Note: This post appeared last week at Magical Musings, and I wanted to share it here as well.

Over the past several months, I’ve been working on writing and self-publishing a new book in my Bigtime superhero series. I’m happy to announce that I self-published Fandemic, the fifth book in the series, on June 2. Woot!

I’m so glad that the book is finally out there for folks to read and hopefully enjoy. And frankly, I’m also glad that the book — and the work — is finally finished. LOL.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy self-publishing, but it is a lot of work — a lot of work.

When you self-publish, you are responsible for every single aspect of the book, from actually writing it, to getting it proofread, to the cover art, to the e-book and print book formats, and everything in between. Sure, you can hire folks to do some of the work for you (and I do), but if you don’t do the work (or pay someone to do the work), then it simply doesn’t get done. And once your book is actually published, you are also responsible for promoting the book and letting folks know that it’s available.

I first started working on Fandemic in May 2014, so it’s taken me more than a year to go from writing the first draft to actually publishing the book. Why so long? Well, I’ve had to squeeze in all the work on Fandemic around writing my two traditionally published series — my Elemental Assassin and Black Blade series.

With my two traditionally published series, I’m responsible for writing the book, as well as doing copy edits and proofreading the book. But that’s it. The publisher takes care of the cover art, the e-book and print book formatting, and some of the promotion (although I do a fair amount of promotion on my own as well).

I do hope to write and self-publish more works in my Bigtime series, but it will probably be a while before I start on something new in the series.

As for right now, I hope that everyone enjoys Fandemic. I’m going to reward myself and go take a nap. 😎

The Fandemic e-book is $2.99 and is available at the following sites:

Amazon Kindle / Barnes & Noble / Google Play / iBooks / Kobo / Smashwords

A print version of Fandemic is also available for $8.99 through Amazon.

Here is the book description:

_­Piper Perez has always wanted to be a super­hero. Always wanted to wear a cool costume, have amazing abilities, and save the day. There’s just one problem—Piper doesn’t have any superpowers.

So she focuses on other things. Facts, figures, memorabilia. Piper knows and collects it all, about both the superheroes and the ubervillains who roam the streets of Bigtime, N.Y. Piper’s friends jokingly call her a fandemic—someone who is a superfan of all things superhero. The nickname is truer than anyone knows, especially since Piper can’t stop thinking about Swifte, the speedy hero who broke her heart months ago.

But someone has been killing off Bigtime’s heroes and villains. When one of Piper’s friends is murdered, she vows to do whatever she can to help bring the killer to justice, superpowers or not. All the clues and information she gathers lead her to believe that Swifte is the killer’s next target. Piper has always wanted to be a hero, and now she’ll have to use all of her fandemic knowledge to save the man she loves—or die trying….

Fandemic is around 43,000 words, which means that it is a shorter book than the others in the series, which are around 95,000 words. For those of you who like page counts, Fandemic is about 150 pages.

You can read the first chapter here. Scroll down and click on the Read Excerpt tab. Happy reading!

Tags: About Books, Bigtime series, My Writing, On Writing, Superheroes