So yesterday was launch day for The Hidden Tower. It went pretty well. In addition to the preorders, over 100 people bought a copy which was cool. I remember when I launched my first book, how nervous and excited I was. Now that I’ve done this thirty something times, I don’t get as nervous, but mostly excited. I didn’t do much marketing for book one, not much point since there’s nothing else for people to read in this series yet. I focused on letting current readers know about it. I’ll do more as the later books come out.

One of the plus sides of experience is that I managed to focus on other things instead of hitting refresh on my sales dashboard every five minutes. I wrote a solid 5 pages on the new book. I’m about two thirds of the way through it.

Something happened this morning and it reminded me of an important lesson I learned from a more experienced writer. I got an email from a reader telling me there was a typo on my book’s description on my website. That’s great. I love it when readers let me know things like that.

After I fixed the mistake my site, I worried I might have messed up on my Amazon page too. I popped over for a look and found everything okay. Everything except the early reviews. Now, I don’t usually look at reviews, but I couldn’t help noticing the low average from the first three reviews. Curious, I scrolled down and saw two 1 stars and a 5 star. Not exactly a great start. At least I caught myself before reading any of them.

See, that was the advice I got from the older writer, never read reviews, good or bad, they get in your head and mess with your writing voice. It’s tough sometimes. This series is one I’m really proud of. I think it’s some of my best writing to date. But it’s also dark. Maybe the darkest story I’ve ever done. And it doesn’t get sunnier anytime soon. I think that might be what threw people off.

And I understand. If you were expecting a light adventure story, The Hidden Tower is certainly not it. This is a story about a basically good man’s fall into darkness. How he’s dragged down by anger and pain and the way he lashes out because of it.

Don’t get me wrong. There are light moments too, but the over all tone is anything but.

See, if I let those bad reviews get in my head, I might try and change what I’m doing with this story. And that really might ruin it. I’ve started down a path and I need to follow it through to the end regardless of how deep the shadows get.

On the plus side, 75 people have already preordered The Great Northern War. Thank you all for that. Your support means a great deal to me.

Talk to you tomorrow.