re already drafting book 3 with book 2 being in translation, and no earthly power can stop us from continuing forever.

So let’s see without any spoilers what it became! (Note: I’m just too happy with this blurb, grabbing every reason to include it. Enjoy!)

“Kahlaran hasn't had a djinn in decades. At least none that they know of. Zaira has so far successfully avoided being found out as a wind spirit, steering clear of trouble and living the life of an ordinary human. Her luck finally runs out when she meets one of her own kind: a water djinn somehow hell-bent on evicting her for a murder she didn't commit. Without her past djinn powers and the whole city against her, the odds of a happy ending are quite slim. Luckily, she's not alone. Forming a hasty alliance with fellow scapegoat and hot-headed mercenary Ezair, the pair has to navigate through the slums and shady brothels of the city, fighting guards, ghouls, magicians, and occasionally each other. But can they really overcome an enemy capable of peeking through every puddle, cup, and teardrop?”

II. The Oscar-speech 

The biggest lesson we learned, that a thing like this shows who our real friends are. I don’t know if they will read this, but I want to thank our friends who supported us on this journey. We are both very grateful for them for giving feedback, or just being a cheerleader team for us. One of our friends and his fiancé were especially helpful in beta reading, they gave detailed feedback on every chapter we sent them and made our book much better. We want to thank everyone who read it beforehand and gave any feedback, you were the ones keeping us going, telling us that we’re good enough to write and one day tell our story to the whole world. But I’m gonna cut this short before this post really turns into an Oscar-speech. 

The take-home message is: keep your supportive friends close and don’t listen to the rest. One person cheering for you while telling it straight that they will never read your work because they loathe reading, but be happy for your success nonetheless, is way more impactful than the dozen people dragging your book through the mud out of jealousy or making up every excuse in the book not to read it just after they swore on everything they would. Just roll your eyes and keep hyping yourself with the real friends.

III. The numbers

I’m planning to write a whole blogpost about how we tried to market our books before publishing, but I can’t really tell which idea worked and which flopped. So far, I know that 5 people pre-ordered our book. 5 people trusted us to deliver them something good. Frankly, that’s five more than what I thought would happen, but it was a pleasant surprise. 

We will have a book tour starting tomorrow (14th of June) with 37 bloggers and bookstragrammers, so stay tuned, you might see us basically everywhere! It is organized by Love Book Tours, they made us a gorgeous graphic, even sharing our self-made promo graphics in their Instagram stories (thank you, Kelly!). We are looking forward to the tour, and hope reviewers will like SotS.  We also sent out ARC’s, 3 of them already gave it a review (3 on Goodreads and 1 on Amazon, but it will be 2 hopefully). We got two 4-stars and one 5-star. For a debut novel, I considered this good, even the 4-star ones had nothing wrong to say, I guess it just didn’t blow their minds, but it’s fine. At this point, the quantity of the reviews is the most important.

Ok, this blogpost became longer than I expected, so last but not least, check out our book here //link// or here //link//, or even here //link// and if you like what you see give it a shot! If you can’t decide, subscribe to our newsletter and read the first five chapters for free.

Oh, and if you are not driving, have a drink while thinking about us!

Cheers,

Lory