My first novel, Identity Crisis, took me five years to write and more than 20 years to start writing after the original Idea occurred to me. I published it this year on the 9th of July, and I started writing another book on the 22nd of July. I finished the first draft of that book on the 1st of September.

I don’t know why writing my latest book, The Last Healer, was so much easier. Perhaps finishing the first one showed me what I was capable of, so I was more motivated to write the next one. It still wasn’t easy, though. Like the first one, I started it without knowing how it would end. Sometimes, it feels like the story writes itself, and I’m just there to type the words.

This one is not quite novel length, but I feel it is a good story. I think this one will appeal to women more than my first book. I didn’t start out with the intention to write a mystery romance, but that is the direction the story took. There is also a bit of science fiction mixed in.

I hired a different cover designer for this book. The last one was good but took way too long. This one was a great artist, but I think she lacked experience with formatting for print books, so after several failed attempts, I was able to fix all the formatting issues and upload the cover art to Amazon. I published the ebook on September 22, but because of the formatting issues, it took until yesterday to get the paperback published, and I am still waiting for approval on the hardcover.

I also decided not to enroll this book into KDP Select. That is supposed to give authors more opportunities to make money in exchange for having the book solely available on Amazon. I found it, at least in my case, to contribute almost nothing extra to my bottom line. Instead, I went with a company called Draft2Digital. They distributed my ebook to several booksellers. Some of the booksellers where my book is available can be found here. Others, like Google Play Books, I’m still waiting for the book to go live. I’m also considering offering a print version through Draft2Digital, but my profit would be much lower than I get through Amazon, which still isn’t that much after printing costs and Amazon’s cut.

I feel like I want to write another book now. The problem is that my few ideas would make good short stories, but I can’t yet think how they could be expanded into full books.