Unsurprisingly, my personal life has led to a lack of updates on not only this blog, but the books in general. I have mainly focused on uploading art to my online stores, primarily Redbubble, in an attempt to potentially earn a different form of income while eventually driving organic traffic back to the books I still intend to publish. I had also focused on uploading to a Society6 store, which actually took more time, but never generated any sales. Redbubble has at least provided a few purchases while generating a few hundred likes, so that will remain my focus in this space. The online store on my main website, epicofold.com, will need to be reworked. Frankly, I have too many potential products to sell, which slows down the website (at least given how it is currently configured).
Moving onto the books, my main focus was originally editing and adding new content to my second book: "Plight of the Gods". My understanding of what I had to do to get the new edition ready (and relist the title on Amazon) was honestly a bit shallow. This is because I had a set of new scenes utilizing newly-introduced characters from the first book's rewrite, one of which creating a nasty case of writer's block. Essentially it covers a scene of different characters using their reasoning to reach a certain conclusion based on previous events in the first story, eventually devolving into a drawn-out fight. I had multiple options for the battle written out, such as who's abilities would be used and in what way, but the whodunit section of the chapter proved the most difficult. In fact, I still haven't made time to complete it despite knowing I don't have a choice.
My other attention has been on the creation of an art book, titled "The Dream Compendium". The contents for that book are practically done. I will likely adjust the artwork that is used, but the written portion of the book is complete. It is from the perspective of Talmanus Acuila, a character from the third book, "The World of Whispering Strife". Obviously, the third book will need to be published before the art book, making my creation of the material an odd form of procrastination, given it delayed my progress on the second. The Dream Compendium will contain a lot of the art found within the dreamscape section of the website, though much of it is not shown on the website at all. It is essentially a collection of notes, maps, and sketches written from Talmanus's perspective and printed in color. Unfortunately, this will make the book itself the most expensive one to print, making it a niche purchase for most people (though not unreasonable as I intend for the profit margin to be rather low to compensate).
The last thing I have focused on is a new potential book trailer. I already have a need to rework the first one, adding newer images and reworking the voice. The video for the second is complete, minus the voice. It is mainly a glorified slideshow, but I feel the script and music are decent while the art is top notch. I also decided to try out a different video editor, which did take time to learn, but was overall worth it. To get the voice-over work complete, I will either need to find the right voice actor for the job or find the right AI service to read from the script in a convincing way. My ability to do that will determine when the new trailers get added to the website and elsewhere.
Overall, updates to the website will come first before the second book gets republished. I cannot reasonably give a timetable for this as I would ultimately fail to follow it anyway. For one thing, the blogging plugin no longer works, so unless I can fix this, that whole section will get scrapped (which is partly why I skipped updates). I also intend, again, to change the online store and add more relevant images for some of the books. Provided I figure out what needs to be done, this work alone will only take a few days. I also intend to write more general blog posts about writing in general, such as tips about the writing process or self-publishing that I've had to learn the hard way. Look forward to it!
