Okay, so I sent off the radio version of “Lost Claus” to The On-The-Air Radio players. And a few months later I learned I placed 2nd in their contest! I won $35 (all gone now) and the play would be produced and recorded in front of an audience. This was very cool. Alas, I was unable to attend ($35 wasn’t enough to gas up for the trip), but they posted the recording of the show on their site.
It sounded really good. Got the laughs and seemed to go over very well. The leaders of the group had very complimentary things to say about it. This, frankly, emboldened me to pull out the novella and give it a go on Kindle. So, I had to pull the script out of Script Thing, a script-writing software program had does have a novel template which is totally incompatible with any other program, converted it to a text file, loaded it into MS Word and began to rework the story, formatting, updating, cleaning up, fixing typos. I pulled in a couple of gags that I created for the radio script. Then in a daring move, I re-did the ending to leave it a little more open. Gasp! Was I thinking sequel? Well, some of the logic behind Kindle publishing is that book series tend to do better than one-offs. And as I said earlier, I had a couple of plot lines and such in the hopper.
I roped some friends into reading it. Then, really pushing my luck, I got a friend who does copyediting to proof it as a favor. She caught the remaining things that my eyes were glazing over. I guess she liked the way it came out as well, because after that, she decided to set up a Gotham Editorial Services and cater to ebooks.
So, the end of October comes and I pull the trigger and set up my account and publish “Lost Claus” at Kindle. And it’s puttering along. So far, I’ve stayed in the top quarter of the Kindle rankings. I’ve done the free promotion days and gave away over 1,700 copies. The reviews have been very positive. There is a sequel in the works, a short story for a planned anthology being put together by a crew of professional Hollywood writers (and me) for February, with the proceeds going to charity.
Is it a happy ending? The jury is still out. It’s been a positive thing but there’s nothing life changing about it thus far. We’re hanging in there and I have some concepts for the future. There are script to write, and jokes to create and funny bones to tickle. We’ll see. If I wanted a sure thing, I wouldn’t have tacked my hopes to my writing. And so it goes...
It sounded really good. Got the laughs and seemed to go over very well. The leaders of the group had very complimentary things to say about it. This, frankly, emboldened me to pull out the novella and give it a go on Kindle. So, I had to pull the script out of Script Thing, a script-writing software program had does have a novel template which is totally incompatible with any other program, converted it to a text file, loaded it into MS Word and began to rework the story, formatting, updating, cleaning up, fixing typos. I pulled in a couple of gags that I created for the radio script. Then in a daring move, I re-did the ending to leave it a little more open. Gasp! Was I thinking sequel? Well, some of the logic behind Kindle publishing is that book series tend to do better than one-offs. And as I said earlier, I had a couple of plot lines and such in the hopper.
I roped some friends into reading it. Then, really pushing my luck, I got a friend who does copyediting to proof it as a favor. She caught the remaining things that my eyes were glazing over. I guess she liked the way it came out as well, because after that, she decided to set up a Gotham Editorial Services and cater to ebooks.
So, the end of October comes and I pull the trigger and set up my account and publish “Lost Claus” at Kindle. And it’s puttering along. So far, I’ve stayed in the top quarter of the Kindle rankings. I’ve done the free promotion days and gave away over 1,700 copies. The reviews have been very positive. There is a sequel in the works, a short story for a planned anthology being put together by a crew of professional Hollywood writers (and me) for February, with the proceeds going to charity.
Is it a happy ending? The jury is still out. It’s been a positive thing but there’s nothing life changing about it thus far. We’re hanging in there and I have some concepts for the future. There are script to write, and jokes to create and funny bones to tickle. We’ll see. If I wanted a sure thing, I wouldn’t have tacked my hopes to my writing. And so it goes...
